Soda Pop Soldier. Nick Cole

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СКАЧАТЬ the world, weirdos with a taste for the twisted that can no longer be satiated by the SimDungeons they’ve constructed in secret are logging on to an illegal open source i.p.

      Looking for thrills.

      The words open source are enough to get federal data surfers interested in what you’re doing, while at the same time dropping the AG’s office an e-mail to start filing blanket charges. Open source just isn’t done anymore. I know the reason why, all the reasons why. They teach them in history class. But it’s the only way to make money tonight, right now. Money I need yesterday. Who cares if open source was once responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of lives and a worldwide global collapse, pandemic, and famine. I need rent money.

      Please be Light.

      On-screen, blood red fades to gray, becoming concrete, stone, then finally grit.

      I’m wondering what kind of game we’re playing tonight as I catch myself again repeating inside, Please be Light. Please be Light. Please be Light.

      Will it be third world dueling crime syndicates in an open-world version of Kinshasa in the never-ending quagmire that is Greater Africa? Drugs. Hit missions. Gang warfare in the streets. Genocide.

      Or …

      Some over-the-top science fiction classic that’s been rewritten for the Black and its particular take on lust, torture, and ultraviolence? There was a Star Wars tribute Black game that got busted and made the news last year because some Hollywood actor hadn’t told the feds about his undeclared income from the game. He’d made an extra hundred thousand dollars playing a rapist C3PO who was fairly good at poker.

      I stop.

      Please be Light.

      “Boys and girls, gents and ladies,” begins a soft, malevolent voice through my vintage Grundig Sharp speakers. Vintage meaning old, but they still do the trick. “Saints and sickos, tramps and troublemakers, predators and prey … it’s dyin’ time … again.”

      Please be Light.

      “Worldwide we are registering over fifty-five million subscribers for tonight’s event,” continues the announcer in his overstylized carny-of-the-damned tones. “And we ask ourselves, my fellow little perverts …”

      Pause.

      “Who will hack, slash, rape, and loot their way out of our little horror show tonight and for all the nights we play our game until everyone be dead or damned? Who’s ruthless enough to backstab, steal, and cheat their way out of hell? Tonight, my lovelies, we begin … again, in”—the voice is musical, singsong, melodic, its cheery note a counterpoint to the death carnival I’m sure I’m about to find myself in—“the lost World of Wastehavens.”

      The music crescendos and then, after a short interlude of silence, returns to the wanderings of a mournful flute.

      I have no idea what the World of Waste-whatever is.

      “Behold the tower of the Razor Maiden, the Marrow Spike,” continues the announcer.

      My screen clouds over. Blue shadows resolve into swirling dust, and from somewhere nearby over ambient in-game sound, I hear a crack of dry thunder followed by the patter of rain falling mutely into ancient, thick dust. Water drops cascade and echo and I’m struck by the certainty that if Sancerré is truly gone, out of my life, I’ll listen to the rain and think of her and it will be little consolation to a very lonely me.

      On-screen a fat gibbous moon, swollen, corpulent, and odd, makes its way across the night as its light falls on a lonely desert. In the distance, a rising tower, more perversion or malignant growth than structure, stands out in the moonlit night. Its crazy architecture rises, feasible only in computer-rendered graphics, pushing away from a crumbling city that is slowly being consumed by the dunes of an endless desert. I let go of a fading hope I’d harbored for a simple AK and the clear-cut purpose of merely machine-gunning my way through this game until I’d earned enough money for rent.

      Modern warfare is my specialty. Fantasy, not so much.

      The spire is jagged and thorny, a black silhouette against the desert night, rising from the jumble of odd-angled ruins in an arid waste devoid of anything living, all made colder by the moon’s pale light. Only the most morbid tourist would choose such a place for an online vacation.

      A piano in minor chord ponderously strikes cryptic notes as the camera pulls focus. I’m scanning for landmarks, features, anything I can use later to navigate my way to some cash and prizes. I don’t see any obvious enemies. Yet.

      “Even now, pretty and not so pretty little things,” continues the announcer abruptly, “you’re awakening from your crypts, graves, tombs, and sewers …” On-screen the view switches to a collapsing graveyard in some courtyard near the the tower, forgotten and abandoned millennia untold. Gravestones with Gorey-like inscriptions denote fallen warriors. The sound of grinding stone caressing stone erupts across the ambient soundscape. A necrotic hand pushes from the earth. The piano continues to strike those minor chords, alternating now with other diminished chords that seem full of suffering and hollow all at once, turning the soundtrack into a march, into a call to nothing good.

      I hate the undead.

      They make me jittery. In most games, they just come at you in waves. Guns are basically useless. In fact, most things are useless against the undead. In the end it comes down to baseball bats and lead pipes. Which doesn’t matter—the more of them you send back to death, the more of them appear. I always wonder, after games I’ve played that involve the undead, after killing a thousand, two thousand, what that does to my mind. It can’t be good. One time I played a game where I had to kill fifty-seven-thousand-plus undead just to unlock an achievement. I can distinguish between reality and games, but … some people can’t. What does killing fifty-seven thousand humanlike once humans do to players?

      The undead are a hard way to spend a thousand bucks.

      A hard way to make rent.

      “Prisoners and fiends, victims and in-betweens … ,” continues the game’s unseen announcer. The rattling of chains, a tortured scream, a woman sobs. Everything happens fast and just moments before the game reveals my avatar, the unknown character I’ll play as I attempt to beat this game, I see the tower above and hear the whimpering of a child.

      “Razor Maiden, devourer of the innocent, eater of life, queen of hell, commands that you die tonight, or live trying.”

      In these online tournaments, and might I add, illegal open source online tournaments, the goal is to figure out the game and then beat it before all the other players find and beat you. You’ve got to start somewhere, and often that’s a game in and of itself that must be beat before you can actually start beating the main game. Just like life. I’m guessing the game I’ll be playing to start with is “escape.” But from where and how, I don’t know just yet. Along the way is where I’ll really make money. Contests, treasure troves, even in-game bargains can lead to big cash and interesting prizes. Or so I’ve been told.

      The intro is over and now my story, the story of my avatar, begins.

      “Please be Light,” I whisper once more in my empty and very dark apartment.

      Gloomy clouds thicken on-screen, then a golden shaft of light, something my eyes are starving for, stabs down through the clouds.

      In СКАЧАТЬ