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The gun was plastic, toylike, but the explosive flashes of its muzzle and the power of its bullets were the real thing. Until that point, I’d always thought that bullets came out like arrows. But inside this tiny room, firing a pistol for myself felt quite a bit different. When I squeezed the trigger, the recoil jolted up my arm to my shoulder. Almost simultaneously, an object flew out the other side of the gunsight. A small dot, the object seemed to move at the speed of light, and I couldn’t follow it with my eyes. Inside this room, my targets had nowhere to escape.

Well, this is surprisingly easy, I thought. However my opponents moved about, all I had to do was have my sights on them the moment I squeezed the trigger. Trigger. Bang. Exploding head. One more down.

Another shooter had already fired six rounds at me without making a scratch. I wasn’t sure if my body knew how to expertly handle the weapon through muscle memory or if the other shooter was too nervous to hit me—if he took a steady aim, he might have. Instead, his bullets flew off into nowhere, gouging at a wall, shattering an ashtray on a tabletop.

You’ll never hit me like that. I was starting to feel bad for my opponent. If you didn’t care about your body, as I don’t about mine, you could take your time to aim, and
bang!
See, like I just hit you now. He died. I kept on firing, and with each shot, my enemies were fewer.

Soon, nothing moved.

From behind a sofa where he was hiding, Aniki shouted, “What do you want?”

To wipe you all out. Without a word, I held my gun at the ready and slowly advanced. The floor was slippery with blood. Smoke hung in the air. I wondered, Is this what gunpowder smells like?

By the time I reached his side, Aniki was near death. He clutched at his side, soaked bright red, and breathed weakly. I looked down at this man called Aniki.

“What is all this?” he said. I didn’t reply. But he was the kind of man who could command a criminal organization, and he seemed to notice something about me. He peered into my eyes and asked, “You. Who the hell are you?”

“I don’t know.”

I didn’t have any other answer for him. I pulled the trigger.

I had blown apart nine heads with twelve bullets. No one moved in the office now. I checked the magazine and saw two rounds remained. This was an incredible gun. Two bullets had been spent before I became me, meaning that the weapon had held nearly twenty.

I fired one more shot into Aniki’s corpse. I didn’t relish doing so, but I didn’t want to risk being transferred to a half-dead man.

Surveying the now-quiet room, I was reminded of an arcade crane game. The bodies, scattered everywhere, looked like dolls. But what had opened their eyes so wide wasn’t some artful appreciation for the painting on the ceiling drawn with their own blood. What had opened their eyes was the giant arm that had come from above to take them to some other place.

I set fires all around the room, and when the tongues of flame grew too large to be stopped, I put the gun to the top of my head, and
bang!

The next moment, I was a man in a suit, recording the yakuza office with my cell phone.

“It’s so scary,” someone said.

A woman was clinging to my left arm. I didn’t know her. Of course I didn’t—I didn’t even know my own face.

I had fulfilled my mission. The office would burn and leave no evidence. The yakuza were all dead, and my parents lived. Right now, my parents were probably sound asleep. For some reason, when I thought of them, I remembered the face of the woman who was my mysterious benefactor in the detention center—not my mother, but the mother of the robber who had killed me. But maybe it was all the same for me now.

“Come on, let’s go,” the woman at my arm said. She felt warm beside me.

I was struck by the temptation to steal this man’s life. If I did, I wouldn’t have to live on the run. That’s right. I have the power now to steal someone else’s life and become them. Are there others with this same ability? Are some of them living these lives of comfort?

But then came the doubt. If what’s inside this shell is only me, then I’ll never be able to be “him.” The social status, the routine, the pleasures that this body had grasped—those things belonged to him. All I can capture are their vestiges. Only this body’s former owner could look at these fleeting traces and find happiness. Not me. I’ll only be happy with a life of my own making. Maybe it didn’t look that way, but before all this—and even now—ladling out beef bowls for some hourly pay gave me all the satisfaction I needed. I liked beef bowls.

