by Dustin Brady
“OUCH!” he screamed as his eye hit the corner of the stand. He let go and grabbed his head.
“Sorry!” I yelled over my shoulder as I ran for the nearest wall.
Remain calm, a woman’s voice said over a speaker in the room. Activate Ghost Protocol.
“WHAT IS GHOST PROTOCOL?!” I yelled as I dove through a wall. The emergency lights began flashing, turning the stark white hallway blood red.
Remain calm. Activate Ghost Protocol.
I continued running across the hallway, through an office and into another hallway. Mr. Gregory came back on my earpiece. “You’re the ghost,” he said. “They won’t stop until they find you now. This is what I was trying to warn you about.”
“Wouldn’t it have been easier to just tell me to stay away from holograms?” I yelled as I sprinted through a bathroom.
“It’s more complicated than that.”
We have a confirmed sighting of a digital ghost.
I crossed another hallway, ran through two more offices and paused to catch my breath in an empty laboratory.
“This is a really bad place to stop!” Mr. Gregory said.
“Why do you keep telling me not to stop?” I asked. “What’s going on?” I looked around the room. It was the type of lab you’d see in a mad scientist movie with bright green goo in beakers, glowing electrical tubes and a stretcher with straps for the arms and legs. The stretcher looked particularly scary.
“Jesse, you must…”
I threw the glasses across the room. Mr. Gregory was clearly hiding something, and I didn’t need his voice in my head any more.
Proceed with caution. This is not a drill.
“Squeak, squeak!”
I spun around to see a wall of cages full of squeaky, stinky rats. Well, actually only half the cages had rats. The other half had all been opened. Where were those rats?
If you encounter a ghost, report to a supervisor immediately.
I knew I should have started running again, but I couldn’t stop looking through the lab. What could a video game company possibly need with a mad scientist laboratory? I turned my attention to the middle of the room where most of the electronics were. The main piece of equipment was a monstrosity of tangled wires, tubes and metal reaching to the ceiling. On one side of the machine was a computer screen, and on the other was what looked like a real-life video game ray gun.
Never interact with a digital ghost on your own.
I was about to examine the ray gun, but something on the screen caught my attention. I took a closer look. The screen was showing Sand Monster Island from Full Blast, but this time there was no golden brown sand. Instead, the ground looked dark gray. And it was squirming.
At this time, please evacuate the building. Take all personal electronics with you.
Oh. Oh gross. I’d found the other rats. A closer examination showed that the island itself wasn’t moving — instead, it was covered with thousands of rodents all crawling over each other to find away off the island. I turned and stumbled right into a desk.
QUADRANT FOUR CLEAR, a man’s voice came over the speaker.
The desk was empty except for an open cardboard box in the center. Someone seemed to have cleared out in a hurry.
QUADRANTS TWO AND THREE ALSO CLEAR.
The cardboard box was filled with personal office knick-knacks. There was a collectible Full Blast alien figurine, a few Dilbert cartoons, a picture frame. Wait. That picture inside the frame. I knew who it was.
LOCK DOWN QUADRANT ONE.
Smiling at me, with his hand on the electricity ball at the science center and his hair sticking straight up, was Charlie Gregory from my class. Next to the picture, I found a nameplate that removed all doubt as to the owner of the lab. There, engraved in cheap, gold-tinted metal, was the name, “DR. ALISTAIR GREGORY.”
Mr. Gregory was the mad scientist.
I dove for the glasses on the ground. “Eric, run!” I yelled into the earpiece. “Run from Mr. Gregory!”
“Get off of me!” Eric said. “Hey, stop…”
The earpiece filled with static. Then the lab door burst open.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Experiment
Four security officers wearing futuristic glasses stormed into the room. “THERE!” one of them shouted. They all ran right at me even though none of them had phones. Something about their glasses was letting them see me in the game. Instead of sticking around to find out how the glasses worked, I ducked my head under the floor and pulled my roll-under-the-bus move. This got me into the ceiling tiles of the level underneath, where I scrambled away from the lab as fast as I could.
