400 Boys and 50 More

by Marc Laidlaw

  Instead, he found people, all sizes and shapes and colors, all ages, but all utterly ordinary. The fact that they were naked was the strangest thing about them. Game models were usually decked in flamboyant colors, military garb, savage armor. So the nakedness of these was odd…but ultimately boring.

  His first task, therefore, was to make the models interesting again. That should be no problem. There were enough similarities in the basic human forms that one good all-purpose program would be able to remake the entire tedious population on a global basis.

  On a whim, and for consistency’s sake, he went back to the image of the stupid cuddly teddy bear he had concocted for his tiles. Having settled on a basic teddy bear model, he went through the human model files, altering all of them in one sweep, creating a motley army of awkward, patchy teddy bears. He spent the next day tweaking them individually, keeping limbs aligned and furry snouts smiling.

  The next group of models was harder to comprehend: batches of limbs, unattached to any creature; horns and fur and scales. There were machine parts, things that looked like the hoods of generic midsized cars, lampstand bases, twigs and fronds. He no longer had any idea what he was altering. He followed his own sense of style, hoping to make all these oddments look as if they shared some common source; he teased the limbs into long strings and let them snap back into floppy curls. He turned gentle arcs into spadelike parabolas. He had never worked in the dark like this before, guided only by a sense of rightness; but after a time he found it addictive. He enjoyed the alterations for their own sake, without a thought to their purpose or ultimate use, or to what sort of game this all added up to. Days passed; and, more importantly, nights, when he hardly stirred from his seat. But while he reveled in the work, his plans for revenge were far from forgotten.

  All the grimness, all the cruelty, that was such an essential element of everything he’d done before the Noware TC, he carefully set aside for a private project. It was to be a secret entity, something made all the more hideous by contrast to the warm and whimsical creatures which surrounded it.

  Barton distilled his conception of evil into a hybrid bearing the worst features of every monster he had ever wrought or dreamed of. A Demon Lord. In scale, it was several hundred times the size of the human figures; it was gray and black and dripping with blood; its maw a festering pocket of abscessed fangs and sucking lamprey tongues. Its body was a slimy mass of chancres from which razor-hooked tendrils uncurled, and it moved on a carpet of insect legs that could adhere to any surface. It was covered with eyes and armor, and was all but unstoppable. He decided to include one—and only one—weapon in the artillery pack which, if cleverly used, might kill it.

  The hardest thing was finding the right sound for the beast. He experimented for days until hitting upon a satisfactory noise, achieved by feeding glass and bone and masses of sinewy fat into the kitchen sink garbage disposal and recording the gurgling, grinding sound with a microphone taped to the plumbing down where the razors whirled. By raising this to an almost intolerably high pitch, he captured what sounded like a scream of demonic triumph.

  The Demon Lord would be Barton Needles’s signature. Anyone who played the game would recognize his handiwork as soon as the monster devoured them.

  But naturally he could not simply e-mail the Demon Lord to n01@noware.org and expect accolades. He could imagine their shock and horror, and then their polite rejection. Well, he would not give them a chance to reject it before letting them know what he thought of their namby-pamby vision of a peaceful world. First, there would be a good long reign of carnage.

  Noware had unknowingly delivered the means of its undoing into his hands. The original collection of models had been accompanied by a large DLL file—a dynamic link library containing a number of animation and other routines shared by many of the models. Changes to the models necessitated changes to the animation functions; and Noware had entrusted him with this rudimentary programming task.

  He compressed his Demon Lord data and hid the unlabeled array among others in the DLL. He then found an ordinary animation function, one that would be called fairly frequently during runtime, and made one minor alteration: at random intervals the normally useful function would return a pointer not to an ordinary animation function, but to the Demon Lord array. The game would then decompress, load, and let loose the monster.

  If Noware eventually did locate the monster array and tried to remove it, all model animations would fail. Meanwhile, it was self-triggering, and would spawn at random but frequent intervals. Over time, if the creatures were not killed, there would be hordes of them all through the game. By then, of course, the hard-core gamers would have risen to the challenge and mastered the tricks of the arsenal.

