The Tenth Girl

by Sara Faring

  The sky is no longer the sky as you or I know it; it’s been transformed into a greedy, sucking charcoal swirl, its inky reaches coming to an apex above the house, like a cosmic toilet bowl ready for a vengeful God to flush us. It’s high time to beg Charon for forgiveness. To grovel. For better or for worse, he’s my only source of wisdom about the game’s structure, with Mama long gone.

  * * *

  Charon must have smelled my desperation or Mavi’s blood, because he’s awake. He looks different. Smug. Beard trimmed. New cheesesteak in hand.

  “Your performances with the English teacher are making me tear up, kid. I didn’t even know she was built for that kind of thing. You know, in the fiveish years I’ve been running this, she’s never been told by Dom that she’s not real. I swear to God. She’s let him do her, like, five times, she’s slapped him, like, fourteen, but she’s never had him shatter her world in some screwed-up romantic gesture.”

  I swallow hard. Charon has been running this? My veins feel like swollen rivers choked with ice. “Who are you?”

  Charon stays silent. He smiles like a cat. “Haven’t you guessed, Angel?”

  The realization hits me like a load of bricks.

  He’s not the programmed oracle I believed him to be.

  He’s not even another regular player, like me.

  Running this.

  He’s the other creator of the game. One of my mama’s partners, as he once let slip. That asshole who joked about strangled girls.

  “You thought I make friends with every Other here?” he says, plucking out a chunk of beef and popping it into his gray mouth. “I knew your dead mom, kid. I worked next to her for five years. Of course I saw your name when you registered.” He takes a giant mouthful.

  It makes sense. That’s why he sees and knows everything. That’s why he understands the game on a level I couldn’t even see. Five years. My goal feels more impossible than ever.

  “How can I convince you to shut down Vaccaro School for good?” I ask. “My mom—my mom wouldn’t want to see it run this way. It’s—it’s her legacy.”

  He shakes his shaggy head, swallows. “Holy shit. You’re so naive. And also so dense. I’m tired of pussyfooting around with you. We’ve run it this way since the beginning. And they’re not girls, kid. They’re lines of code. They’re characters. They’re built from pixels like the Sims your siblings played with as kids. You’re plugged into a machine that makes you think they’re girls. Are you a fucking moron?”

  I’m not sure how to explain to him that, if he and Mama did create these people, if a team somewhere in California did write everyone here, then their creations have outgrown them. She must have known that. But my inability to explain seems like a fatal flaw. “Come on, Charon. They experience real terror, real pain—”

  “And this is an income stream for me, kid. You, too, I might add, in the sense that your mom’s cut still pays her outstanding medical bills, if memory serves. And do you even understand the stellar press we got for creating a game that gives losers and pedos a sort of healthy outlet?”

  “I can pay you, Charon, if that’s what you want. I have money from the settlement with the truck company.”

  “Um, fuck no.”

  “What?”

  “Are you kidding? I’m not a monster. I’m not going to take the blood money you got because your brother died,” Charon says. “Yeah, I know about that, too. Listen, kid. He was a real person, your brother. And what happened to him is a tragedy. Seriously. But these characters aren’t real. What happens to them isn’t real. And I won’t be made to feel bad about making a living off my own intellectual property.” He frowns, stroking his beard. “And also, my Vietnam game makes no money at all, if that’s your next tactic. That Wired article that went viral on Vaccaro School came out like three years ago, but it still gets people interested. Even Reddit lost its shit over how gross some of the players were last year, and that’s Reddit, where selfie videos of twelve-year-old girls cutting themselves is an average Tuesday. We had a dude strangle all the girls last year, low-key, which isn’t chill or even possible. I mean, theoretically, I guess, they’ll feel the pain and think they’re dying, in their own fake-ass way, but they never die. You need a body to do that shit.

  “But besides the money, I’m proud of the game. It has its own mythology based on a seed of truth, like GoT. You know the Zapuche tribe is real? I was backpacking through Argentina and Chile after college when I heard about them and came up with it all. That’s how I met your mom, actually: I put out an ad for coders and designers who were Argentine and wanted to partner up. My dad puts up the cash, and she builds out the details, adding some Latin flavor.