“Perfect. Bring them here,” a voice underneath me said.
I paused and peeked through a ceiling tile to see a large presentation room with tons of chairs facing a small stage and big screen. The room was empty except for a few security officers up front wearing the glasses from the future and a tall man with oily hair and a gross tan. He must have been important, because his portrait hung on the wall.
“I’ll handle him,” the man said to the security guards. Him who? I couldn’t keep poking my head out of the ceiling like this without one of the guards seeing me, so I crawled left, shimmied down a couple feet inside the wall and slowly stuck out my head. It took a few seconds to line everything up perfectly, but when I did, I became virtually undetectable. That’s because I’d managed to poke my eyes through the eyes in the painting like the bad guys in Scooby Doo! All those years of watching cartoons had finally paid off. I didn’t have much time to congratulate myself, because right then the prisoner marched through the door. I heard him before I saw him.
“This is a crime!” Eric yelled. “Unhand me!”
Unhand me? Where does he get this stuff? Four security guards marched Eric and Mr. Gregory to the front of the room. Eric struggled the whole way.
“I wasn’t trespassing, I was playing in the woods! I want my lawyer!”
“No problem.” The tan man held up his hand and pulled out his phone. “Who’s your lawyer?”
Eric was taken off guard by the man’s willingness to go along with his stupid demand. He stopped struggling and went with the first name he could think of. “Uh, Mulaney and Flynn?”
“Those injury lawyers with the cheesy commercials on daytime TV?”
“Mulaney and Flynn for the win.”
“You don’t have a lawyer, do you?”
“You don’t know that!”
“Please,” Greasy Hair said. “Have a seat.”
Eric started to sit down and then tried bolting. A security officer pushed him into a chair.
“Thank you,” the man said. “And welcome to Bionosoft! I’m Bionosoft founder and president Jevvrey Delfino.”
“What have you done with Mark Whitman?!”
“Eric. That’s your name, right? Eric?”
Eric refused to nod.
“Eric, I appreciate your concern for your friend. Loyalty is a trait that I hold quite dear.” He gave a slight nod to Mr. Gregory. “Let me assure you that Mark is doing important work for myself and Alistair here.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Would you like to see him for yourself?” Jevvrey reached behind the podium and pulled out a ray gun that was identical to the one I’d seen in the lab.
“Jevvrey,” Mr. Gregory whispered. “Please don’t.”
“Alistair, don’t be so modest.” Jevvrey turned to Eric. “This man is too humble to tell you, but he’ll soon be known as the Edison of our time. Come, see the invention that will change the world.” He held out the ray gun.
Eric, not being one to turn down an opportunity to check out a sci-fi ray gun (even if that opportunity came from an evil villain type), slowly made his way to the podium.
“That’s it,” Jevvrey said. “Here, take a closer look.” He set the gun in Eric’s hands. Eric carefully turned it over a few times, holding it as if the gun might decide to shoot a giant blast on its own at any momen
t.
“What you’re holding in your hands is not only the future of video games, but the future of life on this planet. Imagine being able to travel anywhere…” he snapped. “In an instant. For example, where would you like to go right now?”
“Uh, home?”
Jevvrey laughed. “OK, besides that one. But what about Fiji? The Eiffel Tower? Antarctica? And not just places in the real world, but literally anywhere you can imagine. Atlantis. Gotham City. The Death Star!” Jevvrey started pacing back and forth on the stage and making large hand gestures as if he were giving a presentation. “With this technology, you can transport anyone to any place that you can build in a video game. It’s better than virtual reality.” He did a big, dramatic pause before delivering his final line. “It’s the new reality!” Jevvrey stopped in the middle of the stage and smiled, waiting for Eric to cheer or something.
“Uhhhhhh, cool,” Eric said in that voice he does when he doesn’t really understand something.
