Press Start to Play (13 page)

Artie let out a slow breath. “Whew,” he said.

I smacked him in the back of the head. “What did you type?” I demanded.

“The only thing I could type. When a cuckoo that isn’t Sarah or Grandma Angela asks what she can do for you, the answer is ‘leave.’ ”

I blinked. And then I laughed. “God, I love you.”

“I know,” said Artie, and he clicked on another puzzle.

What felt like hours later, we were still playing, and the darkness still held absolute dominion over the room. The giggles from the shadows had been replaced by moans, except when they were replaced by hellish screams that made it difficult for us to concentrate on the puzzles we were struggling to solve. The cuckoo woman did not return. I had to view that as a good thing, since otherwise, it would have been proof that we had already lost, and that the game was just toying with us. I didn’t like being toyed with.

“I need to pee,” said Artie glumly.

“Yeah, and my feet hurt,” I said. “How many puzzles do you think we have left?”

“I don’t know. Every time I think we’re done, two more pop up.” Artie hesitated before asking the question I’d been fighting not to ask myself for the last four puzzles: “Do you think they’re ever going to end? Because I’m not sure starving to death in my bedroom is any better than being sucked into a prison dimension.”

“We won’t starve to death,” I said. “We’ll die of dehydration long before that point.”

“I knew there was a reason you were my favorite cousin.” The fear in Artie’s voice was getting clearer with every word. “Annie…what if this never ends?”

“It’ll end. You’ll see. We just need to figure out why we’re playing. You posted about Sarah, and there’s a cuckoo in the game: I think it’s pretty clear that the cuckoos sent this for you, after getting the hidebehinds to program it, which explains the fairness. You said you downloaded this from your forum? That means it’s pretty new, right?”

“Yeah. It’s still being play-tested. I guess if I never log on again, they know it works.”

“Okay. So that means they’re not completely sure it does what it’s supposed to. They’re testing. We’re going to have to track them down and kick their teeth in after we get done with this, you realize, but…have you tried hitting ‘escape’?”

“What.” It wasn’t a question. It was a statement of utter disbelief, like I had just said the most ridiculous thing anyone had ever uttered.

“They can’t have played all the way through every time they decided to test a new puzzle. There has to be a way out.”

“Annie—”

“Can you think of a better one?”

There was a long pause before Artie said, sounding somewhat sullen, “If we get sucked into a localized equivalent of hell for a hundred years, I am blaming you.”

“Maybe we can find Grandpa Thomas while we’re there.” I squeezed his shoulder. “Just try it.”

Artie sighed, raised his hand, and pressed the “escape” key. Words appeared on the screen:

EXIT AND SAVE?

Y
/
N

“Oh my God say yes Artie say yes
right now
,” I said.

“Yes!” Artie stabbed his finger at the keyboard. The screen went black. The moaning in the shadows stopped.

The lights came back on.

Without the tarry floor holding me in place, I automatically adjusted my position, and then toppled over as my long-asleep feet refused to hold my weight any longer. I had never been so grateful to get a face full of carpet. I heard Artie’s chair creak, followed by the sound of the bedroom door slamming open and his feet pounding up the stairs, presumably heading for the bathroom.

“Shouldn’t drink so much Pepsi,” I muttered, and began the laborious process of peeling myself off the floor. Artie’s computer screen had returned to an innocuous view of browser and wallpaper—a picture of Sarah taken the summer before she followed my sister Verity to New York. No signs of an ancient evil waiting to either break free or swallow us whole. That was a nice change.

I staggered up the stairs on shaking legs, and passed the closed bathroom door on my way to the kitchen. Either Artie had needed to pee more than I thought, or he was having a quiet cry in the bathtub before he came back out to face the world. If I faulted him for that at all, it was only because
I
couldn’t be crying in the tub while he was locked in there.

The kitchen clock said that it was almost seven. Artie had launched the game shortly after noon. I’d never been more exhausted in my life.

Aunt Jane turned away from whatever she was stirring on the stove to look over her shoulder at me and smile. “There you are,” she said. “I was just getting ready to send a search party.”

“I don’t think that would have worked.” I walked to the fridge, opened it, and extracted a can of Dr Pepper. After a pause to consider, I made that two. As I walked over to the table, I continued, “They would just have gotten sucked into the magically generated shadows that were holding us captive as we tried to complete a series of complicated puzzles and refresh the wards that were holding Robin Goodfellow in his eternal prison.” I collapsed into the chair across from Uncle Ted and cracked open the seal on my first soda.

