by Rich Horton
no girls allowed
Murr went left. Came back right.
no girls allowed
Murr went left to the beginning of the level, past the respawning, ivory-colored bulls with dark red symbols on their flanks, fighting puzzles to open doors that closed again as Murr passed through them. Murr returned to the temple.
we need to find another way in.
The kid came back to the forums like an empty refrigerator; the only thing he found was that some protagonists seemed to develop more girly hairstyles as they developed—Solace and her pigtails. It was really rare; most posts about people’s characters referred to them as “he” and the object of their quest as “she.”
The kid couldn’t find any conclusive proof that any of legions of right-traveling alternate Murrs were dudes. It wasn’t like any of them were going to drop their pants. No pictures came up of facial hair, except for the fake moustache on a stick, a weapon that usually turned up around the middle levels. Murr used to pose with it when idle.
Murr’s hair was longer than when the game started, but the kid’s hair was longer than Murr’s.
There were screen caps of the hero and the rescued embracing. Sooney-Crow’s alternates were also a little ambiguous, sometimes, but most of them looked as much like girls as the graphics would permit.
There was fan art. There was fan art that made the kid clear the history on the browser and wish he could do the same for his head. The kid couldn’t post the question on the forum, not with his own picture of Murr as an icon.
There was Murr holding the hands of Dasha the Night Witch in the kid’s English notebook.
Meanwhile, in the memory of the console, Murr was standing outside the men-only temple telling the kid they needed to find another way to get the orb.
The kid wondered if Sooney-Crow was a boy. He wondered if she was a girl, if they both were; was that gross or cool or did it even matter? The embrace in the screencaps wasn’t really sexy or anything, but that wasn’t the way he’d seen it. It wasn’t just the fan art talking. That’s how it is. You go right, you beat the reptile, evade the ape, you get the girl, that’s what she’s there for, that’s why you showed up.
The kid wondered if that was how things worked IRL, the invisible reptile, the unseen ape, apparent to some guys, but not him. The kid forced himself to imagine Murr a guy, but it always came back to the idle animation of Murr with the ’stache on a stick, dancing around, the devil’s faux-16-bit twinkle in her eye.
There was no button on the controller to respond to this. Play or don’t play. Jump and attack did not change this. Even not playing didn’t change this. If Murr never made it to Sooney-Crow, it wouldn’t change this.
Canon passed Murr and entered the tower, stopping for a moment and turning in place, which seemed to be the sign for I’ll help you, before going inside.
what are you afraid of?
If Canon returned, the kid was not logged in to see him. Kids at school caught on to the game in waves, and for the most part, they dropped the game after a little while. The kid stopped playing games much at all, but summer was coming, so the constant battle with his mom to game instead of be OUT IN THE FRESH AIR turned out to be an easier one to lose than it had been in a while. He went to the river pretty often, but whether he came alone or with friends, no one was ever there.
The kid drew, a lot. He started coming to the art room as the year wound down and teachers were less inclined to care on his study periods. Blue smocks hung on hooks in the supply cage, but he never touched them.
He drew Murr, drew Murr saving Sooney-Crow (an actual crow, just giant), and flying off on her back. It might have been a cop-out, but it made more sense than taking the blue orb and going through the tower and whatever else happened after that.
Close to the end of the year, the kid left his sketchbook in the art room and remembered on the curb next to his bus. He ran back, heard the busses pull away.
The art room was dark but unlocked, and the weird last bell (the one that tells you that you missed the bus) rang. In the silence that followed the kid heard the sound of the pottery wheel, off to the right. He looked sidelong, just until a flash of blue smock came into view in front of the electric wheel.
“I thought you said you never wanted to go back to that life.” The figure didn’t answer, maybe didn’t hear or didn’t know to whom the kid was speaking. The kid didn’t know to whom he was speaking, either.
“Murr?”
The girl at the wheel threw a puzzled look over her shoulder. He recognized her, she was a grade behind him, seemed an okay person. Maybe she looked a little like Murr might, IRL.
“Wait, you know about Murr?”
The kid shrugged.
“I’m Canon . . . I mean in the game. That’s really weird. Do you play? Do you know who her player is?”
An illusionist’s trick; clever, kind of cruel.
The kid nodded, which was easy, because he was kind of shaking. Play or don’t play?
“I’m Murr.” The kid said it at last. Canon smiled at him.
“He told me I would find out about her if I tried tracing her life. I guess . . . I have something for you? The blue orb from the temple they didn’t let you . . . Murr . . . get. “
“No girls allowed.”
Girl!Canon looked uncomfortable.
Boy!Murr shook his head. Then he started to chuckle. “How was it? The temple?”
“Nothing special.”
Murr laughed. Murr’s laugh got Canon laughing. “Stupid game.”
“Yeah, I know. I was going to call my dad to pick me up. Do you need a ride? We can try to figure out how to meet in the game.”
“My house isn’t too far to walk.”
Canon. Canon’s player (Hazel) washed her hands and took off the smock.
“Do you mind if I walk with you, then? I don’t feel right carrying around something in that game that says it’s yours.”
