The Search for Ball Zero
Read The Search for Ball Zero Online
Authors: Tony Dormanesh
Tags: #dark comedy, #science fiction, #philosophy, #gaming, #pinball
The Search for
Ball Zero
Written by: Tony Dormanesh
Edited by: Jason Obrien
Copyright © 2015 TD All rights reserved.
ISBN-13:978-1505810820
ISBN-10:1505810825
A LITTLE BACKSTORY
A guy sits on a couch playing video games.
His name is Tony. He lives on Earth, population nearing
50 trillion. His reality might be your future--who can say in
this multiverse? He lives in the twilight of the Golden Age
of Humans on Earth, at the dawning of a new era, part of the
generation of Humans that get to see Humanity fall from grace.
Wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe it was the right
place at the right time? It’s hard to say being anywhere at
of the fall of civilization is the “right place”. Unless
you’re not a fan of human civilization on Earth. Most smart
people wouldn’t be a fan of this consumer-driven, insatiable,
Keeping up With The Kardashians-like society we’ve built. If
you’re one of those people,
kick back with a beer, and prepare for a wild hilarious
ride.
Valley Forest was always a decent place; your average,
middle class city. There were nice patches, there we’re not
so nice places. They had all the chain stores, franchises and
restaurants as well as a few hobos, like any suburb. So, at
the time, it was pretty much a small reflection of most of the
country. In other words, boring. Boring as shit.
So utterly, brain-splattering boring that people would do
anything to escape. A two hour movie, a week in the bottle,
an hour at the mall, an eight hour acid trip, maybe even twenty
years chasing the dragon. But no matter how people escape,
they eventually come back home to the same boring place, so they’re
always ready for the next escape. Sure, your iPhone gets
better and the blockbuster movies have bigger, more realistic 3D
explosions. But what happens to this nice, boring little city
Tony grew up in, well, it was really bad and really good at the
same time.
Tony’s hometown was a boring American city,
blah, blah. There actually was one thing he truly loved about
that place: In a sea of Best Buys, McDonalds and Walmarts, a
crazy rich dude had erected a tribute to fun in the form of a
sky-scratching tower. The cartoon lettering above the door
said “The best and coolest place for games in the world.”, and it
really was. It was Treetop Games, an arcade, game store and a pizza
place all in one, and to Tony it defined the community as nothing
else could.
As you come through the valley to get to Valley Forest,
Treetop Games is the only unique landmark you’ll see. 10
stories tall, resembling the Space Needle rising above the leafy
green circumference that surrounded the city. The tallest
“normal” building in the city was only 5 or 6 stories tall, so
Treetop really stood out. The tops of the biggest trees
growing next to Treetop Games were less than half as tall as the
structure. At first you just see the white supports pointing
towards the sky, then the one or two floors nestled between the
twisting metal, and the word “Treetop Games” in skinny, blue -block
letters, each about to tip over.
Tony went to Treetop a lot. It had
been around as long as he could remember. It was filled with
nostalgia for him. He got his first Nintendo there, Genesis,
all the way down the line of gaming consoles. Not to mention
the first place he played Space Invaders, Pac Man, Robotron,
Dragon’s Lair, Attack From Mars, Theater of Magic, etc. This
could be a long list.
When Tony was a kid, a fond memory of his
was being at Treetop Games, it was a smoky place where a lot of
smelly old guys with long hair stood around big machines and every
once in a while laughed really loud. He remembered his
parents taking him as a child. To this day he can’t think of
a reason why his parents would go there, but they did and he liked
it. He didn’t ask about it, he didn’t care. He was
along for the ride back then.
Until that one day, he remembers it clearly. Tony’s
dad and his extra-smelly friend bought this black box type that
hooked up to the tv. It had black, raised ridges across most
of the front and the far end was slanted up with these cool
looking, silver levers that you could pull up and down. It
had this futuristic looking black controller with a big red button
his dad was playing with. Tony remembered looking into the
dusty glass case where they kept boxes of these things. He
remembered it was hot and the sun was shining down on his face
through the window. He remembered running his hand along the
plastic ridges and feeling very familiar instantly. Tony’s
dad bought an Atari that day, and later that day Tony discovered
the magic of video games. From that day on, Tony went to Treetop
Games for himself.