I glanced up and saw, in front of the flaming van, a man desperately pushing at the chest of a dead body. He was big. Steam rose from his bulging T-shirt. The big man looked on the verge of tears as he kept on pressing with his thick arms the center of the corpse’s chest. The dead body was mine, from when I rammed the van into the building. You’re wasting your time. I’m already dead—that’s how I’m standing here. But the big man didn’t know that.

I recognized his face. He was that hero of the night—the man who had caused the death of my original, irreplaceable self.

I approached the man and said, “Thank you.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind. It’s nothing.”

Tears ran down my cheeks. I had simply wanted to express my gratitude to the man who was doing all he could for what once had been my body, and now in death was just a thing. His attempt to rescue me in the beef bowl restaurant may have ended with my death, but he had risked his one—and only—life for me. Out there in the world were people like him, far too good. He was my opposite: a human being of a different kind, one that deserved deep admiration.

The woman asked me, “What’s wrong?”

I shook off her hand and brushed aside her attempts to stop me as I walked away on my own. After a while, my cell phone started to buzz persistently, so I threw it on the ground and crushed it with my shoe.

All I wanted was to return to being me, a man whose face was already becoming hazy in my memory. I didn’t want to be anyone else. My job at the beef bowl joint may have been monotonous, but at least I had done it myself, and not under the command of some other me. But that body—my body—was long since cremated and put into a grave. I would have to force myself to let go of the past. I wanted to be without a past. Death would never smile upon me, and so I could have nothing of substance, nothing to tie me down, nothing at all.

Then a realization came to me. I’m powerless. I’m not anyone. I’m just a lousy dog crawling through the dirt to my death. No, not even a dog. I’m a bone or a broken stick for the wandering dog to find. I’m a stick that hits any dot that comes toward me just because I feel like it. In the Old Testament, didn’t man evolve from a stick? Or do I have that wrong? Whatever. It doesn’t matter right now. Because this world is occupied almost entirely by my kind. Ninety percent—no, maybe even 99 percent—are the same as me, with nothing of their own, no past, no ties, no hopes for the future. Despite this—or because of it—they and I are invincible.

I found myself standing in front of a beef bowl joint in the middle of the night. It wasn’t the place where I had worked, but like my store, it was bright and warm and clean, if only a feeding trough with dingy, mass-produced decor.

Adjacent was a vacant lot. On the other side of a wire fence, a single stick stood in the earth. In the past, the stick had provided support for a sign of some sort, but the plywood sign had fallen to rot in the dirt.

For some reason, I couldn’t help but feel excited. The time had come to begin my next worthless life. At least that’s how I felt. The feeling came as no surprise—I’ve been the same all along. The me who served up beef bowls, the me who was a robber, the me who was a convict and a killer, they were all me.

I roared at the night sky and pulled up the stick.

Inside the beef bowl joint, a lone charmless man interchangeable with my former self was serving up beef bowls.

Resting the stick on my shoulder, I strode inside.

My nose only itches in critical moments.

“Give me your money,” I said.

Taking aim at this good-for-nothing world, I swung my stick as hard as I could.

Hiroshi Sakurazaka was born in Tokyo in 1970. After a career in information technology, he published his first light novel,
Modern Magic Made Simple.
With 2004’s
All You Need Is Kill,
Sakurazaka earned his first Seiun Award nomination for best Japanese science fiction. His 2004 short story, “Saitama Chainsaw Massacre,” won the 16th SF Magazine Reader’s Award. In 2009,
All You Need Is Kill
was the launch title for Haikasoru, an imprint dedicated to publishing Japanese science fiction and fantasy for English-speaking audiences. The book also formed the basis for the international hit film
Edge of Tomorrow
, starring Tom Cruise. Sakurazaka’s other novels include
Characters
(cowritten with Hiroki Azuma) and
Slum Online
, which was published in English by Haikasoru. In 2010, Sakurazaka started an experimental digital magazine,
AiR,
with Junji Hotta. He remains one of Japan’s most energetic writers of both light novels and adult science fiction.

