Press Start to Play

by Wilson, Daniel H.

  The gnome, his head canted so that his mysterious blue eye watched her. Devon reached toward the nightstand, took the wand, and handed it to the gnome.

  Meg murmured, “Why are you giving it to him?”

  Devon said, “So he can give it to you again.”

  The gnome stuck the wand in his sleeve, gave a curt nod, and hobbled from the room.

  Meg was mystified. “You said this bug creates an extra wand?”

  “Yes.”

  She thought of the armory. “But you have hundreds of wands.”

  “Over a thousand,” Devon said. He took the spare wand from her belt and placed it on the bed. “One for each time you’ve come here. One thousand two hundred and seventy-four wands.”

  She was stunned. “But…I don’t remember…”

  He told her, somewhat cryptically, “When you restart a quest, you lose all your progress.”

  Meg stood, pulling from his embrace. “Devon, you lied to me. You said you were trapped here.”

  He stood too. “I’m sorry. I had to. You had to be on a quest to save me, otherwise it wouldn’t work.”

  She fumed. “I was in danger. I was attacked!”

  He held back a smile. “And what happened?”

  “I…” She hesitated. “I beat them.”

  “Of course. Meg, you’re level sixty. You have the most powerful sword in the game. Nothing can harm you. There was never any danger. Didn’t you get my prophecy?”

  “Your prophecy?”

  “That’s why I wrote it,” he said. “That’s why I made the gnome recite it. So you wouldn’t be afraid.”

  She paced to the window and looked out. This was all too much. “So now you’ve got a thousand wands. Why? What are you planning to do?”

  He came and put his arm around her, and said softly, “To remake the world. To make it what it should have been all along—a place of wonder and adventure, without old age or disease. A place where death is only temporary—like in the game.”

  “You’re going to make the game real,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  She felt apprehension. “I don’t know, Devon. Maybe you shouldn’t be messing around with this. I like the world just fine the way it is.”

  “Meg.” His tone was affectionate. “You always say that.”

  She felt a sudden alarm. “What?”

  Again, he suppressed a smile. “It’s already begun. Ages ago. You think the world always had goblins and giant spiders and a gnome running around handing out magic items? That’s all from the game. I made that happen.”

  She felt adrift. “I…don’t remember.”

  “No one does,” he said. “The wand makes things real. Not just physical, but real. Only I know that things used to be different, and now so do you.”

  And the goblins, Meg thought. They knew.

  Devon kept going. “That’s what’s so funny, Meg. No matter what I do, no matter what crazy, incongruous reality I create, you always want things to stay exactly the way they are. That’s just your personality. But we can’t stop now. There’s still so much to do. And you’ll love it when I’m done, you’ll see. You have to trust me.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I…need to think about it.”

  “Of course,” Devon replied. “Take all the time you need.”

  —

  So she stayed with Devon at the Citadel of Power, and they ate meals together in the dining hall and danced together in the grand ballroom, and after that first night they slept together again too. She was still in love with him. She always had been. Even the game knew it.

  They hiked together around the crater’s rim, and he told her of the world as it had been, when there’d been no magic at all, and humans were the only race that could speak, and adventure was something that most people only dreamt of. It sounded dismal, and yet Meg wondered, “Could you reverse the process? Put everything back the way it was?”

  Devon was silent a while. “It would take a long time. But yes, I could. Is that what you want?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  That night, Devon told her, “I want to show you something.” He led her to their tower chamber and turned on his computer. Meg was suddenly nervous. The monitor flickered. Icons appeared. Devon said softly, “Look at my background.”

  It showed two students sitting on a couch at a party. Meg didn’t know them. The girl was pear-shaped and frizzy-haired and wore thick glasses. The guy wore glasses too, and was gangly, with thin lank hair and blotchy skin. The two of them looked happy together, in a pathetic sort of way. Meg said, “Who are they?”

  Devon said, “That’s the night we met.”

  Meg was horrified. She looked again, and suddenly she did recognize traces of themselves in the features of those strangers on the couch.