Uncle Ted and Aunt Jane both stared at me, not saying a word. I took a long drink of Dr Pepper.

“So, what’s for dinner?” I asked.

“Magically generated shadows?” asked Aunt Jane.

“Robin Goodfellow?” asked Uncle Ted.

Artie appeared in the doorway, eyes red, wiping his hands on a towel. “Oh,” he said. “You told them.”

I took another drink of Dr Pepper.

Uncle Ted eyed Artie’s laptop like he expected it to grow teeth and start biting him at any moment. Honestly, that would have been easier to understand than “remotely executable runic magic embedded in the game program by hidebehinds working with a cuckoo for some unknown and probably unpleasant reason.” Even for us, that was pushing the bounds of comprehensibility a bit. “And you say you just downloaded the game, and then the shadows came?”

“Yeah, Dad,” said Artie. He sighed. “I swear there was no ‘contains actual evil’ warning on the file.”

“There rarely is.”

Aunt Jane walked back into the kitchen, waving her phone like it had just unlocked the secrets of the universe. “All right, my contact with the local bogeymen confirmed that some hidebehinds have been taking contract work from whoever’s willing to put down the cash. Something about establishing a competitive multimedia company in a human-dominated market. They specialize in puzzle games and phone apps for cryptids—which does sometimes mean executable magic.”

“Great,” I said. “Let’s go punch them a lot.”

“No can do, my darling, overly violent niece,” she said. “They’re down in Silicon Valley. Even if we could convince your parents to let us take you to California on no notice for the sole purpose of punching people, I can’t get the time off work.”

“Your brother would probably let us take Antimony to California in order to punch people,” said Uncle Ted, giving the laptop another poke. “He’d view it as a bonding exercise.”

Aunt Jane snorted. “No one is crossing state lines in order to commit assault today, all right?”

“But they nearly sucked us into a pocket dimension,” I said. “Don’t they deserve
some
punching?”

“I’ll set up a conference call and have some words with their CEO about taking money from cuckoos,” said Aunt Jane. “That’s really the best I can do right now. Sometimes you have to explore nonviolent solutions.”

I crossed my arms and leaned back in my seat, glowering sullenly. “I hate nonviolent solutions.”

“Even the X-Men sometimes resolve things without punching,” said Artie.

I swiveled around so that I was glowering directly at him. He quailed.

“I mean, punching would be better, we should really go with punching.”

“See, look there, Annie got her way without punching you, clearly diplomatic methods can work.” Uncle Ted pushed Artie’s laptop across the table toward him. “Uninstall the evil software and you should be fine.”

“That’s it?” I abandoned glaring at Artie in favor of staring at my uncle Ted. “Just ‘uninstall the evil software’? We don’t even have to kill a chicken?”

“Why would you? It’s not like you installed Windows 7.” Uncle Ted started laughing at his own joke. I groaned, which just made him laugh harder.

“You’d think someone would be at least a
little
upset about us nearly getting sucked into an unidentified pocket dimension,” I grumbled.

“I’m upset,” offered Artie. “Come on. I’ll let you help me write the game review. That’ll make you feel better.”

“The really pathetic part is that you’re right.” I sighed and stood, grabbing my soda. “Let’s go.”

“Awesome.” Artie picked up his computer. “Mom, when’s dinner?”

“About twenty minutes,” said Aunt Jane.

“Great, plenty of time.” He went trotting off toward his basement. I followed him more slowly. My feet still hurt.

The last thing I heard before I slammed the basement door was Uncle Ted saying, far too calmly, “I told those kids video games were going to get them in trouble one day.”

Artie was back at his desk by the time I finished stomping down the stairs. He had a browser open and was typing something into a forum window. I stopped, eyeing first his screen, and then him. He reddened.

“I’m just…reporting…that the game is sort of evil,” he said.

“Uh-huh. And then?”

“I’m uninstalling the game.”

“And then?”

“I’m deleting my forum account before I accidentally invite any more assassination attempts from pissed-off Johrlac who don’t like people knowing that they exist.”

“And then?”

“I’m being grateful that it wasn’t the Covenant of St. George.”

“And then?”

He sighed deeply. “I’m apologizing to my wonderful, brilliant, totally not going to punch me in the throat cousin for endangering her life.”

