400 Boys and 50 More (73 page)

For the longest time Katherine failed to realize the change that had come over me. The Reaches were utterly dark, so I was indistinguishable from the rest of it. Her hand rested warm and secure in mine, apparently not noticing how mine continued to grow cold and even insubstantial. Our route grew easier for me;

I felt as if I were floating, sometimes tugging Katherine along behind me, sometimes being towed by her, as if I were a black balloon drifting along behind. Then, climbing higher, we entered the realm of the yawning mouths, those tunnel openings that had frightened me on our descent but which now beckoned, so that I wished to follow their contours inward to the deeper completion of the dark. But a small voice, or a collection of voices, a droning hive of sleeping voices recently awakened, spoke to me, promising a larger emptiness somewhere ahead, a great expanse more suitable to my vastness, something I could swell to fill and feed upon and thoroughly engulf, as it had been my dreaming desire to do for as long as I’d lain bottled in the inner realm.

Katherine saw it first, as I watched her. A grey speck of starlight far above us, dim rays falling down the ceiling that had been my upper limit for impossible ages. I watched her outline dawning ahead of me, her graceful silhouette, the edges of her downy cheeks, the polished crystal convexities of her eyes, oblique rays of light scattering over them, promising immensities, veritable oceans of light just ahead. We were almost there. The nearness of our escape quickened her step and her breathing, and I realized that she was laughing as she pulled me along. Laughing so loud that she couldn’t hear the sound I made, until she glanced back at me and, in the light from above, saw what I had become.

She let go of me then. It was almost painful, and I regretted it. I had grown so used to Katherine that I had almost become her. But now all gentleness fled. Her screaming fell harsh upon the rock as she turned and rushed away from me, toward the bright round opening no more than a hundred feet ahead, the gap through which sunlight streamed freely, that fissure with shards of carved and mortared stone scattered at its base, the broken remains of the Threshold itself, its lintel carved with sigils no one could remember how to read, nearly erased by time and then finished off completely by the helpful excavators.

A hundred feet, and she ran fast, with a good start ahead of me on the narrow trail.

Yet I slipped around her easily and passed through the neck of the evil stone bottle whose exterior was so thickly inhabited by those ignorant of its interior; whose contents had been a black wine aging slowly in the dark, growing more potent with each passing cycle. I slipped out and felt myself expanding, much grown in strength since the time of my confinement, all my voices rising rapturously, my millionfold wings unfurling, black sails hurling me outward into space as they caught and quickened in the all-enveloping—but all too easily smothered—light.

And poor Katherine, coming up to her salvation, found only a black sky, curdling, and me in it.

* * *

“Nether Reaches” copyright 2106 by Marc Laidlaw. Read aloud at a WeirdCon circa 1996. First appeared in print at marclaidlaw.com in 2016.

TOTAL CONVERSION

On his way home from CompUSA with the latest overdrive processor and another 128 megs of RAM chips in the tiny trunk of his Alfa Romeo, Barton Needles cruised slowly past the high school and gazed through the chainlink fence at his so-called peers. It was a scene that should have set him tingling with nostalgia, like something out of a PG-13 teen romance movie: sociable kids taking lunch in the quadrangle, running laps on the track, throwing themselves at football dummies, laughing and shouting. But as the bell rang, calling the students back to classes, Barton mouthed the word “Losers,” and stepped on the gas.

At home, he slung his backpack under the computer desk and nudged the mouse to kill the screensaver, which played continuous looped demos of his personal online
Gorefest
victories. A dozen e-mails sprang onto the screen, all received since that morning. He idly scrolled and deleted with one hand while gnawing at a tortilla smeared with peanut butter and jelly—he needed fuel before getting to work under the hood.

There were three messages from GoreX: more optimistic notes on business plans and the revised royalty offer for the
Skullpulper
total conversion. Total bullshit was more like it. He would never work for them again, despite the latest personal pleading e-mail from Tom Ratchip, GoreX’s owner: “Bart, I am asking you as a friend and as your biggest fan to please reconsider your unreasonable position.”