  “For a hot second, I convinced her to name me Ngunechen after their deity—a god who derives knowledge and energy from dreams, get it?—but she told me it didn’t have the same ring to it as boatman Charon, which is true, you know? Granted, it’s kind of a cheap rip-off of my real name, but hey.

  “But besides all that, the game’s just the shit conceptually, like Inception status. I mean, consider the parallelism between the savage oppression in 1970s Argentina and the current shitshow in the USA! And on a deeply individual level, we’re perpetuating this belief that you can find your True Self inside a haunted mansion. Matter a little in this dung heap of a universe by existing in the form you wish to exist in. Start as a ghost and claw your way up to the angel or down to the demon you are. People eat that trash up. We started promising it as part of the tagline—Learn more about yourself at Vaccaro School. We’re on some ‘lean in’ shit with our whole TED Talk–level spiel: Invisibility can heal, because it allows us to strip away all our physical hang-ups and … you know, be our zany selves, LMFAO! You know that Yesi line? Ghosts are a metaphor, blah blah blah? Your mom wrote that. She wrote all this to pander to these people. Okay, maybe she believed it. But she was the only one.

  “None of it’s true. It’s honestly hilarious that people don’t get that you don’t suck the energy from other people to expand and reveal yourself in the real world unless you’re a sociopath. Treating fake humans like shit or even falling in love with code doesn’t result in some major epiphany; it numbs you to your own kind over time.

  “But there’s beauty in witnessing people following their base instincts. It’s like cleansing the phony for once. We’re all goddamned animals.” Charon pauses mid-rant, his forgotten cheesesteak dripping, and he wipes at his soiled lap. “Hang on, hang on. I spilled some of my baby. I make this real clothbound cheddar sauce IRL, and your mom re-created it in the game for me. But only I know where that cheddah is. And the tenth girl knows, of course. Because the tenth girl’s a little bitch deserving of all dairy binges.”

  “So you do know more about the tenth girl,” I say flatly, brain processing his word vomit. Shaking so hard I’m worried I won’t keep it together.

  He closes his mouth midbite. “Of course I do. Once upon a time, she was your mom’s in-game avatar, like Charon is mine.”

  The revelation hits me like a gut punch.

  Mama. Of course Mama would choose to be the tenth girl.

  But how is it that I saw her? How did Mavi? Did we imagine it?

  “But her avatar could fly, while mine sits here all day. She wrote them, first, and made me chairbound in some kind of power play. She got off on being a little house guardian angel,” he says. “She would help the characters here and there—especially Mavi, her little pet. And she built in this special level. If any player bothered to learn Zapuche history from the dusty books in the house and figured out who the tenth girl was meant to be, she would appear and grant them access to this special Utopia level where a dream of theirs came true within the ecosystem. Within reason, of course. No one managed that, though, like I told her no one would. Until you. But by then—”

  “Why didn’t you tell me all this before?”

  He looks at me strangely. “I wasn’t about to talk about it with you and upset you,” he says, taking another bi
te and swallowing it whole. “I’m not here to deal with your waterworks. You came to play and get the angst out of your system, didn’t you? So I let you play. And occasionally gave you a helping hand.”

  I’m silent for a while, a confused, swirling mess of hatred, fear, and love. “So you’re saying that if I’d figured out who the tenth girl was meant to be, she could have shut down the game, assuming that was my dream?”

  He blinks at me in apparent shock. “No. What? For real? You’re talking to the goddamn creator of the game and you’re wondering if a feature of the game will help you get the game to self-destruct? Jesus Christ, you are mental. Just enjoy it, okay? You’re getting so close to the end. You’re planning the sacrifice, for fuck’s sake. The sacrifice ritual! Haven’t heard of one of those happening in about three years. I can’t believe you mined that nugget of an origin story out of the old secretary hag, honestly. You’re your mother’s kid, all right. Plus two thousand experience points for Gryffindor. Good for you. You deserve it.

