by Oliver Smith
Jacobs’s car and my laptop vanished before the ambulance arrived. The murderers left no evidence to be used against them, not that they’re the only ones responsible.
Planet Ruination
By Patrick Lacey
Zach watched as EMTs carried two black bags, in no rush as they placed the bodies in the back of the ambulance and drove off. There had been some sort of fight near the back of the line. No one else seemed to notice.
He and Jesse were a hundred yards or so from the front doors of the store. The sky was grey and sunless and there was a chill in the air that did not fit the July morning. It had been like that all week leading up to the game’s release.
The automatic doors buzzed open and a few store employees stepped outside, one of them with a loudspeaker. It was hard to hear from their position. He looked at Jesse, but his friend was just as confused.
People raised their hands and flipped the store workers off. A woman stepped beyond the barricade and spat in their faces. A cop grabbed her and escorted her away. She broke free and sped off. The officers didn’t bother to pursue her and the line moved up without missing a beat.
“Did you fucking hear what they said?” the man in front of Zach and Jesse asked. He wore a stained white t-shirt and most of his face was covered in tribal tattoos.
They shook their heads.
The man shot a snot rocket onto the pavement and lit a cigarette. “They said they can’t guarantee there will be enough copies. We’ve been standing here for what—six, seven hours now? Said one of the shipments was delayed. Know what I think? I think the developers purposely didn’t send enough copies.”
Zach turned around. The line stretched around the corner. “They must have enough for us, right? There are probably only a hundred people in front of us.”
“We’ll see,” the guy said. “We’ll just fucking see.” He turned around and Zach let out a trapped breath. He had not liked the man’s eyes. There was something wrong with them. In fact, now that he thought about it, everything seemed wrong today. There was something in the air, something primal, like the feeling before an earthquake.
A few protestors broke through the barrier across the parking lot, carrying signs and warning the crowd that the devil was at work. Only evil could come from such filth. The game had been spawned from hell itself. It was not too late to turn back.
A man and woman stepped out of line and kicked the protesters to the ground, stomping on them.
Zach covered his mouth, his stomach churning. He expected everyone around him to do the same, but instead they laughed or barely took notice. Even the cops let the fight continue for a bit too long before stepping in.
Jesse took a sip of his energy drink and belched. “I’m telling you, they better have two copies left for us. Otherwise we’ll have to wait for another shipment, and who knows how long that’ll be. There’s no way in hell we’re missing out on it.” He nodded toward the enormous cardboard cutout, an advertisement for Planet Ruination. It featured a man in sunglasses, cigarette hanging out of his mouth as he stood upon a mound of bodies. He held a shotgun, smoke still risingfrom its barrel. Behind him the street was littered with cops, the night sky filled with helicopters, spotlights shining downward.
“You think it’s true?” Jesse asked, still staring at the advertisement. “About how it goes on forever?”
Zach shrugged. “I guess. It’s hard to believe though.” When the game had first been announced, everyone had been underwhelmed. The first screenshots looked bland and the demo was nothing special. Critics said it was a knockoff of every other open world game.
But eventually more details had been released, the most mind-blowing of which had been that he game did not end. It was not a fictional city or town. It was Earth, geometrically and geographically accurate, an exact recreation, so they said. It seemed revolutionary.
As was the plot.
Because there was no plot. Your only objective was to kill and torture as many people as your heart desired.
Planet Ruination.
The title seemed to move on its own and Zachary imagined the longer he looked the more the letters would slither. He turned his head toward the line.
There was a commotion, people shouting.
And then the front doors opened.
The crowd turned savage. They charged the entrance, yelling and laughing and trampling those who couldn’t keep up. Zach saw a boy with severe acne trip over his own legs. He was lost in a sea limbs and Zach wondered if he would emerge alive. He pushed the thought aside and followed Jesse toward ground zero.
Across the way, in the middle of the store, was a giant bin filled with copies of Planet Ruination.
He was shoved from every direction. Someone jabbed him in the nose and his vision blurred. By the time he could see again his heart sunk.
The bin was already empty.
There were groans from the crowd, which turned to threats, which turned to violence, punches and kicks and scratches all around him. The cops from outside seemed to have vanished.
There was a tug on his shoulder and Zach winced, preparing to have his jaw broken. He turned and saw Jesse smiling as though it was Christmas morning.
He held two copies of the game.
“Let’s get the hell out of here.” He grabbed Zach and pulled him toward the side exit. On their way out they came across a teenage girl crawling on all fours. There were deep cuts along her cheek and forehead. She was hyperventilating.
“Wait,” Zach said, grabbing Jesse.
“For what? We’ve got the games.”
Zach pointed to the girl.
“She’ll be fine,” Jesse said. “The cuts don’t look deep.” He sped past the registers and through the doors. The sensors began to chime but no one noticed they were stealing.
Zachary looked once more at the girl. She tried to get up but slipped back to the floor. He supposed he ought to notify the EMTs or the police, but maybe Jess had been right. The cuts didn’t look so deep up close.
