Gamers Con: The First Zak Steepleman Novel (3 page)

He jerked his thumb over his shoulder to indicate a Chinese-looking kid who hung off his mum’s heels as she was arguing with a grey-haired official, this guy who had dark bags sagging down from his eyes, and who was only nodding along vaguely to everything she said.

In his case, the dark-purple polo shirt looked somewhat ridiculous on him.

Finally, the guy at the desk looked back to me. “Look, kid,” he said. “Like I was about to say, if you want to get yourself one of those All-Access Passes then take part in the Ignition Tournament tonight.” He leaned over the table, whisked up a glossy flyer that lay on a huge stack at his elbow. “Eight o’clock. Free entry. The top five gamers receive an All-Access Pass to Gamers Con.”

I stared at the flyer as I held it in my fist.

Though I could read fine, I was having a hard time processing the text before me—on the flyer . . . just about the only thing I could make out was the word ‘Ignition’ splashed across the front of it with lettering that seemed to be giving off sparks.

I turned back to the guy, saw that he was shifting a sheepish glance back off in the direction of the queue, clearly wanting to get on with handing out passes. “Really,” I said, “there’s no way you can just hand me one of those passes?”

The guy held his hands up to me as if he was surrendering, then said, “Look, if you want All-Access for Gamers Con you know what to do.” He nodded to the suited guy at the front of the queue so that the next person in line would come forwards. “Eight o’clock tonight. Ignition Tournament.”

I don’t quite remember if I stepped away from the desk of my own accord, or if Dad had to grab me by the shoulder and steer me away.

But one thing was for certain.

I knew what I’d be getting up to that night.

4

“WHAT’S SO SPECIAL about All-Access anyway?” my dad said as he lay flat on his bed in our hotel room.

The TV was switched on, but on mute, and my dad was still tapping away at the screen of his mobile, making his latest chess move.

Every muscle in my body felt stiff. My bones felt like they might snap if I moved myself too much. Ever since we’d got into the room, I’d sat rigid on the end of my hotel bed and stared at the cream wallpaper—specifically at this smudge that various hotel cleaners had obviously attempted, and failed, to remove with a whole host of cleaners.

“That pass,” I said, “is
everything
.”

My dad stayed quiet, apparently not wanting to annoy me at all.

But the truth was that I was
way
past being annoyed now.

What had happened to me was nothing short of a tragedy.

The worst possible thing that could’ve happened at Gamers Con . . . short of me not being admitted to the place at all, that was . . .

I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe that Dad had never actually looked around in the five years we’d been coming here—that he’d never actually
got
what the difference between Open-Access and All-Access
was
.

Parents can be so frustrating sometimes . . . not quite as frustrating as
The Whistling Kingdom
, but frustrating
still
.

“All-Access,” I said, “is the only pass that
anybody
at Gamers Con actually takes seriously—it’s the only one that shows people that you’re here to
work
. . . not to
play
.”

Dad glanced up briefly from his mobile, looked to the screen, and then at me. “But I thought that games are all about playing.”

“I’m not going to dignify that remark with an answer,” I said, and then continued with my potted explanation. “An All-Access badge means that you get to go
behind
the scenes, that you can go and speak with the developers—that you can make contacts.”

Dad turned his attention back to his mobile and, apparently, his next move in whatever chess game he was playing. “And you can’t do that with Open-Access?”

“Nope.”

“. . . Ah.”

“Dad,” I said, waiting for him to turn his full attention back to me.

He swiped the screen of his mobile—the final flourish to his move—and then he looked over.

“Open-Access means that you can go into the convention, that you can go
mooching
around the stands, play the games, and maybe, if you’re
lucky
, speak with some of the developers there. But, likely as not, they won’t actually
listen
to what you’ve got to say, they won’t
pay attention
to any of your feedback.”

“And that’s a bad thing?”

“Dad,” I said, this time my tone getting a little brisk, a little sharp at the edges, “have you paid
any
attention to what I’ve been doing my entire life?”

Dad just eyeballed me in that poor, confused way of his. I wondered if it was the lenses of his glasses that were making his eyeballs seem like they were about twice their normal size, or if he really was out-to-sea.

“Developers send
me
games—they look for my feedback on them. Alive Action is . . .
was
one of those developers. They used to send me all sorts so that I could review them—look them over. They were the ones who were supposed to have left the badge for me, like the guy said.”

“So,” Dad said, “what happens now?”

I gave a shrug. “Dunno, truly don’t know . . . now that I don’t have a sponsor any longer things are going to be tough.” I drew in a deep breath and then blew it out, making my cheeks bulge as I did so. “It means that I won’t be allowed into the Grand Tournament . . . they won’t let me compete with the best they’ve got here.”

Dad screwed up his features. “But I thought having
had
a sponsor was enough qualification?”

I shook my head. “Nope, your sponsor just pays for your pass . . . that’s all they do . . . and it seems that Alive Action just ducked
that
responsibility.”

“So anybody can sign up for this tournament, then?”

I rolled my eyes. “Sure, Dad, if you’ve got like a thousand pounds to throw around,
and
you got in the application form six weeks ago.”

“Oh,” Dad said, eyes still wide, “so you’re definitely going to that tournament tonight?”

I narrowed my eyes to slits, and then cast a glare at the muted TV which was showing an ad for some beach resort holiday, then I bent down, knuckled through my Sirocco 3000 carrying case, and dug out the console.

I had to get my mind into competition mode.

And I had to do it fast.

My future as a pro gamer depended on it.

5

THERE WAS A TON of people babbling about the convention centre at around seven thirty that night. The air still reeked of paper and plastic though I had certainly lost the first-flush buzz I’d got off it from before.

Now that smell just seemed to be taunting me, saying,
Hey, Zak, you don’t belong here, why don’t you just wander off home, huh?

