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Good morning, Agent @bc@x1vvYz%#1$…

You enter the Visitors’ Garden at the base of the Palace of Heaven.

You step between two elephants in a topiary hedge.

You twist a sprinkler counterclockwise.

You enter a secret passage.

You enter a secret elevator.

You take the elevator to the Penthouse.

You step behind a column.

You intercept a patrolling ninja and strangle him with his own poisoned garrote.

You don the ninja’s stylish hooded filter mask.

You lob the ninja’s full complement of toxin bombs down the corridor.

You liberate a sword from a dead GMO-samurai.

You enter a security ring and decapitate the controllers.

You power down the Emperor’s Robot Escort.

You step in the Emperor’s Suite.

You step on the Emperor’s marmoset.

You kill the Emperor.

Congratulations!

The Resistance is victorious!

Imagine reading these victory messages In Real Life!

To be clear, you have not actually assassinated the Emperor IRL. This has been a simulation, meant to train you (and all your predecessors) in some of the challenges you can expect to face as we attempt to assassinate the Emperor. As previously disclosed, the Resistance has been left with virtually no resources—not even virtual ones. Once, in our glorious past, we possessed state-of-the-art simulators that allowed our finest killers to develop their skills against a believably responsive set of dynamic, procedurally generated foes. But such simulators are expensive, enormous, and require the kind of technological infrastructure that the Resistance can no longer maintain in its current impoverished state. Once, in our glorious past, we created digital scenarios so convincing that would-be assassins would often complete a training session only to discover that they had assassinated not a virtual enemy but a real one! Sadly, this glorious past of ours is now ingloriously in the past. We retain but the one laptop, a few solar panels, a rack of batteries, and the recalcitrant wooden wheel of the Old Mill.

We are aware that—the assassin gossip network being what it is—you probably believed that by running through this primitive simulator, you were actually engaged in assassinating the Emperor. Naturally we regret to disappoint you, just as we have disappointed all the trainees before you, from Agent @ onward.

On the other hand, you have one advantage not enjoyed by previous trainees: you are still alive. While victory in the simulator is ephemeral, defeat is quite real. We have remained steadfast and true to our code. As educators of killing machines, we insist that death be lethal. (Assassin death, that is. No guard dogs or ninjas were harmed by you in the apparent execution of your simulated duties.)

So take this moment to relax and enjoy being alive. But keep in mind that the Emperor, a greater threat than ever, still awaits.

Also please note that due to inadequate network access and a resulting inability to download patches, all floor plans, shortcuts, and hazards represented in the simulation you have just survived may bear no resemblance to conditions in the actual Palace of Heaven. To name but one example, the Visitors’ Garden was removed four years ago, due to its vulnerability to assassins.

Now please exit the game, Agent @bc@x1vvYz%#1$, and proceed to the Palace of Heaven—

Marc Laidlaw is best known as one of the creators of and the lead writer on the Half-Life video game series, but he initially got that gig on the strength of his short stories and novels of fantasy, horror, and science fiction. His novel
The 37th Mandala
won the International Horror Guild Award for Best Novel. Laidlaw has been a writer at Valve since 1997, and his short stories continue to appear in various magazines and online venues.

It was the day of the mock election at Armstrong Elementary, Dukakis losing to Bush by more than two hundred votes, when Lizzie Kepler finally had to admit to herself she’d made a serious mistake.

Only forty-two of the ballots had been cast for Dukakis—twelve of those by Lizzie herself. (Given that half the people she knew from college were out on the campaign trail, while she herself was a suburbanite teacher molding the minds of young future Republicans and apparently doing a piss-poor job of it, stuffing the ballot box seemed the literal least she could do.)

All those boozy nights watching dawn break through the dorm’s cracked windows, spilling bong water and gnawing on cold pizza, dreaming together about how they would change the world, she and Paula and Sam and Fish, all those plans for revolution and a grown-up life free of commercials, religious taboos, sexual hang-ups, suburban mores, the crap that had hollowed out their parents’ ’60s souls—and now Sam was a Wall Street hack and Fish was dead and Paula, who’d kissed Lizzie’s toes and pledged forever love, was off fucking her way across California.

