At least one of the picketers realized my intent and started quoting some Bible verse at me, complete with
yeas
and
thous
and
wicked one
s.
I started walking faster, and he started quoting faster, which would have been fine except he was also moving to cut me off. I reached the door and a Rasmussem employee opened it for me, which was better service than they'd ever provided before. He was probably set there to make sure the picketers didn't physically interfere with the customers. Once the door was shut behind me, that blocked out road noise and protester noise alike.
The lobby of a Rasmussem Gaming Center looks pretty much like the lobby of a movie theater. Lots of slick posters advertising the latest games, a concession stand, booths where you can feed in tokens and play some of the older virtual reality arcade-type games. For a Saturday on a nice May afternoon, the place looked dead, though the popcorn machine was going, wafting the enticing smell of fresh popcorn all the way down to the doors where I'd come in.
But I was self-disciplined and resisted. I went up to the reception desk in the waiting area. The total immersion gaming rooms were beyond, where they hook you up to the computer—as an individual or with a group—to experience a role-playing fantasy.
There were a pair of older boys, late high school or maybe even college age, sprawled in the comfy chairs in the waiting area, looking as though they'd been there awhile. They glanced up hopefully when they spotted me, then returned to leafing through their catalogs and poking at each other and trying to look cool for the receptionist, who was tapping her computer keys with the speed, concentration, and fervor of someone who had to be playing Tetris instead of working.
She must have made a game-ending mistake for she scowled and looked up. "Welcome to Rasmussem Gaming Center," she said. She wore a gown that was a medieval style but that shimmered and slowly shifted color, going from pink to lavender to deep purple to blue. I knew that if I watched long enough, it would cycle through the rainbow. There was one of those new genetically engineered dragons on her desk, hamster-sized and unpleasant: It had been trying to tip over the receptionist's nameplate, and when I placed my gift certificate on the desk, the little beast lunged at me. "He's just playing," the receptionist assured me as I snatched my hand back. "It's his way of greeting you."
Sure. I have an uncle who'll tell you the same thing about his rottweiler.
The receptionist looked at the gift certificate. "This will get you half an hour of total immersion game time or forty-five tokens for the arcade games up front. You can play your own module, or you can join other players." She pointed toward the older boys. Her desk dragon dove and nipped at the trailing edge of her sleeve. The tiny chain that tethered him to her pen holder yanked him up short, and he hovered, his leathery wings fluttering. The receptionist ignored him. "They're trying to form up a foursome to play Dragons Doom. Interested?"
I don't like to play role-playing games with people I don't know, and besides, I figured an eighth-grade girl with a seventh-grader's figure probably wasn't exactly what they'd been hoping for, either.
"No, I'll play with computer-generated characters," I said.
The receptionist nodded. I could see her set herself on automatic pilot. "Because the computer directly stimulates your brain, you will feel as though you're actually experiencing the adventure." She must have said this about a million times a day, because she spoke quickly and without inflection, so that if I hadn't known what she was talking about, I wouldn't have known what she was talking about. "Half an hour of game time will take you through the three days of your chosen computer adventure. You will smell the smells, taste the tastes, feel the texture of the clothes you're wearing and the things you touch. You will experience cold if your computer persona is in a situation where he or she would feel cold, just as you will feel hunger and you might feel pain. If your persona is killed off, you will not, of course, feel that pain. You are guaranteed at least thirty minutes of playtime. If you get killed before your thirty minutes have been used up, you will be given another life and the adventure will automatically restart. Once you have started a life, you will be able to continue until you successfully finish or until you are killed, even if your thirty minutes runs out partway through. Any questions?"
I shook my head.
"Want to check out the promos?" She pointed to the alcoves, and her dragon once again lunged and missed.
At the promo station, the computer recognized my handprint and showed the names of the games I'd played the other times I'd been here, as well as the game I'd played when I'd visited my cousins in Baltimore and we'd gone to the Rasmussem Center there. The screen showed the dates I'd played and the scores I'd received. I pressed the button indicating I wanted to view the trailers for games that could be played in half an hour or under.
