Press Start to Play (44 page)

“I never got to see my father much,” Ryder says. “It seemed that he was always out traveling around Pele, campaigning for re-election. I spent a lot of time at home with androids. I grew up with them.”

“So you felt close to them,” Alex says. “While you were fretting about ‘freedom’ for your toys, there were people worried sick about how to feed their children outside your mansion. How can a human compete against an android who’s just as creative and resourceful when the human needs rest, might get hurt, might get sick? Your father pushed hard against sentience for androids so that actual people, real people like my parents, would still have jobs.”

Ryder does not flinch away from Alex’s gaze. “The world is filled with multitudes of suffering, and we are limited by our station in life to focus on what we can. You’re right: since the androids aren’t sentient, no one thinks there’s anything wrong with exploiting them the way we are. But we
can
make them sentient with almost no effort; we’ve known how to cross the PKD-threshold for decades. We simply
choose
not to. You don’t see a problem with that?”

“No.”

“My father would agree with you. He would say there’s a difference between acts of omission and commission. Withholding from the androids what they could be easily given, unlike taking away what has already been given, does not constitute a moral harm. But I happen to disagree.”

“I told you,” Alex says, “I’m not interested in philosophy.”

“And so we continue to engage in slavery by a philosophical sleight of hand, through deprivation.”

The flight computer crackles to life. “Exiting hyperspace in half an hour.”

Alex looks at Ryder, her face cold. “Come on, let’s go.”

They proceed together to the cockpit, where Alex waits for Ryder to lie down in the passenger seat. “Hands on the armrests. I have to secure you,” she says.

Ryder looks up at her, his delicate features settling into a look of sorrow. “All these days on the same ship and you still don’t trust me?”

“If you’re going to make a move, re-entry is the time to do it. I can’t take a chance. Sorry.” She activates the chair’s restraint system and flexible bands shoot out from the chair to wrap themselves around Ryder’s shoulders, hips, chest, legs. The bands tighten and Ryder groans. Alex is unmoved.

As Alex reaches the door of the cockpit, Ryder calls after her, “You’re really going to turn me over to my father when you don’t even know what this is about?”

“I understand enough to know I don’t care about your pet cause.”

“I began my life with stories others told me: where I come from, who I am, who I should be. I’ve simply decided to tell my own story. Is that so wrong?”

“It’s not for me to judge the right or wrong of it. I know what I need to know.”

“It is one thing to be ignorant, and another thing to be unwilling to know.”

She says nothing and leaves the cockpit.

She knows she should get ready for re-entry and check on the flight systems one last time before securing herself in the pilot’s chair.

But she turns back to the terminal. There’s still a bit of time. She won’t admit it to Ryder, but she
does
want to know how the game ends, even if it’s probably nothing more than the self-indulgent ravings of a disappointed child.

“But my father must be storing the contraband Augustine Modules he’s seized somewhere in the Palace,” you say. “The question is where.”

“What room have you never been inside of?”

> south

OUTSIDE THE KING’S AND QUEEN’S BEDROOMS

Spring clangs after you.

> TELL Spring to break down the door to Queen’s bedroom

“As you wish, Princess.”

Spring charges against the door and, amazingly, the door holds for a second. Then it crumbles.

> enter Queen’s bedroom

THE QUEEN’S BEDROOM

You can’t remember ever having been inside the Queen’s bedroom. The bed, the dressers, and the cabinets are all faded, as if the color has been leached out of them. There’s a layer of dust over everything, and cobwebs hang from the ceiling and the furniture. The tapestries hanging against the walls have been chewed into filigree by moths.

There’s a painting hanging on the wall next to the window. Under the painting is a desk full of cubbyholes stuffed with parchment.

> examine painting

You make your way through the musty room to look at the painting. The dust motes you’ve disturbed twirl though the air, lit only by a few bright beams coming through cracks in the shutters.

The man in the painting is your father, the King. He looks very handsome with his crown and ermine robe. He sits with a young girl on his lap.

“She looks like you,” says Spring.

“She does,” you say. The girl in the painting is five or six, but you don’t remember sitting with your father for this portrait.

> examine cubbyholes in desk

You retrieve the sheets of parchment from the cubbyholes. They look like a stack of letters.

> examine letters

You read aloud from the first letter.

My Darling,

I am sorry to hear that you’re unwell. But I simply cannot leave the campaign to come home right now. By all signs, the election will be close. Not that I expect you to understand, but if I leave here, Cedric will be able to convince the Electors of Peony that they should throw their support behind him.

