I won’t wear phonebeads in my earlobes. Never have. And I live alone in a single-room occupancy welfare hotel. When someone dies here, they sometimes don’t find the body until it starts leaking through the floor into the apartment below.
I really thought I had it so bad, before. I didn’t. Don’t. I have two hundred square feet of apartment, an SSD check, and enough juice to run my gamebox. While in-game, even Safeway cellulose bars can look like steak.
I thought this place was my Alamout. Before my last log-in, the Gameworld metaverse made so much more sense to me than anything out in the meat lands of bad teeth and bad credit and back taxes. And Shelley, God damn her for making me miss her so much.
There was no one to watch the world while I was Gaming. I lost thirty pounds. My teeth started decalcifying. I remember every night I was ever up until four and faded to zombie status at work the following morning. I remember everything Shelley ever asked me to do and I never did, all the things I promised her and never delivered—the MFA in English I flushed to major in Game Design. Outside, the world ground on and I got old, pickled in my own night-sweat and tears I never really felt.
The Delany1000® game processor in my left ear canal is close to hosed. I’ll have to go back in and have the whole tube out. They can’t remove the fibers going into my brain, but service can be swapped, it’s as easy as changing the outer fixture on a telephone jack. As easy as calling 911. Wish in one hand, shit in the other. And please fill out our handy online survey before you exit Game.
I should never have shelled out all that money for a Delany unit. I fudged the forms when it came to a lot of things. On top of the collagen defect, I didn’t tell them about falling down that flight of stairs when I was five, and the Kübler-Ross experience I had—
Ross. Shit. I shouldn’t even be thinking the name. I don’t understand how any of this is happening. I don’t know what’s happening. But it all keeps happening
I’m stuck in a crashing Zone, left to brain-rot in a seamless prison, a living program that can still exist and move...but cannot cry for help, or be found. Not such a radical change from my recent lifestyle. I find I’m strangely able to deal, to adjust. I thought I had it so bad. Now I’d kill to go back to the meat.
But if I think about my meat-life now, I’ll explode. I’m stuck here, and the designers of this Gameworld don’t know everything. When the Fed shuts it down, I find it hard to believe that the broken wetware in my brain won’t simply shut me off, too. This is an unexplored aspect of the whole headgear issue. The pros don’t know, and neither do I. Your guess is, literally, as good as mine. Somehow, I find none of this reassuring.
Got to slow down and think this through. Got to make like I’ve never played this Game before. In a sense, I haven’t. This is a whole new level of Gaming, occupied only by me, and an Adversary with whom I foresee player-versus-player combat before dawn, and….
No. Not going to the right of that “and,” either. There has to be some kind of way out. I hope I arrive soon. For now, I trudge head-down along the bank of a tumid waterway where unbelievable fish chitter and snap and flip their tails, death-marching to a sea I can’t name. Everything’s gone blurry in a wall out on that sea, visible even from far down this brackish canal where the perspective gets nearly too small to discern.
I look up and far out to the left at the arid plain whose cracks form neat tiles in desolate gray. The tiles form words: ONLY WHEN YOU FORGET YOU’RE HUMAN WILL YOU REMEMBER YOU’RE GOD.
Who said that, back in the day? Shakespeare? Faulkner? Asher? The cracks wend their way along into further complications, up into caves in the rose-quartz mountains someone drew in pretty well toward the edge of the horizon. Mushroom trees run in neat little paths up the slopes, juniper bushes waving back and forth beneath them with their sibilant hiss.
My Cloak of Disability is about to shut off. I think it’s got an hour left until the cred runs dry. Until then, I will pray my phreq can’t be smelled out. I think I’m safe either way. This canal’s in an unfinished section.
Still, every time I turn my back, I feel like little people are peering out to watch me. I’m stuck in my own subplot, breaking down, coming apart with no cheat-codes left to light the way.
I must be very careful, and consider what I ask. A great tension now smolders through this sensorium-stream. Everything looks so much smaller. The gods have left their thrones. The clock is melting down.
For the time being, I remain sourly fascinated by this vast slow burn all around me.
