The Game (21 page)

  I grab a book, not even bothering to see what kind it is, and move to the table beside him. It’s often a him. His hair is white and dirty, standing up in some places and flat against his head in others. He looks to be about 60, but I guarantee you he’s younger. On the table sits a beat-up tan bag, zipper open, stray items threatening to fall out. Crumpled pieces of paper, a small, broken umbrella, dozens of worn pencils of various lengths. A black plastic bag is stuffed into the corner. It’s chaos inside that bag, but not to him. He wears a trenchcoat, faded and worn. He wears a stained sweater over a splotchy, yellowed dress shirt; both are stained and threadbare. His beard is scruffy, and he smells, I can smell him from where I sit at the next table. The sour smell of days-old sweat and unbrushed teeth. Papers are strewn across the entire table, some fresh, some crumpled and stained. There is a small pile of notebooks stacked within reach of his right hand; every once in a while his hand absently strays to touch them, lingering for a few moments before returning to hold the paper he is furiously working on.

  I open my book and pretend to read it as I wait for him to start talking. He looks like a talker.

  After a brief period, I’m rewarded for my patience as he blurts out in a loud, confused-sounding voice, “
Buoyancy!
It’s all about
water!
” then he flings the sheet across the table, scrambling through the messy pile he grabs another full page with purpose and looks down at it.

  “It’s the weight of water that makes it difficult to walk on,” he says before reaching to open one of the notebooks from the pile. He opens it and I get a brief glance inside
—
the most detailed pencil drawing of a brain that I’ve ever seen, but I know what a brain looks like and this drawing has some tiny additions to it. Quickly he stands up and walks away, the book hanging open loosely at his side. He mumbles as he walks, and I slowly begin to count.

When I reach the count of 22 he appears back at the table and sits down, placing the book on top of the others and grabbing a pencil to start colouring another blank page. As he colours, his loud talk begins to come faster, mostly nonsense but interrupted with sentences of pure brilliance. All around him the occupants of the library go about their lives, politely ignoring the crazy man who sits in their presence.

  He repeats his ritual twice more, grabbing the top notebook and walking around for exactly 22 seconds before returning to his seat and beginning to work on a new sheet of paper. When he gets up and walks away for the third time I quickly move to sit at his table. I have 20 seconds before he returns, so I sit politely looking at the papers, careful not to touch or disturb any. I see some extremely advanced material laying here. The most intelligent people on the planet would need help deciphering most of it.

  He comes back and sits down, not giving me any indication that he sees me. That’s normal. I sit quietly watching and listening. He’s fascinating. Broken. Brilliant, most likely, and a remarkable source of knowledge, if you know how to get it out of him. I happen to specialize in that.

  He works quietly on his pages, saying nothing, which tells me he’s aware of my presence on some level.

  When he returns from his next walk, I decide it’s time to break the silence. “Buoyancy, huh?” I ask.

  He doesn’t look up as he mutters, “The water’s too heavy to walk on.”

  “Show me,” I say.

  He looks up and meets my eyes. Then he looks around, first to his left and then to his right.  Slowly he reaches for a notebook from the bottom of the pile. Licking his lips nervously, he opens the book with shaky hands and passes it to me. When the book is touching my hands I break eye contact and look at it. In the neatest, most elegant handwriting is written an extremely complex set of mathematical equations. I grin because I recognize them. Slowly I read it and turn the page, finding the next full of the same type of equations. He looks at me hopefully and when I nod he sighs in relief. I hold up my finger for silence.

  Finally I look at him. He’s been watching me quietly like a student watching a teacher mark the final exam, unsure if they will pass or fail. “Do you know what this is?” I ask him in my friendliest tone.

  He shakes his head and points to his skull. “The water’s too heavy,” he says.

  I reach forward and touch his skull gently, closing my eyes as I open myself up to the energy I command. The coldness from my hand covers his head, telling me what I need to know and giving him some small relief. He leans back in his chair, appearing normal for the first time. “Thank you,” he says, tears forming in his eyes.

