For the inhabitants, exhausted from their labours but unable to stop smiling, it was moments like these that made living in the city worthwhile.
Yet the good times could not go on forever...Following a parachute dive through a maelstrom of bullets and baggage and dollar bills and propellers, as all above Him perished in an implosive ball of fire – including, as was written in the storyline, the brother, signalling his closure from the game – the moment which all the inhabitants had long dreaded arrived thereafter:
To His unremitting elation, and the inhabitant’s suppressed melancholia, The Player had finally prevailed.
To all intents and purposes, it was game over...
The inhabitants could at least take comfort in the knowledge that The Player’s city-wide enterprises were not entirely concluded – there still remained many collectables, secret stages, upgrades and hidden items which required locating before He achieved one-hundred percent completion, and the inhabitants took great pains to ensure that these goodies remained unearthed, at least beneath a layer of fiendishness, for as long as possible.
But no quantity of trinkets can sustain one’s attention forever...
When it came to The Player’s inevitable departure, He did not take His leave immediately. Instead, such was His gradual disinterest, His appearances became less common – passing, short-lived, and for briefer and less enthusiastic periods. As opposed to His primary sessions which could extend for the entirety of a weekend, in His final days The Player dipped in and out of the city as one would a tedious soap opera, His perusals rarely stretching beyond a quick gun-blazing thrash through such-and-such a place before ultimately retiring to one of His apartments once more. Sometimes it was days before any of the inhabitants clasped eyes on Him again – many on the outskirts of the city, those who resided in the hard to reach outlooks which He circulated only on occasion, had been surplus to requirements for months now. As such, they were beginning to grow restless.
Perhaps, they probed delicately, those inhabitants in the more active inner city areas might trade places with them for a day or two? But this suggestion was unheard of: Everyone had a place and everyone must remain there – that was, and always would be, the way of it. The Player would eventually return to those on the outskirts, their fellow inhabitants were eager to reassure – to this end, expansions had arrived and additional hidden items were due to be deposited with corresponding clues – then it would only be a matter of time before He began exploring the lesser frequented spots again.
But when? the unrequited asked with not undue scepticism. Tomorrow? Next Week? Besides, The Player hadn’t been seen since retreating into His sanctuary more than a fortnight ago.
What if something unforeseen had happened to Him?
Maybe, for the peace of mind of everyone, and Him, somebody should go to His room and chec-
No! All agreed this was out of the question! It was forbidden! The Player’s room was hallow – not one inhabitant, no matter their reasoning, was permitted to intrude. Ever!
Yet desperate times called for desperate measures, and the weight of the inhabitant’s consternation only helped to push such measures along. The unenviable responsibility was therefore tasked – and hastily snatched, for he had been made redundant by the city’s narrative and yearned desperately to again be productive – into the trust of the brother: he and he alone would do what was necessary, and enter His room...
While the inhabitants gathered pensively on the streets outside, the brother ventured to The Player’s mansion in the centre of the city, where His last known sighting had been confirmed.
Alone and agitated by the fear of what he may discover – and more so by what he may not – the brother passed under the shadow of the gateway’s marble columns and proceeded to enter the mansion, ascending the dual staircases towards the top floor. He found the gold-leaved corridors to be unnervingly quiet, the guest rooms empty but plentiful, the maroon carpets plush under his workman’s boots. It would be a pity, the brother considered to himself, for such a grandiose accommodation, the reward for so many missions completed, to fall into disuse. Such a senseless waste...
Upon reaching the top floor, the brother paused on the cusp of The Player’s bedroom.
The door was closed.
Should he knock? the brother pondered. Dare he call His name?
Or perhaps it was best, in the off-chance that The Player were indisposed, that he instead peek around the door’s edge? The latter of these options the brother deemed the most appropriate.
With trembling fingers he tentatively leant around the bedroom door no further than was merited, and encroached into the vacant gloom.
Therein, the brother’s and the inhabitant’s worst fears were confirmed.
The Player had abandoned them...
***
Over the months which followed The Player’s departure, the city exhibited all the jovialness of a Christmas pantomime in Spring. With no Player to entertain, the inhabitants meandered around the city in a state of disorientated lethargy – those less aroused could not conjure the reasoning for leaving their beds at all. As a result, just as unkempt hair inevitably attracts lice, it wasn’t long before the city began to exhibit similar symptoms of neglect.
In a real world metropolis these symptoms would manifest in the form of litter, graffiti, cigarette butts and detritus; yet in the inhabitant’s city there was only one result of dereliction:
Glitches.