This Game hooked me from the beginning. Most of the backgrounds were photographed around Centralia, PA (where they got the ultra-OG “Silent Hill,” back in the days) and someplace called Hollidaysburg. For some reason, the look of this Game makes me remember one winter afternoon when my best friend socked me in the face. I was nine. I remember blood on the snow, endless glareblind sledriding skies, and a black storm coming on fast.
Dying, this node-world remembers greater life. Every sense holds me fast. Every blade of grass holds me fast. I have no feeling in any limb or extremity.
* * * *
As I walk, I listen to the songs the fish sing and the voices within the wind, and remember along with them, following the dead gray Roman coin of the sun like a bouncing ball. I have no idea where I’m going. I just know I have to get there.
For the thousandth time, I feel pygmy eyes at my back. I whirl into a crouch, spinning my staff before me. My Cloak ripples sickeningly. Nothing there.
I make my brain go have a cookie and sit in the corner, still listening to the song at the end of Creation, wondering if whatever algorithm was responsible for this canal will ever terminate out in a new place. There must be outlet or there will be crash. I feel my heavy sigh.
That’s something. I feel my lungs, my ribcage, expanding and contracting. Somewhere in there, I also feel a small seed pulse of heartbeat like a bulb in permafrost. I can only infer that I’ll have a body to come back to. I think I felt some feeling in my left thumb a while ago, the one nearest the silicate mousepad they implanted in the back of my dumb right hand.
A few indignant birds wheel overhead. Their wings, too, are filled with whispers of broken digital voice, cross-talk in the wind’s singing more distant and solemn than the stars I can still see fading, up there in the darkling sky where no one can now hack the surly bonds of Earth.
Leaning on my staff, I force myself up a low hill in front of me. The hill is paneled in this disgusting, badly-written growth that looks like swamp moss. I sit down cross-legged under the dead tree up on top. It doesn’t hide me or give me shelter. I never expected it to.
From up here, it’s easy to spot a few future-instanced dead patches to go hide in. I can see the sea now, closer, over on the right ahead, glimmering a sick and awful green like the moss. The wind whickers through the foothills. It’s so silent out here you can hear its endless loop.
Above separates from Below in a clear line of demarcation. Back the way I came, the canal snakes through the buttes, reflecting the sick black bile of clouds roiling through the green-gray sky overhead. A donkey-railroad wends its way along the canal on the opposite side, above a place where the embankment falls away into a valley of cactus and broken stone moai and barbed wire past the opposite bank.
The Überguild made this Gameworld a free-for-all two nights ago. All the players stripped everything they could and signed out of the system. More fool me. I was substitute-gratifying with EverQuest those two nights, just left the connection open until it was too late. No one told me the Fed was going to pull the plug on the Crooked Man.
“There Was a Crooked Man”, that is, my very favorite MMORPG, the hottest first-person shooter horrorworld since Resident Evil, set in this weird little railroad town that’s supposed to be someplace out East. There are holes in the ground all over, holes in the walls, closets you can travel through and wind up anywhere in Time and Space. And the bear, the bad guy, the big kahuna....
I can’t ev
en think it. I found an old newspaper in here before, that had a reprint of the shutdown notice...
* * * *
LEGAL NOTICE ENTERED BY: FARKNEWS.WLL
AND THE ESTATE OF DREW CURTIS
LOUISVILLE, KY.
PLAYERS, DRAW NEAR AND KNOW YE THEN BY THESE PRECEDENTS:
THAT THE GAMEWORLD HERETOFORE TITLED
“THERE WAS A CROOKED MAN”
CALLAIGHT COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA MEGASERV T1L657-K-D-H
IS FOUND TO BE IN VIOLATION OF NSFNET CONVENTION:
PRIMARY EnPeeCee CORRUPTED BEYOND REPAIR
UBERGUILD MEMBER#209 EHREND, ROSS P.
FOUND GUILTY BY GUILD COUNCIL
OF: CORING EnPeeCee
“CROOKED MAN”
USING FOR: EXTRALEGAL PURPOSES
CALLAIGHT COUNTY DISTRICT COURT INVESTIGATING.
EHREND, ROSS P. PA ID 971985057
STILL CONSIDERED AT LARGE.
