by Dustin Brady
“You gonna jump on, or are you gonna get eaten?”
I rolled my eyes, sloshed over to the tank and climbed up.
“That’s the spirit!” Eric said with a salute. “Now that you’ve boarded my vessel, I expect you to only refer to me as Captain Eric.”
“Your vessel? I’d rather take my chances with the crocodiles.”
“That’s no way to talk to your superior, First Mate Jesse.”
I turned the cannon around and blasted Eric. He vaporized and reappeared in the driver’s seat.
Eric nodded. “Point taken.” He then flicked a couple switches and grabbed the steering wheel. “Let’s see what this thing can do!”
What it did was accelerate from 0 to 100 m.p.h. in a quarter of a second.
“AHHHHHH!” I said as my right arm, which had been operating the cannon, nearly got ripped from its socket. I flew backward into the muck with a giant SPLAT. Now in addition to wet socks, I’d also be spending the day in wet underwear.
I climbed back on and pointed the cannon at Eric. “Watch it, captain.”
He accelerated slower this time, but couldn’t resist doing a donut once he found a clearing that was big enough. Then we took off through the level. After five frustrating minutes of trying to aim at aliens while Eric swerved back and forth, I realized why they don’t let 12-year-olds drive cars and why they CERTAINLY don’t let 12-year-olds drive tanks.
“Would you drive straight for one second!”
“I’m working on it!”
CRUNCH!
“And stop hitting trees!”
“I can either drive straight or I can avoid trees, but I can’t do both!”
I sighed as yet another crocodile jumped out of the swamp and ate us whole. We reappeared at the beginning of the level for the fourth time.
“Get out,” I said.
“No wait, I can…”
“Get out.”
Eric huffed and swapped spots with me. I smiled. “Now that I’m driving, I expect you to refer to me as Captain Jesse.”
He blasted me. After I reappeared, we set off. I was actually not much better at driving than Eric, but because he was so much better than me at shooting, we made it through the level in no time. Eric cheered every time he zapped an alien, and I whooped every time I got to use a fallen log as a ramp. I was having a blast. A Full Blast. If driving a car is even a little bit like driving a tank, adults should be way happier on the highway than they seem.
The trees overhead got thicker and thicker until we ended up in an enclosed swamp that was almost pitch black.
“What now?” I asked.
“This is the boss,” Eric said.
“Are we supposed to be able to see him?”
“It’s a crocodile with glowing eyes that light up everything when he emerges from the swamp.”
“Terrific.”
We waited in silence for a full minute. Nothing.
“Hey Eric.”
“What?”
“Cool boss.”
“He should have been here by now. He always shows up right away.”
“Well maybe we needed to get like a key or something?”
Eric looked at me with scorn. “A key? What could a key possibly do to help us find a crocodile in the middle of a swamp? That doesn’t even make sense.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know a game that turns the Statue of Liberty into a rocket ship is supposed to make sense.”
“Whatever. I guess we can see if there’s something we missed.”
I turned the tank around and slowly started driving back through the dark swampland. That’s when we heard it. A hissing noise up ahead.
sssssSSSSSSssssssss
“Is that something?” I asked.
“I don’t know what that is.”
ssssssSSSSSssssseeeeeeeeee
“Shh, listen.” It sounded almost like a hissing voice. Or actually, multiple hissing voices.
yyyyyessSSSSSssssseeeeeeee
“Yessee?” I turned to Eric. “Is that what they’re saying?”
EEEEErrrrrrreeeeeeeeek
Caaaaaapan EEEEEEErreeeeeeeek
My stomach did a somersault. Captain Eric. Jesse. They were saying our names.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Speed Run
Here’s the complete list of things that are creepier than hearing aliens say your name in a dark swamp:
1. Nothing.
That’s it. Nothing can ever be creepier than that.
yyyyyessSSSSSssssseeeeeeee.
