by Gary Paulsen
CHAPTER 3
The rest of the first level was uneventful, if three buzz-bugs and another fire river can be called uneventful. The nearer they drew to the mountains, the louder and more violent the wind became. By the time they reached the foothills, it roared around them as if they were wrestling a tornado.
“What do we do now?” Tom asked.
YOU FOLLOW A TRAIL, Willie wrote in the sky.
“Which one?” A narrow trail that clung to a mountain like a frightened child began at their feet, but twenty other trails on either side of them did the same thing.
IT DOESN’T MATTER.
“But they all go different places.”
I KNOW.
“Isn’t there only one castle?”
YES.
“I don’t get it.”
YOU WILL, IF YOU LIVE LONG ENOUGH.
“But …” Brett shrugged. “I’m glad this is just a game.” He followed Tom up the trail.
WELCOME TO THE SECOND LEVEL OF RODOMONTE’S REVENGE: THE MOUNTAINS, YOU ARE GOING TO FIND THIS MUCH MORE DIFFICULT THAN THE PLAINS.
“More difficult than what we’ve already gone through?” Tom shook his head. “Great.”
THERE ARE TWO HAZARDS HERE, Willie wrote. THE FIRST YOU CAN ALREADY FEEL: THE WIND. WATCH YOUR FOOTING, OR IT’LL BLOW YOU OVER THE SIDE. THE SECOND IS THE TUNNEL SPIDERS.
“Tunnel spiders?” Brett asked.
YOU’LL FIND OUT ABOUT THEM SOON ENOUGH.
Climbing the trail wasn’t too hard in the foothills, but as they went higher, it became steeper and the wind became worse. Ten minutes of battling them left Brett more than tired; they left him exhausted. Rodomonte’s Revenge was more like a triathlon than a video game.
“Stay with it,” Tom called when he saw Brett dropping back.
“That’s easy for you to say. You’re an athlete.”
“There’s a wide spot up ahead. We can take a break when we reach it.”
Brett didn’t need a break when they reached a wide spot; he needed a break now. He collapsed to his knees, then to his belly. The wind seemed weaker as he lay that way; it curled over him like a blanket. The trail was as soft and yielding as a feather mattress. He felt himself sink down. He closed his eyes and imagined his bed at home. It was soft and yielding, too.
His eyes popped open. He wasn’t imagining anything; he was sinking. By the time he rose to his knees, his chin was even with Tom’s feet. A hole opened beneath him, and a thick web shot up to entangle his wrist.
“Tunnel spiders!” The web was a sticky iron, trapping his arm so that he couldn’t use his sword. Before he could aim his laser, a web entangled that arm, too. “Tom, help me!”
Tom shook his head. “I can’t.”
“What do you mean, you can’t?”
“I have only one life left.”
“And I’m not going to have any!”
“Sorry, Brett, it’s too late for you. There’s nothing I can do.”
“Tom, you dirty—” A third web shot out and covered his mouth, then his eyes. What felt like a thousand legs prodded and pulled him down, deeper and deeper into darkness. Then he was hanging from his feet with his blood running to his head. Two needlelike pincers pricked his neck. He felt light-headed and bloodless and very, very thirsty. The world went black.
This time it stayed black; the video landscape did not return. Soft padding pressed against the back of Brett’s neck. He took off his helmet.
He was propped against the arcade wall on his shoulder blades, his feet sticking up in the air. He watched his friend slowly crawl away from him, swaying back and forth. Suddenly Tom screamed and fell on his side. He stretched out, lay still, then took his helmet off. “I fell off the mountain.”
“Falling off a mountain is too good for you. Why didn’t you help me?”
Tom sat up. “I’m not stupid. That spider had you good.”
“I died. It sucked me dry.”
“Don’t get mad. It’s only a game.”
The door opened, and Willie stuck his head in. “What do you think of Rodomonte’s Revenge?”
“That,” Tom said, “is the best game I have ever played.”
“Let’s play again.” Brett put his helmet back on.
“Sorry.” Willie pulled it off. “You’ll have to wait in line. Judging by how long it is, you’ll be waiting until tomorrow.” He led them out the door. “Don’t worry. You’ll play this game so much that in a month you’ll be sick of it.”