You must listen to the Castellan and not give the clockwork servants any trouble.

Your ever-loving father.

Spring shuffles behind you.

“Cedric challenged your father four years ago,” Spring says.

“I don’t remember being sick then,” you say. “Or writing to him.”

In fact, you don’t remember much about the election. You remember reading about it and hearing others talk about it. But now that you think about it, you have no personal memories from that time at all.

You don’t like the strange feeling in your heart, so you try to change the subject.

“I think we should look for the Augustine Module,” you say.

“We’ll need a HCROT,” says Spring. “Have you figured out what is a HCROT?”

> say “no”

(to Spring)

“Then what are you going to do?”

> wander around the room aimlessly

Oh, that is a good plan.

No, actually I meant that’s a terrible plan.

> jump up and down

You’re looking silly.

Have we reached the try-anything-once part of the adventure?

> shake fist at Ryder

What are you supposed to do in an adventure whenever you’re stuck?

> inventory

You’re carrying the following items:

A sheaf of letters

An unlit torch, half filled with oil

> Ha! I got it, Ryder!

I don’t understand what you want to do.

> TELL Spring to light torch

Spring takes the torch from you.

He opens up his front panel, revealing the whirling gears inside.

He touches the tip of one of his steel fingers against a spinning gear and sparks fly out. One of them lands on the torch. The smell of rose fills the room, dispelling the musty smell.

Spring hands the lit torch to you.

> shake torch

You hear something rattle inside the torch, a crystalline sound.

> hold torch upside down

Some of the oil drips out, but the rest, remarkably, stays put.

You can feel the handle of the torch grow hot.

A rattling sound comes from inside the torch, eventually settling into a rapid
tap-tap-tap
.

“A TORCH,” you say triumphantly, “becomes a HCROT when turned around.”

Spring claps.

> move left

You are next to the wall.

The torch in your hand emits the same rattle.

> move forward

You move toward the window.

The torch in your hand emits the same rattle.

> move right

You’re standing in front of the desk.

The torch in your hand emits the same rattle.

Spring looks at you. “I don’t hear any difference.”

“I think it’s supposed to vibrate faster and make a different sound when it gets closer to the Augustine Module,” you say.

“Supposed to. Maybe we need something else.”

> inventory

You’re carrying a sheaf of letters.

> examine letters

You have a burning torch held upside down in your hand. If you try that you’re going to burn the letters before you can read them.

> hand torch to Spring

Spring takes the torch from you.

“You might as well move around the room a bit,” you say. “Try the corners I haven’t tried.”

> examine letters

You read aloud from the next letter.

Castellan,

I am utterly devastated at this news.

Please have the body embalmed but do not bury her yet. Do not release the news until I figure out what to do.

Spring has wandered some distance away. The rattling in the torch has slowed down, more like a
tap
,
tap
,
tap
.

You’re too stunned by what you’re reading to stop. You turn to the next letter.

Artificer,

I would like you to fashion an automaton that is an exact replica of my poor, darling Alex. It must be so lifelike that no one can tell them apart.

When the automaton is complete, you must install in it the jewel I have enclosed with this letter. Then you may dispose of the body.

No, do not refuse. I know that you know what it is. If you refuse, I shall make it so that you will never create anything again.

The campaign is so heated here that I cannot step away and let Cedric sway them. Yet, if the news is released that my daughter is dead and I am refusing to go home to mourn her, Cedric will make hay of it and make me appear to be some kind of monster.

No, there is only one solution. No one must know that Alex has died.

Spring is now in the hallway. The rattling in the torch has slowed down to an occasional tap, like the start of a gentle bit of rain.
Tap…Tap…Tap…

> TELL Spring to return

Spring comes closer.
Tap, tap, tap.

Spring is now next to you.
Tap-tap-tap.

> TELL Spring to hand over the torch

Spring hands the torch to you.
Tap-tap-tap.

“Did you know?” you ask.

“I have been with you for only four years,” Spring says.

“But I remember playing with you when I was a baby! You never told me they weren’t real memories.”

Spring shrugs. The sound is harsh, mechanical. “Your father programmed me. I do what I’m told to do. I know what I’m told to know.”

You think about the letters. You think about how vague and hazy your memories of your childhood are, how nothing in those memories is ever distinct, as if they were stories told to you a hundred times until they seemed real.

