The God Game

by Danny Tobey

  Tim said, “I would hate it. That’s why I have to stay in control. That’s why I can’t have you guys running around messing with us. You know what my dad taught me? The world is a joke. No one knows what they’re doing. Never blink. If someone hits you, hit back twice as hard. If someone smells blood, it’s over.”

  Charlie nodded. Even his sarcastic question had backfired. But the anger was second to his worry for Alex, and he had to pass them to get to the lot. Or he could double back around like a coward, and they’d know it. So he walked slowly and calmly toward them, clenching inside, wondering if they’d take this opportunity to smash him on the back of the head as he passed.

  Yet their brutality apparently had a nobility, a barbarian’s code.

  He passed between them, and no one laid a finger on him.

  Charlie was about to cut his losses and keep going, but a question occurred to him, the one that always seemed to come up since he’d started playing the Game.

  Alex was attacked days ago. Charlie turned around. “Why’d you do it today?”

  Tim said, “Because you told me not to.”

  “What?”

  “Your text this morning. Delete the pic or you’ll kick my ass? Now’s your chance, Charlie. Come try it.”

  Charlie closed his eyes. The Game could make them or destroy them. Tim and Kurt were just as much pawns as Charlie was. He turned his back and went toward the lot.

  Then he got his own text from the Game:

  Better hurry

  62   PLIMPTON 322

  Better hurry.

  Was the Game confirming his worst fears? Was it provoking Alex toward them?

  Alex’s car was gone. He could be anywhere. He didn’t answer his phone. There was only one option, and it made him sick to do it, but he had no choice. He opened his texts with the Game and asked:

  Where is Alex?

  The Game wrote instantly:

  Welcome back, Charlie!

  He ignored the taunt.

  Where is Alex?

  Did you like my present? How’s Mom?

  WHERE IS ALEX?

  You quit!

  PLEASE

  He is preparing to die.

  HELP ME STOP HIM

  How can I help you if you only believe in Me when you need something?

  Charlie banged his hand on the hood of his car. Come on. He typed:

  What do you want from me?

  Love.

  What do I have to do?

  Come back. Be mine.

  Charlie was shaking. This whole thing was his fault, all the way back to the moment he hesitated when Alex begged him to say, We want you—all the way back before that, when Charlie was so lost in his own grief that he didn’t see Alex going down a bad path. Charlie could’ve saved him then, when it was a little thing, a stolen deck of cards here, a dark comment there. Charlie could’ve gotten him help, stood up for him, sat with him the way Peter had sat with Charlie after his mom died, late into the night. And now a chasm was between them, and all he could do was pray it wasn’t too late to stop the worst thing. The thing Alex could never take back.

  This was on him from the very beginning.

  He thought of Alex on a ledge somewhere, one foot out over empty space. Charlie swore, then typed:

  OK

  63   BEFORE THE FLOOD

  A gray dot appeared on a map, hurtling through two-dimensional space.

  Charlie opened his door and was about to get in when Peter yelled, “Charlie, wait.”

  Peter caught up. “You’re going to need my help.”

  “How’d you—”

  “I’ll explain on the way. We should take my car. It’s faster,” Peter said without apology.

  When they got to his BMW, he threw Charlie the keys. “You drive. I’ll deal with the Game.”

  “I can handle the Game.”

  “Trust me, this is beyond your skill,” Peter said haughtily.

  Moments later, they were tearing down the highway, following the gray dot that the Game promised them was Alex. Charlie hoped that was true, that they weren’t following some random dot, but they had no other leads, so all they could do was hope.

  The speedometer read 110. The Aziteks showed the navigation line over the road ahead.

  “How’d you find me?”

  “The Game. I was trying to find Alex, after the photo.”

  “Do you think he’d really…”

  “Beaten by his dad, by Kurt, humiliated in front of the entire school, yeah, I do.”

  The navigation line on Charlie’s Aziteks blanked out. “What happened?”

  “Players are fucking with us.”

  “Why?”

