Each breath caused the light to change. Paces above the men, a cut-glass chandelier trembled with their speaking. A team of artisans had crafted the light piece by cleaving glass with diamond chisels. Photons flickered like electrons through a circuit board. Standing on the silk carpet, Braeden reached for salvation.
“It doesn’t seem fragile,” he said to Chisolm while accepting the box.
To Braeden, they seemed exactly opposite. Chisolm was pale and soft with an active voice and expression. The box was dense, black, and inert.
“If you kill yourself in a wreck,” Chisolm replied, “you’ll ruin it. Otherwise, don’t worry. You have other things to worry about.”
Nothing else in the chamber was black. Even the ebony paneling was deep brown with gold stripes.
“How much time do I have?” Braeden asked.
“All the time in the world,” Chisolm told him. “Time is not your problem. It’s what you do with your time. But if you don’t get this serum down south, hundreds of children will die.”
For a moment, Braeden could only stare at the box.
“I do love children,” he whispered.
“This is your chance to prove it, and to prove yourself,” Chisolm added. “Depending on your success, you’ll prove yourself alien invader, universal prophet, or migrant worker. You’ll learn who you are.”
“I never wanted to be a star. I just want to fit in my own world. Not any other.”
“By accepting this challenge, Braeden, you’ll find your proper place. It might not be any of those three. It might be the grave. Regardless, you’ll get what you deserve.”
Chisolm’s polylinen suit had the sheen of sandblasted glass. He might have been attending a seasonal ball. Braeden wore his driving suit. Both men were working.
Braeden walked away without another word. Responding to his movement, the chandelier fluttered as though waving adieu.
*
The car’s high beams threw light along the narrow road. Braeden had not seen another vehicle since leaving the city. Past the ditches and fields, behind the stands of oaks, people waited for morning in their farmhouses, their cottages, their shacks. The nearest lit window was so far from the road it had the size of a star. The apparent size. Stars are huge. Windows and their walls are tiny. Braeden knew that he was minuscule. His dreams had less limit than his body.
The box lay on the seat at his side. He did not know how to it.
The throaty V8 felt vibrationless at this speed, having found its stride at ninety. Braeden turned on the radio, but heard only crackling. The tires seemed to be skipping over the asphalt, barely touching. Checking his watch, he saw a dim grey light, but no numbers. He was startled by the sight. Grey isn’t a color. Grey is pale black or dark white, either way a lack of hue. Objects reflect grey, but no light source can transmit grey light. Braeden thought this as a small form wearing pale grey moved across the road, and he slammed on the brakes.
The hood tilted down as Braeden’s body pressed hard against his seat belt. He grabbed the steering wheel with one hand and the box with the other. As the tires skidded, the smell of burnt rubber lodged in his nose. Braeden stared at a baby crawling across the tarmac, grey outfit bright in the headlights, tiny eyes reflecting fear as the car noisily stopped a few paces away.
Remaining on his hands and knees, the baby looked up to Braeden, blinking anxiously. Gritty particles abraded his fingers. Grass from the roadside had stained his jumper at the knees. A baby. An average baby crawling across the road in the middle of nowhere. Braeden saw no nearby house, tent, or vehicle. His car hissed and crackled, anxious to be moving again. Across the adjacent pasture, a large bird flew from its ground nest, continuing to the forest. Braeden wondered if the frightened bird had left its offspring behind.
He reached down to the baby, who did not resist Braeden’s grasp. The perfectly average infant spoke with perfect clarity as he met Braeden’s eyes.
“I know who you are.”
