by Alan Ryker
Tears filled her eyes before she even began to cry. She could think of only one last thing to do: search her hard drive for “Wards.”
Through the blur of tears she saw the one file her computer found. A harmless little notepad note. She opened it.
“Your Wards are free. Go live your dreams”
Best,
Teh_wardens_warden”
A knot filled her upper chest and her breaths began to hitch as sobs crowded against the “You bastard” that she barely managed to croak out.
Laying her head on her desk she wept. She couldn’t stop, and she didn’t want to.
After some time—she couldn’t say how long—she got back on the forums and searched for the bastard who’d ruined her life. She could find no trace. She started a new thread, asking if anyone had heard of him, then went to search the rest of the internet while she waited for replies.
WardzRule: Are you trying to scare us?
IRWardsGirl: Yeah, I think she meant to post this in Wards Fiction.
Elizabeth could find nothing. Her searches went from the concrete—”teh_wardens_warden”—to the abstract—”the devil invaded my computer and deleted my Wards game.” She found nothing, regardless, and again rested her head on her desk, though she’d run out of tears.
This was the position she’d taken when David walked in.
“Elizabeth? Are you alright?”
She didn’t lift her head, but tilted it to the side and looked at him through eyes she could feel were puffy and red.
“What happened?” he rushed over, the big lawyer liar phony, and knelt down, putting an arm around her. She could tell he was being careful not to touch his expensive suit to her snotty face.
“My game is gone.”
“Your game? That game you’re always playing?” He released her, the compassion gone from his voice and posture. From a looming, stock upright stance, he looked her over. She didn’t move, but stared at him with her ruined eyes, waiting for his judgment. “You haven’t even gotten dressed today. Did you play all day again.”
“No. You’re not listening because you don’t listen. My Wards are gone. I’ve been working for hours trying to get them back, but they’re gone.”
David stood, scoffed, rolled his eyes. “I told you a million times to back your hard drive up. Did you?”
“No.” Good good good… She found rage there. It was pressing through the thick, choking fog of sadness that had sapped all her energy. It felt better than the sorrow.
He shook his head. “Then I guess this is a lesson. You’ve been wasting way too much time on that stupid game anyway.”
Elizabeth sat up. Stood up. Her robe fell open again, but she didn’t care. His eyes went from her body to her face, a twitch of surprise cutting through his smug self-assuredness.
“It’s not a stupid game. This is a stupid game. This is a pretend life. Get the fuck out of here.”
“Elizabeth, you’re being—”
“Get out!” she shrieked, stepping forward, her eyes opened as wide as she could make them to let all the hate and misery pour through so that it might knock him off his feet, drag him under and drown him.
David took a step back. Two. With a little distance between them, he shut his eyes, took a deep breath and made a show of regaining his composure, of being the adult because he was twice her age.
“Because I can see you’re upset, I’ll make dinner tonight. Tonight,” he said. She was about to scream at him again, but he seemed to sense this, sensed the loss of ground it would imply, and quickly turned and walked out, shutting the door behind him.
Alone, the anger drained away like the plug being pulled on a hot water bottle, leaving her limp and cold and empty again. She flopped back into her desk chair.
She’d scoured the internet and found nothing. There was no hope. Her world was gone.
Elizabeth lay her head on her desk, and even though she should have been out of them, slow tears coursed down her cheeks. She wrapped her arms beneath her head and closed her eyes.
PART 3
Elizabeth dreamed that she approached her silent computer the way one would approach the altar of an angry god. She knelt, pressed the power button with reverence, and then sat back, waiting. The operating system booted up with what she’d always considered nonsense text floating up and out of sight. Now she felt the power of this nonsense text, that it made sense to someone or something greater than her, that it didn’t flow up and disappear but continued into the heavens, a petition to those gods who would listen.