It took him about five seconds to type in, one-fingered, “TTML, AW” and sent the message.
Talk To My Lawyer, Ass-Wipe
. In other words, his dad.

Ironically, Ratchip had forwarded a handful of semiliterate messages from delirious gamers, praising
Skullpulper
in what passed for gushing flattery. “wOOpee! Man thass kewl!” “Barton Needles is GOD!” “wtf is Needles doin workin on TCs? IMHO he shud have have his own fkn company—and prolly will!”

My sentiments exactly,
Barton thought; and how odd of Tom to send that one along. He “prolly” thought it was magnanimous of him.

He deleted the fan transmissions as fast as he could scan them, holding back only on the last message, caught by its surprisingly formal structure—not to mention the absence of spelling errors.

With stunning architecture, fantastic textures, terrifying new monsters and brilliant new skins for existing monsters, everything about
Skullpulper
is an improvement on the original game. This is the best Total Conversion we have seen of any game. Given that it is a TC of
Gorefest
, the reigning blockbuster, this means that
Skullpulper
is now the best 3D game in the world. Period.

Barton leaned a bit closer to the screen, cramming the last of the tortilla into his mouth. Was this an advance review?—something from an upcoming issue of
PC Gamer
, maybe?

Then he saw that it hadn’t been forwarded from GoreX after all. The return address read simply:
“[email protected].”
Mildly weird. Orgs were generally, what, nonprofit groups, religious institutions, stuff like that? The thought of a
Skullpulper
fan heading up an organized religion was amusing. Like getting fanmail from the Pope.

He continued scrolling through the letter, but the praise of
Skullpulper
was confined to one paragraph. The next one was far more intriguing:

Because of your obvious brilliance, Mr. Needles, we are writing to inquire as to your team’s availability for another total conversion project.

My team,
he thought.
That would be me, myself and I.

We have acquired from a third party developer the code to what we consider an extraordinary game. The original program has never been released, and due to legal complications cannot be published or otherwise distributed in its current form. While the source code may not be altered in any manner, we believe that would make your task all the easier. You need not concern yourself with programming or behavior issues, but merely convert the outward appearance of existing game elements. We believe you could accomplish this quite rapidly, and we are prepared to pay extremely well for your services. If you would kindly respond to this e-mail with a simple affirmation (and the appropriate information regarding your financial institution), we will be delighted to demonstrate our intentions by immediate electronic deposit of a one-third advance into any account you specify. Once you have verified the availability of the funds and consented to this project, we will forward everything you need to commence the conversion. You may use your own utilities if you prefer; but we will provide all textures, skins, and entity models for conversion. You may work independently and at your own speed (keeping in mind that time is of the essence), transferring files to us only when you are pleased with them. We will compile the files and, of course, take full responsibility for the ultimate conversion.

Barton was sitting down by the time he’d read this far. Could this be real money? The GoreX boys were a bunch of cheapshit assholes. The artists and programmers were okay, but a bunch of suits had taken over the company since he’d first agreed to do the conversion, and they had done nothing but try to chisel him down and cheat him out of a profit from the moment they’d realized they had a wildfire hit on their hands—something that might give the original game,
Gorefest
, a run for its money.

If these Noware people were serious, he was prepared to put together something that would blow away even
Skullpulper
. It would be supremely satisfying to snatch the ground out from GoreX.

He’d have to top himself, work harder than he had on
Skullpulper
, and of course it all depended on the raw materials he had to work with. He couldn’t imagine how some nonprofit organization had come up with decent code—let alone code competitive with what was already on the market—but they seemed serious. No harm in seeing how serious.

Barton composed a one-letter reply—“Y”—and regretted having to mar its perfect symmetry by appending his clunky account information.

