Spontaneous Fiction


Winston wasn't named for a Lord or an Earl, he was named for the cigarette, just like his brother, Nike, wasn't named for a goddess, but for a shoe. Nike didn't like to fight, but he never passed up a chance because he thought he might learn to like it. He never did, but because he was always ready to fight, other people like him thought he was starting it, and they disappeared down a rabbit hole of tweedle de and tweedle dum. Nike had a lot of pain from where he'd been kicked, stabbed, and beaten with a billy club.

Winston was singing a song about how in the center of fear things dissolve into chaos and men turn to wolves and roam the streets in packs. He didn't believe in anything at all. He just knew that fear is universal, and his wasn't more important than the next person's. Once he began to accept other people's fears they quit hiding and began coming to him like stray cats to a dairy.

"What are you afraid of?" Earl would ask.

"I don't have that kind of separation," Winston would say

"What kind of separation?"

"I forget."

"You forget?"

"That's right, I forget."

"She-at."

They would change lanes and stop at the traffic lights while around them swirled a pervasive enveloping typhoon of products for sale. They didn't think about it because they'd never been outside of it. They were inside a giant store that stretched from sea to shining sea, and they kept on voting it into existence, the way a devotee of Emile Coue would repeat the autosuggestion. The products had surrounded them and insinuated themselves into every empty space, forming collages in their relentless struggle for shelf space and placement.

Winston and Nike couldn't park the car because, for one thing, there were lines of cars waiting like refugees for spaces to open up, and for another thing they were working a game. They didn't know about the people who were playing the game. All they knew was a man showed up at the school and told them about opportunities in the gaming industry, that a young person who joins a game learns structure.

Neither of the boys understood anything about why they were contracting to drive around the city all day and be paid for it, all they understood was somebody wanted to give them money. They drove around all day anyway, so why not get paid to follow somebody else's twists and turns? It was arbitrary, really, where they were going. Their mother was dead. She had been named Ivory and she claimed to have had sex only twice, each time conceiving one boy. "I was ninety-nine and ninety-seven one hundredths percent pure," would be her punch line, and she would always laugh at the joke she'd told a thousand times. She had the peculiar idiocy of what were called, on the street, rifts. They were one trick ponies, jokes retold and gags worn thin. Usually their credit was revoked and they were treated as non-persons until, like the victims of voo doo, they believed in their own invisibility, and obediently died.

For their children, there was just the surrounding container of commerce, of products flowing out of stores and down along the streets and riding sample cases door to door. It was like an ocean they'd sunk down into, and Proteus, ruler of the deep, moved through the procession as a shape shifter, changing his identity as deftly as changing his mind. "Gaming is the fastest growing industry in the world, young lady, and there's no limit. Opportunities are through the roof for somebody willing to be part of the programming."

They were on magnetics. They'd never used magnetics before, because they were expensive. You just programmed your stops and moved your car onto one of the magnetic lanes. The computers planned your route, moved you along, and decided where to store the car at the stops. Some people thought everything would become magnetic drive, but there was a lot of resistance. Now the computer precision movement of cars on the mag lanes was like a geometric painting inside a tornado, as the public lanes became more crowded, rude and jammed with traffic.

As they moved into the inner circles, where the game became subject to increasingly exacting rules, Nike and Winston felt a sense of elation. They didn't talk about it, other than acknowledging it.

"You feel that don't you?"

"You got to be dead you don't feel that."

What they were actually feeling was the effects of the air freshener in the car, which was oblong and dark blue, with the logo of "Real World Gaming" on both sides. The pine scent was a molecular space ship in which alien compounds combined and created an enhanced confidence and the elimination of self-doubt. It was legal for use in the game, because security knew where and when it was being used. Even as the brothers approached the depot, leaving the car in the illegal space determined by the game, they hadn't yet caught on to their predicament. Nike still assumed they'd been told the truth; it was just a game and their robbing the depot was no more real than if they were cast in a movie. Winston was beginning to wonder how many levels there were in the game.