Braeden pulled the child against his chest as the creatures attacked. From the roadside brush, a pack of hyenas ran to Braeden and leapt against him, and the child. Their claws scrabbling across the asphalt made the greatest noise. They did not growl or slobber, and their panting seemed moderate compared to their speed and power and the relentless glare in their eyes. Though Braeden pulled the child close and bent protectively, the animals ripped his arms loose with their snouts and claws, knocking Braeden flat to the road. One hyena grabbed the baby’s jumper and ran away, the little body bouncing like a sack. Braeden could not even attempt to rise, for several of the beasts trampled him, their paws smashing his face. Twisting his neck and covering his eyes with both hands, Braeden felt their coats brush against his arms. He smelled their hard, musty scent, and waited for their teeth to begin ripping. Then the pack ran off, following their peer with the baby bundle in its mouth.
A gasping bundle of tension, Braeden rose so quickly that he fell to his backside, puffing terrified breaths as he stared at the dark, unmoving brush. Rising slowly, he had to lean against the warm hood to keep himself upright. Palpable anxiety ripped at his nerves, bringing nauseating vertigo. After one more breath of recuperation, he would respond. Either he would drive away and ensure the health of hundreds of infants, or he would run after that one baby in the brush, a child likely dead by then, followed to the afterlife by the uncertain hero.
In the distance, he heard the child laugh, but could not judge the sound: happy or horrible? Perhaps he heard a final gargle of demise, a doomed adieu for the loser.
He had to grab at the handle twice before opening the door. The action might have been teeth grasping fabric, and the human flesh beneath. After entering, Braeden managed to drive straight down the road despite that trembling hand on the wheel. The other hand reached for the box, but felt only pleated vinyl. The box was a scant two feet away, but Braeden had missed. Separated by the length of one baby.
Up to speed again, Braeden tried to concentrate on his goal. He still had a chance for salvation. But he couldn’t think. The tires’ sound against the road suggested scrabbling claws. The thrumming engine was an animal’s growl. Each blade of grass was an innocent arm reaching for him, seeking help.
He passed a decaying billboard with flaking paint. Only three words were legible: Please Call today! Continuing, he steered along a sweeping curve, the box sliding against his hip. On this utterly flat stretch of pavement, he accelerated to nearly a hundred, passing a decaying billboard with flaking paint. Only three words were readable: Please Call today! As Braeden steered through a long, sweeping curve, the box slid against his hip. On the following stretch of pavement, he accelerated to nearly a hundred, passing a decaying billboard with flaking paint. Only three words were legible:
“Where am I?”
The holovid’s grey light faded as Braeden blinked, blinked and stepped away from the spherical projection, that long road and billboard vanishing. The other men had only been observing, not playing. He made it to the nearest chair before collapsing.
“You’re lost, man,” Chisolm said as he returned to his computer terminal, “that’s where you are. You love children yet abandon a baby by the side of the road? You wouldn’t make a migrant worker. They try to take care of their kids.”
Braeden didn’t much listen. He hated the feeling. Palpable anxiety ripped his nerves, bringing nausea and vertigo. An older man with a concerned expression brought Braeden a glass. Gabe placed his hand on Braeden’s shoulder as he sipped the filtered water. It tasted like hyena piss.
“How did it look?” Braeden managed to pronounce. He didn’t want to feel weak, despite his roiling guts.
“Excellent,” Gabe said while reaching to Braeden’s neck to remove the spine mod. It resembled a short length of leather belt. “As convincing as the best army simulation.”
Gabe brought the mod to Chisolm, who placed it in a tiny black box.
“It’s as good as the technol you brought us, Lt. Gabe,” Chisolm quipped.
Braeden found himself staring straight up at a bright rectangle. This plas ceiling light had less character than the cracks in the basement wall where fungus grew. The hyenas had disappeared into brush of exactly that shade of green.
“How was the verisimilitude factor for you?” Chisolm asked Braeden.
“Are you feeling better?” Gabe wondered, again standing beside the player.
Braeden began shaking his head.
“It couldn’t get any better. I could feel the springs in the car seat. I saw a little rock chip in the windshield. I could smell food particles on the hyenas’ teeth. Why hyenas?”
“You were telling us you saw some at the zoo,” Chisolm stated.
Braeden was feeling better, perhaps too real.
“I want to find that baby.”
“Who was the child?” Gabe asked.
“Me,” Braeden replied, his voice still not strong. “It fits my past. I don’t remember, but I know I was found along the side of a road.”
They all dressed the same: drably. Average faces, bodies, grooming. Two men, not quite young, plus a third old enough to be an army major. He hadn’t made it that far. He hadn’t made it past the simulation.
Chisolm waved his hand over the desk pad and the screen changed from tiny graphics to ASCII. Text flashed too fast to follow. He turned to Braeden.
“It’s the nature of the game that it responds to the player’s mentality. Since the infant represents you as a child, you want to find yourself. That’s cool. That’s what the game is about.”
Braeden blinked, blinked, and understood that he was leaning on a table with one elbow. A molded plastic table the color of bad teeth, hyena teeth.
Gabe spoke while handing Braeden a self-heating sandwich. Unable to smile, Braeden nodded in thanks.
“Gaming is a waste of the mod tech. It’s more important to find a better place in life than in a game.”
Chisolm frowned. He was never completely removed from a snide expression.
“Great, we’ll save the world when we can afford it. We’re making a game from your sim because the wealthy is paying a lot for it.”
Gabe looked to Braeden as the latter chewed his sandwich.
“Are you feeling better? Your blood sugar wasn’t the best.”
Braeden touched a crumb on the corner of his mouth. It felt like grit from the road.
“Yeah. This game takes a lot out of you. Did the sim?”
Gabe only shrugged as Braeden continued.
“It’s said they ended the program because it caused psychoses in the trainees. Or it replaced reality, or killed people who died in it. What did it do to you?”
Gabe needed long seconds to reach for his words.
“Nothing. It’s all behind.”
“I’m recompiling your input,” Chisolm said while waving his hands over two wireless pads. ASCII flowed with metagraphics on separate planes. “Either that, or I’ll change the parameters to include something sub to a migrant worker. A baby abandoner.”
“There’s nothing wrong with migrant workers,” Gabe told Chisolm. “They’re honest people working hard to support their families.”
“Yes, but they’re such losers they work for sub wages and get treated like shit.”
Braeden was feeling strong enough to snicker. He never snickered before meeting Chisolm.
“You’d find something down in being a universal prophet.”
“A false prophet delivering universal bullshit is nothing to brag about,” Chisolm replied.
“So, next time I play, I guess I’ll try for alien invader. They’re strong enough to conquer worlds.”
“Or they’re slimy green freaks,” Chisolm said. “Like pickle turds.”
Gabe stared at Braeden. He had a way of looking directly into a person. But he always seemed to be sharing a concerned view, not stealing a voyeuristic peek.
“You’re not feeling mentally skewed from the game, are you?” he asked Braeden. “Did you have trouble returning to reality?”
The light from Chisolm’s monitor glared against his face. Grey light.
“The numbers say he had no problem leaving. He played strong, and stayed in charge. The hyenas didn’t even scratch him.”
Braeden looked down to his sandwich. Nothing left. Nothing.
“It couldn’t have been as real for you as it was for me,” he blurted. “If it was, the new holovid rendering is more important than any game.”
Chisolm smiled, one finger on his data pad.
“It’s not more important than a game where you die if you lose.”
“Oh,” Braeden said, flicking dark particles from his fingertips. “We’ll call it Life.”
*
Braeden looked at an apartment building so tall and narrow it seemed a drip of fluid leaking from the sky. But that was on the new side of the city. In the old quarter, some buildings still had stairs. He glanced at the skyline as his finger approached the call button to #3G. A slab of steel seemed to be in the way. He felt like Gabe reaching for the answer to Braeden’s question: What did it do to you? Some things retain their influence even after you leave them. Nothing.
He poked the button like sticking his finger in a hyena’s eye to keep it from that baby. But the baby was gone by then. He poked the button, but sensed no response. No buzz, no vibration, no sound. So what? It wasn’t a car. He didn’t own a car.
