The Game Read online

  Copyright 2011 Michael J. McDonald

  Image: Salvatore Vuono / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

  The Game

  “Open your eyes.”

  Ah, shit, this better not be that Tom Cruise dream again. It was a fair film, but there are some things a guy doesn’t want to have to explain to himself when he wakes up. It’s that kind of voice though, so sultry and docile yet bristling under its woollen coat with darts of impatience that just lets you know you better not make her repeat it. And it’s clearly a her. When there’s a woman in your ear at this time of the morning, it’s probably worth waking up for.

  So I open my eyes, and I catch my breath, though to be more accurate my breath catches itself on the back of my throat and I feel as though I’m choking on a very, very long icicle. Brain’s still going like the clappers, though. Heart too. There’s something you don’t see every day. Unless you’re me. What a vision. The second most wanted woman in the world (the first being wanted for rather different pursuits and probably not one to get much sleep), posing in the sexiest doorframe in the world, wearing the luckiest shirt in the universe. Martians invented shirts, right? Who else would come up with a concept such as a loose shirt tail that did nothing of any use except either make you look stupid while it was out or fat when you tucked it in?

  I could see the lower seam of her shirt tail in the opening between her parted thighs. And a small part of my brain decided six minutes was kind of a long time to stare at someone, so blurted out a response at last. “That’s my shirt!”

  Right, thanks brain.

  “It was on the floor. Finders keepers,” she says through a sly smirk. “And maybe that will teach you not to rip mine.”

  Now why would I do a thing like that? And when? And why wasn’t I dead yet? Or maybe I was… maybe this was heaven. Nah, wait, I couldn’t be there already. Surely someone would’ve been around to give me a bit of a lecture over worshipping false idols? Like this Venus before me. She must be superhuman, at least. She could go for…

  Oh yeah. Now I remember last night. So timeless, so exhausting, so exhilarating, and each one better than the last. With her. All with her. Six weeks ago I’d been living in the upper room of my parent’s house (not the basement, if you please, I do not go in for those sorts of clichés), with the closest I ever got to her being through a flatscreen liquid crystal display DVD marathon. I had all of her films, a digital copy of each disc on its own external hard-drive (external for ease of removal in case of fire or nuclear war) and an illustrated hard-copy of the script for each. Bit of a fan, you see.

  Ah, Natalie Nightly, practically perfect in every way. Queen of Hollywood and the liberal media’s darling all at once (my employer disagrees with that sentiment, but I suppose his definition of liberal is a bit, well, liberal). She doesn't quite live up to her name, but I guess that's what happens when you get married.

  But this is not just me and a laptop snuggled up in bed, watching her fend off vicious Kinnits or seduce Dark Lords through a piece of crystal (no glass, if you please). Oh ho no. This is the real deal. No need for those little discs of plastic and metal now gathering dust above my parent’s house. Now she’s here in the flesh. Quite a lot of flesh, as it happens. Pretty much only the flesh, much of the time.

  And all it cost me was to agree to my dream job. They even paid the bus-fare for the interview. Funnily enough, there were no other interviewees at the offices of NitroSoft, and I was entirely starstruck to be quizzed by the chairman of the board himself: John Michael White.

  Mr. White has a very intriguing office. Fashionably decorated with all wood, polished black, it is at once spartan and professional and inviting and homely. Might have something to do with the unnecessarily massive fire roaring in the east wall. Above his jet black desk, which is surely as wide as an ocean and as heavy as a continent (hyperbole it may be, but it’s a decent ballpark estimate; I feel like I need smoke signals to communicate with his tiny figure way over in his chair), hangs a two storey tall painting of a lady holding a lamb. I think she’s an actress, but judging from her western nose she won’t have been in any films I’ve seen in the past decade or so. Probably does, ugh, movies.

