by Vic Connor
The man kept on with his non-smile, started to sit, then stopped. “Oh! Of course, how inexorably rude of me; I know your name, but you don’t know mine. My name is…Clark. Jerimiah Clark, but simply Clark if you don’t mind, I’m afraid my…mother took the name from my late grandfather and I’ve…always found it a bit ostentatious, myself.”
When all Niko did was stare at him, Clark sighed, and with a groan, sank into his leather chair. “You’re a man of…few words, I see. Well, then, I’ll get directly to the point, my boy. You’re in the Queue…eight-hundred-and-forty…sixth, as of yesterday, if my memory doesn’t fail me.” Clark smacked his lips, gave a sheepish little smile. “That gives you, oh, I’d say, about sixth months or so?”
“My CO said I’d been moved up,” Niko said.
“Yes, indeed. Indeed you have, which is why you’re here, and I’m here, and we’re…sitting in this room having this chat, my boy.”
“What’s to stop me, I mean, why shouldn’t I just deck you and leave through there?” Niko nodded at the unlabeled door behind Clark’s head.
To the old man’s credit, he didn’t budge. “Well, there’s nothing to stop you from…decking me, I suppose, but attempting an escape…” Clark tugged on his charcoal suit. “I don’t expect you to take my word on this, Niko, but that course of action would…break very bad, for you, I fear.”
“My course can’t, well, what I mean is that things can’t break much worse for me, y’know?”
“Which brings me to…why we are here. You see, Niko, I’m not part of the prison system. I’m not employed by the state, not exactly, I’m more of a…contractor. We have a mutually beneficial relationship. You see, Niko, what I do for living is, well… I build worlds.”
“Build worlds?” Niko laughed at the absurdity.
“Yes! Worlds! There is not, in my, ha, humble opinion, a proper word in the popular lexicon for my…particular vocation, but I suppose the most lay terminology would dub me a game developer.”
“A game developer.” Of all the things Niko could have guessed about this guy, game developer was the last one he’d expected.
“Yes. I create virtual worlds with systems designed to…immerse players, make them feel as if they truly are a…denizen of the world. I also balance those systems, to ensure they feel both fair and…rewarding. I say ‘I,’ but the reality is, my current project is so massive, so detailed, so…immersive that I work with hundreds of talented people to make it a reality. I’m more of an overseer.”
“Like…a king?”
“A king isn’t bad, Niko, not bad, but it’s small, you see? A king owns the fields, but he doesn’t make the grass grow. I…make the grass grow, the sun shine, the planets spin.”
“Planets?”
“Yes, Niko. Planets. Cygnus and Phaeton. Do you want to know more about them?” Clark hunched forward, giddy as a child.
“Why are you...” Niko swallowed. “That is, I don’t see what this has to do with me.”
There it was again, that clever, forlorn expression; a breathy, monosyllabic laugh. I know something you don’t. Where had Niko seen this man before? “You’re what, seventeen now, Niko?”
Niko nodded.
“And your eighteenth birthday, it’s in, what, hm…three months, is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to see that birthday, Niko?”
Niko’s mouth opened, then shut again, because he realized it was a rhetorical question.
“Our game is still in Alpha. That means it’s not ready for the broader public, it’s still being worked on. We have a lot of…bugs to work out, and it’s a big world, enormous. We need people to play, to…find the errors in our code, so we can correct them before we make it available to the public, you see?”
“Your game must be pretty bad.”
For a moment, Clark’s expression froze, as if what Niko had said had caused a code error in real life.
“I just mean,” Niko stumbled on, “if the only way to get testers is to pull them from the Queue, it’s got to be, y’know…bad.”
“Ah. Ah, yes, I see, well, that’s not quite it. You see, my game world—Territoria, it’s called—is extremely realistic. Extremely. It interacts with your brain and nerve-endings. It’s a unique form of immersion. The government is…concerned that perhaps, if it’s too realistic, it could, ah…have adverse side effects on participants. So—”
“So they offered up people from the Queue as guinea pigs,” Niko finished.
