Chapter 60: Bug Out
The laughter faded and normal Street Fighter sounds resumed.
It looked like Miguel had started a mirror match. On one side, under the CPU’s control, was normal-ass Ryu, the poster boy for the game. White gi, brown hair. On the other side, a palette swap.
I didn’t know this specific version of this specific game well enough to say for sure, but somehow I doubted there was a palette for Ryu where every surface was the same oversaturated, hurt-your-eyes yellow.
“So weird,” Lena said. “Do you think you have to win the match, or...?”
“I seriously doubt that it matters,” Miguel said.
She waved at the buttons. “At least try some moves.”
Miguel’s shrug was almost, but not quite, imperceptible. He executed the quarter circle forward fireball motion and tapped light punch again, but he did it so slowly that his golden Ryu went through a little dance of crouching, standing up and taking a step forward, and throwing a punch into thin air.
While he ate a fireball from his CPU opponent, Lena scowled at him.
“I told you I was not much for these games,” Miguel said.
“Were you when you were a little kid?” Zhizhi asked.
“I wasn’t allowed to play violent games at that age.” He exhaled a puff of smoke. On screen, he got kicked back to the ground just as he finished rising.
I saw Lena’s fingers flexing and knew she was a lost round away from asking to take his place.
I laced my fingers through hers and felt the tension. She flicked a glance at me, but there was only so much I could do. Thankfully, Bernie meeped in solidarity with me; she reached back and pulled him out to hug him.
Zhizhi said, “Why do you own a copy of one of these Street Fighter games if you never play them? I saw the box at your place.”
Miguel shot her a glance, giving even his passive, first match CPU opponent another unanswered opening. “As you correctly deduced, I’ve played since.”
“When did you start?” she asked.
I didn’t understand her line of questioning, but it seemed to hit home. Miguel’s hand tightened on the stick.
When the CPU shuffled forward to attack again, he twitched through a series of motions. In the darkness of the arcade, I couldn’t follow such quick hand movements. I only knew what he’d done when his golden Ryu countered the CPU with a dragon punch, a fiery rising uppercut.
The whole screen flashed with golden light. Between that and the single color glitched palette, it was hard to tell where Miguel’s actual Ryu ended and his afterimages began, as both rose into the air and the CPU’s health bar emptied out.
Which was wrong on at least three levels. First of all, Miguel hadn’t done anything in the match except whiff a single punch, certainly not enough to fill up a super meter that would usually require multiple exchanges to charge. Second, there were no supers in the original release of Street Fighter 2. Third, when supers finally did get introduced, Ryu’s was an enhanced fireball. Despite using a re-colored version of the original sprite, I was pretty sure this animation was ripped straight from the sequel, a game that hadn’t even come out when Cinderella City closed.
All of which was sort of interesting in the abstract, but I had no idea what it meant. I stifled a laugh and Lena glanced at me. I’d just wondered if Third Eye Productions could be sued by Capcom for distributing a modified version of their game in this unreal environment.
Then Miguel’s golden Ryu landed and turned toward the camera to flash a victory pose.
The cabinet said, “Congratulations!”
The character’s mouth synced up perfectly with it.
Nobody was laughing now.
The game seemed to freeze on the victory screen, except that the golden Ryu’s mouth spread in a grin that really didn’t fit the character. It continued spreading to the edge of the sprite’s face, then kept going a few pixels beyond.
On a scale of creepy shit we’d encountered since we started to play Third Eye, this probably shouldn’t have even rated. At least for me, though, and I’m sure for Lena, it evoked the many video game creepypastas we’d stayed up late reading on the internet. She squeezed Bernie tighter and I wrapped an arm around both of them.
I didn’t think our fear was completely irrational, either. Sure, there was no evidence that this grinning presence could hurt us physically, or even that it would want to. Something messing with our electronics represented a different and equally terrifying threat, though. Our livelihoods, our hobbies, and even our access to Third Eye depended on our phones and computers.