#HAS ESCAPED INCARCERATION.*
PREVIOUSLY SERVING SENTENCE FOR:
5 COUNTS MURDER ONE
10 COUNTS FORCIBLE [addt’l charges next page]
#PLEASE EXIT NOW#
* * * *
When I found the “newspaper,” just before in some rubber antecedent of then-versus-now that makes no difference in here, I couldn’t make my eyes work, though I had to cry. So I started singing an old song under my breath. My Grandma Ruth used to sing it to me. It had to do with a monkey on a string....
“Now’s the time the fun begins! Aaah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha....”
I think I’m being told something. I wonder what. All the witchy-folk EnPeeCee’s are gone. Magic swirls around loose in the air for anyone to pick up but me. Suits of cut-rate body armor are lying everywhere. I found broken crossbows and empty shops. Nothing I can use. Except....
But wait. Just like I used to do when playing “Area 51” on Dad’s ancient gaming-system for shits and giggles, I’m saving what might or might not still be on my personal toolbar until I can figure out a physical way to pull the thing up.
Maybe, if I get some motion back in my left thumb, I can mouse out of here and call 911. Maybe. Maybe nothing. I told you, my headgear’s toast. (I couldn’t afford a walltap. No home cinema. All I ever did was plug in bareback.)
I can’t believe so many people spent so much time in here, even traded ammunition and holy relics and wards here for real money. There’s only one consequential world, one that has no cheat codes, one where we only get one turn as far as I’ve been able to determine up until now.
Why did the power-companies ever start giving away free Net service? Why did the Romans have bread and circuses? Why did Bluetooth start making actual teeth, and Coke and Starbuck’s smear their logo feces across the actual mental wallpaper of the first wetware-to-wetware headcasts?
I’m telling you, all the cracks were already waiting to be slipped through, in every home, in every office, out into space, between haxor invention and bare-knuckle corporate crime.Big fun, epic gorefest games like “There Was a Crooked Man” make every player feel like the Hero with a Thousand Faces.
This kind of game got started again about ten years ago when the graphic novelists threw in with the online novelists, that whole Oneworld movement flap. Now this world is stripped bare of every cred, and an actual loony has the keys. I think. But just like everything else, what the hell do I know?
The Crooked Man Gameworld was frozen in a lethal infancy for at least two years. Nominally based on plots like Night Warriors, the “Elm Street” flicks, and A Wrinkle in Time, the scenario has to do with kids in this little Town That Time Forgot, learning to use magic during lucid dreams. They have adventures in the Dreamscape to break free of the necropolis where they live, or get sucked below into the Tombworld by an omnipotent boogeyman with a face only a coroner could love, and a very, very strange sense of humor.
That’d be the Crooked Man, the bear, the boss at the end of the game. There’s more story about him, but I’d just be quoting from the label of the TWACM startup patch at this point. There’s this whole backstory about him being an ironmaster’s son who was thrown down a well at birth after he chewed his way out of the womb, and came back from that second birth kicking ass and taking names. Heard It.
The Überguild said in a few press-releases that it was based on a true story. Who knows?
Any way around it, TWACM was the kind of game that could have only been designed in America, where everything has to be flashy and over the top. It got more violent and witchy at each level, originally geared toward the over-twenty-one, but snapped up enthusiastically by gamer-twink culture from Iceland to South Korea and back.
It was fun while it lasted. TWACM could bump you into any other gameworld you wanted. That was part of the point of all those closet doors. It was...intoxicating. I can understand why this Ehrend asshat started wallowing in it. I just don’t understand how he....
Cold. Bitter, bitter cold, all over me. Am I feeling this in-Game, or....
But I stopped thinking of this as just a game when I saw the newspaper. All I can do is outlast this, wait for the shutdown to do a hard reboot on my head, and pray that my suspicions are wrong.
The clouds were doing something just now, out on the sea. It doesn’t seem possible, but the coastline, the perspective-point is almost...coming...closer? I sit tailor-fashion under my tree and wait to be eaten alive. Broken applets of product placement float out there on the waves like used condoms.
Rustle. Rustle. I make this body bend down, feeling my jaw involuntarily flop, back in the meat, as I pick up the second newspaper. The dog-end of my cigarette is hanging in the air, and I look up…and snap my fingers.