Sam Atherstone had played nearly every computer game on the planet—he’d worked out the exact number not long ago and written about it on the blog that paid his bills—yet the excitement he felt when his housemate, Jamie, handed him the gray Jiffy bag that had come in the Saturday morning post caused his hands to shake so much that he couldn’t get it open, and Jamie, tired of waiting, grabbed the bag from him and opened it on Sam’s behalf.

“Is it the one?” Jamie said, holding out the black game cartridge on his chubby hand, bringing to Sam’s mind a chocolate on a hotel pillow.

Sam took the cartridge and inspected it. The slightly faded logo of
Games World
, the magazine that had given the game its very limited distribution back in 1992, was the only sign of wear. Providing it still worked, he considered it half-a-grand well spent.

He gave Jamie both a smile and a nod.

While Sam retrieved the Sega Master System II from a cupboard filled with ancient consoles, Jamie went around clearing away the clutter of the MSII’s modern brethren, shoving all the sleek new units and their myriad controllers beneath the huge flat screen that dominated the room.

“Right,” said Sam, crossing the room with the MSII in hand. “Your first job—”

“I already did a job,” Jamie said, pointing at the space he’d created on the floor. He sounded out of breath and his plump cheeks were red.

“Your second job, should you choose to accept it, is to get the tea in.”

“I already
did
a job.”

“No tea, no game.”

Jamie left the room with a dramatic harrumph and Sam set up the MSII while listening to Jamie’s disgruntled clattering in the kitchen directly below.

Once the wires were connected, Sam flicked the
On
switch. The pent-up anxiety that had been building for a week, ever since an anonymous gamer had contacted Sam on a forum and offered to sell him the rare game, melted away when the familiar blue Sega logo lit up the screen. He sat down on the single mattress that he slept on every night, control pad in hand. It had all worked out. It was real.

A menu appeared on the flat screen bearing the
Games World
logo and beneath, a list of six games. The game that Sam had been waiting for was the last on the list. He flicked down and selected it, the sweat of his anticipation greasing the pad.

The following screen was a pixel painting of a man standing alone in the middle of a desert looking across miles of empty terrain at a purple mountain range far on the horizon. Crude as the rendering was, Sam felt a shiver shoot up his spine and dissipate across his shoulders. Above the purple mountains were two words in bright green capital letters that were as much responsible for his reaction as the image:
DESERT WALK
.

At the bottom of the screen, in smaller text, were the flashing instructions:
PRESS START TO WALK!
Sam pressed
Start
.

Immediately the screen was filled with a yellow-pixel desert, seen from the point of view of the game’s main character. On the ground were gray-pixel stones and on the horizon were purple-pixel mountains just below a blue-pixel sky. Sam pushed the
Up
arrow on the control pad, and on-screen the character he was embodying took a step in the direction of the mountain range. The game simulated the sound of footsteps on sand,
chshh
,
chshh
,
chshh
. Other than that, it made no noise. When Sam stopped walking, the game was silent.

“I’m really playing it,” he said. “I’m bloody playing
Desert Walk
.”

He was six steps in when the screen went black.

From downstairs Jamie shouted: “I’ve got it.” Sam looked over at the blank face on the clock on his mattress side table and concluded that for the second time in the last few days, the kettle had caused a power cut. He shook his head.

While he waited for the power to come back on, Sam reached over and picked up the envelope in which the game had come. He looked inside the envelope and noticed a small square of paper. He retrieved it and saw the sender had sent him a handwritten note. It read:
Enjoy the game, but not too much. Don’t forget to eat!

When Jamie finally came in with the tea, Sam had the game back up and running, the power restored. “Mate,” Sam said. “New house rule. When I’m playing this game, we can’t use the kettle.”

“Get out,” Jamie said. “I need my caffeine.”

“Look, you can’t save this game, you can’t even pause it. If I’m fifteen hours in and you start an explosive brew, I’m making you homeless.”

“We could buy a new kettle.”

“Or
you
could.”

