“I’m really not sure about this,” Anita said hesitantly.
“Not sure? How could you not be sure?” Susan demanded, taken completely by surprise.
“But I didn’t think that you were serious,” Anita complained plaintively, holding everyone up.
“About what?” Susan asked with a growing impatience. The window of opportunity was significantly limited and they were rapidly running out of the allowable time.
“About this, the coven, you know - being witches,” Anita listed.
“In short, everything,” Pat snapped, irritated by yet another unnecessary delay.
“Well... yes,” Anita admitted.
“So when we asked you if you wanted to join us and be part of our coven, what did you think we were talking about?” Susan demanded to know.
“I thought that it was sort of a joke,” Anita admitted. “Maybe what you called the W.I. locally. Witches Anonymous.”
“That would be W.A.,” Pat pointed out acidly.
“I am a little bit distracted here,” Anita snapped back, feeling the distraction more than a little.
“Did we not mention that we were witches?” Susan asked, turning her attention to Pat. “When we invited her to join us, I’m pretty sure that we said we were witches.”
“I thought so, too,” Pat confirmed.
“I distinctly recall saying ‘Pat and I are witches’,” Susan continued. “I’m almost certain that was the exact wording; ‘Pat and I are witches. Do you want to join our coven?’”
“Sounds right to me,” Pat confirmed. “Exactly right.”
“Yes, yes, you did say that,” Anita agreed reluctantly.
“So what exactly did you think that we meant when we said that we were witches?” Susan pressed, all too aware of the sand passing through the hour glass.
“I thought you were being self-deprecating,” Anita explained. “You know, ‘we’re the witches of the village’, sort of thing.”
“We are the witches of the village,” Pat pointed out firmly.
“Yes, but I didn’t think that you were real witches.”
“You didn’t think we were real witches?” Susan picked up the reluctant woman’s thought to examine it. “What kind of witches did you think that we were? What other kind of witches are there?”
“I thought you were just playing at it, sort of a lipstick... you know what sort of thing,” Anita tried to explain desperately.
“No, I don’t know what kind of thing,” Pat told her. “And what has lipstick got to do with it?”
“I meant that it was all just a fashion thing, a fad. Picking up on the whole red woman thing in Game of Thrones. Going back to our Goth youths.”
“What’s Game of Thrones?” Susan asked.
“I never had a Goth youth,” Pat asserted.
“Really?” Anita asked in surprise. “I certainly took you for being a bit of a Goth.”
Considering that the other woman was wearing a long black dress, with a black cloak over her head and had her fingernails and lips painted in a very, very dark red, it seemed like a reasonable assumption. She was Morticia Addams without the height or slim build. She had the same haughty nature, though.
“No Goth youth,” Pat repeated.
“So, if you didn’t think we were real witches, what exactly did you think we got up to?” Susan queried.
“Well,” Anita tried to suppress the shrug that raced to her shoulders, but failed. “Drink too much wine, dance naked around toadstool rings in the moonlight and make up spells to curse our exes with.”
“Dance naked?” Susan asked, as though such a suggestion could only have come from the twisted mind of Satan himself. Though, as a witch, she served the Dark Lord of Hell, there were limits to what she was willing to do, even for him. Both she and Pat were well past the point where dancing naked could be considered a good idea.
“We can curse our exes,” Pat pointed out.
“We have cursed our exes,” Susan reminded her.
“I didn’t mean really curse them, I meant more... symbolically,” Anita suggested.
“Oh, it definitely had to do with their boll...”
“What I think, what I think, my colleague is trying to say,” Susan interrupted Pat hurriedly, “is that we never gave you any reason to doubt our sincerity in terms of who we are and what we do.”
“No,” Anita was reluctantly forced to agree.
“It’s a breach of contract,” Pat stated.
“We don’t have contracts,” Susan pointed out. “We’re witches; our word is our bond.”
“It’s breach of promise then,” Pat insisted.
“I’m still not sure that contract law covers situations like this,” Susan suggested pragmatically. “However, I do believe that any misgivings you are having are purely as a result of your own prejudices and misapprehensions.”
“Possibly true,” Anita was even more reluctantly forced to agree.
“We have acted in nothing but good faith,” Susan pressed.
“Also true,” Anita admitted.
“So,” Susan demanded, “are you going to cut your boyfriend’s heart out with that ceremonial dagger or what? He looks awfully cold on that altar without his shirt on.”
There’s an App for That
Alpha Star Strike Force One!
Even the name on the landing screen gave Gavin a thrill as it filled his screen with swirling vistas of attack ships on fire, possibly off the shoulder of Orion. The whole universe, it seemed, was ablaze as the short introductory video showed spacecraft locked in mortal combat, energy weapons (C-beams?) searing through the star bedecked skies, space stations falling out of orbit and burning up in the atmospheres of strange alien worlds and whole planets being decimated by space borne weapons of mass destruction.
It was just so damned cool!