“Who’s there?”
That woman’s voice chilled him. Quite cordial. Hand still extended, he wanted to reach out and touch.
“I need to see you,” he managed to say.
Pause. Electrons pulse slowly along the lines of personal relationships.
“I’ll see you when I see my child again!”
She communicated the passion of finality. Nothing more to say. Nothing.
Returning to the game lab, Braeden saw a delivery truck stop abruptly in front of a building with opaque windows. A three-wheeled bot rolled swiftly from the truck, package hidden inside. No matter. The gangs weren’t choosy. Twenty or thirty young men and women, all wearing headpieces with halos, swarmed on the bot with screwdrivers and hammers. In moments, the bot lay on its side, wheels twitching, and the gangsters ran off with a box, disappearing in the alleyways.
Braeden moved right along, passing scores of people, some cheering for the gang, some jeering, none calling the authorities. Only Braeden had to choke back tears to see that disappearing parcel. He still had his halo. Nothing else was left from his youth.
*
Braeden stood on a dirt road, looking up to a mountainside. Along with other soldiers in field gear, Gabe carefully walked down, searching inside every cave.
“This is the last one,” he told the sergeant beside him. “If we just make it down to the road, we’ll be safe.”
The sergeant read an instrument that he directed into the cavern.
“Private Gabe,” he said, “we’ve found some of them in here. We’ll have to go in and get them. You first.”
Gabe clenched his jaws and shook his head. He seemed more angry than frightened.
“I can’t stand a hole like that. I’d go crazy before anyone could shoot me. You’ll have to court martial me before I go in there. You’ll have to shoot me.”
As the disgusted sergeant shook his head and entered the cave, the entire face of the mountain exploded from within, and…
…the holovid faded, the grey light evaporating. Braeden blinked, looking at Gabe. Both men wore street clothing. Chisolm sat behind the computer.
“I just can’t play it,” Gabe groaned. “That damn army sim keeps coming back.”
Braeden felt a different type of disappointment.
“It was just like every other immersive holovid I’ve been in. I thought you guys said it was ultrareal.”
After returning the mod to its box, Gabe walked away, heading for the fridge. He didn’t need to recuperate from excess electro-reality. He had only been playing a game.
“Your play does produce that type of verisimilitude,” Chisolm said, reading the game’s emotional log. “Gabe’s doesn’t because the most important part of his psychology is the sim—something fake. Your playing is real because it’s driven by your real life.”
Not moving from the holovid realm, Braeden turned to Chisolm.
“Get me ready to go. I have more playing to do.”
Chisolm waved his hands before the electronic boxes. In the nerve-wracking computer, software circuits snapped open and closed like synapses. Braeden felt too real.
Light from the high beams extended like solid, transparent objects. No bump or hole disturbed the car, which seemed naturally part of the road. On a mission, Braeden held the wheel with one hand and the box with the other. But when the astonishing event of a child’s crawling across the road accosted him, Braeden had an ugly impression that this had happened before. The worthy car seemed to stop itself, though Braeden pressed the brake pedal so hard his leg cramped.
He ran out immediately, passing the hood, hearing the engine hiss. As the baby looked up to him, static now, Braeden felt that if only he could clutch the child against his chest, they both would be safe. But as Braeden reached down, the baby spoke.
“I know who you are.”
Startled, Braeden paused, and the gang arrived. From the nearby brush, several hyenas ran across the road, one grabbing the baby’s jumper in its teeth, the rest leaping against Braeden. He could smell their odor and see their bared teeth, but they moved so quickly he could not respond, only cover his face. But he fell to the road without injury, and the pack ran away.
Rising immediately, shaking off his vertigo, Braeden ran to the trunk and removed a hyena gun. Running through the foliage, he heard the child laugh. Perhaps he heard a gasp of terror.
