Game's End

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Tyrone yanked and tugged at the door, banging it with his fist. "I just wanted to get some cookies out of the car. What did you do, David?"

  "I didn't do anything." His voice remained low enough to vanish in the noise from the fire.

  Scott looked at him strangely, then stood up from the carpet. He walked through the kitchen to the door that led into the garage. Yes, David thought, Scott knows. He's figured it out.

  Melanie remained hunched protectively by the map, making sure David stayed away from it. He sat off to the side like a pariah. His cheek still stung, though the bandage had stopped all the bleeding.

  Scott rattled the door to the garage, but it too was locked. He hurried to the patio door, but couldn't open the latch.

  "The Game won't let you out of here until it's finished," David said. But Scott went through all the motions anyway. David felt tired and defeated, still angry at the Game and at his companions.

  "We're locked in!" Scott finally said.

  Tyrone appeared astonished, but not quite afraid. "How did the doors get locked? We were all sitting right here."

  Scott went to pick up the phone. He hesitated with it in his hand, as if afraid to lift it to his ear.

  "The line's dead," David said.

  Scott listened into the phone, shook the receiver and put it to his ear a second time. He refused to hang it up. His eyes grew wider.

  "Tyrone," he suggested, "why don't you turn on the TV?"

  "What for? Shouldn't we get back to the game?"

  "Just turn on the television!"

  Tyrone shrugged and walked across the family room. He found the remote control and stepped back, looking to find the power switch. He pushed it. With a buzz, the television came on, but they heard no sound. In a moment, a colorful picture appeared, a test pattern made up of bright hexagons.

  "This is really getting wild!" Tyrone whispered.

  Melanie glanced at the television, then looked back at the map.

  "What did you expect?" David asked.

  "Shut it off, Tyrone."

  Instead, Tyrone flicked through the channels, but the same pattern showed on each one.

  On the last channel, though, the pattern dissolved into static. As they watched, a vague figure of a young man snapped in and out of focus, as if from a signal very far away. Through the roaring distortion, David heard faint words. "Where am I? Let me go back! Is all this real?"

  Melanie crept forward on her knees, but seemed afraid to touch the picture. "Oh no," she whispered.

  "Are you the Rulewoman?" the image said, then it vanished, leaving only a featureless image of multicolored electrical snow.

  Scott put the phone to his ear again, listened, and his eyes fairly bugged out of their sockets. "My god, it's Lellyn!" Scott slammed the phone back down and unclipped the cord from the wall.

  Then he grabbed the TV remote out of Tyrone's hands and punched the power button off.

  David let his eyes fall closed and tried to picture other times when he had been away from the Game, when he went to stay with his mother in the summer and the group had to postpone their weekly adventures. The times he had spent with his father along the beach or going into the city, or tagging along at some of his dad's business picnics.

  His mom always wanted to play cards or cribbage with him. His dad, trying to make him into the stereotypical version of the all-American boy, insisted that he play baseball or football or just plain catch. His father disliked David's obsession with role-playing games, as if that wasn't an "acceptable" thing to play.

  But this game had gone far beyond any of that.

  Tyrone held up his half-empty plate of dip, extending it toward Scott. "You want some more dip while we figure this out?"

  "No, dammit!" Scott smacked the plate out of Tyrone's hands, and it toppled onto the carpet. "Can't you get it through your thick head what's going on here? This is serious, man!"

  Tyrone looked shocked and upset. His big brown eyes swam with a turmoil of emotions, fighting back tears.

  David got to his knees and crawled toward the map. Melanie stiffened into a defensive position. She splayed her hands out like protective claws, but David ignored her.

  Tyrone got some paper towels from the kitchen and cleaned up the mess on the carpet, glaring at Scott. "Just leave it," David said. "We've got more important things to do."

  Scott and Tyrone both stared at him. David brought his voice back to a normal level. "We have to play this through to the end."

  He picked up the dice from the carpet and extended them toward Scott. "Now it's clear exactly what the stakes are."

  ――――

  Chapter 18

  BROKEN RULES

  "We all carry the greatest power on Gamearth. We have our minds, we have our imaginations. With these tools we can accomplish anything."

  ― handwritten note found in abandoned quarters of Mayer, daughter of Dirac

  Throughout the night, the gusty mountain wind lifted a metal flange and banged it against the Outsider's ship, sending echoes and screeches through the corridors. Mayer attempted to track down the source, furious at the annoyance. But the sound traveled through the bulkheads, distorted and magnified by the thin walls, and she could not find where the noise came from.

  Finally, without the energy to go farther, she curled up in a sheltered corner where the air remained still but cold. Her nose was red and numb. She tried to rest with her fingers curled together and fists under her chest to keep warm. The air inside the ship seemed frigid enough to be brittle.

  Mayer sniffled and closed her eyes. She concentrated on keeping her teeth from chattering. "I can endure this," she said. "Other characters do it."

  She cursed herself for not having worn warmer clothes, for not having brought some sort of heater (which might or might not have worked here anyway). She hadn't the slightest idea how to start a fire from scratch, without matches or a galvanic igniter. She had been too wrapped up in the solving Sitnalta's crisis, and she had ignored the mundane matters of preparation and survival.

