Press Start to Play

by Wilson, Daniel H.

  The eponymous Lady K, a short, apple-cheeked chick who can’t be much older than me, is peering into a microscope when I come in, but she looks up at the door chime and gives me a little grin. I’m not in here often enough to be considered a regular, but Lady K knows me regardless. I’m higher ranked than anybody else who plays here, which probably helps my notoriety.

  That, and Annie.

  Always fucking Annie.

  “Hey, Jenny,” says Lady K. “You working on something today? Or just playing?”

  “Just playing, for now,” I say. “Can I crash out on that couch?”

  “Go for it,” says Lady K, and minutes later I am deep in Coma.

  It’s good, I have a good morning. I play a guy I haven’t played before, some up-and-coming star from South Korea. We play off each other well, building up a huge structure, an entire city of improbable shapes. It takes a two-and-a-half-hour battle for me to bring the entire thing down around his ears.

  When I come out from under, I’m in a way better mood than I’ve been ever since that fucking party. A few people have plugged in to watch my game, and I actually manage a grin for them as we all disentangle from our rigs.

  “That was a sweet trick with the arches,” someone says, and someone else offers to run out for pizza since it’s now past noon, and soon there’s a crowd of us sitting cross-legged in a circle on the floor, pizza grease seeping through paper plates and onto our fingertips. There’s a dimpled, heavyset kid trying to tell everyone why he still prefers to use passive electrodes even though it means getting your hair gunked up with conductive paste, and I feel some unrecognized tightness below my collarbones soften, relax.

  Lady K, sitting next to me, waves a slice of pepperoni to get my attention. “You sticking around for the rest of the afternoon?” She pauses, arches an eyebrow. “Shouldn’t you be in school?”

  I am about to say something disparaging, when a fragment of conversation cuts through the rest of the chatter, the way fragments of conversation sometimes do, loud and unmistakable. “—kid in California hardwired himself two days ago.” It’s a pretty, wide-eyed girl with a punk-rock haircut talking; no wonder all the attention is on her. “That’s like over two dozen people hardwired in, just in America. It’s just so scary, I mean can you even imagine, drilling into your own skull like that? I hear there’s someone not too far from here, do you think—” The guy next to her finally cuts her off with an elbow jab to the ribs. She turns an inquiring glare on him, and he leans toward her, starting up a furious, whispered conversation.

  The tightness underneath my collarbones spools back into existence. I ignore the guilty glances being slanted my way, and take a large, deliberate bite of pizza instead.

  “Skipping,” I explain to Lady K once I am finished chewing. The conversation is still hushed and awkward. I fold the paper plate into a careful fat wedge, wipe my fingers on my jeans. “I’m gonna plug back in.”

  There are too many eyes on me as I try to settle into my rig, I can’t get the electrodes to sit quite right. I never have problems with my rig but it’s taking too long, I’m starting to look like an idiot, so I turn the whole thing on anyway, blissful blank order sliding over my brain waves.

  It fits my current luck that none of my active play partners are connected, so I drift uncomfortably, paging through lists of other people looking for games, trying to find someone whose stats make them look interesting. I am just about to accept an offer to play a teaching game with some newbie when Annie’s pseud pops up as available.

  I send her a game request without even really thinking about it; I’ve done this so many times it’s like a reflex now. And like all the other times before, she declines immediately.

  Because I am childish and bitter, I send her two dozen game requests in quick succession, the Coma equivalent of ringing someone’s doorbell repeatedly.

  Just admit you’re scared, I message her, and as usual, am informed that she is not accepting messages. I game-request her three more times and think really hard about flipping her off, as if the Coma network might somehow be able to convey my displeasure, might carry along my vitriol to resonate into the base of Annie’s wretched skull. Then I accept the game against the newbie and try to forget about it.

  I’m a half hour into it when Annie’s game request pings along the edge of my brain.

