Press Start to Play

by Daniel H. Wilson

  Seanan McGuire was born and raised in Northern California, resulting in a love of rattlesnakes and an absolute terror of weather. She shares a crumbling old farmhouse with a variety of cats, far too many books, and enough horror movies to be considered a problem. Seanan publishes about three books a year and is widely rumored not to actually sleep. When bored, Seanan tends to wander into swamps and cornfields, which has not yet managed to get her killed (although not for lack of trying). She also writes as Mira Grant, filling the role of her own evil twin, and tends to talk about horrible diseases at the dinner table.

  REAL

  Django Wexler

  The big black car pulls up outside Shinjuku Station against the line of concrete posts that marks the edge of the domain of automobiles. Beyond, it’s bikes and pedestrians only, so I get out of the back and tell the driver to wait. From the station it’s only a couple of blocks’ walk to Kabuki-cho, with its famous red archway outlined in pulsing neon.

  Ichibanchou-dori is packed at this hour. All the buildings are tall and thin, with a different business on each floor, and their big vertical signboards looming overhead: 1F BAR, 2F MASSAGE, 3F KARAOKE, lights flashing in a desperate plea for attention. Both sides of the street are lined with touts shouting the advantages of their clubs at the men walking by, trying to draw them into conversation with “special offers.”

  I can’t help but stand out in a crowd in Japan—too tall, too blond, too foreign. It repels some of the shouting men—no point in trying to get a foreigner into a hostess club, he won’t speak Japanese anyway—and draws others like a magnet. I wave off invitations to drinks, to sushi, whatever else they think will appeal to a touring American. One of the salesmen, a big black guy with an impressive Afro, gives me a little nod of shared understanding. We’re both oddities here. I smile at him.

  The door I’m looking for is unmarked. It leads down a half flight of steps into a little izakaya, sort of a pub that serves fried snacks. There’s a long bar top, half-occupied by some really serious drinkers, and a scattering of empty tables. It’s oddly shaped, bending around one of the building’s support columns, so half the floor is out of sight. Around here, no empty space goes unused.

  “Irasshaimase,” the man behind the bar mutters, not looking up from watching some unmentionable chicken component crisp up in a pan. He’s one of these stocky, solid older guys that seem to be standard equipment for places like this, as though there were a press somewhere stamping them out. His hair is frosted white at the temples.

  He doesn’t really pay attention to me until I step up to the bar. Then he takes me in and gets a look I’m very familiar with—it’s the slightly panicked expression of someone trying to dredge up enough high school English to speak to a foreigner.

  “I’m looking for Aka-sensei,” I tell him. My Japanese is not quite perfect, with a trace of unplaceable accent I can’t quite eradicate. It bothers me: professional pride; I’m a translator, after all.

  Relief is written all over his face, though he tries to hide it. He grunts an acknowledgment and points to a back corner.

  I nod. “Send us over another of whatever he’s drinking, and a soda water.”

  Another grunt. He keeps his eyes on the frying chicken parts.

  I thread my way through the empty tables and around the intrusive pillar. Aka-sensei is in the very back, tucked away in the dark, bent over a bottle with the air of a dedicated drunk. There’s only one chair at his table, so I grab one and carry it with me, setting it down opposite him with a clatter.

  He looks up. He’s in his thirties, long-faced and thin, with weird, gangly limbs and a spray of dark hair tipped with the remnants of a blond dye-job. He wears jeans and a sport coat that has seen better days.

  “Who the hell are you?” he rasps at me as I sit down.

  “I wanted to talk to you, Aka-sensei,” I say.

  His face goes sly. “So somebody finally tracked me down.”

  “It wasn’t easy.”

  “No kidding. It’s not supposed to be easy.” He picks up the bottle in front of him, takes a pull that empties it, sets it back on the table. “You with the cops?”

  “No.”

  “The papers, then?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I’m not supposed to talk to the papers,” he says. “Not supposed to talk to anyone, they told me. You know I’m still getting a salary?” He gestures around the dingy bar and laughs. “I’m at work! This is work. Who says lifetime employment is dead?”

