“Dammit.” Edward turned away, blinking green spots out of his eyes. “Jesus. You could’ve warned me.”
But the Artiste had already turned back to his keyboard. He uploaded the picture of Edward onto the screen, then manipulated it with the mouse, tweaking it, sharpening it, pulling it like a piece of taffy, extrapolating it into three dimensions and spinning it deftly through all three axes.
“That’s your skin,” said Zeph. “That’s what you’re going to look like in the game.”
The game. Edward went closer, looking over the Artiste’s shoulder.
“Can I change it?” he said. “I mean, do I have to be wearing these clothes?”
“What would you rather be wearing?” the Artiste asked politely.
“I don’t know.” The figure on the screen had on his clothes, khakis and a brown T-shirt from Barneys. “I’m not exactly dressed to kill.”
The Artiste’s tiny hands chattered on the keyboard, and the figure froze. Its clothes began flickering through a rapid succession of styles and colors.
“One moment please.”
Standing behind him, Edward could see the barest hint of a bald spot beginning at his crown. The Artiste tapped the back arrow a few times until the figure on the screen was wearing a black suit, a top hat, and a monocle. He was carrying a furled umbrella: the perfect English gentleman.
“Hey, wait a second,” said Edward. “Why do I have to—?”
Zeph slapped him on the back, delighted. “That’s excellent! I love it! You look like Mr. Peanut.”
With a little whine a Zip disk popped out of a slot on the side of the workstation. The Artiste whipped it out and handed it to Edward.
“We’re done.”
He went back to typing. Edward and Zeph backed out of the office and closed the door.
“WHAT’S THE DEAL with that guy?” Edward said as they walked back toward his cubicle. That first conversation they’d had at Zeph’s had stayed with him, when the Artiste had mentioned looking through people’s computers. The idea of this bizarre, autistic little elf as an omniscient being, gazing with X-ray eyes into the hard drive of his soul and spell-checking his most shameful secrets, was unnerving.
“He’s always like that. Total genius. Makes me look like a fucking joker. You know what he does with his evenings? He moonlights running global climate simulations for the National Weather Service. Works on the serious supercomputers—the real Big Iron. For all practical purposes he’s God.”
“But what was the deal with those clothes? Did you tell him about England?”
“Relax. You look good. You’re doing the Bond thing.”
More people had arrived since they’d been in with the Artiste, and the cubicles were filling up. Devo’s cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” stuttered from the big speakers in the corners. Zeph explained that the server could handle thirty-two people at once, and they’d probably have almost that many tonight.
“Jesus. You practically have your own subculture here.”
“You have no idea,” said Zeph. “MOMUS is big. Nobody knows who started it, it just bubbled up from our collective unconscious via the Internet. Not even the Artiste knows about everything that’s in it. It’s bigger than books. That library you’re messing around with? Obsolete information technology. We’re witnessing the dawn of a whole new artistic medium, and we don’t even appreciate it.”
Edward didn’t answer. He thought about Margaret, and what she would think of him if she could see him now. In a way she kind of reminded him of the Artiste—she was as much a master of her own world, and as oblivious of everything else. As they walked past one of the cubicles, a skinny young man with a straggly red beard handed them each a bottle of beer, already opened, a can of Mountain Dew: Code Red, also open, and a bottle of water.
“These beverages will provide your body with all the caffeine, sugar, and alcohol it needs to stay healthy and alert,” he intoned.
Edward sat down at his desk again and braced his feet on an orthopedic foot rest he found underneath it. His phone rang, and he let the voice mail pick up, but it rang again, and then again. He was thinking about taking it off the hook when he heard Zeph’s voice from across the room:
“Fucking pick it up!”
Edward punched the speakerphone button.
“What?”
“Put on your headset.” This time Zeph’s voice came from the phone. “They’re going to conference you in on the other line.”
“Look, how long is this going to take?”
“You have somewhere to be? Destiny is calling, you big pussy. Pick up the other line.”
