Two minutes later, I follow Jake back into the house. There, I’ve been outside in the beautiful day for Mom. Now I can come inside and do what I want to do—play DeepSea. Passing through the kitchen on my way to the little computer room, I look on the counter at the stuff from the street that Jake has put there: three bottle caps, an empty matchbox from a restaurant with a picture of a man in a turban on it, and a beat-up penny. I know he’ll use them in some art project.

I settle in with old Victor and we make a quick dive, still looking for the Victoriana. I know we’re not going to find the wreck in this session—I’m going too fast, not feeling up to doing the careful step-by-step stuff necessary to strike gold—but I figure we can map out some new area that will be useful when I’m more focused. After this warm-up, I plan to shift over to a level of the game that I didn’t even know existed before last week, when I was talking to Dominique at Tanks for You and found out we both play this game.

Dominique told me how to get to a hidden level. Like most computer games, DeepSea has some Easter eggs—special levels you can access if you know the right code. Dominique told me that this hidden level includes a demo of the next game to be released by the company that makes DeepSea. That game isn’t in the stores yet, but if I enter the cheat code, I can see a preview.

I hear a knock at the front door. I’m closest to it, so I pause the game and hurry to see who it is.

“Hi, Gabe. Whatcha doing?”

“Evan. Hi.”

“I saw you come in from the soccer game. I was on my porch.”

Evan Peabody lives across the street. We’re friends, I guess. No, that’s not fair, we are friends. Like me, Evan is no street soccer fan, and he likes computer games. And his mom doesn’t make him go outside much. He also likes to fool around with action figures, even though we know that most guys our age have stopped playing with them. It doesn’t bother him at all. “It’s a lot more fun than running up and down the street chasing a soccer ball,” he says. I agree.

So how come I feel disappointed about half the time when he knocks at my door? Like today. All I want is to go to the hidden level of my game. Without any real-life company.

Mom zips past the front door on her way from the kitchen to the stairs. “Hi, Evan.”

“Hi, Anne.” In books and on television all the kids seem to call their friends’ parents Mr. and Mrs. Where we live, nearly everyone uses the adults’ first names. It’s just the way the moms and dads around here introduce themselves to kids.

“You guys are inside?” she asks. Obviously she knows that we, like her, are inside and not outside. What she really means is “I wish you guys would go outside.”

“I was already outside,” I say. “I want to show Evan something on the computer.”

Mom shakes her head, but it’s a gentle shake. She worries that I spend too much time by myself, so when I have a friend over she doesn’t much care where we hang out. “Is Jake still outside with Maxie?”

“I don’t know . . . ,” I begin, but then I remember that I followed Jake inside. “No, I think he’s inside somewhere.”

“Well, then, I’d better check outside on the little guy. I don’t want him running into a car.” That might seem like a sick joke, but we all know that Maxie is lots better at taking care of himself in the street than either of his older brothers. He sees everything that comes at him, and if he falls or gets hit by a ball or another kid, he just toughs it out or shrugs it off.

“I think Maxie’s become an official part of the sixth-graders’ soccer team,” Evan tells Mom. “He’s blocking Steven Coombs’s shots.”

“Sounds like Maxie,” Mom says. “I’ll just make sure they’re not using him as the ball. Then, Gabe, I’ll be up in my room making some calls.”

“Okay.” When Mom makes a point of telling me that she’ll be up in her room making calls, I know they’re not calls to chat with friends. She needs to call her clients who leave messages with a special answering service when she’s away from her office— which is most of the time when we’re home from school. Mom is a social worker, and when we’re in school, she meets with clients at an office downtown. They talk. The idea is that by talking about the client’s problems, the problems will get better.

I used to wonder why, if Mom is an expert at helping people with problems, she had to take Jake to a doctor to figure out what was wrong with him. Mom explained to me that you can’t be a very good doctor or social worker to yourself or to a family member. You’re too close to the problem, she said. You won’t explore all the possibilities, and you may not be entirely honest about the problem because you don’t want to hurt feelings or admit that there may a problem in your own family.

Besides, Mom said, she doesn’t treat children.

I think I understand Mom’s point about not treating a member of your own family. I guess I can also see why she doesn’t want to have children as clients. But I think it’s kind of unfair and weird that Mom is an expert at helping people with problems, but she can’t be an expert about our problems. When it comes to figuring out Jake’s ADHD and LDs and Maxie’s goofiness and the fact that I can’t seem to get along very well with anybody except Evan and make-believe Victor—and even they aggravate me half the time—well, why does Mom have to punt?

“So, Gabe, what’d you want to show me on the computer?” Evan asks.

I had nothing in mind, actually. I just said that to get Mom off my back.

“Nothing new, really. I was playing DeepSea Danger Hunt when you came over. I’m still searching for the Victoriana.”

Evan groans. “Still? How about we play Unnatural Force for a change?”

That’s a shoot-’em-up game. You get your choice of twelve kinds of weapons, and you fight against aliens that have weird special powers. They chase you, and you chase them, all around the Earth and across the solar system and beyond. That’s where they’re from—Beyond. And that’s why they have unnatural powers.

