by S. R. Witt
“Oh,” the shadow said, “you are lost.”
A boot crunched down on my wrist and the dagger slipped from my gasp. A weight landed on my back and gloved hands pulled my wrists together behind me. A black sack flopped over my head and emptied the light out of my world. The thin cord wound around my wrists until they were bound together so tight my fingers began to tingle.
“This isn't—” funny, I tried to say.
My unseen attackers jerked me up on my feet and held me there.
“It is, though. It is kind of funny.” The speaker was close. I could feel his breath on my face through the bag over my head.
I tried to say something, to protest, and someone shut me up with a short, sharp jab to the solar plexus.
My lungs emptied in a strangled whoof and violet sparks danced in the darkness.
“You are lost,” he whispered in my ear. “Just like all of us.”
Then the lights went out for real.
The virtual world disappeared.
The CIN popped loose from my neck and sensation flooded my body in a wave of pins and needles like the first rush of blood back into a sleeping leg.
The carbonite aerogel mattress supported me in its cloud-like mass, applying no pressure to any specific part of my body while still supporting every part of my body. It was nice, and when I’d first laid down on it, I thought I could stay there forever. Now, though, it was as if I was aware of every niggling pain and discomfort everywhere in my body all at once. The puffy mattress felt like it was jabbing needles into my body.
I gasped and rolled onto the floor. The carpet was rough under my palms and knees. It felt like the fibers were cutting into me, slicing through my sweatpants and digging into my flesh.
The pain lasted for a moment, and then it was gone. I checked the clock on the wall and realized I’d been in the game for less than two hours. What was it going to feel like when we spent the whole day in there?
I shuddered.
“Get up,” Karl said. He didn't offer me a hand, just stared down at me with one hand clenched into a fist and the other holding my CIN. He tossed the interface collar at me.
I caught it and struggled upright again. “What's going on?”
“Mom,” he said. That was all the answer I needed.
We crept into her room and did our best not to disturb her. Sleep fled from her these days, and waking her up made us both feel like incredible assholes. So we stood in the dark and listened to her labored breathing and the rhythmic hiss-thump of the machine attached to the port in her side.
They told us it was an allergic response. Something in her environment set off her body's alarm system and it turned against her. White blood cells attacked her heart and lungs and left her so weak most days all she could manage was laying there in bed, letting the machines keep her alive.
Sometimes she spoke to us, but those times were getting further and further apart.
I listened and tried to pick out what had changed. I held my breath and then I heard it.
The rebreather kept my mother's lungs moving and her blood pumping. But it couldn’t do the job alone. It needed her muscles to cooperate with it and share the load. But now I could hear that my mother's breathing had changed. She wasn't helping it on every pump, but every other. The machine had to work harder and harder to compensate.
Now there was another noise. A pained, metallic pinging, like metal striking metal. Something was wearing out.
I nodded and Karl followed me out of our mother's bedroom.
He waited until we were in the shabby kitchen before jumping on me. He jabbed a finger into my chest and snarled, “You have to get with the program. You have to do what you're told. You have to fix this.”
He was right. We needed money to get the machine fixed, and we needed it now. We’d have to pay for a rental while mom's rebreather was in the shop. We’d have to increase the dosage on her meds to compensate for the new machine. There’d be a whole bundle of expenses that needed to be paid, and they needed to be paid soon. If we waited too long, the machines would fail, and our mother would die.
“Okay, okay.” I said. “I’ll do whatever I need to do. You want me to reroll?”
Karl rolled his eyes. “No, you can't reroll. We only had the money for one personal link, and we used it to be generated in the same little town. If you reroll, there's no telling where you’ll end up. No, you're just going to have to go back into the Game and get the old man to let you to become a healer.”
I nodded, but I knew it was a lost cause. The old man hadn’t fallen for my lies. He wouldn't accept me as a healer.
But the shadows, those cruel creatures who pried themselves out of the darkness to take me away?
They wanted me.
I didn't know how to tell Karl, but I was one of them now.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Xi looks at me like I’ve crawled out from under a rock. “So that's your story? You're telling us that not even your own brother can depend on you?”
And there you have it. There's a reason why they call her the Dragon Lady, and it's not because her eyes are green or she has bad breath. Her claws were out now, and she was going to shred me into tiny pieces she could spoon feed to her audience of billions.
Before this series of interviews was over, the whole world would think I was some kind of backstabbing traitor. They’d buy the line that it was my fault that most of the world’s bank accounts had been emptied in a split second. They’d believe their corporate masters when they told them I was the reason Internet access was restricted to one hour a day per person, globally. I knew I was going to take the fall for this mess, I've known that ever since I caught my first glimpse of the big picture, but I didn't think they were going to be quite this personal about it.
That's okay. I'm cool. They want to play this game of character assassination, they're welcome to go ahead and give it a shot. Because, before this is all over, you're going to know the truth about what happened in there. You're going to know why the World was shut down, and why the Game had to be destroyed. But you're going to have to be patient. First, I'm going to stick a few knives through Xi’s argument.