  On the other hand, no hard-core gamer of Barton’s experience would spend more than two minutes in this particular world anyway. With all its soft edges and pastel colors, it would repel them instantly. It was just as well he was working anonymously. A world like this would be death to his reputation…except for the Demon Lord aspect.

  He would do things differently next time. Not that there need be a next time. Once he’d been paid in full for the Noware TC, he would have the capital he needed to start his own company, with a few hand-picked employees. He’d rent an office on the cheap end of Water Street, and a renaissance of coolness would surely crystallize around his arrival. He’d buy a new car…something fast and flashy and astronomically expensive. Yes, it was time to think along those lines.

  He packed up the model files and shipped them off to Noware. The money was almost his. Nothing remained now but to create or convert an arsenal of weapons, an immensely enjoyable task after so much tiptoeing around. It was hard to imagine how even the grubs at Noware could expect him to make chainguns and rocket launchers seem sweet and innocent. Ultimately, a weapon was a weapon, even if it shot marshmallows and had a fuzzy pink handgrip.

  Acknowledgment arrived no more than forty-five minutes after he’d sent off the models.

  Dear Lord Needles:

  Thank you for delivery of your model pack. The models appear more than satisfactory—certainly there is nothing in the least offensive or inappropriate here; further minor modifications can be attended to by our staff if necessary. We have deposited the balance of your payment in the account you previously specified. We thank you for your participation in our TC, and look forward to working with you in the future should any similar project ever again arise.

  Barton’s surprise was enormous. He typed a hasty response: “I don’t understand. I’m still waiting to convert the weapons pack. If you gave that work to someone else I’ll be really p.o.’d—and you don’t want to p. me o.!”

  His fingers slammed and skittered on the keyboard. He smashed the Send button and waited in a fury for n01’s reply.

  It came almost instantly:

  All weapons code has been expunged from source. No weapons in our TC. This is to be a peaceful game as we have previously stated. Thank you again for your participation. All elements are in place, and we have received final approval to embark on Total Conversion immediately. We trust you will be pleased with results.

  Barton couldn’t force himself to stay at the screen another moment. He got up snarling and stormed out of his room.

  It seemed to be morning—what hour exactly, or what day, he felt unsure. His mother wavered in the kitchen doorway until she saw his face; then she retreated to the safety of her pots and pans. He rushed out of the house, past his neglected Alfa Romeo. He didn’t trust himself to drive right now; he would kill someone—maybe even himself. Well, he wasn’t stupid or rash, and he wasn’t about to take chances like that. He felt as if he hadn’t been out of the house, or used his legs, or felt the sunlight in weeks. He was not far wrong.

  Usually—in a deathmatch for instance—rage and thoughts of revenge sharpened his mind, providing a clear black background to his thoughts, allowing him to stalk and slay his enemies with deadly precision. Today, for some reason,
murk accompanied the anger. The sky was blue, the streets looked fresh and bright, as if a storm had swept them and moved on; but his mood clouded everything. He kept surfacing to find that he’d walked another few blocks. He soon found himself downtown, entering the town square. Trees threw their shadows over him. Up ahead, preschoolers clambered on a climbing structure. A dog chased a Frisbee.

  Good, he told himself, calmed by the exercise. You’re getting a grip.

  It was better to plan his next move, and put Noware behind him. He had their money now, that was all that really mattered. With money he could do anything: start his own company, take all the time he needed to make a game that was pure Barton Needles, pure and unadulterated evil. Yes, his next game would be everything the Noware conversion was not.

  In that moment of anticipatory calm, he realized he had made himself dizzy by rushing out so quickly after weeks of concentrated mental effort. Dizzy and sick. That explained why the world seemed to be rippling—and why he saw his textures everywhere he looked, as if they were pouring out of his eyes again. Maybe it also explained why the pine trees were suddenly wrapped in blue and scarlet fleurs-de-lis with ornate tessellations; and why the thin, beaded trickles of sap shimmered with a weird fluorescent orange glow.

