by Elliot Burns
Chapter One
Years before he disappeared, Jack’s uncle, Alfie, used to read to him at night. Normally that job would have fallen to the father of a family, but since Jack had never met his father, uncle Alfie gladly took up the role. Jack would lay there, tucked up and with his nightlight glowing, and listen to Alfie spin stories about a faraway world. It was a world that didn’t exist, that couldn’t exist, one that was too impossible to exist except in Alfie’s mind. It was filled with lords battling each other for power, and mercenary warriors killing for a quick buck (sometimes Alfie’s stories turned a little age-inappropriate, but children can handle a lot more than you’d think). With his eyes closed, Jack could see the castles. He could see the mountains. He could see the dragons. He spent years in these imaginary worlds, only leaving them when he became too old for bedtime stories. It was only much, much later - a year after Alfie disappeared - that Jack found out where these stories came from.
By the time Jack turned eighteen, his uncle’s disappearance had made him mature quickly. He visited Alfie’s home once a week to make sure that the place was okay. His uncle lived in a one-bedroom apartment. It was the kind where rain found holes in ill-maintained gutters and leaked down onto the walls and then onto the cheap timber windows, where it’d eventually find its way inside and collect in little pools on the windowsill. It was a crappy place. It smelled of old paper.
Uncle Alfie owned it, so there was no landlord to snoop around, and that meant no-one else would take care of things. Jack’s mum certainly wouldn’t. She had been in a bad place lately. Actually, she was always in a bad place. How often was she in a good one? Once a month? He couldn’t blame her for it, and in some ways, when he watched her, he wondered was looking at his own future, since mental conditions like hers often didn’t take root until a person’s early twenties. That was around the corner for Jack. As well as her condition, there was her gambling problem. Anyone could get addicted to something, even someone who’d watched a parent suffer from it, and this made him worry. Jack vowed to never, ever go down that path himself, and one day, when he’d figured out how to do it and when he felt strong enough, he would lead Mum away from that path too.
On the day when Jack found out where his uncle’s stories came from, long after Alfie had vanished, Jack was checking the apartment. He cleaned the condensation from the windows and swept away some of the dust. Usually, this was the extent of what he could do there, since there wasn’t much else to do in a home that sat empty. This time was different. He decided to look in his uncle’s room, which he’d never done before. It always seemed wrong, somehow. Checking behind him, as if his uncle would have suddenly materialized, he crossed the living room. He opened his uncle’s bedroom door. It had been shut so long that the hinges whined. A thick, dusty smell hit him and seemed to stick to the back of his throat.
In his uncle’s room, there was a bed. Next to the bed, surrounding all four sides of it like the walls of a prison, were piles and piles of note books. Jack leafed through some of them. Each one was titled: ‘The Kingdom Stone Project,’ and after this title was a different word on each. One book was: ‘The Kingdom Stone Project – Religion,’ and another was ‘The Kingdom Stone Project – Castles.’ There were hundreds of them. As he flicked through the books, leaping from one book to another, he started to realize something. The books, full of sloppy, slanted, handwriting, were all written about the fantasy world that Alfie used to tell Jack about at night, when he was much younger.
It was astounding. As a kid, he’d believed that Alfie made-up his fantastical places and fast-paced adventures on the spot. He thought that his uncle spun his webs there and then, under the glow of the night light. Now, he realized that his uncle had taken a great deal more care and time in creating this fantasy world for Jack. He’d cared about it so much that he’d filled lines and lines, and reams and reams, of writing on the subject. There and then, despite not knowing where Alfie was, Jack had never felt closer to his uncle.
Of course, creating worlds and committing them to books was a thing of the past by then. Printed ink on paper books seemed as old fashioned as hieroglyphics on papyrus. With the insanely fast development and commercialization of virtual reality technology, people rarely got lost in a world printed on the pages of a paper book anymore. They got lost in the world itself. They became trapped in it, enraptured not just by words but by images and sounds; the roar of a monstrous beast as it galloped across a field, and the schwing-sound a sword made when pulled from a metal sheath.
The VR industry had made unforeseen leaps in the last twenty years. VR novels had been a hit, and following that, VR movies where you could follow the action around as if you were right there with the actors. Of course, there was one sector of VR technology that made the most money – video games.
Uncle Alfie used to work for a VR tech company, years ago. They were called Red Frog Games, and they specialized in epic fantasy roleplaying. Full immersion was their thing; a gaming experience where you smelled the embers of a fire, one where you felt a rush of air on your head as a dragon flew above you. They combined this immersion with one of the most sophisticated artificial intelligence systems on the market. A mixture of near perfect AI and unbelievably-real immersion led to an intoxicating experience. It led to an addictive experience, and it led to a costly experience. Not just in monetary terms, either.
