Game Over

Chapter 32





TWENTY THOUSAND HIGH-RANKING alien thugs were making their way through the building’s lobby. Well, that’s how it looked through fly eyes anyhow. It took me a moment to get used to my new senses and to realize there were just a dozen of them. Still, that was a lot.

I flew as fast as I could to catch up and landed on the hat of the tallest one, just as a security guard waved him through the turnstile.

My steed and his buddies then crammed into a single elevator that shot us up to the fifty-first floor where we entered a conference room whose walls were lined with alien antlers, bones, stuffed heads, pelts, and other hunting trophies. The conference table also looked to be from some sort of creature—the hip bone of an enormous animal. And, by “enormous,” I mean the bone must have been at least a hundred feet long and thirty feet wide. When intact, the actual creature was probably big enough to accidentally inhale a city bus.

The aliens took their seats around the table, and the meeting was called to order.

Number 7 presided from the head of the table as the thugs took off their human disguises. The hat I was riding was unceremoniously tossed to the middle of the table, and, unfortunately for me, it didn’t have ribbons or feathers or anything I could use for cover. I was totally out in the open. My only defense was to stay perfectly still. Fortunately, for the moment, nobody seemed to notice the little black fleck on the brim of the gray hat.

“As you know,” began Number 7, “today marks the launch of a new level. It will be the most challenging—and rewarding—hunt you’ve ever undertaken.”

He had them all on the hook, and he knew it.

“What is it?” demanded one of them. “A Mahoneyian Stinkbear?”

“A Corruscated Fosterite?”

“An Endomorphic Nebulan?”

“A Pleionid,” replied Number 7, cutting short the welter of speculation as if he’d fired a gunshot.

The thugs straightened in their chairs and went wide-eyed, or, if they didn’t have eyes, widened other things.

“But—” began the tall one I’d ridden in on.

“No, they’re not quite extinct,” said Number 7. “There’s one left. And it’s here—here in Japan.”

The hunters looked like they were about to break into applause, but Number 7 would have none of it.

“The mission brief, which I’ll feed into your consoles at sundown, will contain a link to the creature’s location. Because of its shape-shifting and self-healing abilities, we couldn’t use a traditional transponder. Nevertheless, we have another way to track the creature that will allow us to send you rough coordinates.”

A murmur of speculation rippled through the room. I too wondered how they might be tracking the Pleionid.

“Also,” said Number 7, glancing at Number 8, “to make things even more challenging, a new hunter will join us tonight, a truly formidable competitor.”

“Who is it? Is he here?” asked one of the hunters.

“You’ll see.”

“This sounds like a tough assignment,” said another. “Are there any special incentives?”

“First of all,” said Number 7, standing to his full height and briefly, somehow, turning a disturbing shade of gray, “this is not an assignment. This is a hunt. All of you signed up for this. But, yes, if you like to think in terms of what’s in it for you, I can tell you that whoever successfully kills the Pleionid”—he paused dramatically—“not only gets the trophy, but gets to live.”

Now it was every other alien in the room’s opportunity to turn gray.

“You mean—?” began one of them, an owl-headed goon with eyes like mirrored lawn balls.

“I should clarify,” continued Number 7. “Because of your miserable failure with the Mahlerian bird-cat, it has been decided to thin your ranks and recruit new players. Those of you who fail to bring down the Pleionid will be terminated.”

Another ripple of shock and surprise rounded the room, but not as quickly as I would have expected in a group that was just told they were about to die. One of them, with a face like a giant squirrel—if the squirrel didn’t have any hair on its face (very creepy)—was even smirking.

“I don’t care. I’ve been getting pretty tired of this game,” he said.

Number 7 smiled. “What, you mean this 5G edition of Intergalactic Safari Hunter?”

“Duh,” said the creepy squirrel.

“Do you know what ‘5G’ means?”

“Fifth Generation,” said the owl-headed goon. “It’s a marketing thing to make it sound advanced, right?”

“Actually, it’s a number we developers use to indicate the final phase of a video-game arc. Previous generations of the program entice players to continue, thereby helping us to optimize programming to ensure we have maximized its addictive properties.

“For instance, with the humans, right now we’re up to the 4G version. The next edition will be the 5G, just like yours.”

“So?” said the freaky squirrel.

“So,” said Number 7, “at 5G, it stops being a game. And when we release that edition here—as we’ve done on several planets before, including your own—all the world’s gamers are going to start acting out the ultraviolent competitions we lay before them in real life.”

So that was how they were going to make humans extinct. They were going to turn all the first-person shooting and war games into the real thing. The game players of the world would go berserk across the planet.

“What does that mean for us?” asked the owl-headed one.

“Have you tried to pause the game lately? Tried to get up from your machine and go get a snack?”

The aliens looked a degree more nervous. Some of them nodded gloomily.

“You see, now you are not playing Intergalactic Safari Hunter. You are living it. This is not your video-game self—this is your real self. In other words, no more restarting the level if you happen to die.”

You could almost hear the sickening realizations dawn around the boardroom table. This was why they hadn’t been able to pause the game. This was why everything had seemed so real. And this was why Number 7’s threat to terminate them should be taken seriously.

I wasn’t sure what kind of a long-term management technique it was, but something told me that Number 7 had just lit quite a motivating little fire under these greedy, selfish aliens, and that this night’s hunt was going to be particularly hard fought.

That poor Pleionid didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell, whatever its abilities were. I cleaned my eyes and flicked my wings, which I guess is the fly equivalent of a discouraged head shake.

“How disgusting!” screeched Number 8. “A fly! There on that hat! Somebody vaporize it!”

Uh-oh.