Press Start to Play

by Daniel H. Wilson

  Before long, I’m up and exploring again. It’s busy work. Everyone around here seems to have something for me to do. Fetching and killing mainly. And although I’ve seen a few other capable-looking adventurers about, the shops are constantly running low on pelts, skulls, and various herbs.

  I honestly don’t see why they can’t seem to manage to do any of these tasks themselves. They clearly have weapons (since I am eventually presented with one in thanks for collecting some particularly pungent fungus) but they are very reluctant to use them. You, on the other hand, seem only too keen for me to facilitate their every desire unquestioningly. And so we move from place to place, action to action, reward to reward.

  As the hours and days roll by we explore mountains and caverns, seas and forests together. But still I remain confused as to why you wish to have me explore this world in the first place. For beyond the portal that separates us I can see that you have a whole world of your own to explore. I spend a great deal of time pondering this issue. Perhaps you have explored every inch of it already and it simply holds no interest for you anymore.

  It’s only on the occasions when you step away from the portal but leave it open that I can get more of a glimpse into the enticing world of my creator. It’s not picture-perfect like this one, but messy and unkempt. It is textured and substantial. It looks as though one could take an action there and not know what the outcome would be. It is through those observations that I begin to see how different the world you’ve brought me to really is.

  The very first thing I saw of your world—aside from your face, of course—were the leaves outside your window. As they fluttered in the breeze I realized they looked very different from the ones in this realm. In this place, every brick, leaf, and blade of grass is shaped perfectly. Some almost copies of the last. Nothing is shriveled, chipped, or out of place. Not like in your world, which seems to embrace chaos.

  One time, when you stepped away to take sustenance, I pulled a leaf off a bush and watched it disappear in my hands, only to see a perfect copy sprout from its stalk. I tried again and the same thing happened. But beyond the portal I could see the seasons change and watched as the leaves outside your window yellowed, curled up, and died.

  Life is fragile in your world. It is fleeting and imperfect. But its closeness to death makes it feel much more alive. Not like here, where death, I have discovered, is not only not the end—it is merely an inconvenience. If I “die,” I find myself locked inside a cold gray spirit-plane until I can locate my fallen corpse, whereupon I reinhabit it and spring back to life as if nothing had happened.

  I do everything I can to please you in the hope that you will keep me safe. But I cannot help but think that the carelessness you sometimes show toward my life and limb is bordering on cruelty. Like that time you left me in the corner of a scorpion pit, while you answered a call of nature. By the time you’d returned, they had respawned and I’d been stung more than a dozen times. You found me lying there while they skittered over me, my limbs coursing with their toxic poison as it gradually dissolved my insides.

  That was definitely among my worst deaths. And of my deaths there have been many: eaten by sharks, gored by boars, chewed by lions, impaled on spikes, crushed by boulders, boiled by steam, flayed alive by dark magic, drowned by mermaids, and, most embarrassing in light of all the rest, fallen from high places.

  Although this world you have brought me into is not entirely unpleasant, I have come to find that there is very little substance to it. Like eating the food here, there is cause and then there is effect, but very little in between. I quest, I kill, I craft. I go through the same actions time and time again, until I am so bored, I could scream. But your attention is unwavering. You are only watching me in this world, yet you seem to enjoy the spectacle more than I enjoy the participation.

  In the early days I used to be so grateful that my creator was willing to pay so much attention to me, but as the weeks and months roll on, I begin to wonder what it is you are getting out of all of this. Is such simplicity a comfort to you? Do you not have quests of your own to complete? Can you not see your own world change outside your window? Do you not wish to be a part of that?

  Despite your many tortures of me, I worry for you more than you know. You dress me in all manner of finery and jewels, ornate armor, and exquisite trinkets, yet you rarely attend to yourself, to the point of self-neglect. And it’s not just that your eating habits have changed—sometimes you don’t even make it to your bed to sleep; instead you lose consciousness directly in front of the portal. You’re so close that I can practically feel your breath on me.

  I fear for you, my creator; do you know that? I fear you are in this world more than I am. I fear that you cannot see the wonders of your own anymore. I know that you are finite, just like the leaves outside your window. I see your face grown pale and drawn, and your eyes redden. You are content to see me grow in strength while you weaken. You let me live in a way that you do not.

  I know I shall never escape this place. But on the brief times you leave me on my own, I dream of something real. I imagine myself sitting where you are, in your imperfect but marvelous world. And do you know the first thing I would do?

  EXIT GAME

  *Click*

  * * *

  Rhianna Pratchett is an award-winning, sixteen-year veteran of the video games industry who has wrestled the wild beasts of narrative for companies such as Sony, EA, Sega, 2K Games, Codemasters, and Square Enix. Her titles include Heavenly Sword, Mirror’s Edge, the entire Overlord series, and the recently rebooted Tomb Raider. Pratchett also works in comics (notably on Mirror’s Edge for DC and Tomb Raider for Dark Horse), film, and TV. She’s currently on scribing duty for Square Enix’s Rise of the Tomb Raider, Rival Kingdoms for Space Ape Games, and two novel-to-screen adaptations. Rhianna is codirector of the Narrativia production company and lives in London with her fiancé and a pair of neurotic tabbies.

  THE FRESH PRINCE OF GAMMA WORLD

  Austin Grossman

  Where did The Fresh Prince of Gamma World come from? I found it rattling around the mainframes of the antiquated computer system of Somerville Community College, where I spent two unproductive years as an information sciences major. It would have been five or ten years old by the time I saw it, but I played it to exhaustion, staying up until three or four in the morning before trudging home along Highland Avenue. The sense memory of early mornings in late November is still with me, the smell of wet leaves in damp frigid air.

  Written in outdated PASCAL, the code base was just a bunch of data and a homebrew parser for input, eccentrically architected. The game itself is uncredited.

  I’ve searched for it now without success, but all I could recover were code fragments posted to a defunct Usenet board devoted to retro games and a user named go4it69 who did not respond to subsequent emails.

  THE FRESH PRINCE

  OF

  GAMMA WORLD

  A RAINY DAY

  It’s raining on Gamma World. You can hear it faintly hissing against the invisible grass even if you can’t see or feel it, while Wednesday afternoon F Block continues on and on but you just can’t pay attention. In another dimension, right close by, heavy, warm, poisonous raindrops are falling on the concrete and broken glass and ten-foot-tall dandelions that grow where the high school once would have been.

  [press space to continue]

  FLASH POINT

  In Gamma World, everything ended on June 22, 1979, at 11:24 p.m., when you were eleven. All over Gamma World you can find stopped clocks, broken watches, and charred newspapers showing the date. In Gamma World, they call this year Year Five. In the real world, of course, everything continued normally. You don’t know how or why it happened that there are two timelines, and that you wander back and forth between them. It’s become a fact of life. It’s like the world is a piece of software with a bug in it, a bug no one can fix.

  Nobody truly knows what happened at that crucial point in Gamma World,
but obviously there was a nuclear war, or something worse. You don’t know if we got our missiles off or not, but you’ve never heard of anyone coming over from Russia to check on us. There’s a city about sixty miles to the southeast that sounds like it could be Providence, but you’ve never been. There’s no TV or radio or Internet. Your working assumption is that the whole planet is like it is around here: primitive tribes, unnatural jungle, mutated people and animals, and rubble.

  [s]tay in Gamma World, stay forever and fuck the rest of it.

  [g]o home and forget there was ever another world.

  COLLATERAL DAMAGE

  Maybe if you understood what caused Gamma World in the first place, you could get your regular life back. You spend a few hours there every day; it’s unpredictable. Sometimes you’ll round a familiar corner and the other world is just there, you’ll smell it and then the sky will twist and wilt around you.

  You always just barely make it back in time to keep up with regular life. Your old friends have drifted away. People think you sell drugs now or since your parents’ divorce you’re just too cool to hang out with regular people. Maybe this year will be different. It’s a new grade, a new chance to understand what your life has become.

  [g]o for it. You just have to try a little harder.

  [f]orget it. Forget it. Just forget it.

  BLAST PERIMETER

  On weekends you go looking for clues about what happened. There are areas out in the suburbs, outside what must have been an annihilating fireball, that are nearly identical to their real-world counterparts.

  This was once an office park on your world. It takes a while to walk there in Gamma World; it’s hot enough that you have to take off your jacket. The only sounds are the chirping of giant insects and the crunch of your sneakers on gravel and broken glass.

  A passenger bus was lifted up and thrown into the side of the building, and rests now between the third and fourth floors. You climb up and gather change out of the coinbox in Gamma World. If you time it right, on Earth you can use the money for the bus ride home.

  You get the feeling you’re being watched.

  [w]ait a while, maybe they’ll come out.

  [i]t’s time to go home.

  [h]old it, is that Thomas Dewey’s face on one of those coins?

  PRINCESS OF GAMMA WORLD

  You gave up calling high school the real world when you met Melodee. You were born the same year but she seems older than you now. She remembers the explosions too, and the world before, vaguely, so she gets pre-1985 pop culture references.

  She lived just a few miles from you; her parents were both physicists at MIT but she hasn’t seen them since the explosion. She’s noble and fierce and can fence and throw a spear. She’s got tattoos on her face and you saw her kill a two-headed dog grown as large as a pony. It’s pretty clear you’re in love with her. She’s betrothed to the chieftain’s son.

  Like everyone else on Gamma World, she doesn’t know the normal world is still there, and you don’t tell her. How can you explain it? But how can you not tell her, without lying?

  Maybe if you could bring her from one to the other, there would be some point in telling her. But would that work? And here’s the thing: there ought to be another Melodee, the regular one, in your world. You’ve tried to find her, but she doesn’t remember her old address, and she probably had a different name before the crash. There’s certainly nobody at school like her. But plenty of people send their kids to private school and you never even meet them.

  [m]aybe you’ll grow old here, maybe you’ll come back and a hundred years have passed.

  [w]hy is it you can only talk to a girl after the world has literally ended.