Full immersion games were safe, on their own, as were sophisticated AI characters and systems. When you mixed the two together, you created something dangerous. With full immersion, you created a game so real that a person’s mind fully believed that they were inside it, and that the game was their new reality. You then filled it with artificial intelligence so advanced that the computer could make decisions about the world for the player; an intelligence that could decide to turn up the fear factor in the immersion experience, or could increase the violence, the blood, the carnage, and the screams. Full Immersion and AI as a combination were like rocket fuel and a flame.
In one high profile case, the AI controller of a fantasy game decided to override its age-restriction limit and content filters, and it treated the guests of a seven-year-old’s birthday party to an afternoon of terror, when it spawned them right in the middle of a battle. It then locked out the menu system, so that the game’s tech-guy had to spend ten minutes messing with the console, his fingers smashing up and down on the keyboard as he tried to code his way out of a lawsuit. By the end of the ten minutes the damage had been done, and the kids had seen enough full-immersion carnage to scar them for five lifetimes.
Full immersion and sophisticated AI games were banned two years after that. Not separately, of course, but as a package. They could no longer be included together. Furthermore, all-immersion games had built-in fail-safes that complied with standards agreed by a panel of tech experts. Unfortunately, these fail-safes led to a lesser quality of game.
“They’re sucking the fun out of it, kiddo,” Alfie would say to Jack. “There’s a way for immersion and AI to coexist, but they don’t want to risk finding it. We’ll never know what might have been, and what worlds we could have explored.”
After that, Red Frog Games lost their core product catalogue and following that, their customer base. The company folded, and my uncle lost his job. He carried on working on games, but only as a hobby with a friend.
Not long after that, he disappeared. Jack was seventeen years old and thinking about college, but the sudden and total disappearance of the guy who had been like a father to him put thoughts of the future on hold. Two years after his disappearance, when Jack was nineteen, Mum sold all of Alfie’s things. She went to Alfie’s apartment while Jack was on a twelve-hour shift at work, and she
sold everything worth more than a dollar.
“You sold everything?” Jack said, unable to believe it. “What if he comes back?”
“He’s gone, Jack. Soon, we’ll have to think about selling the apartment, too, somehow. But I saved these for you.”
The only things she kept were Alfie’s notepads full of scribblings about his fantasy world, and a black digital bracelet. She gave these to Jack. Jack put the notepads under his bed, in his wardrobe and in the attic, wherever there was space. There were so many that he could hardly move for the things. As for the bracelet; it was a digital bracelet, the kind that could be used for debit card payments, for fitness tracking, for messaging, and for almost everything else a person might want to do on a daily basis. The problem was that it was completely dead. Jack switched the batteries, bought a new charger, and even had a technician look at it, but he didn’t have any joy. The thing was kaput. Despite that, he wore the black wristband as a keepsake, and he thought about Alfie every time he looked at it.
Just months after this, Alfie came back. A man walking his dog found him face-down on a road out of town, adjacent to a warehouse that rented self-storage lock-ups. At first, the man had thought that Alfie was dead, but when he checked for a pulse, he felt a light tremor against his fingers. Alfie was alive, but he was in a bad way; his legs were broken, his skull fractured. He’d been struck by a hit-and-run driver and then left to die.
Alfie’s resulting coma meant that Jack never found out where he had been, and why he’d chosen to come back now, of all times. It transpired that just when Alfie had reached the outskirts of the town, a car had hit him. There, near the storage lock-up, Alfie had been just two miles away from Jack’s house.
~
Jack was just stepping out of the door of his house, when his phone rang. His cell, at least eight years out of date, was one of the old-style plastic and metal ones; Jack couldn’t afford a fancy new bracelet phone, or one of the new wrist-implant devices. He checked the display and saw that Sarah was calling him.
“Hey Sarah,” he said.
“Is this Mr. Halberd?” said a ridiculously unconvincing deep voice.
“That’s me.”
“My name’s Bud, and I’m calling you today to talk about the latest pill on the market. Tell me, Mr. Halberd, do you suffer from a case of a droopy dick?”
For a twenty-five-year-old, single-mom, Sarah was immature. In fact, it wouldn’t have been wrong to say she was the most immature person Jack knew. He always thought that it was because she became a mom so young. Stupid jokes were just her way of being immature while she could, before she’d have to go home and put on her parent hat. The problem was that in her never-ending search for a laugh, she sometimes got carried away. The best way to deal with Sarah was to match her immaturity with some of your own.
“Glad you called, Bud” said Jack. “My dick problem is gone. Your mom fixed it for me.”
Sarah dropped her Bud-the-Salesman act. “Mum jokes - very mature, Jack.”
“Says the woman five years older than me who’s pretending to sell penis pills.”
“Hey, I don’t get out much. I gotta get my kicks somewhere. Listen, there’s something I need to tell you about Alfie. But first, are you still coming on Saturday?”