Edward put on his headset and picked it up and immediately heard a babble of mostly male voices gossiping, boasting, talking trash, reciting Monty Python routines, and arguing over arcane network architecture issues.
“So,” he said. “Any chicks on this thing?”
“Hello, Cleveland!” somebody yelled hoarsely. Edward could hear the voice echoed in real life from the cubicle next door.
“Are you there, Edward?” A calm, reassuring voice he didn’t recognize cut through the chatter.
“Yes.”
“Click on the screen where it says JOIN.’”
He found the place and clicked. He felt a prickle of inexplicable nervousness in his palms.
“Yo, Geekstar Six! Let’s do this!”
“We who are about to die salute you!” a bass voice intoned.
“Okay folks,” said the calm voice. “Strap yourselves in. It’s robot fighting time.”
The screen flickered black, and he heard his hard drive thrashing. A long, pregnant pause ensued during which somebody belched loudly. Then an error message popped up on his screen, and there was a collective groan.
“Goddamn motherfucking son of a goddamn motherfucking bitch,” said the voice, calm as ever. “Zeph, can you come here and see if these server settings are right?”
“I can access them remotely,” came the reply.
A hushed debate sprang up on the conference call.
“Someone should just rewrite the network protocols on this thing from the ground up,” said a woman’s voice. “There’s no reason it should be this unstable.”
“I don’t think it’s a network issue, the bottleneck is in the protocols themselves. If they—”
“Protocols my rectum—”
“It doesn’t have to be this slow, either,” said somebody else. “Right now it’s using cubic patches instead of bezier meshes—”
“All right, all right.” The voice was back. “Everybody join again, please.”
The screen flicked to black again. In the blackness a hollow horizontal bar appeared, and the words LOADING MAP appeared above it. Edward watched impatiently as it filled from left to right with an azure blue liquid. When the bar was completely blue it disappeared. There was a longer pause.
And then a scene appeared: a table set with many candles. Standing around the table in a circle, their pale faces illuminated by candlelight, were two dozen men and women dressed in a variety of outlandish costumes, like a coven of witches and warlocks. The walls were stone, with red and blue tapestries hanging over them. It looked like it might have been the banquet hall of a castle. Everything—the weave of the tapestries, the grain of the wooden table, the yellow candlelight that pulsed and glowed—had that same vivid, hyperreal quality he recognized from MOMUS. Edward understood from his point of view that he was supposed to be standing in the circle, too, and he saw that one of the men on the other side of the circle had Zeph’s face. Zeph was dressed as a tall, fat monk, with a cowled robe and a rope tied around his waist.
Edward froze. For an instant no one else moved, then the circle broke and ran for the exits. He was left alone.
Edward blinked at the screen, then leaned forward over the keyboard. Using the mouse, he guided his virtual self out of the room by a long, straight corridor. All was quiet until he turned a corner and blundered in between two men. They were chopp
ing at each other with long-handled axes. One wore an old-fashioned Apollo-style space suit complete with golden reflective faceplate. The other was Clint Eastwood in full ballroom drag. An explosion flashed near them, a bass beat sounded, and the force of it threw them apart in three directions. Something buzzed under him, and he nearly jumped out of his chair. What he had thought was an orthopedic cushion turned out to be an electric pad hooked up to his computer and synchronized with the sound effects.
“Watch it, hippie,” a voice crackled over the phone.
“You’re entering a world of pain, my friend...”
Edward had gotten turned around. He couldn’t find the men with the axes. He was in a stone corridor with arrow slits running all down one wall. A woman in low-cut Elizabethan garb ran toward him with a blue metal pistol in her hand, her décolletage bouncing wildly. A stream of metal nails issued from the pistol, and every time one hit him the bar at the bottom of the screen that measured his health got a little shorter.
He dodged past her and ran blindly until the nails were no longer hitting him in the back. He ended up on a high, thin walkway facing a burly man in a kilt and no shirt.