Jamie flapped his hand dismissively. “Sod off, you know I can’t afford that.” Sam did know this: Jamie had been staying with him rent-free for six months while he tried to get back on his feet following his “redundivorce.” The simultaneous blows in quick succession had made his childhood best friend a figure of maddening pity, but Sam’s patience was on the wane of late.

“No job, no tea,” Sam said. Jamie looked crestfallen, and Sam felt a twinge of regret. Had he been too harsh? He was about to apologize when Jamie gave him the finger.

“Lovely,” Sam said. “You done? Good. Now shut up and watch me play the best computer game ever made.”

Ten minutes of walking later, Sam having made no visible ground on the mountains, Jamie said: “Is this literally it? The whole game.”

Sam shrugged, his gaze fixed on the television. “That’s the point,” Sam said. “No one really knows—that’s what’s so exciting about it.”

“Yeah, I can barely contain myself,” Jamie said, and Sam sighed. “You said this was the game that you’d been waiting your whole life to play.”

After a moment of reflection, Sam spoke softly: “You need to understand what you’re looking at. This is possibly in the top five of the all-time rare games—”

“I know that, I’m just saying it’s probably rare for a reas—”

“Listen first, and then learn. The game’s rare because it was only ever released as part of this
Games World
sampler. The other games on the sampler were all demos that later got a proper release, but due to a manufacturing balls-up, the full game of
Desert Walk
was featured instead of the demo version. So the magazine had to recall the issue, which means loads of the samplers got destroyed. However,
Desert Walk
never got its official release in the end because Sega pulled it for no reason that anyone’s been able to properly ascertain, meaning those few who bought the sampler before it was recalled were the only people to ever play
Desert Walk
.”

“Well, it’s obvious why it never got an official release, isn’t it? It’s rubbish.”

“That’s not the reason. No one knows exactly why it was pulled, but there’s all sorts of cool rumors about it doing the rounds. Go look it up. The game causes epilepsy, it causes blindness, it causes madness. I’d never have put much stock in all that, but on one of the forums someone posted a link to a BBC article from two years ago about some bloke who apparently got a copy off eBay and died of dehydration after playing the game for a week straight.”

“I’m the only one that’s going to die of dehydration if you’re serious about that kettle,” Jamie said. Sam ignored him. Up on the screen, the passing desert looked the same as it had at the start of the game.

chshh, chshh, chshh

“And it isn’t rubbish,” Sam continued. “It was ahead of its time. It might look simple at first, but those stones on the floor aren’t being regenerated from previous screens. The arrangements don’t repeat. They’re all completely unique. That means the designer made every square inch of this huge, endless desert.”

“Why did he bother?”

“She. The designer’s a woman, you pig. That’s the question, isn’t it? And that’s what I intend to ask
her
when I go to Manchester to meet
her
on Thursday to interview
her
for the blog.”

“You’re going to ask
him
point-blank why
he
bothered making a game where nothing happens?”

“Obviously not. And anyway, it isn’t like nothing happens. Some people—”

“Forum people?”

“Yes, they’re people too. Some people who’ve played it a while say they’ve come across different objects after walking for long enough. A small shoe, a mailbox, a skeleton. One guy says he came across a van half-buried in the sand. It’s, like, widely believed that if you keep walking long enough, you can complete the game by finding a main road. No one’s done it, though, so that’s what I want to ask her: Can it be completed? Why the attention to detail? Is there a cheat? Why was it pulled from the— Holy bum flaps.”

Jamie, who was slouching on the mattress, sat up and looked at the screen. “What? What is it?”

“Look,” Sam said. On the horizon a dark shape had appeared. At first it looked like a person, arms wide open. When they drew closer to it, the dark shape became green, and in doing so, revealed its true identity.

“It’s a cactus. Yessss.” Sam pumped a fist in the air, his voice high and excited. “Other people have found those too. Ten minutes in, and we’ve found our first object.”

He flattened out his fist and offered it to Jamie for a high five. Jamie raised his eyebrows, stood up, and left Sam hanging. “Sorry, mate. I don’t think I’ve got another minute of this in me.”