Jack had agreed to go to Sarah’s son’s seventh birthday party. Sarah had her son Harry when she was just sixteen, and Harry’s father wasn’t around. Jack guessed that made him empathize with Harry a little, since he’d never met his own father. Just after Sarah had asked him to go to the party, one of Jack’s buddies had offered a free ticket to watch the Clarets, his favorite soccer team. To his own frustration, Jack had chosen the kid’s party over soccer. Once he made a commitment, he stuck to it.
“I’ll be there,” he said. “But what about Alfie?”
“I don’t think a guy in a coma is gonna be much fun at a kid’s party, Jack.”
“You said you had something to tell me about him?”
“Are you sat down?”
“No, I’m actually on my way to see him now,” said Jack. “Are working a shift today?”
Sarah worked at the care home where Alfie lived. ‘Lived’ was a much nicer term for his uncle’s existence, though. Since being found by the dog walker, Uncle Alfie had spent every second in a coma, hooked up to machines that monitored his vitals and kept him alive. He’d never stirred, never opened his eyes, never made any sign he was really there.
“When am I not on shift, is the question,” said Sarah. “I’m here so much that Harry is forgetting what I look like. He called his teacher ‘mom’ the other day.”
“Yep, we’ve all been there. There’s not a guy in the country who didn’t call their teacher ‘mom’ at some point. I’ll be down there soon, Sar. Hold tight.”
By the time the nursing home loomed into view, he was dying to know what Sarah needed to tell him about Alfie. He walked down the stone path and reached the door. As he opened it and went to go inside, he heard a noise behind him.
Sarah was walking his way. She smiled at him, and Jack saw that she had a cup holder in her right hand with four cups nestled in it. She wore her caregiver uniform, and he noticed that she’d spilled something on it. As a single-mum, it was rare she didn’t turn up sporting a food stain.
“Decided to go on a coffee break while I waited,” she said.
A figure loomed behind her. It was a man, six-foot-two, and with stern eyes. He wore a black business suit. He looked too big for it; as though he’d started working out but hadn’t updated his wardrobe yet. It had the effect of making him seem like a monster about to burst at the seams. The man walked forward and shoved into Sarah as if he hadn’t seen her.
Sarah shouted as one of the lids broke off a cup and hot liquid burned her wrist. She gave a sharp cry, then instinctively let go of the cup holder. The coffee stained the ground like a blood splatter.
The man rounded on her. “You should be more careful,” he said. He held a coffee cup of his own, but it had gotten through the incident intact.
Sarah held her wrist. Jack felt bad for her and hoped that she wasn’t badly burned. The guy could have at least apologized, but he seemed happy to just walk away.
Jack flashed the man a smile and held the door open. Then, as he walked through it, he stuck his foot out and made sure to catch the man’s leg. The man stumbled forward and put his hand out, letting go of his cup and losing his balance. Coffee splashed out onto the white flooring of the reception area.
“You should be more careful,” said Jack.
The man gave Jack an angry glare and then grumbled his way toward the resident section. Jack looked at the coffee stain. He couldn’t leave it there for someone else to clean up, so he went to the bathroom and came back with some tissue. After it was mopped up, he and Sarah walked away.
“My hero, helping me deal with assholes,” said Sarah, not bothering to hide her sarcasm as she inspected her wrist.
“I try my best. Are you okay?”
“The coffee hardly touched me, don’t worry. Have you applied yet, Hal?” she asked.
Hal. It wasn’t the worst nickname a guy could get, but there were better. He’d gotten it when he and Sarah watched a copy of Space Odyssey in the staffroom one afternoon.
“I started the application form...” he said.
“As in ‘I started it, but chickened-out of finishing it.’ Come on, you don’t have long to submit it.”
The first term of college might have been a couple of months away, but it might as well have been a decade. When Jack was in school, he’d shown promise. A lot of promise, a couple of teachers said, but Mum was away a lot, and that derailed him. She’d leave Jack home alone and go to work, but the problem was, she’d never tell him what her ‘work’ actually was. A couple of times, she’d told him she was a landscape gardener, but he’d never seen her with a spade. When she wasn’t working, she was often shut in her room with the lights off and the curtains drawn. He’d hear her crying on the wo
rst days, and those were the times where he’d decide to miss school to look after her.
Due to everything happening with Mum, he couldn’t concentrate when he was actually in class. His grades slipped, and his promise counted for little. After all, promise wouldn’t finish a five-thousand-word essay for you. Before he knew it, his friends had gone to college, but he’d decided to get a job and help pay the bills. Now, though, he had decided he’d try and do something with the potential people said he had.
They came to a set of double doors. Sarah glanced at Jack as they stopped. He didn’t look back, but he saw her grinning out of the corner of his eye.
Here it comes, he thought.
“Open the pod bay doors, Hal,” she said.
“I can’t do that Dave,” he said, rolling his eyes. “That one never gets old. Not even after the hundredth time.”
She led him along the corridor to a section he’d never had reason to visit before. They stopped outside a door with a faded sign that read ‘storeroom.’
“I keep telling you, Sarah. If you wanna get me somewhere private and cozy, you just have to ask.”
