The God Game

by Danny Tobey

  She swung the pipe the other way, but to her surprise she missed, and equally surprising was the way the blade went in before she even realized it, before she felt anything at all like pain. It just went in, like, surprise! She looked down at the improbable sight of the handle sticking out from her belly, and she thought, a little dreamily, But I’m young! The figure had let go of the knife, looking up from her belly to her face as if he was surprised, too. That’s what Vanhi took with her, as she faded away. The strangely maternal observation that he didn’t mean it.

  79   FEAST OF PHOOLS

  It was Charlie’s turn for a break, but Vanhi never came back. He’d felt a nagging dread since the moment she left. The fear had stayed at a low churn for an hour or so. But now, with every passing minute, it was spiraling out of control.

  Finally, he couldn’t stand it and went to get his phone from his locker. As he got near and entered the combination, he could already hear it buzzing away inside, and his stomach churned. It was Vanhi’s mom calling. He recognized the number and her voice and wondered if it was really her.

  “Charlie?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Mrs. Patel, Vanhi’s mom.”

  “Is Vanhi okay?”

  “That’s why I’m calling you. Have you seen her?”

  “She left to pick up Vik, over an hour ago.”

  There was an anguished silence.

  “Mrs. Patel?”

  When her voice came back, it was trembling. She was barely holding it together.

  “She never showed up. She left Vik standing there with his teacher on the sidewalk. That’s not like her, Charlie. She wouldn’t do that.”

  “I know.”

  “Oh, God, do you think she was in a car accident?”

  Charlie’s heart sank. He remembered his steering wheel spinning against his will, whipping under his hands. “Wait. Hang on.”

  He ran to the parking lot. Sure enough, Vanhi’s car was still there. But she was nowhere to be found.

  “Her car is still here, Mrs. Patel.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. Where is she?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it’s good news,” he lied. “It means she has to be on campus, somewhere. Maybe she just got distracted. I’ll find her. I promise.”

  He prayed that was true.

  He promised Vanhi’s mom that he’d call as soon as he learned anything.

  He tried calling Vanhi next, but it went straight to voice mail. He texted her:

  r u ok?

  No answer.

  But then the Game wrote:

  What are you dooooooooing?

  He ran to the library, then the Tech Lab. It was empty, the lights off. He went to the Embankment. A lone couple were making out on the hill in the darkness, but otherwise it was abandoned. He interrupted them to ask if they’d seen anyone, and they looked at him as if he were crazy, a mix of annoyance and interrupted lust. Charlie felt despair setting in, infusing the fear. He ran back inside and looked up and down the long hallways. He could spend hours combing the school, going room to room. He could call area hospitals, but who knew if the Game would even let his calls go through? Every second he wasted meant Vanhi could be lying bleeding somewhere, or tied up in the back of a windowless van, speeding away. His imagination raced out of control.

  There was another option.

  He could already feel the burn of the hypocrisy.

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

  What was the old saying? There are no atheists in foxholes?

  Fine. So be it.

  He was a Deathbed Christian, then. That was fucking fine, because Night Cometh.

  He put on his Aziteks, and the first thing he saw was:

  Congratulations!!!

  You Unlocked Dirty Laundry and ***PUNISHED THE WICKED*** Righteous dØØd!

  TIME TO LEVEL UP

  80   WATCHER

  Charlie turned to find a giant face staring back at him, as wide and tall as his vision, a blank ghastly ghostface with shapeless features, no identity, no soul.

  He’d seen the mask before, but now amplified, grotesque in its size and scale.

  The eyes were black holes, empty and yawning.

  The mouth was a straight line, neither smiling nor scowling, yet it managed to judge him with its lack of interest. The face saw through him, if it saw anything at all.

  The effect set him back on his heels and he nearly stumbled into the lockers behind him.

  “What is this?” His voice echoed up and down the hallway.

  A black hole opened in the face in front of him. It was like a tear in space-time, a portal into a new dimension, the mask opening to invite him in.

  It was black and filled with stars. The Game told him:

  You’re a Watcher now, Charlie. You earned it.

  The words echoed in his Aziteks.

  “Where’s Vanhi?” he shouted back. “What did you do to her?”

  Come inside me.

  “Where is she?”

  Come inside me, Charlie, and All Will Be Revealed.

  “If I’m a Watcher, can I see anyone?”

  Yessssssssssssss!

  “Can I see Vanhi?”

  I See ALLLLLLLLLLLL

  He didn’t want to go inside. It was another victory for the Game. Going higher, clearing more levels, didn’t feel like winning.

  Yet if Vanhi was inside, he would step through glass into a house of pain.

  81   I AM A STRANGE LOOP

  Charlie stepped through, and the world was black and starlit.

  The true lights in the hallway switched off the moment he went in, leaving only the light of the Aziteks, which placed him in an abyss of stars rotating above him.

  The ground below was an expanse of desert, windswept and barren. He could hear the soft thrum of water in the distance and saw the Nile, lush on either side for a few feet before the crops gave way to sand. Insects buzzed quietly in his ears, locusts and crickets.

  Even though the ceiling was above in realspace, he saw in the darkness through his Aziteks constellations from his childhood, more vivid and jarring than they’d ever before been.

  Leo, the Lion.

  Cancer, the Crab.

  Cassiopeia, the Queen.

  A path lit up before him, a soft silk indication in the sand, guiding him where to go. He had no choice. Vanhi was missing, and there was no other way. He was tired of pretending there was always a clever solution to every problem, a way out that dodged the moral morass. Sometimes the only way was through, coming out bloody and tarnished on the other side.

  Above, Perseus, the Hero.

  Taurus, the Bull.

  Libra, the Scales.

  He followed the path as it went upstairs, in gamespace a soft dune that rose, rose, rose, to a higher plane of desert.

  Above, Lupus, the Wolf.

  Scorpio, the Scorpion.

  He came to the third floor, clearing the top of a sand hill to see a pyramid rising above everything else in the distance, an illuminated eye at the top, a beacon, beams in the night. The desert was broader and wider than any school, but the path in realspace was the hallway stretching in front of him in pitch-blackness, lit in the Game as a walkway between two rows of miniature sphinxes facing each other in pairs, a flickering torch below each stone face.

  It brought him to room 322, which appeared as a door in the pyramid.

  He wondered, Maybe the Game hadn’t been onto them? Where are you? What are you dooooooooing? Maybe it had been excitement—it was promoting him to a new level, it was eager to give him his reward. Maybe that’s why it sent those texts only to him.

  Or not. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was Vanhi.

  Inside, he came into a stone temple with a great golden scale, and ideas began to click in his head, fragments of conversation with Tezcatlipoca. A great experiment whose end we don’t know. The oldest question on earth. The Golden Algorithm. An algorithm for Go
d.

  A book containing an infinite number of names was open on an altar before him. As he put his finger on it, the names began to flow by, ink scrolling across the ancient parchment.

  Every moral system failed.

  Maybe we could build something smarter than us to crack it.

  Charlie touched the first name he recognized, Mr. B.

  The scale moved.

  In one tray were Goldz, in the other Blaxx, coins piled on both sides.

  The Goldz sank lower, a slight surplus of goodness.

  As with the Eye of God that Peter had shown him, Charlie could see things from Mr. B.’s life, down to his sad current moment sitting in a robe alone, watching TV as the TV watched him back. But what was new, what was available to Watchers, was the scale. The judgment.

  A creeping suspicion hit him, and he reached out and tilted his hand in space over the balance, and it deposited Goldz and that side sank slightly lower.

  I’m a guinea pig in a fucking morality play that stops when I’m dead?

  Of course! Who else? Lab rats?

  But why could he move the scale? Wasn’t God supposed to be the judge here? Something smarter than us to crack it? A neural net? A deep Boltzmann machine? A tangled hierarchy?

  “Why do I get to decide?” Charlie asked the Game aloud.

  For the first time in this place, the Game spoke:

  God is invisible.

  Man is created in God’s image.

  Ergo, the only way to see God is to see man.

  It hit Charlie then, the brutal simplicity of the recursive loop he was caught in. The desperate failed experiment that was ruining his life, an algorithm tasked to find God that couldn’t. Feed it a bunch of contradicting myths and ask it to spit out the answer, man creating God creating man creating God … morality was outsourced to the Game, and the Game had outsourced it back, crowdsourcing the question of decency to the hive mind. It was as inevitable as it was hideous.

  “You can’t see yourself,” Charlie said softly. He almost felt sorry for the Game then. “You have no idea who you are.”

  The Game didn’t respond, if it heard him at all.

  “Show me Vanhi.”

  The Game was silent.

  “Show me Kenny.”

  He is offline.

  “Show me Peter.”

  He is offline.

  A sudden panic shot through Charlie—had he just given them away? Tipped it off to their hiding together off-line? Had he just plucked the needles from the haystack and shoved them under the Game’s nose?

  Why are all your friends offline?

  Charlie ignored the Game and asked, “Where is Vanhi?”

  I am sorry. She is with me.

  82   CONCEPTION

  Charlie ditched his phone and glasses and ran down to the photo lab.

  “It has Vanhi.” he told Kenny and Peter.

  “Is she okay?” Worry flooded Kenny’s face. “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know. It won’t tell me anything, and I’m a Watcher now.”

  Peter shot a jealous look—he alone should’ve been Watcher level among the two of them—then stuffed it down. “So we only have one choice.”

  Kenny nodded. “We have to destroy this fucking thing.”

  Everybody looked stricken. They didn’t know if Vanhi was alive or dead. She had to be alive. They simply couldn’t process the alternative. It was Not True. They all sank inward, burying their fear in nonstop coding, pressing harder, faster to launch their virus. They knew anything else would be futile—Vanhi’s mom had already called the cops, but the Game would never let them find her, wherever she was. As the three coded, they did a good job of pretending not to be scared to death, although Kenny did run out and throw up in the hallway. This thing, this impostor god, it had to fucking die.

  * * *

  Alex knew there was only one thing left to do now.

  He went home.

  He wanted to see his mom. He’d see his dad plenty tomorrow. No question about that.

