The Monolith

by Stephen Roark

  “What happened?” I asked. Something obviously had everyone all fired up. Jacob turned around and looked at me, but this time, he gave me zero attitude.

  “Konrad…he just—”

  “Went nuts,” a Seeker with a Bloodletter and frayed suit jacket said slowly.

  “What do you mean?” Rey asked.

  “We were all just talking by the lamppost,” Jacob replied, his eyes focused inward. “And all of a sudden Konrad just sort of…froze, like he was lagging or something. Then all of a sudden his eyes…”

  Jacob stopped and shook his head as though he didn’t even believe what he was saying.

  “His eyes what?”

  “His eyes went…red,” he continued. “Blood red. And then he just started attacking everybody.”

  “He killed Clemence!” someone cried out angrily.

  I had to laugh. “Big deal! So the guy’s a PK. Get over it.”

  “It’s more than that!” Jacob snapped at me with an anger I hadn’t seen before. “You didn’t see it. You didn’t see…him…”

  I rolled my eyes and turned back to Rey and shrugged. “Carebears,” I whispered. She laughed gently and opened her character sheet.

  “Will you be on later?”

  “Mom’s working, so yeah,” I replied.

  “Great. I’ll holo you. Later.”

  “Later.” Rey’s body began to dematerialize in front of me, and I opened my own character sheet, found the logout button and pressed it.

  As I did, something unexpected happened.

  As before, the world began to fade, but then—lightning.

  No, not lightning. Electricity. Purple, coiled and fierce, stabbing through the void with a deathly hiss.

  Bzzzzt! Bzzzzzt!

  My mind exploded.

  Pieces of a world chunked into my vision like pieces of a puzzle, linking, snatching each other to form a vista.

  A city, both ruined and grand, stood defiantly against a pouring sky. Great clouds hung like mutated squid over vaulted roofs and cold stone buttresses, stained glass windows and peaked cathedrals.

  Bzzzzzt!

  Lightning arced through the sky, and the vision changed, cut and I was somewhere else.

  Street level.

  Around me, countless voices droned in agony. Shadowed figures, human, staggered and swayed against each other. Before me, a great black monolith.

  It rose from the ground as if it had grown out of the very core of the world. Its inky surface reflected nothing. In fact, it seemed to soak up light from all around it, like a black hole intent on swallowing up the city.

  From everywhere and nowhere, a voice scraped my mind like a cheese grater.

  “SEEK THE MONOLITH!” it roared, causing my soul to quake. “SEEK THE MONOLITH AND FIND SALVATION!”

  Blinding lightning flashed again and the vision vanished, leaving me in blackness. After a moment, I was aware of the feeling of my bed on my back and the Crown on my head. I opened my eyes to the patterns of glow in the dark stars on the ceiling of my room.

  “What the Hell was that?”

  11

  Too Close to Home

  “We still don’t know what causes Epilepsy, I’m afraid. In many ways, the study of the brain has not progressed much in the last 100 years or more. Ironic that we are working to create artificial brains when we are unable to fully understand our own!”

  —Dr. Charles Taylor

  My head was still spinning from whatever had just happened as I logged out. Part of me wanted to think it was just another twisted part of the game, one of Mizaguchi’s mysteries, but there was something…wrong about it. The harsh cuts, the bolts of electricity. It didn’t feel like something built into the game. It felt more like a glitch, like I’d been given a glimpse of something I shouldn’t have seen.

  Seek the Monolith?

  I sat up, removed the Crown and rubbed my eyes. Logging out of VR always felt a little bit like waking up from a dream, and it took a few minutes to get used to my “real” body. I turned and looked out my tiny window at the rows and rows of identical, 3D-printed homes, squat squares of varying shades of beige. The rain was still slamming angrily down as if to remind us all of the hopelessness of where we lived.

  A faint smell of something resembling chicken soup wafted into my nostrils. I turned to my bedroom door and called out, “Mom?”

  To my surprise, I heard her voice call back from the main room of the house.

  “Hey, honey!”

  “Why aren’t you at work?” I shouted.

  “I will be, I just—can you come out here so we don’t have to yell?”

  With a groan, I swung my feet off the bed, slid into my house-hoodie, pulled open my bedroom door—which always liked to stick—and stepped into the main room of our house that functioned as living room and kitchen in one. Mom was sitting in her favorite spot on the couch watching some terrible TV show.

  “I made you one of those Jiffy Soups you like,” she said with a smile. I saw the red container steaming on the counter that divided the living room from the kitchen, and made my way over to it. The truth was, I actually hated Jiffy Soups with their bouillon broth and lab-grown faux-meat, but they were cheap and easy and I didn’t want to make my mom feel bad about buying them, so I dug a spoon out of the drawer and took it over to my chair beside the couch.

  “So, why aren’t you at work?” I asked her.

  “You say that like you’re disappointed to see me!” she teased.

  “I don’t mean it that way,” I replied. “I’m just surprised.”

  The broth was lava-hot as I raised my spoon to my lips, so I set the thing aside to let it cool and glanced at the TV. Mom was watching another one of her “innocuous” television shows, and this time it was one of those surprise gift shows where kids would remodel their parents’ houses for them, usually poorly but spending a lot of money, and then surprise them when they came home from work.

  I wondered what it would be like to grow up in a house with more than four rooms, including a bathroom. The one Mom was watching had two stories and a garage. I couldn’t even imagine having that much space, or what I would do with it, but the people on these shows always managed to fill them up with junk. I guess the more space you have the more crap you end up owning.

  “How was your day?” Mom asked me as she tucked in to one of her vegetarian boxed dinners.

  “Reminiscent of a Greek tragedy.”

  “Oh, God! Honey, what happened?”

  “My friends all ditched me for the senior guys,” I told her bitterly. “Figured it would get them some much needed social status points.”

  “Oh, honey…I’m so sorry,” my mom said, pushing out her bottom lip and looking at me with a combination of love and pity. The second part made me uncomfortable and I looked back at the TV, where someone’s mom was oohing and aahing over a state of the art holo screen they’d installed in her kitchen.

  “Eh, it’s all right,” I lied, grabbing the remote. “Can I change this?”

  I didn’t wait for an answer, as I knew she’d say yes, and quickly started flipping through the nonsense. Old movies, sports that didn’t interest me, paid VR streams and of course, the news. I flipped right past it, but stopped when something caught my eye. I went back a station and saw in-game footage of Blood Seekers playing on the screen.

  “…more reports saying the same thing. Unresponsive. Comatose. Catatonic…”

  “Oh, is this your new game?” my mom asked.

  “Shhh!” I hissed, rather rudely, but I needed to hear.

  “…Mr. and Mrs. Thompson say their twelve-year-old son entered the game this morning when they left for work, and when they returned home, they were unable to wake him.”

  “What?” my mom asked with concern. “What did he say?”

  I shook my head and kept listening. Mrs. Thompson was on screen now, tears spilling from her eyes. Behind her, a team of paramedics were entering the house.

  “We just—we just ca
me home and pressed the uhm—the uhm—the button to ya know, contact him when he’s in game?”

  “Mmhmm,” the reporter nodded.

  “And he didn’t answer! So—so I pressed it again, and he still didn’t answer!”

  “Eventually we just took the Crown off,” Mr. Thompson said, doing his best to keep it together. “But he…he just lay there.”

  The on-scene footage cut back to the bobble-headed news anchor at the studio. “Experts say the Thompsons’ son’s brainwaves are still reading as though he is in the game world, despite not being attached to the Fount device.”

  Another cut, this time to a doctor wearing a lab coat.

  “We’ve never seen anything like it,” he said, shaking his head as he pushed his glasses higher up on his nose. “Without the device—without the Crown, brain activity like this simply should not be possible.”

  “How do you explain it?” the reporter asked.

  “We can’t,” the doctor replied simply. “It’s as though—it’s as though the person’s mind has somehow remained behind in the game world.”

  “What?!” my mom roared, getting to her feet and looking at me as though I would have an answer for her.

  “What, Mom?” I replied defensively, sliding my phone out of my pocket. “I’m seeing this just like you are.”

  “Well, that is it,” she announced, setting her dinner down and stomping into my room. “No more of this game for you!”

  “What?!” I roared, getting to my feet and racing after her. She had my Fount in her arms and marched right past me and into her room. I followed after her in protest. “Mom, come on, what are you doing? I’m sure it’s just…a glitch or something!”

  “Glitch my butt!” she countered as she stuffed my precious Fount into her closet and slammed the door shut. “I won’t have my son getting stuck in virtual reality!”

  “Mom, come on!” I whined. I’d barely gotten started in Blood Seekers, but I was already in love with it, and being stuck back here in my miserable reality, staring out at the Barracks while it rained, was going to be absolute torture. The Fount was my only way out.

  “Don’t ‘mom, come on’ me! You can have this back when they figure out what the problem is.”

  And then she gave me that look—the look I knew meant that our discussion was over and if I tried to argue with her, I’d only be digging myself deeper. My mom cared about me more than anything in the world, more than herself, so getting her to let me take a chance when the news had the general public terrified, would be like asking J.D. not to be a pompous prick.

  “Mom, you know I can just go and get it out of there when you go to work, right?” I asked her, but mom already had her phone to her ear. She raised an eyebrow at me as it rang.

  “Hey, Paul,” she said as her boss answered. “Yeah, I can’t make it in tonight. Clay fell down and broke his ankle and I have to take him to the hospital.”

  My eyes almost bugged out of my skull.

  “Yeah, I’ll work a double for you tomorrow, don’t worry. Thanks. Yeah, I will. Bye.”

  She hung up, crossed her arms, cocked her head to the side and stared at me. Great, I thought. Now what am I gonna do tonight?

  As a last ditch effort, I went back over to the TV, hoping something miraculous had happened in the last minute that would change my mom’s mind, but they were still reporting the same thing, and running the interview with the Thompsons for the second time.

  Angrily, I grabbed my Jiffy Soup and stomped back to my room, slamming the door shut behind me. I sat down in my desk chair and pouted.

  What the Hell is going on? I thought after a few minutes of staring at the steam rising from the red cup of processed noodles. Were people really getting…stuck in the game? How was that possible? And how many of them? It didn’t seem like it could be true.

  It has to be a glitch, I decided, opening my phone to text Rey. Or a sensationalist fake news story!

  Me: You see the news?

  I pressed send and spooned a now tolerably hot mouthful of noodles into my mouth, crushing a thin strip of fake carrot between my front teeth. As I slurped them down, part of me wondered if I’d really mind being stuck inside Blood Seekers. I’d be able to hang out with Rey, go on adventures, not have to go to school or deal with all the drama that came with it. But I’d never see my mother again—unless she all of a sudden became a badass gamer and decided to come with me.

  “Yeah, like that would happen,” I chuckled, glancing down at my phone. No response from Rey. That was odd. She always had her phone with her and never took more than 30 seconds getting back to me unless she was at school. I sent her a follow-up.

  Me: You alive? Mom stole my Fount. Probably can’t play tonight.

  Again I waited. Again, no response. Rey was an artist and sometimes ran a live-stream on her PC while she was working on a new drawing. There was a chance, albeit a small one, that she was caught up in that and didn’t see my messages, so I slid over to my PC, woke it up, opened a browser and clicked the bookmark link that took me to her stream. It opened instantly, and there was definitely a stream playing, but it wasn’t even remotely what I’d expected.

  Instead of seeing Rey sitting at her computer, screen-mirroring while she worked, I found myself staring at the backs of two very concerned adults—Rey’s parents.

  “Rey, wake up!” her mom cried out, running her hands frantically through her hair.

  “That’s it,” her dad growled, leaning forward where Rey was lying motionless on her bed. “I’m taking the Crown off her.”

  “No!” her mom screamed, leaping in front of him. “No, don’t do that!”

  “Mary, we have to get her out of there!”

  “You saw what they said on the news!” her mother protested, her throat choked with sadness and panic. “That doesn’t work!”

  “Well neither does shouting at her!” he snapped back, reaching around her to the Crown on Rey’s head.

  “I said no!” Mary roared, slapping his hand away as tears began to pour from her face. My heart was in my throat as I watched the panicked scene. My blood pressure was so high I felt like it was about to start squirting out my ears. “You take that off her—we don’t know what it will do!”

  “What else can we do?!” her father shouted. I could hear the pain in his voice, despite his lack of tears. “It’s not like we can do anything from here!”

  I couldn’t watch the stream anymore. It was like watching your dog die. I closed the browser and leaned back in my chair as I thought about what to do.

  A spark of inspiration flared inside me. “From here!”

  Rey’s dad was right. There was nothing to be done from here, but what about in game? If Rey was somehow stuck in Blood Seekers like the Thompsons’ son, then maybe I could reach her and figure out why she wasn’t able to log out. It was a long shot, and a dangerous one if the same ended up happening to me, but Rey was my best friend—my only friend—and I knew she’d do the same for me.

  But how was I supposed to do that anyway? My mom had the Fount in her closet, and there was no way she was going to give it to me. Despite the small size of our home, I’d learned to sneak around it from a very young age. Getting up from my chair, I quietly made my way across the room and pressed my ear to my door.

  The sound of the TV was gone, and I heard the faint sound of running water, which meant Mom was in the bathroom getting ready for bed. That meant I probably had about 30 seconds, about how long it took her to brush her teeth, to get into her room, grab my Fount and make it back before she noticed what had happened. There was no time to waste. I yanked the door open, rushed straight through the living room and into my mom’s bedroom.

  Her towel was hanging from her dresser and caught my ankle as I raced past, almost sending me to the floor. But I managed to recover and moved quickly to the closet. With a swift tug, I opened the doors to reveal my precious Fount sitting on a pile of dirty clothes. I snatched it up, closed the doors again and dashed back in
to my room just as I heard the water shut off.

  As I shut my door, I heard the one to the bathroom open, and wasted no time concealing my Fount beneath my sweatshirt, then leapt into bed and switched out the light. Seconds later, I heard my mother’s knock at the door but pretended I didn’t.

  “Honey?” she whispered, opening it a crack, but I just lay there, pretending I was asleep. A soft exhale of breath let me know she was smiling at me, and for a second I felt bad for deceiving her, but it had to be done. Rey was trapped in Blood Seekers, and I wasn’t just going to leave her there. She’d do the same for me.

  Countless questions raced through my mind as my mother shut the door and went to her room: Why are people getting stuck in game? How is that even possible? What was that big black monolith I saw when I was logging out?

  I’m sorry, Mom, I thought. I pressed the initialize button and felt my consciousness begin to lift away from my body and I knew I had just made a very, very dangerous decision.

  12

  Red Eyes of the Bloodless

  “Doing what needs to be done is the hardest duty of a Seeker. Life rarely gives us alternatives when facing its brutality.”

  —Rathborne of the Order of the Raven

  The silver glow of the lamppost’s light expanded in the darkness. Slowly, the world came into view and my ears were filled with the roar of voices, loud and fierce like an angry mob.

  “What else can we do?!”

  “Just relax, will you? I’m sure it’s just a glitch!”

  “Glitch my ass! We can’t log out!”

  I turned around to see a group of Seekers, probably at least ten of them, huddled together and arguing. I looked carefully, but Rey wasn’t among them. Jacob stood at their center, shaking his head like he was ready to punch somebody.

  “Jacob!” I shouted, striding quickly over to them. “Have you seen her?”