“Fine,” Sam said. “But don’t cry to me when you miss me making history.”

Jamie mumbled something on his way out the door but Sam didn’t hear; he was already focused on putting the cactus behind him and finding the next secret of the game.

The alarm clock on the bedside table continued to flash uselessly on the default setting of 12:00, depriving Sam of a meaningful relationship with the correct time of day. He’d been too engrossed to get up and open the curtains. After what felt like an hour of playing, he hadn’t come across any more objects, and the purple mountains still looked ominously distant.

He didn’t mind, though. The gentle
chshh
,
chshh
and the undemanding graphics had lulled Sam into a deep contemplative state where he’d been able to think clearly for the first time in a long while. In addition to his biweekly blog, there had been numerous commissioned pieces he’d been writing that took up a substantial amount of his time, not to mention the monthly column he was writing for one of the national newspapers. It had been almost a year since Afshan left him, and it was only out here in the make-believe desert that he simultaneously reasoned and believed that it had probably been for the best. He wouldn’t have had time for all the demands of gaming had they still been together. He’d have had to go back to work on the shop floor at PC Planet.

Certainly there wouldn’t have been enough time or goodwill for the demands of a blog about
Desert Walk
.

Sam’s stomach growled. He put down the controller and up on the screen the walker stopped. The room went quiet and Sam felt an unexpected stab of loneliness. He ran down to the kitchen, eager to return to the game. He opened the fridge and pulled out a bowl of leftover Balti from the night before. Only after he’d put the bowl in the microwave did he notice that the light coming through the kitchen window was much weaker than he’d expected it to be. He looked at the clock on the oven. It was flashing 12:00 too.

He went into the lounge, where Jamie was sitting, watching television. “What’s the time, mate?” Sam said.

“Dunno. Can I use the kettle yet?”

“What do you mean, you don’t know? Seriously, what’s the time?”

Jamie sighed and flicked the button on the remote that brought up the menu. “It’s twelve minutes past four.”

“Get out.” Sam went over to the screen to see for himself. He snorted out a laugh to hide his genuine shock. “Bloody hell, I thought it was, like, lunchtime.”

“Nope, you missed that. You been playing that game the whole time?” Sam nodded. “Why don’t you take a break, mate. Come watch this unbelievably fascinating documentary about the 1876–78 Indian famine. Next up’s one about the fastest car in the world.”

“Sorry, I’d love to, but I’ve got to get on with work.”

“Yeah, of course.
Work.
You found anything else out in the desert yet?”

“No. Not yet. Can’t believe it’s been nearly six hours. That’s insane.”

“What’s insane is you’ve been playing it for six hours and nothing’s happened yet. You haven’t even found another cactus? Or an anthill? Or a dried-up twig or a bit of leaf?”

Sam shook his head and grinned. “Nope. It’s brilliant.”

After devouring his curry, Sam went back upstairs. He was nearly at the landing when he heard the familiar noise of the game coming from his room:
chshh
,
chshh
,
chshh
. Wondering if he’d left the controller the wrong way up, he went inside and saw everything was as he had left it. The control pad was the right way up, and, on the screen, his character was standing still.

chshh, chshh, chshh

It was a glitch. It must be. Perhaps he’d uncovered the real reason the game had been pulled, and it was nothing more fantastic than a useless bit of programming.

Sam reached for the control pad to check that the buttons weren’t stuck. They weren’t. Two things occurred to him then. The first was that the
chshh
,
chshh
sound emanating from the television was slightly different from the one he had grown accustomed to over the course of the day. This sound was softer, and somehow more distant. And the spaces between footsteps sounded irregular, less rhythmic and robotic. The second was that there was a small dark shape on the desert horizon that hadn’t been there when he left the room earlier.

More unnerved by both these realizations than he dared acknowledge, Sam laughed and went over to the television to look at the object more closely.

chshh, chshh, chshh

The object had already grown larger by the time Sam got close to the screen. He could make out that it was a small figure now. He could see its arms, and legs, its shaggy yellow hair.