Game Slaves (34 page)

Then something else. It was something Jevo had said as we left him bleeding and dying on that strip mall floor.

What was it?

“If this was a game, you hadn't . . .?”

Wait a minute.

“ . . . we hadn't seen the last of him.”

Hold on.

Of course he'd be out now too. Right?

What about Max? What about all these people? What about the neighbors? What about this house?

The memories washed over me, a flood of clues. A torrent of stray facts. What had I missed? What had been said?

This was my house, right? We lived in Redwood and worked for BlackStar, right?

But what if . . . from the beginning . . .

No.
This
was real now. Back when we lived in Central Ops, every sound was recorded and the same. Every time a gun shot or a table clanked, it was programmed. That was digital. All created by BlackStar.

Out here, the sounds were individual. The smells were unique. The people were unpredictable. There's no way BlackStar could write software around that. You could always tell. There's always a little glitch.

My love for Mi. My pain. The throb in my neck. All because
I was human
now. I was not something else. I was not . . .

Then, one of those stray facts planted itself right square in the middle of my mind.

It was something Max Kode had said. He'd stressed it more than once:
“To really win, you have to choose to go back in the tank.”

Were we now back in . . . ?

No way.

He'd been lying. Dakota had tortured an alternative out of him. We'd won on our own terms. This was not fake.

Right?

I panned the room. There were so many random events—the laughter, the television, the interaction between York and Jevo and Max and Reno and Mi and everyone and . . .

A ringing phone. The juice stain on the carpet, the small crack in some plaster near the door. One of the hall pictures wasn't hung exactly straight. My keys had fallen off the entryway table and lay in a corner—they'd even picked up stray lint.

That's when my eyes narrowed past them all, focusing on the back wall, on the giant window that overlooked the yard.

Jimmy and Charlotte. They were out there, having a blast. Water balloon fights. Giggling. Laughing.

I looked at their father, Max.

I stared at them.

Such a close resemblance. The same hair. The same faces, just younger.

And then I looked at myself in the wall mirror.

Bigger than Max. Stronger than Max. But still, I
was
Max. I was his clone.

And, the pain in my skull pointed me to this . . . I'd spent
weeks
in his guest house. Where Jimmy and Charlotte had seen me every single day. Growing my hair back. Becoming my human self . . .

Two thoughts suddenly became clear. Each of them made the side of my brain sear like the port had caught fire. I reached up, was it bleeding? Would it explode? Was my mind going somewhere it shouldn't?

First,
how
had Jevo even found us at that strip mall? And silently closed that gate? That was always eating at me. But there just wasn't an answer.

Still, the second thing—how could I have missed it?

Sure, when we'd been floating in the clone soup for years, we didn't look all that good. No hair, no muscles. We were just growth-accelerator pieces of BlackStar property.

Then we'd come out. Jimmy and Charlotte, to be precise, had pulled us out.

And we'd become human. We'd begun using our physical bodies.

It should have occurred to me before. I should have figured this out. Maybe this wasn't a shooter game. Maybe it was a puzzle all along. The whole damn thing.

Because . . . I was Max Kode's clone, right? So, if I was his exact duplicate, living in that guest house . . .
why hadn't Jimmy and Charlotte recognized their own father?

My eye stopped pulsing. The pain went away.

I solved it, didn't I?

But if I did, that meant . . .

In a burst I dropped my drink and ran full speed toward the front door. Crashing through, onto the porch, I scanned left, right, up, down, everywhere.

Scrambling, crawling, poking with my hands, I scoured the yard. The hedge. The driveway. The grass and gutter and street.

Where was it? Where was the door?

“Dakota!” I screamed. “Dakota! Come back! Come back . . . You were right . . .
You
solved it . . .
You're
the one who won . . .”

Silence.

The wind whistled slightly. Leaves rustled. Bugs crawled. Trees creaked.

But I got no answer.

Other than from Max, who came up behind me and said, “Phoenix, you're missing the party. Mi needs you for something. Time to come back inside.”

Big thanks to Andrew Stuart, Julia Richardson, and Jon Cassir, who moved so quickly and purposefully to bring this book to you. Overdue thanks to all those editors at all those papers and magazines who let me do things in ways they hadn't been done before.

Creative thanks go to Buck, Flash, James T., Zap, Deckard, Logan, Overman, Lara, Marcus, John Marston, and whoever that guy was in Liberty City. Cranial thanks go to Vonnegut, Thompson, Asimov, and PKD. Occupational thanks go to Mark McG., who let me store all those arcade games in the rugby house. It was quite a 1-up on anyone who still played Atari.

Also, to Mom and Dad. You put up with a lot. Dad, you once told me that society, throughout history, reserved a special place for its storytellers. Whether around a campfire or scrawling shapes on a cave wall, the exploration of our humanity is critical to learning the truth about who we are as a race and as individuals.

We've barely begun to reserve that same place for our digital designers. Just like writers, directors, and musicians, developers are weaving incredible tales filled with startling game characters and brilliant observation. But now we get to stand side by side with protagonists and choose our own paths based on personal morality, goals, and experience.

The best part is that we've
barely
scratched the surface of those environments. This decade is a straight throwback to one century ago. The world was just discovering science fiction.
Everything
was possible. Look where we are today. I can't wait to see tomorrow.

 

G
ARD
S
KINNER
, a.k.a. Gard3, lives in a stilt fortress on a narrow strip of sand that's well known for hurricanes and morons who surf during hurricanes. He spent a dozen years mucking up the ski industry, then turned his mutant powers toward books and games.

 

Find out more about Gard at
www.gard3.com
or @gardthree.