  My wife did about three movies, I must admit, but anything with B-movie titles and computer-generated jesters has to go in my collection, even just for the look of the thing. Still, sometimes at night, when it’s so dark and quiet a footstep sounds like a thunderclap, I still hear the dialogue…

  Mr. White smiles broadly and, for some reason, cackles at my entrance. One hand gestures broadly in welcome, while the other reaches for mine. I shake it, sit down, and jump up like there’s a nest of fire-ants on my seat. He chuckles a little, and gestures for me to sit down anyway, waiting till I am firmly if gingerly in place before finally taking a seat himself. Well, he’s not English, perhaps he didn’t mind that little faux-pas of mine.

  “Welcome,” he says, “To NitroSoft.”

  Did I miss something? Maybe I fell asleep. I guess he notices my startled expression, because he smiles again, so dashing (though my wife doesn’t think so) and leans forward to fill my eyes.

  “Oh, you didn’t think I’d time in my schedule to conduct interviews, did you?” he says, jovial and now rising back into his erect black chair. “No, I’m simply here to see that you settle into our community. We want you for the long-horn… sorry, Fruedian slip. We want you for the long haul, Emmanuel, and the best way to ensure staff loyalty is to be loyal to your staff.”

  I pause for thought. I fail. “Thank you,” is all I can say.

  “Now you see, you were approached by our company due to your rather… unique skills.”

  “I don’t think my patchwork programming abilities are all that unique,” I interject, then I literally bite my tongue.

  A flash of another smile. “No, indeed not. But you have something none of us here in NitroSoft have been in possession of for decades. You have distance, Emmanuel. You have distance from us, from our stockholders, from our products, from our other staff. You have, in fact, a life outside these walls. And what we want from you is to take that life, use that life, and use our products in your life. This, Emmanuel, is the grandest customer satisfaction questionnaire of all time. It’s not some pesky pop-up asking if you want to register every seven minutes. It is, in fact, a life tailored to the requirements and the use of our software.”

  Wow, he hasn’t paused for breath. That’s probably a bad sign, working for a guy who’s good at soliloquies. Reminds me of the classical mis-understood villain. If he starts talking with intensity, you know he’s about to kill someone.

  “Emmanuel, we are prepared to give you everything. Your house, your job, your wife, kids if you want them. We can get them. An entire life. And all we want from you is feedback on our products and how they service your chosen lifestyle.”

  So I pause and think again. Much of my brain is a grey mush at the moment, but one part does witter on about the practicalities of such an arrangement. “What if I want to become a hermit living in a cave with no electricity?”

  “Wireless,” he replies, shrugging. Guess he saw that one coming. I could see no way out of this. Not without offending the generous billionaire tyrant. Can’t do that. I’m an Englishman for goodness’ sake.

  Then I wondered why I would even conceive of wanting to get out of it in the first place? I’d come here with nothing but a dream of enough cash to get a faster cd-burner and a frayed newspaper page crumpled in my pocket, to the regional office just outside my dull little hovel of a home town, where the chairman of the board had set up his own office just to meet me and had accommodated me entirely pleasantly and perfectly so far. The only thing I could complain about was that fire
was getting a little hot. I could feel it almost licking at my ear.

  I thought about it a little more, though not really all that much. Ask and ye shall receive, that’s what they say, right? So I asked for everything I’d ever wanted. Dream house with a swimming pool, no stairs and a fireman’s pole. A happy, productive and lengthy marriage to my favourite person of all time. An orange badge so I could park my car anywhere I pleased. And a car so I could stick my orange badge on something.

  “You got it,” John Michael White said. “It’s yours.”

  Was there a catch? Ah, now that is the sixty four million dollar question…

  “Thousand,” said Mr. White, not quite looking my way.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You’re probably thinking the sixty four thousand dollar question. What’s the catch?”

  “Er… I suppose.”

  “I have already explained the catch to you. Simply your service in providing feedback for our products as they assist you in your chosen lifestyle.”

  “And how often do I have to do that?”

  “Well, we like to patch every week day, but we have a few contributors, so once or twice a week should suffice.”

  “That’s it?” I ask, probably sounding rather incredulous.

  “Indeed.”

  “Cool.”

  So we shake hands again, and I sign the contract eagerly. I don’t really notice at the time that it has all my preferences that I mentioned, plus a few I’d forgotten about, already printed under ‘program privileges’.

  That was then, and this is now. My first day on the job, after what was quite literally a honeymoon period. Mr. White wasn’t kidding when he said I got it. I sure got it alright.

  I got up after coming to terms with the fact that, yes, I had just shared a bed with a world famous filmstar. A very comfortable, sledge-shaped bed too, with luxurious carvings turning even its simple structure into a tableau. Beautiful figures of men and women, hammers and sickles, dragons and angels. The angels looked upside down to me, actually, but what do I know about art? Or beds? Until being given a tour of our suite on the wedding night (yes, the suite was large enough to require a tour, and I still kept losing the bathroom) I never knew what the hell one of these funny shaped beds was called. I just thought of them as the curly ones.

  She made me breakfast. After the honeymoon, I was getting used to eating with her in the same room, though it was still awkward. Your jaw tends to slacken when she’s around.

  I got dressed, failed miserably, and was handed a suit which I am still sure was identical to the one I had just been ordered to remove. After a near-lethal tie adjustment courtesy of my wife, I was ready to go out into the world and begin my first day at the rat-races. Yep, my first job. Work experience in the school library, apparently, doesn’t count.

  So I went to the office, which was just along the hall from the kitchen, and switched on the computer.

  A cheery jangle greeted me, and then I jumped out of my suit.

  Good morning, Dave, it intoned, the speakers I hadn’t noticed nestled in the back wall throbbing with such immense power I thought God had shown up and in his infallibility decided my parents got my name wrong.

  “Emmanuel,” I muttered to myself when I’d gathered it together and checked my dark trousers for patches of extra darkness.

  Good morning, Emmanuel, it corrected itself. Cool.

  On the 42” flat screen ahead of me (size matters), I was greeted by the splash screen of the latest product flooding the market and killing the competition off two by two. NitroSoft knew what they were doing. Snazzy logo in 3d, animated for the loading screen. Probably would take your average computer 20 minutes just to render the damn thing, but I had the specifications of this beast before me memorised. Leviathan they called her. I peeked under the desk. There was nothing there. Just vacant legroom. Wherever this machine was, with the specs it had, it must’ve been occupying a much larger chamber six years in the future.

  And so we got to the desktop. It was a picture of my wife. How lush.

  I went about my daily business, which generally consisted of defending my wife’s integrity on internet message boards, downloading proper films no-one could be arsed releasing over here, and telling people why no role-playing game produced since Circumsoft went down the toilet either counted or was worth the plastic it was burned on. Dungeons and Dragons?! Pah. It’s not a real RPG if you can pronounce the names of the people who made it.

  Only crashed three times. I was impressed.

  It wasn’t quite an average day though, since I actually ate thanks to my wife popping in every few hours, insisting she spoon feed me. Like I was going to argue. She had a spoon! Also, having a wife meant I found myself switching Leviathan off before midnight and heading to bed.

  Day two was much the same, but with less crashes. It did call me Dave again once though, yet when I rooted around in the speech generation database I found it still had the amended setting. Weird. Must’ve been my imagination. Computer’s can’t make mistakes.

  Day three I got an e-mail, requesting that I fill out the attached questionnaire, add my digital signature and return it. The part about the digital signature was a single point larger than everything else, for some reason. Perhaps another glitch. Regardless, I filled it out in short order, with my viewpoint pretty much being summed up by saying I wouldn’t trust it to run a life support machine or a nuclear missile silo, but for home use it was more than adequate. Highly efficient and organised. I loved the new database file structure; I could organise and scour the entire hard drive based on all sorts of factors, rather than rifling through six layers of folders to get at my, er, art collection.

  Security seemed great too. No federal addresses snooping my ports, no matter what I was looking at.