And Lizzie? Lizzie was very much not saving inner-city youth from a life of violence and poverty, nor was she bringing literacy to the oppressed daughters of some third-world village. Lizzie was a glorified babysitter to overprivileged fourth graders who didn’t give a shit what she thought about trickle-down economics or the likelihood the so-called crack epidemic was a collaboration between the White House and the CIA; Lizzie was doing her parents proud with a plum job at a
nice
suburban school and an efficiency apartment in a
nice
neighborhood, because when her father said, “Over my dead body will you live in the ghetto,” and her mother said, “We didn’t send you to college so you could get shot in a gang war,” and her aunt’s rabbi’s wife forwarded her name to the Armstrong school board without asking permission, she’d caved.

She’d promised herself: one year, maybe two, just enough to put away some savings, pay off some student loans, pacify her parents, and then she could return to the life she was supposed to live.

That was September.

By the end of October, after the weeks of mock campaigning, the little bastards dressing up as Reagan and Nixon for Halloween, after she’d served carpool duty enough times to know which kids came by Audi and which by BMW, which by Volvo and which by Jag, after she’d promised Lauren G.’s mother that yes, of course, the little princess could retake her math test as many times as she liked and let Robbie J.’s father lecture her about system-abusing freeloaders (like, say, Lauren G. and co.) while peeking shamelessly down her cleavage, she was forced to accept that two years, maybe even
one
year, was asking too much. She didn’t belong in a school like this. She was starting to doubt she belonged in any school—it was turning out she liked the idea of children substantially more than she appreciated the real (germy, snotty, squirrelly) thing.

She lived for the hours she could dump them off in someone else’s lap: gym, art, music, recess. These were her oases of sanity, precious moments to close herself into the silence of the empty classroom and try to imagine herself into a different life. Which is why she so resented the twice-a-week computer labs, because for incomprehensible reasons, she was expected to stay with the class, sitting in a corner monitoring their behavior while the computer teacher instructed them on basic typing skills for five or ten minutes, then let them piss away the rest of the hour on whatever ostensibly educational game they wanted.

Lizzie resented the sparkling new computer lab, its whirring monitors and tangles of wire representing the district’s disgusting surplus of funds; while other, worthier districts were scrounging to pay for pencils and chalk, Armstrong had stocked itself up with twenty-two state-of-the-art computers, to teach computer literacy to a bunch of rich kids who all, as far as Lizzie could tell, had even more state-of-the-art computers at home. (Unlike Lizzie, who made do with the hand-me-down electric typewriter with broken space bar that only a couple of years before had seemed a technological miracle.) Most of all, she resented the computer lab supervisor, Rebecca Grady, who either couldn’t be bothered or wasn’t permitted to actually supervise the children, and who had a barbed wire tattoo ringing her taut bicep and a diamond stud in her nose and had held Lizzie’s hand for a beat too long when they first met, which was an invitation to complication that Lizzie could very much not afford…but also, some treasonous inner voice complained,
not long enough
.

Every Tuesday and Thursday at four p.m., Lizzie trooped her class down to the computer lab, stationing them in front of the monitors and herself in whatever corner was farthest from Rebecca Grady, which seemed safest. But that day, mock election Thursday, Rebecca came to her.

“That election’s a bitch, isn’t it?” She said it in a low voice, but even if she’d screamed it, the kids were too immersed in their stupid computer games to hear.

“Excuse me?”

“Oh god, you’re not a Republican? I mean, you dress like one, but I assumed—”

“I dress like a
Republican
?” Lizzie forgot herself, forgot even, for a second, the soft tufts of hair curling at the nape of Rebecca’s neck and the hint of cinnamon gum on her breath. “Fuck no.”

