I looked down. I wish I didn’t.
Amrith and Laurent jumped down to Josh’s level. Josh bent down and pulled something from his hoodie—the pocketknife he’d used back in Level Zero. He flipped it open. The sun flashed in the steel. Josh held it down.
“And this—” Lena grabbed my hand and pulled me down to the lower platform. I felt a bit dizzy—like I had two bodies moving at different speeds—but when my feet planted down I felt better.
Josh ran the knife along the air. A blue line glowed where it went. He curved the line and made it pierce itself.
The sigil flashed, and turned a deep, dark red.
Josh put his hand on the mark.
“What does—” I began, and stopped because I was screaming too hard to think.
Colors flashed and I realized they were buildings blurring in our speed. I couldn’t hear myself. I couldn’t hear anything. I thought my eardrums burst.
The landscape drifted with sickening speed. We passed the sun and its superheated shine blazed all the vision out my eyes. All I saw was the shadows of the others—crouched in place.
Only Laurent moved. He gripped his aluminum bat, held it ready, and looked at Josh.
Josh nodded. He took away his hand. The symbol he’d carved glowed in the air like a sickness.
Laurent brought the bat down.
The sign turned blue.
And vanished.
My vision blackened. I saw blue skies. Then green trees. Then silver light.
Sound came back. I heard the roar of wind in my ears. I couldn’t breath.
The trees were getting closer.
#
“We call that glitch ‘dropping’” Lena said.
The forest around us hummed with buzzing insects. Tiny green bugs spiraled up and corkscrewed down. Birds tweeted, squirrels rustled, and a deer ran very, very quickly from us. In the distance, freeway traffic rumbled.
I looked at the tree we’d crashed into.
The poor thing bent onto the ground—the trunk a pulp of splinters and ruined wood. A deep score marked the earth where we’d kept going until grinding to a halt.
Josh said we’d fallen about half a kilometer out of the sky, with the accumulated speed far exceeding normal terminal velocity of a hundred miles per second.
And yet, when we’d pried ourselves out of our landing-hole, my clothes weren’t even ripped. My soft white t-shirt still held its immaculate color, and my dark blue track pants still smelled slightly of clean laundry.
My socks were the only part of me that had suffered. They’d turned muddy and twiggy on the forest floor. I looked at them disgusted. They squelched in the dirt.
My feet hurt. I looked around and found a thin white log scoured with yellow-brown fungus. I hopped over and sat down on it.
“See,” Lena began. “Laurent says that there’re these things called gluons. They don’t exist in Level Zero, so when you twist a gate you can sort of make the world forget about them for a while. Then when we turn physics back on we remain sorta immune to kinetic damage until our external force is equalized.”
“You’re so good at sounding smart Lena,” Laurent said from the ruined tree. He dangled from a tree branch that now stuck vertically in the air, a foot above the ground. He dropped, and thunked onto the dirt. Lena gave Laurent the finger.
Amrith was throwing up in a bush a little way away. For the past five minutes he’d done it in quick, business-like hurks.
When he finished, he came out of the bushes and spat the last of it against a tree.
“So anyway we’re a bit boned,” Laurent told me. “I think we landed somewhere near Newmarket. Normally we’d open up a gate and get back by walking through Level Zero, but I don’t think there’s enough action here to do that.”
My socks would be ruined after this, I concluded. When I got home, I was going to buy a big bag of socks. Fresh socks, ripped right out from the packaging with the scent of polymers still clinging to the fabric. That was just excellent stuff.
“Uh, I saw Josh on the phone. We might be able to get a cab.” Amrith mumbled, wiping his mouth.”
I’d go with grey socks. The fancy ones with the padding at the heels for extra odor absorption. Not that I had an odor problem.
Laurent shook his head. “Man you do those crazy backflip things but you can’t take a little drop.”
“It’s different,” Amrith said, coughing. “Very different.”
“Amrith and Lena do this crazy parcour stuff,” Laurent mentioned to me. “That was actually how we got them. See we needed some fit people to run some tests in Level Zero while Josh and I—”
“I’d like new track pants too,” I murmured to myself. “Roots has good ones.”