  Devon explained, “I used the wand on us. Nothing drastic. I could do a lot more. I could make us anything we want. But you need to understand, Meg, when you talk about putting things back the way they were, exactly what you’re saying.”

  Meg could accept the way she looked now—merely a pale shadow of Leena. But to think that she might not even be pretty, might be that girl…

  “I thought you should know,” Devon said, apologetic.

  The next day at lunch, Meg asked him, “What is it you want me to do?”

  He lowered his utensils. “Start the quest over.”

  “How?”

  He nodded in the direction of the tower. “On my computer. I can show you.”

  “So that you’ll get another wand?” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “And I won’t remember any of this?”

  “No,” he said.

  She leaned back in her seat. “How many more times, Devon? My God, how many more wands?”

  “As many as it takes,” he said, without equivocation.

  She stood up from the table, and said, “I need to think. Alone.” He nodded. She went and paced the castle walls.

  Devon wanted his new world more than anything. If she went along, then together they could have immortality and adventure and opulence and wonder. What had the old world offered? Crappy jobs and student loans, illness and death. What kind of a choice was that? She’d been here before, even if she didn’t remember, and had sided with Devon one thousand two hundred and seventy-four times. Who was she now, to doubt the wisdom of all her past choices?

  He was still sitting there when she returned and said, “Fine. Show me.”

  He led her to the tower and loaded the game. He selected a character named Meg, who looked exactly like her. The character was level 60, and carried a Sword of Ultimate Cleaving +100. Devon clicked through a few menus, then stood. “Okay, you have to do it.”

  Meg sat down at the computer. A box on the screen said: “Citadel of Power—Are you sure you want to start this quest over from the beginning?” The mouse pointer hovered over “Yes.”

  Devon leaned down next to her. “Are you ready?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  He kissed her cheek. “I’ll see you again soon, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said, and clicked.

  —

  Meg hadn’t heard from Devon in four months, and she realized that she missed him. So on a whim she tossed her sword and scabbard into the backseat of her car and drove over to campus to visit him.

  Ages passed.

  —

  And now Leena the elf-maid is the most beautiful woman in all the world, and her lover is the most handsome man, Prince Devonar. They journey onward together, battling giants, riding dragons to distant lands, and feasting in the halls of dwarven kings. The prince is incandescent with joy. He was born for this, and Leena enjoys seeing him so happy. She loves him.

  They ride two white unicorns down a forest path blanketed with fresh snow, and by some strange twist of magic or fate they come upon something that should not exist.

  It lies half-buried in the drifts, but Leena can see that it was once a sort of carriage
made from black metal. It has a roof, and its underside is all manner of piping, rusted now. Long ago, someone had sliced it in half. Where its other half may now lie, none can say.

  The prince leaps from his mount and circles the strange object. “What foul contraption is this?”

  Leena drops to the ground too, and staggers forward. A strange feeling passes over her, and a teardrop streaks her cheek. She can’t say why. Soon she is sobbing.

  The prince takes her in his arms. “My lady, what’s the matter?” He scowls at the object. “It’s upset you. Here, it shan’t trouble us any longer.” He pulls the Wand of Reification from his belt and aims.

  “No!” She pushes his arm aside. “Leave it! Please.”

  He shrugs. “As you wish. But come, let’s away. I mislike this place.” He mounts his unicorn.

  Leena stares at the strange carriage, and for a moment she remembers a world where countless such things raced down endless black roads. A world of soaring glass towers, of medallions that spoke in the voices of friends a thousand leagues distant, and where tales were told with light thrown up on walls the size of giants. Film, she remembers. Independent film. Jane Austen.

  But the moment passes, and that fantastic world fades, leaving only the present, leaving only this odd, lingering sensation of being trapped in someone else’s dream. She mounts her unicorn, and three words stick in her head, an incantation from a forgotten age. She no longer remembers where she heard the words, only that they now seem to express a feeling that surges up from somewhere deep inside her.

  Save me plz.

