by Danny Tobey
They could see Vanhi again, in her hospital room. Her machines roared back to life, and her breathing resumed, her chest rising gently up and down. Her vitals normalized. Death, the figure superimposed on her screen, lowered his shears. He walked away. The audience, unseen in front of Charlie and Kenny, applauded.
“She’s okay.” Kenny’s eyes crinkled with relief.
The screen changed back to the cartoon street fight. Tim was flat on the ground. He still had half a heart left. His little form was breathing slightly, facedown against the concrete.
“Vanhi’s okay,” Charlie said. “We can stop.”
“Yeah, we can stop.” Kenny agreed, and they looked at each other.
“Why is it still showing Tim?” Charlie asked slowly.
“Isn’t the fight over?”
But the same terrible idea had already occurred to them both.
“Is one of us going to say it?” Kenny said finally.
They watched that little cartoon character, barely breathing. Feeling no pain.
“‘If you and your friends want to leave the Game, you have to take a life.’”
“‘Human sacrifice.’”
“That’s what Scott Parker said.”
It would be so easy. Only half a heart left. And by appearances, he wasn’t even conscious. Just one more click. One more press of the same button. He wouldn’t feel a thing.
And they would be free.
The hooded men stood there, hovering over Tim, waiting for a command. As if reading Kenny’s and Charlie’s minds, a door appeared on the brick wall behind the action. The sign over it said EXIT.
“We still have our virus,” Kenny whispered.
“If it works.”
Kenny nodded. “How much more time?”
Charlie looked at his watch. “Ten minutes. Less.”
But the EXIT sign began blinking over the door.
Fading away.
Charlie stared at Tim on the screen and tried to make himself angry. He thought about Mary’s bruises. Tim smashing him against the lockers. Threatening Mary’s family. Driving Alex to suicide.
There was no way the virus would work. It was a pipe dream. Charlie got himself angrier and angrier. Could he raise his finger to tap the button, just a tap, one more time?
“Charlie,” Kenny said softly, putting his hand on Charlie’s forearm. “No.”
Charlie looked at him. “I wasn’t going to.”
“I know.” Kenny nodded a little too much. “I know.”
92 AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION
Everything had gone wrong at the restaurant. The electricity was out. The freezers were dead. The gas stoves wouldn’t light. The phone lines were down. All Arthur could think was Did Charlie do this somehow, some hacking trick, now that he knows what I am?
Arthur met the maintenance guy, but there was no fixing this. They couldn’t even figure out what was wrong. They tried plugging one of the freezers into the portable generator, but its circuits were fried. The entire dinner shift would be lost, and if the food spoiled, that would erase the gains Arthur had made so far. It was terrible luck, if it was luck at all—but then he thought about things he’d done and realized he deserved every bit of it.
After the maintenance guy left and Arthur sent the last waitress home, he heard the footsteps behind him, too late.
* * *
Charlie and Kenny were alone in room 333.
The street fight disappeared. Tim was gone. Vanhi was gone. All they saw now was the empty classroom. Not even an audience of Watchers to cheer them on.
The test was over. They used a spoofing technique to call 911 anonymously, telling the operator the street name that had appeared in the cartoon world where Tim was beaten. Maybe it would get him help. Strangely enough, the Game seemed to let them do it.
Kenny’s watch went off: 2:00 P.M.
It was minutes to Φ o’clock.
“Get your laptop!” Kenny said.
Charlie opened the casing and popped the Wi-Fi back in. They texted Peter but couldn’t raise him. By now, the virus had spread far and wide. It had implanted and opened the flaps of its Trojan horses. If it worked, they should be able to see into the back end of the Game, into the gearbox behind God’s eyes. Charlie felt it suddenly. He looked at Kenny.
“There’s no way this can work.”
“I know.” Kenny felt despair.
“Unless it does.”
Kenny closed his eyes. He’d spent his whole life being a skeptic. Not a coldhearted atheist, the kind that takes pleasure in tearing down other people’s dreams. He saw what faith did for his parents. He wanted it so badly but just couldn’t lie himself into it.
But now he needed it. “Unless it does.” He smiled. “You’re my brother, Charlie. I believe in us.”
They looked at the laptop, and it was working.
The great codex of the Game was churning in front of them.
* * *
By now, the gas from the boiler room had spread through the network of ventilation shafts coursing through the school like arteries. The Game had opened the pressure-release safety valves like flaps on an organ, piping the odorless carbon monoxide through the school. The building was full of students in the middle of seventh period. A few had begun complaining about headaches, but the bomb would soon go off, before anyone left. Once ignited, the bomb and the gas around it would create a sun, a spectacle of oceanic proportions.
It was time. Christ let Alex know, told him to be strong. The Game handed Alex a device lovingly crafted by the avatar of Sigmund Freud, a Victorian steampunk apparatus, all wires and alligator clips and a black-raised button ringed in polished brass. Its virtual wires ran from the controller to the actual bomb in realspace, which the Game would ignite with the real sparkbox in the boiler once Alex symbolically pressed the virtual button.
