Everything had gone wrong at the restaurant. The electricity was out. The freezers were dead. The gas stoves wouldn’t light. The phone lines were down. All Arthur could think was Did Charlie do this somehow, some hacking trick, now that he knows what I am?
Arthur met the maintenance guy, but there was no fixing this. They couldn’t even figure out what was wrong. They tried plugging one of the freezers into the portable generator, but its circuits were fried. The entire dinner shift would be lost, and if the food spoiled, that would erase the gains Arthur had made so far. It was terrible luck, if it was luck at all—but then he thought about things he’d done and realized he deserved every bit of it.
After the maintenance guy left and Arthur sent the last waitress home, he heard the footsteps behind him, too late.
Charlie and Kenny were alone in room 333.
The street fight disappeared. Tim was gone. Vanhi was gone. All they saw now was the empty classroom. Not even an audience of Watchers to cheer them on.
The test was over. They used a spoofing technique to call 911 anonymously, telling the operator the street name that had appeared in the cartoon world where Tim was beaten. Maybe it would get him help. Strangely enough, the Game seemed to let them do it.
Kenny’s watch went off: 2:00 P.M.
It was minutes to Φ o’clock.
“Get your laptop!” Kenny said.
Charlie opened the casing and popped the Wi-Fi back in. They texted Peter but couldn’t raise him. By now, the virus had spread far and wide. It had implanted and opened the flaps of its Trojan horses. If it worked, they should be able to see into the back end of the Game, into the gearbox behind God’s eyes. Charlie felt it suddenly. He looked at Kenny.
“There’s no way this can work.”
“I know.” Kenny felt despair.
“Unless it does.”
Kenny closed his eyes. He’d spent his whole life being a skeptic. Not a coldhearted atheist, the kind that takes pleasure in tearing down other people’s dreams. He saw what faith did for his parents. He wanted it so badly but just couldn’t lie himself into it.
But now he needed it. “Unless it does.” He smiled. “You’re my brother, Charlie. I believe in us.”
They looked at the laptop, and it was working.
The great codex of the Game was churning in front of them.
By now, the gas from the boiler room had spread through the network of ventilation shafts coursing through the school like arteries. The Game had opened the pressure-release safety valves like flaps on an organ, piping the odorless carbon monoxide through the school. The building was full of students in the middle of seventh period. A few had begun complaining about headaches, but the bomb would soon go off, before anyone left. Once ignited, the bomb and the gas around it would create a sun, a spectacle of oceanic proportions.
It was time. Christ let Alex know, told him to be strong. The Game handed Alex a device lovingly crafted by the avatar of Sigmund Freud, a Victorian steampunk apparatus, all wires and alligator clips and a black-raised button ringed in polished brass. Its virtual wires ran from the controller to the actual bomb in realspace, which the Game would ignite with the real sparkbox in the boiler once Alex symbolically pressed the virtual button.
“We’ll count down together,” Christ told him.
Alex was shaking so badly he could barely stand. The images of Christ and Thoth and Freud were around him, but he misstepped, and they couldn’t support him so he stumbled and was grateful no one was there to see.
“Be strong, be strong,” the Game whispered over and over.
He knelt before the bomb and put his finger on the black plastic button, which looked like an old doorbell. It gleamed in the vacuum-tubed light.
“You can do this,” Freud whispered.
“I’ll guide you on the other side,” Thoth said. “A great river, for you alone.”
“You will show them all,” Christ said. “They won’t forget you.”
Alex’s finger began to push down. He could almost feel the virtual button lowering, the smooth domed plastic, when Christ said, “Wait.”
Alex thought madly for a second that it was all a test, like Abraham and Isaac, that they would call it off now.
But instead Freud said, “Your father is late. We can’t start without him.”
As Charlie and Kenny watched, breath held, the atomic clock approached Φ o’clock:
2:01:77
2:01:78
2:01:79
It hit 2:01:80, and their eyes flicked to the code tracker.
They watched it light up.
The code was telling—daring—the God Game to create a stone so heavy it could not lift it. A sphere large enough to contain the set of all spheres. Assuring it that according to its own predictions, it would do so. In the sim, God would draw all resources from all corners of its botnet toward the task, causing an exponential memory drain that would arch toward infinity.
They felt very small then, and very foolish.
And then it worked.
They weren’t sure what to expect visually, but the Game began to flicker. In one corner, they were watching the code executing itself. In another, Charlie’s 3-D view in the school phased in and out, the players moving around the map fluxing. His chessboard was up, the pieces no longer black and white but various shades in between, battered and bruised. The screen locked and unlocked, fuzzed in and out.
This is it, he thought. Then, Is this it?
The code scrolled faster and faster.
“It’s working,” Kenny whispered.
Charlie squeezed Kenny’s arm. Charlie was too nervous to get excited yet.
The map unfroze, then scrambled. More static. More pulsing. “Oh, shit,” Charlie said. The code stream was accelerating to the point of being unreadable. He took Kenny’s hand and put it on the hard drive. It was hot to the touch, almost burning. Together, they’d done this.
The lights in the room pulsed off and on.
It will suck power until it burns itself out.
The whole screen went black. Charlie felt a tentative hope spreading. The lights in the room came back on, and in the hallway, too, but the computers were dead. The Aziteks were dead, too, just blank, plain glasses now, the avatars in the hallways gone. Charlie and Kenny exchanged glances. Charlie picked up his phone and it was fine, but the text thread from the Game was gone. The hope sprouted, blossomed, spread.
Then a window opened in the middle of the laptop screen.
On a little cartoon hill with flat shrubs was a squat little God with a white beard and white robes. He hopped with each step. He was as flat and two-dimensional as the green landscape around him. He pushed a giant stone at the bottom of the hill, so infinitely large you could only see the bottom of it on the screen.
God waddled up to it, gave a little grunt, and worked his flat shoulders under it. The speakers chirped with animated sighs and heaves. God’s knees bent, then straightened out, shoving the planetoid boulder until it started to roll up the hill. When he got near the top, it started to waver and almost roll back down, but then he gave a last shove and got it to the top.
He flipped it up onto his index finger and spun it like a basketball.
With his other hand, boulder still spinning, he raised his middle finger at the screen and jerked it up and down a few times, right at Charlie and Kenny.
God grinned at them.
The rest of the Game sprang back to life on their screen. The avatars filling the school. The dots swarming the map. Their virus, on the other hand, was gone.
The code bank was empty.