“Good.” I walked back to the bed, where my comic book was still waiting for me. “Let me know when you want to start.” I stretched out on my stomach, getting comfortable, and turned the page. All in all, the afternoon hadn’t been
that
unusual.

Seanan McGuire was born and raised in Northern California, resulting in a love of rattlesnakes and an absolute terror of weather. She shares a crumbling old farmhouse with a variety of cats, far too many books, and enough horror movies to be considered a problem. Seanan publishes about three books a year and is widely rumored not to actually sleep. When bored, Seanan tends to wander into swamps and cornfields, which has not yet managed to get her killed (although not for lack of trying). She also writes as Mira Grant, filling the role of her own evil twin, and tends to talk about horrible diseases at the dinner table.

The big black car pulls up outside Shinjuku Station against the line of concrete posts that marks the edge of the domain of automobiles. Beyond, it’s bikes and pedestrians only, so I get out of the back and tell the driver to wait. From the station it’s only a couple of blocks’ walk to Kabuki-cho, with its famous red archway outlined in pulsing neon.

Ichibanchou-dori is packed at this hour. All the buildings are tall and thin, with a different business on each floor, and their big vertical signboards looming overhead:
1F BAR, 2F MASSAGE, 3F KARAOKE
, lights flashing in a desperate plea for attention. Both sides of the street are lined with touts shouting the advantages of their clubs at the men walking by, trying to draw them into conversation with “special offers.”

I can’t help but stand out in a crowd in Japan—too tall, too blond, too foreign. It repels some of the shouting men—no point in trying to get a foreigner into a hostess club, he won’t speak Japanese anyway—and draws others like a magnet. I wave off invitations to drinks, to sushi, whatever else they think will appeal to a touring American. One of the salesmen, a big black guy with an impressive Afro, gives me a little nod of shared understanding. We’re both oddities here. I smile at him.

The door I’m looking for is unmarked. It leads down a half flight of steps into a little
izakaya
, sort of a pub that serves fried snacks. There’s a long bar top, half-occupied by some really serious drinkers, and a scattering of empty tables. It’s oddly shaped, bending around one of the building’s support columns, so half the floor is out of sight. Around here, no empty space goes unused.

“Irasshaimase,”
the man behind the bar mutters, not looking up from watching some unmentionable chicken component crisp up in a pan. He’s one of these stocky, solid older guys that seem to be standard equipment for places like this, as though there were a press somewhere stamping them out. His hair is frosted white at the temples.

He doesn’t really pay attention to me until I step up to the bar. Then he takes me in and gets a look I’m very familiar with—it’s the slightly panicked expression of someone trying to dredge up enough high school English to speak to a foreigner.

“I’m looking for Aka-sensei,” I tell him. My Japanese is not quite perfect, with a trace of unplaceable accent I can’t quite eradicate. It bothers me: professional pride; I’m a translator, after all.

Relief is written all over his face, though he tries to hide it. He grunts an acknowledgment and points to a back corner.

I nod. “Send us over another of whatever he’s drinking, and a soda water.”

Another grunt. He keeps his eyes on the frying chicken parts.

I thread my way through the empty tables and around the intrusive pillar. Aka-sensei is in the very back, tucked away in the dark, bent over a bottle with the air of a dedicated drunk. There’s only one chair at his table, so I grab one and carry it with me, setting it down opposite him with a clatter.

He looks up. He’s in his thirties, long-faced and thin, with weird, gangly limbs and a spray of dark hair tipped with the remnants of a blond dye-job. He wears jeans and a sport coat that has seen better days.

“Who the hell are you?” he rasps at me as I sit down.

“I wanted to talk to you, Aka-sensei,” I say.

His face goes sly. “So somebody finally tracked me down.”

“It wasn’t easy.”

“No kidding. It’s not supposed to be easy.” He picks up the bottle in front of him, takes a pull that empties it, sets it back on the table. “You with the cops?”

“No.”

“The papers, then?”

“Something like that.”

“I’m not supposed to talk to the papers,” he says. “Not supposed to talk to anyone, they told me. You know I’m still getting a salary?” He gestures around the dingy bar and laughs. “I’m at work! This is work. Who says lifetime employment is dead?”

A waitress arrives, an older woman who conspicuously avoids Aka-sensei’s gaze. He gives her a long, unashamed stare as she bends over to put a new bottle in front of him and hand me a glass of bubbling water. She nods politely and leaves, and his eyes stay glued to her ass until she’s out of sight.