The screen went blue and green, a centered horizontal split with a white house in the divide, and before it stood a happy family. The Wards. It was the game’s loading screen. Her heart thumped in happiness, crawled up into her raw throat. The Wards beamed blankly out at some fixed point, some imaginary photographer. And then their gazes shifted, slowly sliding down to where she knelt on the ground.
The screen pulsed and grew larger. Elizabeth felt pinned to the floor by their eyes and by the press of this contained world as it throbbed against its confines.
They didn’t move. Papa Ward still hugged Mama Ward around the waist. Suzy still held her music player in her hands, but now they saw her. It wasn’t like she’d stepped into the path of their eyes. They saw through the monitor to where she knelt.
The screen pulsed again. Grew larger, brighter. Elizabeth wanted to run but some older part of her mind, one that didn’t believe she was the center of the universe, kept her there awaiting her fate. Even little Billy’s expression was beyond her interpretation. Anger? Curiosity? Love? Hunger? Yes, all at once and more.
Elizabeth continued to kneel. The vision, now well beyond the edges of a monitor, now a window into another world, a brighter, more vibrant one than she occupied. It swelled again, expanded to fill everything she saw, the electric buzzing expanding to drown out every word her mind could use to interpret the experience. The blue sky was so blue. The green grass so green. The dark room around her disappeared in contrast, and shrank.
* * *
Consciousness began as a tiny spark disrupting the expanse of darkness of her mind. The darkness became aware of itself and the spark and knew it for the terrible thing it was, and yet couldn’t stop it from expanding.
Elizabeth fought awakening, but it did no good.
Her head throbbed like the computer monitor from her dream. Her back and neck ached terribly, and she registered that her face was not supported by its usual soft pillow, but by something hard and angular. Her computer desk.
She didn’t want to open her eyes and acknowledge the existence of an outside world, but it seemed that she’d have to do that if she wanted to move to her soft bed. With the light coming through her eyelids, she knew that David would be at work already. He must be really angry to have left her there all night and then to not even wake her before he left the house.
Rising up from the warm depths of oblivion, Elizabeth’s senses began to return. That’s when she noticed the smell.
Once she’d refused to do the dishes, though she hadn’t said she refused. She just didn’t do them. For days. For a week. They piled up until she and David were eating off the odd single pieces that matched nothing and were never used. She was cooking in the strange, single-purpose devices ordered off the television, like the pan that could fry chicken with no oil.
Eventually, once it was apparent that she wouldn’t correct her own behavior, she and David had an argument and David won, as usual. And as usual, she became the woman coerced into a task, with the right to sigh, roll her eyes, and shake her head in such slight movements it was almost imperceptible visually.
But the smell that the kitchen and adjoining rooms had developed before that, she smelled it now but much, much worse, and it made her afraid to open her eyes, because it shouldn’t have been a part of her reality.
When she finally did, she knew that she was no longer home.
She lifted her head from a desk that wasn’t hers, her neck
creaking and popping. Wiping the drool from her cheek, she looked about slowly, scanning her surroundings. She didn’t know why she moved so slowly except that it felt like she should draw as little attention to herself as possible.
She found herself in a very messy bedroom. It contained little furniture, just the bed and the desk, but there was enough garbage strewn about to make up for the lack. Stacks of dirty plates stood around an empty space just large enough for her head and arm on the surface of the desk.
The walls were stained, and unidentifiable puddles marred the floor. Cobwebs hung thickly in the corners. In stark contrast, a vibrant, insanely blue sky shone through the window.
Where the hell was she?
She stood, and her chair bumped into a stack of dishes, sending it leaning, leaning, crashing to the filthy floor. She jumped, bumped the blocky desk, disturbing more stacks of dishes and rubbish, which in turn collided with each other. The racket that broke the strange silence was deafening, making her pull her robe tight around herself and then pull her shoulders to her ears and clamp her eyes shut.