Lena, Amrith and Laurent looked at each other.
“You okay man?” Laurent asked.
“I’d like new socks,” I said to the ground. “When we get back to Toronto.”
“... Cool.” Laurent said. He looked at Lena and shrugged. “Socks are cool.”
“Oh man,” Amrith clutched his stomach. He turned and stumbled back to the vomit-bush.
Far away, Josh railed on a cell phone. “We’re right on off-ramp. You can’t miss it. No. No. We were just—no. Come on!”
I took a big breath of woody, loamy air. The air had flavor out here, with a bitter edge from the highway exhaust.
It was getting dark. The rim of the sky blazed orange, but the dome was darkening. An impossibly thin crescent moon hung small and distant above us. The woods hid the setting sun. I could almost see the stars.
“Um,” Lena said. “So, your Stalker Man—”
My Stalker Man?
“We probably confused it when we broke the gate. I’d guess you have about a month, maybe more time depending on how smart it is.”
Laurent sat down in the leaves. Twigs snapped under his ass.
In the distance, Josh swore himself hoarse. He finished the call with a reedy, “fuck you!” and almost threw the phone away.
Josh stalked towards us wordlessly.
“So before that we’re gonna have to meet Haze,” Lena told me. She held her hands clasped like a doctor delivering bad news. Behind her, Josh sat down and glowered at the dirt. “We’ll explain everything, and then he’ll tell you how to undo the mark.”
“We just fell. From half the height of the CN tower. My socks are dirty,” I said. I lifted a leg for emphasis.
“You’ve gotta cut that out soon,” Josh said. “It’s only gonna get weirder. A drop is nothing.”
“Fuck! Youuu!” Amrith called from the bushes.
“Anyway I managed to get a cab,” Josh said. “Two of them.”
“We’ll be in touch,” Lena said. “We’ll bring you to Haze on Saturday. Before that you’ll have to get some things.”
“Socks.” I said.
“Alright, I’m not riding with this guy,” Josh said.
#
I thought about Level Zero on the ride back. It beat Amrith and Lena, talking alternately about parcour, internet memes, and the release of Mass Effect 3.
“You know the best name?” Lena asked. “German. German Shepard!” Amrith laughed. He slapped his thighs which I thought was a bit overboard. But then again, he’d carefully positioned himself next to Lena on the way over, inviting me to take the cab’s shotgun seat.
The cab driver snorted at me as I entered the car. My dirty socks and overall glazed expression didn’t invite much respect I guess. I ignored him, and did my best not to let the dirt scrape off into the car.
Level Zero—Laurent said—was an alien world. Dark and different.
It had its own rules, and developed by its own laws. Its creatures were strange—more thoughts than matter. Humans were not exactly welcome, and neither were our physics.
And now, according to Laurent, the stalker man that had marked me was wandering the real world. It had no power. It couldn’t see, hear, or move anything without access to a gate. It would wander the city blind, deaf, and dumb, until
it found a gate to enter
Until then, I could prepare. I could wander Level Zero in relative safety, I could learn from Lena, Laurent, and the others.
“Urdnot just has style though,” Amrith said from the back.
“Urdnot Shepard kicks ass,” Lena agreed.
We came closer and closer to Toronto. The highway stretched awesomely flat, like God’s kitchen table, in front of us. A row of power-stations followed us.
The stars were out, bigger and brighter than anyone saw in the city. Dollars and cents added in orange light on the cab’s dashboard.
“Commander Shepard never retreats, he just attacks in the opposite direction.”
The city loomed ahead of us. I could see the CN Tower already. The cab’s clock read 11: 03 pm. I’d have to take the last GO bus back to my place at Long Branch.
Level Zero and the stalker men were becoming a task in my mind—another check on a to-do list.
That felt good. It felt normal. It felt like I could end this wierdness and go back to blogging.
And I had people to help me now.
I just wished they were a little cooler. It was easy to place confidence in James Bond. A set of gamer athletes not so much.
