by Parker Tiden
No longer a rookie gamer, I got the hang of it pretty quickly, and in a matter of minutes, Prancer and I were whipping through the sky doing rolls and triple loops. "That's whack! I didn't even know that was possible," I heard Broccoli shout in my headphones. I was already hyped, and his positive feedback didn't do much to mellow me out, so I pushed further. I pointed Prancer straight up and shot for the sky. How high could I go? "Uhh… Luna… where are you going?" I heard Broccoli in my headphones again. I didn't answer, I clicked off all communication and pushed further into the atmosphere.
As I looked down, I started to see the curvature of the planet, and off to the right, I could see the ocean stretch to the horizon. Clouds swirled around me. A flock of golden birds joined me in my flight, escorting me ever higher. The sky turned from baby blue to deep sky blue, to cobalt blue, to midnight blue as I approached the edge of space. Three moons loomed. Prancer's antlers and head and then his entire body beneath me began to dissipate, dissolve, and become nothing. I was all alone in space until I fused with eternity, and lost myself completely.
The fourth night we met by the same forsaken stream and took to the air. It was daytime in Alphacore, as it always seemed to be. We had dawn, dusk, and any shade of sky in between, but we never had night. Seems obvious, I guess, what's the point in having a game where you can't see where you're going, let alone who you're killing?
"I can't explain it," I said. "I just became everything and nothing, and then I woke up with my face on the keyboard."
"Now that's what I call a trip," Broccoli said, clearly impressed.
"Right up until his death, she was on his case, never letting up. Sometimes I can't help it. I can't help thinking, why him and not her? Why did he die and not her?" I said as I pulled Prancer up through a cloud.
"Not an entirely healthy thought," Broccoli said as he tried to follow me on his giant kangaroo.
"She was raging on him the day he died, you know."
"Do you ever really know anyone… even a parent?" When he realized he wasn't going to get a response from me, he continued. "Especially a parent. You think these fishes, this stream, these algorithms, are complex, right? On a scale from one to ten, I'd say the complexity here in Alphacore is a one. The complexity of your mother's mind is a ten."
"What kind of excuse is that?"
"It's no excuse. You wouldn't get very far pleading complexity in front of a judge and jury.”
"Exactly.”
"It's just a perspective."
"I'll show you perspective," I said, and without much thought, tilted Prancer hard to the right. No one had ever done this before, so I wasn't sure what was going to happen or how the algorithms would react. Prancer crashed hard into Gilliad's side.
"Whoa!" was the only sound Broccoli managed to utter before he fell. The crash threw him off and he fell hopelessly towards earth—or Alphacore's pixelated ground, to be precise.
"Oh shit!" I shouted.
"Thanks a lot… ahhh!" was all I heard in my headphones as he tumbled away from me at an alarming rate.
Come to think of it, I had no idea how gravity worked here in Alphacore, let alone aerodynamics. I was about to find out.
"Right behind you, bro!" I cried and forced Prancer into a deep dive. I could see Broccoli flailing below me. I was basically flying straight down and, evidently, going faster than terminal velocity because I was getting closer and closer. I was now close enough to see his face, and then just as Broccoli was about to hit the ground, I swooped in and grabbed him single-digit feet from death.
"That was totally crazy!" he cried as we dismounted. He turned to me, his pupils were, I hadn't thought it possible, even wider than before—like dinner plates. "Let's do it again."
My Sister, Io
We met up in Nick's basement the next afternoon. Nick had given George and Jamaal the latest info on the snow globe at school. They had immediately volunteered to help out. When they came down the basement steps, they looked at me with renewed respect and nodded knowingly as if to seal some sort of pact.
Nick placed his laptop on the coffee table and we plunked ourselves down onto the basement couch. I stuck the drive into the laptop and opened it up, going through all the same security layers as last time. I clicked on the video. The video was just as shitty as before. George was intrigued. He listened to one segment of the conversation over and over again until he leaned back. "I sure as hell don't know what these two are saying. But I can tell you one thing, it sure as hell ain't all in English."