  I stop breathing. For at least thirty seconds I am essentially paralyzed; I know this because when I come back to myself, my opponent is making good headway toward tearing down the defenses I’ve built up, sending me a little stream of surprised and pleased messages about how he thinks he’s finally really getting it. Sorry, I say, sorry, I have to go, and forfeit the game, just like that.

  I accept Annie’s game request and the world is a clean slate.

  Then Annie starts building a box.

  Maybe you can see what’s coming here. I don’t know. Maybe it was obvious from the outside. If you had asked me before, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what I thought was going to happen, because I didn’t think anything. I wanted to play Annie. Of course I did, she’s my sister, my sister who I lost, and I wanted to have her again, in any way I could. And I wanted to beat her, because she’s my sister, and you always want to win against your siblings. That’s just the way things work, right? That should have been enough.

  So I didn’t think anything. But here’s the thing, and I know this makes me a fool, but deep down, I believed, somehow, that if I could just beat her, everything would be all better. Believed, with that sort of secret inner ferocity of a fairy tale or a religion. I would win against her, like nobody ever had, and there would be a silent, eternal moment. And then her name would blip out of existence, and I’d pull off my rig and look over to where she was doing the same, prying her goggles away from her eyes and sliding the probe out from the back of her skull. And we’d look at each other, and start laughing, and everything would be okay.

  In fairy tales, you can wake somebody out of death with a kiss. Does waking somebody up like this really seem like so much to ask?

  When I beat Annie, there is indeed one silent, eternal moment. And right then I don’t even realize what I’m waiting for, bated breath and tense muscles, until it doesn’t happen, until she leaves the space we created without comment, until she doesn’t blip out of existence.

  Until she starts up another game, immediately, against someone else, as if absolutely nothing has changed.

  —

  When I get home my mother is waiting for me.

  “The school called to tell me you missed classes today,” she says.

  My keys bite into my palm, hard and irregular. I get past my mother without looking at her, make my way into the living room. Climb onto the couch, pull my knees up to my chest. Turn my face into the cushion so the upholstery forces my eyes shut.

  I have mostly stopped crying by this point.

  “You listen when I’m talking to you,” says my mother.

  I can hear her moving into the living room after me. The shadows behind my eyelids get darker as she stands over me, half blocking the light. I expect her to grab hold of me, yank me upright, something, but she doesn’t move.

  “Would you unplug me?” I hear myself asking. My voice filters through the cushions, muffled and strange. I doubt my mother can even understand what I’m saying. “If I was like Annie. Would you unplug us both?”

  Silence. The tender spots at my temples throb in time with my pulse, thudding slow and regular. Then I feel her moving, feel the couch shifting as she sinks down next to me. Her fingertips press into my scalp, thumb curling into the fine hairs at the base of my skull.

  “I don’t know,” she says, almost a whisper.

  I almost want to believe she sounds sorry.

  “Okay,” I say. Her fingernails catch in my hair when she pulls her hand away, bringing long strands with them. I feel them lift and separate, imagine them shining and infinite, like wires. “Okay.”

  * * *

&nbs
p; Jessica Barber grew up in Tennessee but moved to New England to attend MIT, where she studied physics and electrical engineering. After a brief stint building rocket ships in Southern California, she returned to Cambridge, where she now spends her days developing open-source electronics, with a focus on tools for neuroscience. Her work has previously appeared in Strange Horizons and Lightspeed.

  STATS

  Marguerite K. Bennett

  He was pink as a cocktail shrimp when he stepped out of the shower, with a splotch of red across his chest like a burn of radiation. He liked the water hot enough to scald, the sweet, clean burn that made him grin in the predawn gloom of the apartment, and he liked the sweep of red heat that crept down his SoulCycle arms, his Equinox abs. He’d always been pale—sunburns at beach weeks, seventy-proof sunscreen at baseball games with clients—the raw acne of high school sinking smoothly down beneath a magazine-cover complexion that even women envied. He enjoyed their envy. He enjoyed the catch of breath in their throats, their downcast eyes and clotted mascara lashes, the sudden flare of high school insecurity in their cheeks as they went through their fears, their flaws, their recurring thoughts when he slid up at charity dinners and after-parties—This man is too handsome for me.

  His name was Joey fucking Connor, and on the last day of his life, he stood in front of the medicine cabinet, looking like an HBO heartthrob and sweeping the fog away from the glass.

  Shit, he thought. He had forgotten the manicure. He’d gone to the spa on Thirty-Ninth, but it had been run by heroin-chic Russians who looked like ex–runway models, booted when they’d gotten too old to make the clothes look like invitations to a gangbang. Not a single Asian to be found. What was he supposed to do?

  He needed to look like perfection. The case today was vital—a huge pharmaceutical suit, a line of antidepressants that led to a spike in suicides. Prozac fucking Nation, man. Christ hadn’t chosen his apostles with as much care as Joey’s law firm had chosen their witnesses. He was fairly certain most of the clients had just been sad sacks whose families welcomed the sudden inheritances, but billable hours were billable hours.

  He jiggled the latch on the medicine cabinet—the goddamn thing always stuck like this; he’d actually sprained his wrist prying it open last month, could you believe that?

  He practiced his smile in the mirror—wide-set and guileless eyes, the correct cat’s tongue brush of stubble, the teeth that were Crest-commercial white (though uneven enough not to be mistaken for caps). An artificial appearance was dangerous for a lawyer. Lawyers were easy targets, and the jury seized on any reason to hate them; he’d fought discrimination his whole life, but did anyone care what people like him had to put up with? He reached for the mirror again. As long as the judge wasn’t the bitch he remembered, he’d—

  The cabinet mirror shattered in his hand.

  Joey leapt back, nearly slipping in the tub, nearly cracking his neck on the sink—a stupid, ignominious death. The condensation on the mirror trembled in the splintered glass, like beads of rain on a spider’s web. His face was a fracture.

  “The. Fuck?” he asked aloud.

  He picked up his towel from where it had fallen. The double-scalloped Egyptian cotton felt light as tissue, not the rich, heavy fabric he’d bought the week he’d been hired at Koertig, Lefferts & Johns.

  Joey grabbed the bathroom door.

  The door dissolved in splinters, the crystal knob falling to the bath mat with an absurdly hilarious thuck.

  I’m the Incredible fucking Hulk, Joey thought. His mouth had gone dry and his ears were ringing. He wasn’t drunk and he didn’t do drugs—he was too possessive of the body he’d spent thousands of hours perfecting. He combed slivers of wood from his hair, scraped them from his feet onto the bath mat.

  Super strength, he thought.

  And then, with a certain surreal dissonance, I…don’t have time for this.

  Careful—he had to be careful. Something had happened. He didn’t flatter himself to assume this was a side effect of protein shakes and Broga. He needed to get to work, win this case, fuck a mountain of NYU coeds, and buy…something—he didn’t know, but whatever it was would make his friends hate him when they saw it.

  He left steaming wet footprints in the hallway as he hurried to his bedroom, but lurched to a standstill as he glanced into the living room. His TV was on, and his new console, too. Not counting his on-and-off girlfriend—a video game engineer named Samantha with an ass that he’d eventually like to be buried in—these were his favorite toys. He would never have left them on overnight to burn through their beautiful neon glow.

  A single gray pop-up hung on the eighty-inch retina display screen. The controller vibrated, beeped sweetly to him.

  THANK YOU FOR ACCEPTING

  NEW TERMS AND CONDITIONS

  PRESS X TO OPT OUT

  —

  Joey’s biceps were the size of grapefruits by the time he got dressed, and he’d shredded his best gray wool suit. His second-best suit made it with him out the door and into the Uber when a bolt of pain shot up his right arm.

  “Fuck!” he roared. The Arab driver turned down the fucking nonsense music he’d been playing and glanced back in concern.

  “Is everything all right, sir?”

  “My—briefcase—” Joey began. The Tumi briefcase felt like it was filled with gold bars, dragging his arm down; it fell to the floor of the cab, pinning his foot to the mat as though it were an anvil. Even the weight of his clothes made him feel like he was lying under those lead sheets at the dentist. Struggling to keep upright, Joey glanced at his arms. The blood drained from his face.