“When Commander Shepard does his taxes—” Lena began.
“Commander Shepard doesn’t do taxes.” Amrith cut in. “He’s a Spectre.”
“Shut up! This one’s funny.”
It’d be a long ride back home. I closed my eyes and thought about stalker men. And about violets made of light.
CHAPTER SEVEN: ALPHA GATE
“This knife,” I said to the woman at the booth. “Is it sharp?”
The woman at the engraving booth wrinkled her nose and adjusted her gold, bottlecap lenses. An open Nicholas Sparks novel lay face down on the glass counter. The woman took a long look at it, like an alcoholic looks at a misty bottle. Then she looked back at me.
“I think I need a sharp knife.” I said.
“They sell swords in Chinatown,” the woman said.
I nodded, dimly aware that this woman had just zinged me.
Around me, Square One shoppers bustled. Mall sounds replayed on an endless track: crying babies, clapping feet, and peppy store music.
Square One was the largest mall in Ontario. About seven years ago, it exploded onto Mississauga like a gigantic capitalist boil grown out of stucco. I didn’t like it; most of the stores sold clothing, and you could find that at Wal-Mart. But I’d stepped the TEB Financial building overlooked the mall, and going downtown would take too much time.
I clocked out of work early this Friday to pick up a pocket knife. Josh told me to. More specifically, he’d messaged me on Facebook.
We meet haze at eight. Were going to lakeshore first to show you something. Get a knife for your lesbian self. Don’t make it one of the stupid red swiss ones.
I didn’t know how to buy knives. I didn’t know where to buy knives. For an hour I’d trekked through the consumerist maze before finding the booth called Things Engraved, an engraving booth that engraved stuff from their stock of picture frames, pocket watches, water bottles, pens, toy cars, statuettes and, yes, pocket knives.
The knife I pointed to was not a stupid red one. It was translucent blue plastic, like my first USB stick. A single silver blade cut through the plastic. A white Swiss cross stamped one end of the handle.
The price tag said $15.99. Not bad.
“I think I’ll take this knife.” I concluded. I took a twenty from my wallet and brandished it at the engraver lady.
The lady blinked slowly. “What do you want engraved?”.
“I need it engraved?”
The woman pointed to the sign that read “Things Engraved.” I realized I had been zinged yet again.
“… Alright, I know exactly what to do,” I said. The woman raised her eyebrows and I gave her the inscription.
While I was supposed to be working, I’d instead searched the internet, googling bugs, glitches, and quantum physics. I wanted to grasp Level Zero. I wanted to know what it did—or what my new friends thought it did. But while I blazed through cyperspace, I’d also found something else:
↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A
The Konami Code: the grandfather of video game glitches. In an ancient sci-fi shooter called Contra, it turned the player’s 2D spaceship into God. The game was impossible to finish without the code. I figured the Level Zero crowd would dig it.
The lady handed me the knife in a blue polyester bag. I didn’t take out the blade to check the inscription because something told me normal people didn’t open knives in public. I pocketed the bag instead.
I left through the mall’s west entrance. It was a cold out. For the past week we’d sweltered under sudden humidity with an unseasonal twenty-five degree heat wave. Now, the thermometer had swung down just in time to fuck everyone’s weekend plans. I heard on CTV that Sunday would have a low of seven degrees. Complete bullshit.
My white Pontiac waited for me in the middle of a deserted lot outside the Zellers. No one used the lot, since it sat fifty metres farther from the mall. I beeped the car open as I approached, and noticed that my walk had more confidence in it. Was this the joy of knife ownership?
I yanked the car door shut, swore, and rubbed my white hands together. The dashboard still had some residual warmth left, and I pressed my palms against it.
When my hands had warmed, I pulled the blue bag out of my pocket and upended its contents on the passenger seat. The knife dropped out.
I picked it up.
It felt lighter than a knife should. I flipped it around in my hand. The knife was just a bit shorter than a pen. It felt like a toy.
I pulled the blade out with my thumb. A smooth, stainless-steel paddle emerged from the handle. The Konami Code shone along its side.
