by Danny Tobey
Her finger rested over the touch screen.
No. There were limits.
She couldn’t do it. She wouldn’t do it. Her magic essay had been a victimless crime, plucked from the ether. But this was an assassination.
Vanhi took off her glasses and walked away before she could change her mind.
* * *
One hour to opening.
Charlie could barely stand it. The Game was silent. No warnings. No promises. No demands. Just … silence.
He imagined what it might do—flood the internet with negative reviews? Turn off the gas so they couldn’t cook? Blackmail some kid to release cockroaches under the table?
He could do nothing to stop it.
He checked the internet—the reviews, the ads, were all the same. At least on his screen.
He could do nothing but wait.
That night, Charlie watched his dad reopen World’s Fair as Charlie’s. It was a tremendous success. People came. Old people, young people, families. It wasn’t a massive crowd, but it wasn’t small either. The room felt full and boisterous. It was exactly the kind of place his dad had imagined. You could bring your family on a Saturday night and feel safe and happy.
The Game was nowhere to be found.
Arthur came up to him, and a woman followed tentatively behind. She was pretty, maybe midforties, with sandy hair and a nervous, somewhat sad smile.
“Charlie, this is Susan.”
Not my friend Susan. Not my new girlfriend or your new mom. Just Susan.
He was supposed to hate this woman. Punish her by withholding his courtesy. That was the script. But he wouldn’t. His dad was happy. The restaurant actually happened. Yes, his dad had mortgaged their future, but if things kept going like this, they might actually make money. Maybe college was closer, not further, away. His dad looked better than he had in years. Not to mention, if all this was a trap, if it was going to fall apart as part of some epic Game revenge, at least let him have tonight.
“Hi, Susan.” Charlie extended his hand.
“Hi, Charlie.” Her smile got less nervous, but no less sad.
The look on Arthur Lake’s face said it all. Charlie surveyed the room, all the families eating and having a nice time. For the first time in a week, he didn’t even think about the Game being played all around them.
It was a good night.
54 MIDNIGHT
Late that evening, Alex tried the drugs Peter had given him, something new. Peter had given him the Adderall before, when Alex asked, but this was something more. It would help him see further.
He had to stop thinking about the day. His father had given him a choice that morning: belt now, or belt after work. He chose after work. Pain later was better than pain now.
All day long the Game wouldn’t let him visit his sites. Not the video ones. Not even the story ones where you could post your violent fantasies. He loved the disclaimers on those sites: These are works of imagination. The webmaster does not authorize, screen, or condone anything posted here. He liked that—it was just a platform. And what were we all if not blameless platforms for the dreams posted inside our skulls?
Instead, the Game pulled him in deeper, filling him up with its vast mythologies and crypto-mystical programming. He lapped it up.
His dad came home looking weary, but he administered the punishment dutifully, with the obligatory “This hurts me more than it hurts you.” Yeah, really, fucker? Wanna trade?
He wore his Aziteks throughout. The Game did him the courtesy of distracting him from the humiliation and pain. First, every time the belt came down, the image in his eyes showed the scenario reversed, his hand raised, his dad on the receiving end. He wanted to smile, but then his dad would see it and have to go harder. Then it was Kurt Ellers on the receiving end, then Tim, then other meathead fucks. Then it was Vanhi and Kenny, those traitors who wanted him out of the Vindicators. Then finally it was Charlie. Because Charlie still didn’t get it: the only thing more humiliating than being punched and slapped was being rescued.
Everyone but Peter, because Peter was all right. He didn’t say no when all Alex needed desperately was for someone to tell him yes. Peter treated him as an equal. He trusted Alex to rise or fall on his own choices.
Snick was the sound of the belt.
When it was done, he saw his dad had tears in his eyes.
“Please try, Alex,” he whispered. “Just try.”
That night, Alex made ayahuasca tea as the Game instructed. It told him Peter could get the ayahuasca, and Peter didn’t judge him for asking. After all, Peter said he’d taken ayahuasca at St. Luke’s and it changed his life. Peter had written back:
You sure?
I need it.
Ok. Let’s meet.
Peter had sat side by side with Alex, showing him how he navigated the auction houses in the Game, the avatars bidding silently. How the box would be delivered to them within the day. Alex saw what Charlie saw, how special it felt to have Peter’s undivided attention.
Now Alex lay in bed, concentric circles of neon and gemstones rotating over him and pulling back in infinite regression. Time melted away.
When the shapes parted, he was alone in his room, perfectly still and silent in the darkness, but Christ was sitting across from him, in the chair in the corner of the room, barely visible in the dim light of the digital clock. Christ held up a hand, which was bloody and marked with a hole.
“My Father did this to me,” he said softly.
Alex didn’t know what to say.
“‘For He so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son,’” the figure added. “Why didn’t He love me?”
Alex tried to study Christ’s features, but the room was too dim. The figure sat quietly in the chair.
“He did love you,” Alex said, knowing that he and the Game were really talking about Alex’s father.
“You truly don’t know, do you?”
Alex felt tears begin to well in his eyes, that shaking feeling just before the waterworks when you want to hold it back.
Christ asked, “Why does he hurt you?”
“Because he loves me?”
The figure shook its head no.
“Because he hates me?”
“No,” Christ whispered. “Because he fears you.”
The figure was still in the corner, staring right through Alex. “Children are born slaves. They do not choose existence, it is thrust upon them. The child grows, yet the parent refuses to relinquish control. He uses maxims: ‘Honor thy father and mother.’ Why? It is the child’s right to take his place.”
Alex sat, mesmerized. He’d never thought of it that way.
“Who sacrifices a child and calls it love? Sacrifice yourself, Father.”
Alex nodded.
“They tell you you’re the Lamb, so you won’t see what you truly are.”
“What am I?” It was the question Alex had never been able to answer. A loser? A freak? The Boy from Mars? The Dumb Asian? The Worst Vindicator?
“‘For I have come to turn a man against his father,’” Christ told him. “‘Children will rise up against parents and have them put to death.’”
Alex felt his vision failing. Whether it was from the drugs or exhaustion or the Game, he felt himself pulling back, heading into a bottomless place.
“You were forged in the furnace of my grasp,” Christ whispered. It filled Alex with a sense of possibility. “I will make you matter.”
* * *
At midnight, Vanhi woke to the sound of shattering glass.
Her first instinct was to protect Vik, so she ran to his bedroom. He was sound asleep, curled up safely. The sound had come from the living room.
She heard her parents stirring. Her dad came into the hallway in pajamas. Her mother followed, pulling her robe tight.
“Stay back.” Vanhi awed them with her fearlessness.
“No, you stay back.” Her father wasn’t a large man, but he was possessed with a sudden feroc
ious love of his children.
They ended up creeping side by side, and Vanhi felt in the dark and flipped on the living room lights. The front window was broken. A spray of glass went across the carpet.
“Careful,” her mother said.
A brick was in the middle of the room. Someone had written GO HOME on it, which was all the more terrifying, Vanhi realized, because this was home.
There was nowhere else to go.
Her father lifted up the brick and turned it around in his hand. “It’s just kids. Kids being stupid. Nothing to worry about.”
A sick wave passed through Vanhi. Was this her punishment for turning down the Game’s offer? She almost told them everything: Don’t worry, it’s just a computer game!
Or was it? Because this kind of stuff was in vogue again, suddenly, in the real world. Bricks through brown people’s windows, swastikas on schools. People had thought it was gone. But it was always there, just waiting for someone to make it okay again.
What would happen if she did tell them everything, the Game listening?
How much worse than a brick through the window?
Later, she would study the brick through her Aziteks and see that in gamespace it was labeled:
400 Blaxx. Ingratitude.
“It’s the times we live in,” her mom said now. “It will pass. Most people are good.”
“That’s true,” Vanhi’s father said theatrically, for her benefit.
She wanted to believe they meant it.
She realized that the only thing that would eclipse this horribleness, the only thing that might revive her parents’ faith in the dream they’d traveled halfway around the world for, was to get into Harvard.
What else was within her power? What else could even come close?
55 ICON
The next morning, Charlie received a text, from someone new and unexpected.
The number was blocked. But it wasn’t the Game—it came from a new sender, a different thread.
I heard you were looking for me
Charlie rubbed his eyes awake and rolled over onto his back, the phone above him.
Who is this?
It gave him the name of the person he’d googled on a whim, when he couldn’t find how to quit the Game. The last of the known Friends of the Crypt, who’d taken himself off the map over a decade ago, after he served his time and got out of jail.
Scott Parker
Charlie was torn. What he would give to hear from someone who had played before them. Who knew where it all ended. But Charlie was out. Why dip his toe back in, even a little? The answer was obvious. For his friends.
Still, he knew the Game was watching. He couldn’t open this door. Not even a little. He typed back:
I already quit
no you didn’t
Charlie didn’t respond. He had his fingers over the keyboard, thinking of what to say, when the person claiming to be Scott Parker added:
you think you did
Damnit, Charlie thought. This guy—these letters claiming to be a guy claiming to be Scott Parker—was reeling him back in. He could feel it.
Still, he wouldn’t take the bait. He didn’t respond. Good, he thought. Stay strong.
But the person wrote again:
only one way to quit
“Oh, fuck.” Charlie hadn’t bitten yet, but he could already feel the hook sinking into his jaw. Either this guy was real and knew the one thing Charlie desperately needed to know. Or the Game was the most sneaky, manipulative piece of shit he’d ever encountered.
Cursing himself, Charlie typed:
How?
Predictably, so predictably, the person on the other end wrote:
We need to meet
56 SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY
Of all places, Scott Parker picked the mall. Of course he did. Maybe he’d been watching Charlie through the Game all along. Maybe he knew full well that the last two times Charlie had gone to the mall, he’d gotten his ass kicked. Thanks for the lulz!
Charlie moved through the food court, trying to pick Scott Parker out of the crowd. But it was impossible. Hundreds of people were milling about on the bright Sunday morning, every race and culture, light streaming through the epic windows, families at tables, trays of cinnamon rolls and coffee and doughnuts and breakfast tacos, elderly couples strolling holding hands, tweens chattering away. Charlie put on his glasses and scanned the crowd again.