“We’ll count down together,” Christ told him.
Alex was shaking so badly he could barely stand. The images of Christ and Thoth and Freud were around him, but he misstepped, and they couldn’t support him so he stumbled and was grateful no one was there to see.
“Be strong, be strong,” the Game whispered over and over.
He knelt before the bomb and put his finger on the black plastic button, which looked like an old doorbell. It gleamed in the vacuum-tubed light.
“You can do this,” Freud whispered.
“I’ll guide you on the other side,” Thoth said. “A great river, for you alone.”
“You will show them all,” Christ said. “They won’t forget you.”
Alex’s finger began to push down. He could almost feel the virtual button lowering, the smooth domed plastic, when Christ said, “Wait.”
Alex thought madly for a second that it was all a test, like Abraham and Isaac, that they would call it off now.
But instead Freud said, “Your father is late. We can’t start without him.”
* * *
As Charlie and Kenny watched, breath held, the atomic clock approached Φ o’clock:
2:01:77
2:01:78
2:01:79
It hit 2:01:80, and their eyes flicked to the code tracker.
They watched it light up.
The code was telling—daring—the God Game to create a stone so heavy it could not lift it. A sphere large enough to contain the set of all spheres. Assuring it that according to its own predictions, it would do so. In the sim, God would draw all resources from all corners of its botnet toward the task, causing an exponential memory drain that would arch toward infinity.
They felt very small then, and very foolish.
And then it worked.
They weren’t sure what to expect visually, but the Game began to flicker. In one corner, they were watching the code executing itself. In another, Charlie’s 3-D view in the school phased in and out, the players moving around the map fluxing. His chessboard was up, the pieces no longer black and white but various shades in between, battered and bruised. The scree
n locked and unlocked, fuzzed in and out.
This is it, he thought. Then, Is this it?
The code scrolled faster and faster.
“It’s working,” Kenny whispered.
Charlie squeezed Kenny’s arm. Charlie was too nervous to get excited yet.
The map unfroze, then scrambled. More static. More pulsing. “Oh, shit,” Charlie said. The code stream was accelerating to the point of being unreadable. He took Kenny’s hand and put it on the hard drive. It was hot to the touch, almost burning. Together, they’d done this.
The lights in the room pulsed off and on.
It will suck power until it burns itself out.
The whole screen went black. Charlie felt a tentative hope spreading. The lights in the room came back on, and in the hallway, too, but the computers were dead. The Aziteks were dead, too, just blank, plain glasses now, the avatars in the hallways gone. Charlie and Kenny exchanged glances. Charlie picked up his phone and it was fine, but the text thread from the Game was gone. The hope sprouted, blossomed, spread.
Then a window opened in the middle of the laptop screen.
On a little cartoon hill with flat shrubs was a squat little God with a white beard and white robes. He hopped with each step. He was as flat and two-dimensional as the green landscape around him. He pushed a giant stone at the bottom of the hill, so infinitely large you could only see the bottom of it on the screen.
God waddled up to it, gave a little grunt, and worked his flat shoulders under it. The speakers chirped with animated sighs and heaves. God’s knees bent, then straightened out, shoving the planetoid boulder until it started to roll up the hill. When he got near the top, it started to waver and almost roll back down, but then he gave a last shove and got it to the top.
He flipped it up onto his index finger and spun it like a basketball.
With his other hand, boulder still spinning, he raised his middle finger at the screen and jerked it up and down a few times, right at Charlie and Kenny.
God grinned at them.
The rest of the Game sprang back to life on their screen. The avatars filling the school. The dots swarming the map. Their virus, on the other hand, was gone.
The code bank was empty.
93 SISYPHUS
Alex’s dad reached the school. He was running late, so he pulled too fast into a far spot and fumbled with his keys. The school towered in the distance, a vast tan building. He felt overwhelmed. For all Alex’s troubles, what teacher had taken the time to call Bao in? The teachers had all written Alex off years ago. Bao couldn’t say why it was happening now, so late in the game, but it seemed hopeful. It made him see his son a little differently.
He checked his watch and cursed. His manager had held him late, despite his pleadings that he had to meet a teacher for his son. It was humiliating, to be a grown man taking orders at sixty-five. Mr. Dinh wouldn’t have argued with Alex about that. The thing Alex never asked himself was why Mr. Dinh subjected himself to such humiliation. For whom?
Bao half walked, half ran toward the front doors in the distance. The windows were filled with students counting down for the bell to ring. He imagined poor Alex, alone in those massive crowds, and suddenly felt such tenderness for him. He wished he could sweep his arms around Alex and protect him from the world.
But Bao knew he couldn’t.
This was paradise, compared to what Bao had known. But it was all Alex knew, and it hurt just as bad, Bao realized now, seeing it.
So Bao Dinh went to find Alex and reminded himself to say something kind.
* * *
The virus was dead and the Watchers were everywhere, laughing now.
Their canned laughter, audience participation, was echoing in the Aziteks.