Fat chance.

I could still taste the remainder of the grease from my hamburger and chips, still had that kind of crackly taste from the half a litre of Brizzmere Buzz that I’d blasted down my gullet. I kept getting hot and cold flushes—those reactions that I
just knew
were nerves.

Nerves? Me? At this?

A
beginners’
tournament?

Because
not one
of the people buzzing about the place could compete with me . . . well, perhaps that Chinese kid aside, the one who’d also got himself burned by Alive Action Games—just
that
name sent waves of nausea through my stomach.

But there were five spots, if the guy at the desk had been telling the truth.

I
only
had to place in the top five.

And that would be simple.

Dad was still glued to his chess match as we lined up, once again, along with all the other kids for the first test. I did have to admit that the sheer number of kids here
was
intimidating. There must’ve been at least as many as the two hundred or so there’d been in the queue for passes that afternoon.

But I remained focussed.

Eyes
fixed
on our destination.

Up ahead, I saw the large plastic dome, and the darkened doorway which led inside of it. And, beyond, I could see that there were others.

Kids wandered in through the archway of the dome, and then wandered out the other side.

Onto the next step.

I was familiar with these
initiation
tournaments—or
Ignition
, as the flyer stated—they pretty much always took the form of a few timed challenges, with the winner of each round appearing up on the board to continue onto the final round.

My goal, first off, was simply to play through these initial timed challenges, absolutely
destroy
them, before getting down to the nitty-gritty of the final stage.

As we approached the first plastic dome, this woman dressed in a dark-purple polo shirt with purple-grey hair and a clipboard took my name and—
embarrassingly
—the serial number attached to my Pass-of-Shame . . . but, as I told myself, over and over again, that pass would not be around my neck for much longer.

Nope, I would be
certain
to make sure of that.

When we arrived to the archway of the first plastic dome, I found that I could look inside, see the current kid there, playing away.

It was
Ridgeway Highway
—an old-style, fifties motorbike racing game.

Like pretty much all racing games, or any games really for that matter, I had achieved one-hundred-per-cent completion on my first run-through.

Hadn’t so much as looked at it again after that.

Developers send me a whole bunch of stuff, and I really never have much time to bother looking a second time at most games.

Unless I’m planning to enter a competition for one of them.

And I
hadn’t
planned on entering a competition with
Ridgeway Highway
.

Maybe I should’ve dug out my copy and had a quick play-through . . . but, then again, I hadn’t known till now just what games I would up be against.

Retrospect is a
fine
thing.

The kid with the pad in his hands, I saw right away, was that same black kid from the queue earlier on.

I couldn’t help but give a slight smirk as I thought about him tapping away at his mobile playing on whatever ‘game’ he’d had on there.

Then I turned my attention to the screen.

I noted, straightaway, that it was the level of
Ridgeway Highway
where you have to breach this tunnel between the east of Russia, and the far west of the US . . . it’s an
imaginary
undersea tunnel, and the idea is to arrive on the Alaskan coast where you proceed onto the next stage—through
snow
, obviously—before returning to face the final race in Las Vegas.

I watched as the black kid steered the leathered-up rider, slumped low on the motorbike, handlebars pretty much sticking into his chest, through the tricky course.

He took the corners nicely . . . no, I mean
really
nicely.

I mean, this kid, he
really
knew how to drift.

How to catch that extra boost out of each of the corners.

How to absolutely
jet
right ahead.

As he approached the finishing straight, I couldn’t help but glance up at the timer.

Though I hadn’t played
Ridgeway Highway
for quite a while, I still had a vague notion of just what the timings meant . . . I guess some things are impossible to completely singe from your mind . . . and I knew that, for this level, the black kid was absolutely whipping along.

He finished up and I watched as the invigilator—another guy with a clipboard and dark-purple polo shirt—made a note of the time.

After the black kid and his dad—or the guy I
thought
was his dad—skirted on out of the booth, the invigilator glanced at me, nodded, and then I handed over my badge.

Watched him scrawl down the serial number on his page, then hand me the badge back.

And, just like that, with Dad watching over my shoulder, I picked up the pad and started into
Ridgeway Highway
.

6

TEN ROUNDS LATER—and a whole host of games I’d
hoped
I’d
never
see again . . . even—
shudder
—the truly awful
Bubbled Up!
. . . I wandered on out to the main concourse of the convention centre, to the place with the slicked-up, white floor tiles, to where a plasma screen was spewing out the results from the tournament so far.

We each had a score graded from—I guessed—zero to ten thousand.

Our names were all up there on the board, written out in neat, crisp, white block capitals.

After everything that had happened earlier that day, I was feeling pretty low.

So I started off reading from the bottom upwards.

It was a bit of a boost to see—of the hundred or so other people there—that I was sitting right at the top of the list with 9,640 points.

The next name down had 9,420 points.

Chung Wen.

I guessed that was the Chinese kid I’d seen earlier in the queue—with his mother getting angry with the official.

Pretty much on autopilot, I skimmed the next eighteen names on the list: the names which appeared before the neon-red line which read ‘CUT OFF’ . . . the people I’d have to face off against in the final round.

I watched on as lots of kids skulked away, their parents consoling them.

I also watched a couple of adults—clearly unable to understand how they’d got beaten by a bunch of kids—getting all angry with some of the officials with clipboards.

I looked about me as the crowd thinned out, sizing up my competition.

Sure enough, I spotted right away the Chinese kid—Chung Wen—and his mother alongside him. Both of them wore neutral expressions, like they hadn’t expected anything else. And I knew that though I didn’t need to beat Chung Wen right now, I most certainly
would
have to face him at some point if I actually
managed
to get through into the Grand Tournament later on.