  He headed toward a park bench to sit down, but it was changing, growing narrower at the ends, beginning to sag and spiral into limp dangling curls like the tendrils of a creeping plant. He crouched in the grass and put his head between his knees, eyes shut, hoping his textures would stop crawling over everything he saw.

  He would get help next time. He wouldn’t try to do it all himself. It was too much for one kid to make over an entire world. He kept his eyes closed until he saw only sparkling darkness, devoid of the self-created patterns he’d been staring at for weeks.

  When he opened his eyes, he gazed straight down at the grass and earth underfoot.

  The grass was red. The earth beneath the blades was purple, faintly shot through with lime. Things were crawling in the soil—things like soft enormous pink ants with floppy legs.

  Barton shot upright—too fast, for it made him even dizzier. As the world spun, he saw it had been completely remade with his textures. He couldn’t stop seeing them no matter where he looked. The buildings at the far edge of the square were all colors but the proper ones; they were shaped like enormous saggy mushrooms, puddling on the soft cushions of streets that were not so much paved as upholstered.

  Barton turned and ran toward home, hoping he could find his way now that he’d lost his senses.

  Near the edge of the square, something darted to and fro, dragging a leash across grass that stubbornly refused to revert from red. If he squinted his eyes it was still mostly a dog, but the sound it made was not at all canine. Where had he heard it before? It shot between his legs, snagging him in the dragging leash. Somewhere in the distance he could hear its owner piping on a weird shrill dog whistle. Hopelessly tangled, Barton fell. As the dog circled toward his face, he braced for a licking.

  Then he remembered where he had heard the creature’s call. Like the textures, it was something he’d carried in his head that had somehow spilled out into the world. It was glass and bone and metal and meat, all grinding together in a bottomless bubbling throat.

  The cries, with all their overtones of impending total victory, grew louder as the Demon Lord overshadowed the square, then dimmed to a muted slurping as the first of many lamprey tongues found his face.

  Next time they’ll want weapons, Barton thought indignantly. Lots of weapons!

  His final conscious act was the unhappy one of seeking his reflection in a million rheumy eyes, but failing. There were no Lord Needles or even Bartons anywhere.

  All he saw were a million orange teddy bears, screaming.

  * * *

  "Total Conversion" copyright 1999 Marc Laidlaw. First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, August 1999.

  THE NEW MILLENNIUM: HALF-LIFE & LESSONS HALF-LEARNED

  The early millennium, as anyone who lived through it can attest, was a time of almost constant crisis, social and political.

  But enough about all that! I was having trouble writing videogames!

  Half-Life had been well-received by the public, but behind the scenes it had felt like a desperate, last-minute salvage operation, barely cobbled together out of spare parts. Now I was floundering as I tried to figure out how we might develop a more stately, well-proportioned narrative for Half-Life 2. At some point, I realized that I could no longer tell if I was any good at the thing I was supposed to do. I wasn’t sure I could write anymore. I made several erratic attempts to return to my roots, to sharpen my tools, to flip through my life’s thesaurus.

  I had given up any thought of writing another novel; game design had taken over that part of my brain. But it seemed like a reasonable self-compromise to write the occasional short story.

  Anyway, as I said, it was a time of strife and crisis and videogames. “Sleepy Joe” was my response to 9/11, and I trust it did far less harm than invading Iraq, even though I undertook the story without the backing of any of my traditional allies.

  Several stories written in this period simply channeled my idiot love of video games (“An Evening’s Honest Peril” is pure fanfic) or tried to capture the dizzying oddness of making them for a living (“The Vicar of R’lyeh”). “Sweetmeats” was the fulfillment of a long-held wish to express my debt to Roald Dahl’s Charlie & the Chocolate Factory, the novel that more than any other had made me want to be a writer.

  Rudy Rucker’s self-published online zine Flurb was the perfect venue for stories I wanted to write but knew would be very hard to sell. Writing these, sending them to Rudy, felt a bit like sitting at the back of a stuffy lecture hall, cackling and drawing cartoons to share with your friend.