Arriving at the first mountainside cavern, Braeden directed the gun inside, and the indicator light blinked POSITIVE. Entering, he saw the hyenas walking calmly and the baby reclining passively in a crib with metal bars. As the creatures turned to Braeden, he raised his weapon and fired. Every animal fell. Running to the baby, he reached down to see a hyena cub in the child’s jumper. As Braeden choked, “Who are you?”, the beast leapt against Braeden, knocking him to the cavern floor, smothering him with its fur. Braeden smelled the sick combination of hyena stench and baby powder. Not concerned with any infant’s welfare, he tried to press the thing away because he was smothering. He felt foolish that his legs were twitching even as his head felt ready to implode. Trying to jerk his face aside and gasp in another breath, he encountered more smothering fur. Clutching at the body against his face with both hands, trying to rip it away, Braeden felt that he was crushing a baby, and released his hold. Devoid of air, he released his energy, his identity, accepting a pleasant repose, the most gratifying nap from a childhood in heaven….
Air sweeter than a baby’s breath filled him with satisfaction. He did not want to move, ever. Reclining, he sensed people above, not animals. Farther, he heard a city’s sounds, traffic and construction. The sounds that caused him to open his eyes were scrabbling feet and grunts and bending metal. Looking up, he saw the halo gang attacking the ambulance. Removing their probes from Braeden’s skull and chest, the EMS crew ran to their vehicle, weapons drawn.
The ugly zip of their strike guns encouraged Braeden to sit. Feeling weak and woozy, he noticed Gabe and Chisolm kneeling beside him. One of them squeezed an inject-ampule against Braeden’s arm, and his eyes popped open. Seeing the gangsters tussling with the med techs, Braeden rose and turned away, leaving flying halos behind. He felt energized and conflictual, the clean air filling his head, his feet twitching right along though his legs were weak and he was getting out of there before….
Gabe and Chisolm grabbed either arm.
“Move easy, Braeden,” said the former. “It’s just the upper that makes you feel good.”
Braeden felt that his body lagged behind as his senses rushed ahead. He knew the feeling. And he knew to cooperate as his friends directed him to the game lab.
Reclined on an air cot, he saw the entire sky, which had receded from reality, returning as a game version, small and squarish against the ceiling, an unconvincing patch. Before he passed out, Braeden heard voices, but could not assess their verity.
“I can’t believe I let you dump him in the alley,” Gabe complained.
“Did you want to bring them here? They resuscitated him, didn’t they? You couldn’t. And you’re the one who nearly killed him.”
Braeden was pleased to hear no more, accepting an uncomfortable sleep far preferable to pleasant dying.
*
Chisolm sat behind his computer crafting slushware with a circuit burner. At the camp stove on the plas table, Gabe poked sizzling veggies with a wooden fork. Neither man looked to Braeden, who stood just outside of the holovid array, just outside of their vision.
“This game stinks,” Braeden grumbled. “I followed both routes, and still couldn’t win.”
“You have to make the right decision first time,” Chisolm said, adjusting the burner’s color temp. “Just like life, there are some things you can’t retrieve.”
“I thought the beta wasn’t supposed to be deadly.”
Gabe gently slid a mushroom across the pan.
“Everything stopped in you. Your brain, your heart. But you came back easy.”
“It wasn’t so real that time,” Braeden said, staring at the holovid’s lenses. “Until I started dying.”
Chisolm stopped subvocalizing machine code in order to speak aloud.
“Gabe’s influence from the originating sim is too strong, causing you to OD on electro-reality. The simulation’s protocol is stuck in the game routines. I don’t know how it got in, but I need to get it out.”
Braeden couldn’t tell if he smelled Gabe’s lunch or Chisolm’s circuits. Wrinkling his nose, he turned away.
“Let me know when you get it straight. I need to crash again.”
*
Standing in the sphere’s grey light, Chisolm reached for his computer and for the mod on his neck, but could touch neither as the game began.
