The God Game

by Danny Tobey

  Peter came by with his backpack over his shoulder. “Ready?”

  “Not really.”

  They walked down the hall together, toward the Dragon’s Lair. The students they shoved past stared at them. One of them stupidly went “Ooooooo-oooooh” while doing a tsk-tsk with her fingers. All the while, Charlie tried not to look up at the obscene number of posters of himself staring back down at them, as far as he could see down the long corridor.

  As they walked, Peter whispered, “It’s not going to work.”

  “What?”

  “Our virus.”

  Charlie shushed him. Even with their devices buried in their backpacks, he was paranoid that everything was being heard.

  “It already knows. Of course it knows,” Peter said.

  “How? We—”

  Peter just smiled sadly. “It will see us coming a mile away.”

  “You don’t have enough faith in us.”

  “You have too much.”

  Charlie had sat next to Peter all night, watching him solve problems in the code, just as he had saved them from hacking omnipotence without omniscience.

  “If you’re so sure it’s not going to work, why’d you bother helping us?”

  “I don’t know, Charlie. I guess I’m trying to be more like you.” Peter considered that. “It’s not much fun.”

  They found themselves outside Morrissey’s door.

  “Glasses on,” Peter said. “This is gonna be bad.”

  84   GRENDEL’S DEN

  Elaine Morrissey sat behind her desk, looking grim. Mr. Burklander stood behind her, madder than Charlie had ever seen him. He looked betrayed.

  “Sit down.” Mrs. Morrissey’s voice was barely restrained. It almost trembled.

  Charlie and Peter took the two uncomfortable seats in front of her desk and glanced warily at each other.

  “I have a student in the hospital.”

  “Vanhi?” Charlie blurted out hopefully, feeling a ray of hope. Was she still alive?

  “What? Why would Vanhi be in the hospital?” Morrissey asked, baffled. Vanhi’s mom had indeed called the school several times already and spoken to the Game, who assured her that all steps were being taken.

  “Alex?” Charlie tried again.

  “No. What are you going on about? Zeke.”

  “Zeke?”

  “Zeke Taylor. Overdosed on some kind of drug they’re not even sure what it was, it was so tainted. He’s in a coma. He probably won’t ever come out.”

  She paused, her eyes boring into them, waiting for them to say something. Peter just looked down at his hands, unconcerned, pleasantly aloof, the way he always was, which made people wonder, Who is this guy? I want to know this guy.… But this time it looked more sinister to Charlie. It felt like biding.

  Morrissey leaned in. “And then after I go to the hospital and watch his parents cry over his ruined life, I get this.”

  She turned her monitor toward them, and Charlie watched her click on a file attached to an anonymous email that said, “Watch This!” He felt his stomach churn as he saw the video of them on the Embankment from just last week, Charlie and Peter lounging in the grass, talking. It was shot from above, from a security camera Charlie hadn’t even known existed. Peter handing Charlie the crumpled brown lunch bag. Charlie walking it stupidly, innocently, across the grass (He gave me half his lunch yesterday. I forgot mine). Zeke looking up lazily, his long dirty-blond dreads and washed-out eyes (Hey, from Peter) (Thanks, dude).

  “I’m alerting the police,” Morrissey told them. “You killed that boy.”

  “No.” Charlie shook his head. Peter put a hand on Charlie’s wrist, as if about to remind Charlie of his Miranda rights. But he couldn’t stop talking. “I thought it was a sandwich.” He realized the moment it left his mouth how lame it sounded. His voice was desperate. “I didn’t … I wouldn’t…”

  “Is that right?” the Dragon Lady said coldly. She pulled her phone closer, across her desk. Charlie couldn’t process what was happening. The police were coming? For him? Just like that? Before he knew what he was saying, it came out:

  “It was Peter’s! He said it was food.”

  If Peter cared, he didn’t show it. He didn’t flinch or protest. He just stared down at his manicured nails benignly.

  “Then how do you explain this?” Mr. Burklander asked.

  Morrissey clicked on the second attachment, and another video came up. It was Charlie at Neiman’s, buying the bracelet with his wad of cash.