  There was no thought of being respectable, and little thought at this point of ever again having a typical career as a writer. Hey, I was writing games for a living!

  Whatever was in the air, it wasn’t typical.

  SLEEPY JOE

  The plan must have come to Rog fully formed that first morning, as he stepped off the elevator into the lobby of Szilliken Sharpenwright and saw the old soldier newly stationed there in his omnichair between the potted silk ferns and the coffee tables.

  "Oh. My. God. I am in love."

  Megan, her arms loaded with Rog-House props and paraphernalia she hadn’t had time to ditch yet, said, "You say that an awful lot for someone who styles himself completely asexual. Not to mention atheistic."

  "There’s no conflict! He’s completely post-human!"

  "Hm. You two even look a bit alike."

  "Oh please don’t say that. You flatter me." He stalked up to the omnichair, tugging at the collar of his black turtleneck, adjusting his thick black plastic spectacles. Crouching down before the chair’s inhabitant, he put out a stick-thin finger, gingerly. "Can I touch him?"

  Antoinette, the receptionist, said, "He’s not in yet, do you want his voicemail? Be my guest. I just wish he’d stop staring at me. Law offices."

  Megan watched Rog examining the old soldier. They did look alike. Rog was completely hairless. He scrubbed his head with some kind of depilatory agent that had eradicated even his eyebrows. The old vet, in the omnichair which hummed and slurped and quietly took care of all his hidden functions, was similarly shorn, although in a military style. Unlike Rog, he had eyebrows like bristly fiberoptic filaments with a faint orange light playing through them. And where Rog blinked continually behind his thick lenses, the old vet’s eyes were half-open, sleepy-lidded, and actual blinks came so infrequently that it would be days before Megan had a confirmed sighting. His face, in sharp contrast to Rog’s utterly unblemished pallor, was dark, creased, chapped—like a weathered boulder sharpened by the elements, instead of worn away. But there was nothing sharp about the expression. The brain inside could have been a lump of dough, to judge by the drowsy eyes.

  "Could you turn him to
face the elevators?" Antoinette called across the lobby. "Gives me the creeps, him staring at me. And he’s got some kind of smell. Law offices."

  Megan didn’t smell anything except perhaps a whiff of machine oil, which she supposed had something to do with the chair. But she took the handles of the chair and wheeled it around to face the elevator bank. On the back of the seat was a small embossed label: Property of Civilian Rehabilitation Foundation.

  Rog stayed crouched before the chair, declaiming poetically under his breath, even as she shifted it. "Oh veteran of foreign wars unnameable, at least by me. Defender of this hoary law firm’s priceless horde of Fortune Magazines and rented modern art. I welcome you. I honor and appreciate all that you have done at great personal sacrifice to keep this country safe for me and my community access cable show, the Rog-House. As seen each Tuesday at 2 a.m. I hope I can someday prove myself worthy to call you a fan, as I am of you."

  "Rog," Megan said.

  "Hush a moment, we’re communing."

  "Rog, I need coffee."

  "Elixir of Mammon."

  She turned aside. "Whatever!" And halfway down the hall to her cubicle she looked back and saw him still gazing deep into the old vet’s eyes. "I’ll drop this crap on your desk!" she said. He waved her off with a distracted hand.

  At that moment, Mr. Szilliken himself arrived, striding from the elevators with the look of extreme distaste he reserved especially for Rog.

  "Get away from my sentry!" he snapped.

  Rog straightened up like an odd black heron on stilts, stumbling backward, barely catching himself. "Sorry, Mr. Szilliken."

  "Show some respect and stay out of his face."

  Megan rushed back. "Hey, Rog, you said you Acco’d that full set of exhibits last night? I need it for a rush filing. Good morning, Mr. Szilliken."

  "Good morning, Miss Megan!" A smirky smile and a wink, saved especially for his favorite paralegals. She shuddered and knew it wouldn’t register. "I suppose you noticed the latest addition to the firm?"