400 Boys and 50 More (75 page)

Usually—in a deathmatch for instance—rage and thoughts of revenge sharpened his mind, providing a clear black background to his thoughts, allowing him to stalk and slay his enemies with deadly precision. Today, for some reason, murk accompanied the anger. The sky was blue, the streets looked fresh and bright, as if a storm had swept them and moved on; but his mood clouded everything. He kept surfacing to find that he’d walked another few blocks. He soon found himself downtown, entering the town square. Trees threw their shadows over him. Up ahead, preschoolers clambered on a climbing structure. A dog chased a Frisbee.

Good,
he told himself, calmed by the exercise.
You’re getting a grip.

It was better to plan his next move, and put Noware behind him. He had their money now, that was all that really mattered. With money he could do anything: start his own company, take all the time he needed to make a game that was pure Barton Needles, pure and unadulterated evil. Yes, his next game would be everything the Noware conversion was not.

In that moment of anticipatory calm, he realized he had made himself dizzy by rushing out so quickly after weeks of concentrated mental effort. Dizzy and sick. That explained why the world seemed to be rippling—and why he saw his textures everywhere he looked, as if they were pouring out of his eyes again. Maybe it also explained why the pine trees were suddenly wrapped in blue and scarlet fleurs-de-lis with ornate tessellations; and why the thin, beaded trickles of sap shimmered with a weird fluorescent orange glow.

He headed toward a park bench to sit down, but it was changing, growing narrower at the ends, beginning to sag and spiral into limp dangling curls like the tendrils of a creeping plant. He crouched in the grass and put his head between his knees, eyes shut, hoping his textures would stop crawling over everything he saw.

He would get help next time. He wouldn’t try to do it all himself. It was too much for one kid to make over an entire world. He kept his eyes closed until he saw only sparkling darkness, devoid of the self-created patterns he’d been staring at for weeks.

When he opened his eyes, he gazed straight down at the grass and earth underfoot.

The grass was red. The earth beneath the blades was purple, faintly shot through with lime. Things were crawling in the soil—things like soft enormous pink ants with floppy legs.

Barton shot upright—too fast, for it made him even dizzier. As the world spun, he saw it had been completely remade with his textures. He couldn’t stop seeing them no matter where he looked. The buildings at the far edge of the square were all colors but the proper ones; they were shaped like enormous saggy mushrooms, puddling on the soft cushions of streets that were not so much paved as upholstered.

Barton turned and ran toward home, hoping he could find his way now that he’d lost his senses.

Near the edge of the square, something darted to and fro, dragging a leash across grass that stubbornly refused to revert from red. If he squinted his eyes it was still mostly a dog, but the sound it made was not at all canine. Where had he heard it before? It shot between his legs, snagging him in the dragging leash. Somewhere in the distance he could hear its owner piping on a weird shrill dog whistle. Hopelessly tangled, Barton fell. As the dog circled toward his face, he braced for a licking.

Then he remembered where he had heard the creature’s call. Like the textures, it was something he’d carried in his head that had somehow spilled out into the world. It was glass and bone and metal and meat, all grinding together in a bottomless bubbling throat.

The cries, with all their overtones of impending total victory, grew louder as the Demon Lord overshadowed the square, then dimmed to a muted slurping as the first of many lamprey tongues found his face.

Next time they’ll want weapons,
Barton thought indignantly.
Lots of weapons!

His final conscious act was the unhappy one of seeking his reflection in a million rheumy eyes, but failing. There were no Lord Needles or even Bartons anywhere.

All he saw were a million orange teddy bears, screaming.

* * *

"Total Conversion" copyright 1999 Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
, August 1999.

THE NEW MILLENNIUM: HALF-LIFE & LESSONS HALF-LEARNED

The early millennium, as anyone who lived through it can attest, was a time of almost constant crisis, social and political.

But enough about all that! I was having trouble writing videogames!

Half-Life
had been well-received by the public, but behind the scenes it had felt like a desperate, last-minute salvage operation, barely cobbled together out of spare parts. Now I was floundering as I tried to figure out how we might develop a more stately, well-proportioned narrative for
Half-Life 2
. At some point, I realized that I could no longer tell if I was any good at the thing I was supposed to do. I wasn’t sure I could write anymore. I made several erratic attempts to return to my roots, to sharpen my tools, to flip through my life’s thesaurus.