The kid thought about it for a second.
“Sure. I don’t mind. You can call your dad to get you at my house or my mom can drop you off.”
“Cool.”
“Thanks for saving me from those vampires.”
They went right, and out to the street.
Social Services
Madeline Ashby
“But I want my own office,” Lena said. “My own space to work from.”
Social Services paused for a while to think. Lena knew that it was thinking, because the woman in the magic mirror kept animating her eyes this way and that behind cat-eye horn-rims. She did so in perfect meter, making her look like one of those old clocks where the cat wagged its tail and looked to and fro, to and fro, all day and all night, forever and ever. Lena had only ever seen those clocks in media, so she had no idea if they really ticked. But she imagined they ticked terribly. The real function of clocks, it seemed to her, was not to tell time but to mark its passage. Ticktickticktick. Byebyebyebye.
“I’m sorry, Lena, but your primary value to this organization lies in your location,” Mrs. Dudley said. Lena had picked out her name when Social Services hired her. The name was Mrs. Dudley, after the teacher who rolled her eyes when Lena mispronounced “organism” as “orgasm” in fifth-grade health class. She’d made Social Services look like her, from the horn-rims to the puffy eyes to the shimmery coral lipstick melting into the wrinkles rivening her mouth. Now Mrs. Dudley was at her beck and call all the time and had to answer all the most inane questions, like what the weather was and if something looked infected or not.
“This organization has to remain nimble,” Mrs. Dudley said. “We need people ready to work at the grassroots level. You’re one of them. Aren’t you?”
Now it was Lena’s turn to think. She examined the bathroom. It had the best mirror, so it was where she did most of her communication with Social Services. The bathroom itself was tiny. Most of the time it was dirty. This had nothing to do with Lena and everything to do with her niece’s baby, whose diapers current
ly clogged the wastebasket. There was supposed to be a special hamper just for them with a charcoal filter on it and an alert telling her niece when to empty it, but her niece didn’t give a shit—literally. Lena had told her that ignoring the alert was a good way to get the company who made the hamper to ping Social Services—a lack of basic cleanliness was an easy way to signal neglect—but her niece just smiled and said: “That’s why we have you around. To fix stuff like that.”
“That is why you decided to come work for us, isn’t it?” Mrs. Dudley asked.
Lena nodded her head a little too vigourously. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, that’s it exactly.”
She had no idea what Social Services had just asked. Probably something about her commitment to her community or her empathy for others. Lena smiled her warm smile. It was one of a few she had catalogued especially for the purposes of work. She wore it to work like she wore her good leather gloves and her pretty pendant knife. Work outfit, work smile, work feelings. She reminded herself to look again for her gloves. They didn’t have a sensor, so she had no idea how to find them.
“Here is your list for today,” Mrs. Dudley said. The mirror showed her a list of addresses and tags. Not full case files, just tags and summaries compiled from the case files. Names, dates, bruises. Missed school, missed meals, missed court dates. “The car will be ready soon.”
“Car?”
“The last appointment is quite far away.” The appointment hove into view in the mirror. It showed a massive old McMansion in the suburbs. “Transit reviews claim that the way in is . . . unreliable,” Mrs. Dudley said. “So we are sending you transport.”
Lena watched her features start to manifest her doubts, but she reined them in before they could express much more. “But I . . . ”
“The car drives itself, Lena. And you get it for the whole day. I’m sure that allays any of your possible anxieties, doesn’t it?”
“Well, yes . . . ”
“Good. The car has a Euler path all set up, so just go where it takes you and you’ll be fine.”
“Okay.”
“And please do keep your chin up.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your chin. Keep it up. When your chin is down, we can’t see as well. You’re our eyes and ears, Lena. Remember that.”
She nodded. “I—”
A fist on the bathroom door interrupted her. Just like that, Mrs. Dudley vanished. That was Social Services security at work; the interface, such as it was, did not want to share information with anyone else in a space and so only recognized Lena’s face. Her brother had tried to show it a picture of her, and then some video, but Lena had a special face that she made to log in, and the mirror politely told her brother to please leave.
“Open up!”
Lena opened the door. Her niece stood on the other side. She handed Lena the baby and beelined for the toilet. Yanking her pants down, she said: “Have you ever had to hold it in after an episiotomy?”
“No—”
“Well, you might someday, if you ever got a boyfriend, which you shouldn’t, because they’re fucking crap.” The sound of her pissing echoed in the small room. “Someday I’m going to kill this fucking toilet.” She reached behind herself, awkwardly, and slapped it. Her rings made scratching noises on its plastic side. “You were supposed to tell me I was knocked up.”
Lena thought it was probably a bad time to tell her niece that her father, Lena’s brother, was the one responsible for upgrading the toilet’s firmware, and that he had instead chosen to attempt circumventing it so it would give them all its available features (temperature taking, diagnosis, warming, and so on) for no cost whatsoever. He didn’t want the manufacturer knowing how much he used the bidet function, he said one night over dinner. That shit was private.
