45 THE FOREST OF EVER-BRANCHING TREES
At 3:00 A.M., Vanhi had finished her job and her hands were shaking wildly. The box was delivered. The Game had sent her back to Tremont Street, where she’d picked up an earlier parcel in the God Game’s network of postal deliveries. This time she was dropping off. Am I putting postmen out of business? she wondered sardonically. Disruption indeed.
But she couldn’t shake the feeling of dread inside. She sat for an hour in the shadows across the street from the house. Nothing happened. The box didn’t explode. It just sat on the front porch. She fell asleep sitting up, against a tree in the woods behind the cul-de-sac. She knew what the Game was offering her—a second chance, redemption. She dreamed about it.
When she woke up, it was an hour to sunrise. The box was still there. No fire, no fury. She exhaled, felt a little better. She ran home, to be under the covers before her mom came in, smiling brightly and beaming with pride.
All the while, Alex was awake in his room, door locked, dreading the coming school day. Three A.M. Four A.M. Mrs. Kite was an efficient grader. She would return their tests today. He was certain the Game would make sure his father knew the outcome no matter what Alex did to intercept it. If he failed, it was his own fault for not thinking of using his Goldz earlier, for running out at a key moment—and he deserved to be punished. If he disappointed his parents over and over, why would the Game feel any differently? He might eke by with a pass, but if he didn’t, he’d brought the pain on himself again.
He couldn’t take it, another round with the belt, he just couldn’t. He went online to visit his websites, the ones no one knew he went to. Freshman year, porn was enough. After a while, it was all the same. He’d found the other tube sites after that. Live feeds from war zones, jihadi porn, crash footage too vile for freelancers to get on TV, vintage uploads from older snuff films—executions, hunting accidents, suicides caught on tape. It was all there. This was his secret refuge. It was so striking it blotted everything else out. What scared Alex was what would happen when even that got boring?
His finger hesitated over the link. It always did. It felt like a transgression. Every time. He clicked the link: Wild Electrocution—Watch Him Dance!
His screen went black.
It stayed there, locked, as a growing panic spread through him. No, no, no. Come on. Why are you crashing now? Can’t something work in my fucking life? Not this one stupid thing? He felt all the frustration of the day swelling inside him, burning, aching. Then a text appeared on the black screen, and it wasn’t just a random crash. The God Game was inside his VPN. It said:
Only though me will you find salvation.
In front of the school, Kenny felt sick to his stomach. But he did what he was told. In the dark, before anyone would arrive on campus, he stood there with the can of spray paint.
Abraham had promised him a way out. All he had to do to save his friends was mark their door so that the Angel of Death would pass over them and smite someone else. Someone who deserved it. He’d offered to sacrifice himself, but the Game had refused. Kenny looked at the spray paint. He felt his heart sink.
He began writing in tall letters along the brown-bricked wall of the school. The message was exactly as instructed, straight out of the bowels of the internet. He thought of Tay, that telltale AI experiment from Microsoft. It was supposed to learn through “casual and playful conversation” online. The trolls of the internet taught it to be a race-baiting Nazi in twenty-four hours.
Kenny felt like he wanted to puke. He’d had the same feeling as a child, when he broke his brother’s record album, then hid the pieces under the couch cushions. He’d had the same gut ache when he’d lied to his parents’ faces about it hours later. Now he felt that again, magnified times a thousand, gnawing through him. He remembered something his dad had told him once: If you don’t do wrong, you never have to feel guilty. But here, he was doomed either way. Do a bad deed and absolve his friends. Don’t do it, and they all go down.
He finished writing the words across the wall. When he was done, the letters spanned five feet tall and twenty feet wide. The Game had instructed him in cubits. He’d made the conversion himself, with the help of Google for what the hell a cubit was.
Soon the sky would go from black to bluish pink to daylight. He needed to get out of here fast. It felt like the Game had chosen this message just for him, to fuck with him, to watch him twist in the wind. It was a sick game. He took a few steps back, wishing he could take it back, unspray the wall, but he was stuck with time that only went one direction. He wouldn’t tell the Vindicators. He had saved their asses but he wouldn’t say so. Or how.
This would have to be his little secret to bear.
Later that morning, when the students started arriving, the front entrance of the school—its broad main façade—announced in bold strokes, with a swastika on either side:
