Austin Bunn: The Brink: Stories

At the horizon, the dull gray wall of the Exit sparkled with tiny match flares, the lights of hundreds of players stepping through. For the last month, the Exit had been moving closer, absorbing grid. The engineers designed it so that players could off under their own power, ceremoniously and unalone. Transiting through the Exit was the official way to de-install. Since the game worked its way into every cranny of motherboard, if you didn’t off through the Exit you’d have bits of the game cluttering your OS, trying to recompile. We’d all go through it soon enough. Above me, players streaked by on aerial, hunting their home populations. The processor couldn’t handle the air traffic, couldn’t render all the individual skins, so they went naked, like fuselages, arcing in an empty sky. The sight depressed me. Another humiliation in a windless world. That’s how it would be when the lights went out: we’d all be looking for someone.

I ping’d Aremi, who would understand, who still needed to tell me which world was next so I could follow. But she wasn’t on yet.

/ yo get over here. It was Rrango. His userpic popped up in the dash: a koala with an eye patch, smoking a cigar. He was off in Saturnalia, helming an end party for our raid group.

/ i need your fat ass for confession tennis , he ping’d.

/ hang tight. waiting for someone.

Rrango was my spawn brother, born the same instant on the entrance platform and trapped there until we figured out how to loft. (Notoriously, the Also had no instructions. Part of the appeal, the high barrier to entry.) He worked in Silicon Valley for a start-up launching its own alt-world, and he was always trying to mess with the game parameters. Changing species on every quest. Maphacking for grid he didn’t have the points to see. For a while, he had a crew of Chinese digging a pit mine for Alsonax, so he could build this player mod — part amusement park, part nightmare — he called Bewilderville. But then the start-up tanked and his paycheck evaporated, so we had that in common.

These days, Rrango citizened 24/7. He knew about the Cessation Event before anyone. Apparently, the Also had been bought by a Chinese company that ran its own massive alt-world and they couldn’t get two systems to integrate. Ours, the lesser, was turning off. Silicon Valley thought alts were gashes anyway, Rrango said, money pits of freeloaders, and since he worked out there, I trusted him. For all I knew, the Chinese didn’t even exist.

/Aremi? Rrango ping’d. Dude: she is a BOT. Don’t get played by a program.

That was Rrango’s theory, one of many.

/r i g h t , I answered.

A figure zoomed me. A female, but not Aremi. Blue troll hair spun off her head like some giant curl of frosting. Her chest swelled out grotesquely — one of the cheaper, trashier player mods dialed up to the max — and when she landed, her skin layered on: a rune-keeper robe with flared cuffs. Now I recognized her: Melanak, the first woman I sync’d in the Also. I hadn’t seen her for months.

/ trying to boink your way out of here? I ping’d.

/ hahahahaa, sweetie. just one last costume change.

Red sores began to appear on her face, and white tendrils worked their way out from inside. They looked like the hairs on a coconut, quivering with weird life. I’d heard about the pox — a viral experiment the engineers had released to get players to de-game early — but had yet to see it up close. I will admit she did not look sync-able.

/ kiss me? she ping’d.

/ think i just puked on the inside. is it contagious?

/ nope. pox is soulbound , she answered. / tied to your play hours.

So the engineers were punishing us for our loyalty, and Melanak was the loyalest. What I knew, or what she’d told me and what I agreed to believe, was that Melanak was a forty-year-old EMT from Tampa, a beta tester for the Also. I’d met her by chance on one of my early quests when I had the bad idea to unzip a Kraken all over his lair. She was knobbing on intersect mode in the Gjajan market when I asked for help, and she enlisted long after she’d leveled past. Some people prefer to give rather than receive. With the Kraken, Melanak became my meat shield, taking damage and guiding me through the attack step by step, like the older woman I’d always wanted and never had.

/sent u something , she ping’d. /parting gift.

A photo flashed in my dash. I already had several of Melanak’s pics — at first, they were tame, like a family shot she’d taken at Sears with her boyfriend and teenage son. Then came a run of sexy ones I hadn’t asked for. She had hauntingly massive areolas and the stoic face of a Ren-faire butter churner, and though she wasn’t exactly hot she was always game. There was affection there, between her and my hand and a few pumps of Jergens in the home office. When I opened the newest photo, it took me a minute to recognize his face. It was Melanak’s son, grinning back, holding a black cat upside down, its paws lashed together and head hanging lax, the way a cat never does. You could tell by the cockeyed angle it was a selfie, camera at arm’s length.

/wtf? I ping’d.

/what do u think

/. . cat is mucho unhappy.

/what do u think of me?

/? you? your son?

/hahahahaha.

My breath stalled. / who is this?

/ ;p

I pushed away from the machine and made sharp angles with the crap on my desk. In the other room, my wife Jocelyn chopped a salad for dinner and hummed the NPR theme, and the sound of real life brought me back into myself. Melanak had been a woman when I first met her — I knew that, or wanted it with the full force of my personality. The ruse was too long, her syncing too dexterous and knowledgeable for a teen to fake. We’d game-chatted all the time, her voice Southern and bossy. Four hundred pounds maybe, but female. Except, the engineers had let the protocols slip, and the voice-chat function stopped working weeks ago.

/tell me when , I ping’d.

/when what faggot?

/when you hacked mommy’s account.

/maybealways lol

I lunged at him with a Reverse Time Knife, but Melanak had levels on me. He lofted, out of reach, and spun in a circle, the blue coif perfectly still. The engineers had never figured out the breeze physics and never would.

/where’s mommy?

/dead. got her head in my lap.

/sicko , I ping’d. good luck with 8th grade.

/ good luck with being a faggot.

I blocked him, silenced his pings, and Melanak zoomed off anyway, taking his disease with him. From the twilight, white pixels started to drift down. There had never been any seasons in the Also. You always dropped into luminous summer. But as I waited, it started, at last, to snow.

“So. . did you get out at all today?” Jocelyn said as she dropped her bag at the front door and collected the spray of mail at her feet. “I’m guessing not.”

The lemon scent of Endust hung in the living room — I misted minutes before she got home, to give the impression that I’d spanked up the place. The ghost velocity of the Also persisted inside me, the feeling of roller-skating long after you’ve stopped roller-skating.

Jocelyn scanned the bills, and my eyes ached from the hours staring at the screen, where objects didn’t reflect but gave light. I willed myself to see her, to take her in. Her charcoal pants and blue blouse looked assembled from a dropdown menu — her cloak of professionalism, she called it once.

“I took a walk,” I said. Actually, that had been yesterday. I sometimes harbored details to deploy them. “The locksmith has a help wanted sign in the window.”