The newspaper in my hand, seeing partway through it, seeing...enough. Green phosphorescent sand dunes march out everywhere around me to the edges of west and east. South is behind, and north....
Is down. On the beach now, I clamber up onto the boardwalk, under the high black torii gate, reading the same thing for the thousandth time as I walk.
...AT LEAST TEN MINOR CHILDREN STILL IN CRITICAL CARE FROM UNKNOWN CROOKED MAN GAME SIDE EFFECTS: CRESSWELL, LAWRENCE J., AGE 10, POCATELLO, IDAHO, FLATLINE EEG COMA INDEF; WILLIG, JAMES ALLAN, AGE FIVE, LANCASTER PENNSYLVANIA GRAND MAL SEIZURE NO PREV EPILEPT HISTORY; MILLER, EMMA P. AGE 17 PORTLAND, OR. POST-TRAUMATIC....
I read further down, the names blurring into a finger that doesn’t point at me. But when you clear the board, sometimes the monsters still follow you out. There’s a catamaran moored to the pier below me, its incongruous sail flapping in bright tartan. I’m finally afraid.
EHREND WAS ORIGINALLY SENTENCED WHILE USING A PART-TIME TELEMARKETING JOB TO PHISH FOR CHILDREN HOME ALONE. HE WOULD STATE THE NAME OF THE BUSINESS, ASK WHAT TIME THE CHILD’S PARENTS RETURNED, SCHEDULE A CALLBACK, AND THEN LEAVE WORK EARLY....
Even being afraid simply feels like my essence is sliding into someone else’s server as I sit down on the dock, watching one gods-damned thing after another eating each other in the snaps and spumes of sick green foam, wondering if there’s any weaponry lying around that the baang-men and heavies didn’t get, but...but I still have....
An Enpecee approaches me on the pier, hushed and bowed of head, fair gamine curls in a cowl like mine. Her voice is a broken-throated croak.
“Please help. Walked for...many days. The cultists from the Starry Wisdom commune...are loose in town. None of the men yet live....”
“Take it on the road, lady. Here’s a quarter. Go call someone who cares.” I point my staff at her. “The world’s ending. What do I care about your cultists?”
She disappears, not before giving me a look that could fuse glass. As I look around, though, I wonder if one last quest, one last caress, would just be an upped dose of morphine to a terminal patient. Sometimes, a ball of string can really just be a ball of string.
This capacious realm brims over with signs and portents. I’m incarnated here, but my story has yet to be made active. Or does it? I wonder if I can summon
up the strength to get in the boat. I fully expect to sink. Then, somehow, I’m sitting on the bench seat in the catamaran, trying to figure out the tetherball rig of this sail, here, over-and-under and.... Shit.
The sail flops down all around me, useless, twitching in the wind like a severed grasshopper wing.
Got to remember the Player’s Manual. The power of any character doesn’t necessarily depend on skill, just....
“How much time you spend in-game. If Ross was already in jail, he....”
Something swirls together in my headgear, a primitive face taking form....
An aged teenager full of lusts and impotences, scars and knives, with a killer game idea.... His eyes like holes in the ground outside of town so far down, his smile a big scar, running around in the wastelands of Not Without the Expansion Pack.
On his third left, an emerald ring. Across his shoulders, a black cloak of human skin.... His profile like a thumb and forefinger poised to pinch, a cigar in his filed teeth, and cocked back on his head a top hat so old that Dickens might have known its cut....
The true shape of something born in the dark, twisting wetly through Ross’s sad head from a very early age, like a mushroom whose umbrella stirred, protruding fans, ears, corrosive acid, teeth, screaming louder and louder until he could hear nothing but the sound squirming through the fertile mulch of his corpus callosum....
I look up from the shimmer on the waves. How did I just see all that? How did I see his avatar? Where the hell is he? Will I ever be able to access the map on my toolbar? How did I...?
“Who is that?” The corrupted Crooked Man-mod’s bitter, alkaline voice rattles the storm. I put the hood up on my somehow-still-active Cloak of Disability and flail my cheap, shitty staff in the general direction of the mooring-rope, wondering much....
Once Upon a Future Page 10