Booth slammed his fist into his enemy’s nose. His bare knuckles screamed with agony at the impact, but that was OK. The pain was part of what bled away the rage. A sharp, satisfying pop of breaking cartilage helped, too. Blood gushed. Booth could practically smell it.
The simulated fighter groaned and grabbed at his broken nose, leaving his gut wide open. Booth could have driven a punch into his opponent’s stomach. He’d have rather tackled him, taken the other figure completely down with a full body, bone-crunching slam that felt powerful enough to drain all Booth’s fury out of his veins and into the earth.
But you could only do so much with VR inside the restrictions of your own small bedroom. And he only wore haptic gloves, not a full suit.
Your brother is dying. And your parents need you. Get your ass back out there.
Booth glared at the semi-realistic depiction of a human punching bag in front of him, but the need to beat something senseless had subsided for the moment. And the thing he really wanted to punch, to tackle, to take to the ground and never let up again, it had no face. He couldn’t touch it.
He ended the simulation and shoved his visor to the top of his head. After rubbing at his eyes to make sure there were no signs of tears and weakness on his face, he put on his best stoically cheerful expression and trudged to his little brother’s room.
Toby was ten, half Booth’s age. He’d have been eleven in a couple of weeks. A little less than an hour ago, Booth had helped Mom drag every spare pillow in the house into Toby’s bedroom. They’d wedged and stacked the pillows until Toby was propped up enough to make his breathing easier.
While they’d worked, rage had built like unbearable pain in Booth’s blood. After, Booth had gone to his room for a fifteen minute punching bag break, so he could spend his helpless fury enough to prevent him from punching a wall, a past experience that had taught him that doing real injury to his hand would both keep him on the bench and prompt a pained sorrow in his mother’s eyes. The first consequence no longer mattered. The latter did, more than ever. He’d learned long ago to limit his tension-releasing outbursts to the football field, where they were acceptable, or to at least keep them behind closed doors.
Another fifteen minutes later, Booth sat in a hard-backed kitchen chair beside Toby’s bed and played on repeat the pre-release trailer for Redemption Wars. Their parents sat with them, not so much watching the trailer with their sons as pretending the world wasn’t ending.
“Play it again.” Toby rasped out the request at barely the volume of a whisper.
At any normal, sane time, Toby should’ve been in the hospital. But the AI running the online triage system had told them with simulated sorrow that Toby’s symptoms didn’t indicate he was a candidate for elevated care at this time.
During his senior year in high school, Stephen King’s The Stand had been on Booth’s English class’s classic literature reading list. Even considering the very real events of the COVID pandemic of the early 20s, King’s novel had described the initial outbreak of a fictional epidemic in terms that had seemed over the top to Booth at the time. It had turned out to be scarily realistic.
There was nothing anyone could do for Toby. There wasn’t anything anyone could do for any of them.
We’re all fucked.
Even just making someone comfortable was beyond the resources left in this strained, dying world. Frustrated, helpless rage bubbled anew in Booth’s blood.
The end result was that Toby remained in his own bed and leaned against a mound of pillows, twig-like to the point of being nearly lost in them. Stringy ginger hair a shade lighter than Booth’s and their mom’s framed his too-pale, freckled face.
Toby could barely get together enough breath to ask Booth to play the trailer again. Booth wasn’t all that interested in the game itself. The world seemed interesting and the trailer was good, but he wasn’t sold on the turn-based gameplay. A couple of his buddies wanted to play, so Booth had pre-ordered to join them. The new tech that Redemption Wars had been created to showcase sounded cool, too.
But the bottom line was, whatever Booth personally thought of the game, if Toby wanted to re-watch the trailer until everyone in the room had every nuance of every word memorized, that was what Booth would do.
Just keep pretending everything’s OK. Don’t give him time to think about anything.
Booth and Toby both wore visors which could handle full VR and AR. Mom and Dad weren’t wearing visors, so they’d only see the trailer’s flat projection image. Booth didn’t think either of them cared about that. Mom had curled up on the edge of Toby’s bed and sat as close as she dared without making him uncomfortable. Her hand rested lightly on the back of Toby’s arm, and her eyes were closed. Dad sat in a kitchen chair a few feet from the foot of Toby’s bed, arms crossed and gaze fixed on the floor. Booth was pretty sure both of them were mostly trying not to cry. Or scream.