  His wrists were thin as yardsticks, so frail that the blue veins showed through his apple-white skin.

  Weak, he thought. Super weak—

  His Piaget Altiplano watch slipped right over his hand and bounced on the floorboard. In the rearview mirror, Joey watched his cheeks draw in, drawn thin—watched his eyes drift farther apart, watched his nose begin to flatten—he tried to scream—

  “Here we are, sir,” the driver said. Joey scrambled from the car. He jerked the briefcase after him and staggered onto the sidewalk—the briefcase slammed into his chest, all but knocking the wind out of his lungs.

  The briefcase was normal again, no heavier than it had ever been. He was healthy enough that the sheer weight of his clothes didn’t exhaust him. He stared down at his wrists, which had thickened—more slender than they had been this morning, sure, but not emaciated. He whipped out his smartphone, snapped a picture of himself.

  The face in the photo was not his own.

  —

  “Linda—” Joey began, but Linda was hustling the junior associates into a lineup in the firm’s lobby.

  “The photographer is here!” Linda cried. She always sounded like a Girl Scout troop leader when the press was on the floor, but in her aubergine Vivienne Westwood pantsuit and crystal pin, Linda Koertig was no one’s mother. Right now, she was pure hustler, pressing her employees in front of the camera, pushing back the men’s shoulders, pulling up the women’s chins. “Joey, you’re late. Ladies, here, fill in—”

  Joey wiped sweat from his upper lip. He had to be here—the bonus that came from this case was exorbitant, and if he failed to win a suit that was so perfectly gift wrapped for him…Stress, maybe this was stress, a psychosomatic break—but the medicine cabinet, the bathroom door, his best suit…He had read about hysterical bursts of strength, hadn’t that been in the case file? The adrenaline gushed through a body, and flu-like symptoms set in when it subsided. Maybe he had internalized something he’d read, but he had to be here, his future at the firm all rested on this fucking case—

  “Make sure you get him in the front,” Linda murmured. Her eyes swept between the photographer and Joey, who raised his eyebrows.

  “Diversity hire,” he heard one of the first-year lawyers whisper behind him, in a breath as cold and sour as battery acid. He felt their eyes on him, burning into the back of his skull
. Bewildered anger welled up in his throat like bile—he’d been second in his fucking class at the University of Chicago, third in his class out of law school at Yale, he’d won the Smits vs. Cheong case with a jury that couldn’t tell their eyes from their crusty unbleached assholes—

  “Don’t listen to them, Joey,” one of the interns said, a skinny white girl with retro glasses and a polka-dot pencil skirt. The photographer’s camera sent eerie explosions of light across the lobby, like the strobes in a club. The intern flashed him a waxy red smile that he wanted to tear off of her face lip by lip. “I’ve always thought black guys were hot.”

  —

  The flashbulbs hadn’t even cooled when Joey bolted into his office and shot both the locks closed. In the dark of his private bathroom, he reached for the antique porcelain tap, listening to the squeal of the metal, the retching stutter of the water, the sudden flood of blissful heat soaking through his hands.

  The yellow overhead lamp finally sizzled to life.

  Joey’s hands were not his hands. They were slender and dark as vanilla beans, their palms and the inner curls of the fingers the color of a conch shell. These nails had been manicured.

  He stared at the face in the glass. A handsome black man stared back at him, slender and midthirties, with exquisite almond-shaped eyes and a $10,000 smile.

  Joey turned out the lights.

  In his office overlooking Midtown, he stared at the pictures on the polished mahogany walls. The frames were sterling silver, all matching—gifts from Samantha last Christmas: his first day at the firm, his first million-dollar victory, a perfunctory shot of their last Fourth of July at the lake.

  The face in these pictures was the face he had seen in his mirror a moment ago.

  It was not the face he had woken up with this morning.

  He reached down for his phone, dialed Linda.

  “I need to take a day,” he whispered, in a voice much higher than his own.