Brett grunted. “I doubt it.”
“We’ll see,” Willie said as he showed them out.
CHAPTER 4
“I had the strangest dream last night,” Brett told Tom the next day as they waited for Mrs. Compson, their math teacher, to come into the classroom. They were sitting in the back, where there was less chance of Mrs. Compson’s asking them questions; neither was very good at math. “I dreamed I was shooting a fire river’s rapids. The front of my raft went under, and sparks flew into my face.”
Tom nodded. “And then the raft burst into flames, sank, and I burned to death.”
Brett chuckled. “Pretty crazy dream, wasn’t it?” He stared at Tom. “How do you know my dream?”
Tom stared back. “The question is, How do you know my dream?”
“We dreamed the same thing?” Brett shook his head. “That’s impossible.”
“It’s not impossible; it’s just improbable. Maybe we should ask Mrs. Compson to figure out the odds.”
“No. Not in a thousand years.” Mrs. Compson made her students figure out their own questions by assigning them as homework. Nobody needed to know anything that badly.
The door squeaked opened, and Mrs. Compson waddled in. Any room she entered she waddled in; she was built like a duck. She began droning about polynomials without so much as a “good afternoon” or a “prepare to be bored out of your minds.” Brett’s mind drifted away. Polynomials did that to him.
He imagined being at the arcade and thought about playing Rodomonte’s Revenge again. He was so bad at everything else—school, girls, and sports—but video games were different. Everything always worked in them; everything always turned out the way he wanted. If classes were video games, he’d ace them. If parents were, he’d ace them, too. If life were, he’d cruise, just as Tom had said.
A loud hum brought his mind back. Two buzz-bugs tore the door off its hinges and blitzed straight toward the back of the classroom.
“Look out!” Brett tumbled off his seat and rolled across the floor. From the clatter at Tom’s desk, Brett guessed that he was doing the same. Brett reached for his sword and leaped to his feet, shouting, ready for battle.
Then the buzz-bugs disappeared, and the door was back in place. He and Tom were standing in the middle of the room, clutching their pencils like samurai swords. The class stared at them. So did Mrs. Compson.
“Look out for what, Mr. Wilder?” she asked.
“Uh …” Brett looked at the class, at Tom, at Mrs. Compson. He felt like a first-class fool. “I thought you were going to work that problem wrong.”
Mrs. Compson tapped her chalk against her palm. “I’m pleased to see you finally showing such avid interest, but raising your hand will do.”
“Right. Sorry.” Brett sat back down, his face burning twenty-eight different shades of red.
“You can sit down, too, Mr. Houston.”
“My leg fell asleep,” Tom explained. “I had to stretch it.” He rubbed his knee and limped a little, lying to prove that he wasn’t lying. He sat down, too.
“Back to the matter at hand.” Mrs. Compson turned to the blackboard. She could even turn in a boring way. “If X squared minus X plus one equals zero, then to factor it, all we have to do—”
The floor beneath her feet opened, webs shot up to ensnare her chubby wrists, and eight ugly black legs rose to factor her. She plunged, screaming, into the earth.
“Mrs. Compson!” Brett and Tom ran to the front of the room, hurdling desks and students.
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The hole in the floor was gone. Mrs. Compson wasn’t. She glared at them.
“Is this supposed to be funny?” she asked.
“No.”
“One more outburst from either of you, and you’re both going straight to the principal’s office.”
“Yes, Mrs. Compson.” They had to wade through giggles to get back to their desks.
“What’s going on?” Tom whispered as soon as Mrs. Compson had turned back to the blackboard.
“I don’t know.”
“We have to talk to Willie.”
“Right after school.”
When another buzz-bug knocked the door down and pinned Mrs. Compson’s screaming, waddling body against the ceiling, Brett closed his eyes and pretended it wasn’t there. When he opened his eyes, it wasn’t.