“Bitch,” he mutters. “Asked her out once. As a joke. She got all serious about it.” He barks a laugh. “Women, eh?”

“I wondered,” I say, “if I could ask you a few questions.”

“I could get in trouble if you write about it,” he says. “Lose this sweet gig.”

“It’s not for publication. Call it professional curiosity.”

“Curiosity is a goddamned curse, let me tell you. I know better than anybody.” He eyes me sidelong, but I can already tell he’s going to talk. He
wants
to tell his story, so badly he’s practically panting at the opportunity. Finally, awkwardly, he shrugs. “What the hell. You won’t believe me anyway. Nobody believes me. I don’t even believe me, some days.”

“Let me confirm a few things.” I sip my drink. “Your
real
name is Nakamura Takumi. You were born in—”

“Skip the biographical bullshit. I know what you want.” He sits back in his chair, bottle dangling from his hand. “You want to know about
REAL
.”

I offer him a tight smile.

“
REAL
” is what you might call a loanword, although in this case it hasn’t been so much borrowed as abducted. Pronunciation changed (it’s “REE-ah-ru,” or close enough), and it was twisted from an adjective to a noun. It means the flesh-and-blood world we all live in, as opposed to the electronic fantasyland of the Net.

“You built a game,” I say, going through the facts as though I really were a journalist. “A game that people don’t believe is only a game.”

“Come on. Nobody
really
believes that.” He smiles, a bit sickly around the edges. “A few weirdos, maybe. Everyone just…pretends. Like a mass hallucination. It’s a joke.”

“Isn’t that what you intended from the start, though?
REAL
was never announced in public, and no one has officially claimed responsibility for it. It just appeared.”

Aka-sensei laughs again. “You think that just happens? I had six social media guys working overtime to make sure it ‘just appeared.’ We were hardly the first, either. Remember that
Halo
thing in the States? And that movie—”

I nod. “Maybe you should start at the beginning.”

Aka-sensei lets out a long sigh. He pats his pockets like he’s suddenly remembered something, comes out with a rumpled pack of cigarettes and extracts one with a practiced tap. He makes a show of looking for a light, but I’m way ahead of him, pulling my brushed-steel lighter from my inside jacket pocket and extending it across the table. It lights on the first try, and the end of the cigarette glows bright. I put the lighter away, and Aka-sensei takes a long drag.

“The beginning,” he muses. “That must be Shiki. You know Shiki?”

I shake my head. He takes another pull from his beer, cigarette dangling limply from his fingers.

“He’s probably your boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss. We were buddies in college. Nerds together, at the time, but after graduation, he straightened up and I went hard-core. Shiki went straight to the top. Works at the big publisher now, head executive vice president of something or other. Nice big office with his own bathroom. But he still calls me now and then, or he used to. Throws me work, like he’s doing me a favor.

“A couple of years ago, he called me up and said he had a project for me. They were doing a new game, a networked phone game. Real pie-in-the-sky stuff. He had no goddamn idea what he was talking about, but there was a lot of money behind the project, so I told him I’d run the thing for him if that’s what he wanted. I sent him a spec of what I wanted to do, and right there and then he kicked out his corporate programmers and put me in charge.

“It’s a pretty simple idea, honestly. Demons are invading the world, and there’s this special phone app that lets you see them. I ripped it off from that old movie
They Live
. You remember
They Live
, with the glasses?” I shrug, and he shakes his head. “Nobody watches the classics anymore.”

“Was it your idea to keep the origin of the game a secret?”

“Of course. Shiki could never come up with anything so ballsy. He went for it, though, I have to give him that. We ‘leaked’ it, made sure it got spread around, got a little buzz going. When you start the thing up, it doesn’t show you everything all at once. You get these little glimpses, you know? You look through your phone, and there’s glowing runes on a wall, or you see a flash of something moving in the distance. You get pulled in. After a while, you get a message from Mari.”

“Mari?” I ask, though of course I know all about Mari.

“Mariko. The heroine. I wrote all this myself. Outcast fighting to save an uncaring world, the middle school kids eat that up. Mariko was supposed to be the one who’d written the program in the first place. She needs your help to stop the bad guys. There’s a secret message board, with information, the demonic hierarchy, all this stuff. We had this guy—”

He stops, cigarette halfway to his lips, staring into space for a moment. Then he shakes his head. “Mariko, though. She was perfect. The agency sent us this actress. Smart as whip, and she got the role down perfectly, first try. Determined, but just a little scared. Strong, but vulnerable.
Moé
. They eat that up, I told you. God, and the body on her…”

Aka-sensei stops, pulls in smoke, lets it out in a languorous puff.