Treetop is on the outskirts of Valley Forest if you take
the creatively named Main Street north, where the buildings and
neighborhoods end at 41
st
Street. At
42
nd
Street there’s a slight downward sloping hill that
goes about a quarter mile and Main Street ends at a T intersection.
The hill isn’t too steep, but after a quarter mile, anyone on
a bike is hauling ass and anyone on a skateboard is fighting the
Speed Wobbles. (Tony did both of those many times.)
At the end of Main Street, make a right at Park Street
and Treetop Games is at the end of the street on your
left.
Park Street was an old part of town that was
basically abandoned when Tony was young. A few hundred yard
stretch of old, straight road that was the northernmost street in
Valley Forest, beyond which was hills and forest. When
Treetop opened there were a lot of businesses down there--auto
repair shops, some medical offices, and an old dog pound.
Tony was too young to remember why, but all the businesses
down there closed around the same time and Treetop was the only
place that stayed open.
It always was very weird, this flashy arcade, surrounded by
dark, chained, and boarded up empty buildings and menacing barbed
wire. Somehow Park Street was forgotten by Valley Forest
street repairs. It was full of potholes and huge cracks with
grass growing. You couldn’t walk down the street without
twisting an ankle. Main Street was a well-maintained street,
so where the two streets crossed, the bright, black, new asphalt of
Main Street contrasted with the old, grey Park Street. At
points you could see the newer Main streets layers, stacking and
overlapping the older Main streets, every couple of years, they’d
add another layer of asphalt on top, leaving Park Street greyer and
farther behind. Tony always thought it was like looking at
the rings of tree, you could see the years pass with each layer of
new asphalt. There were five or six layers the last time he
bothered to count.
But the eccentric, rich owner of Treetop never let the
government ruin his customer’s fun, he always kept a part of the
road nice so people could get to Treetop. In fact there was a
nice curvy, well kept path from the corner of Main and Park that
ran diagonally through Park Street and right up to the elevator of
Treetop Games. He even added some things: A little Koi
pond, some benches, with different plants and posted information,
like a zoo. No matter what the owner of Treetop did though,
he couldn’t hide the creepy, ghost town-like feel of the rest of
Park Street. Over the years, the plant life had slowly washed
over the abandoned buildings and sprinkled itself in every nook and
cranny where the seeds could grab a foothold. The trees
reached out over the middle of the street, grabbing as much light
as possible, and hanging over the sidewalks as if to snatch unwary
pedestrians. The path to Treetop Games was lit and clear, but
the rest of Park Street was abandoned and dark. Needless to
say it was kind of spooky at night.
Then throw Tony into the picture, a little
kid with a giant imagination, high on caffeine and sugar, who had
just spent the last three hours killing zombies and being chased by
dragons, and who now has to ride his bike through this forgotten
stretch of neighborhood in the dark. A kid in that situation
hears things: just out of sight behind you, close enough to reach
out and grab you, fast enough to keep up with you riding your bike
at full speed, things that make your spine tingle and leave your
memory in snapshots, things that make everything seem like a movie.
It can seem freaky at the time and it sounds silly to think
about it now, but was it? How silly was it? How much of
a survival mechanism is it? What evolutionary adaptations
poured through Tony’s veins those nights, testing his flight or
fight instincts? Was his brain teaching him survival skills
by suggesting something in the dark was about to grab him, even
though it was perfectly safe? It is amazing how a kid’s
imagination can propel them to play games and act out crazy
situations. In a world without danger, those games can be
seen as silly and pointless. Yet in a world rich with danger
and death, those silly games become life or death training
exercises. All mammals play, in the wild, in cages, in
society.