Rebecca smiled, as if to say:
I knew you were in there somewhere.
Then she pressed on. “You even have a Republican name, come to think of it. Elizabeth Kepler. Ann Taylor WASP, three generations back.” She rolled it around in her mouth like she was tasting each syllable, and approved.

“
Lizzie
Kepler. Proud Kmart shopper. Jew. And just for the record, I voted Dukakis. Twelve times.”

“Only twelve?” She tapped her chest. “Thirty.”

“Miss Grady!” It was the high-pitched squeal of Keith Stoneapple, who Lizzie had known upon first sight would be the most shit-upon kid in the class. His concave, wart-speckled face was a kick-me sign, and neither the inhaler nor the Garbage Pail Kids obsession helped, especially with the latter’s tendency to call attention to the unsubtle eau de Keith, an unfortunate mixture of sweat and rotting fruit. “Miss Grady!” He was waving his hand wildly, bouncing in his seat like he needed to pee, which was a distinct possibility and one that had been known to end in disaster.

Lizzie nudged her. “Rebecca, I think—”

“Who are you asking for, Keith?” the lab teacher asked, without turning to look.

“Uh,
Ms.
Grady?”

“Yes, Keith?”

“The screen froze.”

“Turn the computer off and on again.”

“But I just shot a buffalo!”

“And America thanks you for it.”

“What? Ms. Grady, what do I
doooo
?”

“Off and on, Keith. Think like an early settler: there are always more buffalo.” She turned her attention back to Lizzie, who was trying to direct
her
attention anywhere else. Lizzie liked this too much, all of it. “They have to learn that names matter,” she said, and Lizzie, who answered to Ms., Miss, and Mrs. indiscriminately, figuring it wasn’t worth the effort, felt chastened. “Speaking of which, forget this Rebecca shit. You can call me Beck. Rebecca’s a fat girl name.”

Lizzie’s gaze swung inadvertently toward Jordana Goldstein, a chunky girl whose inability to break into the popular crowd had turned her mean.

Beck rolled her eyes. “Trust me, they’re in a world of their own. A bunch of ten-year-olds obsessed with Manifest Destiny? If it weren’t a postcolonialist nightmare I’d say it was fucking adorable.”

It was the first time since her graduation that Lizzie had heard the word
postcolonialist
spoken aloud, and it made her want to lunge at Beck tongue-first, gave her dangerous visions of the two of them tangled naked and sweaty arguing about Foucault. Maybe, she thought, trying to force herself back to safer ground, if she ever went back to school, she could write her dissertation on the retro semiotics of
Oregon Trail.

“You die of cholera!” Robby Kline shrieked, jabbing a finger into Keith’s shoulder.

“No touching,” Lizzie snapped automatically.

“Cholera! Cholera!” Robby cried, kicking out his legs in what Lizzie took to be his very own cholera dance. “Dead! Dead! Dead!”

Keith burst into tears.

“Fucking adorable,” she murmured, then sprang into action to do her teacherly duty, she and Beck double-teaming the increasingly hysterical pack, perpetrators and victims punished alike, as was the way of elementary school life.

Robby Kline was a hyperactive monster, and Lizzie supposed she should muster some sympathy for the kid, whose mother forbid him all sugar in a futile effort to keep him on an even keel. But she couldn’t. No sympathy for the little bastard, no sympathy for poor, wheezy Keith, no sympathy for fat Jordana or shy Lindsay or even Lauren G., who was surely only such a royal bitch because her mother taught her there was no other way.

In the beginning, Lizzie had tried to imagine herself into their world, pretending to be one of them in an attempt at empathy. Rookie mistake. It was an age before empathy; picturing herself as a ten-year-old only encouraged categorizing them as her young self would have: losers to shun, cool kids to envy, weirdos to mock, nerds to resent because they were the only ones who would have her. Next she tried imagining them all grown up, searching for the matured, wondrous adults they surely had the capacity to be, but that was even worse, because by the time they were the age she was now, she would be depressingly old. And the older they got, the older she would be.

She hated them for that.