"I agree. Based on the rhythm, I would say it was a Slavic language, leaning towards Russian," Jamaal added.
George clicked on the bitcoin folder. He paused for a second, looking like he was doing some mental math. He logged on to some bitcoin website.
Jamaal was following the computer screen over George's shoulder. "Holy shit!" Jamaal blurted out, "What kind of business was your dad into?!"
Nick punched him in the arm, hard.
"Environmental technology…" or at least that's what I'd always thought.
"It is a growth sector," George said in an attempt to disarm the situation. "Ordinarily, I would advise you to sell a chunk of coin to lessen your vulnerability to market fluctuations. But given your situation, we wouldn't want to expose you to any potential inflection points. "
"There is also the fact that the files on the drive are the only proof we have of the coins’ existence," Jamaal added. "So, if something happens to the drive, you could get wiped out. What I suggest you do is make a copy, on another drive, and leave it here with Nick."
"Hah!" George scoffed. "I wouldn't trust Nick with my financial future, but you do what you have to do. When it comes to the Russians on that home movie of yours, I have an idea. I suggest we pay the Russians a visit, I know a white-hat… maybe gray-hat, hacker over there who might help us out."
For the bitcoin, Nick bought two extra drives for me the next day, and we made two copies. We hid one copy under the floorboards in Nick's attic, and the other was buried in my garden, in a vacuum-sealed storage bag inside a zinc container. We decided that the safe thing to do would be to delete the bitcoin on the original drive. Left on that drive, the one my dad had left for me, was the grainy video and a file none of us could figure out. I made a copy of these two files and placed them in an encrypted folder on Speed Freak.
Broccoli and I had been hanging out on and off for almost a week now. Talking, exploring, and flying. Other than meeting my dad in my dreams, it was, as little as I liked to admit it, the thing I most looked forward to in my pathetic little life. We were now almost one week away from the big tournament, and I was wandering in the meadow by the stream with Broccoli.
"Do you ever get out?" he said as he swung at the meadow with what was, absurdly enough, a golf club.
"What do you mean?" already not liking where this line of questioning was going.
"You know, out in the real world, with quotes around the real."
"You don't know the half of it." The time I spent battling solo, when the rest of the team was in school, and with the team in the evening and at night, coupled with the time I spent exploring and the time I spent hanging with Broccoli, a good chunk of the day was gone. If you add the time spent dreaming of Alphacore, there wasn't much time left for anything else.
"I've been out there, in the real world," he said and took another swipe at the meadow, flinging a plume of glowing pollen, pestles, and petals into the air around us. "It ain't so bad, you know."
He knew my dad was dead, maybe killed, he knew my mom was cracking, and he knew I was about to lose my house. How could he say it ain't so bad? I was about to tell him as much.
"There are rivers there. There are sunsets and sunrises there. There's the moon." He looked at me and smiled. "Admittedly, only one moon." In the sky above us, three moons hovered, and as I saw them, I thought of the earth moon, and the nights when my dad and I would stay up late to stargaze through the telescope he bought for me when I turned eight. T
he SF metropolitan area to the North threw light pollution into the sky, limiting what we could see. But we caught Jupiter and the rings of Saturn. If we were lucky, we could get a glimpse of the Orion nebula or Andromeda. We spent hours studying the moon in detail, her valleys and mountains, the Sea of Tranquility where man first set foot on her. My dad could tinker for hours every time we brought out the telescope, whistling tunes and talking to himself while experimenting with different combinations of filters and Barlow lenses, all to get the perfect setup for the conditions of that particular night. I rarely felt as close to him as I did in those moments. I could just sit and watch, absorb him, in need of nothing else.
I remember one clear, cool, and moonless night in late November, a few years back. The house and garden are in total darkness. Dad has even managed to get our nearest neighbors to turn off their own outdoor lighting. With a red flashlight in his mouth to guide him, he makes the last adjustments. I sit next to him on the back deck with one of his sweaters on me and a cup of hot cocoa between my hands. He is peering into the eyepiece and turning a dial, when finally, he says, "Wow..." He turns to me. "Check this out." Through the red light, I can see his eyes are glowing.