  “For the lolz.” Peter moved his fingers, navigating windows Charlie couldn’t see. “I’ll get it back.” Peter waved something over to Charlie’s Aziteks, a series of branching gray lines ahead, forks and probabilities, some on the highway, some exiting here or there, each giving rise to more branches, receding over the horizon. Alex was a quantum man now.

  “Which one do I follow?” Charlie asked, weaving through traffic.

  “I’m working on that.” Peter moved his hands. “I bought us a Wayfinder. It’s making me solve multiagent pathfinding problems. Fucker.”

  Just as one branch leading to an exit approached, it disappeared.

  “Jesus, I need more warning,” Charlie shouted.

  Charlie spun the wheel to the right to get around a car in front of them, but then in real life the wheel locked under his hands. It spun against him, out of his control, back to the left.

  “Holy shit!”

  They nearly rammed into the car racing beside them.

  “I didn’t do that!” Charlie yelled.

  “We’re being hacked. Hang on.”

  The wheel released and Charlie had control again. “Who’s doing that, the Game?”

  “No, other players are throwing shit at us.”

  Peter cleared a few more paths, the road ahead clarifying.

  Then they saw the creature, small and spry. In their Aziteks, it leaped on a car in front of them, perched long enough for them to speed closer, then leaped at them, hitting their windshield and sending out a spiderweb of virtual cracks. It trailed a bloody mess and rolled up and over the roof.

  “What the fuck?”

  “I’ve seen these things, they’re dumb fucking Game bots, they mess up electronics for real. So cheap any moron can buy them and throw them at us.”

  “What do I do?”

  “Just drive. I’ll handle them.”

  Another virtual bot came into view ahead and sprang from car to car, getting closer. It flew under them, small wings just lithe enough for it to glide like a flying squirrel, disappearing under the front of the car. In the AR-sound piping in from their Aziteks and through the satellite radio, too, they heard a grinding, chewing noise, teeth on metal, and in reality the wheel locked up again, spinning left, nearly crashing, sending the car next to them into a honking, swerving fit, then the creature tore up through the floor in the gamespace and ripped into the dashboard. The wipers went on full blast for real and sprayed the windshield with water, messing with their view, while the car swerved right, the wheel spinning under Charlie’s hands, death-metal music suddenly blaring full blast from the radio, and they grazed the guardrails, which screamed metal on metal and sparked. “Fuck, Peter, do something,” Charlie yelled over the chaos.

  “Hold on,” Peter shouted. He reached “into” the virtual hole in the dash and pulled the thing out writhing, all teeth and spit. It bit his hand in the AR, loosing a gush of virtual blood and leaving a bloody stump. Their Aziteks painted background over Peter’s hand wherever it moved so it looked as if nothing were left. Peter grabbed the creature with his other hand and smashed its head into the dash until it stopped moving.

  “Fuck,” Peter said, “that just swallowed my Goldz.”

  There were still too many gray lines ahead.

  “I can’t help.” Peter sounded
strangely, uncharacteristically desperate, as if his whole mysterious-chill-outsider persona was a front.

  Charlie didn’t like it. But for once, he was one step ahead of the Game, and he didn’t need Peter’s help. “I know where we’re going.”

  “You do?”

  Someone must have heard because two more creatures appeared, leaping toward them from the cars ahead, suicide-diving into their windshield, spreading their wings the moment before impact to blot out the view. The windshield went black and red.

  “Oh, no.” Charlie hit the windshield wipers, but all it did was smear the filth around.

  Charlie lifted his Aziteks off his face, hit suddenly with blinding sunlight. But the second he raised them, the car spun out of control, the wheel whipping violently back and forth.

  “Put them back on!” Peter cried. The cars around them were blaring their horns.

  It was crazy—they were trapped in augmented reality. If he took the Aziteks off, the Game would apparently smash them dead. It was play or die. Charlie put the glasses on and the splattered bots were back blocking his view, but the car immediately stopped swerving.