I folded the knife and slid it into my back pocket. I flung the blue bag into the well of the passenger seat and started the car. The engine hummed under the dashboard and hot air blasted out the air vents.
My eyes shone in the rearview mirror: cold, hard, icy blue. I looked away, and gunned the engine.
#
I spotted Josh and Lena outside the parking garage at my building. Josh sat on one side, Lena stood, stretching her calves against a wall, on the other.
I’d never told them where I live.
Josh spotted me first. He raised a hand, and called to Lena. Lena spun around, waved, and hopped onto the street.
I rolled down the windows. Josh passed me without a word and pulled the passenger door to my car open. Lena took the shotgun seat.
“Took you long enough,” she said. “Did you get the knife?”
“I don’t remember telling you to meet me here,” I said. I clicked the transponder clipped to my rearview. The door to the parking garage rose.
“Knife,” Josh said. He held out his hand. I took out the pocket knife and slapped it into his palm.
Josh drew it to eye level.
“You got a Swiss one,” he announced dourly. “So you’re gay?”
“I got a single-blade like you asked.” I said. I rolled into the parking garage. It was mostly empty this early in the afternoon: just claustrophobic concrete pillars and orange lights. I turned through the narrow lane—my space was at the end of the garage, near the elevators.
“Not that it’s bad to be gay,” Josh continued. He pulled open the knife. “Ten percent of the world is—the fuck? What’s this shit on the knife?”
"The—the Konami code." I said. "You've heard of it? Right? Lena?"
Josh held out the knife to Lena. She looked at it and shrugged.
“You people,” I breathed. “What now?”
“Drop your stuff and get back down here. We’re going to a park,” Josh said.
#
I followed Josh and Lena’s directions down the Queensway and onto Lakeshore. They were leading me to a place called Bay Park.
I Google Mapped the place before I left. Bay Park was a tendr
il of land, shaped a bit like a runny inkblot. It jutted out of the city, splashed across the water, and quickly fell into the deep, dark blue of Lake Ontario.
We took Lakeshore to get there. After a long drive, the neighborhoods dropped away. and we had a clear view of the lake shooting across the horizon. Just about the time we entered the outskirts of Toronto, Josh pointed out the park.
“Go up there.”
I glanced over.
It always bothered me that any suitably large area of grass can be called a park. Bay Park was no exception—a peninsula of turf bordered by a thick copse of trees and lots of rocks to prevent erosion. A thin bridge of wooded turf connected the park to land.
I turned onto the bridge and the road became gravel. It curved gently towards the main body of the park. Pebbles pinged the underside of my car.
Bay Park’s parking lot was a gravel square spray painted with yellow parking lines. It could hold about four cars. Luckily, it was empty except for a green garbage drum in the middle of the painted lines.
I stopped the car. The tires skidded on the gravel.
Lena said. “What do you think?”
I got out. The cold lakefront air bit through my jacket. The sound of water lapping rocks came loud and clear here. It was cold so close to the lake, and the air smelled rancid. There were trees. Water. Squirrels probably having sex in the distance.
“It’s nice?” I tried. I tucked my hands in my armpits. “Very... flat.”
I took another whiff of lakefront air. The smell. Granted, Lake Ontario was so polluted that if you tried to swim in it you’d come out with a third mutant arm, but there was something beneath this lake-stench that twisted my stomach the wrong way.
Lena and Josh got out as well and led me through the flatness towards the water. As we stepped onto the turf, my feet squelched in the grass. The mud tugged at my heels like it wanted me to stay.
We neared the edge of the turf. A thin strip of land, bordered by trees and a single-lane road, extended farther out into the lake. The strip arched back after few hundred metres, back towards land.
“Before we meet Haze we’ve got to show you something,” Lena said.
We walked on the roadside. The wind howled across the water. Seagulls shrieked, and squirrels rustled in the trees. But beneath those tiny sounds, it was just the water and the stone. Lena, Josh, the trees and I seemed transitory—newcomers in a conversation that had gone on for a long, long time.