EEEEErrrrrrreeeeeeeeek.
yyyyyessSSSSSssssseeeeeeee.
EEEEErrrrrrreeeeeeeeek.
Eric panicked and started blasting wildly ahead. It did no good. If anything, the voices only got louder.
yyyyyessSSSSSssssseeeeeeee.
EEEEErrrrrrreeeeeeeeek.
yyyyyessSSSSSssssseeeeeeee.
EEEEErrrrrrreeeeeeeeek.
I put the tank in reverse, and we started slowly backing up. Both Eric and I remained silent as we drove back toward the boss area. Soon it was almost completely dark, and the voices sounded closer than ever.
yyyyyessSSSSSssssseeeeeeee.
EEEEErrrrrrreeeeeeeeek.
I felt Eric’s hand on my shoulder. I tried to comfort him. “I know, buddy. We’re going to figure out a way out of here.”
“But how?”
Eric’s voice sounded far away. Not like he was lost in thought or something, but actually a couple feet farther than I remembered. I looked down at the hand on my shoulder. My eyes had started getting used to the dark, so I could just make out that this hand was bigger than expected.
“Eric?”
A face leaned in real close to me. An adult face. Making a “shh” motion with his finger to his mouth.
I did not shh. I did quite the opposite of shh-ing.
“AHHHHHHHHHHH!”
Suddenly the voices stopped. Then two eyes from the swamp lit up. They illuminated our tank. They illuminated me and now Eric screaming like a chorus of small girls. They illuminated an angry man tearing me away from the steering wheel. They illuminated an army of aliens blocking our path out of the swamp. And they illuminated their leader — Mr. Gas Mask.
Our tank thief slammed the vehicle into drive and took off toward the army. The glowing crocodile ahead opened its mouth to swallow us whole.
“Hold on!” the man yelled back at me and Eric. A nanosecond before the crocodile could chomp down on us, the man pressed a series of buttons, and our entire tank did a barrel roll away from the mouth.
“You never told me we could do that!” I yelled to Eric.
“I never knew we could!”
Now that we had narrowly avoided the glowing crocodile, we found ourselves plowing through the army behind him.
“Don’t shoot anything!” the man yelled back to us.
That seemed hard to do, since aliens were now grabbing onto the tank and trying to climb up. Before any of them could get too far, our driver found a log, used it as a ramp and hit the thrusters in midair to turn our tank into a flying missile. As we soared over the heads of our attackers, the driver did another barrel roll to shake the remaining aliens off our tank. We landed with a splash behind the alien army and tore back toward the beginning of the level with the aliens behind us.
While Eric and I had driven with all the grace of a dizzy cow, this man handled the swamp like he was born there. Every time a new crocodile jumped out of the water, he was ready with a zig or a zag or a flying barrel roll. Unfortunately, in addition to the new aliens jumping out of the water in front of us, the army behind us had regrouped and was gaining ground.
Just as the aliens started grabbing for the tank again, our driver jerked the steering wheel hard right, and we zipped down a small path that I hadn’t noticed on our first run through the level. The path led us into a small dead-end swamp. We were trapped — our only hope would be to turn around and try jumping over the army again. But our driver was not interested in slowing. If
anything he sped up. Directly into a rock.
“AHHHHHHHHHH!” Eric and I screamed as we closed our eyes and held each other, bracing for impact.
But we never hit the rock. Instead, we drove straight through it.
When we didn’t explode into a giant fireball, I opened my eyes. We continued driving through blackness — complete blackness. I couldn’t even see any kind of ground underneath us. The only thing I could make out was what looked like the bottom of a swamp above us. The man had driven us underneath the level.
After a few minutes, we popped back up. But we were no longer in swamp land. We emerged through a waterfall in Hawaii. Our driver didn’t slow down. He drove straight into the ocean, went underneath the level again and popped out of the ivy-covered outfield wall at Wrigley Field in Chicago. We drove like crazy through secret passages in and out of more levels — the Golden Gate Bridge, the Nevada desert and the Atlantic City boardwalk.