  “I guess we know where you got that kind of money,” Mr. B. said.

  “No.”

  Peter put another gentle hand on Charlie’s forearm, but he swept it off.

  “Those two things have nothing to do with each other!” And that was true! They were both crimes, apparently, just separate crimes. “I … I … made that money at my job.”

  Burklander snorted. “At the copy shop?”

  “Yes,” Charlie said, so desperately he felt pathetic.

  He felt the wires tightening around him, curling like a vine around his chair, over his wrists and through his legs, across his neck.

  Morrissey said bitterly, “We always knew Peter had a bolt loose. But you? You, Charlie?”

  Burklander lost it then. “Goddamnit, Charlie. You ruined everything. You made an ass of me. Everything I did. All year. Trying to pull you back from the edge over and over. And you were doing this? You let me put you in front of Harvard? I knew you were lost, Charlie. I didn’t know you were gone.”

  Charlie tried to answer. To tell him something that would wipe the heartbroken look off his face. Charlie came up with nothing.

  Morrissey picked up the phone. She was dialing, then waiting as it rang. A rising panic came over Charlie. Was this the end? Would they frog-march him out the main door, in front of the entire school? Would he really go to jail?

  His panic reached a fever pitch. The attacks had been scary. But he could fight his way out of those. This was the system, as invisible as it was ubiquitous. There was no one to punch back against. Two undoctored videos and the apparatus was in motion. His whole life over while he was still alive to suffer through it. Arrested, like Scott Parker. That couldn’t be his path.

  The picture on Elaine Morrissey’s desk moved.

  It was a photograph of her family. Three beautiful children around her. A grinning husband, his arms around her. The Dragon Lady was actually smiling in it.

  Then the husband and children in the photo turned their heads and gasped.

  It startled Charlie.

  They were looking across the desk at another Elaine Morrissey—not the one on the phone, waiting for the district liaison officer to answer—but one on her back on the desk, her skirt hiked up. Mr. Burklander was over her—not the real Mr. Burklander standing against the wall now, fuming, his eyes closed, but another Mr. B., plucked from another moment in time in this very room, just a week prior—his pants unceremoniously around his ankles, his white Costco boxers halfway down, hands on the desk on either side of his boss, in the very place where they were supposed to be adults guarding the well-being of children.

  “Fuck me, Edward,” said Elaine Morrissey’s doppelgänger.

  In the picture on her desk, the husband dropped his head in shame. The three children’s mouths opened into identical cartoon O’s.

  “Fuck me, Edward,” Charlie said out loud, before he even realized he was doing it.

  “Excuse me?” Morrissey roared, her hand over the receiver of her phone.

  “Fuck me, Edward,” Charlie said, deliberately this time, across the Rubicon, driven by the sheer terror of prison.

  Morrissey froze, her hand over the receiver. Ed Burklander opened his eyes and stared at Charlie.

  “Right there.” Charlie pointed at the spot on the desk where the phantom Ed and Elaine were now fading away, translucent ghosts still pumping in forbidden passion. “Right there, in front of the picture of your children?”

  Now Charlie real
ized he was not just scared but angry. Because his mom was gone, but this mom was alive and treating her own family like garbage, just as his dad and Susan McAllister had done to him, screwing each other in secret while the real Mrs. Lake was suffering through chemo. All the rage and fear was now one indistinguishable emotion that he could only perceive as forward.

  “Right there. And there. And how many other places?” The scenes were now flashing in front of his eyes, visible only to him. “Your house? At three in the afternoon.” He looked at Morrissey. “Your bed?” He looked at Burklander. “Your classroom?”

  They were all talking at once. Elaine Morrissey was saying, “How could you…”

  But Burklander was fully enraged now, standing tall, coming toward them. “If you think, for one second, that you can blackmail us…”

  “Ed,” Morrissey said, “wait…”

  “They are not going to…”

  “Ed”—tears filled Morrissey’s eyes—“you don’t have a family.…”

  Burklander stood right in Charlie’s face.

  “Ed, you don’t have kids.…”

  “I don’t care,” he said, eyes burning. “They will not get away with this.”

  “Yes, we will.” It was the first time Peter had spoken, and he said it with his head still tucked down against his neck, calm and collected.

  He stood up and stared at Mr. Burklander. The look in Peter’s eyes was cold. Morrissey was right. There really was a bolt loose. His eyes were shining, but it wasn’t from those mirror neurons that made people feel for others. The sparkle in Peter’s eyes reflected inward, an illusion, mirror on mirror: infinite regress that was infinitely thin. Charlie wondered, Had it always been that way? Why was he seeing it now?

  “You will sit down,” Peter said to Burklander, raising a hand and pointing at him. “You will listen to your lady friend and keep quiet, about me, about Charlie, all of this.” No fear was in Peter’s voice.

  “Or what?” Mr. B. didn’t look like a teacher now. He looked like a grown man who’d had enough. Enough of kids. Enough of disrespect. He was one step short of rolling up his sleeves and pummeling Peter.

  Charlie felt things spinning out of control. His anger had faded. He regretted immediately what he’d said to Mr. B. It was like his talk with Vanhi—what was real? How he felt now or two seconds ago? He tried to keep Peter from stepping toward Mr. B., but Peter shoved him back.

  “Or what?” Mr. B. said again, a growl this time, stepping toward Peter. “You ruined Charlie. I can’t fix that now. But you are done.”

  Peter moved his hand in the air. The arcane gesture was like a magus conjuring spirits, then he thrust his hand palm-forward and shot an invisible signal at the speed of light and Ed Burklander convulsed. His chest thrust back and his eyes went wide and bulged out. His implanted defibrillator went off like a mule kick. It sent him buckling to the ground.

  His back arched up and he passed out.

  Elaine Morrissey cried out and ran to his side, propping up his head in her arms. “Get help,” she cried. “Somebody get help. Oh, Eddie.”

  “Come on.” Peter walked toward the door, leaving Elaine Morrissey on the floor cradling Burklander’s head and reaching back blindly for the phone above her on her desk.

  Charlie tried to run toward Mr. B., but Peter grabbed him around the chest and yanked him back, with more power than Charlie realized Peter had.

  “What did you do?” Charlie yelled at him. “Is he okay?”

  “He’s fine.” Peter dragged Charlie out of the room. “He just got a little pacemaker jolt. Happens all the time. Come on.”

  Charlie struggled to get away, but Peter was too strong.

  Morrissey was dialing 911.

  Peter caught her eyes. “You won’t say another word about us, will you?”

  She shook her head, terrified.

  “Go,” Peter said to Charlie, shoving him into the hallway.

  Outside the office, Charlie spun on him. “What did you do?”

  Peter wiggled his fingers in the air and said merrily, “I used the Force!”

  85   ST. PAUL AND THE MAGICIAN

  Charlie shoved Peter hard, his head hitting the column behind them. “We’re done.”

  “Excuse me? Didn’t you just come beg me to code your little virus?”

  “You could’ve killed him.”

  “I saved your ass from jail. Remember?”

  “There was another way.”

  “Was there now?”

  “Maybe I should’ve gone to jail.”

  “Easy to say now.”

  “Fuck you, Peter. Vanhi was right. There’s something wrong with you.”

  “Go back in there. Pick up the phone and call the cops. I won’t stop you.” Peter smiled, holding his arm out elegantly, inviting Charlie to turn himself in. “That’s what I thought.”

  “We’re not friends anymore.”

  “No, it’s worse. We’re brothers.”

  Charlie walked away.

  “You think you’re so high-and-mighty,” Peter yelled after him. “You just don’t have the guts to be honest about who you really are.”

  Charlie spun around and got in Peter’s face. “I am not like you.”

  “No mom, shitty dad, handsome outcast, just a half click off from mattering. Yeah, we’re nothing alike.” Charlie started to turn but Peter grabbed his arm. “They will never give it to you. You have to take it.”

  “Keep telling yourself that.” Charlie walked away, furious, because Peter was right. And what then?

