The God Game

by Danny Tobey

  “Who made it?”

  “No one’s saying. Isn’t that nuts? It’s old. It goes back to the bulletin-board days. It’s invitation-only. It could be Cicada 3301. Or maybe the Dritë Collective. The code base has grown over time massively. Now it’s self-perpetuating. The things I’ve read…”

  “If it’s so secret, how do you know all this?” Vanhi asked sarcastically.

  “Did you google it?” Kenny asked.

  “Ha, um, no. You don’t google this. It’s Dark Web stuff. I still know some people. Listen, it’s all here. ‘Win, and all your dreams come true.’ If you do well, things really go your way. In life.”

  “Like what?”

  “Money. Girls. Cars. You name it.”

  “Bullshit. In real life?”

  “Yes, in real life, you loser!”

  “That’s impossible,” Charlie said.

  Charlie glanced at Alex and Kenny. They looked way too excited.

  “It’s not impossible. The only thing impossible is a bad attitude,” Peter chimed, channeling one of Mrs. Fleck’s self-help posters. “But there is a downside. I wouldn’t want to get you all involved in this without full disclosure.”

  “Of what?” Kenny asked.

  “Well,” Peter said, thoroughly enjoying himself, “the Dark Web is a little sketchy about this, but the rumor is, if you die in the game, you die in real life.”

  “Oh, come on,” Vanhi said. “Bull.”

  “That’s what I’ve heard.”

  “That would be so illegal!”

  “Illegal like hacking a street sign?” Peter grinned.

  “No, illegal like murder. Like that.” Vanhi folded her arms defiantly and blew a tuft of hair out of her face. Charlie felt a growing unease. If Goldz supposedly meant money, girls, whatever, in real life, it stood to reason that Blaxx would mean something bad in real life, too. He didn’t believe any of it, but still—if a fraction of it was true, he didn’t like where it was going. Or how easily his friends were walking toward it.

  “It’s not murder if God does it,” Peter said.

  “Touché,” Kenny said.

  “It’s his game. If you do right in his eyes, you have nothing to worry about.”

  “Come on,” Alex said. “It’s bullshit anyway. A game can’t kill you. Don’t be a bunch of babies.” Alex was shockingly animated, way too eager.

  “‘Don’t be a baby.’ A sound, logical argument,” Kenny said.

  Alex threw a mouse pad at him.

  Peter walked over to one of the screens. The same words from the other night bobbed around, welcoming them:

  You are invited!

  COme inside and play with G.O.D.

  Bring your friends!

  It’s fun!

  But remember the rules. Win and ALL YOUR DREAMS COME TRUE.TM Lose, you die!

  :)

  It’s ur choice. Free will!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  “Come on, guys,” Peter whined. “I can’t play this alone.”

  “I’m in.” Alex sat down at one of the monitors.

  “Me, too,” Kenny said, surprising everyone. He walked over to Peter and the terminals. It was tantalizing to Kenny, the religious angle—he was so steeped in family religion, he found it both loving and suffocating. This was a minor rebellion too sweet to pass up. Plus, it was just a game. He didn’t believe rumors.

  “Oh, fuck it,” Vanhi added. “Me, too.”

  “Vanhi,” Charlie whispered, grabbing her arm. He tried to catch her eyes.

  “Come on, Charlie, it’s just a goof. You don’t believe that stuff about really dying?”

  “You don’t need this. Who knows what it really is.”

  “If people had been dropping dead for the last twenty years from a video game, don’t you think we’d have heard about it?” She walked over and sat down.

  Charlie sighed. It didn’t matter who you were—man, woman, loser, cool—it was hard to share Peter. His danger was intoxicating. He was a secret society of one. Everyone was staring at Charlie, waiting to see what he’d do.

  Fuck it, Charlie thought. They’re all in. And here I am, standing alone.

  “Fine. I’ll play.”

  “Well, Charlie, that’s the thing,” Peter said sheepishly. “You might have noticed there’s only four invitations. And five of us.”