  A waitress arrives, an older woman who conspicuously avoids Aka-sensei’s gaze. He gives her a long, unashamed stare as she bends over to put a new bottle in front of him and hand me a glass of bubbling water. She nods politely and leaves, and his eyes stay glued to her ass until she’s out of sight.

  “Bitch,” he mutters. “Asked her out once. As a joke. She got all serious about it.” He barks a laugh. “Women, eh?”

  “I wondered,” I say, “if I could ask you a few questions.”

  “I could get in trouble if you write about it,” he says. “Lose this sweet gig.”

  “It’s not for publication. Call it professional curiosity.”

  “Curiosity is a goddamned curse, let me tell you. I know better than anybody.” He eyes me sidelong, but I can already tell he’s going to talk. He wants to tell his story, so badly he’s practically panting at the opportunity. Finally, awkwardly, he shrugs. “What the hell. You won’t believe me anyway. Nobody believes me. I don’t even believe me, some days.”

  “Let me confirm a few things.” I sip my drink. “Your real name is Nakamura Takumi. You were born in—”

  “Skip the biographical bullshit. I know what you want.” He sits back in his chair, bottle dangling from his hand. “You want to know about REAL.”

  I offer him a tight smile.

  —

  “REAL” is what you might call a loanword, although in this case it hasn’t been so much borrowed as abducted. Pronunciation changed (it’s “REE-ah-ru,” or close enough), and it was twisted from an adjective to a noun. It means the flesh-and-blood world we all live in, as opposed to the electronic fantasyland of the Net.

  “You built a game,” I say, going through the facts as though I really were a journalist. “A game that people don’t believe is only a game.”

  “Come on. Nobody really believes that.” He smiles, a bit sickly around the edges. “A few weirdos, maybe. Everyone just…pretends. Like a mass hallucination. It’s a joke.”

  “Isn’t that what you intended from the start, though? REAL was never announced in public, and no one has officially claimed responsibility for it. It just appeared.”

  Aka-sensei laughs again. “You think that just happens? I had six social media guys working overtime to make sure it ‘just appeared.’ We were hardly the first, either. Remember that Halo thing in the States? And that movie—”

  I nod. “Maybe you should start at the beginning.”

  Aka-sensei lets out a long sigh. He pats his pockets like he’s suddenly remembered something, comes out with a rumpled pack of cigarettes and extracts one with a practiced tap. He makes a show of looking for a light, but I’m way ahead of him, pulling my brushed-steel lighter from my inside jacket pocket and extending it across the table. It lights on the first try, and the end of the cigarette glows bright. I put the lighter away, and Aka-sensei takes a long drag.

  “The beginning,” he muses. “That must be Shiki. You know Shiki?”

  I shake my head. He takes another pull from his beer, cigarette dangling limply from his fingers.

  “He’s probably your boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss. We were buddies in college. Nerds together, at the time, but after graduation, he straightened up and I went hard-core. Shiki went straight to the top. Works at the big publisher now, head executive vice president of something or other. Nice big office with his own bathroom. But he still calls me now and then, or he used to. Throws me work, like he’s doing me a favor.

  �
��A couple of years ago, he called me up and said he had a project for me. They were doing a new game, a networked phone game. Real pie-in-the-sky stuff. He had no goddamn idea what he was talking about, but there was a lot of money behind the project, so I told him I’d run the thing for him if that’s what he wanted. I sent him a spec of what I wanted to do, and right there and then he kicked out his corporate programmers and put me in charge.

  “It’s a pretty simple idea, honestly. Demons are invading the world, and there’s this special phone app that lets you see them. I ripped it off from that old movie They Live. You remember They Live, with the glasses?” I shrug, and he shakes his head. “Nobody watches the classics anymore.”

  “Was it your idea to keep the origin of the game a secret?”

  “Of course. Shiki could never come up with anything so ballsy. He went for it, though, I have to give him that. We ‘leaked’ it, made sure it got spread around, got a little buzz going. When you start the thing up, it doesn’t show you everything all at once. You get these little glimpses, you know? You look through your phone, and there’s glowing runes on a wall, or you see a flash of something moving in the distance. You get pulled in. After a while, you get a message from Mari.”