At first they were inconsequential – a twitching fencepost in the park, a child’s swing frozen in time, a tree with the colour of its branches inverted, a taxi unburdened of a wheel; little more than creases in an otherwise smooth cloth – but, left unsupervised due to the inhabitant’s sombre, these glitches soon seeded and multiplied like a cancer, with major incidents such as upturned planes dropping from the sky and whole floors of buildings disappearing overnight becoming all too regular happenings. Still, if He wasn’t around to witness such failings, why should the inhabitants pay them any significance?
The brother disagreed with this morose outlook. Invigorated by the new-found seniority established during his broaching of the mansion, he countered that the city was an extension of every inhabitant within it, and therefore, Player or not, it must be maintained to a respectable standard.
And there was always the risk, he warned, that the glitches could spread to the inhabitants themselves...
Much to the brother’s vexation, no one paid his forewarnings any attention. Alas, on the morning that a new Player finally arrived, everything came to a head...
***
It should have been a day of celebration. A new Player! A fresh start! Yet no one had been prepared; all had panicked and dashed haphazardly for their places while the number 47 came rolling down main street unannounced. The brother had been the first to reach his mark; he arrived just in time to see the new Player – different in overall form than the previous, yet still recognisable – step from the bus, look around, then fall helplessly into a bottomless void where the kerb should have been, all the result of a single, unrectified glitch.
The Player did not return. In the weeks that followed, neither did another.
Actions, the brother resolved, needed to be taken...
***
In light of the disastrous miscarriage involving the most recently departed player, an emergency meeting was arranged in the city’s central park at the brother’s behest. Speaking from the top of the steps which led to the park’s monuments – which, he was quick to point out, glitched manically as though shards of broken wind chime caught in a hurricane – the brother made his impassioned case for an intervention.
They, he addressed of the inhabitants, had grown careless – the city had lost two players already, and it seemed unlikely that they would be blessed with a third if the condition of the city did not improve.
The city was becoming wayward! the brother spat. Unsafe! Downtrodden! With a rising temerity and banging of his fists, the brother upheld that should every inhabitant’s application continue to regress, it would not be long before the city was lost to a catastrophe of its own making!
The time to act, he insisted, was now!
Despite the brother’s exertions, the inhabitants were not aroused – they only exchanged thin and questioning glances between themselves.
But the brother was undeterred. Be it an unpopular viewpoint, his reasoning was this:
The city and its inhabitants needed a solution to prevent everything from sliding any further into disrepair – there must be, as a means of re-establishing competence, the introduction of a clearly defined structure.
There needed to be oversight!
This time there came a chorus of angry jeers from the crowd. If the inhabitants were reading the brother’s intentions correctly, he was advocating a system of governance! Did the brother need reminding – humble inhabitant that he was, lest he forget – that the city had never required governance in the past?
The city had never lost two players in the past, the brother countered sternly. And no, he would not be asserting sole responsibility for this so called ‘governance’, if that was their thinking. Rather, the brother proposed an immediate election where every inhabitant stood as a candidate, with those candidates who received the ten highest number of votes being delegated to oversee the city’s restoration. They, these overseers, would not be permitted to exert their authority onto individuals; their sole remit was to ensure that each and every glitch in their assigned jurisdiction was, and remained, eradicated. That was all.
And to those sly inhabitants at the back: No, they could not vote for themselves...
Despite the inhabitants’ overriding reservations, voting took place that very same afternoon. By the end of the day, ten overseers had been elected and assigned their portion of the city.
Of those ten elected, one of them just happened to be the brother...
On the toll of sunrise following the previous day’s election, every inhabitant rose early and set about the task of rejuvenating their designated sector, being prudent to remove any glitches which had wormed their way into the cracks. While everyone worked tirelessly with their backs to the sun, the overseers acted just as their newly acquired titles suggested – they oversaw. In most cases they participated in the clean-up alongside their fellow inhabitants with every bit the equal effort; yet there were some overseers who deemed it a more efficient use of their energies to supervise from the comfort of the shade, rather than overexert themselves with the hot and heavy lifting. When they considered the quality of their fellow inhabitants’ work to be unsatisfactory, they demanded that it be improved; if progress was running behind schedule then it was the inhabitants’ responsibility, the overseers underlined, to quicken the pace.
At the conclusion of each day, the overseers reported their statements back to the brother – for although the brother was but one of the ten elected, and in no way of a higher stature than any of his nine colleagues, in his own words, ‘Someone has to drive the bus’...
Following the rejuvenation’s completion, it wasn’t long before a new and eagerly heralded bus pulled up beside a freshly sparkling shelter. As was his original responsibility, the brother encased the new player in the same bear hug as always, before leading him around the block towards his car – yet now the brother did the escorting with an air of authority, a bouncer as opposed to a butler. While nonchalantly walking and delivering his lines, the brother made certain to keep an eye on every surrounding activity to ensure that it was running correctly: any pedestrian who dawdled, stuttered, or acted without the inconspicuousness required could expect to find themselves on the receiving end of a furrowed brow.
