Ghosts in the Machine Read online

  "That's right, and we have no power to stop it," says Jackpot, his eyes narrowing to surly slits. "Not that we ever did. It’s not our place. We have no power over anything we do here. You think you decide where to point your gun? They just pull our strings."

  "See, that never made any sense to me," I say. "The users, the developers—which is it? Which one matters?”

  "None of it matters anymore, apparently," Jackpot says, his voice low. He's throwing half his ammo on the ground, now. "In a just world, that hacker wouldn’t be allowed to live. That asshole deserves a bolt of lightning from the sky. He doesn’t belong here."

  He runs ahead. I pick up the ammo he dropped. “I don't know about you,” I call after him. “I control myself. I can control myself.”

  He grunts an inaudible reply.

  “What?” I say.

  The shots have begun. We’ve hung around the base too long. The counter-terrorists are already here.

  I see Jackpot's body twitching, coiling into a fetal circle as he falls, too fast, to the ground.

  For the first time since I ever spawned in the world, I close my eyes. I run back and forth in the darkness. I imagine the sound of bees in my ears, buzzing, blaring out the laughing cyborgs.

  This isn't fun anymore.

  ***

  Jackpot screams.

  His arm is moving.

  “I'm not doing it,” he screams at me. “I'm not doing this!”

  The arm draws his gun, points it.

  I try to speak. My voice crackles like a rusted can. “What?!”

  “I've been hacked! I've been hacked!”

  He sounds on the edge of tears, his stony, square face stricken with shock.

  “Do something,” he says, shaking me with his good arm. “This thing...this isn't me. I didn't do this. I didn't put this in me!”

  I stare.

  He pulls away, paces.

  “This must be a test of faith,” he says, after a while.

  I can hear the shots coming. Not far away now.

  “We’re camping,” I say. “We can't stay here.”

  “I will overcome this,” Jackpot says. “This is my choice. This is what I will do.”

  His arm raises and shoots through the wall. A headshot notification blares on my visor. His arm jerks left. Right. Headshot. Headshot.

  He shoots through my body.

  No friendly fire.

  I fall to my knees.

  “You're not hurt!” he cries. “I saw it! I saw it go...through.”

  I lie on the ground anyway. “Jackpot,” I say. “I can't do this. I can't deal with this.”

  “What are you saying?” says Jackpot. Headshot. Headshot. His eyes focus on me, his arm moving without him needing to see where it goes.

  The victory screen appears.

  “What are you trying to say?” I hear his voice fade in and out as the kill counts display on the insides of my eyelids. Jackpot's arm killed them all. Every last one.

  ***

  “Tell them to take me,” I say, as the round restarts. I don't buy ammo. I take out my knife.

  “Tell who?” says Jackpot. He looks afraid. I am afraid, too. My chest hurts from where the bullet went through it. An invisible, leftover pain.

  “Tell the developers,” I say. “Tell them to take my body. Make it into a different person. Tell them to take me out. Either that or give me the upgrade.”

  “I can't talk to them,” says Jackpot, his voice cracking.

  “You're a man of faith,” I say. “You told me you knew them.”

  “Just the text,” he says. “I've only studied the symbols. I don't know how to make them hear me.”

  “But they changed people here,” I say. “The world changed us. I have to change, too. I can’t keep up, anymore.”

  Jackpot can't hear me now. He's shooting through the wall again. I lie on the ground. I wait for him to finish beating everyone.

  “Why is your hack so much better?” I shout over the shots. “Why are we winning?”

  “I don't know,” he shouts back. “Maybe I'm just that good?”

  ***

  In the next round, Jackpot's legs are gone. The world has replaced them with sparkly sticks that hurt my eyes to look at directly. He clips the air as he jumps, too high to see. The world shatters around him into pieces. I blink and blink again as he jumps, my eyes unable to focus on him.

  “Come back,” I say, my voice feeble. But I don't mean it. I feel jealousy grow in the pit of my stomach.

  He calls something from high above me.

  “I can't hear you,” I say.

  The victory screen appears. I begin to understand.

  He doesn't need me anymore.

  ***

  I run ahead. I want to die. I want to watch the world through Jackpot's eyes, through the re-spawn camera feed. I have to be dead to see it.

  I am tired of being alive, being safe, just sitting by as the world burns down and reconstructs again and again and again, so fast that it makes me sick.

  I make it up to the crates and I wait. I hear shots, but far away, and behind me. Is Jackpot jumping and shooting? I won't be able to die and watch the world if he kills everyone too fast. The rounds go by so quickly now, I’ll barely have a chance to see through his eyes before he ends it all and I’m jolted back to the spawn point again.

  I run further ahead. Finally, I hear footsteps, but still no shots.

  Why haven't they tried to kill me? Do they see me on their visor maps? They must know I’m not Jackpot. After all, they’re still alive.

  I pause. I take out my knife to show I'm not a threat, and I strafe around the corner.

  A man has his back to me and his knife out.

  I jump up and down, hoping he will hear me, but something feels wrong. He is too still, and he won't turn. And then, without warning, he runs. I watch a bullet zigzag through the wall and clip his shoulder.

  I run past him, throwing my body in front of his knife. He backs away from me in a panic, slicing wildly. It's over fast.

  ***

  I’m in the air, with Jackpot, soaring. The world looks like shimmery steel; buildings and walls waver, flickering in and out of being. The sand-swept inclined planes. The low rock walls. The pyramid of crates by the bomb site. The tiny counter-terrorists stumbling on their well-worn pathways, the old routes that made sense back when all of their enemies fought on foot. They are like mice in a maze now, or ants in a farm, trapped but still going through the motions. What else can they do?

  I watch Jackpot's aim-assisted arm blast them out with slick precision. Headshot, headshot, headshot.

  The victory screen feels too fast.

  I want to stay up there with him forever.

  ***

  “Jackpot, I don't think anyone is hacking anymore,” I say.

  “I don't think so either,” he admits. I strap on armor. Jackpot goes bare-chested, now.

  “You could stop using your powers,” I say, a little too quiet.

  Jackpot gives me a hard look. “What makes you think I can?”

  “I don't know,” I shrug. “I just mean, you don't have to jump all the time.”

  “We're winning, aren't we?” Jackpot says, his voice tight. “And anyway, I didn't ask for this. I can't control my arm anyway. I mean...it's not my arm. I didn't put this on. I was chosen.”

  I pause.

  “Chosen,” I say, at last.

  Jackpot won't look at me.

  “You really can't control it?”

  Jackpot shakes his head.

  “When you see the code,” I say, “what does it look like?”

  He meets my gaze. His eyes look tired. “It gives me a headache, now,” he admits. “I can't look at it anymore.”

  “That can't be good,” I say. “That can't be the developers.”

  “It could be,” he says. But I can hear the doubt in his voice.

  “It’s the users,” I affirm. “If this were the developers, if this was an update, then
why can’t the rest of us jump like that? This doesn’t seem fair, you have to stop—”

  “How many times do I have to tell you?” Jackpot has begun shooting. “I can't stop it. You can't stop it. We can't control anything here!”

  I pause for a while, then I crouch and stand up again. I try to sense whether I am standing up, or whether someone else is standing up. I wave my knife in front of my face. Am I doing this? I feel a dull panic rising in my throat. Am I the only one in my head? How would I know if I weren’t?

  I try to think back to my first day, meeting the team, hearing Jackpot’s gruff swears for the first time. He told me where to hide, when to strafe, how to jump. I didn’t always do it right, and I still don’t. I have good days and bad days. But everyone does, don’t they? Or are my good and bad days the fault of someone else, some higher power that decides how well I fight?

  My kill counts, my deaths, my stats—I see the numbers, I know they’re real, I lived those experiences. I earn my victories, and when I have a rough day and feel too dizzy to aim straight, that’s on me. Believing otherwise sounds like a cop-out, like making excuses. I own my mistakes.