  “Take a look in the fucking mirror,” Peter yelled after him, down the long hallway.

  86   CONTROL/ALTER/DELETE

  Alex sat with the bomb, in the hissing heat of the boiler room. He let his hands wrap around it, gathering his courage. The Game had whispered to him all night, as it had for the past several nights, introducing him to new intelligences who could fill in gaps in his understanding.

  Christ sat to his left, whispering in his ear. The alchemist Hermes Trismegistus sat to Alex’s right, explaining how his actions might seem cruel to some, but they would be understood eventually. All great plans were initially misunderstood, until the hidden meanings became clear with time. The alchemist transformed into his black-eyed alter ego, Thoth, who, carrying a lantern, would guide Alex’s soul to the afterlife.

  Freud was there, explaining that the most natural thing in the world was for a son to kill his father. That was the origin of religion, after all, in aboriginal cultures. Kill the father and replace him with a totem to worship. It both solves the problem and eases the guilt.

  Alex closed his eyes and whispered to himself:

  “For I have come to turn a man against his father.

  “For I have come to turn a man against his father.

  “For I have come to turn a man against his father.”

  “That’s right,” the Game said to him, stroking his hair, “that’s exactly right.”

  “We’ll ignite at a special moment,” Christ said. Thoth drew it on the boiler with his finger, where the bloody pentagram once was, now a faint and distant memory.

  Φ

  “What does it mean?” Alex asked.

  “It’s a symbol I used, once,” Freud said. “For something called the Project. How the brain makes consciousness.”

  “No,” Jesus said, “it’s the number of divine creation. The golden ratio.”

  “One point six one eight zero…,” Freud said. “Two oh two P.M.”

  “Just before school lets out,” Christ said.

  “And the building is full.”

  Thoth tapped the boiler.

  “We’ll fill the school with gas,” Christ said.

  “The explosion will be magnificent,” Freud added. “A ball of fire.”

  “What about the good people in the school?” Alex asked.

  “Did my Father worry about that with the Flood?”

  “Are there any good people, really?” Freud put a hand on Alex�
��s. “When the video spread, how many people stood up and said, ‘Stop this. It’s unacceptable’?”

  Alex couldn’t bear to answer.

  “No, they all laughed. Man is not a gentle creature. He desires to humiliate his neighbor, to seize his possessions, to torture and kill him. Homo homini lupus! ‘Man is a wolf to man.’”

  “You are not the Lamb,” Christ reminded Alex.

  “Rest,” Freud said, “lie back and listen. There is so much left to know.”

  87   TABLET ON THE UNCOMPOUNDED REALITY

  Kenny pedaled like a maniac. He hadn’t ridden his bike in years. But it was all part of the plan. Low-fi. Off-line. No signals, no tracers. He wobbled at first but soon he had momentum, and muscle memory took over. He sailed through the traffic and found the back roads.

  The plan was to go to the Oak Street Library southside. Far from their homes, unchecked internet access, no sign-ups, no log-ons. One of the last anonymous ports of entry they could think of. Every car Kenny passed made him flinch. Would this be the one to suddenly swerve, unbidden, running him off the road and into a ditch?

  He linked finally onto the bike trails along the river and looked up, seeing the sun come in and out of view through the leaves. He felt alive and free and hopeful.

  Miles away he came onto the roads, winding through a wooded back street until the Oak Street Library came into view. He kept waiting for something to happen—a transformer to suddenly surge and blow as he passed. A light to magically switch from red to green as he pedaled toward his own green light, sending traffic at full speed into him. It was all wired, available.

  But he pulled up safely to the library, and the doors were old-school, not even automatic. The building was comfortably dilapidated. The signs in the kids section were cut out of construction paper. He could almost smell the Elmer’s glue like paradise.

  He had a panicked thought. What if the computers were so old they didn’t even have a USB port? But they did. He pushed in the flash drive and copied the virus over, then launched it, following the steps Charlie and Peter had carefully laid out for him. Code spun on the screen rapidly. It was born. It was dividing and growing. Nothing about this birth was beautiful or sacred. But it was alive, and all he could do was hope.