  “Mari?” I ask, though of course I know all about Mari.

  “Mariko. The heroine. I wrote all this myself. Outcast fighting to save an uncaring world, the middle school kids eat that up. Mariko was supposed to be the one who’d written the program in the first place. She needs your help to stop the bad guys. There’s a secret message board, with information, the demonic hierarchy, all this stuff. We had this guy—”

  He stops, cigarette halfway to his lips, staring into space for a moment. Then he shakes his head. “Mariko, though. She was perfect. The agency sent us this actress. Smart as whip, and she got the role down perfectly, first try. Determined, but just a little scared. Strong, but vulnerable. Moé. They eat that up, I told you. God, and the body on her…”

  Aka-sensei stops, pulls in smoke, lets it out in a languorous puff.

  “We signed her to a long-term contract, ironclad. We would run her whole life until it was over. Shiki talked her into it. He must have paid a fortune. Or maybe not. She was smart. She could see how big this was going to be when we finally pulled the cover off.

  “After about a year of dev, we launched it. Started letting people in, a few at a time. My guys got rumors started. Shiki even had some stuff put in the papers, unexplained disappearances, that kind of thing.” He chuckled. “You know that’s why I’m talking to you, right? It doesn’t really matter what I say. Shiki will never let you print anything that blows the secret. He runs the whole show now.”

  “I’d like to hear it anyway,” I say. “Like I said, professional curiosity.”

  Aka-sensei stares at me as he grinds the cigarette out in the ashtray. He wants to tell me everything, I can see it in his eyes. He wants to tell someone what he knows, so badly it hurts. It can be hard, keeping secrets.

  “You won’t believe me,” he says.

  “That’s my problem.”

  He shrugs. “Fair enough. After six months, we were doing great. Everyone was excited, the community was growing, people were working on the little mysteries I threw them. We hired people to go out and plant things—dead drops, spy stuff. And then if you looked through the phone, you could see they were ‘possessed,’ with weird mirror eyes and a green aura. I loved it. I used to sit in the command center, watching all the screens—we could track everyone who used the app, follow them around—and I thought this must be what it’s like to be a god. I speak a word, and something gets created. You have no idea how much fun it was.”

  Aka-sensei stops, looking down at the table, the ashtray and the dead cigarette. I signal the waitress over my shoulder for another beer.

  “Something went wrong,” he says very quietly. “That’s when it all went bad. People started dying.”

  —

  “I read about that in the papers,” I say. “The kid they called Boy A, who killed himself—”

  “You don’t know shit.” Aka-sensei slams his hand on the table, hard enough to make the empty bottles jump. “Shiki was happy to let people talk about stuff like that. Sure, a kid killed himself. So what? Kids do that all the time. Some other guy fell in front of a train while he was looking through his phone, and they talked about banning us. We laughed and laughed. That’s all just publicity. If it hadn’t happened, Shiki would have made something up.”

  “Then I’m not sure what you mean.”

  He hesitates, shakes his head. His hand is tight on his latest beer. “We were getting ready for the big reveal. The endgame. We had this elaborate setup, all these demons, and right at the top there was the big, bad boss. The Dark Queen. I drew her, I sketched her out in pencil on a goddamn cocktail napkin and gave her to my assistant to copy over. We had just started looking for an actress, since she was going to have some video with Mariko. After that…”

  Aka-sensei sighs. “I told Shiki it was time to thinking about going public. We’d had a good run, but we couldn’t expect the secret to hold forever, and it was time to monetize. Take all the buzz we’d created and turn it into something people could buy. That’s the whole point, right? And the big shots at the publisher were getting anxious to see some return on investment. So I figured once we ran through the Dark Queen stuff, we’d wind it up—Mariko defeats the Queen, right, the heroes always win. Darkness driven back but not truly defeated, and we get a spin-off anime, manga, video game, figurines, the works. I thought I was going to be set for life.” He looks around the bar and gives a weak chuckle. “Heh. I guess I was right about that.”