The Game showed the thousands of players who had come to witness the destruction of a school. Mr. Dinh was walking up the front steps, surrounded by them. Charlie and Kenny exchanged glances.
“Why is his dad here?” Charlie said.
“Is that why the players all came?”
“To see what? Is he going to hurt himself again? In front of his dad?”
“Or…” Kenny couldn’t bring himself to say it.
But Charlie knew what he meant.
Everything that happens now is your fault, Alex had said, sending a chill through Charlie now. “He’s not going to hurt himself. Not just himself.”
“His dad?”
“Maybe more?”
Charlie shouted at the Game screen, “Where is he?”
The Game ignored him.
“You said I’m a Watcher now. You said I earned it. Show me where he is.” The Game complied. It put the map on the screen and showed where Alex was.
The dot for his father was moving into the building. Whatever was going to happen was happening. They jumped up and went to the door, but it was locked from the outside. Charlie rammed against it and smashed it open, the lock bursting. They ran down the hall, passing the rooms filled with students, but ahead of them, the Game triggered one of the fire/panic doors the school had added last year, Wi-Fi enabled. The pins dropped and the heavy doors slammed closed, locking into place. Charlie rammed against them, but they were solid and he crashed off them.
“Come on,” Kenny said. They ran back the other direction, but at the end of the hallway the Game triggered another safety door, slamming shut and blocking them in.
On their Aziteks, the Game said:
All Must Die
“Run,” Charlie yelled.
A teacher came out from one of the rooms to check out the crashing noise, but they ignored her yells and ran back into 333. The Game sent overvoltages to lights above them, the fluorescent tubes bursting open with sparks. Charlie went to the window and opened it. The ground was thirty feet below them, but a Dumpster was below one window that might lessen the fall.
Kenny looked at him, gulping. “You can’t hack gravity.”
They jumped together, slamming into the top of the Dumpster, which buckled a little, absorbing some of the impact. They jumped off and ran for the basement. In the hall along the way, Charlie pulled a fire alarm, trying to warn the school that something bad was happening—Get the fuck out!—but the Game didn’t let the alarm go off.
They ran down the basement hall to the boiler room and pounded on the door, yelling, “Alex, Alex, it’s us.”
On their Aziteks, the Game gave them an X-ray view through the door, a mocking tableau: in tears, eyes haunted and lost, cradled by Christ, Alex knelt before the bomb.
94 I ALONE
“Your father is here,” the Game told Alex. “It’s time.” It spoke through the avatar of Freud, cold and aloof, eyes judgmental.
Alex cradled the Victorian box as Christ cradled him.
“It’s your birthright,” Christ told him lovingly. “No one can take it from you.”
Thoth was standing now, silent. His black ibis eyes watched.
Alex told himself, On Mars, there is no one to hurt me.
Someone banged on the door.
“Alex, Alex, it’s us,” the voices cried. It was Charlie and Kenny.
Alex didn’t answer.
“Alex, open the door. Don’t do this.”
Alex squeezed his eyes shut and covered his ears. He wanted them to go away.
“Submit yourself to God,” the Game cooed. “Resist the devil, and he will flee from you.”
“Alex, we can talk about this,” Kenny yelled.
“Eloquent lips are unsuited to a godless fool,” the Game hissed.
“We can help you,” Charlie said.
“How much worse lying lips to a ruler!”
“Quit lying to me,” Alex yelled.
“We let you down. I know it. I’m sorry,” Charlie said.
“This isn’t the way,” Kenny added.
“Pay no mind to the necromancers who chirp and mutter,” Christ said.
“You shame them,” Freud told Alex. “You are their totem and taboo.”
; “You’re ashamed of me,” Alex yelled through the door.
“That’s not true,” Charlie said. “We can be a team again. One for all, and all for one.”
“It’s too late,” Christ whispered, “no one can serve two masters.”
“It’s too late,” Alex yelled. “I have to do this.”
“Woe to the wicked! Disaster is upon them!”
“They have to pay,” Alex said.
“No, there are good people here, too.”
“I will put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence.”
“All must die,” Alex said.
“You’re confused. You’ve been lied to.”
“They are the liars and the deceivers,” the Game hissed.
“You’re the liars,” Alex said.
Charlie gave Kenny a desperate look. There was no getting through to Alex. The Game had cut off their view through the door—they were blind now, too.
“I’ve never—” Charlie stopped. “I did lie to you. Once. I did want you out of the group. Because I was a coward. Because I was afraid of what people would think of me. I was wrong about that, and I was wrong to lie. I won’t do it again.”
There was silence, for the first time, from the other side of the boiler room door.
“You were wrong,” Alex said, with just a trace of connection.
Kenny raised his eyebrows hopefully.
“I know.” Charlie felt his own eyes welling now. “I can be better. I will be.”
Kenny and Charlie stared at each other, afraid to even breathe, waiting for Alex to respond.
“I’m sorry,” Alex said finally. “It’s too late.”
The Game showed the view through the door again: Alex picked up the Victorian box and put his finger on the small black button.