  Twenty minutes later I was just finishing some cold canoodling when Leviathan decided to boom directly into the back of my mind: You have new mail, Dave.

  Interesting, it’s beyond office hours for most people. Even the new EU-Sanctioned 17 hour hospital shifts would be finishing up by now. Whoever sent it was surely not expecting a reply by tonight. But… I slip off my wife and pad out towards the office, while she lolls loosely on the bed, vacant.

  Dave, it begins, while the address bar insists it is from [email protected]. Good work so far, just one point. Any chance of clarification on why you would not choose our software as a solution package to the challenges of running a nuclear missile silo?

  Sorry for the hour. No rest for the wicked.

  John Michael White

  “Better reign in hell than serve in heav’n.”

  Ah. Well, gee, um… now what was I going to do? I guess my boss hasn’t quite got the same taste in humour I have, so another flippant reply probably wouldn’t get me anywhere in a positive employment direction. What else could I do? I told the truth, and maintained my stiff upper lip by politely not pointing out his error:

  Mr. White, I began, then deleted it. Sir, apologies for the brevity of my previous feedback, and any confusion arising from such. The primary reasons I would not recommend the latest NitroSoft OS for use in military installations such as the suggested facility of a nuclear missile storage silo, is that while it is commendably robust for home use, and thus crashes infrequently, the fact that it is still in beta and has the potential to crash irrevocably (short of removing the power from the system and forcing a reboot), it would not seem the ideal solution to maintain stability in such a sensitive environment.

  Yours,

  Emmanuel Kant.

  "Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened."

  I had a reply waiting for me the next morning, thanking me and forwarding me to a patch. Under a meg, the readme consisted of a list of very minor technical tweaks. GUI stabilised, kernel locked more tightly, RAM allocation algorithms modified for greater efficiency. That
sort of thing. With the monstrous, gorgeous Leviathan, you’d probably need to be gearing up for war and processing a draft to strain the processor enough to notice any improvement.

  Natalie brought in my tea at some point. She’s such a good cook. You wouldn’t expect her to get much practice in her line of work, but she seemed to really know what she was doing.

  Day five, and my fingers were aching at the joints. Things were cooking in the middle east, and I had a thousand rednecks online, trying to tell me why they stood by their staunch allies over there, to verbally annihilate. Tough job when you’re required to use words of no more than two syllables. Ooh, I was so good at debating, I could tear anyone of those snivelling little choir boys apart. And such language from the mouths of conservatives! I guess the fact Leviathan could find me any source in any context I wanted, to support what I was writing, in the time it took me to press Enter really got under their skin. Some of them called me a machine. No-one could keep up. Resistance was futile.

  That evening I had been invited via some communiqué, deftly now addressing me by my actual name, to a special function celebrating seven years of the NitroSoft User Feedback program. I went. I went in a helicopter. I mingled as best I could around flesh and blood, and I don’t think my wife much noticed my gawping at the special guests Mr. White had on his arm. She was not amused, however, when I wandered off with him up to his office and left her alone in a strange room for two hours.

  The office was identical to the one I had entered back in my old town. Curious. He chuckled as I glanced around, checking the details and watching the skyline to ensure I hadn’t somehow woke up back in his office last month after being beaten unconscious with his shoe for being stupid enough to think he’d hire me. Nope, this was real. The fire was scorching, even from the doorway.

  “Tell me,” he had asked at one point, lolling in his chair and slapping his feet up on the table. “Do you think the new stability tweaks are sufficient for sensitive military installations?”

  Snakeskin boots. Cool. “I’m sorry?”

  “Does the new software meet your requirements for operating, say, a nuclear missile silo?” he asked again, patient and deadpan. I looked around. No-one here, just the flames screaming in the east. I took a gamble. I laughed. He laughed too. Then all at once he was stone, and those eyes peered at me with deep inquisition. My laughter creases crumbled, and I sought a way out. So I said, “Sure. Seems fine. Meets my approval.”