  * * *

  David Barr Kirtley’s short fiction appears in magazines such as Realms of Fantasy, Weird Tales, Lightspeed, and Intergalactic Medicine Show, on podcasts such as “Escape Pod” and “Pseudopod,” and in books such as The Living Dead, New Cthulhu, The Way of the Wizard, and The Dragon Done It. His story “Save Me Plz” was picked by editor Rich Horton for the 2008 edition of the anthology series Fantasy: The Best of the Year. Kirtley is also the host of The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast on Wired.com, for which he’s interviewed more than one hundred authors, including George R. R. Martin, Richard Dawkins, and Paul Krugman. He lives in New York.

  THE RELIVE BOX

  T. C. Boyle

  Katie wanted to relive Katie at nine, before her mother left, and I could appreciate that, but we had only one console at the time, and I really didn’t want to go there. It was coming up on the holidays, absolutely grim outside, nine thirty at night—on a school night—and she had to be up at six to catch the bus in the dark. She’d already missed too much school, staying home on any pretext and reliving all day, while I was at work, so there really were no limits, and who was being a bad father here? A single father unable to discipline his fifteen-year-old daughter, let alone inculcate a work ethic in her?

  Me. I was. And I felt bad about it. I wanted to put my foot down and at the same time give her something, make a concession, a peace offering. But, even more, I wanted the box myself, wanted it so baldly it was showing in my face, I’m sure, and she needed to get ready for school, needed sleep, needed to stop reliving and worry about the now, the now and the future. “Why don’t you wait till the weekend?” I said.

  She was wearing those tights that all the girls wear like painted-on skin, standing in the doorway to the living room, perching on one foot the way she did when she was doing her dance exercises. Her face belonged to her mother, my ex, Christine, who hadn’t been there for her for six years and counting. “I want to relive now,” she said, diminishing her voice to a shaky, hesitant plaint that was calculated to make me give in to whatever she wanted, but it wasn’t going to work this time, no way. She was going to bed, and I was going back to a rainy February night in 1982, a sold-out show at the Roxy, a band I loved then, and the girl I was mad crazy for before she broke my heart and Christine came along to break it all over again.

  “Why don’t you go upstairs and text your friends or something?” I said.

  “I don’t want to text my friends. I want to be with my mom.”

  This was a plaint, too, and it cut even deeper. She was deprived, that was the theme here, and my behavior, as any impartial observer could have seen in a heartbeat, verged on child abuse. “I know, honey, I know. But it’s not healthy. You’re spending too much time there.”

  “You’re just selfish, that’s all,” she said, and here was the shift to a new tone, a tone of animus and opposition, the subtext being that I never thought of anybody but myself. “You want to, what, relive when you were, like, my age or something? Let me guess: you’re going to go back and relive yourself doing homework, right? As an example for your daughter?”

  The room was a mess. The next day was the day the maid came, so I was standing amid the debris of the past week, a healthy percentage of it—abandoned sweat socks, energy-drink cans, crumpled foil pouches that had once contained biscotti, popcorn, or Salami Bites—generated by the child standing there before me. “I don’t like your sarcasm,” I said.

  Her face was pinched so that her lips were reduced to the smallest little O-ring of disgust. “What do you like?”

  “A clean house. A little peace and quiet. Some privacy, for Christ’s sake—is that too much to ask?”

  “I want to be with Mom.”

  “Go text your friends.”

  “I don’t have any friends.”

  “Make some.”

  And this, thrown over her shoulder, preparatory to the furious pounding retreat up the stairs and the slamming of her bedroom door: “You’re a pig!”

  And my response, which had been ritualized ever since I’d sprung for the five-thousand-dollar, second-generation Halcom X1520 Relive Box with the In-Flesh Retinal Projection Stream and altered forever the dynamic between me and my only child: “I know.”