I had given up any thought of writing another novel; game design had taken over that part of my brain. But it seemed like a reasonable self-compromise to write the occasional short story.

Anyway, as I said, it was a time of strife and crisis and videogames. “Sleepy Joe” was my response to 9/11, and I trust it did far less harm than invading Iraq, even though I undertook the story without the backing of any of my traditional allies.

Several stories written in this period simply channeled my idiot love of video games (“An Evening’s Honest Peril” is pure fanfic) or tried to capture the dizzying oddness of making them for a living (“The Vicar of R’lyeh”). “Sweetmeats” was the fulfillment of a long-held wish to express my debt to Roald Dahl’s
Charlie & the Chocolate Factory
, the novel that more than any other had made me want to be a writer.

Rudy Rucker’s self-published online zine
Flurb
was the perfect venue for stories I wanted to write but knew would be very hard to sell. Writing these, sending them to Rudy, felt a bit like sitting at the back of a stuffy lecture hall, cackling and drawing cartoons to share with your friend.

There was no thought of being respectable, and little thought at this point of ever again having a typical career as a writer. Hey, I was writing games for a living!

Whatever was in the air, it wasn’t typical.

SLEEPY JOE

The plan must have come to Rog fully formed that first morning, as he stepped off the elevator into the lobby of Szilliken Sharpenwright and saw the old soldier newly stationed there in his omnichair between the potted silk ferns and the coffee tables.

"Oh. My. God. I am in love."

Megan, her arms loaded with Rog-House props and paraphernalia she hadn’t had time to ditch yet, said, "You say that an awful lot for someone who styles himself completely asexual. Not to mention atheistic."

"There’s no conflict! He’s completely post-human!"

"Hm. You two even look a bit alike."

"Oh please don’t say that. You flatter me." He stalked up to the omnichair, tugging at the collar of his black turtleneck, adjusting his thick black plastic spectacles. Crouching down before the chair’s inhabitant, he put out a stick-thin finger, gingerly. "Can I touch him?"

Antoinette, the receptionist, said, "He’s not in yet, do you want his voicemail? Be my guest. I just wish he’d stop staring at me. Law offices."

Megan watched Rog examining the old soldier. They did look alike. Rog was completely hairless. He scrubbed his head with some kind of depilatory agent that had eradicated even his eyebrows. The old vet, in the omnichair which hummed and slurped and quietly took care of all his hidden functions, was similarly shorn, although in a military style. Unlike Rog, he had eyebrows like bristly fiberoptic filaments with a faint orange light playing through them. And where Rog blinked continually behind his thick lenses, the old vet’s eyes were half-open, sleepy-lidded, and actual blinks came so infrequently that it would be days before Megan had a confirmed sighting. His face, in sharp contrast to Rog’s utterly unblemished pallor, was dark, creased, chapped—like a weathered boulder sharpened by the elements, instead of worn away. But there was nothing sharp about the expression. The brain inside could have been a lump of dough, to judge by the drowsy eyes.

"Could you turn him to face the elevators?" Antoinette called across the lobby. "Gives me the creeps, him staring at me. And he’s got some kind of smell. Law offices."

Megan didn’t smell anything except perhaps a whiff of machine oil, which she supposed had something to do with the chair. But she took the handles of the chair and wheeled it around to face the elevator bank. On the back of the seat was a small embossed label: Property of Civilian Rehabilitation Foundation.

Rog stayed crouched before the chair, declaiming poetically under his breath, even as she shifted it. "Oh veteran of foreign wars unnameable, at least by me. Defender of this hoary law firm’s priceless horde of Fortune Magazines and rented modern art. I welcome you. I honor and appreciate all that you have done at great personal sacrifice to keep this country safe for me and my community access cable show, the Rog-House. As seen each Tuesday at 2 a.m. I hope I can someday prove myself worthy to call you a fan, as I am of you."

"Rog," Megan said.