They opened again when the bedroom door did, slamming into the wall. In the doorway stood David. Almost. This twisted version of her husband was like a counterfeit portrait painted by an artist with both less talent and malicious intent. His features were blunted, too smooth in areas where there should be small detail, and the details that were there were too craggy, like the deep lines going across his forehead, the exaggeratedly hunger-sunken cheeks, and eyes that glinted surprise, hunger and rage out of black pits.
His blocky brows knit together. “How can you be here? You’re in there. Can’t you hear you?”
Through the open door a sound now came that Elizabeth couldn’t believe she hadn’t heard before. A shrieking like a klaxon, never faltering, never pausing for breath, endless and yet hopeless because what it hoped for was an end. It was the most horrifying sound she’d ever heard.
And that’s when she understood where she was, why the place was so familiar, why the man in front of her looked like a twisted version of her husband.
Go live your dreams.
This was her torture house. This was the last place she’d visited in her world before it was taken from her.
She’d woken up in her game.
PART 4
“How are you here and there, too?” David’s voice was thick with stupidity. She’d adjusted his stats to be the intellectual moron she felt he was emotionally, and she’d never let him get smarter. She’d never built a bookshelf in the torture house, because in the real world David had an office lined with bookshelves full of books from which he was constantly reading. She’d seen him grab something almost at random from the shelf, open to somewhere in the center and flop down into an overstuffed chair. It was nothing that interested her. No fiction. All law and history and other boring junk. But he enjoyed it, and she wasn’t about to let this double of his enjoy it, raising his intelligence and skills in the process.
“I’m not her. I’m me.”
“You’re you.” He said like it was the deepest of existential statements, one which he couldn’t yet grasp but hoped to one day. His brow knitted tighter.
“I have to go,” she said, walking past him, cinching her robe tightly at the neck and waist in white-knuckled little hands, feeling her breasts move too freely without support as she hurried past, and seeing this damaged David’s eyes drawn immediately to the movement as any man’s would be in the real world.
She needed to get back to the real world. She didn’t know how she’d manage to do that, but she knew it wouldn’t be from that filthy bedroom.
David’s eyes continued to scan her body through the thick terry cloth as she slipped past him and padded down the hall. Her feet were bare, and the grime and puddles of filth forced her to take a winding path although she felt a pressure building, not just inside herself, but inside the house, and she wanted out as quickly as possible.
Down the hall, horrific music pounded through a closed door, shaking it, making it bow out so that it looked like it would come off the hinges.
Albatross. Oh holy shit, she’d almost forgotten about Albatross.
He’d been a complete accident. Her Wards hated each other. This was before she’d locked Betty away. Davey was a moronic, antisocial slob. Betty, his wife, had the Self-Confidence trait cranked all the way up to Vain and the Gumption trait all the way down to Sloth. He needed caring for, and she refused to do it though she could have.
It was the perfect real-world love story, an endless battle, the weapons of complaining, whining, weeping, and ignoring rotating endlessly in little cartoon bubbles above their heads. She did bathe, unlike Davey, but she refused to clean a dish or mop the floor, and considering they both ate constantly because it was the only source of happiness, Elizabeth couldn’t deny them without killing them, and since Davey was so dumb he wouldn’t use the toilet unless explicitly told, preferring to piss his pants, leaving most of the puddles on the floor which Elizabeth was right then avoiding. It was impossible for either Ward to be anything but completely filthy.
They hated each other. They were disgustingly dirty and unattractive. And yet, when she wasn’t watching, they had intercourse and conceived.
Elizabeth was furious. This was something she had, despite all pressures, avoided doing in real life, and yet here was her horrible doppelganger walking around a filthy house, stomach distended like an overripe fruit. Davey couldn’t divorce her—Davey was barely smart enough to pick his own nose—and yet she’d had sex him. He hadn’t bathed once in his entire life. He pissed himself several times a day. Yet she’d let him lie on top of her and put that filthy thing inside of her, then sweat and squirm beneath writhing sheets until she was pregnant. This woman who was a copy of her.