“Wait up,” he called, heading back into the sunless day.
Jesse tossed him his copy. There was something sticky on the back. He turned it around to examine and wished he hadn’t.
There were a few drops of blood obscuring one of the screen shots, already beginning to dry.
They were well stocked with chips, cheese curls, candy bars, beef jerky, and more energy drinks. Jesse tossed their stash onto the floor and they dug in as his system powered up. Jesse’s room was dark, the television’s glow the only source of light. His shades were drawn and what little traces of light shone through made no difference. It was as if night had come early.
Jesse put the disc in and a loading screen appeared. It was unlike any Zach had ever seen. Instead of a bar or percentage, there was only a symbol; an upside down triangle inside of a square inside of a circle, with smaller circles placed sporadically around the perimeter.
“What do you think it means?” Jesse asked.
“Probably just the company’s logo or something.”
The symbol seemed to grow, and while he couldn’t say why, Zach felt uneasy. He could have sworn he’d seen it before, perhaps in a nightmare. He tried his best to look at Jesse’s dirty floor and poster-covered walls, but his eyes always made their way back to that deformed set of shapes.
After an eternity the symbol disappeared and the game began. There was no title screen, no options for game difficulty setting. It simply opened on a suburban street.
The first thing Zach noticed was that the character looked nothing like the one from the advertisement. He was much scrawnier and paler, and somehow more familiar. It bothered him in a way he couldn’t explain.
Jesse was instantly drawn in, his eyes wide, mouth hanging open. Zach swore he saw the symbol reflected in his friend’s eyes, but it must have been a trick of the light.
After a few minutes of getting the controls down, Jesse began to move his character toward something that lay on the ground. He kneeled d
own and picked it up and the game informed him he’d obtained his first weapon—a bat.
An elderly woman appeared at the end of the street. She carried a bag of groceries. A box fell from one of the bags and she swore, kneeling down to pick it up.
Jesse did not hesitate. He steered his character toward the woman, breaking into a run and winding the bat back before swinging it across the side of her head. The sound was beyond realistic; Zach heard it in his own skull—the tearing of flesh and cracking of bone. The woman fell to the pavement. Jesse brought the bat down again and again, six times in all, before the woman finally stopped twitching.
He turned away from her and continued down the street.
He was smiling.
Zach made the connection then, why the character seemed so familiar. Because the character was Jesse, a nearly perfect digitalized version. And the woman, now that he thought about it, resembled Jesse’s next door neighbor, Mrs. Lieberman, who had given them a hard time for just about everything.
Wasn’t the scenery familiar, too? Wasn’t that the oak tree in Jesse’s yard and wasn’t that Jesse’s house fading into the background as his character picked up a machete and sped toward a teenage boy walking a dog?
The rumors had been true.
The world in the game was the world from their lives.
His pulse began to quicken and he wasn’t sure if he was excited or sick, perhaps a mixture of the two.
On the walk home Zach thought he saw the symbol on the ground. He nearly fell over, stepping back to catch his breath. But when the moment passed he saw that it had been an optical illusion, the shadows of tree limbs and the glow of the street lamp playing tricks with his mind.
When he reached the point where Jesse had beaten Mrs. Lieberman in the game, his heart began to beat unevenly. Suddenly afraid, he ran the rest of the way home. It was only a few minutes but it felt like forever as he looked in yards and on porches, wondering if anyone lurked in silence
He triple-checked the locks when he got home. The house was empty and dark. His parents both worked the graveyard shift. He had not been in the same room with them in a month or so. They were saving up for a vacation, his mother had told him. The late shifts paid an extra three dollars an hour.
The lie was told so well he had almost believed her.
Zach turned on every light in the house. He thought about going to bed, but his room seemed the darkest. There were too many shadows that were unaccounted for.
He slid some jerky from his pocket, took a few bites, and sat on the living room couch watching syndicated sitcoms and waiting for the sun to rise.
He did not mean to fall asleep and did not notice the transition. For a moment he thought he was still awake, which was quite cruel when he saw Bethany come through the front door and toss her backpack onto the recliner.
It was still dark out and Zach wanted to ask her why she’d arrived so late, but he found he had no voice, and as he tried to flag her down he discovered he was paralyzed.
A cool wind passed through the room as the door blew open. She’d forgotten to shut it behind her.
There was someone outside, standing a few feet from the front steps.
Zach screamed but Bethany did not notice. She flipped through the day’s mail, answered a few text messages, and began making one of her health shakes. They were always green and slimy and Zach used to give her shit for them every chance he got. She whistled as she worked and the man from outside crept inside. The whirring of the blender hid the sound of his footsteps.
Though the scene was wrong because Bethany had been killed near the theatre on Main street, the events were similar. She had been getting a coffee at the café on the corner when the man had begun to follow her. He had pulled her into an alley and had done things to her that made his parents choose graveyard shifts instead of coming home to their remaining child and the house where they’d once had a daughter as well.