I’m tired of shoot-’em-up games. I played them a lot when I was younger—in third and fourth grades—and now Maxie likes them. Come to think of it, he may have gotten his strange soccer shriek—”whee-yuh!”—from the third level of Unnatural Force when the Zygurts unleash their pent-up solar energy as they streak through Earth’s stratosphere. Suddenly I realize that “whee-yuh!” is almost exactly the sound they make.

“I don’t think so,” I tell Evan. “That game’s boring to me now.”

“Come on, Gabe. DeepSea Danger is boring to me.”

Well, who asked you to come over? I think, but I don’t say it out loud. Instead, I sigh, and say, “There’s always Solitaire.”

Evan snorts. “Right, we’re gonna play a one-person card game. You would suggest that. Come on. Get real. Unnatural Force is about the only game that lets us both play at the same time. Get out the joysticks. It’ll be fun.”

I give in, and we boot up Unnatural Force. Level one: invading Cyrants attack the solar system. But I’m bored, and as defender of the solar system against the Cyrants from Beyond, I’m a total failure. Evan wipes me out in no time.

“Come on, Gabe,” he says. “You’re supposed to put up a fight.”

“Hey, I played the game, didn’t I? Sorry if that’s not good enough for you.”

“Well, let’s go to the next level,” Evan says. In the second level the Moon is under attack by even more powerful aliens from Beyond—the Tritorgs. I pay more attention this time and manage to hold off annihilation for a while, but finally Evan overpowers me, and the Tritorgs take over the Moon.

“Now my target is Earth itself,” Evan says in a sinister voice. “Are you ready, Earth weaklings?” And he presses the key that takes us to the third level. Now, he’s the Zygurts, the most fantastically powerful of all the aliens from Beyond.

He puts a fleet of battle stations in orbit around Earth, while I launch missiles in an effort to shoot them down. I miss nearly all my shots and next thing I know Evan is punching the button on his joystick and yelling, “You’re toast, Planet Earth!”

“Whee-yuh! Whee-yuh! Whee-yuh!” the computer screeches. “Whee-yuh! Whee-yuh! Whee-yuh!”

“Aah! Stop!” I shout.

“Whee-yuh! Whee-yuh!” every time Evan sends a Zygurt drone from one of his orbiting battle stations down to Earth to explode over a major city. “Whee-yuh! Whee-yuh!”

“Evan!” I yell.

“I know!” he says. “Great battle plan, huh? You are pulverized, man!”

“Whee-yuh! Whee-yuh!”

I can’t stand it any longer. I know it’s bad for the computer. I know it means Evan won’t get to see the awesome final explosion when all the major cities on Earth are done for, but I can’t listen to this any longer. I push the computer’s on/off button. The screeching stops. The game collects itself into a surprised-looking point in the center of the screen. And the screen goes black.

“Hey!” Evan says. “What’s your problem?”

“I told you,” I say. “I told you to stop!”

“Stop what? Winning?”

“That noise, Evan! That ‘whee-yuh, whee-yuh’ noise. It was driving me nuts!”

“The Zygurt noise when they stream through the stratosphere?”

I nod. “I hear Maxie doing it all the time. I hate it like crazy!”

Evan looks at me. “Jeez, Gabe,” he says. “Why didn’t you just turn the sound down?”

I stop, dead still. Then I shake my head. I had forgotten. Why didn’t I just turn the sound down?

Evan says he’s not mad at me, and I believe him. Things don’t shake him up. But he goes home anyway. Now I have the computer to myself, exactly what I wanted all afternoon. Only now I don’t feel like playing.

Then I remember there’s that hidden level to explore. I turn the computer back on and click on the DeepSea icon. When it prompts me to select “New Dive,” instead I enter the code Dominique wrote down for me: “FREEZEHOT.”

The screen goes blank for a second, and then an underwater landscape appears. There’s no introductory screen, no directions. A school of ordinary-looking fish is clustered in the top right-hand corner. There is no diver. I click on the school of fish, and one of them comes to life—that is, I can control it with my mouse.

I move my fish around, and suddenly I’m in a weird environment with strange-looking sea creatures. Unpredictable underwater currents sometimes swirl me away to another part of the environment. An on-screen thermometer indicates that the water temperature changes dramatically depending on where I swim. I come to the rim of what looks like a volcano, and the thermometer goes wild, shooting way, way up. I see other fish disappear in there, but none of them come out. I stay away from the edge.

I swim to a formation on the ocean floor that looks a lot like pictures I’ve seen of the Grand Canyon, only under water. I move toward the canyon and press CTRL-D, the keyboard combination that lets you make a dive. But I don’t move. Instead, the computer beeps twice, then makes these bubble sounds. I notice that the thermometer keeps jumping from thirty-two degrees to two hundred-and-twelve degrees Fahrenheit. It’s either freezing cold or boiling hot— or both at the same time?

Congratulations! A message flashes on the screen.

You’ve made it to the deepest, coldest part of the ocean. It’s so cold here that the water is thick—you can hardly swim. But down deep in the crater, a whole new world exists, where the water vaporizes into steam and a different kind of life form lives. Just how far can you survive? To the earth’s core? Don’t press CTRL-D to find out, because you can’t get there from here! Watch for further releases from DeepDown Software for continued adventures in the deep!

What a rip-off! I press CTRL-D anyway, but nothing happens so I just sit there looking at the underwater Grand Canyon. My fish blows bubbles and hangs above the watery black hole. Great, I think, another letdown. Victor should have warned me about this.