“More like testers, people who…try new and exciting, experimental drugs, the kind that could end the common cold or remove unwanted hair or cure cancer. You’re on the cutting edge of making something amazing possible.”
“I think those people volunteer.”
Clark sighed, leaned down, adjusted the pen on the table. “I don’t mean to suggest you don’t have a choice, Niko. You do.”
“I can go back in the Queue, you mean. Number 846, right?”
“Hm. A good memory you have, my boy, but not good enough. You forget that you have been moved up. Ichiban. Numero Uno.”
“Next in the Queue…”
“With a bullet. Or, I suppose, a needle. Ah, that’s very…morbid of me, isn’t it? But, that is the way of it, I’m afraid.”
“Why was I, I mean, do you know why I got moved up?”
“Why would I? I was merely lucky, or I should say, you…were lucky that they informed me of the change just in time. But, if you’re not interested…” Clark leaned forward over the table, casting a sharp shadow over the pen and stack of papers as he started to pick them up.
“I’ll do it,” Niko said, quickly.
“Are you certain?” Clark was still leaning over the table.
“Well, it’s not like I…” Once I’m in the game, Niko thought, I can find a way to escape. Log out or something. “I mean, I’d be stupid to say no, right?”
“If you agree to be a tester…” Clark flipped through a few pages. “Sign here. Oh, and here, as well.”
Niko scribbled out his name in wobbly cursive on three or four of the pages, then put the pen down.
“Good. Very good! Very, very good, my boy.” Clark looked up, and with a start, Niko finally recognized him. Because leaning forward, directly under the light, his prominent brow cast sharp shadows over his sunken eye sockets. They were two black hollows in his shorn, milky-white skull. He was the man that had arrived in the black car.
Clark finally smiled, really smiled, and Niko understood now why he didn’t do it often. It was a tight, wide, ghastly smile of crooked, rotten teeth. It pulled the milky, translucent skin back from his face in rippling waves. He had the worst breath of anyone Niko had ever met, a putrid smell of cigarettes and rot that hit him in the face.
Clark stood up, walked to the unlabeled door in the back. “All right, my boy,” Clark said through his grinning teeth, and opened the door. A sterile blue light exploded out, casting Clark as a black, backlit figure. “Let’s get you in a Vat.”
7
The Vat
“What’s a Vat?”
Either Clark didn’t hear Niko’s question or ignored it, leading the way through the door into a broad, bustling lobby. The room was painted in the same blue and orange as the hallways, only here they were presented in vast, aggressive swaths instead of stripes. Two pairs of glass double doors flanked the room left and right. People pushed in and out, carrying charts and paper coffee cups, talking about things like subsurface scattering or four-loops or CAT scans. A few greeted Clark by name, and others whispered and pointed to him with reverent smiles.
A reception desk shaped like a melon slice sat against the back wall, under a massive, backlit logo that read “TERRITORIA.” The “O” was comprised of a pair of oblong spheres intersecting. A young woman sat behind the counter at a computer, but she glanced up when Clark approached. “Hello, Mr. Clark. Looks like we’ve got a new member of the QA team.” She pushed her feathery, black hair behind her ear with a
single french-manicured finger and gave a smile too big for her face.
“That we do, Clarissa. Here’s his…paperwork.” Clark slid Niko’s signed contract over to her. She put it behind the desk, then started tapping on the keyboard.
The people walking through were an odd mix: cargo shorts, lab coats, geeky t-shirts, scrubs. All around was the Territoria’s “O,” emblazoned on everything from baseball caps to stethoscopes. In the corner stood a ten-foot statue of a bestial woman with bulging eyes, a protruding tongue, matted white hair, and pointed claws and tusks.
“Rangda,” Clark said, noticing Niko’s gaze. “Phaeton Mythic, a little above your…pay grade, my boy, but one day.”
“All right, Mr. Clark, his Vat’s all set. Here’s his room number,” Clarissa chirped as she wrote it down on a little pad of sticky notes. “It’s just through those doors on your right.”