  “Don’t thank me,” I say. “It’ll come back in a few seconds. But if you come with me I can try to help you.”

  He nods quickly. They are so quick to believe the lies. But it’s necessary, and in the long run I
will
help him. When I’ve retrieved everything I can, I’ll probably help him escape this broken avatar shell he’s trapped in. His type of broken is special, though. He’s more valuable this way than he ever was as a normal person.

  I pull out my phone and dial a number, watching him pleasantly. “I’ve got one,” I say, and hang up. Leaning towards him, I flash him a smile. “Somewhere in your head, my friend, you’ve been doing something very special. You’ve been spying on the Mainframe and stealing its secrets. Very powerful secrets that now belong to me.” I tap the notebook and grin. “We are going to do some truly evil things together.”

Chapter 39

  There are dangerous moments inside the Game where players can either excel and continue on a high scoring path, or succumb to temptation and be lost. One of the biggest threats to a player is the opportunity to become a farmer. The term ‘farmer’ comes from old-style video games, and it refers to the process of doing a simple task over and over again, gaining a small reward each time the task is complete.

  Here’s an example of how it works; there are small animals roaming around on a little playing field. Each animal is easy to slay, and when it is destroyed, you gain a small amount of game money for your efforts. There are bigger creatures to slay, but that involves more time and risk with the possibility that you may die, and it’s game over. So the player decides to be safe and spend time killing the tiny creatures. Their reasoning is that they can remain in the game and, over time, acquire as much game money playing safely as they could taking large risks and trying to bring down the big monster. They begin to methodically kill the small, easy animals. After an hour, they think about quitting for the day, but they see how much game money they have acquired and think, ‘I’m doing very good! Perhaps I will stay for another hour and
really
get some cash.’ They do this and after another hour, just as they are about to quit for the day, a tiny creature gives more than just a small amount of game money — it drops an item which the player can sell to other players for even more money.

  The player can’t stop now — what if that tiny creature over there has another one of these great treasures? The player convinces himself that he can afford to play for just another hour, and as simple as that, the player has become a farmer. He will come back each and every day to do the same thing, kill tiny creatures and earn small amounts of game coin, selling the rare extra items when (if) it appears again. Each day the farmer will spend more time playing, mindlessly clicking the mouse as his eyes glaze over and he passes time stuck in an endless, boring loop. Soon he will tell his friends that he’s too busy to go out with them, instead staying home to farm in the game. All he will think about when he’s not playing the game is the game. His work performance will decline and his social life will disappear. That’s farming from the old style video games. It almost destroyed our society.

  Farming in the Game is much worse.

  A promising player does well at the beginning of her play, then her avatar becomes an adult and moves out on its own. Her avatar has many plans and dreams and goals inside the Game, all a combination of credits spent and strategies formulated before beginning the play. On the way to her goal of becoming a doctor, she takes a part time job at a factory to help pay for schooling and the bills. She soon believes that working at the factory, while paying less than a doctor earns, certainly is easier and does add up. She gets some overtime and sees her pay increase more than she had hoped for. Soon she decides to abandon her dreams of becoming a doctor and remains at the factory. She’s become a farmer. If you were following this player, you’ll quickly lose interest as she becomes a boring, automated creature. Over time, her life will become a depressing, sad drama that ends with an unviewed and droll play.

  The Game is full of farmers in so many diverse farming situations. Drugs, miserable relationships, avatars stuck in jobs and unhappy yet unwilling to change, gambling addictions… the list goes on and on and on. Millions of individuals are caught in a trap and will never escape.

  Be careful to avoid this trap. There are credits to spend so that, during your play, people and events will come into your life to help prevent you from becoming a farmer. Spend the credits so that this happens, and spend the credits so you recognize the danger when it attempts to fold you into its soft, warm, destructive embrace.

