You

Chapter Eighteen



Sometimes I’d get to the end of work and realize I just didn’t feel like going home. There were people at Black Arts, and snack food, and infinite soda, and a lounge stocked with games.

When Lisa walked by, the Heroes from Across Time were hurtling over a rocky chasm and through a tunnel, jostling for the lead in 100-cc engine-powered go-karts.

I called after her, “Hey. You know, you could play an actual video game sometime.”

She sighed audibly, but stopped, and I already regretted having spoken. “Okay, so what’s happening in this one?”

“Wellll, this is Black Karts Racing. So plainly, I am Lorac, and today I am racing against my friends.”

“Uh-huh. Where did you guys get those go-karts? Did you invent internal combustion?”

“Found ’em. And I’m crossing this bridge,” I said. “Aaaand… now I am dead.”

“And now you’re alive again,” she said.

“Right. So now I’m jumping over the lake of fire. And now I’m on fire. But I’m jumping in the water, and I’m not on fire anymore.”

“Nope.” She sighed, but she didn’t leave. With the audio off, the only sound was the creaking and clacking of the controller itself. “Why is there another Lorac up ahead?”

“That’s Lorac from the future. Space-Lorac.”

“And the Lorac you just passed?”

“That’s Dark Lorac, my evil self. And now I’m being eaten by piranhas. Aaaand I’m dead again. Not really, but I lose ten seconds.”

“I can see why this is so meaningful to you.”

“Check this out,” I said. I veered through what looked like a vine-covered rock wall and through a portal into a sparkly, purple-and-white abstract space, a bonus area, until another wormhole spat me out again at the head of the pack. “I am so getting the Paris 1938 trophy and the points bonus.”

“Awesome. Where are you going to spend all those points?” she said. She sat down on the arm of the couch.

“At the Motor Shop. Duh. Do you want to try?”

“No. I find this disrespectful.”

“Fine. You’ll never marry the princess, though.” I started another race, this time through a gleaming city in the far future. Alien constellations glittered coldly overhead.

“Where’s the princess? Princess of what? When the f*ck is this happening?”

“She is waiting in her diamond castle outside of time, for one thing,” I said, trying to make it sound obvious. “Matt and I decided there’s a thing called the Ludic Age, where all these things happen. It’s not a part of history, and the characters were all summoned here by mystic forces. Or I think by an experimental drug, if you’re in Clandestine. Or a temporal-spatial anomaly for Solar Empires characters. And so then all the characters come here and you’re stock-car racing or in a giant pinball machine, depending, then you’re back to your lives.”

“But did it happen or did it not happen?”

“I think we all saw what we all saw.”

“And so now why are you child versions of yourselves with giant heads?”

“No more questions.”

“I mean, it’s not good parenting.”

“Don’t be jealous.”

“Well, you’re right—obviously I need to be doing this more. God, I’ve wasted my life,” she said. She went to get coffee.

Later, around midnight, I glimpsed her at her desk, crouched forward, her face held six inches from the monitor. Coding, she lost her nervous smile, and her rounded features took on an expression of calm, searching intensity, like that of a hawk circling above the keyboard, waiting for its prey to make its fatal error.