This resulted in two major changes in the lives of the family in the torture house. First, the birth of Albatross. Second, the creation of the ultimate torture room, where Betty was confined to be eternally punished for her disgusting sins.
Elizabeth had some control over Albatross’s traits, though they were primarily the combination of his mother’s and father’s. Those three factors together combined to make him the worst creature the Wards world had ever seen. His Disposition stat was so far from “Sunny” that the needle quivered beyond the stormy rainclouds. At that moment, as Elizabeth scurried past, his door bulged from the volume of the death metal he kept cranked to maximum despite his father regularly scolding him until Albatross chased him away with a kitchen knife.
All the neighborhood pets disappeared. The boards Elizabeth visited told her that must be a glitch. After all, there was no “serial killer” career path, which would have certainly begun with animal torture.
Albatross was an eternal burden on his parents and he didn’t care at all. He had grown out of adolescence and yet showed no signs of going to college or getting a job. Sometimes Elizabeth would force him to read the paper, which was always good for a laugh because he was illiterate and the storm cloud icon would rage over his head before he tossed it down or set it on fire on the stove.
The other sound, as loud as the death metal, was the constant scream. The music Elizabeth recognized, as the game did actually have songs to go along with its radio stations. Annoyed by the music but not wanting to turn her computer volume down so that she couldn’t hear the rest of the game, Elizabeth had often gotten into battles with Albatross, forcing him to turn his radio off. He’d look up into the sky, rage, and flip it back on. She sent Davey in to do it, but he’d be chased out, barely missing a stabbing and not even touching the radio. So she sold the radio back into inventory. And yet another would appear hours later, bouncing on the table, speakers throbbing to a singer who sounded like Cookie Monster. Albatross didn’t have money, which meant he was stealing them.
So she’d often heard the music before, as much as she wanted not to. The screaming though…
When Wards talked, they sounded a bit like babbling babies. When they ar
gued, they sounded like mad squirrels, fast and high-pitched. But the game makers hadn’t given them a scream sound. They had a facial expression; they turned their wretched visages to the sky, mouths twisted beyond the range of the human jaw. They gripped the sides of their faces like the subject of a Munch painting. Sometimes they spun in place or dropped to their knees. But they made no sound, which Elizabeth had always thought was creepier than if they’d actually screamed.
She’d been wrong. The scream was much worse.
PART 5
The world she’d entered was more real than it appeared from above, but it was still wrong. And the scream was beyond anything the human voice could create. Without a reference file, she thought the code must have created its own wave form, an overblown blast of static shaped by misery, so full-spectrum that it almost wasn’t sound, so loud it was almost physical.
This wasn’t funny. She’d walled Betty into the torture room for spite and laughs. But this wasn’t funny. Davey stepped out into the hall after her and her heart hurt. He was pathetic. His sunken cheeks, his confused eyes. How had she laughed on the forums about what she’d done to this family?
“Can you cook?” he asked. She got a double pang, one of anger, at David again unable to do anything in the kitchen, and of guilt because she knew that she’d never allowed this character to learn to cook, that he ate raw flour paste because if he used the stove it burst into flame, and most Wards were terrified of burning alive.
Ignoring him, she found the wall of the torture room and put her ear to it, hearing the buzzing of Betty’s constant, invariable shriek through it.
It wasn’t much surface area. The room had been bigger once. She’d built it with a fridge, a toilet, and space to sleep, the minimum she thought necessary for keeping a Ward alive. Elizabeth had been forced to lie in wait for hours to spring her trap, but Betty had finally—despite her sloth and incurious nature—wandered into the torture room and Elizabeth replaced the door with a wall. For the first day Betty didn’t seem to mind, but her Entertainment meter slowly dropped, then redlined, and without her magazines or television she had no way to bring it back up. She was alone with whatever inconceivable thoughts someone as empty as her would have.