Her niece didn’t bother washing her hands. She took the baby from Lena’s arms and kissed it absently. “It’s creepy to hear you talking to someone who isn’t there,” she said. Her eyes widened. Her eyeliner was a vivid pink today, with extra sparkles. Her makeup was always annoyingly perfect. She probably could have sold the motions of her hands to a robotics firm somewhere. “Don’t you worry sometimes that you’re, like . . . making it all up?”
Lena frowned. It wasn’t like her niece to consider the existential. “Do you mean making it up as I go? Like life?”
“No no no no no. I mean, like, you’re making up your job.” She glanced quickly at the mirror, as though she feared it might be watching her. “Like maybe there’s nobody in there at all.”
Lena instantly allowed all of her professional affect to fall away, like cobwebs from an opened door. She turned her head to the old grey leather couch with its pillows and blankets neatly stacked, right where she’d left them that morning. She let her niece carry the full weight of her gaze. “Then where would the rent money come from?” she asked.
Her niece had the grace to look embarrassed. She hugged her baby a little tighter. “Sorry. It was just a joke.” She blinked. “You know? Jokes?”
A little car rolled across Lena’s field of vision. Its logo beeped at her. “My car is here,” she said. “Try to leave some dinner for me.”
“Is it true they make you all get the same haircut so they can hear better?”
Lena peered over the edges of her frames. Social Services didn’t like it when she did that, but it was occasionally necessary. Jude, the adolescent standing before her, seemed genuinely curious and not sarcastic. That didn’t make his question any less stupid.
“No,” she said. “They don’t make us wear a special haircut.”
Jude shrugged. “You all just look like you’ve got the same haircut.”
“Maybe you’re just remembering the other times I’ve been here.”
Jude smiled dopily around the straw hanging out of his mouth and slurped from the pouch attached to it. It likely contained makgeolli; that was the 22nd floor specialty. Her glasses told her he was mildly intoxicated; he wore a lab-on-a-chip under the skin of his left shoulder, in a spot that was notoriously difficult to scratch. The Spot was different for every user; triangulating it meant a gestural camera taking a full-body picture or extrapolating from an extant gaming profile. “Oh, yeah . . . Yeah, that’s probably it.”
“Why do you think I’m here, Jude?”
“Because the Fosters aren’t.”
The kid didn’t miss a beat. The algorithm had first introduced them three years ago, when his foster parents took him in; he referred to them privately as “the Fosters.” Three years in, “the Fosters” had given up. They collected their stipend just fine, but they left it to Lena to actually deal with Jude’s problems.
His main problem these days was truancy; in a year he wouldn’t have to go to school any longer unless he wanted to, and so he was experiencing an acute case of senioritis in his freshman year. If he chose to go on, though, it would score Lena some much-needed points on her own profile. There was little difference, really, between his marks and her own.
“Is there any particular reason you’re not going to school these days?”
Jude shrugged and slurped on the pouch until it crinkled up and bubbled. He tossed the empty into the sink and leaned over to open the refrigerator. You didn’t have to really move your feet in these rabbit hutch kitchens. He got another of the pouches out. “I just don’t feel like it,” he said.
“I didn’t really much feel like going, either, when it was my turn, but I went.”
Jude favoured her with a look that told her she had best shut her fucking mouth right fucking now. “School was different for you,” he said simply. “You didn’t have to wear a uniform.”
“Well, that’s true—”
“And your uniform didn’t ping your teacher every time you got a fucking boner.”
Lena blushed and then felt herself blushing, which only made it worse. She looked down. True, their school district was a little too keen on wearables, but Jude’s were special. “You know why you have to wear those p
ants,” she said.
“That was when I was thirteen!”
“Well, she was ten.”
“I know she was ten. I fucking know that. There’s no way I could possibly forget that, now.” He crossed his arms and sighed deeply. “We didn’t even do anything.”
“That’s not what you told your friends on 18.”
He sucked his teeth. Lena had no idea if Jude had really done the things he said he did. The lab inside the little girl had logged enough dopamine to believe sexual activity had occurred, but it had no way of knowing if she’d helped herself along or if she’d had outside interference. The rape kit had the same opinion: penetration, not forced entry. When the relationship was discovered, the girl recanted everything and said that nothing had happened, and that it didn’t matter anyway because even if something had happened, she really loved Jude. Jude did the same. Except he never said he loved her. This was probably the most honesty he had demonstrated during the entire episode.
“I know it’s difficult,” Lena said. “But completing your minimum course credits is part of your sentencing. It’s part of why you get your record expunged when you turn eighteen. So you have to go.” She reached into the sink and plucked out the pouch with her thumb and forefinger. It dangled there in her grasp, dripping sweet white fluid. “And you have to quit drinking, too.”
“I know,” he said. “It’s stupid. I was just bored, and it was there.”
“I understand. But you’re hurting your chances of making it out of here. This kind of thing winds up on your transcript, you know. You can’t get a job without a decent transcript.”
Jude waved his hand. “The fabbers don’t care about grades.”
“Maybe not, but they care about you being able to show up on time. You know?”
He rolled his eyes. “Yeah. I know.”
“So you’ll go to school tomorrow?”
“Maybe. I need a new uniform first.”