He walked along a rural road at night. Despite the darkness, he saw a baby crawling across the pavement. Since the baby was pixelated, Chisolm continued past. Arriving at the basement lab, he descended the alley stairs and entered, stepping beneath that stark light fixture. When he opened the door for a visitor, Gabe entered. Chisolm noticed the large pores on his facial skin, not a hint of stubble, saw that his dominant eye was more open than the other, heard a faint scraping stop as Gabe’s shoe left the tile foyer and touched the main hall’s carpet. Above, the chandelier’s faceted elements, suspended by slender platinum chains, responded to Gabe’s movement by shimmering. In an anxious gesture, Gabe reached to scratch the back of his neck, then flicked his fingertips. Particles of skin too small to see settled to the floor.
Wondering of the superreal sensitivity that Gabe had brought, inspiring Chisolm to notice a dead cockroach’s wing in the corner and feel a split fingernail snag on his pants, Chisolm studied Gabe, his play. As the men stepped across the lab and spoke, Gabe tried not to move backwards. He tried not to retreat and fall into a cavern that followed him. Whenever he came to the precipice, Gabe was stopped by a small, impassible barrier. Resembling a short length of leather belt, the barrier was not positioned near his feet, but near his brain.
Gabe was not present when an unsolicited client arrived. A moderate man with a moustache so flat it seemed painted on, this wealthy individual proposed that Chisolm create a new game so convincing it killed. Chisolm accepted the challenge. He could not have envisioned a more satisfying situation. Just as some people live to play, whether the game is romance or business or politics, Chisolm lived to make a game so vital that one might play until death. Like life.
Unable to succeed in his creativity with Gabe’s military background corrupting play, Chisolm followed Gabe’s path, which was personal history. Entering that marginal cavern, Chisolm saw Braeden leaving an apartment building, rejected by former family.
Braeden proceeded to a bistro whose corners were as dark as a cave. Seated with a man whose moustache was so flat it seemed an application of paint, Braeden dully poked his dolphin salad with a fork.
“If you don’t help me, I don’t know where to turn,” Braeden said. “I don’t exactly have any friends. Chisolm…it’s just a game with him.”
“No one cares about Chisolm’s stupid damn game except the stupid damn players,” the moustache man grumbled quietly. “Games that can kill you are all over the world. Try Russian roulette. But that video renderer is unprecedented. Chisolm has figured how to tap in to the player’s experience and project it in a holovid so convincingly it might as well be real. No mil sim can do that.”
“And if I get you this technol, you’ll…? I don’t really want anything else. Ever since my wife took our baby because some of the old gang came over….”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that story, restraining order, blah. Look, I can bring your baby back. The courts can’t do that. We’re not burdened by the law. …You look just like your dad. I bet your son looked like you.”
After leaving his contact, Braeden did not immediately return to the game lab, but waited for Chisolm to conclude his adjustments. When Braeden next entered the holovid realm, Gabe joined him. Braeden did not care to judge Chisolm’s odd expression, his unusual tone. Chisolm might have been OD’ing on achievement.
“The interference came from a skull mod the military implanted in Gabe to prevent him from returning to the sim’s psychology. But I’ve learned how to harness it, not just neutralize it, so now you two can play together.”
Braeden turned away from Chisolm’s unconvincing smile. Chisolm wasn’t good at smiling. He was good at the game.
“Let’s go,” Braeden said. “This renderer is great.”
“I’m looking forward to something better than before,” Gabe smiled.
Gabe was better at smiling. He wasn’t worth a damn at playing.
*
Light glaring from the chandelier caused Braeden to squint. Gabe didn’t seem to notice. Stepping across the brocade carpet, Chisolm held forth a black box, his passage causing the chandelier to sway minutely.
“I’ve been waiting for this,” Braeden said while looking down to the box in his hands.
Gabe’s pate seemed to be pulsing due to the shimmering light on his nearly bald scalp. In this day and age, he could have fixed that for a few dollars. Gabe didn’t care to fix his head. Not the surface.