  After a long time, her body warmed the floor enough that she did not feel completely uncomfortable. Mayer fell asleep.

  For the past several nights she had done the same, while during the day she continued her excavation work. Each time the sun set and darkness fell like a dropped curtain over the mountain terrain, the warmth leaked away into the night.

  The brooding Slac citadel loomed over the ruined ship. Mayer could have found shelter there, but she felt more comfortable away from the claustrophobic chambers with spikes on the doors and windows. Not that stories of ancient Slac and their torturings of human characters frightened her. But she preferred the tarnished metal, the indecipherable angles and controls, and the winding corridors of the ship. It seemed more like Sitnalta.

  When daylight leaked through the cracks of the hull, Mayer blinked her eyes and felt the stiff aches of her body. The wind outside had died down with dawn, and the persistent flange ceased its squeaking rhythm.

  She stood up, cracking the stiffness from her joints and spine. Her eyes had gummed shut, and she blinked several times, pawing at her face. Mayer didn't admit to herself how miserable she felt. None of that mattered. She had work to do.

  The first Sitnaltan team had left the ship before they finished their work. Though Mayer was only one character, one pair of hands and one set of crude tools that she had managed to improvise from among the debris, she would find the answer in here somewhere. She could still save her city.

  Sitnalta held the future for all of Gamearth. Human characters imagined progressive ways to solve their problems without relying on magic and superstition. Mayer knew their ultimate destiny, though many Sitnaltans did not understand it yet, not even her own father.

  Several years before, Mayer had proposed an idea that she felt would mark Sitnalta's mission on Gamearth. She was young, with a handful of inventions already to her credit. Because she was the daughter of Dirac, he succeeded in getting her a hea
ring before the Council of Patent Givers.

  When she stood before the gathered professors, she felt nervousness wheedle its way into her stomach. Seated men and women carried storming ideas behind their eyes; just the sight of them filled her with awe. She had always imagined herself someday being part of this auspicious body. Now she had to make a good first impression.

  Dirac stood at his podium and smiled, fluttering his hands. He looked foolish, but that was his personality and his manner. Everyone understood that.

  "My daughter proposes a topic for debate," Dirac said. "I don't know what it is myself, but she assures me it is of great importance." He smiled and drummed his short fingers on the podium. "Very well, Mayer, let us hear it."

  Mayer drew herself up and tossed her head. Her short dark hair fell neatly into place. She maintained a serious expression, controlling her emotions. She wanted to emulate the fire she saw in Professor Frankenstein's eyes, the passion he had for his ideas. She stepped forward.

  "Remember to clear your throat!" Dirac whispered as he brushed past her. "Or they won't take you seriously!"

  She cleared her throat, then began her speech. She had rehearsed it a dozen times already.

  "Distinguished inventors of Sitnalta, let me begin by telling you a story you already know. The race of old Sorcerers ruled Gamearth with magic's iron hand. After they had brought destruction to the map, they gathered their remaining magic together and forced themselves to ... to evolve. They transformed their collective consciousness into a set of enormous gestalt beings, the Earthspirits and Deathspirits. They called this magical process the 'Transition' ― a rather technical term for a very unscientific process."

  She stopped and looked around the tiered chamber. Some of the professors shifted restlessly. Sitnaltans rarely paid heed to tales of uninteresting events of the past. Magical deeds, whether failures or successes, simply had no pertinence to their lives.

  "Now," Mayer continued, "we Sitnaltans pride ourselves in establishing that anything the primitive magic users could accomplish, we can do equally well or better with our own inventions. No need for hands waving and gibberish-mumbling spells. We can do it with science.

  "I believe that we of Sitnalta should focus our efforts into finding a way, through the Rules of science, to create such a Transition for us, for human characters. It will free our minds from the bonds of the map and launch us forward into the future. It is a destiny that all human characters should hold proud. Imagine the challenge!"

  Mayer raised her head a little and half-closed her eyes in reverence as she finished. The other professors murmured among themselves. She felt relieved for that at least: her greatest fear had been that the Council of Patent Givers would greet her proposal with total silence. She had at least sparked a debate.

  Professor Darwin rapped his palm on the polished railing in front of him, signalling that he wished to make a comment. "What Mayer suggests is interesting. The characters best equipped to survive on Gamearth will indeed survive. But I am a bit skeptical of this drastic path, since evolution must be a gradual process to adapt and change. This sudden 'transition' may be to rapid for any of us to endure."

  Mayer looked to see her father's reaction, and in surprise she saw that he knitted his eyebrows, trying to fight back a scowl.

  "Mayer, you must remember," he said, "that we know nearly nothing about this Transition the old Sorcerers inflicted upon themselves. In order for us to create an improved technological substitute, we must know all the details about the process we are trying to emulate. None of us has wasted our time studying the way mumbo-jumbo spells operate on the rest of the map. Our efforts are focused toward driving the stain of magic away! What you suggest smacks a little too much of sorcery and gobbledegook to me. I'm not sure our technology is fitted to this purpose."