  “Are you saying I’m not invited?”

  “No.” Peter turned on a fifth monitor. “When I put your name in, this is what happened.”

  The screen warmed up, and instead of an invitation, a gamespace lit up. Inside the tent, so to speak.

  A small dot was on the screen that said Charlie below it.

  Peter shrugged. “Whatever the God Game is, you’re already playing it.”

  15   IN THE BEGINNING

  It started with a blank space. Like a stage, before a play.

  A black screen, with an empty inventory on the side. And a coin purse, so to speak. With 800 Goldz, as promised. Zero Blaxx. A little dot in the center of the screen, marked Charlie.

  When he sat down and tried to move the mouse, four lines appeared, the contours of a room. It was just the barest hint of a 2-D, top-down space. But as he moved the cursor around, the details of the room fleshed out. A desk here. A table there. All linear. All retro. The kind of game you might’ve made with BASIC when you were a kid.

  The Vindicators all stared at their monitors, in the arc of computer stations in the center of the room. Peter was already in the gamespace with Charlie, starting to explore.

  Vanhi clicked on the invitation, and Charlie saw what he hadn’t for his own invitation. The lizard perked up, still sleepy, and flipped on his top hat. He did a little bow, then held his other hand out, toward the slit in the red curtains.

  They pulled open, a clumsy animation.

  It was black behind them, then the tent came toward the screen until the black between the curtains filled the whole view, and there was Vanhi’s avatar, another little dot, in the dead center. Charlie was up and to the left. Peter was moving around top right. The furniture and details they’d already explored were revealed for Vanhi, too.

  So they were playing together. They’d have to work as a team.

  Good, Charlie thought.

  Kenny and Alex appeared soon after, and among the five of them, they were mapping out the gamespace in no time.

  They were looking down on the world, filling in what became more and more like a blueprint, the 2-D floor plan of a large space.

  “It feels like an old console game,” Peter said.

  “Yeah, like Pyro 2.”

  “SubSpace Continuum.”

  “Classic!”

  “Or Bolo!” Kenny chimed in.

  “It’s not like Bolo,” Vanhi said somewhat arbitrarily.

  “Piss off.”

  “It’s free scrolling. I found a door. I’m in a hallway.”

  Everything seemed to map out as they went, loading from some unknown database.

  “Whoa!” Alex cried, and everybody looked over.

  “What is it?”

  “Pull back on your mouse wheel.”

  They did, and their views changed.

  Charlie almost had a sense of vertigo as the 2-D gamespace lurched and tilted, rotating into a 3-D view, all lines and blank space in between.

  “Oh, no way, it’s like Knight Lore!”

  “Little Big Adventure!”

  And now his little dot avatar was a diamond polygon, with Charlie hovering below it.

  Vanhi was a sphere.

  Peter was a cone.

  Alex was a rhomboid.

  Peter started laughing.

  “What?” Alex said, assuming the joke was on him.

  “Kenny’s square.” Peter laughed harder. “How appropriate.”

  “I am not!” Kenny snapped. “I mean, I am a square here, but I’m not square.” He slugged Peter’s arm. “That’s not even modern slang,” Kenny mumbled under his breath.

  “Follow me, I’m going down the hall.�
��

  They spread out down the hallway, all black and white lines revealing the gamespace just a few steps ahead of the players. A world building itself plank by plank, just in time for each footstep to land on something solid, instead of the void.

  “I’m getting Goldz,” Vanhi noticed, looking at her inventory. “The more I map, the more I get.”

  “How many do you have?”

  “Twenty-five. And counting!”

  “I’ve got twelve,” Kenny said.

  “That’s cuz you suck,” she shot back.

  “This game is bringing out the worst in you all,” Kenny said, shaking his head.

  Charlie glanced at his bank. He already had 800 Goldz from the fight today. He didn’t want to embarrass Alex by having to explain it. He hoped nobody noticed.

  “Why are Blaxx bad anyway?” Vanhi asked. “What racist bullshit is that?”