Through his Aziteks, the person sitting in the middle of the court had a grotesque face, part skull with turquoise and lignite and patches of deerskin pulled tight, lipless teeth, and wide eyes under a red-plumed headdress. His body was massive and rippled, one leg replaced with a thick snake. On his chest was a mirror made of black obsidian. Smoke swirled within it.
Charlie peeked over the glasses and nearly lost the man in the crowd—he looked back through the lenses and pushed his way toward the godlike thing.
Its teeth stuck out in a strange overbite.
A sickly, gaping smile.
“Hello, Charlie.”
“Who are you?”
The figure seemed surprised. “Well, obviously I’m Tezcatlipoca.” He raised an eyebrow. “Smoking Mirror?” He said it like a failed rock star—Don’t you know me? I’m huge in Mesoamerica!
The god waved his hand, as if to say, Doesn’t matter. His buck teeth grinned.
“Who are you for real?”
“That’s an interesting expression. For real. You haven’t taken your glasses off yet.”
Charlie reached for his Aziteks, but the god stopped him lightly with a black-and-red feathered hand on Charlie’s forearm.
Charlie brushed him off and lifted his glasses. He looked over the lumpy pale man. His skin was rashy and his hair was thin and combed over. It was sad to draw a line from the fresh-faced boy in the news articles to the man before him now.
“Better on, don’t you think?”
Charlie set his glasses back down. “Are you really Scott Parker?”
“I was, way back when.”
“You were in the Friends of the Crypt?”
“I was. Now I am the Friends of the Crypt!” He sighed. “Sit,” he said, opening a hand to the chair across from him. “It’s good to see you in person, in Charlie. Funny, right? I can see anyone in the world online, but there’s still something special about being in the same place. Maybe it’s the smell. I’m glad you came.”
“What happened to you?”
“But you already know that, don’t you? Isn’t that why you were looking for me?”
“You were playing the Game.”
“You don’t play the Game, Charlie. The Game plays you. Haven’t you figured that out by now?”
“I want to quit.”
“You can’t. Playing is life. Winning is living.”
“You’re just trying to scare me.”
“No, it’s true. For you and your dad.”
“Leave my dad out of this.”
Tezcatlipoca laughed. Charlie didn’t know if the god was cruel or crazy or both. Playing the Game for a week had almost driven Charlie mad. What would twenty years do?
“What is the Game? What does it want?”
“Now you’re talking!” Tezcatlipoca said, delighted. “Curiosity killed the cat! Curiosity killed Schrödinger’s cat! ‘He opened his box to look inside, to see if he was dead or alive!’ Boxes within boxes within boxes! What box are you in, Charlie?”
“Stop making fun of me.”
“Poor Charlie! So sad! So angry! I wouldn’t dream of mocking you. I’m telling you something. Are you listening?”
“Why should I trust anything you say?”
Tezcatlipoca looked hurt. “You’re one of my favorite characters.”
“I’m not a character.”
“You have to change your thinking, Charlie. This is an honor. You’re part of a grand design. A great experiment whose end we don’t know. The oldest question on earth.”
Tezcatlipoca gestured at th
e milling crowd around them. “They seem so normal, don’t they? Out here, it’s all ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you’ and ‘Pardon me’ and ‘After you.’ But you know that’s a lie. In the dark, they’re typing. Pornographers and pedos and traffickers and terrorists, righties and lefties and commies and fascists, connecting and amplifying. You can feel it, can’t you? The infection. The acceleration. Can you tell who’s who?”
Charlie eyed the crowd around them.
“We knew it, Charlie, early on. The bulletin boarders, the Vint Surfers, Tezcatlipoca the TCP/IP. The optimists said the Web would give every human a voice. Holy shit! Have you met humans? We created God to protect us from ourselves. From our brains. Then we accidentally built the world’s biggest brain, and we forgot to give it a conscience. A seething mess of unbridled humanity: all id, no ego. We can’t even see it, much less stop it, any more than a neuron in your brain can see your thoughts.”
Tezcatlipoca leaned in. “But, we asked, what if you could hack the higher-order process? There’s no problem tech created that tech can’t solve. Infect the metaconsciousness with a metaconscience.”
“A virus?”
“Not malware. Call it Virtueware! A moral virus infected into the global electronic system. The Golden Algorithm. An algorithm for God.”
“What was it?”
“That was the problem! Everyone agreed we needed one, but no one agreed what it should be. The Golden Rule? Hackable. Simplistic. The Ten Commandments? Contradictory. Incomplete. ‘Thou shall not kill’—and ten pages later He’s saying, ‘Kill kill kill!’ Kantian ethics? You can’t lie to a murderer knocking at your door looking for his victim? Bullshit. Utilitarianism? A farce, grotesque—kill a homeless man to give his organs to five nuns? Macabre math. Every moral system failed.”
“Then what?”
But Charlie saw the answer, right in front of him.