You bring the torch closer to your chest. The heat makes you flinch.
TapTapTap.

You wonder where she’s buried. Is it in the garden, right underneath your bedroom window, where the lilies bloom? Or is it farther back, in the clearing in the woods where you like to catch fireflies at night?

You bring the torch even closer. The flame licks at your hair and a few strands curl and singe.
T-t-t-t-t-ap.

You tear open the dress on you to reveal the flesh beneath. You put a hand against your chest and feel the pulsing under the skin. You wonder what will happen if you slash it open with a knife.

Will you see a beating heart? Or whirling gears and tightly wound springs surrounding a rainbow-hued jewel?

It is one thing to be ignorant, and another thing to be unwilling to know.

Ken Liu is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. A winner of the Nebula, Hugo, and World Fantasy Awards, he has been published in
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
,
Asimov’s
,
Analog
,
Clarkesworld
,
Lightspeed
, and
Strange Horizons
, among other places. He lives with his family near Boston, Massachusetts. Liu’s debut novel,
The Grace of Kings
, the first in a silkpunk epic fantasy series, was released in April 2015 by Saga Press. Saga will also publish a collection of his short stories later in 2015. Learn more about Liu’s work at
www.kenliu.name
.

In the spring of 1989 the Karvina Corporation released a curious game, whose dissemination among American students that fall was swift and furious, though its popularity was ultimately short-lived.

The game was
Killswitch
.

On the surface it was a variant on the mystery or horror survival game, a precursor to the
Myst
and
Silent Hill
franchises. The narrative showed the complexity for which Karvina was known, though the graphics were monochrome, vague gray and white shapes against a black background. Slow MIDI versions of Czech folk songs play throughout. Players could choose between two avatars: an invisible demon named Ghast or a visible human woman, Porto. Play as Ghast was considerably more difficult due to his total invisibility, and players were highly liable to restart the game as Porto after the first level, in which it was impossible to gauge jumps or aim. However, Ghast was clearly the more powerful character—he had fire-breath and a coal-steam attack, but as it was above the skill level of most players to keep track of where a fire-breathing, poison-dispensing invisible imp was on their screens once the fire and steam had run out, Porto became more or less the default.

Porto’s singular ability was seemingly random growth—she expanded and contracted in size throughout the game. A Kansas engineering grad claimed to have figured out the pattern involved, but for reasons that will become obvious, his work was lost.

Porto awakens in the dark with wounds in her elbows, confused. Seeking a way out, she ascends through the levels of a coal mine in which it is slowly revealed she was once an employee, investigating its collapse and beset on all sides by demons similar to Ghast, as well as dead foremen, coal-golems, and demonic inspectors from the Sovatik Corporation, whose boxy bodies were clothed in red, the only color in the game. The environment, though primitive, becomes genuinely uncanny as play progresses. There are no “bosses” in any real sense—Porto must simply move physically through tunnels to reach subsequent levels while her size varies wildly through inter-level spaces.

The story that emerges through Porto’s discovery of magnetic tapes, files, and mutilated factory workers who were once her friends, and deciphering of an impressively complex code inscribed on a series of iron axes players must collect (this portion of the game was almost laughably complex, and it defeated many players until “Porto881” posted the cipher to a Columbia BBS; attempts to contact this player have been unsuccessful, and the username is no longer in use on any known service) is that the foremen, under pressure to increase coal production, began to falsify reports of malfunctions and worker malfeasance in order to excuse low output, which incited a Sovatik inspection. Officials were dispatched, one for each miner, and an extraordinary story of torture unfolds, with fuzzy and indistinct graphics of red-coated men standing over workers, inserting small knives into their joints whenever production slowed. (Admittedly, this is not a very subtle critique of Soviet-era industrial tactics, and as the town of Karvina itself was devastated by the departure of the coal industry, more than one thesis has interpreted
Killswitch
as a political screed.)

After solving the axe code, Porto finds and assembles a tape recorder, on which a male voice tells her that the fires of the earth had risen up in their defense and flowed into the hearts of the decrepit, prerevolution equipment they used and wakened them to avenge the workers. It is generally assumed that the “fires of the earth” are demons like Ghast, coal fumes and gassy bodies inhabiting the old machines. The machines themselves are so “big” that the graphics elect to only show two or three gear teeth or a conveyor belt rather than the entire apparatus. The machines drove the inspectors mad, and they disappeared into caverns with their knives (only to emerge to plague Porto, of course). The workers were often crushed and mangled in the onslaught of machines, which were neither graceful nor discriminating. Porto herself was knocked into a deep chasm by a grief-stricken engine, and her fluctuating size, if it is real and not imagined, is implied to be the result of poisonous fumes inhaled there.