  “That’s true.” Peter moved his avatar into a new room. “Goldz should suck. Blaxx should rule.”

  “What a couple of snowflakes you two are,” Kenny said.

  “Guys, I hate to interrupt this fascinating conversation, but look at this.” Charlie pointed to his screen.

  Charlie had noticed something as he mapped out the main room: a row of tables, organized into a semicircular arc, surrounded by tables along the outer walls. The details were missing—the equipment, the printers. But they were looking at an accurate floor plan of the Tech Lab.

  “No way. It’s our room.” Kenny gestured around. “It’s this.”

  “You don’t see that in Bolo,” Vanhi mused.

  They all ran their characters back down the hall, into the virtual Tech Lab. As they explored, more and more details emerged.

  Until something fantastic happened.

  As if by some invisible paintbrush, they saw a stripe of “reality” swipe across their screens, filling in the black space of a wall with a line of cinder block painted white—the real surface of the walls around them. And then they saw why.

  Kenny was standing up, looking thrilled and shocked in equal parts. “I didn’t think it would work.” He was holding his cell phone. “I went back to the original text and followed the link on my phone.” He held it up for them. “I got to the same gamespace. But instead of just moving my player around on the screen, I went to the same wall in real life. I held it up to match them—real wall, virtual wall. And look!”

  He painted another swipe through the air with his phone.

  They all immediately swung their heads from Kenny to their terminals. Sure enough, another swipe of reality appeared on the screen, filling in the wall further.

  “Oh, no freakin’ way.” Alex sounded happier than Charlie had heard him in years.

  They all hopped up and started canvassing the room, waving their phones around like lunatics and filling in the wire-frame world on their screens with real-world details. The game mapped the real surfaces onto the 3-D polygons on-screen. The more angles, the more views, the more the Game seemed to fracture and expand the polygons into the real-life images wrapping them, like the foil on old-timey popcorn growing and smoothing into a dome.

  “This is freaking sick,” Vanhi said, her highest compliment. She put a hand on Charlie’s shoulder as they passed each other, and she just smiled and shook her head. “Cool. This is beyond cool.”

  It was.

  The Goldz were accumulating, racist or not.

  “How did you think to try that?” Peter asked Kenny, impressed.

  Everyone knew that Kenny was brilliant in a different way from the rest of them, the philosopher to their physicist. But that’s how he saw it first.

  “This book I love,” he told them. “I Am a Strange Loop. It’s about consciousness, how it arises from unconscious matter. He talks about infinite regress—pointing a camera at its own image on a screen. This reminded me of that.”

  Charlie remembered Kenny’s loaning him that book freshman year. Charlie felt like his own life was looping.

  “How many Goldz do you have?” Vanhi asked in Charlie’s ear.

  “Same as you, I guess,” he answered vaguely, avoiding the issue. “Come on.”

  They went back to mapping.

  But he wondered, how many Goldz did he have now? He went back to his terminal, away from the others. On the screen, the room was filling in nicely. He minimized that and pulled up his inventory. Still empty, but now he had twelve hundred Goldz. He tried clicking on them. A text box appeared.

  Charlie thought about that. Anonymity was good on the Web, but paired against social control, it sounded a little introverted. Social control sounded more than a little fascist, so that was odd, too. But intriguing. Why the hell not? It was only “introductory” fascism, anyway.

  Charlie typed in:

  He hit Enter.

  Nothing happened for a moment.

  The gamespace reappeared, but with a new POV.

  He was looking right at the row of terminals.

  The one in the middle was his.

  He was looking at the back of his own head, looking at his screen.

  And on the screen, that picture was repeated, and within the little screen in the repetition, it was repeated again … and on and on … as if the Game had been listening to Kenny’s explanation and decided to have a little fun. Or, Charlie thought, getting the willies over that idea, was it a coincidence? Because an infinite regress was exactly what this POV would look like, regardless of what Kenny had just been saying …

  Occam’s razor. Let’s not get crazy.