  Professor Clarke cleared his throat and stood up. He was a tall man with an broad face and thick black spectacles. "You are splitting hairs, Dirac," he said. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

  The other Council members broke into a hubbub of discussion. Dirac allowed this to continue for a few moments, then rapped his hands on the podium again.

  "My daughter had given us an interesting theoretical idea to ponder. At the moment it is eminently impractical, for we do not know enough about the Rules or about magic to implement it."

  Then he smiled at her, and she hated him for it. "But it does show good imagination, and many of us had worse ideas as our first experience with the Council. She is still young, but I think she shows promise."

  He began to clap for her. Mayer's skin flushed as she turned away. The scattered applause in the Council of Patent Givers seemed like mocking laughter to her ears.

  She is still young.

  She would show them.

  Mayer spent that day digging out a half-buried corridor deep beneath the ground where the ship had come to rest. The other cabins she uncovered bore nothing but small items of furniture and nonfunctional gadgets she could not decipher. As she worked, she hummed and mumbled to herself.

  Gamearth had begun to fall apart. If she found a way for the characters of Sitnalta to emulate the Transition, Mayer could free them from much more than just the invisible manipulator beneath the city.

  She thought of the Outsiders playing their games, creating a race of characters, the old Sorcerers, who used their magic in the Transition. The Spirits then supposedly went off to create their own worlds and play their own games.

  Something about that idea disturbed Mayer, tickled the back of her mind. But then she drove down into the caked dust with her digging implement and heard a clang where no wall should have been.

  Mayer stopped as the echo died away, muffled in the dirt and debris. She smiled, suspecting she had encountered something significant ... exactly what she had been hoping to find. Mayer wanted to use both hands and claw the dirt away as fast as she could, but she forced herself to be calm, to be patient. She didn't want to damage any part of what she found. The anticipation felt delicious.

  Mayer uncovered the great hinge of a heavy bulkhead door with a round locking valve set in the center like a steering wheel. As she brushed the dirt away, she saw that the door was a dull brownish red ― it had probably been bright as an alarm once. Her thrill grew.

  During the first expedition, she had uncovered the ship's control room. Professors Frankenstein and Verne had dismantled it to form their mysterious weapon. Now she had found something else.

  Mayer used both hands to grip the locking valve and attempted to turn it. She had to use her digging implement as a lever to crack the seal. She cranked the round wheel until a hissing sound burst from the door as it unseated from its airtight jamb.

  Had she perhaps found the living quarters of the Outsiders? That didn't make sense, for the Outsiders had not truly come here, only sent manifestations of themselves because they were real. And the Game was not.

  Somehow this ship sat on not just the technological fringe between science and magic, but some sort of pocket between Gamearth and reality. Perhaps the Rules lay bent and twisted here.

  Maybe she was about to see what the old Sorcerers saw when they suddenly became the great Spirits.

  Mayer pulled open the heavy metal door, closed her eyes, then stepped into the darkness. Silvery light shimmered around her as she entered the chamber.

  Mayer stood in a hall of mirrors.

  Each angled facet of the wall carried its own crystalline reflection. Mayer stepped deeper and saw thousands of images of herself unfold, reflected, bounced back. Each of the mirrors had angled the reflections on top of each other, overlapping, extending into a kaleidoscope of infinite images within images within images. Though she stood alone, Mayer felt surrounded by an enormous crowd of herself. Her dark eyes widened in awe as she turned around, staring.

  Then she noticed that the images were not all the same. Some appeared subtly different in her bodily position, her motions, the clothes she wore. In on
e she saw long dark hair, in another she saw a scar on her face. In some her expression appeared lined with deep sadness and trauma; in others, filled with delight.

  Mayer blinked with shock, as did most of her images. She couldn't tell which image truly reflected herself. But these were all images of her, all Mayer, but all different, an unending series of Mayer characters.

  "Is this some sort of game?" she said out loud. Her voice echoed much more than it should have, as if a thousand overlapping Mayer images had each spoken the same thing.

  She considered a cruel trick the Outsiders might play, toying with their own creations. Except ― one set of their creations had evolved and gone on to play their own games, to create their own characters.

  As Mayer stopped and looked into the endless versions of herself, she felt the intuition exploding in her mind. One of her other images spoke before she could form the words.

  "It goes on and on. In both directions!"

  Another image interrupted. "The Outsiders create the old Sorcerers. The old Sorcerers go on the Transition, and then they create their own games, their own characters ... who then go on to create their games."

  "And on and on," said a new Mayer. "We're seeing only a few links in an endless chain."

  "The Outsiders themselves must have some sort of gods, some external Players that manipulate their actions. And those gods in turn have their versions of the Outsiders."

  "It never ends!" several Mayers said at the same moment.

  "The only thing that remains throughout," Mayer said herself, and the other images stopped to listen to her, "is the Game! It's all a Game, the whole universe, no matter who we are or what level we play in. The Game moves through ― a game within a game."

  "Within a game."

  "Within a game."

  The phrase repeated and echoed, growing stronger and louder as if each version of Mayer had to say the same thing.

  One of the mirrors shattered, sending shards of glass spilling outward, falling to the floor as the image of that Mayer vanished, leaving only a flat black spot on the wall.