"Sure, Dad," I say as I put down my coco and approach the scope.
"Take a look," he guides me gently to the scope with his hand on my back. I bend down and rest my eye socket against the eyepiece. The gas giant, with its stripes and the great red spot, a storm three times the size of Earth hangs in my field of view. "Wow..." I say, without really understanding his excitement, we had seen Jupiter a half-dozen times already.
"Look closer."
Then, I spot her, tiny and yellow… Io. Oh, I'd seen Io, a Jupiter moon, before. She'd be hanging alone in the dark, to the side. But here she is, tracking across the surface of Jupiter with a new clarity. There is a second dot on Jupiter's surface, about the same size as Io, it’s her shadow. Suddenly, I lose my foothold, my stomach sings, my brain fizzles, and I’m slung out into the solar system.
I’m now standing on Io, she has invited me, her volcanoes and molten lava all around me. The giant's gravity whips us together, across space and time.
I have no idea how much time had passed when I hear someone calling me back. I don't want to leave Io so soon, she is my sister… I want to hang on just a little longer, but I know I must go.
"Luna," I hear my dad's voice. "You there?" I look up from the eyepiece, earthbound once again. "It's called a transit," my dad says behind me. "That shadow is moving at 50 times the speed of sound across the surface.”
Dad and I had often talked about packing our tent and sleeping bags and heading out to Death Valley and its Dark Sky Park. There, we could catch the Milky Way in all its glory. We will never be going to Death Valley, my dad and I.
Broccoli was looking at me inquisitively, studying me even. "Are you ok?"
"I'm fine... I miss him, that's all." I let my anger fade to sorrow.
Back to Reality?
Not to brag or anything, but we'd been owning good since I joined the team. It was Sunday night and Just Regular Noobs were hunkered down behind some steel beam in what looked like a blown-out factory. We were just finishing off a weak team, ironically called OverForce, when Nuffian turned to me, still firing, "Luna, it's time now."
"Yeah, time to slay!" my Luna cried, opening up a fierce barrage of hellfire. "Let’s finish these losers off!"
"No, I mean, it's time for you to go back."
I continued to pound the enemy position with all my fury. I knew what he meant, and I knew he was right.
"Time to get this over with," I cried and charged the enemy position, taking several hits as I crossed the space between us and lunged for the hapless warrior taking cover behind a low-slung wall. I sunk my combat knife into his back with a satisfying crunch, pulled it out, and crunched it into his neck, finishing him off. We had won.
"Fine," I said to Nuffian as I pulled out the knife. "But you'll have to cover me."
"I'll cover you, Lily... I'll cover you..."
The next morning, I stood in front of my open closet staring at the wardrobe of a stranger. What was I doing with so much to wear? It made me want to puke. I settled, instead, on a pair of standard jeans and a plain black t-shirt. My hair was basically still gone, a half-inch buzz covered my head, and I hadn't bought any more makeup since I threw out my old stuff.
Nick was waiting outside on the curb. As we set off on the walk to school, my backpack was light with a mere pencil case and calculator in it. I had no schoolbooks and no idea what schoolwork awaited me as a sophomore. I had missed the first two months. The night before, I had logged onto my school account for the first time since June. If I was going to school, it might be a good idea to know what my schedule looked like.
"Just remember, it's all about perspective," Nick said.
"What?"
"Nothing."
As we made our way to school, block by block, many of the streets quaintly sidewalk-less, it was as though I was rediscovering my own hometown. I had been out of school for weeks, but I had also been out of society. At first, cooped up in my own darkness, and then venturing out to the small circle of the team, and another world entirely. We passed familiar restaurants, shops, I think I might even have got some nods or waves of recognition. Restaurants and shops that I never again would visit with my dad. We passed The Cricket, where we'd celebrated his 40th birthday.