  But when he clicked on the monitor within the monitor, it changed to something simpler: a chessboard. Sixty-four squares. Thirty-two pieces, half white, half black. Simple 2-D graphics.

  That ultimate symbol of machine over man, the chessboard. Chess was supposed to be the timeless battle of human wits, and it turned out it was just a math problem that our creations could solve much faster than their creators.

  Charlie clicked on the board.

  A flicker, and then—

  The computer screen was filled with windows flipping so quickly Charlie could scarcely make heads or tails of the images. But certain things registered—his social media pages, profiles, thumbnail images of himself, his friends, their friends, their social media, the whole spreading web of messages, comments, pings, photos, queries, searches (was that the Google image search of Mary that had revealed the bikini photo he had sheepishly discovered late one evening, guiltily in the dark, door locked?). It was a blur, yet a certain rhythm and pattern emerged at a higher level from the data itself, the image of a spider spinning a web ever outward. Connecting triangular points on faces in photos (did you know every face can be recognized by just three points with 98 percent accuracy?), silver threads spooling out between friends of friends of friends of friends (like that classic STD poster—you’re not just sleeping with one person, you’re sleeping with everyone the person has slept with has slept with has slept with—then why is it so hard not to be a virgin!)—hypnotic, the way the spider was connecting the world, until the world itself was irrelevant and all that mattered was the web.

  “Oh, wow,” Alex said from behind Charlie. Others were coming over to look. Charlie snapped out of the hypnotic stare and turned to see what the ruckus was.

  They were all standing behind him.

  “How did you get it to do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Charlie said, lying lamely.

  On the screen, the flipping and shuffling through Charlie’s social media universe was gone. The chessboard was there, all thirty-two pieces, filling the screen.

  But now the pieces had faces.

  Mary the white queen.

  Tim the king.

  Kurt Ellers the bishop.

  Joss Iverson the knight.

  Across the board: Vanhi, Peter, Alex, Kenny—knights and bishops and rooks, united for a fight.

  And Charlie the king, all in black.

  16   ISOMETRIC

  “Why does Charlie get to be
the king?” That was Alex, sulkily.

  “I don’t know,” Charlie said. “Maybe because I clicked on it first.”

  “The camera-on-camera thing was my idea,” Kenny said, annoyed.

  “No one’s gonna forget that,” Peter told him. “When they write books about this. You’ll see.”

  Kenny ignored him. “Whatever, it’s just a game.”

  “True,” Charlie said. But deep down, did he feel a bit of excitement, being named king? He did found the Vindicators, after all, back in the day. Not that anyone much cared anymore. Peter was the real golden boy now. So did it thrill a little to be king here, with Peter his right-hand knight? You bet your ass it did.

  Turns out, it didn’t matter anyway.

  “Try to move,” Kenny said.

  Charlie clicked on his pieces. Nothing happened.

  “Maybe white has to go first.”

  “More bullshit,” Vanhi said.

  Maybe. Or maybe Charlie hadn’t unlocked the mysteries and permissions of Intro Social Control—a purchase he kept to himself, since he couldn’t explain it without embarrassing Alex.

  When in doubt, change the subject.

  “Come on,” Charlie said. “We’ve got a school to map.”

  Fueled by adrenaline and awe, they spent the next three hours running through the empty halls of Turner High like conquering barbarians, waiving their phones around, capturing every fire extinguisher and trophy case.

  It was a decadent thrill—the school was theirs! Empty, quiet, after midnight: their footsteps and whoops echoing down the corridors and bouncing off the lockers and tiles. All day long the school was fraught with hazards—a sea of bodies pushing and shoving, laughing and bickering and canoodling and fighting—but now it was theirs alone.

  Charlie jumped up and smacked the GO TIGERS! sign, sending it swinging on its hinges.

  He let out a holler and felt freer than he had in years. It was pitch-black out the windows, silent as a crypt.

  They kept running until they couldn’t think of where else to run.

  Suddenly Charlie’s phone buzzed in his hand.

  All of their phones did.

  A text came in: