Yeah, she loves the voice work, but it’s not the game, it’s the dream in the gray box. With her eyes closed, the sets are not merely realistic, they’re real. The spaceship smells of ozone, and the artificial gravity varies nauseatingly from AG node to node. When the Alliance troops come around the corner, her body explodes with tingles of dread. So what if the line is cheesy? Cheesy lines are video verité when you’re a mite mining through a block of bleu. In her first-ever session, years ago, in a game called Infymy, she sent the script stand flying (she still remembers the line: “Let me . . . go!”). Phil tells her she claws, kneads, pummels the air. She has learned to wear a sleeveless cotton t-shirt that makes no noise no matter how she moves.
End of the fourth hour. She’s getting punchy. Her last line of the day, prompted if the boy-wanderer opts to abandon the Hispanic cutie with the howitzer who’s helpful in a firefight, but will use up oxygen in the escape shuttle and thus reduce its range: “You . . . bastard.” Her cheap tricks are creeping in on little shit feet. That pause in the middle, that hitch of unbelief, timed so predictably you could schedule a train by it. Let’s face it, it’s all tricks. But keeping the tricks fresh, that’s the trick. Tricking yourself into believing they aren’t tricks.
Six o’clock. “Thanks, Saskia,” Phil says. “Great day’s work. Tomorrow and Wednesday Tom’s in to do the Commander. How’s Thursday for you?”
“I’ll have to check my busy—hey, lucky you, I’m free.”
She drums down the stairs and out into the dhark, heading west toward Third Avenue. That CGI hottie was a younger Hispanic version of herself: short, hippy, breasty, kind of a Babylonian-fertility-figurine look, although the hottie had thicker hair, fuck her.
So the boy-wanderer is abandoning her? She’s long suspected he was a weasel. She feels righteous rage. “You bastard!”
She’s been wondering when he would grow a pair and betray her. She’s amused, contemptuous. “Youuu . . . bastard . . .”
She taunts him with a bounce of her astonishing mammaries, accompanied by a noli me tangere smirk. “You . . . bas-tard!”
She’s exultant, gleeful, at the chance to paint the walls of the launching bay with his teaspoon of brains. “Youuuu bastaard!!”
She’s never suspected a thing. She loves him. She’s so stunned she can’t process what he’s saying. “You—bastard—”
All men are snakes. Trusting them is a fool’s game. “You bastard.”
There’s no morality. The universe is a hilarious playground for superbeings such as herself. “Youu! Bastaaard!”
She’s arrived at a corner. She looks around. Broadway. Damn! Too far. She backtracks.
Interesting that a lot of the fans seem to feel the same unhappiness at the limitations of gameplay that she does. She’s poked around on the Dhark wiki, where the characters are described as real people, complete with speculations about their pasts and their motives. The entry for a greedy brothel madam she voiced in Dhark Rebellion II said something like, “Angela Quikcustard runs the brothel in Iron City on Smilin’ Jack’s Moon. She came to Iron City in 2256. Some say she ran away from an abusive home on the Torkan home planet, others say she gained her cynical attitude toward life during a stint in the rebel army, in the disastrous Keyhole Nebula campaign of 2254.” Saskia remembered the character, but where did the abusive home come from, the experiences in the army?
She’s also read some Dhark fanfiction. Most of it doesn’t involve any of her characters, which tend to be minor, but she did voice a ditzy blonde volcano-rim shack dweller in the first installment (she assumed the intended humor was the juxtaposition of her fetid quarters with her bubbleheaded lines, which she voiced in a Valley Girl drawl) who has turned out to be surprisingly popular in fan porn with a fuck-the-brainless-bitch-every-last-way theme, and inspired at least one actually not-bad story, in which the girl-wanderer (go 18 percent!) realized the blonde was speaking in code because her shack was bugged by the Presidium, and the code eventually led the two of them, now power sisters, to discover something or other, but what Saskia mainly remembers is the clever elaboration of the blonde’s lines so that they sounded both hilariously vacuous and pregnant with meaning.
She finds it kind of marvelous, this fan love. Like most love—let’s not say “all,” shall we?—it’s a heroic effort of the imagination to turn a pedestrian object into something worthy of one’s . . . well, imagination. Thousands of fans gather around this inert mountain of clay, this crude giant’s form with Dhark incised on its forehead, and with a great collaborative heave they stand it on its feet, and with a great collaborative shout they awaken it, and then they bow down before it as though it had awakened them, its creatures.
Corner again. Third Avenue, damn straight. Who says she’s got no sense of direction? She’s at 11th, the restaurant is just past 12th, a Thai place.
Quentin’s not there yet. The room is pretty empty. They give her a window table so passersby will say, “Hey this place can’t suck too bad, there’s a really short woman in there.” It’s drafty near the door, but she’s worked on and off as a waitress for years, and customers who ask to be moved are a pain in the ass. She keeps her coat on.
“Would you like