It was also the single most downloaded app in the history of apps. Forget Angry Birds, Rush (be it Temple, Minion or Star Wars) and Pokémon Go, Alpha Star Strike Force One’s numbers dwarfed them all. According to the reported figures, there wasn’t a single smartphone that the game hadn’t been downloaded to. That just meant that there were some people who had downloaded multiple copies, of course, but it was still a staggering statistic. The developers had become billionaires overnight from the in-game purchases as people sought to outfit their burgeoning fleets and flagships with the most exciting methods of dealing virtual death and destruction on their friends and complete strangers through the multiplayer function.
That day’s update, the third in the game’s short history, was promised as being the most epic yet. Since the previous two had exceeded all expectations, the hype appeared to be justified.
A graphic appeared that promised the most awesome battle cruiser configuration that he could have imagined and informed him that an update was available. Did he want to load it?
Hell, yeah, he did.
The blue update line crawled across the top edge of the screen so slowly that he imagined he could count the pixels. He was hooked into the house wi-fi, so the delay was at the other end. No doubt there were thousands of other people all trying to download the game update at the exact same moment as he was. That was one of the downsides to a game that virtually everyone liked.
Finally, the ‘downloading’ notification changed to ‘installing’ and the blue line was replaced by a green one that seemed to move at the same slow pace. The images on the waiting screen cycled through some of the new features that lay at the end of the straight emerald road and by the time that the scene changed to tell him that no new access was required, he was all but salivating at the prospect of trying them out.
‘Alpha Star Strike Force One needs to restart your device. Do you agree?’ the app asked and then proceeded to blow up each letter in turn, replacing them with a strange alien font that then also self-destructed back to English.
Gavin tapped the ‘yes’ button immediately without thinking about it. At this point, he would have done anything
that the app told him to. If it had told him that he needed to buy a new phone he would have gone straight down to the high street and bought one.
The screen stuttered into darkness and then started up again. His fingerprint opened the lock screen and there was the shortcut on his home page, shining at him like pearly gates themselves.
“Sometimes, I think you like that game too much,” his mother had told him only the day before when he had mentioned the forthcoming update, but he had ignored her. She was such a technoneanderthal that she didn’t even own a mobile phone, asserting that, “People can call me on the real phone.”
She still had a VCR connected to the TV and preferred reading books to switching on either device.
Gavin’s thumb touched the shortcut with no conscious command from his brain and the screen burst into a coruscating display of stars and constellations, the backdrop to universal war.
The options popped up into place and he immediately selected the ‘private duel’ box. The status of all his friends who possessed the app, which was pretty much all of his friends full stop, were revealed
Gavin had been so distracted at work by the imminent arrival of the new update that his boss had finally dismissed him early after he had messed up on a single job three times in a row. That meant that he was home and ready to play before most of his friends, but she was there.
Fleet Admiral Lorelei Opalstone was, in fact, Sally Jenkins from around the corner, but nobody went by their real names in Alpha Star Strike Force One. He himself gloried in the title Admiral Bane Starkiller. It galled him that Lorelei (or Sally) outranked him by one level, but she was the single best player of the game of anyone he knew. She wasn’t good enough to play professionally (the last world champion had pocketed a cool million dollars as well as the title), but she was pretty damn close. He had also promised himself that when he reached that final level, he would ask her out. He’d been in love with her from afar for as long as he could remember knowing her, but the courage he showed on the starbattlefields was not something that he could replicate in real life.
He sent the invitation to a private duel and she accepted almost immediately, her avatar popping up on his screen. The green-skinned buxom warrior with double laser-pulse rifles was taller and more attractive than Sally was, but in Gavin’s eyes they were one and the same.
“Hey Gav, you ready for me to kick your bum again?” she asked, the app having taken control of the phone and connected them through the microphones and speakers.
“Excuse me,” he complained cheerily, “but I very nearly had you last time out.”
“Very nearly doesn’t cut it at Fleet Admiral level,” she jibed good-naturedly.
“Oh that’s how it is, is it?” he responded in kind. “Of course, you’ll have the advantage, having tried out all the new bits.”
“I wish,” was her response. “I’ve been sat here waiting for one of you losers to come online. I’m just glad that it’s you and not Stevie, Joe or Becky.”
Gavin’s heart glowed inside him for a second.
“They would have posed a real threat,” she continued.
The glow was gone again.
“You want to make it interesting?” he challenged her.
“It’s Alpha Star Strike Force One, hell it’s an updated Alpha Star Strike Force One; it’s already interesting,” she objected.
“If I beat you then you have to go out on a date with me,” Gavin said, all in a rush before the courage, born of irritation admittedly, failed him.
There was a moment’s silence.
“So you finally got around to asking me.”
There was another, longer and even more unbearably silent pause.
“Thank God for that. I’ve been fending off Stevie for months now,” she told him.
“You will?” he asked, not really believing what he was hearing. He suspected that he might be having a daydream delusion or something.
“Movie. Saturday night. Winner picks the film, loser pays,” she told him. “Hope you like chick flicks.”
“Hope you like torture porn,” he shot back and then winced when he realised that he’d just used the word ‘porn’ with a girl who had accepted a first date with him.
“You’re not going to win,” she promised him.
