The God Game

by Danny Tobey

  He knew Tim had Geology next, Rocks for Jocks, and headed down the stairs two at a time to catch him before he went into class. Charlie saw his blond hair, a head above everyone else, and called out, “Tim. Hey, Tim.”

  Tim turned around, and a raging look was in his eyes, as if the fight had started hours ago and Charlie had just showed up late.

  Charlie went toward him, but before he knew it, Tim threw him backward, so hard that the lockers buckled behind him and a lock dug into his back.

  Tim didn’t even bother to watch. He just turned and went into his class.

  Charlie was a flea to him. A nuisance.

  No kind of king, in this or any other world.

  50   SECOND SIGHT

  Alex couldn’t go home. When school was over, he left in a daze, not quite sure where he was going but knowing he could not face his dad. He imagined the sound of the belt.

  Snick.

  The Game taunted him.

  No one asked how you did.

  True. Not one of his friends had asked. One for all and all for one, right?

  Then, later:

  You are a failure in every way.

  He left his bike on the side of the road, two streets over from his house.

  There was a place only he knew about, a place he used to go to play when he was a kid. Alone. Even in elementary school he just didn’t know how to play like the other kids did.

  In first grade, he made up his own languages, and the kids thought it was funny. By third grade they thought it was weird. And he was so hurt. What changed? he’d wondered.

  The place he liked to go served as a cave in many of his adventures back then, or a lair, or an underworld, or a subterranean mine track. It was the nook under a driveway on a house that hung over the side of an eroding hill, propped up by piers. You could run up the slope into the soft armpit where the earth ran up to the concrete ceiling. It was dark and moist and cool.

  He crawled into there now, and it was so much smaller than he remembered. He tried a little of the old imagination, but it was gone, like a magical realm he could no longer access. The wardrobe had a back wall again. The mirror was just a mirror.

  He put on his Aziteks, but the glasses showed him nothing. The Game was disgusted with him, obviously. No illusions to hide in now.

  Why couldn’t it light up the cave, with red torches and swarming bats?

  As if reading his mind, it told him:

  You are the hero of no story.

  He lay back in the dirt and stared up at the shadowy underside of the driveway above. He didn’t know how long he stared, just trying to block out the sound of the belt in his head, but the sun eventually went down. He wasn’t going home. He realized that now. He would stay here all night. He even tried sucking his thumb. That had given him so much comfort when he was little. But now it did nothing. It started raining but he kept dry under the overhang. Then clouds and rain came in from outside the cave. He thought he was dreaming, but then he realized it was his Aziteks. Finally the Game was talking to him! How late was it? He was crashing now from all the speed and caffeine leaving his system. He felt like he couldn’t move. So he just watched the images before him, the man standing under the overhang, dressed in ancient clothes, a guard, standing over a slave who crouched on the ground, whimpering. The guard brought the whip down, drawing blood. The slave cried out and fell facedown in the sand—it was sand now, not dirt, all around them—and the whip lashed again and again until someone stopped it. Alex remembered the story from Sunday school, as it played out now before him: Moses grabbing the whip from the slave master and beating him to death, hiding his body in the sand. Alex, bleary, started laughing because he got the Game. And the Game got him.

  You are the hero of no story!

  Except you could be, it was telling him.

  The oldest story on earth.

  Masters and slaves.

  Chains and freedom.

  Those who whip and those who get whipped.

  * * *

  Charlie opened the last hidden folder on his laptop.

  He used to have dozens. Games. Hacking stuff. Porn. He’d outgrown hiding all that.

  But one folder was still locked away so his dad would never find it. You had to hold down three random keys simultaneously, then type in a password.

  Charlie had come home from school. His father had tried to tell him about good news, but Charlie zoned out, and this time his dad didn’t even bother to press. He just left the room, and Charlie was locked upstairs when he came back. It was the end of a terrible week. Charlie still wondered if the Game was letting him go or not. He’d left school, his back bruised from being thrown into the locker. He suffered through a two-hour shift at the copy shop, with no incidents. No men with bats or attackers under his car.

