In the Court of the Yellow King (12 page)

“Not really... I don’t spend too much time on it... it’s just that it’s too weird for me.”

“Weird?”

“Well, the last time I played this guy came running into the gym from the street, and started fighting with everyone, screaming and acting crazy. One of the other players had to kill him with a hand weight. The guy had no eyes, like someone tore them out... or maybe he did it to himself. He kept asking us if we saw the sign, or something like that. If we’d found the sign yet.”

“You act like you haven’t lived in Punktown your whole life.”

“Exactly. I think I’d prefer a game that got me away from all the scary stuff in this city,” Beau said.

Now, night after night, Giff found himself obsessed with finding that beautiful woman in the black and gold dress again. The impulse was so strong, and seemed so beyond his control, that he wondered if it was all part of the game’s central storyline, trying to pull him back in.

He repeatedly checked the area where he’d first seen her, but couldn’t find her again. He noticed that the hovering holographic sign reading
Imperial Dynasty
had vanished, and the room beyond the window was entirely swallowed in blackness, the people and even the tables he had seen previously now apparently all gone.

Yet one night as he was prowling in his search for the woman in the silk dress, as his stolen car crossed a high, elevated bridge he happened to look down at the street below and spotted the luminous yellow letters that spelled out
Imperial Dynasty
, hovering in front of another building with a large dark window out front. Was it a chain of restaurants, then, or the same business... hopping from one location to another around the city? As restless, perhaps, as he was.

He always entered Fukuda Bioforms through one of the Employees Only side doors, but today when he’d parked his brand new fluorescent pink Razer and walked to the entrance, he realized he didn’t have his company ID card on him. He asked the door scanner to read his face and voice, but it didn’t respond. Probably a glitch. Frustrated, he decided to try the building’s main entrance instead. It was a large structure, so as he turned away he was prepared for a bit of a walk, but he had only taken a few steps when a series of loud cracks caused him to flinch to a stop.

He looked toward the parking lot, and saw a figure walking between the vehicles, carrying a bulky assault engine – the kind of military weapon that could fire solid projectiles, beams, shotgun pellets, even mini rockets from its various muzzles. He knew this, because he often used one himself in
GTH
, usually when fighting forcers or street gangs. This person had set the gun to single-action fire, solid bullets, and was pumping rounds into the parked vehicles as he maneuvered between them. Windshields erupted into crystalline sprays, black holes popping open in the vehicles’ hoods and flanks. Giff realized the man was laughing wildly as he fired.

The man turned his head and noticed that Giff was rooted in place, staring in stunned disbelief. That was when Giff recognized it was Donny.

“Hey, Giff!” Donny called to him. “Have you found the Yellow Sign yet? It changes the whole game, man... it changes
everything!
”

Giff held up his hands as Donny started walking toward him. He wanted to whirl away and make a run for it, but was afraid to set the younger man off. “Come on, Donny... easy, guy.”

“I’m glad you’re here, Giff.” Donny kept coming. “You understand! You’re addicted, too.” Grinning, he turned the big gun around in his hands. “Hey, watch this, man... the sign wants to get inside us... you got to let it in!”

He stopped about ten feet from Giff, raised the assault rifle so that one of its muzzles pressed against his own forehead, and pulled one of its multiple triggers.

Giff jolted to consciousness.

He was slumped back on the love seat that could be folded out into his bed. The stink of excrement greeted him, and he realized his pajama pants were soiled, and thoroughly soaked with urine. So was the cushion he was seated on. “Oh God,” he groaned, and in speaking discovered that his throat was as dry as a tube of cement. He stripped off his pajamas, dropped them into the trash zapper, and before stepping into the shower leaned over the sink to cup handfuls of water into his mouth. When at last he straightened, in the mirror he saw the ultranet interface disks stuck to his temples. He peeled them off.

No wonder he couldn’t get into Fukuda Bioforms, he thought. For security purposes, of course the company wouldn’t allow its interior to be mapped for
Grand Thef
t Hovercar
. Or had that been reality, after all, and he was now immersed in the game? No... no... this reflected face was his, not Marcel Valentin’s. That was the only real way he could tell.

He showered, then emerged to stare at his love seat in disgust. Cleaning it would be a headache, but he couldn’t afford replacing it right now.