With a snap, Clark pulled the note from the pad, nodding his thanks to Clarissa. He walked Niko over to the doors, which had the letters “SN-SY” etched into the glass. The doors opened to a network of hallways dotted with medical equipment, closed doors, television screens, and matted artwork. Was there this much behind all the other doors he passed with the guards? Niko wondered. Was this what all that construction had been building?
Someone stopped Clark halfway down the hall—an older woman with mono-lid eyes, ochre skin, and a medical mask tucked under her double-chin. She and Clark started a technical conversation, which Niko tuned out, too busy staring at the artwork on the walls.
Right in front of him hung a print of a beautifully rendered creature who looked like a cross between a seal and a gorilla. Bright blue war paint covered it, and it sported hollow eye sockets, each split in half with lightning lines. At the bottom, it had wavy, billowing fabric instead of feet, as if the creature was laid over something, like a Photoshop layer. Four double-pronged tusks floated in a perimeter around the beast, and a few cruder illustrations underneath showed the tusks in a variety of configurations.
Like the eyes, the broad chest was split at the sternum, like someone had cut it open. Huddled inside the hollow of that dark gash was a girl. She was hourglass-shaped, with strong shoulders and long, black hair. Her features were hazy, no more than a splash of unreadable paint strokes, but even so, Niko could tell she was beautiful.
“Nikolai.”
The sound of his name startled him, and he spun away from the print like he’d been caught doing something illicit. He blinked at Clark, who was smiling at him. “Excited to get into the world, I see! Do you think you’ll decide to be a tank-class Mythic?”
“Tank-class… Mythic?”
Clark looked about to answer Niko’s question in detail, but the woman interrupted him.
“Wait, Clark, this is Nikolai Somov? Well! That explains why you’re escorting a resource to the Vat yourself.” The woman, who had been businesslike to the point of dullness moments before, now seemed flustered.
Clark gave a nervous laugh, then took Niko by the shoulders and steered him back down the hallway. “Yes, well, every QA tester in our employ requires a…an attentive hand, Tala.” Clark gave her a forceful, conspiratorial glance that Niko did not like. “Come now, let’s…get you to your room, my boy.” Clark’s hand was firm between Niko’s shoulder blades as he pushed him down the hall and away from the woman.
Clark’s hand stayed there the rest of the way down the hall, until he turned Niko by the shoulder to face a door. The tiny paper placard next to it read “ONBOARDING ROOM 0034,” and it required keycard entry. Clark slapped his closed wallet against the pad, and it turned green, the lock clicking open. He opened the door for Niko, then gestured inside.
The room was hardly more than a closet. It had no windows, the only illumination coming from a man-sized tank, its crescent top popped open, half-filled with an azure, glowing liquid. A girl in glasses, heels, and a lab coat bent over it, making her body a delicate arch.
She was the certain kind of pretty girl that Niko didn’t like. Girls like this reminded him of birds, slight of frame with sharp, delicate movements. They were sharp in all other ways too: sharp eyes, sharp wits, sharp comments, sharp laughs. Girls like this put their perfect hair in a perfect ponytail, and it bounced as they jogged on a treadmill and talked shit about imperfect girls, which was any girl not currently in attendance. But growing up a poor kid in public high school had developed a sort of a survival instinct in Niko: Even if he didn’t like her, he wanted her to like him.
The blue light from the Vat shone up on her face, the shadow of her glasses giving her arched, villainous eyebrows. An array of medical equipment and worming cords extended out from the tank until they disappeared into the dark. “Go on in, my boy,” Clark said, but Niko didn’t.
What was this place? If it was just a game, why were they testing it on prisoners in the Queue? Why had he been moved to the front of the line, and why had that woman, Tala, known his name? There was more to this, like a blue vein under the surface that he couldn’t quite see.
The thing was, now or six months from now, Niko would have wound up dead. Even if this new situation appeared messed up, it was messed up to his benefit. So why did it feel like he was trading one prison for another?
Niko felt Clark behind him, blocking the doorway. That subconscious voice screamed at him, Run. He turned, and Clark was in his face, putting his hands on Niko’s shoulders.
“What in heaven is the matter, my boy?” Clark laughed nervously. “You can’t possibly be...afraid of a game.”