  Now he was home and exhausted but couldn’t sleep.

  The tombstone picture was seared in his head. It reminded him he hadn’t visited his mom in months. The thought terrified him; it hurt so bad to go there.

  He was a horrible son, obviously, he thought.

  He opened the hidden folder on his computer. Locked away because his dad had gone to great lengths to purge the house of this stuff. It would be bad enough if his dad knew that his password was Alicia. He’d done it right after she died. Now he couldn’t bring himself to change it, as sappy and humiliating as it was. It would be like erasing the last remnant of her soul.

  But the folder might kill his dad, seeing it all in one place. Every home video, every picture, every scanned note and card. The folder appeared, name: Mom.

  Charlie picked the first movie, a clip of her holding him when he was a baby.

  His vision was instantly blurry, pain exploding all over again, like a tree trunk being torn out of his chest, the roots so long and deep that hardly any stuff was left in him. He was a collection of holes that would never heal.

  Someone knocked at his door. He ignored it. He was crying so hard his dad surely heard. The knock was soft and tentative. He saw his father’s shadow in the crack under the door. He knocked quietly once more, knowing he wasn’t wanted, then walked away.

  * * *

  Vanhi kept checking the internet for anything in the news about a cardboard box on Tremont Street and tragedy. Any kind of tragedy. She didn’t know what she was looking for. She’d ruled out all the worst things she could imagine from shaking, prodding, and kicking it.

  Yet the possibilities gnawed at her, all the things that might have come from her moment of weakness. She delivered that box to win her magic essay back, but ever since, she hadn’t had the heart to go back to the Harvard website and see if it had reappeared. She knew she couldn’t bring herself to hit Submit yet, even if the essay was there. First she had to know everything was okay, that her delivery had done no harm.

  But no bad stories popped up, no matter how many times she searched. She watched the morning news and the five o’clock news, too. Just the usual urban and suburban crime. Nothing box related. Nothing God Game–ish. She was starting to relax.

  Maybe something good had been in the box. Like the bass pedal. Whatever the person on Tremont Street secretly desired. A reward for some other task. A new Xbox. Adidas Red Apple NMDs. An Aerigon drone with a Phantom Flex4K camera.

  And if it had been something good? If no one had been hurt?

  Then, finally, she could claim her reward.

  All through dinner, her parents chatted excitedly about a promotion her mom was up for at the bank. Her mom kept asking her if she was okay, and her dad kept saying, “Leave the girl alone, she’s had a long week at school, let her daydream!” He’d ruffle Vanhi’s hair each time, as if she were five years old again, in pigtails on his lap.

  When she couldn’t take it anymore, Vanhi kissed Vik on the top of the head and asked if she could be excused. Her mom asked why, and she dropped the game-winning card:

  “To finish up my Harvard essay.”

  “Oh.” Her mom tried not to smile too broadly. “Y
es, I think that would be okay.”

  Her father winked at her.

  In her room, Vanhi opened the application and held her breath, waiting to see which essay was there. Would it be her lousy catastrophe of a personal statement, or the Game’s magnum opus? She clicked on Personal Statement: In Progress and prayed it wouldn’t say:

  I am deeply passionate about Harvard.…

  That vomitous first line of an insipid essay, the essay of a bright girl paralyzed with fear. She opened her eyes and read:

  Vanhi means “fire,” a Hindi word tied to creation and destruction.

  Oh, God, she thought. Oh, wow.

  She read on. It was all there. The creative destruction. The story of fire, the ballad of her life, her fears and hopes. Her strengths and her failures, too, but framed as insights, recast as possibilities. It was the best essay she never wrote.

  And now it was hers.

  Mama, this one’s for you, she thought, feeling an odd pang as she did.