  Most people, when they got their first Relive Box, went straight for sex, which was only natural. In fact, it was a selling point in the TV ads, which featured shimmering adolescents walking hand in hand along a generic strip of beach or leaning in for a tender kiss over the ball return at the bowling alley. Who wouldn’t want to go back there? Who wouldn’t want to relive innocence, the nascent stirrings of love and desire, or the first time you removed her clothes and she removed yours? What of girlfriends (or boyfriends, as the case may be), wives, ex-wives, one-night stands, the casual encounter that got you halfway there, then flitted out of reach on the wings of an unfulfilled promise? I was no different. The sex part of it obsessed me through those first couple of months, and if I drifted into work each morning feeling drained (and not just figuratively) at least I knew that it was a problem, that it was adversely affecting my job performance, and, if I didn’t cut back, threatening my job itself. Still, to relive Christine when we first met, to relive her in bed, in candlelight, clinging fast to me and whispering my name in the throes of her passion, was too great a temptation. Or even just sitting there across from me in the Moroccan restaurant where I took her for our first date, her eyes like portals, as she leaned into the table and drank up every word and witticism that came out of my mouth. Or to go farther back, before my wife entered the picture, to Rennie Porter, the girl I took to the senior prom and spent two delicious hours rubbing up against in the backseat of my father’s Buick Regal—every second of which I’d relived six or seven times now. And to Lisa, Lisa Denardo, the girl I met that night at the Roxy, hoping I was going to score.

  I started coming in late to work. Giving everybody, even my boss, the zombie stare. I got my first warning. Then my second. And my boss—Kevin Moos, a decent enough guy, five years younger than me, who didn’t have an X1520, or not that he was letting on—sat me down in his office and told me, in no uncertain terms, that there wouldn’t be a third.

  But it was a miserable night, and I was depressed. And bored. So bored you could have drilled holes in the back of my head and taken core samples and I wouldn’t have known the difference. I’d already denied my daughter, who was thumping arou
nd upstairs with the cumulative weight of ten daughters, and the next day was Friday, TGIF, end of the week, the slimmest of workdays, when just about everybody alive thinks about slipping out early. I figured that even if I did relive for more than the two hours I was going to strictly limit myself to, even if I woke up exhausted, I could always find a way to make it to lunch and just let things coast after that. So I went into the kitchen and fixed myself a gin and tonic, because that was what I’d been drinking that night at the Roxy, and carried it into the room at the end of the hall that had once been a bedroom and was now (Katie’s joke, not mine) the reliving room.

  The console sat squarely on the low table that was the only piece of furniture in the room, aside from the straight-backed chair I’d set in front of it the day I brought the thing home. It wasn’t much bigger than the gaming consoles I’d had to make do with in the old days, a slick black metal cube with a single recessed glass slit running across the face of it from one side to the other. It activated the minute I took my seat. “Hello, Wes,” it said in the voice I’d selected, male, with the slightest bump of an accent to make it seem less synthetic. “Welcome back.”

  I lifted the drink to my lips to steady myself—think of a conductor raising his baton—and cleared my throat. “February 28, 1982,” I said. “Nine forty-five p.m. Play.”

  The box flashed the date and time and then suddenly I was there, the club exploding into life like a comet touching down, light and noise and movement obliterating the now, the house gone, my daughter gone, the world of getting and doing and bosses and work vanished in an instant. I was standing at the bar with my best friend, Zach Ronalds, who turned up his shirt collars and wore his hair in a Joe Strummer pompadour just like me, only his hair was black and mine choirboy blond (I’d dye it within the week), and I was trying to get the bartender’s attention so I could order us G and Ts with my fake ID. The band, more New Wave than punk, hadn’t started yet, and the only thing to look at onstage was the opening band, whose members were packing up their equipment while hypervigilant girls in vampire makeup and torn fishnet stockings washed around them in a human tide that ebbed and flowed on the waves of music crashing through the speakers. It was bliss. Bliss because I knew now that this night alone, out of all the long succession of dull, nugatory nights building up to it, would be special, that this was the night I’d meet Lisa and take her home with me. To my parents’ house in Pasadena, where I had a room of my own above the detached garage and could come and go as I pleased. My room. The place where I greased up my hair and stared at myself in the mirror and waited for something to happen, something like this, like what was coming in seven and a half real-time minutes.