"Hush a moment, we’re communing."

"Rog, I need coffee."

"Elixir of Mammon."

She turned aside. "Whatever!" And halfway down the hall to her cubicle she looked back and saw him still gazing deep into the old vet’s eyes. "I’ll drop this crap on your desk!" she said. He waved her off with a distracted hand.

At that moment, Mr. Szilliken himself arrived, striding from the elevators with the look of extreme distaste he reserved especially for Rog.

"Get away from my sentry!" he snapped.

Rog straightened up like an odd black heron on stilts, stumbling backward, barely catching himself. "Sorry, Mr. Szilliken."

"Show some respect and stay out of his face."

Megan rushed back. "Hey, Rog, you said you Acco’d that full set of exhibits last night? I need it for a rush filing. Good morning, Mr. Szilliken."

"Good morning, Miss Megan!" A smirky smile and a wink, saved especially for his favorite paralegals. She shuddered and knew it wouldn’t register. "I suppose you noticed the latest addition to the firm?"

"We were just admiring him. I think it’s great you volunteered for this."

"Well, there's a small fee involved, but it’s not much to pay for his eternal vigilance. I’m a vet myself, you know."

"You mentioned. Come on, Rog. I already called a courier."

She stuffed her load of kitty-cat ears and pig snouts on elastic bands into Rog’s arms, and hauled him away from Szilliken. She could feel the old name partner watching her ass all the way to the end of the corridor.

"Thanks for the rescue."

"You owe me a coffee."

"I owe you one anyway for keeping you up all night." He untangled a pig’s snout from the supply in his arms, and cupped it over his nose.

"No, that I do gratis," she said. "
Pro bono.
For the Rog-House."

"Oh my God, Megan," he said suddenly, sounding more nasal than usual under the pink snout. "I just had an amazing idea."

"That’s because you’ve been awake for 24 hours straight."

"I’m going to put him on my show."

"Who…oh no. You can’t do that, Rog. It’s completely crazy."

"All the more reason!"

"Rog…they’ll fire you. And worse."

"You’ll see."

* * *

Despite his protestations of post- or trans-humanity, Rog was a sloppy sentimentalist. Megan suspected he affected the robot thing for contrast. And although the old vet quickly slewed in status from waiting-room weirdo to office mascot, it was Rog who lavished actual affection on him, in the way of party hats and thrift-store scarves and doilies of only slightly yellowed lace for the arms of the omnichair. While an attendant from the Vets Administration came by twice a week (and hauled him away completely on weekends) to change the chair's canisters and replace various tubes, Rog was a constant ministering presence. He propped magazines in the vet's lap. He brought in CDs he thought the vet would appreciate and had Antoinette pipe them through the lobby. (Rog's tastes were just old fashioned enough that it seemed quite possible the vet might have listened to, and even loved, such strained melodies in his youth.) All this gave him a semblance of life, to which some reacted badly—particularly Mr. Szilliken, who found all Rog's attentions inappropriate.

"Roger!" Szilliken stepped out of the elevator, irritated to find Rog settling an embroidered sampler across the old soldier's knees. He gave a wink to Megan, then instantly shut it off and turned back to Rog. "Get away from him! I've talked to you before about tampering with my property. By the way, I'm going to need you here tonight, pulling exhibits for my hearing tomorrow in
Landauer
. Megan can give you more information. She'll be staying as well."

Megan stiffened. It was the first she had heard about it. The assignment was clearly intended as punishment for Rog, though it was not entirely out of character for Szilliken to drop all-nighters on Megan just as she was preparing to head home.

Rog flashed her a desperate look.

"But…but Mr. Szilliken, I'm supposed to tape my show tonight. I've booked time in the studio already, and—and I'm going to need Megan there as well. She's my right hand man."

"You know what I say to that," Szilliken growled. "If you can't handle the responsibility of a paralegal career, I suggest you go find yourself some form of employment that doesn’t involve a framed certificate."

Downcast, Rog chewed his pocked cheek. "No, I…I'll stay and work with Megan."

"Really? Are you sure? Because you're welcome to go home any time you wish."

"It's no problem."