  The most important lesson to learn from the Game is this: don’t be a farmer. It’s a lesson very few ever learn.

  Please be one of the few who do.

  Excerpt from Gamer’s Manual - Final Thoughts -

   a Personal Message from Brandon Strayne

Chapter 40

  Brandon leaned back in his seat, staring at the monitor and slowly drumming his fingers on the desk. Hack sat behind him, quietly looking over Brandon’s right shoulder at the scene playing out on the screen. They were viewing Danielle in real time, something that was supposed to be impossible.

  Ordinary citizens of Tygon believed that they watched events unfold in the Game in real time, but only Game Masters and handful of top level designers knew the truth. A one hour delay between the Game and Tygon had always secretly existed. This built in feature provided some interesting options for the men and women running the Game, specifically the ability to install improvements and patches seamlessly without interrupting the viewer’s experience. The Game was not meant to ever be powered down, players inside would die or be lost, and the virtual world would cease to exist. The one hour delay allowed improvements and maintenance to be conducted without interruption of service or any stoppage of viewing. Inside the Game the occasional avatar would sometimes experience déjà vu or other odd glitches that were a result of the maintenance, but no one made any fuss over the small hiccups when they occurred. The time delay also made it difficult to hack into the Game. A hacker inserting a rogue program into the Game was very easy to detect and eliminate. Mainframe detected hacks as time variations, and quickly neutralized them.

  Brandon had designed this feature into the Game, but he considered all these benefits secondary to his original purpose, which was to give him the sole advantage of being able to see things as they happened in real time. Brandon had kept this a closely guarded secret for thirty years, and now that he could finally communicate with players inside the Game, he had been forced to share the information with a few trusted individuals.

  Once they were sure it worked properly, Brandon decided to make contact with two Eternals. It was good to talk with Stephanie and Raphael again; he’d missed them both so much. Because of his busy schedule and the demands of running a world, Angelica used the apparatus far more often than he did. That would change once he began talking to Trew. Brandon would soon be spending a significant amount of time in the communication apparatus.

  A contact team, comprised of Angelica, Raphael, Stephanie, Hack, and Brandon, decided to wait until Trew was 20 years old to contact him. They were concerned that contacting him earlier than that might damage his avatar’s mind, or perhaps confuse him and knock him off the carefully planned path that was set for his play. Yesterday was the first attempt at contacting Trew, and it had resulted in a frustrating failure. Hack looked at the information and reported the results to Brandon. Now he sat quietly, processing his thoughts, watching Danielle go through her daily routine on the monitor.

  “He doesn’t seem to be too interested in meditating, Hack,” Brandon said.

  “I know.”

  “There has to be another way to get through to him. You told me prayer could work, too. He seems to be closing his eyes and praying lately. At least that’s what it looks like to me.”

  Hack shook his head. “I said prayer matches the brain waves of meditating, but we can’t get in on that, Brandon. I’ve been spending all my time trying to break into that avenue, but it’s locked solid.”

  “Mainframe,” Brandon said, closing his eyes.

  “Likely,” Hack said. “And if it is, then I can’t access it.”

  “It’s a computer. You’re the world's best hacker.  It’s your
name.
” Brandon said.

  “It’s a god inside its own closed and secure system of the Game. I could break into it, sure. But the danger to the rest of the system is too great. What if I got in and accidently deleted key commands?”

  “Okay,” Brandon said. “Then what do we do?”

  “Well, the easiest thing to do is get Trew to meditate,” Hack shrugged. “We know that works, but he needs to get his brain into a stable alpha pattern for at least 15 minutes, and that can take months or years of practice to be able to get into a stable pattern for that long, depending on the avatar.”

  Brandon waved his hand dismissively. A few months or years was acceptable. It would only be a few days of Tygon time. Brandon didn’t have faith that Trew would ever take up the practice. He tapped he screen. “What about her?” he asked. “She’s been studying Eastern medicine for a few years, and she’s been meditating since she was a little girl, right?”