The closer we got to school, the tighter my chest became. We stopped a block away, where Ocean Street met Jefferson Avenue. Nick gave me a concerned glance and gently took hold of my arm. "You can do this. Just remember, 95 percent of people's thoughts are just incessant loops of self-obsession."
I let his hand guide me as we crossed the lanes of the avenue and stood, finally, in front of the school. He instinctively let go of my arm. I could feel eyes on me. Some of the kids probably thought I was some new kid, bussed in from the other side of the tracks.
Terrible things happen to people every single day, people ten times better than I am or ever will be. Just imagine the total amount of collective pain housed within the walls of this one school. You've got the perhaps tangible, like a brother with leukemia, a grandmother dying in agony, a beloved dog run over by a vegan food truck. Then you've got the more insidious kind of pain that can erode a life—the gnawing financial anxiety of a mortgage under water and a college fund depleted, the quiet desperation of failing and fading dreams, the haunting feeling of being forever disconnected from others, the hollowness of chronic depression, the shame of marital failure, the fear of loneliness, the forever wanting what others seemingly have.
So, why was I a novelty? Please just let me be embraced by our collective pain, let me bathe in our common sorrow.
As we made our way up the stairs to the main building, I glanced up at the morning moon hovering. The moon, caught between night and day, compelled, finally, to define itself in all its spherical glory—no longer a pancake, but an orb. My dad would have loved this moon.
We pushed through the door into the hallways and were met by a sea of familiar and unfamiliar faces, a sea that parted as we walked towards the lockers. Whispers, nods, careful smiles, a few confused looks. I was relieved to have Nick by my side and felt a compulsion to grab his arm, to lean in, but knew better. I glanced over at Nick, who walked upright with conscious authoritative steps like he was my bodyguard. Not to be a bitch or anything, but this must have been a highlight moment in his high-school career.
George and Jamaal, who were waiting for us by the drinking fountain, had wide grins on their faces as we approached. They couldn't believe their luck that they now had a girl in their little nerd clique, a popular—or at the least previously popular—girl, at that. My face flushed as I remembered when we met in Nick's basement and I thought it was for the first time. How easy it had been not to see, to filter reality like a real-life Facebook feed.
I bid farewell to the guys and set off to my first class, alone. I was still in a
daze when I stepped into Ms. Dorsit's English class. "Oh, Lily!" she cried out in her high-strung British voice as she rushed from behind her desk to hug me. She held me by my shoulders as if to get a good look at me. "Why didn't you let us know you were coming!?" I didn't have anything to say, so I smiled meekly and looked around the classroom trying to figure out what seat I could take. Reading me, Ms. Dorsit pointed to a desk in the middle of the room. "Why don't you just take a seat right there."
I plunked down behind the desk, feeling somewhat safer there. I was staring at my own fingers when I sensed a sudden change in the room. There, by the doorway, stood Sarah, knock-down beautiful as ever, but tired and pissed. Without so much as offering me a glance, she took a seat behind me and proceeded for the rest of the class to burn a hole through my skull.
The English class was finally winding down, I think the subject had been Chaucer—I could have picked a better day to go back to school, but to be honest, I hadn't been listening much anyhow. Feelings of guilt were welling up inside of me, irrational as they had to be. I was the victim here after all, my dad had died, right?
As soon as the bell rang, Sarah was out the door. I was just about to run after her, or at least I like to think I was, when Ms. Dorsit grabbed my arm. "Lily, dear, just a moment," she said. "Principal Woods and Mrs. Rancetti would like to talk to you, to welcome you back, my dear. Why don’t you head down to the office.”
They were waiting for me in the office, ready to pounce. Principal Woods, with his closely cropped graying hair and sports coat, looked the part and was mostly harmless. Mrs. Rancetti, the guidance counselor, dressed in a flowery dress and thick glasses covering half her face, on the other hand, was a pain in the ass. She had expectations. She had hopes and dreams for her students.