“A teaching degree is safe,” her father had advised her. “You’ll always have a job.”

Best not to dwell on that, lest she start hating him, too.

Beck put Robby out in the hall, while Lizzie escorted poor Keith, whose tears had erupted into a full-blown asthma attack, down to the nurse’s office. But not before she agreed to meet Beck for lunch the next day. Which, by virtue of being limited to school grounds and daylight, could most definitely not be qualified as a date.

Lizzie avoided the faculty lounge whenever possible. She’d taken her lunch there the first couple days of the semester, assuming that this was what one did at a real, grown-up job—mingle, kibitz, gossip, whatever. She was still close enough to her own school years to remember the glamour of the faculty lounge, the suspicions of scandal unfolding just beyond the formidable door. It turned out that even at a school like Armstrong, where the bathrooms gleamed with new linoleum and the office boasted its very own fax machine and two copiers, the faculty lounge was a dump. Two moldy couches spotty with cigarette holes, a narrow row of windows that would have peered out over the playground were their curtains not perpetually drawn, and a sad, squat refrigerator that reminded Lizzie of the dorm, each Tupperware container marked by exclamation-point-studded Post-its,
mine, mine, mine.
The old ladies lunched together on the best of the couches, the two middle-aged men swapped baseball stats and tinkered with a beat-up old black-and-white TV, and Beck—at least on the two occasions Lizzie had ventured inside—sat with the school’s one black teacher and the sixth-grade science teacher who no one else liked. It depressed Lizzie more than anything, the thought that wherever she went, however old she got, there would always be a table for the cool kids and one for the freaks.

After that, she’d eaten lunch in her classroom. But Friday, as promised, she met Beck at noon. Mercifully, Beck led them out onto the playground, staking out a shady spot beneath the low stone wall. The lower-grade kids used it for wall ball, but they were all back in class, and the upper-grade kids disdained the whole area as tainted by “babies.” It was the closest they would get to a private picnic without playing hooky. Lizzie watched her kids chasing after one another, trying, as she occasionally did, to locate some affection for them. Wondering what it was about happy children that made them want to scream.

Today’s charming hijinks seemed to involve chasing Keith around the playground, shouting that he was going to die of cholera, and wheezy Keith had apparently accepted his fate, foregoing tears for one impressively melodramatic death scene after another. Robby, the little playground dictator, presided over the funeral.

“That game is so fucked-up,” Lizzie said. “Do you think they even know what cholera is?”

“That’s what makes it educational,” Beck said brightly.

Lizzie had watched over their shoulders long enough to dimly understand the deal: You bought your supplies and lit off for the territory, shooting buffalo and fording rivers in a doomed effort to make it to the West Coast, an apparent nirvana, for reasons never specified. You were encouraged to name your wagon party after your friends, and as far as Lizzie could tell, the whole endeavor was simply an excuse to watch them die off one by one, of cholera and typhoid and dysentery and the ever-mysterious “exhaustion,” then crafting a loving epitaph for their tombstone, like “Keith sux.”

“It’s morbid,” Lizzie said. “Not to mention boring as hell, except for the dying thing.”

Beck offered her an Oreo. Lizzie loved her a little for eating real cookies, not the fat-free crap her friends had been shoveling down their throats for as long as she could remember. She took the Oreo, then on second thought, two Oreos, and tried not to stare as Beck split hers open and licked the cream out of the center. Her tongue was very pink. Once she’d dispatched with the cream, she dropped the bare cookies into her lunch bag.

“What are you doing?”

“Sorry, I know it’s gross. I only like the cream.”

“Are you insane?” Lizzie said. “The cream is just the part you have to tolerate to get to the cookies.”

Beck shrugged, then reached into the bag and retrieved one of the chocolate disks. “Unless you think I have cooties.”

It felt like a dare, and Lizzie took it.

“I think something in their little peanut-sized brains must recognize the game’s fundamental similarities to life,” Beck said as Lizzie crunched and swallowed. “It’s practice.”