  “And hey, good news: Your character friends will get to meet some charming Others at the vigil, too. Others always attend that little shindig. It’s the only ending that allows the players to inhabit their true forms, per the game brochure pitch, so that’s kind of fun. Despite hating the Others so much, you gifted all of them what they wanted more than anything. They should be s’ing your metaphorical d big-time.

  “Funny how all your machinations precipitated the end for your real friends, though.” He smirks. “You get that, don’t you? Pretty soon after the sacrifice, your friends will all fall asleep for the last time. And the world will disappear just like that. Poof. Characters’ memories erased. And you—you and the Others go back to your boring lives in high school or working in HR or whatever the hell you losers do, and you can pay for access to a new game if you can gather up the dough. It’s ending, kid.”

  “I know it’s ending,” I whisper, digesting every shred of information he’s said. I tattoo it into my brain, every painful word. “I can tell. But I still need to end it for good. It’s what Mama would want.”

  “Okay. Let me humor your psychosis for a minute.” He presses his filthy fingertips together in a steeple. “If you end the game for good, your precious English teacher will disappear from existence.”

  “We could transfer them somewhere. You can do that kind of thing.” I swallow. “But even if you didn’t, she wouldn’t suffer anymore.”

  “Holy shit. You’re sounding like a Romeo and Juliet case. Don’t pull some bullshit right now and tell me you love her and will kill yourself if a few lines of code are trashed. You signed disclaimers. I know you probably scrolled right through without reading, but still. That shit’s legally binding.”

  How couldn’t I care about her? I think to myself. Mama made her, and she exceeded her wildest hopes. I’m sure of it.

  “Jesus H. Christ, you are so screwed up. You know, despite all the psychos who play, this has never happened before,” he says. “Never in the years I’ve been running this. No one has ever gotten so attached to one of them. So all I can say to that is, you are either a full-on lunatic of a breed I’ve never encountered or, the more likely case, you’re a sad little kid who has PTSD because of your whole family dying.”

  “Or no one else got to know Mavi like I did,” I snap.

  “She’s AI, kid. Some lines of code pieced together to make her think like an intelligent being. You think she would pass a Turing test? Don’t make me piss my pants.”

  But he’s wrong, and I know he’s wrong. Mama once told me about another colleague of hers, a computer scientist, who coded a brand-new personality based on that of his daughter, who was dying from leukemia. After she died, he uploaded the personality into a robot, and over the course of a few months, the robot behaved in a way so eerily similar to his late daughter—having the same empathy, the same quirks, the same loves and hates, the same mannerisms, the same character—that he and his wife destroyed the robot for good. Man and our machine-based creations are melding, for better or for worse. Everyone knows that new personality traits can now be coded and uploaded into human brains: I saw as much happen last year. A serial killer on death row was given the first ever technolobotomy, a scientist replacing the psychopath’s lack of empathy in his brain with an acute sensitivity to others’ pain.

  How can creators be sure of the consciousness levels of their creations? I’m not saying that I (as a peer) am the ultimate judge, either—after all, from the beginning, I would have said that Mavi is as intelligent and conscious as anyone else. But I’ve watched her learn and grow in tandem with me; I’ve watched her feel and fight those feelings, and I want to bet everything on her consciousness now. “She feels real pain,” I say.

  “That’s not proof. They’re built to show a pain they don’t feel, when faced with certain fake external stimuli.”

  “She’s grown as a person,” I say. “She’s changed over the course of the game.”

  “Growth built into her character arc.”

  “She cares for me,” I say. “Even though she knows I’m not like her.”

  “She’s rigged to care for anyone in Domenico’s body. She’d let him treat her like dirt and still follow him all gaga. You chose your meat shell wisely. Or unwisely.”

  “How can I prove you’re wrong?”

  Charon snorts. “That’s just it. You can’t. If the English teacher could walk out of the game and survive a year as a real human being, then that might prove I’m wrong. Might. But that’s impossible.”

  I’m silent for a while. “By the way, how did you even know I told Mavi what she is?” I ask. “How did you know we’re planning a sacrifice? How do you know any of this if you’re just sitting here all day?”