CHAPTER 5
“I want to make sure I understand this,” Willie said. “You two are seeing elements of the game when you’re not playing it.” He was sitting at the computer, monitoring a game in progress. Two older guys, probably bankers who had called in sick to work on their lunch breaks, were stumbling around the game room like intoxicated orangutans.
“It’s like the game doesn’t want to be over,” Tom said.
“And you both see the same things?”
Brett nodded. “At the same time, and more and more all the time.”
“What do you mean?”
“He means that a buzz-bug is chewing on your ear right now,” Tom said. Brett nodded. It wasn’t just chewing on it; it had almost chewed it off.
Willie touched his ear. It felt fine. He shook his head. “You guys need a psychiatrist.”
“Maybe, but we didn’t need a psychiatrist yesterday. We were fine until we played Rodomonte’s Revenge.”
Willie sighed. “The computer records all game results. When I look at yours and find nothing abnormal, will you see a doctor?” Brett and Tom agreed, and Willie nodded. “As soon as these two guys are done, I’ll run a diagnostics check.”
“Can you fix it?” Tom asked. “Can you fix us?”
“If there’s something wrong with the program, it will be tough. No one knows how it works. I was there when it was created, but Rodomonte’s Revenge was designed by computers.”
“Computers programmed your computer?” Tom asked.
“It was the only way to develop the game. It’s too complicated for human designers.”
Two muffled screams leaked through the window. Both bankers fell over at the same time. Willie typed something on the computer, went to the door, talked to the bankers for a minute, then showed them out. He walked back to Brett and Tom, shaking his head. “Poor guys. They never even got past the first fire river.”
There were more important things to Brett than bankers playing hooky. “Run the check,” he said.
Willie typed DIAGNOSTIC ANALYSIS: ALL GAMES on the keyboard. The screen overflowed with numbers. Willie studied them. “Hmm, that’s strange.”
“What’s strange?”
Willie pointed to the screen’s top line. “There’s a variance in the first game. That was you, wasn’t it?”
“That was us.” Brett stared at the numbers. They might as well have been hieroglyphics. “What kind of variance?”
“We’ll find out in a second.” Willie typed EXPAND ON DIAGNOSTIC ANALYSIS: GAME ONE. The screen filled with numbers and words.
Brett pointed to a sentence that read GAME INSTALLATION MODIFIED. “What does this mean?”
“I don’t know.” Willie typed EXPAND ON INSTALLATION MODIFICATION. He sat back, rubbing his chin. A single sentence darted across the monitor’s top line, INSTALLATION MODIFICATION: GAME WAS INSTALLED INTO PLAYERS RATHER THAN INTO THE SYSTEM.
The blood drained from Willie’s face. “Oh, no.”
“What do you mean, ‘oh, no’?” Tom asked. “I don’t like ‘oh, no.’ ”
“If this sentence means what I think it does, ‘oh, no’ means the computer used the helmet electrodes to put the game program into your minds.” Color came back to Willie’s face; now it was gray. “The program has been sabotaged. Instead of your being in the game, the game is in you.”
Tom gasped. “That’s why we’re seeing buzz-bugs and tunnel spiders.”
Willie nodded. “Eventually everything you see, hear, and do will be part of the game.”
“How could something like this happen?” Brett asked.
“Maybe we can find out.” Willie typed WHO PROGRAMMED THE MODIFICATION?
PROGRAM MODIFICATION WAS PART OF THE ORIGINAL PROGRAMMING.
“The computers did it.” Willie typed WHY?
A single sentence ran across the top of the screen, ORIGINAL PROGRAMMERS WANTED TO LIVE.
Willie sat back. “The programming computers don’t want to be just game computers anymore. They want Rodomonte’s Revenge to exist beyond this arcade. And they’re using you to get there.”
“So they want to share our lives?” Tom asked.
“They want to take over your lives.”
“That’s crazy.”
“It’s worse than crazy,” Willie said. “Rodomonte’s Revenge is a part of your minds now. If something happens to you when the game takes over—”
“Then it happens to us in real life.” Brett shuddered. He didn’t want ears like the mangled one he believed Willie had. But there was something even worse than that. “So if we die in the game—”
“Then we die in real life.” Tom shuddered, too.