Alien Conflict I didn't even bother with, nor Dinosaur Safari. I watched the promo for Lost in Time and decided it looked too complicated. It was probably the kind of game where you had to come back four or five times before you got anywhere. Weatherly Manor was a haunted-house game that looked like a possibility, though the computer knew my birth date, which meant I would get the toned-down version for those under sixteen. A Witch's Stew sounded too young even though this list was supposed to be age specific. Sword of Talla looked interesting, and I was thinking I'd probably go with that, when I pressed the button for Heir Apparent.
The voice-over described Heir Apparent as a game of strategy and shifting alliances. "The king has died," the voice said. "Are you next in line for the throne, or next in line to die?" There was a flurry of quick scenes: a castle on a hill, an army assembling, a dragon, someone being pursued through the woods, a wizard tossing powder into the air, and an eagle forming from the powder and lunging—talons outstretched—so that he looked about to come straight out of the screen, and I instinctively jerked back. "Who can you trust?" the voice asked. The screen went dark with an ominous thud like a dungeon door slamming. A child's voice whispered, "Bad choice," and cackling laughter echoed while the name Heir Apparent flashed on the screen, then slowly faded.
I found myself more inclined toward Heir Apparent than Sword of Talla, and knew myself well enough to know why. In the montage of scenes, there had been some really good-looking guys. Probably
not
the smartest way to choose a game. On the other hand, it made no sense to pick a game specifically because it had nobody interesting-looking.
I went back to the receptionist. "Heir Apparent for girls as well as boys?"
The receptionist had been filing her nails while waiting, and now that she paused, the desk dragon leaped and clung on to the emery board, gnawing at the edge. She shook him off. "Yes," she told me, "a female character can inherit the throne and become king if she makes the right decisions."
"Is there only one set of right decisions?" I asked. That could make for a frustrating game, the kind you have to play over and over.
"Heir Apparent," she said, "is like bean soup."
"Excuse me?" I said.
"Playing Heir Apparent," she explained, "is like making bean soup, whereas Dragons Doom is more like making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich."
I had
no
idea what she was talking about.
"With Dragons Doom, all you've got to do is remember you're making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and you'll end up with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Barring, of course, dropping the bread, peanut-butter-side down, onto the floor."
"Of course," I agreed, just to humor her.
She continued, "But with Heir Apparent, you can approach in any one of several ways, and still end up with bean soup. You can use pinto beans or black beans or navy beans. You could maybe add macaroni, or not, and you'd still end up with bean soup. But there're all sorts of dangers—if you
do
decide to use macaroni but you add it too late, it's undercooked, maybe even crunchy. Add it too early, and it becomes mushy. You can have too much salt, not enough pepper. Tarragon might help, or it might make the whole thing bitter." She leaned forward confidentially. "And that's not even getting into the question of boil or simmer."
Just my luck to get an explanation from someone who didn't know when to give up a bad metaphor. "Not just one set of right decisions?" I interpreted. "Okay, I'll go for it."
Just then her desk dragon pooped on the desk.
I should have taken it as an omen.
Rasmussem Enterprises must have a vice president in charge of bad smells.
It makes you wonder—or at least it makes
me
wonder. What kind of person takes a job where, when you go home every night and your family asks, "How did the day go, dear?" you answer, "Oh, very nice, thank you. Some kid I don't know paid a couple weeks' allowance money to get hooked up to the computer to enjoy a nice fantasy game, and I got to plunk her into a pile of sheep dung"?
I woke up thinking I'd been set down in a barn, which is sort of a Rasmussem specialty, I guess. But I could hear birds chirping, and I could feel grass prickling me through my clothes, and when I opened my eyes, there was blue sky and a warm sun above me. I could hear sheep bleating not too far off.