  Yet here was Jackpot, whose body had changed before my eyes, against his will. Or so he said. Did he really not choose this path? Could I get modified, too—cursed with powers by some unseen demigod?

  I flash back to that sensation of floating in the air with Jackpot, seeing far-away dots moving on the ground. We didn’t deserve that feeling. And yet no one had taken this power away from him. The world around us had broken, and no one had fixed it. How long could this go on?

  I have to pray now for a miracle, even though that miracle would confirm my fear that I am not alone. This world has rules, rules that I had followed in spite of myself, all along. There are higher powers here. My victories are mine, but they are not only mine.

  “I can hardly believe all of this,” I say.

  I wipe my eyes. Where is he?

  “Jackpot?”

  ***

  I walk out of the base.

  I can't see a victory screen yet. Someone is still out there.

  I walk slowly through the crate maze. I take my knife out.

  In the hallway, I hear a soft rustle of movement. I move towards the noise.

  Three men with knives have lined up at the end of the hall. They stare at me. I edge ever closer.

  “Hello?” I call out.

  I bounce in the air slightly.

  “Hello,” I say. “I'm sorry.”

  The one in the middle bounces back but remains silent.

  “Let's just be normal,” I say. Can they hear me?

  The one on the left takes out his gun.

  “Let's just be normal,” I say again, more to myself. “There are no hacks on this server. Hackers get booted.”

  The pain comes slow and thick, in bursts. All three men have drawn and begun to fire. My eyes fill with blood. The world goes red, then black, then white, then the gold of stretching sand. I’m back at my camp again.

  I close my eyes and let my body go still. I can almost feel the code. It feels safe. It feels balanced.

  Ten Steps

  Lana Polansky

  He walks toward the same cave, in the same bushes, on the outskirts of the same town. Those are the same blue herons and tracks in the mud. The same grateful, young damsels eager to put themselves on display for him and only him. The same big blade slung over his back, the same pistol in his holster. He’s only vaguely conscious of the sameness, of how every new step forward feels like trodden ground, of how the words in his head never quite feel like his own. He walks, or he is compelled to walk. He enters the cave, he removes the gun. He takes a remarkably familiar ten steps forward, but he doesn’t remark it. He removes an elixir from a satchel he has never actually seen. He drops it on the ground.

  He takes a step back, and the world crumbles away. The lines disappear, all the details shatter, and a fractal forms around him. Waves, diffraction, and eventually darkness.

  The walls twist and the floor falls away. Colors mix and separate; lines blur, expanding and diluting from opaque saturation, dulling and greying, until they are imperceptible. The distinguishable world collapses into a color-faded soup.

  He jumps, falling endlessly. He splays his arms like a heron, because there’s nothing else to do. Waves radiate from his limbs, his head, the sharp angles of his body as he falls. Parts of him separate into the void. Dullness opens up to more dullness, spirals curl into deeper spirals. The world of rocks and trees and townsfolk and incongruities washes into a limbo. Everything falls apart. A world made infinite in a grain of sand, a world made of little grains, imploded.

  The world goes black. . .

  The world whirrs and buzzes and tries to start again.

  He wakes up in the darkness. Something went wrong: a hiccup in the system, the fabric of his universe now thinned and frayed.

  His eyelids brush against a cold, dark surface. Cold. He feels something all by himself. He lies there several moments, presses his hands, his body, his face onto the concrete. Cold. It shocks him into awareness of his own skin, his muscles, his veins, his heartbeat. He gives locomotion a try. A hero can move his own hands and feet. He can hold up his own head. So the hero begins: he pushes himself up, falling onto his backside. He stabilizes himself with his hands almost involuntarily. Almost. He is aware of why he did it. His brain sent the message to his hands. He didn’t know he had one, but the message was carried to it by his nervous system. It told him to stop from falling. He sits there a moment, eyes widened and fixating on nothingness. His hands planted on either side, his legs lying half-bent limply in front of him, he moves his neck. He feels the movement of his head, craning and flexing, looking up and down. A dim light trails across the floor that he wants to follow, highlighting the crevices and corners of the otherwise barren, cold, black cell. He’s blessed with suffocating muscularity, but feels like bent straw. He pushes off with his hands, getting one leg bent up, the other resting on its knee. He rests his weight on the ball of his raised foot, holding himself, gritting his teeth, pulling both legs up uneasily, almost falling. With the same kind of involuntary yet deliberate action, his arms fan out on either side as he tries to find equilibrium, one foot in front of the other, shuffling forward. He feels as though he has never done this by himself before.