  She checked her search one more time—still no box-related traumas. Her hands were clean. And with those hands, that delicate fingernail painted hot pink, bedazzled with loopy Vanhi magic, she hit Submit.

  * * *

  At 4:00 A.M., only Peter was happy and unburdened. Alex was hidden under the driveway seeing visions. Vanhi was staring at her ceiling sleeplessly, while Charlie was passed out in his bed, laptop on his chest. Kenny was tossing and turning with nightmares of Eddie Ramirez throwing himself in front of trucks.

  But Peter was wide-awake, blissfully serene, unlocking a new level of the Game. He stared down the third-floor hallway of the school, but through his Aziteks, he saw a broad expanse of desert, with a pyramid towering high over him, a luminous eye in the stone just below the apex. This was the heart of the Eye of God, but that was just a tool. He was about to inherit a purpose.

  The hallway itself looked like path leading to room 322, which was now not a science lab, but the entryway to the great pyramid, torches on either side casting light over the hieroglyphs. He opened the door in realspace, and inside the pyramid was like nothing he’d seen in other parts of the Game. He’d seen the auction houses, where players bid their Goldz silently on anything they could dream of—drugs, black-hat hacks, back-page services. He’d seen the virtual chat rooms like lush French salons where players the world over met anonymously and exchanged slivers of knowledge about the AI running the system around them. But this was different. He saw a great judgment room, stone walls and red-orange flames, frogs staring dully from the flat surfaces, breathing slowly. A dog-headed man had a staff in one hand and an ankh in the other, standing guard by a golden scale as large as the creature. On one tray was a feather. The other was empty.

  The dog-man stared blankly past Peter, blinking, waiting for him to do something.

  In front of Peter, on a stone pedestal, was an ancient book containing names. It was the Book of Life and Death. The Vindicators’ names were in there. And now Peter was a Watcher. It was more than just voyeurism now, simple spying as he’d done through the Eye of God. Now he was at the heart of the Game, its core purpose. And he was a part of that mission.

  One by one, Peter touched the Vindicators’ names on the thin page, and the scale moved.

  51   GOOD NEWS!

  To Charlie’s surprise, it was a glorious morning.

  He’d slept for twelve hours straight. He woke up with sun coming through the small slats in his blinds, hitting his face and warming him awake.

  He felt strangely, wildly free.

  There was no Game. No adventure last night. Or at least not one he went on. The crying was awful, painful, but it felt like it purged him. He had fallen fast asleep and woken feeling lighter than he had in months.

  For just a moment, there was a paralyzing fear: What will I do today?

  But then the smell of pancakes rose from downstairs, and he realized he was ravenously hungry. However foolish his dad was, he could cook. Man, could he cook. And for once, Charlie was desperate for that.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” Charlie’s dad said, looking at him from over the stove as he came down the stairs. “We have a busy day ahead.”

  “We do?”

  “Yes, we do.” His dad flipped two pancakes onto a plate and slid them across the island to Charlie. “Fresh-squeezed orange juice in the pitcher. Help yourself.”

  Charlie took the plate and poked at the pancakes with a fork, waiting to see if they disappeared in a puff of smoke. But they were real. This was real. He smothered them in syrup and put two pats of butter on top, which melted instantly.

  This time, he thought, I won’t ruin it by bringing up mom.

  “Where are we going?”

  “It’s a surprise. It was a surprise for me, yesterday. And now it’s a surprise for you.”

  Charlie remembered the good news his dad had promised yesterday, when Charlie shoved his way past him, up the stairs. Now he would find out.

  Charlie finished his breakfast and felt revived in more ways than one. His dad sat across from him, reading the paper and eating. They didn’t talk. The windows were cracked open and the sunlight brightened the room and the crisp blue fall air streamed in, making everything feel alive and good. Then they were in the car together, driving down East Bishop.

  His dad’s cheeks were flushed and fuller than Charlie had noticed in a long time. Life was here.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Sometimes, good things just happen.”

