In the darkness, Peter became aware. He felt weightless, floating. For a moment, he wondered if his consciousness had been uploaded to the machine. That was the only true immortality. If every neuron in his brain was mapped to a corresponding bit, it would be a perfect representation of his life, his memories and beliefs, his dreams and nightmares. Would that be him, a continuity of awareness? Or would his old self die, and this new thing would be someone else, disconnected yet seamless?
But it wasn’t an electronic dream. He wiggled his fingers and toes. Every part of his body screamed with pain, but he was alive. He let his eyes open and saw the roof of the school high above him, then focused his mind on the sting of the net under him, taut thick cords of black nylon. His body was lashed where the real-world lines and nodes had torn into him on impact. The Game had foreseen all this, warned him, mapped out in an evolving stochastic web the possible outcomes of the rooftop confrontation.
Alex would jump, thinking he’d saved his friends, unless Charlie stopped him. Charlie would stop him, unless Peter interfered. If Peter interfered, Charlie would kill him, to save his friends from the Game. He would think it was noble even, although he wouldn’t offer himself. The Game was retesting one of its favorite hypotheses: anyone is a murderer under the right conditions.
Peter had bet against the Game on that one, and it would cost him dearly in Blaxx. But he would recover, just as his wounds would recover.
It was child’s play for the Game to calculate acceleration, to instruct other players on the height and tension in the net, so that Peter would hit just far enough above the ground to stretch down and smack the earth but live. Peter would hit the net because Alex would stand wherever the Game guided him. Had Charlie looked down from the roof, all he would’ve seen was Peter unconscious on impact, the black nylon invisible from fifty feet above. But the Game also predicted correctly that Charlie wouldn’t even look—he would cradle Alex and carry him away.
Now, as Peter came to, Charlie and Alex long gone, he was laughing, partly because every inch of his body hurt, and partly because he knew he could now die and be reborn.
What was death, after all, but a police report in a system, which set in motion a series of events, boxes checked wherever appropriate? The Game would talk for the police to the principal, who was happy to learn the body was found and cared for before any media arrived. The Game would talk for the police to his father, who was offered the chance to ID the body by screen share since he was in Europe, before boarding a long flight back for the funeral. He accepted the policeman’s thoughtful recommendation that cremation was the way to go here. The electronic charts would confirm the body was ruined, the DNA certain, the urn labeling the remains as Peter’s delivered to the funeral home. Electronic signals would assure the right people that everything was accounted for, packaged, delivered, exchanged, disposed, departed.
The Game even provided a note, posted on Peter’s social media, recalling his run-in with Morrissey on the drug charges: You caught me. Better this than jail.
And what if someone opened the urn to see what was inside?
It would be ash.
And Peter was free, to go anywhere, to be anyone.
Free within the Game.
He was laughing also because a new mod had occurred to him while he lay there. The Game would honor Charlie’s deal, because Charlie had—to the best of his efforts—offered a killing to the gods. The Game had stopped the death, but Charlie didn’t know that. It didn’t make Charlie any less a willing executioner, which was all the Game wanted to see.
But Charlie had only bargained for himself and his friends’ freedom from the Game. Peter was already drafting the invitation in his mind, and the fun and games that would follow.
Do you love your son? Y/N?
Once, Peter had dreamed that if he couldn’t have his own dad, maybe Charlie’s dad would adopt him, too, be his surrogate father, but Charlie’s dad had hated Peter instantly, leaving him once again in the cold—with Charlie, the favored son, always in the light.
A day from now, or maybe a month, Arthur Lake would sit alone in front of a screen, his loved ones asleep, and the Game would ask, Would you like all your dreams to come true? You have a restaurant, yes, but would you like a second? A third? A new patio, an award, an empire?
And the eternal loop would continue, filled with unwitting playthings tossed and turned by the whimsy of the fates—for amusement or sport or no reason at all—asking questions that have always been asked and expecting an answer.