by Danny Tobey
* * *
Kurt Ellers watched the video. He was alone in the locker room, towel around his waist. He’d come to work out instead of going to geometry. When he got out of the shower, his phone was buzzing. The video was there, the one he’d feared since his run-in with Charlie Lake yesterday. How would you feel? If someone posted something secret about you? Kurt didn’t know what the video would be, exactly, but he knew what it would show. And now it was real.
His first reaction was panic. How far had it spread? Who had seen it? What would his dad say? He thought of Caitlyn.
Kurt watched the video, fascinated. He hated certain things about it. He was fat, over his slabs of muscle. He had manhandles like an old man. That was inevitable—he ate like a beast to play like a beast. Other parts of the video were better than he would have guessed. The moment wasn’t awkward or forced. It was deep and true. The passion was real. He loved the person in it. They’d met at conversion therapy. Kurt’s father had told him he’d rather have a dead son than a gay son. Dan’s father had offered to beat the gay out of him. Having pricks for fathers was their first bond.
Then Kurt realized all that would be over now. No more camps, no more preachers licking their lips as they told him to purify his thoughts. No more Seroquel or Prozac to fix his “distorted thinking.” No more lies.
There was no hiding from this.
It was a bomb in the dollhouse of his life.
He would go to Caitlyn’s party tonight. Of course he knew about it. She thought she could erase him just like that? Her boyfriend of three years just swept aside? He would do the one thing no one expected. He would show up, head held high. Not to claim Caitlyn. That was over. No, he would walk in because he was bigger and stronger than everyone else. And if anyone didn’t like it, he would bring the pain. As if to say, Sorry, motherfuckers. Some things haven’t changed.
Kurt recognized the name of the feeling that had come to him, once the shock and fear had worn off. It was liberation.
* * *
Tim was pushing Mary around, just before the call came on his phone. “You’re letting him make a fool of you.”
“Who?”
“You know who. Those posters. You put up, what, two? He’s got a hundred.”
“You’re obsessed.”
Tim smacked her hard across the face. “There is no escape plan. You are with me forever. If you so much as look at him again, I will tell everyone what your family did.”
“You were there, too.”
“I was a kid. Your parents were there, not mine. Your lawyer, not mine. Bribing police. Covering up their precious golden boy’s dead reputation. I can destroy your whole world.”
“I’m leaving you. I don’t care what you do.”
“I will hurt you, Mary. In so many ways.”
That’s when his phone rang. He glanced down and saw his father’s office line. “Don’t go anywhere.” Tim poked a finger into her ribs. She grimaced with pain.
His listened to his dad’s rushed voice and closed his eyes. Tim always knew this day might come. He’d heard bits and pieces over the years as his parents fought. They spoke in hushed codes, but he’d figured out enough: the money problems, stealing from the bank, the fear of getting caught. But now it was real: his dad was telling him to prepare.
His dad spoke quickly: Yes, it was happening.… Yes, they’d planned for this.… No, it couldn’t be on the phone. Especially not on the phone. It was hard to hear his dad like this: he was tall, sturdily built with a large belly and broad shoulders, a deep, sonorous Texas voice, a banker-pioneer. Class and grit, all in one. It was hard to hear him in a situation he couldn’t totally control.
Still, there’d be no shame in his dad going to prison. He wasn’t the first CEO behind bars and he wouldn’t be the last. His dad used to say, “No one gets rich without cutting a few corners.” Rules were for little people. You planned. You took calculated risks.
So Tim went to meet his dad in a shady part of the city, and Tim was ready to do whatever was asked of him. He would be the man of the house now. His parents would try to flee. Tim would have to take care of his sister, and his mom, too, if a deal was ultimately cut to keep her free. But he couldn’t help the creeping fear—what if he couldn’t become his father? What if the world had changed and the old ways didn’t work anymore? What then? Those were the only ways he knew.
He parked his Porsche blocks from where his dad told him and walked down a strip of pawnshops and payday lenders. Smart choice. His parents would probably leave right from here. Skip town and go where?… Mexico? Cayman? If they pulled it off, Tim might never see them again. A few locals stared at him, but he was big and tough and didn’t give a shit and projected that, so he was left alone. He rounded the buildings into the alleyway and waited for his dad. But the people who came from the open end of the alley a few moments later weren’t with his father. And they certainly weren’t Feds either. Tim didn’t know whom the fuck they were with.
There were three of them, with lead pipes, wearing hooded robes and white porcelain masks.
88 VIRUS/PLAGUE
By the time Kenny got back to school, the virus had had plenty of time to propagate, embedding itself into remote patches of code, implanting itself in the past, where no harm can occur because it’s already passed. Unless they were right, alongside Thomas Aquinas and C. S. Lewis. Kenny locked his bike and went into the school. He met Charlie behind the Dumpsters as planned, where no cameras could see them, they hoped.
“Did it work?”
“I think so,” Kenny said.
“How much time?”
Kenny looked at his watch. “Soon. It should be soon.”
“Let’s get back online.”
When Charlie got his Aziteks out of the locker and put them on, he shuddered to see the halls swarming with players. There were avatars of all types, chimeras and characters from games and graphic novels and Watchers, too, moving among them in their masks and robes. They were everywhere, more players than he’d ever seen in one place. Blending in with the students, moving among them in the crowds. Was Peter right after all—did the Game know about their virus? Surely all these people hadn’t gathered just to see their program fail? None of them seemed to be looking at him at all. Was something else happening? Charlie figured this many players would only gather to see something magnificent.
Kenny came up behind him, from his locker. “Hey.” Kenny slipped on his Aziteks and yelled, “Jesus Christ!” In front of him, through his glasses, Charlie was white masked in a black cloak and robes.
“What?” Charlie had no idea what he looked like.
Kenny shook his head. “I forgot you were one of … them … now.”
Charlie glanced down at his hands, horrified to see they were skeletal thin in black leather gloves coming out the sleeves of a dank robe.
Kenny gestured at the stream of players moving past them. “Why are they here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Should we follow them?”
Charlie nodded. He had an inkling of an idea, too horrible to let form.
Whatever was happening, word had spread far and wide, but it hadn’t spread to him, and he was a Watcher, too, wasn’t he? So why was this news being withheld from him?
“I know what the Game’s about now,” Charlie whispered to Kenny, as they climbed the stairs, following the rush of visitors moving virtually through the halls. “It’s crowdsourcing morality, creating situations to see how players judge each other’s choices.”
“That’s insane,” Kenny said, as they turned the corner. “If that’s how morality works, Donald Trump will be our next president.”
The players seemed to be heading to the third floor. Charlie and Kenny ran after them, pushing past the students trying to go in the other direction. As the two made it through the crush of the stairwell, they saw the players moving in different directions, like eddies in a current.
“Where the hell are we supposed to go?”
Charlie asked.
“That’s it!” Kenny shouted. “Look!”
The goat, Azazel, was limping along the hallway, worse off than ever. He’d already been slaughtered and thrown on a pyre. Now he was charred and decimated, just a burned skeleton clacking down the hallway. He looked mournfully back at them, like, Oh, shit, you assholes?
“We should follow it,” Kenny said.
“No,” Charlie shot back. “I think it’s a distraction.”
“Trust me, the last time I saw it, it was important.”
“Fuck, I don’t know.”
They followed the goat as he led them down the hallway, back to room 333, where Abraham had been. Azazel reached the threshold of the door and set himself down, spent, as if he couldn’t bear to go inside and return to the scene of his ritual sacrifice.
Charlie and Kenny went in.
But instead of the art supply room Kenny had seen last time, on their Aziteks now it was dark and unadorned until floor lights came on abruptly with sound and music. The cheerful game-show melody had the occasional sour note, like a memory run through a meat grinder. The tune was a convoluted perversion of countless theme songs, the tempo slowing down and speeding up, an organ grinder distracted by his monkey. An announcer spoke as lights shone into their eyes, blinding them temporarily, spotlights lighting their stage, only the front row below them visible, Plasticine white faces staring back.
The voice was both familiar and artificial. If real announcers were intentionally transhuman, this voice was their perfect amalgam, so generic it was every voice and no voice at once:
“Welcome, friends! It’s time to play.…”
The title card came up before them, happy and bright, as if all life were a game:
WILL VANHI DIE?
The unseen audience cheered the name in unison.
89 LIFE METER
And there she was, suddenly, hooked up to beeping machines in a hospital room somewhere, filmed from above from the nurse’s monitor camera on the wall. Her eyes were closed. The beeping on the machines was slow and steady. It kept her chest rising up and down.
Her name in type across the video feed said JANE DOE, AGE ~17–19.
Charlie felt a moment’s relief just knowing she was still alive.
Then on the screen, Death appeared, a hazy pixelated character, cloaked and hooded. His skeletal hands held gardening shears with long blades, which he placed on either side of the real tubes running between Vanhi and the machines.
He looked at the screen and grinned.
Then he snapped the shears shut.
“Oh, no!” the crowd roared in unison.
The respirator shut off, and Vanhi’s chest stopped moving. The machines around her went crazy, their screens flashing warnings and dropping vitals. But no alarms went off. No nurses came. The camera switched to the nurses’ station, where they sat boredly, checking email and surfing the Web. The Game intercepted the alarm signals and squelched them before they reached the nurses, never to be heard.
The camera switched back to Vanhi. She was fading now, with a life meter over her head, ten little hearts in the top left corner, ticking down.
90 RED BULL / BLUE TEETH / GREEN FIRE
Tim Fletcher faced the men at the end of the alley. There was nowhere to run. Behind him was a brick wall. He squared his shoulders and waited.
“What do you want?” he shouted, trying to show them he wasn’t afraid.
The men began walking down the alley in their weird costumes, robes and masks like those of some freakish sex cult you read about in Europe. Satanists or tree worshippers.
“Who are you?” he yelled.
They marched closer, lead pipes down by their sides.
His dad should’ve been here by now. Were these thugs from someone his dad had cheated? Had they already taken his father?
“Where’s my dad?”
How could he know his father had never called?
Through the eyeholes of their masks he now saw them gazing back. He tried to read their intentions, the way he would size up a defensive line.
The men got within a few feet of him and stopped.
They raised their lead pipes.
Tim braced himself for the pain. He was ready to fight.
Then the men paused.
As if waiting for something.
91 TABLET/SCROLL/COMMENTARY
Vanhi disappeared, replaced with a screen that said LOADING … like an 8-bit horizontal scroller. Just before, the hearts on her life meter had begun dropping precipitously as the machines shut off and her chest lay still. Every heart would flash six times, then half would disappear, then six more flashes, another half gone … counting down to death that would come in minutes.
“Charlie, she’s dying,” Kenny said.
“I know.”
Then the progress bar hit 100 percent and the game appeared, an old-school 2-D street-fighting game. The pixilated goons had white masks and iron bars and hooded cloaks. In the middle of their circle was a little digital version of Tim Fletcher, a caricature of his blond hair and bulging biceps. His face was cartoonized from the football roster, same smug smirk. Vanhi’s life meter was at the top left, still ticking down. Now Tim’s was on the right.
For a moment, Charlie thought he was being asked to play the role of Tim, fighting his way out of the crowd, an interesting act of empathy.
But one tap on the icons at the bottom of his vision and all was clear. As he hit the button, the thug closest to Tim raised his pipe and swung through the air, hitting nothing—a little MIDI whoosh rang out. Charlie tapped the arrow, and the thug moved a step closer to cartoon Tim. The next blow would connect.
“It’s too easy,” Charlie said. “It’s three against one. Unless…”
“You don’t think…,” Kenny said, eyes wide.
“No…”
Vanhi’s hearts were dropping.
“Charlie, we don’t have much time.”
“I know, but…” Charlie felt a sickening lump in his throat.
“We don’t know that there’s any connection between this and real life.”
“Why else would it be so simple?”
“We don’t know,” Kenny said. “But we do know Vanhi’s dying, for real.” Kenny looked at Charlie miserably. “We can’t be sure we’re hurting our enemy. But we know we’re saving our best friend. That has to make it okay, right?”
“Not really.”
“Yeah, me neither.”
The goons stood around cartoon Tim, the only movement the steady, rhythmic animation of their breathing.
Charlie said, “We have to at least see … if it’s even what the Game wants.”
Kenny nodded slowly. “Okay. Once.”
Charlie tapped again, and the pipe swung. Thunk! The little cartoon Tim buckled. A comical wee woo woo woo slide-whistled as he went down on one knee.
Tim’s life meter went down. Vanhi’s went up, the same amount.
“Oh, no,” Kenny said.
“Don’t touch it.”
“Charlie, she’s dying.”
“I know. I said you don’t touch it.”
“We’ll do it together.”
“No. You already saved us once, with your swastikas.” Charlie met Kenny’s eyes. “Yeah, I know. That had to be for you. That’s how the Game is. This has to be for me.”
* * *
The men circled around Tim.
“Do you want money?” he asked. “Is that it? I can get money.”
No answer.
“Then what?”
He didn’t sound scared. He’d been on the other side of these circles, some victim in the middle. Everybody gets a turn in the ring, he told himself. But unlike that little coward Alex, who nearly pissed himself, Tim would fight to the death. And it wouldn’t be his death.
“Come on, then.” He closed his fists.
Then one of the men swung his lead pipe through the air, a few feet away, hitting nothing. It made a violent
, whisking sound.
“Quick fucking around.”
Then suddenly, the same man took a step forward, clearing the distance between them. He waited there, pipe raised.
“You bastard. Fucking do it.”
An erratic pause—then suddenly, savagely, the man swung. Tim tried to dodge right but he was boxed in and the pipe landed squarely.
He felt pain blossom in the meat between his neck and shoulder. His vision flickered. He felt his knees weaken and went down on one. But he was strong. He rallied and lifted himself back up. He was Tim Fletcher, goddamnit. Two-time state champion. Another pipe cracked against his ribs, and he realized he might die.
What popped into his head was Mary.
* * *
Charlie was in a trance now. He had no choice. Cartoon Tim was fighting back. He even managed to wrestle one of the video-game villains down, and Vanhi’s life meter dropped again, dangerously low. Kenny reached out and helped Charlie, pulling another hooded figure into the fight.
He gave Charlie a worried look. “For Vanhi.”
“For Vanhi.”
They could see Vanhi’s life hanging in the balance. The hearts fluttered back and forth. Charlie gritted his teeth. He hit the button and the man took another swing.
And another.
And another.
Finally, it was too much for Tim to bear, and his little avatar went down and cradled on the ground as the blows kept coming. Charlie felt his gut clench as the life meter for Tim dropped low. Each blow helped Tim’s hearts go to Vanhi’s side, but how many would it take? How low would Tim have to sink toward his own death for Vanhi to survive? Another blow, with cartoon Tim cradled on the ground, Vanhi’s meter closer to full, but every time Charlie paused, her hearts started dropping again rapidly, her machines still off. Come on. Another blow, Vanhi’s life meter inching stronger, Charlie cringing as he gave Tim another blow, and then Vanhi’s meter maxed out, flashing red and dinging, and the screen changed.