“We signed her to a long-term contract, ironclad. We would run her whole life until it was over. Shiki talked her into it. He must have paid a fortune. Or maybe not. She was smart. She could see how big this was going to be when we finally pulled the cover off.

“After about a year of dev, we launched it. Started letting people in, a few at a time. My guys got rumors started. Shiki even had some stuff put in the papers, unexplained disappearances, that kind of thing.” He chuckled. “You know that’s why I’m talking to you, right? It doesn’t really matter what I say. Shiki will never let you print anything that blows the secret. He runs the whole show now.”

“I’d like to hear it anyway,” I say. “Like I said, professional curiosity.”

Aka-sensei stares at me as he grinds the cigarette out in the ashtray. He
wants
to tell me everything, I can see it in his eyes. He wants to tell someone what he knows, so badly it hurts. It can be hard, keeping secrets.

“You won’t believe me,” he says.

“That’s my problem.”

He shrugs. “Fair enough. After six months, we were doing great. Everyone was excited, the community was growing, people were working on the little mysteries I threw them. We hired people to go out and plant things—dead drops, spy stuff. And then if you looked through the phone, you could see they were ‘possessed,’ with weird mirror eyes and a green aura. I loved it. I used to sit in the command center, watching all the screens—we could track everyone who used the app, follow them around—and I thought this must be what it’s like to be a god. I speak a word, and something gets created. You have no idea how much fun it was.”

Aka-sensei stops, looking down at the table, the ashtray and the dead cigarette. I signal the waitress over my shoulder for another beer.

“Something went wrong,” he says very quietly. “That’s when it all went bad. People started dying.”

“I read about that in the papers,” I say. “The kid they called Boy A, who killed himself—”

“You don’t know
shit
.” Aka-sensei slams his hand on the table, hard enough to make the empty bottles jump. “Shiki was happy to let people talk about stuff like that. Sure, a kid killed himself. So what? Kids do that all the time. Some other guy fell in front of a train while he was looking through his phone, and they talked about banning us. We laughed and laughed. That’s all just
publicity
. If it hadn’t happened, Shiki would have made something up.”

“Then I’m not sure what you mean.”

He hesitates, shakes his head. His hand is tight on his latest beer. “We were getting ready for the big reveal. The endgame. We had this elaborate setup, all these demons, and right at the top there was the big, bad boss. The Dark Queen. I
drew
her, I sketched her out in pencil on a goddamn cocktail napkin and gave her to my assistant to copy over. We had just started looking for an actress, since she was going to have some video with Mariko. After that…”

Aka-sensei sighs. “I told Shiki it was time to thinking about going public. We’d had a good run, but we couldn’t expect the secret to hold forever, and it was time to monetize. Take all the buzz we’d created and turn it into something people could buy. That’s the whole point, right? And the big shots at the publisher were getting anxious to see some return on investment. So I figured once we ran through the Dark Queen stuff, we’d wind it up—Mariko defeats the Queen, right, the heroes always win. Darkness driven back but not truly defeated, and we get a spin-off anime, manga, video game, figurines, the works. I thought I was going to be set for life.” He looks around the bar and gives a weak chuckle. “Heh. I guess I was right about that.”

“But who died?”

“I told you we had a guy who wrote out all the backstory for us. Kabbalic symbolism, ancient secrets, that sort of thing. Anytime we needed a big chunk of text. We all called him the Professor, but his real name was—” He names an author, a well-known professor of philosophy with several popular volumes to his credit. I raise an eyebrow, and he smiles. “I guess spouting bullshit doesn’t pay as well as it used to. He never wanted to be associated with us in public, but he was happy enough to take our money. Until they found him dead.”

“I thought he died of a heart attack.”

“That’s what they told us. Natural causes, very tragic. Especially since he was barely fifty. Shiki sent me to his house to make sure he hadn’t left anything behind that would blow the project—he was already getting paranoid—but there was nothing. I mean,
nothing
. No notes, no computer files. Like he’d written a book’s worth of demonic history for us without ever scribbling something down. Or like someone else had already cleaned the place out. Shiki was relieved to hear it. You know what he told me? ‘Thank goodness he’d already finished up.’ ”