by Gwynn White
See your face,
With your eyes,
And you will escape the Maze.
I had first seen the clue in town, carved on a signpost. Shortly after, the royal guard shoved me off the dirt road. I watched the royal procession from a distance. The way had seemed easy enough.
But nothing is what it fucking seems to be.
I rolled down the slope and ignored the thorns gouging my scalp. I hated this body. I’d been stuck in it too long, a farthing of time paid over and over. There were no clues, no faces to see with my fucking eyes.
I just wanted out.
A wooden contraption was at the bottom of the slope. My account had been drained to build this thing, having contracted townspeople to haul it into position.
When the commoners have been paid.
My escape was inside that dreaded carriage. I was still winning this bloody game but needed out of this world. Not the next spawn or the next. Now. I need out now.
After paying the commoners, I bought their silence with a dagger. Not so easy since I was three feet tall and nearly as wide. And not so easy when they looked so human, when they screamed and begged.
This isn’t real.
Life as a bald assassin dwarf was not kind. Half of my weapons were useless in stubby fingers. This contraption, however, was different. I crawled into the cradle and set the trigger.
I’m the weapon.
The advance guard trotted past, their feathered helmets within sight. When the sound of hard-spoked wheels approached, I reached for the wooden handle. The carriage’s horses with burgundy velvet headdresses first appeared. Then the coachman.
[Stop.]
I took a breath.
The timing had to be precise. I couldn’t afford to waste stop commands, but I’d botched this launch too many times. The coachman’s head had just entered the clearing. A few more feet and the royal flag would come into view.
[Continue.]
[Stop.]
The scene advanced a frame.
I was unable to move from my position in a stop command, but it gave me time to absorb the surroundings. The mustard yellow of the royal flag was visible. The coachman held the reins with both hands. The glow of the tattoo warmed his throat. He wasn’t a threat. Getting to him, though.
I called up my inventory, snatched a scattershot—the only weapon my hand could handle—and grabbed the exit key. The weapon would blow a hole in the carriage and the exit key would hit the coachman’s throat just before plunging through it. I held them like daggers and swore to donate half my fortune to helping the handicapped.
[Continue.]
I yanked the trigger.
The contraption catapulted me through the clearing. I saw the flag snapping and the wheel turning. I began to teeter and turn. The wind rushed past me; the trees spun.
There was a spontaneous time lag as I entered the opening. I thought that odd since a time warp command was costly. Maybe this was the generosity of the game’s creators, a freebie on the house. But there was no such thing as compassion in the Maze.
It had to be a glitch.
The royal flag waved in slow motion, the crest warped in the flow—two ornate dragons holding a British shield, a sweeping scroll with a single word stenciled in blocky font.
I kept focused.
My eyes swept across the dirt road. I had rolled too far left, my short arm stretched painfully over my head. I was facing the coachman’s companion this time. I would have to stretch out to hit my targets blindly. And if not, respawn in the village and start this shitshow over.
Please. No.
The guards didn’t have time to turn their heads. They only heard my weapon and the hole blown through the bowman’s left shoulder, removing his arm and ribs and an opening through the ornate carriage. The white light of the keyhole shot out from inside.
I stretched out the key and felt the stamp fall on the coachman’s throat, the connection bleeding warmly up my arm. The bowman was beginning to crumple as I passed and I saw my reflection in his mirrored eyes as I popped through the hole. I’d been mistaken. The bowman wasn’t a man. She had mirrored eyes.
And a notch from her ear.
The royal crest. There was a word ornately stenciled at the bottom. How many times had I ignored it?
Bathed in warm light, the crowd was no longer a roar but a small gathering. The opening I had blown up had closed. The horse hooves faded. I pounded the carriage door. It was not going to open. Once inside the keyhole, there was no exit. There was only the next world. And another farthing to be paid.
The royal crest was Cass.
CASSIDY
The car idled.
Cassidy reclined the driver’s seat and stared at the desert. The patches on her arms itched. The world smelled crispy.
Cassidy hurried inside a three-story villa tainted by wet skin, the kind that was gray and puckered. Scented candles were losing the battle. She longed for the chlorinated tank.
That was Minnesota.
“Bad day today.” Jack, a fifty-five-year-old nurse, turned her father’s wheelchair. “I wrote down a few things.”
Nonsense dribbled out of her father like a leaky faucet. Cassidy dabbed his head with a towel. The scar on his forehead always looked angry. Jack read his list and Cassidy half-listened because it hadn’t changed in years.
“I can’t come tomorrow.” Jack turned to her father and sang, “Talk to you Thursday.”
Cassidy walked him to the door. Once his car was around the corner, she drew the shades and pushed her father to the back of the house. She unlocked a door and ushered him inside.
“On.”
Voice recognition triggered the room. There were no monitors hanging on the walls. The entire room was a monitor. His head slowly lifted, eyes darting, images soaking in. His tremors stopped; his incoherent ramblings transformed into a familiar mantra.
“See yourself. See yourself. See yourself.”