Time. He glanced at a clock and groaned again; he was over an hour late to work. He was afraid to talk to his manager, Pierre, so he decided to call Beau and Donny to tell them he’d be in late. But his head pounded so much from the hunger that yowled in his belly, he knew it was better to just tell them he wouldn’t be in today.

Before calling his friends on his computer’s vidscreen, he went to put on a fresh t-shirt and sweatpants, and that was when he spotted his love organ curled on the worn carpet beside his bureau. It had blackened and shriveled in death, its taint of decomposition masked by the stench of his own waste.

He dumped the starved love organ into the trash zapper, too, then called his department at work.

Beau came on the screen, and immediately blurted, “God, Giff, you really had me worried! Where have you been?”

Only an hour late and Beau was this worked up? Trying not to sound irritated, Giff told him, “I feel horrible, Beau... can you tell Pierre I need the day off?”

“
Again?
Giff, I don’t know if you’re going to have a job left when you get back.”

“What do you mean, ‘again’?”

“This will be the fourth day in a row you’ve been out. Don’t you know that? Are you on drugs or something, Giff? Do you even know about Donny? I was beginning to think the same thing happened with you. Pierre has been calling you and calling you... we were getting ready to come out there and look in on you.”

“
Three days?
” Giff croaked in his still parched voice. Then his befuddled brain backed up a few steps. “Wait... what happened to Donny?”

“Oh God, you don’t know. Oh God, Giff...”

“Tell me,” Giff said. Though he did know, in fact. Had seen it, in fact.

“Donny shot himself yesterday. At home. He shot his poor wife Tessy first, and then he shot himself. He left some crazy note painted on the wall of his living room, I guess.”

“Something about a... Yellow Sign?”

“I don’t know, Giff; the forcers haven’t released that to the public. Why, did he say anything to you about what was going on in his head?”

What was going
into
his head, Giff thought. “No,” he replied.

“You know what I think was wrong with him? And what’s wrong with you, too? It’s that blasting game. I played it.... I know how crazy it is. Why do you think they announced they’re shutting it down?”

“Shutting it... down?”

“You really have been out of it, huh? Yes, Giff. Go look at the news on the net. I think that game poisoned Donny, and it’s poisoning you, and—”

Giff ended the call abruptly, and navigated to a popular news site on the standard net. He did a search on
Gra
nd Theft Hovercar
, and right away came up with a press release from the company that had created the VR game. It was as Beau had said: effective immediately, the game was going to be made unavailable due to a virus that had somehow been introduced into it. Intentional sabotage was suspected, but was still unproven. The virus, which had not yet been pinned down, had created “unfortunate irregularities and distortions in game play.”

“No,” Giff said aloud as he read this announcement. He was distressed almost to the point of desperation. Shut down
Gr
and Theft Hovercar
? It was like hearing his own death sentence pronounced. At the very least, like hearing himself sentenced to live the rest of his life locked in a tiny cell, all his freedom forever denied.

He retrieved his interface disks from the corner of the bathroom sink, pasted them back on his temples, returned to his computer and tried logging on to the game.

He was successful.

G
rand Theft Hovercar
had other ideas about being shut down.

He was spawned in the game standing on a fire escape platform, three floors up from street level, at about twilight. He recognized the neighborhood: it was the mutant slum dubbed Tin Town, which was always a good place to go in the game if you wanted to end up fighting for your avatar’s pseudo life.

He wasn’t alone on the fire escape. Beside him, even more out of place in this neighborhood than himself, the woman in the gold-patterned black silk dress leaned against the railing looking down at a vacant lot directly below. His heart sitting up like an eager dog, Giff moved to the railing alongside her, but a curved wing of her glossy bobbed hair shielded the side of her face from his view.

She pointed below. She said, “The play has already started.”

Though he hated to take his eyes off her, Giff followed her graceful gesture.

It didn’t look like a play to him; more like some kind of ritualistic dance. A dozen mutants cavorted below, in a circle, as if drunk or insane or both. Their afflictions varied wildly. One had eight or more stick-like, crooked limbs hanging out of its torso, thrashing as if to some unheard music. Another’s head looked composed of a bunch of giant, flesh-colored grapes. The blighted beings shared only two things in common. All twelve of them were naked, and all of them bore on their forehead (or what approximated a forehead) an identical glyph, the symbol Giff had seen painted in the alley, glowing yellow against their skin like a holograph. Glowing like a fiery brand.