  “But who died?”

  “I told you we had a guy who wrote out all the backstory for us. Kabbalic symbolism, ancient secrets, that sort of thing. Anytime we needed a big chunk of text. We all called him the Professor, but his real name was—” He names an author, a well-known professor of philosophy with several popular volumes to his credit. I raise an eyebrow, and he smiles. “I guess spouting bullshit doesn’t pay as well as it used to. He never wanted to be associated with us in public, but he was happy enough to take our money. Until they found him dead.”

  “I thought he died of a heart attack.”

  “That’s what they told us. Natural causes, very tragic. Especially since he was barely fifty. Shiki sent me to his house to make sure he hadn’t left anything behind that would blow the project—he was already getting paranoid—but there was nothing. I mean, nothing. No notes, no computer files. Like he’d written a book’s worth of demonic history for us without ever scribbling something down. Or like someone else had already cleaned the place out. Shiki was relieved to hear it. You know what he told me? ‘Thank goodness he’d already finished up.’ ”

  “It doesn’t sound like you and Shiki got along.”

  “We used to. But he was obsessed with REAL, with keeping it secret. He wouldn’t even talk about going public. And he kept fighting with the agencies about who would play the Dark Queen, wouldn’t accept anyone they sent over but wouldn’t say why. Then Gopher died.”

  I frown. “Who was Gopher?”

  “In the game he was a friend of Mariko’s. A fat, nerdy guy who helped her out with stuff. He never got a name, so we called him Gopher. We used to send him out on trips, just walking around where there were a lot of players, so people would see him and think he was running errands for their heroine. Well, one day he went out and didn’t come back. The cops found him in an alley, stabbed about fifty times.”

  “That I didn’t hear about.”

  “Of course not. You think Shiki would let that get out? We’d have to say what he’d been doing; it would blow the whole thing. He became convinced someone was on to us, one of the other publishers maybe, and they were trying to sabotage him. Murder people so that REAL got shut down. He was going crazy! Nobody would do that, not for a goddamn game.”

  “You must have had your own theory.”


  “Yeah.” Aka-sensei holds his beer cupped in front of him, in both hands. “Yeah, I did. I guessed Shiki might not be the only crazy one. See, on the message boards for REAL, there was a group of people who had decided that Mariko was lying to everyone, and that the demons were really the good guys. I loved it, tried to encourage them whenever I got the chance. That was the idea, right? That people would react in their own way. But after Gopher died, that part of the boards was celebrating, and I thought, maybe one of these guys is taking this seriously.

  “I started looking through the tracking data. I had this idea that if someone from the boards really had killed Gopher, I could track their phone and figure out who. We had a ton of data on everyone who used the app, and the hard-core REAL players kept it running all the time so they could get alerts on anything nearby. So I pulled a bunch of information on the top players.”

  “One of them was the killer?” I lean forward, expectant.

  “I wish. God, that would have been easy. I could have been the hero.” He shook his head, slowly. “No, I forgot all about that. What I found was that the top players were disappearing. One by one, everyone who had made the most progress toward, you know, uncovering the demon conspiracy, they were quitting the game. Or not even quitting, just going dark. I found one guy who had the app on, just sitting still, for seventeen hours. After that his phone must have died.”

  “Maybe he left it on the train.”

  “That’s exactly what I said. But it was still happening. I could watch the list in real time, watch them disappear one by one. Even people on the message boards were starting to clue in. When I told Shiki about it, he thought it confirmed his conspiracy theory. He put us all in lockdown. Everyone associated with the project was hustled off to a block of company apartments while he sorted it out.

  “I spent a lot of time with Mariko. You would have thought she’d have lost her shit, but she was braver than any one of us. She wanted to move on, incorporate it into the story and run with it. God, that girl.” He sighs. “I was fucking her by then. Honestly, it was just a favor to her. She couldn’t go out, not ever, since Shiki couldn’t take the chance she’d be recognized, so I was one of the only people she ever got to see. She needed some kind of entertainment, right?