“Here.” She positioned his hands over a laptop.
He began typing. “See yourself. See yourself.”
It would go on that way until exhaustion took him. She would find him crumpled in the wheelchair, chin wet with drool. Documents would be opened and programs running. They were always related to memory comprehension.
She returned from the kitchen with an old soldier for her father. She tuned out the dancing keystrokes and watched the opening of the fiftieth Maze. The introductions had become heavily produced, interviews with former winners and deep-pocket sponsors.
The black-market game was hardly black anymore.
Four tanks were on stage. The other six players were sunk deep into cushions, imbedded rollers massaging their bodies, nurses standing by. Each player had a strap around their head, a black knob centered on their forehead.
The needle’s nest.
Upon immersion, the needle would flick out like a serpent’s tongue and transport their awareness into the Maze. They chose the needle over the tank for various reasons, but they all received it through the mail in a plain package.
And a velvet bag.
Cassidy rarely grew bored of the games. Each challenge was unique, every result new. She’d grown callous to the losers’ plight, indifferent to the winner’s exaltation. Still, she watched the events, predicted the outcomes. She was an armchair chess master.
My father’s secret little weapon.
On the ninetieth day, a winner emerged and Cassidy woke to find her father slumped in his wheelchair. He’d been awake for almost a week. She had begun to worry. His tremors had become violent. She covered him with a blanket. The laptop was at his feet, the screen cracked. A document was open. Line after line of his mantra had been typed out, no spaces or returns.
Seeyourselfseeyourselfseeyourself…
It wasn’t like she couldn’t afford another laptop—she could buy a hundred of them. She just didn’t want her father to start over each time it fell. As she picked it up, she paid no attention to his stirring.
>
His programs always had to do with memory manipulation, as if he was trying to solve the memory wipe that was applied to the players. There were even snippets of how to manipulate a memory dump.
Or maybe he’s trying to put himself back together.
Just as the winner escaped the fiftieth Maze and the cheers roared and the lights flickered, she sensed her father’s weight lean toward her. Instinctively, she reached up to catch him.
Pain lanced her ear.
She yanked back. Her fingers fell into a notch. Blood smeared beneath her fingernails. A fleshy chunk dribbled from her father’s lips.
He died as the confetti dropped.
She was not in shock, only slightly sad. Like her father, she felt only faint representations of emotions, a detached imitation of human reactions. She had only known two things her entire life: her father and the Maze.
One of them took the other away.
In a moment of true anger, she destroyed the room. She threw empty cans at the faces, spit at the losers and winner. Cursed the Maze. Eventually, she found the fullness of her grief in the middle of the room, all alone. With her fury depleted and her tears spent, she rose to cradle her father.
She couldn’t blame the game any more than climbers could blame the mountain. The mountain is just the mountain.
It would be much later that Cassidy would learn his last true intention wasn’t an act of insanity that marked her ear. He wasn’t trying to heal himself with his memory programs.
He was still climbing the mountain.
WORLD 200
The garbage truck stopped.
The workers hopped off the back, their long sinewy arms effortlessly slinging bags of trash into the back. They paused as the truck’s jaws compacted the contents, their black eyes aimed at me.
I sipped a drink that, in this world, was a hopped up sort of tea that burned the back of my throat. Euphoria made me aloof to the white light seeping from the back of the garbage truck, the workers daring me to come for the treasure inside.
I unfurled a long boney finger. Fuck you.
They packed up and left, taking the keyhole with them, stranding me in a tavern of long-toothed aberrations. They were all stringy in this world—hairless freaks who were sickly pale and almost translucent. Veins throbbed along their arms and across their foreheads; tendons flexed and bulged.
I was no different.
The characters had become less human in the last hundred worlds. It was easy to pull a trigger or bash in a brain because I hated them, every one of them. This low-gravity, urbanized planet was dominated by concrete and steel. Trees were contained in plastic boxes, patches of turf protected by electric fences.
Even the creatures were bland.
I was an invalid a few worlds ago, bound to a wheelchair without the use of arms or legs. I depleted my account hiring outsiders to help me escape that world. I wasn’t in a hurry to leave this one.
What’s the point?
There would just be another one—an endless string of births that blurred together like inky droplets smeared across a windshield. Are my memories corrupt? Is this even a game?
I knocked back the rest of my drink. My ears burned and my throat clenched. I began to laugh.
“Keep it down,” the thing in the next booth said.
“Mind your own,” I said.
His head swiveled 180 degrees. The blackened eyes glistened like river stones. His lips pulled back in a mirthless grin, a double row of teeth as colorless as the sky.
[Stop.]
I dialed through the weapons cache. Most were useless or depleted. My vault was damn near empty. For the first time, I was in danger of being dead broke.
But I still had enough to cap this savage’s ass.
I pulled out a wide-range vaporizer. One shot loaded, enough to erase the lower half of this dipshit’s face. Real or not, let him smile without a jawbone, maybe earn a few entertainment credits. I held the weapon an inch from his nose.