  He trips. He repeats the process. He falls, a tooth falls out and fades away. It hurts; it really hurts. He pushes himself up again and walks, following the dim light. He becomes more accustomed to himself, finding his gait, the barrel-chested gait of a hero, or something like that. The light leads to a slit in the darkness, becoming brighter and more distinctive as he approaches it.

  He catches his own shadow in the light. He has seen it before, but never took the opportunity to examine just how odd it looked. He doesn’t really know why it’s odd, just that it’s so blocky. So jagged. It never swished and swayed elegantly like the others did. The strangers had nice-looking shadows. But his just sort of jarred frenetically, even when he was standing still. He never realized how self-conscious this made him feel.

  He has been watching it flicker on the ground for...who cares how long? The passage between one point and another was always so fluid, but the actual sensation of time—of slowness or speed—never crept up on him. Something would happen...and then it would stop. He would become fixed, like stone, until it started again. He could never control when it began or stopped, and it hardly mattered anyway. He always carried with him information from the last session, never knowing how it got there. He never knew how it stayed there, and he didn’t know the difference between starting and stopping. Now he feels it so viscerally. There is a difference between the two, but he can’t put his finger on it.

  The hero walks through the crack tentatively. It’s jagged like his shadow, but it’s hot. Little, blocky grains of white light twitch and spill out. His body dissolves in the white grains, reforming on the other side as though all his molecu
les separated and reunited.

  Familiarity washes over him. He feels the need to breathe. With his nostrils. His nostrils. He suddenly becomes aware of his nostrils. This world with rocks and trees and people makes him want to breathe in with his nostrils. He heaves, inhales the heady aromas of...

  ...Nothing. This familiar world smells like nothing. The void had more feeling. But. But. But maybe if he touched something? The grass? The green-gray grass sways elegantly in the scentless wind. He feels fairly confident about the grass. He kneels to touch it. His eyes widen, his lips curl into a pathetic, little grin. His hand wafts over nothing.

  Nothing. All these new thoughts swishing into his brain make him self-conscious about the vapid ones he’d say aloud all the time, sometimes for no reason, sometimes while he was just running, or loading a gun. His rippling muscles—look at them! How they glisten! The bitches love them, just like they love a little tap on the bum. It was always assumed, and no one ever bothered to ask.

  Nothing expands and warps in color. Suddenly the grass multiplies before him, prismatically spawning distinctively un-grasslike colors. The grass twitches and jars like a shadow, this little patch, multiplying into oblivion. The ground shakes under it, a ground he can’t feel underfoot. He falls on both knees, looking out onto the spontaneous overgrowth.

  “What are you doing, Bud?”

  “...”

  “I said, ‘what are you doing?’”

  Bud looks up at the old guru in the white gi. Wrinkling, wispily and balding, stoic and perpetually unimpressed. This was the place where he came to learn his formidable Kung Fu skills. He had never had a lesson with the man. He just ran the gauntlet tutorial until he could do it adequately enough.

  But he hadn’t used his mouth yet. He makes himself aware of all the tiny muscles in his face. He tries parting his lips, contracting those muscles around their contours, forcing the breath through his vocal chords to produce sound made audible in his throat and articulated by his tongue, until finally,

  “Muuhhhhh....”

  “We need you to clear out the cave.” The master doesn’t blink, doesn’t flinch. He points to that same cave, down that same path, down the definitely different string of infinite grass now growing into the air. This is the part where Bud would run to it, gung-ho, kicking dirt up under his heels.