  A car ride later, and Arthur looked out the window and smiled. “There it is.”

  They were staring at a storefront at the bend in a shopping strip. The brown building had warm shutters and a pub vibe. The sloped roof and green shingles gave it a slightly Germanic, fairy-tale feel.

  “I was facing down permits, licenses, the loan. It was going to take months to get through the red tape. Fine, I could’ve done it. But then this just fell into my lap.”

  “What just fell into your lap? This place?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Really? How?”

  “I got a call yesterday morning. The owner ran into some kind of trouble. He needed to turn it over to someone else right away. Like, right away. He was freaking out. He basically begged me to take it over. I did take it over. It was a steal, Charlie. I can keep the staff, run the kitchen, sub in my recipes over time. It’s plug and play.”

  His dad was happy, but Charlie had a sinking feeling. He wanted to believe in fairy tales. But in recent days all coincidences had become suspect.

  “Doesn’t it seem a little too good to be true?”

  Arthur looked at him and snapped, “Yes, it does. And when you look at the pile of shit we’ve been dealt for the last two years, everything besides a kick in the teeth feels too good to be true.”

  “I know, but…”

  “I think we’re due a little good luck, Charlie,” his dad said, a little softer.

  “How’d he even find you?”

  “Online. I’ve been posting on restaurant blogs for months, learning how it’s done.”

  Charlie started to run the situation through the lens of the Game: Had it caused someone’s crisis? Had it connected that person to Arthur? And why now, when Charlie had just quit? Was this to lure him back in? Or maybe this was the punishment. Maybe his dad would sink all their money into this place, and then the Game would tank it. The possibilities were endless. They were probably evolving by the moment. Or—maybe sometimes a restaurant was just a restaurant. Charlie didn’t know.

  But Arthur was already out the door. “Come on.”

  Inside, the place was just as Charlie would’ve guessed. Tight booths, cozy and rounded. A pool table and two pinball machines. Low-hanging lamps with a warm glow. It felt like the kind of place you wanted to live in. A mural was on the wall, a nineteenth-century city wrapping a forest park with lights strung through the trees and hot-air balloons above. Genteel couples in suits and dresses strolled along a promenade.

  �
��What was this place called before?”

  “World’s Fair.”

  “And now it’s going to be Arthur’s?” Charlie preferred World’s Fair but didn’t say so.

  “Well, wait, check this out.”

  When Charlie was little, his dad used to go on and on about how he’d wanted to be a chef and own a restaurant when he was young. But Charlie’s grandfather had been a stern, sullen accountant who had seen his share of restaurant clients fail. “Running a restaurant is a sucker’s bet,” he would tell Charlie’s dad. So Arthur Lake became an accountant, like his father, except not as talented and not as adept with numbers and financial statements. He hated every day of it, but he supported his family and he loved his wife and child. Then one day his wife was gone and his son was lost and he wondered how his life’s balance sheet had flipped so suddenly.

  Now, he was leading Charlie through Arthur’s own restaurant, beaming with pride.

  In the back, a canvas banner was unrolled across the floor with ties on each end, the cheap kind you could get at a same-day print shop like the one Charlie languished in.

  “I got it last night. It’s temporary, just until we get a proper one.” Arthur nodded at the sign.

  It said CHARLIE’S.

  “If it’s okay with you.”

  Charlie felt his throat catch. He willed his eyes to stop before they grew damp.

  “I’m so happy,” his dad said, not noticing. He put a hand on Charlie’s shoulder. It was tentative at first, as if he suspected Charlie would flinch. And Charlie did flinch, because the mix of emotions was overtaking him, the hope and joy of something new, the certainty that his father had now mortgaged their future, and the creeping feeling that the Game might be behind this, for reasons as yet unknown. But then the grip on his shoulder was firm. Arthur squeezed Charlie’s shoulder and let his palm rest on the back of Charlie’s neck, something he used to do when Charlie was little.