The End of FUN (4 page)

One problem was, they kept changing the rules. Like the YAY!s. At first they were optional, but then they became mandatory, and then you couldn't just YAY! a hot product in the YAY!log to collect points—you were supposed to talk about it, too. It was a lot of work. I started to get a little behind. OK, a lot behind. Because the truth is I hardly even touched the YAY!s.

Here's the other problem: FUN
®
is
fun
, but it's also got some
really
addicting distractions. Like take, for example, the game
Tickle, Tickle, Boom!
(YAY!). Say what you will about the console versions, the FUN
®
adaptation is
insane
. You get to the point where all you want to do is play until your eyes fall out. And if you get serious about it, you'll of course want to skip the grind—but you can't skip the grind for free. Or say you want to respawn on a friendly face? That'll cost you, too.

Not gonna lie—I got hooked. Pretty soon I was spending all my time on
Tickle, Tickle, Boom!
, and even though I was doing a decent job earning (so I thought), there was bound to come a day when the roof caved in.

It was a Tuesday, I remember, right after I'd defeated the Boss 4: The Pandacorn on
Tickle, Tickle, Boom!
, maybe three months into my life in San Francisco.

I woke up like any normal day—took a leak, munched some Zazz—but when I went to log in to
Tickle, Tickle, Boom!
, Homie
™
popped up and was all,

And I was like, WUT?

And Homie
™
was like,

So I told it to bring up my account info, and that's when I saw the problem. My balance was at –10,000. How did that happen? The truth is, I knew exactly how it happened. You don't spend a month on your butt playing
Tickle, Tickle, Boom!
and not fall a little behind. But
FAIL
? I thought that was reserved for, like, egregious trolling or whatever.

I asked Homie
™
again if I was truly in
FAIL
, and it was like,

So I took a deep breath and asked Homie
™
what I had to do, and it said I had two choices: file a Petition for Return to Normal or an Application for Termination. In order to do either, first I had to earn back all my FUN
®
, plus catch up on my YAY!logs—100 in all, and they all had to be user approved, meaning I had to get more YAY!s than BOO!s. Plus complete all the regular YAY!s. In the meantime, I was in
FAIL
:

No mindtalk
™
.

No timestop
™
.

No brainzip
™
.

No unauthorized games.

Basically no real FUN
®
until I earned back the FUN
®
I owed. As I sat there reading the terms of my fate, it occurred to me that my rent to the hivehouse was due in a week.

So now what?

How would I have some FUN
®
?

Homie
™
blinked.

YAY! for Parties
™
. In the beginning, they were kind of all right—everyone getting together IRL to exchange YAY!s. But they kept changing the rules and adding more time, and pretty soon no one went unless they had to. Listen: if everyone who is at the party is only there because they have to be, then where you are is not a party—even if there are balloons. Which there were not. Instead, it was 80 people crammed into a dimly lit meeting room in the basement of a building on Pine Street, with a single ironic disco ball dangling from the ceiling.

They'd handed out name tags at the door, like actual name tags—more irony, I guess. The other person in my party pair was this hipster girl named Sasha—username sasha.c8kes—and she was having a lot of FUN
®
and not paying much attention to IRL. What she did was she accidentally grabbed my name tag and slapped it on her shapely chest without even looking—and now she was original boy_2. So I took hers: sasha.c8kes.

Her mood was
WHATEVER
, so I changed mine to
FLIRT
?
just to see what she'd do. She didn't do anything. So I told her a joke, the one about what's long and brown and sticky, the answer to which is:
a stick
. But either she didn't like it or she didn't get it. Not that there's all that much to get.

The reason we were there was to review the latest Animal of Wonder & Light
®
, the Buffaloon
™
. I'll say this much: they were getting better with the haptic response. You could almost feel the bristly hairs. But as for personality, I don't know…the thing just stood there flapping its wings…and every once in a while it would whistle. Also: you could give it virtual “hay” and, you know, watch it eat.

is how I summed it in my review,

The Party
™
planners could see that the Buffaloon
™
was kind of a bust, so they announced a double bonus for revised summaries, and just as I was getting started on it, Homie
™
popped up.

“Send it to voice mail.”

“Aaron? Are you there?”

“Hey, Evie. I'm in the middle of something, so—”

“We need to talk.”

“OK, but—”

“Right now.”

So I filed for a bathroom break and stepped outside. I was certain she'd found me out. My sister is a newspaper reporter and she's got a nose for scandal. Nothing can stay buried for long. It was like,
Oh, shit! Here it comes!
I could feel the sweat beading on my forehead. I was starting to twitch a little.

“Hey, Evie. So what's up?”

“It's Grandpa Henry,” she said.

“What about him?”

“He shot himself.”

“
Shot
himself? Is he OK?”

“No, he's dead.”

“Dead?”

“I'm so sorry, Aaron.”

And for a moment there I was just like, WHA—? with that last
T
hanging silently in the air. I hadn't thought about Grandpa Henry in forever. And now he'd killed himself? Old people aren't supposed to
kill
themselves. They're already at the end. It's like dropping out of a marathon at mile 25.

OK, this might sound awful, but I was kind of relieved. Not that Grandpa was dead but that my sister hadn't discovered my lies. I asked Evie what happened, and she gave me the story:

Dad hadn't heard from Grandpa in a while. This wasn't unusual. They didn't really talk. Then there was a snowstorm, and it dumped six feet on Antello and shut everything down for a couple days. So finally Dad called to see if Grandpa was OK out at his place, but no one answered. They found him in the basement on the dirt floor. He'd been there a couple weeks at least.

It was a lot to process. I didn't know what to think. I started walking down the street, weaving through the crowd, everything a little blurry.

“The funeral's next weekend,” she said. “You need to come home.”

“Home? Who says?”

“Me. You have to.”

“No, I don't.”

“YES, YOU DO. Talk to your teachers and get all your homework. Take a train. Dad's going to send you money for a ticket, OK?”

“Evie—”

“Aaron. It's your
grandfather
. And there are some things we have to discuss. You're coming home. Got it?”

I needed to think, so I just wandered the streets for a while, heading generally downhill as a person will, and eventually I ended up at the piers, and stood there listening to the waves washing against the pilings. A cloud of flies swarmed a seagull carcass. What are you supposed to do when someone dies? It's so weird. One day they're here, and the next they're not, and most of the time you don't even get to say good-bye.

When I got back to the Party
™
, sasha.c8kes was gone and I'd missed the double bonus. This guy, Dan_Bomb, had taken her place at the table. He was a little guy with big hair, and he was a very serious partier—by which I mean he took the party very seriously—and when I asked him about Sasha, he gave my name tag a funny look and ticked off something on his score pad.

We spent the next hour discussing the tactility and resolution of the Buffaloon
™
—or at least Dan_Bomb did. But I had other things on my mind. In our coevaluation Dan gave me a 10 out of 10—which he didn't have to do, of course, but actually kind of did, because if he didn't give
me
a 10, I wouldn't give
him
a 10, and then we'd
both
be screwed, quid pro quo–style. Dan wasn't happy about it, though, and in the comment section he wrote:

I took a train home for the funeral. Sodas were a500 each, and the tiniest packet of Zazz was going for a750. I was still getting used to the new currency—the ever-fluctuating value of the mighty amero—but I didn't need a conversion table to tell me when I was getting screwed. I had two seats to myself until Reno, and then this old dude got on. His name was Cody or maybe Cory, and he was a businessman of some kind, but which kind I forget. He was also a drinker and a talker, and once he got going there was no stopping him. I stared out the window at the smoke factories passing by and thought about my grandpa.