Miguel just seemed annoyed, though. He tapped light punch until the screen unfroze. A second round began, but the CPU’s Ryu stayed prone and its health bar didn’t refill.
Miguel pushed away from the cabinet and took a drag on his cigarette.
“Did it bug out?” Zhizhi asked. “If you can’t attack, you can’t win?”
“Depending on how bugged it is,” he said, “I’ll win when the timer runs out, since my opponent has less health. If that doesn’t work, then I’m done with this nonsense.”
She approached the cabinet for the first time. After she shifted her camera to the opposite shoulder, she touched Miguel’s hand. “Does it bug you because you don’t think you’re going to get anything out of this? Or because you don’t like having your past dredged up?”
“Both,” he snapped. His shoulders sagged. “Sorry. I know I’ve been short with you this evening.”
Zhizhi patted his arm. “Once I understood, it didn’t bother me.”
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“No?” He raised an eyebrow.
She grinned. “Didn’t bother me much.”
He held his cigarette out to the side and leaned in to kiss her cheek. She tilted her head at the last second and he got more of a kiss than he’d bargained for. Although as easily as he leaned into it, perhaps he had bargained for it – that was the smooth sort of move he’d always had and I hadn’t.
I felt Lena’s elbow in my stomach and glanced at her. She was staring at Miguel and Zhizhi. She mouthed, “When?”
Meaning when had they gotten together. I realized I’d never confirmed my suspicion with Lena, or even voiced it. Between – everything – it had slipped my mind. So much shit had happened.
And continued to happen. On screen, the timer ran out. The mechanical voice announced, “You win.”
“You’d better see this through,” Zhizhi said. She stepped away and Miguel turned back to the cabinet.
The win screen flickered as he gripped the controls again. When it cleared, it showed the map with the different characters placed around the world. Except that while the flags representing their home countries seemed to be in the right places, the map itself had glitched out and was all blue. A drowned world.
Aside from that visual bug, the game worked about like it had. Miguel breezed through his next match. His golden Ryu was absurdly overpowered. He had supers that hadn’t existed in this version of the game, he seemed to have no limits on how or when he could use them, and they did outrageous damage. He finished Ken with a fireball super and, like the CPU’s Ryu, the American fighter spent the whole second round lying broken on his side of the screen.
While we waited for the timer to tick down, I said, “Maybe try beating the next one without a super?”
Miguel grunted. “It would be more engaging. Perhaps it will be informative, too.”
We waited in silence for about thirty of the sixty seconds. Amazing how long that can feel.
Abruptly, Miguel said, “You were right.”
About finishing a round without a super? Before I could put my foot in my mouth by saying it aloud, Zhizhi nodded.
“It was a hell of a birthday party,” Miguel said. “It may legitimately have been the last one ever held down here. My brothers, my sister, my cousins, my classmates. We did not fit in the arcade, so we took turns exploring Cinder Alley.”
“Even you, birthday boy?” Zhizhi asked.
“Even me. My papa insisted.” Miguel’s fingers drummed on the rim of the cabinet. “He was also the one who insisted I be allowed to play every game, though. Even the forbidden ones. I didn’t understand at the time why my mother indulged him.
The end of the match put his story on hold.
If it’d been me at the controls, I would’ve gone back on my resolution when I saw the next match was against Zangief. I’ve always hated fighting grapplers, and here was the origin of the entire archetype. I’d have whipped out an instant kill super on him for sure and gotten back to my emotional journey.
Or maybe I just wanted to hear Miguel get back to his emotional journey.
Instead, he buckled down and won the match more or less fair and square. More less than more, considering that even without the absurd super, golden Ryu moved crazy fast and hit like a truck.
Miguel’s reward was a normal second round, and he played it normally. It seemed like it would be possible for him to lose if he played sloppily, since he did take damage when he let hits through, but he cruised to another win.