And if any driver dare stray into another lane, even by a single pixel, they could be certain that the matter would be raised at the newly established post-performance assessment meetings...
With a clapping and a cracking of his knuckles, the brother brought the day’s meeting to order. Foremost on the agenda:
Inhabitant 87245 – newly assigned numbers allowed the administration to run smoother – On the thirty-seventh minute of mission three, act five, the brother berated of the accused, why did you repeat your line ‘Fine weather we’re having’ on consecutive engagements with the player? Why, can you explain to the council, was this so?
Regardless of the reasoning put forward by the stricken inhabitant for his careless misdemeanour, excuses, despite his sympathetic expression, were nonetheless deemed immaterial by the brother. There would be no punishment handed down at this stage, let it be recorded in the minutes – the inhabitants had yet to be warmed to this sufficiently – instead, it was agreed upon by the brother and his overseers that the guilty party must return to their mark and use the time before the player’s next arrival to rehearse. The brother hoped, and expected, that this would remedy said inhabitant’s oversights sufficiently.
Through gritted teeth, the inhabitant thanked the brother and his overseers for their leniency, before returning to his place...
While the attending inhabitants shifted in their seats through restlessness, the meeting continued. Referring down to the reams of paperwork at his desk, there were further mishaps that the brother had noted during today’s performance – but these would be addressed by the relevant overseer at a later date, for the capacity of their roles, it had been decided, was to increase beyond the ongoing restoration of the city. The new system had worked so successfully, the brother insisted, that there could be no discernible argument for its discontinuation – nor against its expansion. For, he reiterated with a thumping of his chest as the meeting reached its conclusion –
The retention of the player’s occupancy must take priority over all our wants!
Albeit privately, many did not share this viewpoint. Unquestionably, every single inhabitant was unreservedly dedicated to serving The Player – after all, this was the sole purpose for which they assumed they existed. However, it was an established truth that every inhabitant had been created equally, and they were, at their core, fundamentally identical – it was only their costumes, per say, those they wore for the benefit of The Player, which differentiated them.
In this regard, democratically elected he may well have been, who was the brother to administer commands? He was no better, greater, nor wiser than anyone else! The only attribute which distinguished him – his bond with The Player, albeit a fictitious and assistive one – was a bestowal of pure fortune, neither earned nor attained. The brother could just as easily have found himself in the guise of a call girl, a bartender, a construction worker or tramp. He was merely a benefactor of chance.
As they trudged back to their homes upon the adjournment of another assessment meeting, some made the point that there were many inhabitants who, for their part, wore the costume of a police officer – yet, despite this, they never acted out their authority beyond the hours of the game...
And never to the detriment of their fellow inhabitants...
Yet the continued preservation of the game, the city, and, foremost, the player, continued to take precedent over these petty quibbles. Indeed, the brother could confirm that the player – as well as himself – was supremely happy with proceedings thus far.
But things can always be improved! So began the brother’s opening statement to that night’s meeting, central park once again filled to the corners with a pasture of weary inhabitants – for attendance was now considered compulsory.
Much to the brother’s displeasure – for he, so he sighed, took little pleasure in having to raise this issue – today’s mission had not proceeded without indiscretion. The pilot of helicopter four, the flight leader in this instance, needed to pay closer attention to their altitudes. It had been observed, due to inhabitant 30483 rep
eatedly flying too low under bridge nine in sector twelve, that the player had mistimed a pivotal bank on four separate occasions and crashed. It was only the player’s success on the fifth attempt – thanks to some interventionist words of encouragement on the brother’s part – which had convinced the player not to quit the game.
And, heaven forbid, had the player been allowed to quit outright, there was no guarantee that he would ever have returned. Of this the brother was convinced...
To ensure that this fateful calamity would never befall the city, the brother, backed by his twenty overseers, had a proposition:
He wanted to make the game easier.
A startled hush fell over all in attendance. Was it seriously being proposed that there be an alteration to the game’s rules? many whispered. Such a strident idea had never been contemplated before – it was comparable to a dictator inscribing in law that an additional minute be inserted into the hour, or the outlawing any weather beyond that of the inclement. It was inconceivable, impossible madness!
With all the confidence which empowers those cocooned within a mass, the inhabitants soon took the opportunity to remind the brother, albeit respectfully, that they had played along with many of his radical ideas already – roles being switched between inhabitants, depending on the results of their performances, being a controversial and not entirely successful scheme. But a fundamental change in the rules? That was taking things too far! Besides, the capability to instigate such a change was beyond the powers of any mere inhabitant – even one as oh-so great as the brother...
While The Player Sleeps Page 2