  Peter opened his window and reached out of the car with his “remaining” hand, his seat belt unbuckled at 100 mph, pulling off one of the carcasses. The moment it was clear, Charlie saw a car immediately ahead that they were plowing toward.

  He jerked left and whipped past it, horns blaring, clipping its back bumper.

  “Get the other one,” Charlie yelled, still blinded on his side.

  “I can’t reach it.”

  “Shit,” Charlie shouted. “Take the wheel.”

  Peter held the wheel while Charlie unbuckled his belt and leaned out the window, feeling the air whip past him. He grabbed the thing and yanked it off, having to pull hard before the digital form would move. When it caught the side wind, it ripped out of his hand, and he saw it whip backward in the rearview mirror as it smacked off the crash wall onto the road, smearing as it went. Charlie pulled his seat belt back on and stared at the road ahead.

  “It’s the spillway.”

  Peter understood, ashamed that Charlie had thought of it first.

  People went there to die. You could jump off. You plow your car into the forty-foot-thick concrete retaining wall. You could ankle-weight yourself on the other side and drown. The place had a romantic reputation for loss and despair.

  “There, that’s our exit,” Charlie said.

  The bots were gone now. The wheel no longer jerked out of control. It was eerily silent, as if the Game had heard Charlie put it all together and silenced the jesters throwing obstacles in their way, out of respect for the solemn task ahead.

  But as Charlie changed lanes toward the exit and the spillway beyond, a car coming the other way suddenly rammed over the median and rolled, the terrified driver looking not stylized and hyperreal like a character in the Game, but just horrified and real, and Charlie realized this was no joke and swerved, the poor guy’s car being hacked as Charlie’s had been, the guy probably going to die as casualty of a Game he didn’t even know existed, and Charlie swerved with all his might, fishtailing across three lanes, smashing off the far sidewall just as the other car came down where they’d been a second before with a horrifying impact as Charlie barreled off the exit onto the grass and nearly into a ditch before pulling with all his might to veer back onto the country road as it veered around toward them, wheels sending a spray of dust as they jerked back onto the road. He drove white-knuckle forward, adrenaline surging, shaking, eyes dead-locked ahead. He glanced in the mirror just once at the car flaming behind them and felt sickened.

  “Jesus Christ, that car came out of nowhere.” Charlie’s hands were shaking.

  Peter stared at him, rattled from the maneuver, and said, totally honest and bewildered, “What car?”

  64   GROUND TRUTH

  Right after the terrible assembly, Vanhi had run out of the auditorium looking for Alex. She didn’t love Alex. She didn’t even like him. But she feared what he might do next.

  She wrote Charlie, and he instantly responded, calming her fears.

  Don’t worry. He’s with me now. He’s fine.

  Vanhi wrote back:

  Fine?

  Not fine. Ok for now. Safe.

  Ok. Where r u?

  Boiler room—come meet us.

  Why on earth would Alex go back there?

  The site of his last humiliation, peeing his pants over a virtual monster with real flames.

  What was the Game doing to him?

  But she went because she needed to help Charlie. Even if I’ve just put a knife in his back? Forget that. A week ago, he hadn’t even wanted Harvard anyway.

  In the basement the boiler room door was already unlocked, no mystical code needed this time. She went into the darkness, calling for Charlie. It was pitch-black now, not even the safety lights on, and her voice echoed off the piping and through the empty nooks and back to her.

  The door was creaking shut behind her, and suddenly she remembered the fight with the Hydra—how the door had bolted shut, trapping them in.

  The echo faded and no one had answered, and Vanhi knew it, she was being played.

  She turned and ran back toward the door, catching it just before the safety locks could click.

  “Jesus, fuck.”

  Her text buzzed again.

  Went down to tech lab. come meet us.

  She gritted her teeth, feeling manipulated. But if they were there, she had to find them.

  When she walked in, it was still dark, but then all the monitors lit up at once. The sixteen linked computers in a semicircle. The fifty-inch LED over the NanoStation, hooked to a microscope. The other flat-screens over the robotics and circuitry labs.

  They all clicked on and showed the same image.

