The Game Read online

  He clapped his hands together, sharp and harsh as a lightning bolt, and laughed again, delighted. “Excellent.”

  I woke up around lunch time on day six, after a pretty rotten night. Natalie had been sniffing and sobbing into her pillow for a good couple of hours, and my curious grunts didn’t seem to be getting through to her. So when I finally opened my mouth to ask what the big deal was, I got a four hour Spielberg epic of a tale about how frightened she was for her grandparents way over there.

  “Oh, they’ll be fine,” I said with authority. “There’s always some trouble brewing over there, but no-one has the balls to really have a go. It would take a monumental act of stupidity to take on your homeland. Remember, they’re not alone.”

  She snorted. I guess she wasn’t comforted by the idea of the most hated country in the world watching her grandparent’s backs. We got to sleep though. As far as I know.

  Early that afternoon I was heading to the office again, when the crispy static of a poorly shot TV show gripped my attention. I was just passing the living room, and stuck my head through the frame. There was Natalie on the couch, those beautiful, serpentine fingers wrapped around her mouth, eyes wide and wet. I looked at the TV. I felt something, something I hoped I’d never feel again; the horrible lurch in the gut when your brain begins fighting with itself over whether or not what you’re witnessing can truly be reality.

  The Whitehouse was burning.

  Below the ghastly visage of firefighters rushing around, flames licking the sky and soot smearing the world, a ticker chugged merrily along:

  Seven strikes against western targets… Washington, New York, LA, Las Vegas, London, Belfast, Berlin… US presence in Palestine on high alert… Mossad denies knowledge…Willams wins the open…

  I withdrew from the room, dumbfounded. I got to the office to find the computer already on, ticking quietly at my favourite message board. Seventeen threads about the attacks. I picked the one with most replies. What were they thinking? You do not bite the hand that feeds you, even if it feeds your enemy too. Right?

  I didn’t eat that day. I didn’t really notice either. Guess I wasn’t hungry. When I got to bed, Natalie was already asleep. I kissed her cheek. Thank goodness she was getting some rest. Hope she didn’t have a headache with all this stress; there was a bottle of pills on the bedside table at her end of the bed; left open.

  And on the seventh day, a computer ‘glitch’ caused a major malfunction of seven missile silos on the east coast, launching their payloads straight towards the trajectory panicky operators had pointed them at yesterday. Jerusalem.

  Bugger. I was having a tedious sticky fumbling on the couch when the news broke. I felt I might’ve been neglecting her, at least in her perception.

  My wife broke off, and for the first time in days looked me in the eye. Tears wavering around her eyes, cheeks sunken, breath catching on grief, she asked me “How could this happen?”

  I swallowed. I couldn’t think of anything, other than “bad things happen”, which I felt was pushing it even when a teacher was trying to rationalise why people in school felt the need to push me down the stairs onto a board of nails.

  Fortunately I was relieved of this duty by Leviathan, who took the opportunity to chime in. Human error, she said.

  I cast my eyes upwards, as if a pervasive machine might like eye contact. “Human error?” I repeated.

  To be human is to be in error. To destroy, divine.

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