Finally, at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, we slowed to a stop. For the first time since the aliens started talking, everything was totally silent. Our driver parked the tank and turned to say something to me and Eric. But before he could get a word out, Mr. Gas Mask jumped up behind him and grabbed his neck.
I raised my blaster. Our driver’s eyes got huge. “DON’T SHOO…”
I shot.
Time literally slowed down. The alien dodged the blast by leaning backward almost in half. Then, just as the blast was going over his body, the alien lifted up one finger of one hand. The blast consumed his finger. Before we could understand what had just happened, time went back to normal and the alien stood up again. He looked at his hand, gave us a four-finger wave bye-bye and beamed himself into the sky.
Our driver, who’d fallen to the ground, stood back up and shook his head.
“You have no idea what you just did.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Source Code
The driver took us into a cave and parked the tank again.
“OK Jesse and Eric, what are you doing here?”
Eric threw up his hands. “How does everyone here know our names?!”
The man looked at him quizzically. “Well I know your names because I went to school with you.”
“You don’t look like any of our teachers.”
“I wasn’t a teacher. I was your classmate.”
That’s when I noticed the man’s super-duper blue eyes. In my whole life, I’d only met one person with eyes that blue.
“Mark? Mark Whitman?”
He smiled a sad smile. “That’s me.”
Mark Whitman. I could kind of see it. You know those missing person posters that they age up 20 years to give you an idea of what the person might look like now? That’s what Mark looked like, except the poster artist had also added lots of muscle and a blaster arm.
Eric was having a hard time keeping up. “But, but, but, but why aren’t you drowned?”
Mark cocked his head. “Drowned?”
“Everyone thought you drowned in the river.”
“Really? Who goes swimming after a storm?”
“Exactly!”
“No, I was playing Full Blast and got sucked in.”
“Us too!”
“Yeah but why are you guys still young?”
We didn’t know what to say. Finally, Eric spoke up. “Why are you old?”
“Because I’ve been in here for 20 years.”
Eric nearly fell off the tank. “Whhat?! You’ve only been missing for a month!”
“What are you talking about?”
Eric and I filled Mark in on everything that had happened since he disappeared — the river search, the big photo of him in school, the Mark Day.
“So I got you guys a half day off of school?”
“Well yeah, but it wasn’t a good half day because everyone was sad.”
“And you’re sure I’ve only been gone a month?”
We both nodded.
“That’s great news! That means real time moves way slower than video game time. And if we’re able to somehow find a way out of here, I can see my parents before they turn into grandparents!”
It was my turn to speak now. “What do you mean ‘somehow find a way out of here’?”
Mark turned the tank back on. “I have something to show you.”
We drove through a wall in the back of the cave. As we zigged and zagged through more levels, Mark explained that every video game has accidental shortcuts through unfinished walls and scenery. There are even gamers called “speed runners” who compete with each other to find these glitches and beat video games in record time. Over the years, Mark had found all of Full Blast’s accidental shortcuts and made a home underneath the video game world where aliens couldn’t reach him.
We eventually found ourselves back in the Nevada desert. We drove along the beginning of the level, hugging the force field boundary. Suddenly Mark snapped the wheel left, and we went through an invisible hole in the invisible wall. After driving through never-ending desert for 15 more minutes, we came upon a massive, black building. It looked kind of like a warehouse, except it stretched for miles.
Mark hopped off the tank. “Come on.”
He grabbed the handle of a huge sliding door and creeeeaaaaaked it open. When we stepped through the door, lights automatically flickered a path in front of us. They illuminated row after row of filing cabinets and TV screens (the big tube kind) and abandoned metal parts.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“The source code,” Mark said as he led us forward. “All the files that make this game work are right here.”
“Great!” Eric said. “Then we should be able to find one that we can use to get out of here, right?”