“I’m not afraid,” Niko barked. Run. Run!
“Then, please, stop acting so emotional. You don’t want to look like a fool in front of Oxana here, do you?”
Niko didn’t quite look over his shoulder; couldn’t quite see Oxana bent over the Vat with her sorceress eyebrows, tilting her head at him in silent, smug judgement.
“All that’s left for you back there is a…needle,” Clark said. “Just as you said, you’d have to be…ah, stupid not to take this offer. Isn’t that right, my…boy?”
It made Niko feel like something between a man and a boy; something between dreading Clark’s derision and wanting his approval. It was the same mixed relief he felt in the wilderness, at the moment when, sick with starvation and exposure, he knew that he would have to go back. Knowing, in a physical way, that he couldn’t survive without help, and how weak it made him feel. Niko twitched, made a fist, then clenched his teeth, and looked at the floor. “Yeah. You’re right,” he said.
“Good. Very good, my boy, very, very good! Now. Oxana will get you all set up. To answer your earlier question, Niko, this—” Clark presented the glowing blue tank “—is the Vat. It’s a bit like a…sensory deprivation tank filled with a non-Newtonian liquid, except we use millions of nano-robots in the liquid to channel in…replacement sensations. They interact with nano-robots you’re going to ingest. That’s what creates the game world.” Clark’s voice was heightening, his sunken eyes bright. “Think of it like a, ah, virtual reality headset for all your senses, not just…sight and sound.”
“Mr. Clark, can you grab him a suit?” Oxana said in a language different from English—and to Niko’s surprise, he understood her. This language, both intensely familiar and almost completely forgotten, brought back the sense of disquiet and alarm he hadn’t experienced for ages. The feeling seemed to float up from the deepest layers of his psyche; it was so profound that until this moment, he has always believed it was the main part of his character.
Why did a simple phrase in a long-forgotten language unsettle him so much? Niko’s mind brought up a number six, for a reason he couldn’t understand.
Six…the feeling of loss, so overpowering that he wanted to wail like a wild wolf right where he stood.
Six—he was six years old.
It hit him like a sledgehammer to the stomach, cutting off his breath. He stumbled backward, almost knocking over Clark before he regained his footing, his arms hanging by his side, his eyes sta
ring vacantly above Oxana’s head.
He remembered.
It was the absence of the smell of breakfast that told him something was wrong.
Every day, his parents would rise about an hour before him, and while his father showered, his mother would stoke the ornate old samovar—one of the few things they had brought with them from Russia, ready to pour out the endless cups of dark, smoky tea that fueled them throughout the day.
Breakfast was the one meal that both Anna and Yuri insisted on having in the Russian manner. They had no control over what Niko would be given for lunch at daycare (clammy macaroni and so-called cheese from a box most of the time, wieners on a special day) or what they’d find in the cafeteria at work, and in the evenings they were generally too tired to cook properly, so often there was takeout or prepared meals.
Only on weekends, sometimes, to unwind, would both of them be able to spend a whole day in the kitchen, with Yuri making pelmeni and the pastry for pirozhki while Anna cooked the meat for holodets and made meatballs, and sometimes spent hours making vast quantities of mayonnaise using the super-secret recipe she got from her grandmother. No store-bought mayo even came close to it, and Anna never stopped laughing about the look on Yuri’s face when they’d first come to America and he’d taste the mayonnaise their hosts had brought out as a special treat for him to have with his fries. Most of the week, though, their suppers were no different from those of hundreds of other people in the same neighborhood. But breakfast was sacrosanct: They would start the day remembering where they were from.
So there would be porridge, usually cream of wheat, that Anna knew how to make it thick and smooth before topping it with homemade raspberry jam, and small cottage-cheese dumplings on the side. When Yuri was out of the shower, he’d make himself fried eggs while Anna used the bathroom herself. He always made sure not to break the yolks, pointing out to Niko how this way, the eggs looked like they had eyes, which is why they called them glazunya—from the word glaz which means ‘eye.’ Then when Anna was done showering, she’d slice day-old bread and mix two eggs with sugar so that Niko could make himself grenki.