Zach watched from the couch as the man stripped his sister naked and the dream mercifully began to fade away.
He opened his eyes, sweating and sick to his stomach. He cleared his throat, found that he could speak and move. He sat on the floor, his neck arched toward the television screen.
The game was on.
Planet Ruination was in full effect.
The digital version of Zach was surrounded by body parts; a finger here, an ear there. There were hundreds of bodies scattered along his street, none of them whole. There were more than a few severed heads, and he saw they were not random victims. There were Jesse and Mrs. Lieberman and Bethany and his parents, eyes all lifeless, mouths all stuck in an eternal screams.
In the background, a plane flew through the sky, its engine emitting a vapor that formed the same shape from the loading screen.
Meet me near the canal, Zach texted Jesse. Fuck school today. We need to talk.
He walked downtown, crossing the street when he reached the coffee shop and theatre, and crossing back once he was a safe distance away. He checked his phone every few seconds but there was no response. When he arrived at the canal he hoped he would see Jesse there, smoking a cigarette and trying to look cool for passersby.
But the canal was empty save for a few men fishing across the way. Zach sat down on the wall and waited. He could see the high school from there. Students were parking and busses were unloading. He couldn’t stand the thought of sitting in a class room all day, surrounded by people who may have killed him in their Planet Ruination save files.
When the waiting became too much he started walking toward Jesse’s house. There was a light drizzle in the air and it chilled his skin. The sky was darker than the day before, the clouds thicker.
A few minutes later he stepped up to Jesse’s front door and rang the bell. Jesse’s mom answered. “Hi, Zach. How are you?”
“Good, thanks. I was wondering if I could talk to Jesse?”
“I’m afraid he’s feeling sick this morning. He stayed home from school.”
Zach nodded. He’d known Jesse couldn’t go back to normal life a day after playing the game. There was nothing normal once you’d had a taste of it. “Would it be okay just to pop in his room real quick? I think I might have left my homework there last night and I’m running late as it is.” He pretended to smile.
“I suppose that would be okay. Try to keep your distance though.” She opened the door and waved him in. “Whatever he’s got, it’s not good. He looks like death.”
Zach thanked her and headed upstairs. The hall was dark save for the slit of light underneath Jesse’s door.
Zach knocked.
There was no answer.
He could hear movement on the other side. He knocked once more with no response then turned the knob and stepped in.
Jesse was sitting on the floor in the exact position as yesterday. Most of the junk food had been devoured, empty wrappers and cans littering the floor. The curtains were still drawn and the room was still cloaked in shadow.
And Jesse was still huddled in front of the television, the controller in his hands.
On the screen Jesse stood above the squirming form of Allison Beckham, the girl they both liked to imagine had a landing strip and was painfully good at fellatio. She was raising her hands to the sky and trying to block Jesse’s fists as he pummeled her. She pleaded with him and it sounded as though her voice were real, as if she was in the room with them.
Not for the first time Zach wondered how it was possible, how the game could capture the world so accurately. He imagined satellites hidden above the clouds, taking constant video of everyone that passed within reach, collecting data for Planet Ruination.
Collecting victims.
“Jesse, why don’t you turn that off. Your mom said you were sick. I don’t feel too good myself. How about we go for a walk or something? Clear our heads, you know?”
Jesse grunted, his eyes never leaving the screen. He seemed lost, almost in a trance. He nibbled his lower lip as he watched himself break Allison
’s nose.
“Jesse, please.” Zach stepped closer. “There’s something wrong with the game. You must feel it, too. It’s like it’s… getting in our heads or something. I think we need a break from it.” He reached a trembling hand toward the console. “It saves automatically, so you won’t lose anything. We can always play again later.”
Jesse grabbed Zach’s wrist. His grip was strong, cutting off the blood flow. His eyes were swollen and red, as if he’d been up for weeks. “Don’t do that.” For a long time he held Zach’s numbing wrist and gritted his teeth before swatting it away and turning his attention back to the screen. “Son of a bitch,” Jesse said, pointing.
Allison had managed to stand up and was limping away from him. “Now I have to catch her again.”
Zach backed into the hall and closed the door. He heard a piercing scream followed by Jesse’s on and off screen grunting as he caught up to Allison.
Zach went downstairs.
“How’s he doing?” Jesse’s mom asked as she watered a plant.
Zach rubbed his wrist as he made his way outside. “You were right,” he said. “He looks like death.”
There were police cruisers and ambulances parked in front of the school as Zach passed by the canal. He could see a crowd of students gathered. It looked like chaos from where he stood.
Another two cruisers sped by, each turning in opposite directions. He could hear more sirens in the distance. Across the way, toward the boulevard, black smoke rose into the sky, a fire not too far off.
He stepped into a convenience store for an energy drink and a candy bar, tapping his foot too fast as he waited in line. The newspapers near the register all had similar headlines: sudden increases in murders, spikes in suicide, a few too many rapes for an ordinary day on Earth.