“How many children can we save with this?” Braeden asked.
“One,” Chisolm curtly replied. “But you can also lose him. And yourselves. Now we’ll learn who we are: alien invader, universal prophet, or migrant worker.”
Gabe led the way, but Braeden drove.
*
Every subtle rise and fall of the car revealed new members of the roadside brush: a brilliant, blooming lantana; lengths of prickly vines; a sprouting acorn the height of a crawling baby. In houses denoted by tiny panes of light, families calmly proceeded in life, not having to abrogate a past horror or avoid some upcoming doom.
Gabe cranked the handle, lowering the window enough for fresh air to enter. It smelled like the breath of an animal.
In nature’s greater realm, crawling babies are animals.
The box lay on the seat between them. Braeden considered it.
As Gabe turned on the radio, Braeden noticed the illuminated panel’s grey light. Wondering of the headlights’ hue, which he had never noticed, Braeden looked up to see an animal creeping across the road. A human animal.
The screech of slammed braking seemed to come from the speakers. Gabe grabbed the dashboard with one hand and the door handle with the other. The box slipped to the floor as the men exited together.
No movement showed in the child except for panting. Gabe’s pate beneath the chandelier had seemed more active. Though Gabe stood nearest, the baby looked up to Braeden, and his lips began to tremble.
“I don’t know who you are,” the child said as Braeden lifted him.
His jumper was damp from the dewy grass. Stiff from apprehension, the baby could not settle in Braeden’s arms. Braeden just wanted to comfort him. As Braeden turned to the car, he faced the pack.
Streaming from the dark foliage, countless hyenas rushed to the roadway, overwhelming the three people. The scratching of those scores of claws filled Braeden’s senses as he bent, protecting the baby. Though Gabe lifted the black box and began ferociously beating at the animals, he could not affect their mass. Every animal he struck fell dead, but more ran past, flowing as effortlessly as electrons. Ignoring Gabe’s futile violence, the hyenas leapt against Braeden, who fell to the asphalt, snouts and paws thrust against his head and arms until the baby was forced free. As the animals ran over him, scratching his neck and face, Braeden with his chin on the pavement saw a pale figure dangling from a hyena’s mouth, suspended by soft clothing.
Black box raised, Gabe charged after the pack. Braeden followed after removing the hyena gun from the car’s trunk. Both men ran across the flat land, stumbling over prickly vines and blooming weeds, exhibiting a stressed breathing not seen in the hyenas.
Above his own panting and Gabe’s gasping, Braeden heard a youthful laugh, a blurt of sudden joy, he hoped.
Braeden felt that his mind or spirit rushed ahead while his weak, ineffective body lagged behind. But he did not slow, and did not pause as he and Gabe arrived at the pack. The animals were so numerous that they warmed the air, all milling about a crib with steel bars. Instead of providing a safe space, the crib kept the baby out, excluding the crawling child from reaching a mattress as firm and comforting as a father’s embrace.
The hyenas did not respond until Gabe began beating them to death with the box and Braeden shot so many with his gun that their bodies covered the land like a brocade carpet. But the effort exhausted Gabe, all that warfare with no end, no exit, and Braeden’s gun ran dry. As more hyenas appeared from the brush, the men found themselves retreating. Not hearing or seeing the child, they ran toward the mountains, snapping teeth one baby length behind.
Rushing Braeden’s feet slipped on the rocky incline, causing him to reach down for balance. The gritty mountainside abraded his fingers, but he did not drop the gun. Ahead, Gabe scrambled upward until arriving at a cavern he could not pass. Stopping at the dark hole, he seethed wordlessly while looking past Braeden. The men had run so far around the mountain that the car was clearly visible just beyond. If they could only slip to the road and drive away, they could continue with their mission and save one child. But the hyenas had relentlessly followed. They extended down the slopes, approaching at the future’s implacable rate.