  “Come on.” Charon smiles the sort of smile that could shatter at any moment. Is he sweating, or am I imagining it? “I can’t tell you that.”

  “From your office?” I ask gently. “From your cloud chair?”

  Charon snorts. “Cloud chair? Office? No, kid. Jesus, you don’t get tech. If I’m in my office, I’m in my office. If I’m here, I’m here. If I’m in there, I’m in there. It’s an old-style immersion game. Perfectly contained. I was one of the first to build this shit. Well, your mom was. It’s sort of a dinosaur now, but the good ones, the beautiful ones, they still make the most money, even when they get old. That level of detail—sometimes I would joke that she put her own blood, sweat, and jizz in it.”

  An immersion game. An old-school immersion game. I think of what Charon once told me: that everyone has their motivations, fears, desires. Charon is motivated to control the game, monitor the players, and keep tabs on his source of income. He’s motivated to stir up drama inside the game. Create conditions ripe for his players to have fun. His fears? Losing that source of income, for one. But his desires? I don’t know enough about Charon to understand his desires beyond the financial one. What does anyone want? Attention? The ability to play God? But how would he play an omniscient God in a game that is immersion-only?

  And how did I see the tenth girl, and how did Mavi? Who was inside the avatar, the meat costume, the shell?

  Her avatar could fly, while mine sits here all day.

  I’ve been silent too long—he can see the gears whirring in my head. “Okay,” I say as glumly as I can muster. “Well, thanks for telling me a bit about my mom. I guess I should go now.”

  His eyes narrow, and my spidey-sense tingles. “Don’t go killing yourself or anything,” he says. “I’d hate to see that. I like you, as batty as you are. You’re a good egg, kid. You’ll find your way.” And he burps, clutching his stomach like he’s eaten a bad cut of meat, as the tenth girl grabbed her own before launching herself onto the ice.

  That’s when I know for certain.

  I’ve known the tenth girl all along, and the recognition guts me like a fish knife.

  If I’m here, I’m here. If I’m in there, I’m in there.

  But her avatar could fly, while mine
sits here all day.

  With Mama gone, he was free to inhabit her avatar.

  “Thanks, I guess,” I say carefully. “Would you be free to talk some more tomorrow before the sacrifice?” I expel the air from my mouth, sounding as pathetic as humanly possible. “I feel like I’m going to be sad.”

  He nods, enough of an idiot to think I’m giving up.

  Mavi needs all the time she can get while she’s not under Charon’s watchful eye. She’s as smart as Charon—smarter. She’ll need all the time she can get while the tenth girl is distracted. Charon’s words ring in my head: If the English teacher could walk out of the game and survive a year as a real human being, then that might prove I’m wrong. Might.

  I punt his last sentence out into the dark, as far as I can:

  But that’s impossible.

  33

  MAVI: ARGENTINA, JUNE 1978

  I cannot conceive of a force strong enough, an act damaging enough, to rip the youthful spirit from a person for good, except for learning you are not a person at all by the traditional definition implanted in us—you are a pale shadow of a self, someone’s toy, everyone’s joke. This is not to mean there aren’t thousands of other ways to lose yourself. But in losing a parent—my only other touchstone, false as it was—I temporarily lost touch with that great cornerstone of identity, the child, not the foundation of humanity. As I regain consciousness, I am struck by a powerful, incomprehensible craving.

  I crave a body.

  It’s laughable, perhaps, because it’s something I’ve never known. But I crave a real body, with flesh that aches or sparkles with energy, heals or rots. Can you imagine it? Touching, and being touched, by another real body that shimmers with vibrant cells? I swear my every nerve would be lit up in ecstasy by the simplest handshake. I cannot stop thinking about it, dreaming about it, obsessing about it. The stroke of the wind, the feel of cotton, the ripple of your own flesh …

  Logic tells me that perhaps all of that can be simulated to some small degree. But I believe so much else could not be. Say: the touch of another human being. That could not be faked. I know this because I remember the many moments I shared with Angel in which I felt skinned and raw. They were a glimpse into humanity: a taste so powerful it changed the course of my existence, even though Angel was but a human in Dom’s shell.