What follows is the most cryptic and intuitive part of the game. There is no logical reason to proceed in the “correct” way, and again it was Porto881 who came to the rescue of the fledgling
Killswitch
community. In the chamber behind the tape recorder is a great furnace where coal was once rendered into coke. There are no clues as to what she is intended to do in this room. Players attempted nearly everything, from immolating herself to continuing to process coal as if the machines had never risen up. Porto881 hit upon the solution, and posted it to the Columbia boards. If Porto ingests the raw coke, she will find her body under control, and can go on to fight her way out of the final levels of the mine, which are impassable in her giant state, clutching the tape containing this extraordinary story. However, as she crawls through the final tunnel to emerge aboveground, the screen goes suddenly white.

Killswitch
, by design, deletes itself upon player completion of the game. It is not recoverable by any means; all trace of it is removed from the user’s computer. The game cannot be copied. For all intents and purposes it exists only for those playing it, and then ceases to be entirely. One cannot replay it, unlocking further secrets or narrative pathways, one cannot allow another to play it, and perhaps most important, it is impossible to experience the game all the way to the end as both Porto and Ghast.

Predictably, player outcry was enormous. Several routes to solve the problem were pursued, with no real efficacy. The first and most common was to simply buy more copies of the game, but Karvina Corporation released only five thousand copies and refused to press further editions. The following is an excerpt from their May 1990 press release:

KILLSWITCH
WAS DESIGNED TO BE A UNIQUE PLAYING EXPERIENCE: LIKE REALITY, IT IS UNREPEATABLE, UNRETRIEVABLE, AND ILLOGICAL. ONE MIGHT EVEN SAY INEFFABLE. DEATH IS FINAL; DEATH IS COMPLETE.
T
HE FATES OF PORTO AND HER BELOVED GHAST ARE AS UNKNOWABLE AS OUR OWN.
I
T IS THE DESIRE OF THE KARVINA CORPORATION THAT THIS BE SO, AND WE ASK OUR CUSTOMERS TO RESPECT THAT DESIRE. REST ASSURED KARVINA WILL CONTINUE TO PROVIDE THE HIGHEST QUALITY OF GAMES TO THE WEST, AND THAT
KILLSWITCH
IS MERELY ONE AMONG OUR MANY WONDERS
.

This did not have the intended effect. The word “beloved” piqued the interest of committed, even obsessive players, as Ghast is not present in any portion of Porto’s narrative. A rush to find the remaining copies of the game ensued, with the intent of playing as Ghast and discovering the meaning of Karvina’s cryptic word. The most popular theory was that Ghast would at some point become the fumes inhaled by Porto, changing her size and beginning her adventure. Some thought this was wishful thinking, that if only Ghast’s early levels were passable, one would somehow be able to play as both simultaneously. However, by this time no further copies appeared to be available in retail outlets. Players who had not yet completed the game attempted Ghast’s levels frequently, but the difficulty of actually playing this enigmatic avatar persisted, and no player has ever claimed to have finished the game as Ghast. One by one, the lure of Porto’s lost, unearthly world drew them back to her, and one by one, they were compelled toward the finality of the vast white screen.

To find any copy usable today is an almost unfathomably rare occurrence; a still shrink-wrapped copy was sold at auction in 2005 for $733,000 to Yamamoto Ryuichi of Tokyo. It is entirely possible that Yamamoto’s is the last remaining copy of the game. Knowing this, Yakamoto had intended to open his play to all enthusiasts, filming and uploading his progress. However, to date, the only film that has surfaced is a one-minute-and-forty-five-second clip of a haggard Yamamoto at his computer, the avatar-choice screen visible over his right shoulder.

Yamamoto is crying.

Catherynne M. Valente is the
New York Times
bestselling author of more than a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including
Palimpsest
, the Orphan’s Tales series,
Deathless
, and the crowdfunded phenomenon
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making
. She is the winner of the Andre Norton; James Tiptree, Jr.; Mythopoeic; Rhysling; Lambda Literary; Locus; and Hugo Awards. She has been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with a small but growing menagerie of beasts, some of which are human.