I sat up and was amazed to find nothing under me except the grass.
Which was when I realized that the stink was coming from me.
My shapeless, scratchy, rough-spun, and many-patched dress of unbleached wool was a far cry from the rainbow-hued gown of the Rasmussem receptionist. The people who work for Rasmussem have a pretty weird sense of humor.
Why do I put myself through this?
I wondered. When my dad, who rarely calls except for the week before my birthday and the week before Christmas, had asked—through his secretary—what kind of gift certificate he should send for my birthday present, I could have named a clothes store or an electronics store or a bookstore. But no, I asked for Rasmussem, and I'd crossed a CPOC picket line to get here.
On the other hand, as soon as I stopped sending mental hate messages to Rasmussem, the computer conditioning kicked in. My mind filled with details of memories I'd never had. The effect is like holding two pieces of tracing paper up to the light, one on top of the other: At first all you can see is a jumble, but as you concentrate on one drawing—or on one life, as the case may be—then suddenly you can make it out by ignoring the pieces that don't fit.
So I ignored those parts that were Giannine Bellisario, eighth grader at St. John the Evangelist School. I ignored Rasmussem Enterprises and its overpriced computer that lets you see, hear, feel, taste, and—yes, thank you very much—
smell
a fantasy adventure in quarter-hour segments that seem to last for days.
I let myself become Janine de St. Jehan, sheepherder. Along with the identity came all sorts of snippets of information that I'd have known if I'd been born and raised in the village of St. Jehan.
Most of that information had to do with sheep.
If one of those woolly critters came over here, I could milk it, shear it, cure it of ringworm by an infusion of ringwort, castrate it, or help it in case of a breech birth. Not all at once to the same animal, of course.
"Janine!" a voice called. "Janine, come back to the house."
A dog came bounding up to me, black and white, with floppy ears. Did animals in this world talk? No, my implanted memory told me—well, mostly not. And definitely not in this case. This was merely Dusty, who helped me with the sheepherding. Dusty was old and her energy came in bursts, but you wouldn't guess that from the way she put her front paws on my shoulders and licked my face to greet me after my midmorning nap.
"Hiya, Dusty," I said at the same time I tried to fend her off.
The voice called again: "Janine!" And this time I recognized it as my mother's voice.
That distant, half-buried part of me that was my true self surfaced long enough to bark,
Ha! Fat chance.
I tried to bury me even deeper.
Play the game,
I told myself.
Did you pay big bucks just to find fault with everything?
My real mother lives in New York because that's where her employer wants her to be, so I only see her one weekend a month during the school year, when she comes and stays with my grandmother and me. That, and for two weeks during the summer, which—apparently—is all she can take of me in her New York apartment, which is, as she says, "cozy for one." I told myself not to be bitter about my mother's attitude toward me. It is, after all, better than my father's: My father demanded a paternity test before the divorce settlement, when I was five. And—excuse me very much—but while five might be too young to catch all the nuances, I didn't need nuances to understand that my father wasn't willing to love me, much less pay child support, unless my mother could prove I was his.
But none of this, I told myself, was true in
this
lifetime, so none of it was important. In
this
lifetime I lived with my mother, named Solita, and my father, Dexter, who was a peat cutter, and my three younger sisters and two younger brothers. And we all loved each other unconditionally.
I stood, despite Dusty's attempts to knock me over. Instinctively my eyes found the right hut out of a cluster of eight—the entirety of the village of St. Jehan in all its glory. All the huts were made of straw and held together with sheep you-can-probably-guess-what. There was my mother, nearly as broad as she was tall, waving to me from the front yard, a swirl of chickens and small children stirring up the dirt around her skirts. "Stay, Dusty," I ordered the dog. "Guard the sheep."
Dusty lay down on the spot I'd vacated, resting her head on her paws. I assumed that if a wolf or thieves came, she would know what to do.
I waved my woolen cap at my mother and started down the hill.