Austin Bunn - The Brink - Stories

“You’re thinking. . keys?”

From my back pocket, I removed the paper with his phone number.

“You only wrote that down to show me, though, right?”

“Maybe. But don’t I get some points?”

She untucked her blouse, and I recognized her more.

“You do, Josh. You get a million points.”

Jocelyn darted up to the bedroom and returned barefoot, in a T-shirt for a band neither of us had listened to since college. We started on our dinner, a mound of salad greens, and she asked about the business school applications she’d printed for me. Yes, I saw them. Yes, they were in the office, stamped with coffee rings. School was her dream, not mine. We ate on the couch watching the television — the comedy news from the day before — almost laughing but not quite.

“Listen,” she said. “I just know something amazing is going to happen for you. And it’s not keys.”

Something amazing like a phone call from Renfield in city planning, inviting me back to work. She registered the purple glow from the study, the twilight of the Also on my monitor, and sighed.

“How long is it going to be,” Jocelyn said with disdain, “until that is finished?”

A cold breeze swept through me. An enormous grave had been dug, but the dead were in a distant country Jocelyn had never been to and didn’t care about.

“Days, I guess,” I said.

“Good,” she said, and took her salad bowl to the counter. “Because I want you back.”

She grabbed her bag and went up to the bedroom. The door shut, and I felt abandoned. At first, years ago, Jocelyn had pretended interest in the game. Then she tolerated it, and we kept a running silence going, like it was some nerd dialysis I had to do but that nobody — not our friends, not her mother — wanted to hear about in detail. But then in March, Renfield called me into his office and asked me about the huge traffic on the network pegged to my desktop. I told him I was getting stronger, just not the version of me he could see. He raised his eyebrows and said, “We’ve had a good run,” and I disappeared into the Also for a weekend, questing a Dissolution Cube. That Sunday afternoon, one task short, Jocelyn yanked the power strip. She said she was living with a teenager, which sucked, which needed to change or we were over. The cords hung in her hand like the bouquet of dead snakes I ended up with after draining the Moat of U’mkatam. So we posted a calendar in the kitchen where I recorded my hours. Now, when she came home, she’d palm the CPU to see if it was hot.

Through the blinds, I watched the sunset fire through the windows of the unfinished condos across the street. The developer had gone bankrupt during the construction, and a gate surrounded the ground level. Stacks of Sheetrock and buckets lay abandoned on the cement floors. A blue tarp flapped from a wood beam, tugged by the wind. I lingered on the couch, heartsick for the next thing in my life, for some future that could bear weight, while I listened for a ping from the office. The sound of company.

Aremi.

I met her two weeks ago, when she was forty minutes old. I had encircled the homestead with a perimeter alarm, and she tripped it. When I found her, she was just a nub of black hair sticking out of the render. Somehow, she’d lofted from Entrance Rock and backhoed herself in deep. As we neared the end, you could find pockets of null all over the place.

/ this interface blows! she ping’d, her head thrashing in the busted polygons.

Eventually, Aremi maneuvered free. She’d outfitted herself in classic moon elf, green skin with red eyes and flared ears. It was first choice on the pull down. Her hair fell in two braids down to her chest, disappearing into a maroon cowl. Pretty much everybody dumped the Mordor crap long ago for bespoke player designs like BabyMomma, DimeBag, Ice-Queen. I skinned in EmoPrince, mostly for the syncs.

I pulled up her player profile. She’d sketched it — only diehards fleshed them out — but she said she was in grad school in Arizona, mostly “taking baths” and “avoiding my adviser.”

/what’s your field? I ping’d.

/how’d you know?

/your profile, you wrote it

/doh! psych.

/here for research? on gamers?

/on loneliness.

/srsly? I ping’d. /I should leave you alone then.

It was an n00b mistake to ask too many questions too fast. And I didn’t want to creep her. So I backed off, let her drive herself, and answered her pings when she asked. We lofted over the hedge maze that I had planted out the back of the manse. I’ve always had a thing for labyrinths, the original alt-worlds, and Rrango used to invite crowds over to lose themselves and sync in the bushes or whatever. It’d taken me a year to earn the Alsonax to buy the grid and build it. The bright-green walls sprang two stories tall, so once you were in, you were in. Along the paths flowed a series of connecting pools, bordered by statuary of all the creatures I’d pwned — from world bosses down to lair dogs. At the exit, where all the water sluiced to, lay my sea.

/you designed all this? Aremi asked.

/pathetic, eh?

/no, impressive. i mean i had no idea. .

And for the first time in months, since I stopped working and Jocelyn looked at me as though I had another few mistakes in me, I added up. A stranger saying that I had not wasted my time. This is what the Also does: it feeds you people.

/all this will be wiped soon , I ping’d. /you know the Also is ending right?

/endings better than beginnings , she answered. /last song beautifuler than first.

And I thought of Jocelyn with her novels, and how she always read the final sentence before starting them.

/ so who are you? she ping’d.

/32 yr, 5ft11. 235lbs (losing;))

/ew. don’t care. I meant: why help me?

/like being a tour guide.

/don’t you have friends? or no friends in the game, just players?

I had this small, warming hope that she might become the one thing from the game I could take with me.

/have friends. but new friends better than old friends. interestinger.

/so not a word!

/what about: don’t want to be alone when the lights go out.

Aremi went aerial and dusted me. I chased her, and for the rest of the night we did this thing where I’d zoom her and she’d fling herself away. Everybody goes through it, the I-can-fly moment. It’s half the appeal of the Also, but eventually, she flung herself away and signed off. No good-bye. A minute later came a ping, slowed by traffic through the Core:

/alone at the end? but we will be .

I spent an hour idling in Origin Park before Aremi finally showed. She was quieter than normal, slow to ping, as though she had come only for my benefit.

/RL aggro , she said, then: /correct usage?

I needed to wow her.

/there’s so much world left to see , I ping’d. /how about a tour?

/show me!

We tethered together and flew through my quest history, every place we could re-achieve — the Lair of the Kraken, the smoking Manhatta ruins, the dungeons of UnderAlso. But viewed on aerial, buried in the new snow, the sites looked small and unpersuasive. The Lair of the Kraken without a Kraken deboning players is a pretty much a cave with clip art. We’d achieve one vista, Aremi would ping, /next , and we’d go. I tried to impress upon her what had been undertaken. In an empty Moon Faire, we downed sinister mead and let our screens blur. We launched together in a catapult, thrown out over the sea. At the giant bones of Dnarak the World-Eater, I told her how thousands of citizens had brought it down. It was the best night in-game I’ve ever had, a civilization rising up, the hail of weapons like a punishing cloud.