“I guess that's one way to look at what happened.” I give her a little shrug and my fancy suit turns it into a grand gesture. It's easier to watch myself on the monitors than to look at Xi’s pitiless black eyes or Mercy’s tear-stained face.
Damn, I have to stop thinking about Mercy. This is hard enough without worrying about whether or not something I say will be punctuated by a bullet traveling through her head at subsonic speeds.
Just a glimpse. Just to make sure she’s still there.
Just to make sure she's okay.
Her eyes are wide and wet in the dark oval of her face. It's funny, we spent so much time together in-game, but the first time I saw her was 10 minutes ago.
I wish I could shake the image, but I'm afraid that every memory I have of Mercy is going to be superimposed by her crying face and the pistol pressed to the back of her head.
Xi is staring at me. I've drifted again. I didn't used to do that, but there’s a time distortion between the World and the Game. It's supposed to be harmless, but when you've worn a CIN for as long as I did, nothing's really harmless. I've developed a weird sort of temporal fugue state where my thoughts roam on their own. It feels like a second, maybe two, for me but to everyone else I look like I’ve been staring off into space for the past 30 seconds.
Awesome. Now I really do look like a psychopath.
Xi clears her throat and turns her eyes back on me. “I'm not sure there's any other way to look at this. You and your brother had a plan, correct? He was going to do whatever it took to help your mother get the help she needed. All you had to do was go along and help him out.”
I smile again and it looks pretty good on the monitor. Not as convincing as Bastion’s killer smile, but it was better than what you get from a crocodile. I looked like I was, if not having a good time, at least rel
axed. It looks like Xi wasn't getting to me, which is pretty far from the truth. “He had a plan, but the Game didn't like it.”
Xi rolls her eyes. “You expect me to believe this theory of yours that the Game has a mind of its own? We know that's not true. The kind of thing you're talking about—”
“You don't know what I'm talking about, Xi. You think you do. You want to believe the AI isn’t aware. But you don't really know.” My smile is broader now, but less relaxed. Not forced. Feral.
I’m not smiling.
I was showing her my teeth. “But even if you don't believe what I have to say, it's pretty obvious the Game sometimes makes decisions about characters that their players disagree with. I'm not the only person to talk about the strange glitches in the character creation process. You and I both know that's one of the big complaints that came out about the Game shortly after release.
“People wanted to play with their friends, and the Devs said no. They wanted to be able to design the character of their dreams and fantasies, and the Devs said maybe or maybe not. That’s part of what people hate, and part of what they love. The unknown. The mysterious.”
She waves her hand as if fanning away an odious stench. “Fine, assuming we believe you that the game picked these for you, you still can’t deny that your decisions helped steer the algorithms in that direction. You weren’t exactly a paragon of virtue, were you? Not what some would call a Saint.”
I do my best to keep my eyes from rolling out of their sockets and across the floor. If there's one thing I regret about my time in-game, it's that stupid name. I should've gone for something more exotic, something less descriptive. Some word that suited my personality, at least.
Look at Mercy, nobody makes fun of her name. She is exactly what she told people with that name.
Somehow mine got all twisted around, and I became the Saint of Shadows. If I could go back, I'd pick something simpler.
Elmer. Yeah, I’d call myself Elmer. No one plans a revolution around a guy named Elmer.
“You're right, I won't deny that I wasn't exactly playing nice. But, come on, Xi. Don't tell me you've never played a little against type in one of these online games. You think everybody who plays a warrior is secretly yearning to bust a few heads off with a battleaxe? Or how about everyone who plays a priest? Do they all believe in a higher power that guides their hand through their daily lives and shows them the way?
“People often play as criminals or other miscreants online, but that doesn't mean that's the kind of person they are.
“Assuming I wanted to play at being the bad guy. Let's just say for the sake of argument that I really had my heart set on pissing off my brother. How do you get from there, with me rebelling against Karl’s plan, to here, with you interviewing a gamer you want your viewers to believe wiped out the digital infrastructure of the entire world? That's a pretty big leap, Xi.”
I’ve made a mistake. I don’t know how, but I said something wrong. I'd opened a chink in my armor and Xi has already sharpened the arrowhead meant for that soft spot.
She glances down at the notepad on her lap, a hopelessly archaic affectation Xi believes makes her look somehow more reputable, more knowledgable than the rest of the world with their slates and phones and monolenses. Maybe it does, I don't know, but I can see her lap and there is nothing written on that notepad.
She riffles the pages and then looks up at me with a smile that makes my testicles turn tail and retreat into my guts. “No, you're totally right about that. It is a big leap to go from being a simple gamer with no real experience, to being the most feared digital vigilante in the virtual world.”
That's odd. Here I am thinking she was going for the kill, and she tosses a real softball at me. I didn't want to take a swing at it, but I didn't know what else to do. It was just floating out there, the straight line I’ve been waiting for all night.
I'd set it up, she pitched it over, and I was going to knock it back. “Oh, so now you believe me? Now you see the sense in all this? Because, really, if that were true, I don't think I'd be here.”