  Vanhi saw herself from behind, hiding in the woods across from the house on Tremont Street. Someone had been filming her then, from a cell phone. It felt like mirror on mirror: watching herself watching the house, feeling like someone must be behind her now. Lord Krishna? G.O.D.? She glanced behind her and was alone.

  On the screens, time sped up and the stars rotated out of the sky and the sun came up. She snapped awake on the screens and left, satisfied the house hadn’t blown up.

  Time sped on, the house on Tremont Street quiet until the front door opened, and a young man with his wrist in a cast opened the door.

  He looked at the box and then around the neighborhood, his gaze passing right by the screen without stopping. He knelt down and opened the box clumsily, using his keys in his good hand and holding the box steady with his other elbow, grimacing when his wrist jostled a little.

  He ripped the flaps open and dug out the balls of old newspaper. And then saw inside. His face looked absolutely, totally broken. He pulled out something limp, and it took Vanhi a moment to realize it was a cat, hanging lifelessly, its spine snapped in two, gray and black stripes, a collar with jangly tags. The video had no sound, but he appeared to cry out and held the limp form to his face and buried his nose against it. A lady came up behind him, clearly his mom. The scene was horrible. The cat hung from his arms like a shirt folded in half.

  Vanhi started to cry. The deep sobbing came from a place far down inside her. It wasn’t just for the cat that was broken in half. It was for the dream that wasn’t going to come true.

  She sobbed for what she had done, for what she had to do.

  65   THE HAND OF GOD

  Charlie and Peter tore down the road, the BMW gunning.

  This was the same road where Mary’s brother had died, a dangerous route, one lane, two-way traffic, on the edge of the city near woodlands, a fun place to cruise too fast. It was dusty and rough. It ended at the reservoir beneath the high dam. Kids would sit at the top on the walkway and smoke in the dark and look at the city in the distance. Alex was a gray dot in their augmented vision, hurtling ahead on the map, out of real sight. Charlie couldn’t catch up so he took the lef
t at the ridge and sloped up to the lookout point, a hilltop that was level with the crosswalk along the reservoir and looked down at the spillway in between. He kept an eye on the gray dot and hopped out of the car, looking for the real Alex to drive into view below.

  Peter came up beside him. “There!” He pointed.

  A cloud of dust plumed out and Alex’s car passed through it, a fairly scraped-up 2010 Jeep his dad had bought used for all of the siblings to share.

  With a sickening clarity, Charlie realized Alex was accelerating, not slowing, as the wall of the reservoir—all sixty feet high and hundred feet wide of it, poured concrete and steel reinforcements—loomed in front of him. This wasn’t the first time someone had gone headfirst into the wall. A decade ago there had been a rash of copycat suicides, three or four maybe. But now it was happening, for real, right in front of him. Peter already had his glasses on and hands up, working in the Game, but he was out of Goldz, and his right hand was ruined in gamespace, gnawed to a stump by the bots, and nothing he tried was working. And there was nothing Charlie could do to help.

  Or was there?

  He had just rededicated himself to the Game. Be mine, it had said. And he’d said okay. How many Goldz might that be worth?

  Charlie scrolled in the gamespace and waved his hand in front of him, moving the display. His loyalty had been rewarded: fifty thousand Goldz were in his bank. He looked at Alex’s car, moving quickly, bringing his hand in front of its image and closing his fingers over it, moving in time with the accelerating car. As he hovered over it, a grid wrapped it, white lines crossing along three axes, with a diagram of the attack surface laid out for him. He looked at the wireless entry points. Keyless entry was too short range and the attack surface was too small. Bluetooth was better, but he quickly found the telematics unit. It was wide-open and he could go in through the radio over cellular, and the arrows and flow diagrams on his overlay showed his way from there to the CAN-IHS bus and the CAN-C bus. Charlie swiped, and the God Game did the work. Code scrolled past under his hand—memifs2 -q -d /fs/usb0/usr/share/swdl.bin/—and the car’s system unfolded for him in waves, working him toward the physical controls—