Jevvrey pulled a cannister of green gas from his pocket and took the gun from Eric. He spoke as he screwed the cannister into the base of the gun. “This is plasma gas. Several months ago, Alistair discovered a method for using plasma to send living things into digital worlds. There’s just one problem — the process costs millions. No matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t make the gun affordable enough for people to buy. But,” Jevvrey waggled his finger. “What if we didn’t need a gun at all? What if we could use something that already has plasma in it? Something that’s already inside every living room in America.”
Eric was starting to get it now. “A TV?”
Jevvrey smiled. “I think you already know the answer to that.”
“But why test it on us? We never agreed to be in your game!”
“I’d like to know that too,” Mr. Gregory said.
Jevvrey ignored him. “You agreed to test the game for Alistair, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t agree to be a human guinea pig! I almost got trapped for life!”
Jevvrey grinned and leaned closer. “Can you keep a secret?”
Eric backed away like Jevvrey had bad breath.
“You’ve actually gone inside Full Blast four different times.”
Eric stared for a second, then shook his head.
“What’s the matter? Don’t remember?” Jevvrey walked back to the podium, picked up a remote and turned on the giant screen behind him. Eric appeared on the screen, doing loops in a helicopter. “Remember this?”
Eric sat with a confused look on his face.
Jevvrey clicked a button, and the video changed to Eric snowboarding down a mountain while blasting aliens. “How about this?” Eric watched in silence as Jevvrey explained. “When you get out of a game the right way instead of breaking things like you did, your memory restores to the last save point. You can live years inside of a game without remembering a thing.”
“But, but I did get out the right way! And I must have remembered, because I texted Jesse about it!”
“I know,” Jevvrey said. “That was an unfortunate glitch that we’ve since fixed. And we’ve been able to fix countless more glitches just like it with the help of beta testers from around the world.” He clicked the remote again, causing hundreds of boxes to pop up on the screen with all different types of people fighting through games. Some looked happy like Eric, but most looked downright terrified.
“So if Mark is one of your testers, why not just let him go?”
Jevvrey clicked the remote one more time. All the boxes disappeared except for one. It showed Mark, still huddled and shivering, looking worse than ever. “Through this whole thing, we’ve always had one question: What will happen when people die in these video games? Will they be gone for good, or do they come back here? If they come back, will they be ready to return to the video game again? Have we just discovered the fountain of eternal youth? According to our calculations, Mark’s digital body is over 80 years old now.” He turned to look at the screen. “He doesn’t look well, does he? I think we’ll get our answer any minute now.”
Eric started looking around wildly. “Wait, why are you telling me all this?”
Jevvrey smiled. “I just want you to know what you’re getting yourself into,” he said as he aimed the plasma gun.
Eric tried to run, but the security guards pounced.
“Keep him still,” Jevvrey said. “I don’t want to waste this shot.”
“ERIC!” I yelled as I jumped out of hiding. I ran toward Jevvrey screaming. “NOOOOOOOOO!” Jevvrey turned a few dials on the gun and aimed it at Eric. I dove in front of him.
ZIIIIIIING!
The plasma gun shot me square in the chest.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Pirate!
I closed my eyes when the ray hit me. It felt all tingly, like I’d been blasted with a mouthwash hose or something. When the tingling stopped, I opened my eyes again, expecting to find myself in some dark video game dungeon. Nope. In fact, nothing actually seemed different. I was still in the Bionosoft conference room with Eric, Jevvrey, Mr. Gregory and a bunch of guys wearing weird glasses. The only difference was everyone now seemed to be staring at me in disbelief.
“Jesse?” Eric said. “You’re… you’re back.”
“That’s the other one!” Jevvrey shouted.
One of the guards holding Eric lunged for me. Instead of running away like I normally would, I surprised even myself by rolling at his knees.
“OOF!”