  Alex found her on the couch, repairing one of his shirts, one of his favorites. She knew that. She was sewing with a fine red thread to match the color in the plaid.

  He wanted to tell her, Don’t bother. I won’t need it.

  Then he thought, I can wear it tomorrow. I will carry a little bit of you with me.

  He was a bad son. He knew that. He had tried to make them proud. He never did. His mom deserved so much more, after all she’d suffered. Yet she loved him anyway. She couldn’t stand up to his father, she couldn’t stop the things he did. But she loved him. He did see that.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked without looking up from her needle.

  I’ve come to say goodbye.

  “Mom?” He didn’t recognize his own voice.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m tired.”

  “I know, baby.”

  She put down her sewing and looked at him. “You father loves you. He’s doing the best he can.”

  “I know.”

  “Is everything okay at school?”

  They hurt me today.

  That’s what he wanted to say. But the shame was too great. Whatever she thought of him, he couldn’t bear her knowing how bad it really was. She was weak, he realized, too weak to protect him. All the love in the world wasn’t enough.

  His mind was a house of pain, all exits locked.

  He nodded, trying not to cry.

  She swept his hair off his forehead. “Tomorrow will be better.”

  “It will,” he said, and his heart broke.

  * * *

  An hour north, a man sat in the dark, staring at the message on his screen. He scratched his face out of habit and prayed for the message to go away, but it didn’t.

  He was a killer—well, a retired killer, to be fair, if there was such a thing. His story was a miracle. He’d gone into prison bad and come out good. Pure as Christ.

  The Game didn’t choose him by accident. It was curious about redemption. What were its edges and parameters?

  The man had similar questions. Ever since his prison conversion, he’d wondered, Was God’s grace strong enough to wipe his sins clean? Who forgives murder in exchange for a loyalty oath? It sounded more like a mob boss than a holy spirit. But that’s what the prison preacher was selling, so he was buying.

  Beats hell, he figured.

  All his sins, gone. There was the drug use, and the trafficking that had landed him in prison. There were the habits that drove him to meth in the first place. The websites he visited, for urges that society would never understand. The arrangements in strip malls he made to satisfy those desires. What was so wrong with wanting something pure? Something unspoiled? He knew the answer to that, but in the darkness the excuses glowed like angels. Meth had dulled those drives. Given him something new to crave.

  But now he was clean in all ways. Released early for good behavior. He found a church. A charity paid to fix his teeth. He met a nice woman, and they got married, with—surprise!—a kid on the way. Sure, he sometimes went back to the websites that started it all. But almost every time he refused to click Enter. Even now, just before the message had come, he was saying no. That’s how strong he was. He could face his demons and say no.

  But the Game had turned everything upside down. It had started with an invitation, promising him what he wanted deep inside. Now it had blown up in his face.

  His whole past was thrown back at him. Every transaction, every chat, every ad in Craigslist or Backpage, things no one knew, all tied together with a simple promise: Do this one last thing, and it will all go away. It was God’s grace in a fun-house mirror: redemption, not through abstention but through one last sin.

  And if you had to sin, a last sin was the best kind.

  The man knew he couldn’t trust this promise. How many times had he shot people after promising to let them go if they did what he asked? Now he was on the other end of the barrel, and he saw what they saw. There was no choice.
>
  His wife called from beyond the locked door, “Come to bed!” That settled it. He was not going to trade clean sheets, a pretty wife, a kid on the way, for a prison cot and a sharpened toothbrush in the spleen.

  So he took the clean gun out of the shoebox in the attic. Why did I keep the gun? I could’ve thrown it in a lake. Did I always know this day would come?

  The next morning, he gassed up his car and looked at the photo of his target one last time, before he put a match to it, and wondered what the guy had done. They’d always done something. They always had it coming. Regardless, the guy was nothing to him. Just some asshole who owned a restaurant named Charlie’s.

  83   DRAGON’S LAIR

  When the Vindicators stepped out of the darkroom the next morning, the loudspeaker was summoning Charlie and Peter to Mrs. Morrissey’s office for the second time.

  They were bleary-eyed and exhausted. They had all told their parents they were spending the night of each other’s house, and the network of symmetric lies had worked.

  Now, propelled by fear and desperation to save Vanhi (If she is alive, she has to be alive), they had coded through the night and their virus was almost ready. It was compiling now, and then Kenny would sneak off to a distant location and start it propagating through the system. By their calculations, it would take hours to burrow and spread and insinuate itself into the guts of the God Game, so that the eggs could hatch in enough places that the sweeper bots that read and reread vast libraries of dead code would, with statistical certainty, find the implanted memory. False memories of predictions past, an act of masturbatory confirmation: What I said, is.

  The loudspeaker cracked off, and Charlie and Peter exchanged glances. Why would Morrissey be calling them now? The Game was making its move. They went to their lockers to retrieve their devices. Charlie prayed as he did that a message from Vanhi would be waiting, writing back to his text:

  r u ok?

  Duh yeah quit being such a pussy

  But no text was there. Just a million missed calls from Vanhi’s poor frantic mom.