Mark shook his head. “I searched for a long time to find something I could use to CTL-ALT—DELETE my way out of here, but that’s not the way it works. After years of digging and experimenting, I came to the conclusion that the only way out is through Level 20.”
So what’s the problem?” Eric asked. “I beat Level 20. It’s not too bad.”
Mark stopped at the end of a dead-end row. This particular section of the warehouse looked like it had been torn apart by someone desperate to find something. The lights here flickered ominously. Files and pictures were taped haphazardly to the wall. There was even red yarn attaching everything together like in those police movies.
Mark pointed at the wall. “This is the problem.”
At the top of the wall — above the files and pictures and red yarn — were two words scrawled in spray paint. Two words we had seen before.
“HINDENBURG PROTOCOL.”
Underneath those words hung a familiar gas mask.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Hindenburg Protocol
“What’s, uh, what’s the Hindenburg Protocol?” I asked while trying to follow the zig-zagging string.
Mark shook his head. “It’s the thing that’s going to make sure you never make it out of here alive.”
Mark turned on one of the old TVs. The Hawaii level popped onto the screen. “When you were jetpacking around this level, did you notice the detail everywhere? Not just all the trees, but all the different types of trees. Sixty-seven to be exact. Sixty-seven different types of trees, each with thousands of leaves that all do something different in the wind. And did you notice the crickets? Not just the sound of crickets, but actual crickets and flies and mosquitoes zipping around. Do you know how hard it is to put that kind of detail into a video game?”
“Uh, hard?” Eric offered.
“Impossible,” Mark said. “It’s impossible to do that.”
“Okayyy, so why…”
“It’s impossible because even if you had enough time to code all of those different trees and bugs, you’re creating infinite headaches for yourself. The more stuff you cram into a game, the more things can go wrong.”
“Like glitches and errors,” Eric said.
“Exactly. Every video game developer in the world i
s trying to make games that trick you into thinking they’re more complicated than they are. Every developer except these guys. The Full Blast team has done the opposite because they built this.” Mark tapped the gas mask on the wall and clicked a button on the TV.
The TV showed the beginning of the Hawaii level again, but this time, it zoomed in on a mosquito. The mosquito happily flew around, looking for someone to annoy. We watched the mosquito in silence for a full minute (which, in mosquito-watching time, is an eternity) before Mark spoke up.
“Notice anything weird?”
“Yeah,” Eric said. “We’re watching a mosquito on TV instead of trying to beat the game.”
But then I saw something. “Ohhh wait, is it…”
It took a while to notice, but the mosquito was growing right in front of our eyes. It started slow, but as the seconds ticked by, it began growing faster and faster. Soon, it was the size of a cat. After 10 more seconds, it reached human size. That’s when the screen flashed blue and a figure appeared in the corner. Mark paused the video.
“Look familiar?”
It was our gas mask friend.
“That mosquito is a glitch in the game. I’m sure it started as a baby, and the developers forgot to put a limit on how big it could get. This is something that a human would usually have to fix, but not here. The Full Blast developers built their own clean-up crew. These guys. They’re special agents called Hindenburgs.”
Mark unpaused the video. Mr. Hindenburg Gas Mask scanned the mosquito with a laser thing and shot a net out of his blaster. The mosquito got tangled in the net, but it quickly grew too big and snapped the rope. Now it was the size of a tank. In a flash, the Hindenburg also got as big as a tank and shot a metal net at the mosquito. This time, it got tangled up for good.
Mark paused the video again. “The genius of the Hindenburg is its ability to learn. If it sees a mosquito getting bigger, it gets bigger too. When the mosquito snaps the net, it makes a metal net. It will do whatever it takes to destroy a glitch. With the Hindenburg Protocol, you can create the ultimate game, because you can build a world that builds itself. Any mistake gets zapped into oblivion, and only perfection remains.”