At 4:17 he sent the message. At 4:26, when he walked back into his room, gouging a cold spoon into a pint of espresso ice cream, a reply was waiting in the mailbox:
“Electronic deposit complete.”

Was this for real? No organization worked that fast. There were committees, accountants, people who filled out the requests and submitted them to others who had authority, and on and on.

He connected to his bank. Checking deposits. There was something new, today’s date, timeclocked at 4:22 p.m.

At first the amount itself didn’t register. Until he saw the dollar sign in front of it, he thought it was his account number. It had almost that many digits.

* * *

“Well, the money’s clear, but I can’t get a lead on these Noware people,” his father announced the next evening over dinner.

“Keep trying,” Barton instructed. “I’ll start work on the TC. Put that money somewhere nice and warm where it can breed. I won’t touch it yet. I’ll be too busy. This is the last sit-down dinner I’ll be eating with you two for a while.”

“What about school?” his mother asked. “Have you given any thought to going back?”

“Did you see the size of that deposit?” his father asked. “At this point, for what Barton wants to do, school has become irrelevant."

“This conversation has become irrelevant,” Barton said, pushing away from the table.

He went to his room and organized his desk to the tune of explosions and screams from
Gorefest
battles. He meant to replace the screensaver with a
Skullpulper
deathmatch, but so far he hadn’t done much online battling in his own game. The TC had only been available for a week; he’d been busy.

He decided that before beginning on the Noware project, he would treat himself to one last
Skullpulper
battle—one that would leave his name ringing in the ears of the Pulper community. It was time to liquefy a few skulls.

He pulled on his Intraspexion 3D goggles and connected to GoreWorld, the network of servers dedicated to endless
Gorefest
and
Skullpulper
online wars. It took about a second to find a battle in progress; he mouse-clicked on a maelstrom icon and was sucked right in.

“Lord Needles enters fray,” said a little voice in the headset, barely audible above the screams of his first victim. He was in the best of his own deathmatch levels, “The Killing Floor”—three stories of metal ramps and catwalks with adjoining corridors that wove in and out of each other. The Killing Floor was a Möbius strip, a hollow hypercube; you could walk through a gate at one end of a room and find yourself coming in at the far side of the same room. There were ten players already in the map, and as soon as news spread that Lord Needles had jumped in, the number of players joining from other sites began to soar. It topped at thirty-six—the max limit for this level—and by then things were getting crowded.

Lord Needles cleared the mob as fast as it respawned.

From his first victim—a startled blur of neon colors with a human face, quickly transformed into beautifully rendered chunks of flying meat—he had liberated a stomp-gun and an ammo pack. As orange streaks of firebolts began to seek him on his ledge, he spied a lift just rising past. He leapt aboard, riding the platform two levels up, clearing catwalks of upright figures and strewing the room with a rain of bloody meat.

Within seconds he had the high-ground. A Tesla-cannon floated in midair, just out of reach, but for Lord Needles it was money in the bank. A normal jump would fall short, and leave you plunging to the Killing Floor below, which rippled periodically with gnashing spikes as the walls closed in and caught anyone not fortunate enough to have rocket-jumped onto a ledge. Lord Needles turned his back to the gun, slid until his heels were at the edge of empty air, then fired the stomper at the nearest wall. The recoil blew him backward, all the way across the gap; in midflight, with a clang, he snagged the Tesla, then came down smack on a suit of glowing armor that snapped into place around him. He held his fire until the level was full again, crawling with gamers hoping for a shot at him. They’d all go to bed happy tonight, bragging of how they’d actually been reduced to ground-round by Lord Needles himself.

The world is good,
he thought.
This one, anyway.

* * *

“Who’s building your levels?” he queried n01. “If you want an exciting, comprehensive package, full of traps and murderous surprises, I’m a skilled mapper as well. I can do more than just straight conversion.”

“We understand that you are an excellent level designer,” n01 replied via e-mail. “However, the world is already complete in every respect. It merely needs total conversion, element by element. Please restrict yourself to that task.”