  UNIVERSITY SECTOR

  You look for ideas in the libraries and the labs at what’s left of Harvard. Maybe somebody was working on something like this? The books have theories you half understand. Sure, strings vibrate, antimatter exists, quantum events happen, but there’s nothing that says an entire world can split apart.

  What if there was a last-minute escape plan they figured out at the Pentagon to rescue the whole reality from nuclear annihilation: just before impact they could trigger something that spawned another reality where the war hadn’t happened. One world would die, but the other one would continue on like nothing happened.

  That would make your reality, the one you really grew up in, the fake one, wouldn’t it?

  You [k]now in your heart this is true. Don’t you.

  [b]ury this truth inside you forever.

  —

  Or maybe that’s how time works, when things go badly enough in one world, another one forms nearby. Or it could have been the missiles themselves, that they had a secret payload invented behind the Iron Curtain, that had the power to break up reality itself. But why would you be the only one to remember both worlds? Or is it just that everyone got their own Gamma World, and nobody talks about it? Perhaps you [s]hare my own creeping sense that this is the case.

  FINANCIAL MELTDOWN

  Evidently the bomb hit in the center of downtown Boston. It left a perfect circle roughly four miles in diameter that cuts right through Logan Airport to the east, and clockwise through Dorchester, Brookline, Cambridge, Chelsea.

  The Atlantic flowed in to form a warm, briny crater ocean filling most of the impact site. You walk along the perimeter sometimes but there isn’t much to see. You have never been all the way around it. No one knows how deep it is but there are fish in it, enormous and terrible. Steam rises continually from the surface, and when the wind blows right you can see the former Prudential Center, the highest building in all of Boston, which projects from the Crater Ocean, knocked three degrees askew. At night one can see lights glowing below the waterline.

  You used to worry about breathing the steam, about being poisoned by the radiation here. Maybe you should stop caring. No one else who lives here worries, so why should you? Who needs to live past thirty anyway?

  [t]ake a boat out into the steam—you’re probably already mutated, so what exactly do you have to lose?

  [c]omb the glassy shore for the kitschy Revolutionary War memorabilia everyone here seems to value.

  A STERILE PROMONTORY

  You may as well see what it says on the sheet. You know it won’t be anything good, and it isn’t. Osric? It’s like ten lines. At least you’re in the play. The kid playing Hamlet used to be a friend of yours. Who cares, Drama Club’s not your life. Later you ride the long way home around the golf course, jumping your bike off little ruts in the road, killing time until your dad gets home. Remember when you were popular?

  [n]ot really

  [n]ope

  FALSE MEMORIES

  There are other weird things. You’ve found things that were never invented in normal reality, like a plasma rifle or antigravity disks. Most of them don’t work, but still—they shouldn’t have existed at all. It’s like the split goes back way before the bombs. That could be why a few of the skyscrapers look strange. Hancock Tower is taller and curvier, and something has given it a quarter twist. They look like science fiction versions of themselves. You start breaking into offices, one by one. Some of these people were defense contractors, on something called Project Gemini.

  Gamma World is probably your fault, you know. Your fault for wishing the whole world would be annihilated in a nuclear fireball. Which you do every single day.

  [n]o

  [y]es

  […]

  THE FATAL SIGN

  It’s time to stop ignoring certain things. As Dad sits across from you at dinner you wonder how much he knows. You’re thinking it so loud, it seems impossible he can’t somehow hear your thoughts. You wonder how somebody so clueless about the world around him could be considered a brilliant scientist.

  He won’t tell you what he’s working on at the lab because it’s all Department of Defense work, but it’s particle physics work, so really, isn’t it time to put two and two together?

  “Dad,” you ask sud
denly, “do you think there are other dimensions? Parallel worlds?”

  He smiles and shakes his head. “If only.”

  He leaves the table, his food untouched.

  Finish your [m]ac and cheese. You’ll never know the truth.

  He’s not even your real [f]ather, is he?

  HYPERBOREAN WINDS

  Traders arrive from the farthest north, hiking down the train lines from Montreal. They have horses and one enormous mutant elk. It’s the same up there, they say, just colder. Bombed-out cities, endless pine forests, and intelligent wolves. Snakes have grown fur and mammoths have appeared from someplace. They believe the bombs fell everywhere. They give us furs, and we give them local fruits and urban salvage: a generator, blowtorches, wooden beams. They leave, promising to return in six months.

  One day you might go there, but not in Gamma World. You’ve found that if you get too far from Boston in the real world, you stop crossing over. Which I guess means you should just wait until college and move away and all your problems will be solved.

  But you know that even if you moved a thousand miles from here, there would be a moment on a perfect crisply cold autumn day when you’re studying outside on the quad and your friends are laughing but you wouldn’t believe in it, you’d always, always, always know that this fresh and unscarred unburnt reality is a lie, and underneath it’s all rubble.

  Why fight it? It’s where you [b]elong. We both know it.

  Run forever, the [r]est of your life if that’s what it takes.

  SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE

  None of this happened before Mom left. Maybe she could have kept you out of Gamma World if she’d cared to try. You talk on the phone twice a week but she sounds distracted. You hear dishes clatter in the background. Is she hosting a party?