Her eyes flare. Her smile curls so wide I’m sure the edges of her lips are tickling her earlobes.
Oh. Oh, shit. She was setting me up.
“You're absolutely right, Adam. If I believed any of your story, you wouldn't be here at all. You wouldn’t be sitting in your cell. You’d probably be out there watching me talk to whoever was really responsible for this disaster be interviewed on this very stage.
“But the fact of the matter is, I do not believe you story. I don't think any of these people watching believe you, either.” She smiled and made a slight gesture off-camera. “But there's someone here who could help explain why I don't think that you're just a simple gamer. I don't think your experience started just a couple of years ago, and I don't think that you're as unmotivated and scatterbrained as you want us all to believe.
“No one believes your little staring-off-into-space act, Adam.”
Someone steps out of the shadows stage left. Someone tall, and more than a little overweight, and dripping with my worst nightmares.
Xi watches me squirm with a smile on her face. The camera zooms in on me so tight I'm pretty sure people can see the sweat oozing from my pores. That ultra ultra high definition resolution is for the birds. Nobody wants to see that. I mean, really, do you want to be able to see the boogers in your favorite actor’s nose? Do you really need to see the stray ear hairs sticking out of your favorite actress? No. Nobody needs to see that.
Just like nobody ever wanted to see the creeping bastard coming across the stage at me.
Here I am, the most feared revolutionary in the history of mankind. Here I am, the Saint of Shadows, a virtual killer who’s brought entire governments to their knees and laid waste to the financial system that propped them up.
I am the bogeyman, I am the nightmare made flesh.
And here I am, about to piss my pants because my dear old dad has turned up alive after all these years.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I haven't seen my father in at least five years. Karl told my mother and I that the old man had been on the bad side of a car accident and ended his life as a greasy smear along the side of a desolate West Texas highway.
Thinking back, maybe I should've asked Karl more questions about what happened to the old man. Maybe I should have ask how Karl knew about this before my mother heard the news. Aren’t the police supposed to come to the house when there’s an accident? It wasn't like my mom and dad were divorced. I don't think they were even legally separated. One day, he just stopped coming around.
I didn’t ask questions about Karl’s news, because I wanted it to be true. I wanted the old man dead.
Where had Xi dug the old bastard up?
He steps into the lights and blinks against their harsh rays. I pray for some sign that this is a lie, that they’ve found somebody who vaguely resembles the old man to try and pass him off to all the millions of people who don’t know any better. But I can't find any flaws.
He looks just like he did the last time I saw him. Well, just like that plus five or six years of heavy drinking. His face is bloated from decades of booze and looks like it’d be more at home on a pig than a human. His nose is slightly upturned so you can see whatever gruesomeness he has going on up there. He’s even wearing the same clothes: A dark gray polo with grease stains across the stretched-out belly and jeans with ragged hems and knees so threadbare you can see the pink flesh of his legs through them.
My stomach does a barrel roll and my hands ache from clenching them together in my lap. “I don't know what you think this proves, Xi, but this man isn't a very reliable character witness.”
Xi offers me a merciless smile and shakes her head. “After all these years, you don't have anything else to say? How long has it been since you last saw your father?”
I let out an exasperated sigh, and immediately regret it. I need to stay in control of this situation and not look lik
e I’m on the ropes taking shots from Xi. That sigh is the exact opposite of what I should be doing. I take a moment to gather myself and then respond with a calm, even tone. “At least five years. Probably closer to six.”
She makes a sad tutting noise and reaches over to pat me on the knee. “It must've been hard, going through your teen years without a father.”
The muscles in my jaw jump and I struggle to keep from grinding my teeth into dust. “It was hard, I won't deny it. But in some ways I think it was better.”
Xi lets out a fake gasp that doesn't fool me, but I know her audience is eating it up. “Really? I couldn't imagine being without my father.”
The old man is close enough now that I can see and hear him struggling to breathe. Someone wheels an oversized chair into a spot equidistant from Xi and me. My dad oozes into the chair and folds his hands into his lap. The three of us form a cozy little triangle on the stage, but I refuse to look at my father.
I wonder how much Xi paid him to crawl out from whatever hole he’s been hiding in all this time. More than anything else, I want to punch my father in his stupid fat face.
Instead, I keep my attention focused on Xi. “I'm sure your father didn’t beat the hell out of you after he had a few drinks in the afternoon. Every afternoon.”
Two can play the shock-and-awe game. If she wants to wheel out my old man, I’m not pulling any punches for his sake. Maybe I can discredit him before they get rolling and put an end to this farce before it can gain momentum.
The old man grumbles. “Never beat you. Might've spanked you now and then, but you weren't an easy kid to control.”
I knew the trap here. They wanted me to turn on my father and go bugnuts crazy. It would be easy to do. Here was the guy who'd beaten me for the first 12 years of my life and then abandoned my mother when she was at her worst. Here is the man who stole my childhood and made me take over his job when he vanished from our lives.
I want to tell everyone watching the raw, angry truth. I want him to pay for what he did to our family.