Golden Ryu frowned at us from the screen, and I frowned back. The character, or the game, was definitely reacting to what we did, and didn’t like this approach. Did that mean we weren’t supposed to play fair? Was that a message straight from Third Eye Productions?
Miguel didn’t seem to notice. He said, “It turned out to be a farewell party.”
“You don’t mean for the mall, do you?” Zhizhi asked.
“I suppose it was that, as well,” he said.
Another trip across the drowned world. Another match. Miguel dialed in and, once again, won without using one of his character’s broken supers. Once again, it looked to me like the character was frowning. After the second round, he showed off a new win pose: pacing back and forth on the screen.
“Interesting,” Miguel said. “Another piece of sloppy design.”
The pacing stopped. Golden Ryu glared out of the screen. It wasn’t proof that whatever Third Eye entity we were dealing with could hear us, but it sure as hell felt like it.
Either Lena shuddered or I did. Maybe both. Bernie grumbled.
“How so?” Zhizhi asked.
“Third Eye obviously wants me to dwell on my tragic past. I’m sure it will be exceptionally therapeutic.” Miguel saluted the screen with his cigarette. “Why, then, does my character throw a fit if I don’t breeze through matches without thinking?”
“You think the character is, what, a representation of Third Eye itself?” she asked.
“It’s obviously connected,” he said.
She paid the character more attention. He snapped instantly to his original win pose, complete with too-wide, face-splitting grin.
While the match ended and Miguel moved on to his next opponent, she compared her footage of the screen. “It’s mischievous.”
Lena’s eyebrows raised. She pushed Bernie against me. I gave him a hug and he responded with a happy hum, but I felt like I was missing something.
Miguel struck a balance with the next match. He played the first round without using a super, then ended the second instantly. Golden Ryu struck a win pose straight out of the normal game. Neutral.
While the next match queued up, Zhizhi said, “May I ask?”
“If I said no,” Miguel said, “would you go home and search the obituaries?”
She rested her hand on his arm. “You already know the answer.”
“The arcade was closed within the week,” he said, which definitely wasn’t what she’d planned to ask about. She seemed content to wait while he ended the next match, but she didn’t have to. He’d fallen into a rhythm, and, coupled with the strength of his character, won even as he continued to speak. “Papa checked into the hospital a week later. All the adults already knew he had cancer.”
Zhizhi glared at Miguel’s cigarette.
“Colon cancer.” Between rounds, he took the cigarette out of his mouth and tilted it in her direction. “Where do you think I’m putting these?”
She leaned away and folded her arms.
“Sorry to hear about your dad,” I said. “I never knew that.”
Miguel startled all of us by barking a laugh. “Cameron, he died when I was six. You and I didn’t meet for another twenty years. That is what makes this whole thing so absurd. Third Eye has opened a window into my soul? It needs to look closer.”
He’d just won another match. Instead of even bothering with a win pose, golden Ryu put his hands on his hips and glared out of the screen.
Miguel glared back. “I’ll get nothing out of this. I can’t play the game, and whatever trauma it’s trying to dredge up is so old I can’t even remember how I felt about it at the time.”
Golden Ryu hung his head.
“Maybe it’s trying to help you remember,” Lena said.
“That’s not my definition of help,” Miguel said. “I’m glad the game worked you through some things, but this? Does nothing for me.”
Lena propped her chin atop Bernie’s head.
“Let’s see it through,” Zhizhi said. “If nothing else, we’ll learn something. And Cameron and Lena should get something out of it, right?”
The prospect of collecting a resource from Miguel’s Realm made my stomach churn, but he just nodded.
“I’ll win this,” Miguel said. “But that’s it. One token, one win, one prize. The three of you are welcome to play on if you want, but I’ve had my fill.”
We got a full blast of mechanical laughter.
The screen glitched out. Instead of another trip across the drowned world, it launched directly into the versus screen, with both character portraits a garbled mess.
From the cabinet emerged a familiar line, but spoken in the same carnival attraction voice as the laughter:
“Here comes a new challenger!”