Maybe both. That was definitely what Booth wanted to do. The urge to lash out physically rose—stand up and shout, throw the chair, beat down all the things that were wrong in the world until they surrendered.
None of the things that were wrong were things he could lay his hands on.
Just be here, then. Be with Toby.
Booth lifted his hand, still encased in a haptic glove, and a projected control pad flickered from transparency into opaque view in front of him. He tapped the control pad to start the trailer.
The music started a split second before any visuals, eerie and soft and whispering. In the space between Booth and Toby, the cube-shaped diorama of a 3D presentation formed, a simple dark space filled with floating gray mist. The camera closed in, drawing Booth’s point of view into the darkness until it surrounded him. A campfire glow emerged, but he remained back from it, watching from a distance. People dressed in the faux medieval-styled clothing of pretty much every epic fantasy game ever huddled around the fire, glancing nervously at the surrounding darkness.
In the mist, a lurking shape appeared and then vanished, moving too quickly to focus on, circling just outside the light.
“There are forces which exist just beyond the sight of mortal ken.” The narrator’s voice was feminine but deep, vaguely accented and deliberately mysterious-sounding.
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
The lurking shape rose from the mist and spiraled skyward. The camera tilted and followed it, leaving the campfire’s warm light far below. Mist and clouds cleared, and the dark silhouette of a dragon came into focus against the starry field of night sky. One of the stars flashed and then grew quickly brighter and larger, as if coming closer.
“For ages, Dragons and Radiants, the corrupted creations of vengeful gods, have battled each other for dominance, wreaking destruction across the world.”
The brightening star resolved into a massive winged humanoid figure with fiery eyes and a snarling mouth. The figure’s armor and massive two-handed sword emitted a fiery glow which illuminated the details of the opponent it faced, a scaly crimson dragon. With sharp teeth and claws, the dragon spun toward the angelic figure as it swung its giant sword at the dragon. The sword clanged off metallic scales, and the dragon roared and breathed flame.
As the dragon’s flame breath created a special effects transition, the music blasted into a hardcore driving riff with screaming, growling vocals. The trailer rocked through various cuts of dragons burning through cities, angelic figures leveling temples, and normal people fleeing in terror or getting caught in the crossfire. Some looked like actual gameplay footage, but Booth thought a lot of it was purely cinematic.
A turn-based game won’t have that much action. It sounded boring to Booth, excruciating like chess compared to football’s immediate gratification.
The music fell, and the sultry narrative voice spoke over top of it. “Each time, at great effort and cost, embattled mortalkind has managed to end the threat and return the avatars of the gods to their slumber.”
More cuts played, of humans and another taller, thinner humanoid race that Booth assumed would be elf-like but lacked pointed ears and had shades of skin and hair coloration that might mean they were elemental-themed. The beings formed armies which wore differing armor types and tabard designs. The armies clashed on massive battlefields, while dragons and angels wheeled overhead. A montage of varying individual heroes played, showing classes that were clearly fighters and rogues, mages and clerics, fighting solo or in small teams directly against the dragons and angels.
The music rose again, punctuated by clanging swords and blazing spell effects. As the song reached a final crescendo, a truly spectacular spell blast overtook the entire screen, punctuated by a dragon’s roar. The effect’s lingering sparks slowly fell away and the screen cleared, back to dark with mist and the campfire. The music returned to the eerie soft whispering it had started with.
“But gods cannot truly die. It is only a matter of time before their forces rise again and the battle must be fought anew.”
A dark shape flickered though the mist, circling around the edge of the screen.
“That time is now. Heroes are needed. Will you answer the call?”
With that, the screen darkened to show the game’s title, Redemption Wars, in crackling silver letters on a black screen with the smaller logo of the production company in the bottom corner.
As the trailer did its end fade, Toby grinned weakly at the spot where it had been. “You’re going to let me play on your account, yeah?”
“Course,” Booth replied without hesitation.
A held-breath moment followed, where everyone in the room knew the truth and also that everyone else also knew, but none of them could bring themselves to stop pretending and say it out loud. In another life, what would have gone into the space was the immediate objection of their parents to Toby playing a game which was clearly rated Mature and used a controversial, unproven device to play.