[Continue.]
A hard pinch came down on the crown of my head. A draft blew inside me as I slid to the floor. My brain spilled out.
Something bit the back of my skull.
* * *
The garbage truck pulled away.
I watched from a little table next to the bathroom. Forget the Maze. I couldn’t escape the building. Even when I attempted to run down the garbage truck, my guts were puddled on the floor. These demented things were touchy, always finishing me with a mouthful of teeth to the back of the head, sometimes feeding on the brains before they spilled out. It took twenty respawns to find safe haven in the back.
They’re punishing me.
I was winning and they were punishing me for it. No one had won the Maze yet, or they hadn’t told me so. But now I was stuck and they were punishing me. I refused to follow the garbage truck. I had hit rock bottom without a credit to my name. How many players were trapped in a world? How many forgot where they started or who they were?
Time to score porn points.
Fetish acts were double credits. Lick a few toes, vomit on a chest and I’d bump the coffers. It was unlikely any of these deviants would be up for some butt play, even more doubtful I would survive it. But get through this world and maybe I’d find something that might get me hard.
“You done?”
The waitress appeared at my side, her long translucent legs exposing a network of spidery veins. Her face was pale and tight, her thick hair hanging over her face, a gold earring glittering somewhere in the thicket.
“Fill it up. Keep them coming.”
I could drink my way into a blackout before one of the thin-skinned animals unhinged his jaws on the back of my head.
“Quitting?” she asked.
“You a player?”
Confused, she shook her head. She was a character, not a real person. Why would I even think that?
“Shit will kill you,” she said, nodding at the drink. “They use it to quit living.”
“Nothing kills me, sweetie.”
“Not the way to go, ask me.”
“I wasn’t.”
She came back with a pitcher, smoke rising from the spout. Her sharp teeth bit her lower lip. Brown hair pulled back, the top part of her ear was missing. Something about that was in the mindfog. I was supposed to know about that.
“What happened to your ear?” I asked.
“Dog bit it off.”
“That’s a lie.” I knew that she lost it some other way. Someone else did it. How do I know that?
“Do I know you?” I asked.
She stood up and rubbed a dark patch on her uniform where a name tag would be, her eyes sharper than the other pale beings’. Her eyes were bottomless and searching.
[Stop.]
The tavern continued moving. I couldn’t even afford a goddamn stop command. I just wanted a closer look to give me a second to remember. I knew her from somewhere. A clue was right in front of me. I couldn’t remember. Memories were foggy and disjointed. I couldn’t trust them.
“You all right?” she asked.
I needed some credits to get through this, just enough to explore. I could rack some easy kill points, but I’d have to do it bare-handed. Maybe I could stick a broken chair leg in one of these crazy fucker’s throats before it unhinged.
I could do her.
No one would know. A few kill points could score some ammo. Then we get the party started.
“You have to see,” she said.
“What?”
“I said the drink isn’t free.”
“No, no. Before that?”
“I’m sorry?”
“You said I have to see.”
She seemed frozen. Tension filled the space between us. The kitchen door swung behind her, a sliver of light splashing her face. Something flashed behind all that hair.
“Cass!” one of the cooks shouted. “Order up.”
Some of the patrons took notice. The cook held the door open and shouted with a wi
de mouth of teeth. They were all looking now.
“I know you,” I said.
The cook started toward her. I shot out of my seat—my body lithe and strong—and hooked my arm across her neck. The cook lunged and I kicked the bathroom open. I pinned her against the wall with one hand and locked the door with the other.
“I know you,” I said. “Why do I know you?”
She didn’t struggle.
I squeezed until her throat collapsed, tendons springing from my wrists, muscles rippling along my forearm. Her silvery eyes pleaded but not for mercy. She would give her life to me, allow me to rack kill points so when the crazies broke through the bathroom door I’d have something to spend after respawn.
Why is she giving herself?
“Who are you?” I said, voice cracking. “I can’t remember.”
Her nostrils flared without breathing. She reached up and pushed the hair from her face. My distorted reflection stared back from her mirrored eyes, veins bulging over my scalp. She gently placed her hands on my wrists, moved half a step to the left and cocked her head.
See your face, with your eyes.
There was only a reflection of a deranged killer in her eyes. There was nothing to see, no clue. No escape.
The pounding stopped. They were shuffling outside the door.
Cass looked back at me and, once again, looked over my shoulder. Something was behind me. Instead of letting go, I looked in the reflection of her eyes again. Something was glowing behind me, in the bathroom mirror.
I could see the burning glow of a tattoo.
Only then you escape the Maze.
My grip loosened. A long inhalation whistled through her lips. Her eyes wet, she smiled a knowing smile.
Has it been there all this time?
I called up my inventory, grabbed the key and flipped the hilt—
The door exploded.
The long-limbed monsters piled on top of me and shoved Cass into a stall. I waited for the steel pinch of their jaws but instead felt straps clamp around my wrists. These psychos weren’t from the tavern.
“Clear out,” one of them said. “Give us some room.”