Willie studied them long and hard. “You’re going to play Rodomonte’s Revenge again whether you want to or not. This time there won’t be any second or third chance. This time you play for real.”
CHAPTER 6
Willie closed the arcade early. He told the disappointed line of customers that Rodomonte’s Revenge had a slight technical malfunction that needed fine-tuning; that was like Noah telling his neighbors he was expecting a little rain. After he’d locked the gate, he led Brett and Tom into the game room. He took the gloves, helmets, and boots and set them along with the boys’ coats beside the computer.
“This time,” he explained, “you won’t need them.”
“What will we need?” Tom asked.
“Every bit of luck we can get,” Brett answered.
Willie nodded. “And every bit of knowledge I can give you.” He sighed. “Unfortunately that isn’t much. We know so little about the game that we hardly even know how to play it. I’ll tell you what I can. There are five levels. The first two you already know. The third is getting inside the castle, the fourth getting inside the throne room, and the fifth is defeating Rodomonte.”
“How do we do that?”
“I have no idea.”
Tom looked about as confident as Brett felt. “That’s all you can tell us?”
“That’s all I know. I’ll probe the program once the game begins and see what I can come up with. I think I’ll be able to send you keyboard messages; the program should pick them up.” He rested his hand on Tom’s shoulder. “I’ll help you every way that I can.”
“What do we do now?” Brett asked.
“You wait for the game to come to you.” Willie nodded toward the computer. “I’ll see if I can figure anything out. You guys do what you have to do.”
“Let’s hope that’s not more than we can do.” Tom gulped. He joined Brett as he slumped against the wall. They waited for the game.
Reality slowly washed away, like chalk on a rainy sidewalk. Beneath reality was the game. Within half an hour the arcade and mall were gone. The world was gone, at least the world Tom and Brett were used to, the world they wanted back.
Words flashed across the sky. WELCOME TO THE FIRST LEVEL OF RODOMONTE’S REVENGE: THE PLAINS.
YOU’D BETTER GET GOING, Willie typed, GOOD LUCK.
The game hadn’t changed. The first fire river was in the same place, and they crossed it in the same way. Brett was so nervous jumping it that he was sure the butterflies in his stomach carried him over. There was n
o fooling around now. One slip, and everything was over. Everything.
They were almost to the mountains before the first buzz-bug struck.
Tom picked up its clatter before Brett. He pointed toward the mountains. “Let’s separate.”
Brett ran to the side, fear turning his legs into lead, his throat as dry as the video sand beneath him. As the green dot grew, he hoped that it wouldn’t come after him. If Tom missed beheading it, then … His knees went weak.
But, Brett thought, it really doesn’t make any difference who the bug attacks. If it gets me, then another bug or a spider will get Tom, and if it gets Tom, then another bug or spider will get me. Willie had been right. The only way they were going to get through this was if they did it together.
“It’s coming this way!” Tom cried. “It’s after me!”
Brett sprinted back. The bug came on fast, but the fear of what would happen if he didn’t send its big, round head rolling across the sand gave him speed. He was in position when the bug roared by. Its wings hummed, his sword flashed, and the bug was a dead, jumbled heap in the sand.
“One down,” Tom said as he trotted up.
“And about a million to go.” They headed for the mountains.
The next buzz-bug came for Brett. Tom took it out as easily as Brett had done. The third came for Brett, too, and at a bad time. He had just hurdled a fire river, and Tom was still on the other side. Tom had to leap the river and chase down the bug at the same time. It flew so near that Brett had to duck to avoid its flying, severed head.
“Too close.” His breath whistled in his chest. “Way too close. I’ll almost be glad to see tunnel spiders.” Tom looked at him but didn’t say anything.
When they reached the foothills, Brett couldn’t tell if the trail in front of them was the same one they had taken in the first game or not. He stopped Tom before he stepped onto it.
“Are you there, Willie?”
I’M HERE.
“In the first game you mentioned something about its not making any difference which trail we took. What did you mean?”
ALL THE TRAILS LEAD TO THE CASTLE. THE PROBLEM IS THAT AT THE SAME TIME NONE OF THEM DOES.