“He’s only ten,” their mother would have said.
“You’re a grown man now, old enough to know better. It’s your responsibility to act in his best interests,” their father would have said.
And Booth, in all honesty, would have known that already and weighed it just as carefully as Dad would have insisted. Not only were there the usual reasons for a Mature rating on Redemption Wars—not to mention it was multiplayer, which could turn it mature even if the game content wasn’t already—but it used a new device called a Neuroconnect cap which interfaced directly with your brain. The biggest part of that was to feed the game’s sensory input directly into your nervous system, rendering the need for things like haptic suits and feedback beds obsolete and also, at least theoretically, delivering a more realistic experience than those pieces of gear.
Booth didn’t pretend to understand all the science behind it. But he’d worked every summer for as long as he’d been old enough, with most of the money going into his college fund. The college thing hadn’t happened, so he’d had enough to afford Neuroconnect and the game pre-order.
That Neuroconnect interfaced with your brain had understandably raised some concerns about privacy protections. Redemption Wars did also use Neuroconnect to perform a limited amount of mapping your brain, gathering data so it could do things like customize your origin story and class recommendations. There were rumors RW also read your public records for the same purpose.
The gamemaker, Ugly Star Productions, had made transparent all their intentions and issued the necessary warnings and disclaimers, and the privacy regulations put into place had assured Booth enough for him to pre-order for himself. He’d have been less quick to put the cap onto the head of his ten-year-old brother.
But in that heartbeat of a moment it took for Booth to consider all those things, a susurration of distant sirens rose and fell outside. A tingling mix of antiseptic sting and sick room decay reminded him that Toby’s room had become a hospital ward. And no one said any of the things Booth knew they’d have said in other circumstances. They all knew that neither Toby nor Booth would ever actually use Neuroconnect to play Redemption Wars or for anything else. Possibly no one ever would. By the time the game would have released, they’d all be dead.
The urge to shout and punch things welled up. Booth pushed it back down.
Earlier generations than Booth’s had grown up believing the world would end by climate change or nuclear war. They’d had problems like world hunger and failing sources of natural resources. Humanity had fought like hell to fix all those issues. Maybe not entirely, but they’d made things better. Things had always been looking better.
Until they hadn’t. In the end, all the things they’d done right and made good progress toward fixing, and it hadn’t mattered.
It’s like the universe wanted us to fail, no matter how hard we tried.
Booth lived in a small town close enough to Champaign-Urbana that he could catch U of I home games. He came from a family of farmers and firefighters, teachers and nurses. People who took pride in doing the right thing and never backing down when the going got tough.
This fight hadn’t given them any choice. Toby had caught it a little over a week ago, Booth a day later. Booth’s mom hadn’t presented any symptoms yet, but his dad had started coughing this morning.
Neuroconnect’s showcase game, Redemption Wars, had originally been scheduled to release in late December, just in time for winter break. The bug had started going around in early November. At first, everyone thought it was just another flu strain. It wasn’t until after fall break that people started dying. More people got sick. More died.
No one recovered. Not one person. Everyone who caught it died.
Booth didn’t feel as terrible as Toby, yet. He had the cough, the fever, the burning in his lungs. But he hadn’t weakened too much to do anything just yet. The final twenty-four hours seemed to be the real crashing point, symptom-wise.
Booth allowed himself for one moment to contemplate the fact that once Toby died, his own death would inevitably follow in less than twenty-four hours. His throat closed, and the fire already burning in his lungs felt hotter at the thought.
So don’t think about it. Think about Toby. That’s what matters right now.
“Again?” Toby asked.
Booth played the trailer again, three more times before Toby’s breathing rattled and dragged so weakly that he couldn’t ask anymore. Then Booth kept playing it anyhow. The two of them let the music thump through their veins as if it could keep their hearts pumping forever. They leaned into the all-encompassing vision of mythical monsters and heroic figures as if they could will themselves into the fantasy and live there forever instead of dying here.
They watched it twice more after Toby stopped being able to ask.
Then Toby stopped breathing altogether. The cessation of that terrible rattle and rasp left a vast, horrible silence in its wake, filled a split second later by Mom’s anguished wail of denial.