The big man stepped forward. So did Edward. He wasn’t sure what to expect. When they were five feet apart the big man dropped to one knee with startling quickness and snatched Edward bodily over his head pro-wrestling style. The world blurred as it spun around him, and he saw that the walkway spanned a vast circular pit.
“Luik!” the man howled insanely in a Scottish brogue. “I am yuir father!”
He tossed Edward lightly over the edge. Bricks and masonry rushed past his face as he descended into the darkness, Alice’s view falling down the rabbit hole, and then he was dead.
And then he was alive again. He woke up in a lavishly furnished bedroom, lying on his back in a four-poster bed. Beautiful yellow-tinted light poured in through translucent curtains. He pushed through them onto a stone balcony looking out over a perfectly manicured green courtyard. The sky was blue, and the grass was billiard-table green. Neat pathways picked out in white gravel radiated out from a central fountain. Sunlight flashed off the falling water. He was happy to have escaped from the fighting for the moment. He wasn’t really in the mood anyway.
To Edward’s surprise the Artiste was there in the garden. His skin wasn’t surreal or exaggerated in any way: It looked exactly like him in real life. He was neither running nor shooting nor stabbing, just sitting perfectly still on a marble bench. He looked up at Edward, and their eyes met, but neither spoke. The sun was setting behind a distant line of puffy Claude Lorrain trees.
The screen darkened and faded to black. Time was up. The game was over. Statistics appeared on the monitor; next to Edward’s name it said, in typical ungrammatical computerese: YOU DIED ONCE TIMES AND YOU KILLED ZERO ENEMIES.
He hardly had time to scan the list before the screen went dark again, and when it lit up he was back in the circle of players. This time they were deep underwater, suspended between the surface and the pale sandy floor of some great shallow ocean or lake. Across the circle from him, right next to Zeph—so close their shoulders were almost touching—floated a tall, broad figure dressed in armor. His face was hidden in the murk, but a towering rack of silver antlers sprouted from his head. Was it—? It looked exactly like he imagined the stag knight looked, that Margaret had told him about in the Viage.
Then the players vanished like a school of startled fish, kicking and stroking away in all directions, leaving trails of silver bubbles that ascended slowly in their wakes. The antler-man was gone before Edward was even sure he’d been there.
He swam off on his own, through the murky light that seemed to emanate from all directions equally. The silence was broken only by the occasional dull boom and distant, burbling scream. It was almost restful. He swam upward, but no matter how persistently he tried he could never quite reach the shimmering, shifting surface above him, though he got close enough to see the pale underbellies of foaming whitecaps sweeping by above him. Sometimes a shaft of green sunlight would lance down from on high, through a break in the invisible clouds, and then disappear again. He spent long, tense minutes dodging through a network of luminescent caves, playing cat and mouse with a woman in a black wetsuit, until he was unexpectedly devoured by a giant green eel the size of a subway train. YOU DIED ONCE TIMES AND YOU KILLED ZERO ENEMIES.
They played again, and again, and again. In spite of himself he let the room, the cubicles, the headset, the Smurfs, everything fade away into the background. What was he, a moron? A violence junkie? The game, these little running pictures on a TV screen, took over his senses completely. Maybe Zeph was right, this was the real thing, the powerful mojo, a new medium for the new millennium. They fought on a featureless open plain, while schussing down an alpine slope, in the desert, in the jungle, with swords, with lasers, with no weapons at all, so that they had to punch and kick each other to death with their bare hands and feet. He died and was reincarnated instantly, like flipping a light switch off and on. He lived a hundred short, brutal lifetimes in one night. When a player died, the body lay where it fell for a few minutes before it disappeared, and once or twice Edward had the disconcerting experience of stumbling over his own nattily dressed corpse staring blankly up at him. For a while they all had white feathery wings, and they flew in silent circles around a meticulous re-creation of the floating cloud city from Star Wars. When the fighting got especially thick a thin white mist crept through the office: The geeks had set up a portable smoke machine.