There wasn't any way to know that because they couldn't go back once they'd started riding the magnetics into the central districts. The only way they could move was forward, looking for a way out up ahead of them, like searching for light in a cave. Right now it felt good to be inside the depot and moving through mile long aisles of products, cans and bottles and anything that could be imagined that might hook a wandering eye and reel it to the register. They went unchallenged all the way to the back of the store.

Three butchers came out of the employee lounge wearing belts with a boning knife on the left and a cleaver on the right. "Cutters," Nike said. The most frightening thing about cutters was that they killed and carved every day, so they did it without emotion or conscience. When they ate lunch they talked about the best way to filet a fish or drain the blood from a goat. And because they had accepted money from Real World, they were obliged to act when they felt the prod current. It was enough of a current to contract the muscles in the abdomen for a moment but not enough to hurt. If they didn't act, then the pain current would come. So they acted according to the rules of the game, of kill or be killed.

Even as they got hit by the burner Nike pulled from under his long coat, they kept coming, with that humorless smile a butcher has when he's raising a small sledge hammer to deliver a killing blow to the front of the head. Nike dropped two of them with slashing shots to the legs and the third one was on top of Winston before he blew it off himself with a sandgun blast. The sand blew a concave depression in the chest where it hit, and the heart was visible, now, pumping blood uselessly into the air. The butcher sat there, his weak blue eyes staring without expression at the two intruders. Then he went blank.

"She-at yes," Nike said.

"That was a throw away," Winston said. "We've got guns and they had knives."

"But they were butchers."

"So what? That's nothing but the farming underground."

They moved deeper into the stacks of boxes and crates filled with merchandise, some of it moving around in stacks on fork lifts, some of it being unloaded off containers that started out in China and India, Japan and Korea. The object of the game was known only to the player; they were just employed elements with one rule, and that was becoming one with the game program.

It was quiet in the row they were walking down, and they moved silently, scanning behind themselves and forward, sweeping the visual field for motion. Because they were inside the game they couldn't see this as an artificial lull in the action. The game was on hold. The player was taking a call. Until he returned to the console nothing much would happen except the visual scanning along endless rows of stored merchandise.

The call was from the woman he'd known was going to break it off with him. He could feel it coming, so he didn't react with any surprise. "Whatever you wish," he said, "I have no hold on you." He felt nothing, but made no connection between this and the ending every relationship within months. Those were the long ones.

When he returned to the console he switched to Character View and looked out through the eyes of Winston, who was scanning with a short barreled Taser Fireball automatic shotgun. Something moved in the shadows near a loading dock. It was security. He loosed a ball of electricity the size of a melon toward it and watched without emotion as the form of a man sizzled with energy for a moment, then toasted and crumbled into a pile of grey ash.

"Sweet."

"There's no way out of here is there, Nike?"

"No way back, I know that." Security forces were pouring into the warehouse, now, called by a silent alarm. They wore body armor and carried enough firepower to razz the place to the ground if they loosed it all at once.

"Well, there's no way forward, either."

"Then is is where we make a stand I guess."

The Player laid down a withering field of fire with the Burner, but that wasn't what he paid for. It was the feel of the body ripping apart as it was hit by the security forces, the numbness of the shock and the elongation of the last moment of perception, the awful yawning emptiness opening up to swallow him. Then he was back behind his console; the game was over. He'd only made it to level three again.

At the Depot Superstore three of the employees of the meat department were killed by drug addicts who were apparently trying to find a back entrance to the pharmacy for an armed robbery of controlled substances. They were killed in a confrontation with store security officers who said the men were armed and refused to put down their weapons. Nothing was found on the men except a Taser gun and a flashlight, but an inquiry ruled that the behavior of security forces was reasonable use of force because either object could be mistaken for a gun in a confrontation. "These are split second decisions," the store's public relations spokeswoman said. "The house takes pushes."

The next day a small ad appeared on Craigslist, in the help wanted section: "Gamers needed. Will train."

Posted: Thu - December 28, 2006 at 03:06 PM