I took him out and continued running toward Eric. The other guard holding onto Eric let go to lunge after me too. When he let go, Eric tried to help me by pushing him over. Unfortunately, Eric wildly overestimated his ability to topple a 220-pound man, and instead fell over himself. This turned out to be just the right move, because at that moment, another security guy came running at me from the other direction and tripped over Eric on the ground. As that guard fell, he grabbed wildly for anything he could reach, which just so happened to be the ankle of the last guard. In a matter of seconds, Eric and I had somehow taken out three bad guys.
“LET’S GO!”
I got two steps toward the door before a vice grip clamped onto my ankle. One of the security officers holding Mr. Gregory had abandoned him and was now dragging me to the ground. I kicked a couple times, but he held on like his life depended on it. The bad guys were starting to get up. “Eric!” I yelled. “Keep running! I’ll…”
“OWWWWW!”
The hand on my ankle loosened. I looked back to see Mr. Gregory’s mouth clamped onto the security officer’s other hand. One of the guards tore Mr. Gregory off of him, but not before I was able to kick myself free. “RUN!” Mr. Gregory yelled after me. “THERE’S STILL TIME TO RESCUE MARK!”
Eric and I scrambled out the door as Mr. Gregory did his best to keep the guards busy behind us. “Where to?!” Eric shouted at me like I had some sort of map to Mark. Instead of replying that I had no idea “where to,” I led us through a random door. Inside, we found ourselves surrounded by green walls and tons of foam props. As we ran through the room, I grabbed a long pole, and Eric picked up a foam shield and curvy pirate sword.
I glanced over. “You planning on running into a foam pirate?”
“YOU NEVER KNOW!”
We reached the opposite side of the room just as a mob of security officers burst through the door we’d entered.
“Stop, or else…”
We didn’t get to hear the rest, because we’d just run into our own “or else” as we rounded the corner into the hallway. It was the bearded security officer I’d yanked into the hologram base earlier. He now had medical gauze taped over his left eye. Between the big beard and patch, he looked exactly like a…
“PIRATE!” Eric shrieked.
The guy pulled out a taser and shot it at Eric. Fortunately, Eric had a big foam shield to hide behind. As soon as the taser prongs THUNKed into the foam, Eric shrieked and — for reasons known only to himself — spun in a screaming circle. Tha
t again turned out to be just the right move, since the spinning yanked the taser out of the pirate’s hand, swung it in a circle and bonked him in the head, causing him to fall. Eric dropped the shield, and we ran down the hall to the stairwell.
As we approached the stairs, I noticed a security camera at the end of the hall. “How are we going to get anywhere with all these cameras?!”
Without breaking stride, Eric took my pole, aimed it at the security camera and jabbed as we ran by.
FITZ!
“Problem solved!”
We took the stairs down two flights and FITZed two more cameras. We decided to open the door to an empty hallway, take out one more camera and pick a room to hide in. The room we chose happened to be less of a room and more of a long, narrow junk closet.
“What is all this stuff?” Eric asked when we turned on the light. Old computers, bare circuit boards and tangles of colorful wires overflowed from shelves onto the floor. Eric picked up half a robot while I looked around the room for some way to hide from the bad guys.
“There!” I shouted. The ceiling tiles at the end of the room had been moved to reveal a Jesse-sized hole in the ceiling.
“And how are we supposed to get up there?” Eric asked. “Turn into Spider-Man?”
“With this!” I smiled as I held up my pole.
“I don’t get it.”
“Watch,” I said as I backed up. I sized up the jump, counted to three and started running toward the back wall with the confidence of someone who’d pole vaulted in the Olympics and not just watched it on TV one boring Saturday afternoon. At the end of the room, I planted the pole into the back corner and jumped. If my foam pole had been too noodly, I would have flopped into the wall. If it had been to hard, I would have speared myself with it and fallen back to the ground. But since it was the perfect combination of foam and springy core, it vaulted me toward the open ceiling tile eight feet off the ground. As I flew through the air, I marveled at my good fortune. Who would have thought this would work! Maybe we’d escape after…