“Says you,” he responded. “Flagship or Fleet config?”
“You joking? My flagship sneezes and your star drive will fall out.”
“Fleets it is.”
As the one who had sent the invitation, he selected the nature of the duel, leaving the app to choose the location, difficulty and hazard settings.
“Ready?” he asked.
“More than,” Sally assured him.
“Engaged,” Gavin activated the battle.
“Let’s try dating first,” Sally suggested drily.
Gavin felt his cheeks turning bright red.
As the ships of his fleet started to appear, he quickly manipulated them into the battle formations that he wanted. He’d been thinking about this a lot since the last time that she had beaten him and he thought that he had come up with a few tricks that would give him the edge this time around.
There was a pounding at his door, the kind of pounding that did not suggest all was well with the world.
“It’s open!” he called as he put the final touches to the small flotillas that lay at the heart of his surprise tactic.
The door thumped open and Stevie burst into the room looking like he’d been spooked by one of those morons in clown costumes who thought it was funny to scare kids a while back. Stevie had always had a thing about clowns, but Gavin had never seen him looking like this, even when they’d watched that Stephen King TV thing about the clown from outer space (or something like that anyway). Stevie looked wild-eyed and panicked. Genuinely scared.
“Gavin, what are you... Oh crap. Are you playing?”
He didn’t have to say what game he was referring to.
“Yes, but we’ve just started. I can...”
“No!” Stevie shouted, the vehemence of his denial startling Gavin. He had known Stevie since the first day of primary school and the kid was so laid back he was practically horizontal. Gavin had never seen him react to anything like that. “Keep playing. Don’t stop. But you have to see this.”
He grabbed the TV remote from its usual spot on top of the Xbox and switched it on, changing the input from the gaming platform to the first channel that came up. It was a news report.
“What’s going on, Gavin? Is that Stevie I heard?” Sally asked as the app announced both sides were ready and the battle would begin in twenty seconds.
“Is that Sally?” Stevie demanded, horrified. “Oh, Jesus Gav, tell me it’s not Sally.”
“It is Sally,” Gavin admitted. He knew that Stevie might not take it well that she had agreed to go out with him when she had turned him down, but his reaction to simply playing a game, the game, with her was exaggerated to say the least.
“Look at that,” Stevie said, on the edge of hysteria. “Look at that, Gav!”
Gavin looked. The sound on the TV was down, mainly because the Bluetooth headset was still active, but there was a ribbon of text running below the serious-looking talking heads. It was just recycling from its end back to the start.
“It’s the game, Gav,” Stevie gabbled on, not waiting for the newsline to pass on its message. “The update messed with the game. If you lose, the phone explodes, rips your arm clean off.”
“What?” both Gavin and Sally, who was listening through the app’s voice connection, said at the same instant.
“It started in Japan and America,” Stevie reported. “Thousands, tens of thousands, killed in the first hour. It took a while to figure out what was going on. Cops went to Ikishareen’s house and found him fallen on his sword with a note saying that he was going to end our obsession with our phones in a single stroke.”
“Ikishareen’s dead?” Gav asked in shock. The Japanese genius had been his favourite game
designer.
“Will you focus!” Stevie shouted.
The phone in Gavin’s hand trembled to warn him that battle was about to commence, Red alert sirens also sounded.
“We’ll just not play,” Gavin said, trying to comprehend what he had been told. The news report on the TV had confirmed that Stevie wasn’t making it up. “We’ll not play.”
“You have to,” Stevie insisted. “If you don’t, the game makes the phone explode immediately. The same happens if the game detects any movement not normally connected with playing it.”
Gavin launched his fleet. The screen indicated that Sally had done the same.
“So if we throw it...”
“It blows up in your hand before your arm’s fully bent,” Stevie reported.
“We can just keep circling each other,” Sally suggested desperately.
“No,” Stevie shook his head sadly. “It recognises that as well. Besides, the battle’s on a timer. If nobody wins by the time that runs out, both blow up.”
The Starkiller and Opalstone fleets sped across virtual space towards each other. In just a few seconds, the first fictional energy weapons would unleash their imagined fury on the approaching unreal ships.
“Gavin, I don’t want to die,” Sally’s voice said, trembling.
“Me neither,” Gavin admitted.
The pixelated fleets tore into each other. Normally, such a frontal assault would have been an unthinkable tactic that would have led to immediate defeat, but they had both been too distracted to change what their ships were doing. Frigates were torn apart by the fury of the lasers and missiles that assailed them. Battlecruisers burned as brightly as the nebula around which they were battling, their space drives overheating. Destroyers were burned to nothingness as their thin armour boiled away into space.
“You have to beat me,” Gavin decided suddenly.
“What?”
“You’re the Fleet Admiral,” he reminded her. “You have the better ships, better weapons. You have to beat me.”
He ordered the main phalanx of his fleet to break up and drive their new wedge formations deep into the main body of Sall...no, Lorelei’s fleet. Think of her as Lorelei. It would be easier to fight against Opalstone. If he thought of Sally, he would fail and he would die.
Taking the Tube to the Outer Limits Page 15