Dangerous Games

cheaper, easier, and more fun than the original version, of course people are going to buy it.

The lift was full. She stood, drab bodies packed around her, breathing the stale air. Every face was a mask of dull endurance. She closed her eyes. The caravanserai walls rose strangely from the empty plain…

(with apologies to E. R. Eddison)

THE HALFWAY HOUSE AT THE HEART OF DARKNESS by William Browning Spencer

William Browning Spencer was born in Washington, D.C. and now lives in Lexington, Missouri. His first novel, Maybe I’ll Call Anna, was published in 1990 and won a New American Writing Award, and he has subsequently made quite a reputation for himself with quirky, eccentric, eclectic novels that dance on the borderlines between horror, fantasy, and black comedy, novels such as Resume with Monsters and Zod Wallop. His short work has been collected in The Return of Count Electric and Other Stories. His most recent book is a new novel, Irrational Fears.

In the free-wheeling, pyrotechnic story that follows, he shows us that there are as many ways to be Saved as there are people to be Saved, even from a peculiar addiction such as computer gaming-and that often the most unexpected way is the way that works the best…

***

KEEL wore a ragged shirt with the holo veed there, simmed that shimmering on it. She wore it in and out of the virtual. If she was in an interactive virtual, the other players sometimes complained. Amid the dragons and elves and swords of fire, a bramble-haired girl, obviously spiking her virtual with drugs and refusing to tune her shirt to something suitably medieval, could be distracting.

“Fizz off,” Keel would say, in response to all complaints.

Keel was difficult. Rich, self-destructive, beautiful, she was twenty years old and already a case study in virtual psychosis.

She had been rehabbed six times. She could have died that time on Makor when she went blank in the desert. She still bore the teeth marks of the land eels that were gnawing on her shoulder when they found her.

A close one. You can’t revive the digested.

NO one had to tell Keel that she was in rehab again. She was staring at a green ocean, huge white clouds overhead, white gulls filling the heated air with their cries.

They gave you these serenity mock-ups when they were bringing you around. They were fairly insipid and several shouts behind the technology. This particular v-run was embarrassing. The ocean wasn’t continuous, probably a seven-minute repeat, and the sun’s heat was patchy on her face.

The beach was empty. She was propped up in a lounge chair-no doubt her position back in the ward. With concentration, focusing on her spine, she could sense the actual contours of the bed, the satiny feel of the sensor pad.

It was work, this focusing, and she let it go. Always better to flow.

Far to her right, she spied a solitary figure. The figure was moving toward her.

It was, she knew, a wilson. She was familiar with the drill. Don’t spook the patient. Approach her slowly after she is sedated and in a quiet setting.

The wilson was a fat man in a white suit (neo-Victorian, dead silly, Keel thought). He kept his panama hat from taking flight in the wind by clamping it onto his head with his right hand and leaning forward.

Keel recognized him. She even remembered his name, but then it was the kind of name you’d remember: Dr. Max Marx.

He had been her counselor, her wilson, the last time she’d crashed. Which meant she was in Addition Resources Limited, which was located just outside of New Vegas.

Dr. Marx looked up, waved, and came on again with new purpose.

A pool of sadness welled in her throat. There was nothing like help, and its pale sister hope, to fill Keel’s soul with black water.

FORTUNATELY, Dr. Max Marx wasn’t one of the hearty ones. The hearty ones were the worst. Marx was, in fact, refreshingly gloomy, his thick black beard and eyebrows creating a doomed stoic’s countenance.

“Yes,” he said, in response to her criticism of the virtual, “this is a very miserable effect. You should see the sand crabs. They are laughable, like toys.” He eased himself down on the sand next to her and took his hat off and fanned it in front of his face. “I apologize. It must be very painful, a connoisseur of the vee like you, to endure this.”

Keel remembered that Dr. Marx spoke in a manner subject to interpretation. His words always held a potential for sarcasm.

“We are portable,” Dr. Marx said. “We are in a mobile unit, and so, alas, we don’t have the powerful stationary AdRes equipment at our command. Even so, we could do better. There are better mockups to be had, but we are not prospering these days. Financially, it has been a year of setbacks, and we have had to settle for some second- rate stuff.”

“I’m not in a hospital?” Keel asked.

Marx shook his head. “No. No hospital.”

Keel frowned. Marx, sensing her confusion, put his hat back on his head and studied her through narrowed eyes. “We are on the run, Keel Benning. You have not been following the news, being otherwise occupied, but companies like your beloved Virtvana have won a major legislative battle. They are now empowered to maintain their customer base aggressively. I believe the wording is ‘protecting customer assets against invasive alienation by third-party services.’ Virtvana can come and get you.”

Keel blinked at Dr. Marx’s dark countenance. “You can’t seriously think someone would… what?… kidnap me?”

Dr. Marx shrugged. “Virtvana might. For the precedent. You’re a good customer.”

“Vee moguls are going to sweat the loss of one spike? That’s crazy.”

Dr. Marx sighed, stood up, whacked sand from his trousers with his hands. “You noticed then? That’s good. Being able to recognize crazy, that is a good sign. It means there is hope for your own sanity.”

HER days were spent at the edge of the second-rate ocean. She longed for something that would silence the Need. She would have settled for a primitive bird-in-flight simulation. Anything. Some corny sex-with-dolphins loop- or something abstract, the color red leaking into blue, enhanced with aural-D.

She would have given ten years of her life for a game of Apes and Angels, Virtvana’s most popular package. Apes and Angels wasn’t just another smooth metaphysical mix-it was the true religion to its fans. A gamer started out down in the muck on Libido Island, where the senses were indulged with perfect, shimmerless sims. Not bad, Libido Island, and some gamers stayed there a long, long time. But what put Apes and Angels above the best pleasure pops was this: A player could evolve spiritually. If you followed the Path, if you were steadfast, you became more compassionate, more aware, at one with the universe… all of which was accompanied by feelings of euphoria.

Keel would have settled for a legal rig. Apes and Angels was a chemically enhanced virtual, and the gear that true believers wore was stripped of most safeguards, tuned to a higher reality.

It was one of these hot pads that had landed Keel in Addiction Resources again.

“It’s the street stuff that gets you in trouble,” Keel said. “I’ve just got to stay clear of that.”

“You said that last time,” the wilson said. “You almost died, you know.”