Settling against a lichenous rock that stained his pants, Braeden reached behind to remove the spine mod from his neck, jamming it into the gun’s chamber. As those thousand glaring eyes arrived, Braeden began firing, feeling no recoil, hearing only an abstract sound of violence, watching every hyena drop away but one. The last was pale and soft with an active expression. This creature lived for the game. By using the game to attack Braeden and Gabe, the beast became an invader, its tactics alien.
Braeden pulled the trigger, but again the gun was empty. At the cavern entry, Gabe held on with one hand to avoid falling behind. With the other hand, he hurled the black box, striking the final creature on the head. As the box split open, a slip of paper fell out, a death certificate, male. Death did not dissuade the future, did not repel the past.
Beneath the full moon’s grey light, this part of the mountain appeared spherical. Braeden and Gabe would not leave until concluding the game. In activating this realm, the beast had conquered the world of perception. But his murderous play was freakish, foreign. As the creature ran up to prove the men losers, Braeden turned to his friends.
“This is the best game.”
They sat in the living room of his apartment. People occupied all the chairs and sofa. The grey crib was empty, for the baby crawled across the floor, toward the open entry door.
“We swiped it from this pale guy,” said a halo man. “His stuff is so far out, he’s from another planet.”
The creature remained in midair as Braeden kept his finger on the pause button.
“I’m supposed to pick the old lady up from work and take the kid to the zoo. But this is great. So lifelike.”
He reached for another toke but couldn’t find it on the sofa. His hand hit only vinyl. Two feet away and he couldn’t reach it. He was busy playing.
“Watch the baby,” he told his friends, thumbs poised over the controller, a little blackish box. “He’s playing right there. Don’t let him get away.”
Returning to the game, Braeden saw his baby crawl to the edge of the street, heard a gasp of terror that sounded like a laugh on this stressed level of decimated emotion.
Though the headlights continued past without slowing, the remainder of the world turned silent and static, shocked into a deathly pause. Dropping the box, Braeden ran to the door, becoming a migrant worker struggling to better his family, losing eternally.
Arriving at the entry, Braeden stood beside Gabe as the beast approached. Gabe now held on with both hands, squeezing the cavern’s rocky edge, pulled backwards by irrefutable darkness.
The creature came for Gabe first, moving at an alien velocity. The idea of doom rushed ahead at the rate of emotion, inundating the men, though reality slowed the beast to the speed of bodies.
Braeden only had to slip past and run to the car to be safe. Far beyond, at the past’s impossible distance, Braeden saw the child at the roadway’s edge. But the creature stood in the way.
Braeden grabbed the death certificate. It might have been a map. Gabe knew the correct play. A universal prophet could not have delivered a more perfect truth.
“Don’t go back,” he groaned, voice strained from his saving effort. “There’s nothing left. Nothing.”
As Braeden loaded the certificate into his breech, Gabe reached to his spine, but continued into his skull, removing the barrier that separated him from his greatest fear. Braeden aimed the gun at the creature as Gabe pressed the modifier against his neck. Losing his grip with this action, Gabe fell into the waiting darkness as Braeden pulled the trigger and the mountainside imploded, shards of reality filling the space with an end game that excluded winners. The third loser tumbled down the mountain, to the road.
*
He didn’t know where he was. The asphalt was just another hard surface to him. He could not distinguish kitchen floors from concrete driveways. He knew his family, but little of their motives. He knew something of lights. When his daddy came home, he would pull himself up to the window ledge and laugh at the headlights. He knew they brought joy.
These headlights made his feelings explode. Before they arrived, he understood that he had taken the wrong path. The cry that came to him might have been enlightenment. Too late to return. Lights glimmered like the twinkle in his father’s eyes.
He only wanted to play.
E N D
—
H. C. Turk is a self-taught writer, sound artist, and visual artist living in Florida. His fiction has been published by Villard, Tor, and The Chicago Review. His sound pieces have appeared on numerous web-sites and radio programs.