Edward’s thoughts drifted to buying into one of these computer games companies. Something this addictive must be disgustingly profitable. The initial hostility he’d sensed around him when he arrived had dissipated, and an ad hoc esprit de corps had settled over the room, embracing even him. It was no longer the geeks against the outsider. They were all in it together, a Local Area Network of brothers in arms, bound by the electric bond of virtual combat. Could a book do this?
It was five in the morning before it even occurred to Edward to check his watch. They’d been playing for four hours straight. He’d sweated through his shirt, and there were five beers and three empty Code Red cans on the floor around his chair. He didn’t know how many times he’d gotten up to pee.
For the last game they played in the same castle where they’d started out. He woke up in a circular room in a high tower. He looked out the window at a sunless sky filled with swirling colors like the marbled endpaper of an old book. He was tired of fighting, and he wouldn’t have minded just taking a virtual nap. He started down a long spiral staircase, but a nimble swordsman with a musketeer’s mustache met him coming up and skewered him with a rapier.
Maybe it was the beer, or the lateness of the hour, but now Edward couldn’t seem to go thirty seconds without getting himself killed. His luck had turned sour. Twice a sniper picked him off from above. Once he took a swim in the castle moat and a black current sucked him down and pinned him against an iron grate and drowned him. When he finally managed to arm himself with a decent weapon, a rocket launcher, he accidentally fired it point blank at a ballerina in a pink tutu and they both died in the blast.
He only saw Zeph once more, when they came face to face in the middle of a battle royal. They squared off.
“I smell a wumpus!” Zeph howled. “Move or shoot?”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Edward muttered through clenched teeth.
They chopped at each other for a tense minute before someone waved a laser through the room at waist-level, cutting everybody in it in half.
“That was bullshit,” said Edward’s headset.
“Nothing worse than a loser who won’t admit it,” a high voice—the Artiste?—replied.
He was reborn in darkness, and for a long time he wandered alone in a low-ceilinged, heavy-timbered space that felt like an attic. Finally he reached a stone archway that looked like a way out. He peered inside, but there was nothing except pitch blackness. His hea
dphones crackled.
“Stay away from that doorway,” the calm voice said in his ears. “There’s nothing there—the level’s not finished. Could take down the whole network if you go through.”
Something about this reminded Edward of the black, blind canyon into which an entire company of bold knights had disappeared in the Viage. What happened to them in there? On a hunch he backed up and ran through the archway at full tilt.
It happened so fast that he never knew if he’d died and been reborn, or if he was magically transported to another part of the castle, but suddenly he was standing on a parapet on the very outermost wall of the keep. The dark, marbled sky was gone: This sky was clear and blue, and the sun was shining. The day was quiet. He’d left the fighting far behind.
Edward hadn’t really noticed the landscape beyond the castle, but now it was all laid out in front of him panoramically. Peaceful wooded hills rolled away into the far distance, each one glowing a vivid emerald green. Some of them were farmland, divided up into squares like a green patchwork quilt, or like some fantastically complex mathematical function plotted in three dimensions, and others were dotted with tiny perfect trees, each one precisely the same as all the others. There was no fighting there, just endless electronic peace.
He wondered if this was what Weymarshe looked like. Could there really be somewhere this digitally perfect in real life? A rogue wave of childish, unironic longing suddenly welled up in him, rushing over him from he didn’t know where and swamping him with melancholy before he was ready for it. God, what was wrong with him? All at once he was overcome by self-pity—he was embarrassed, but he couldn’t stop it, he had to just let it happen. Empty tears washed down his cheeks. For the past four years it had seemed like time was standing still, but now it was rushing past him like a gale-force wind, like the wind from an atom bomb, tearing everything away and whirling it off to parts unknown, palm trees and roof tiles and fence posts, and suddenly he felt his whole future, his managership and his promotions and his year-end bonuses and his office parties, hanging like a lead weight around his neck, dragging him downward. He didn’t want this. He only had one life, and he wanted it to be something else. Terror surged inside him, and in his panic he seized on something.