Booth had almost quit the JV team his freshman year of high school. Football was something that had been expected of him—he was a big guy, and a big guy in a central Illinois town who wasn’t playing football was a waste of potential. But he hadn’t loved it, at first, and he’d wanted to quit. He would have, because his parents had always told him and Toby both that all they wanted was for their boys to be happy.
When Booth had marched out to the backyard to break the news to his father, Dad had been leaning on the fence and bragging it up to Mr. Haines next door about how his boy Booth was going to be the next star defensive tackle. Dad had been grinning so big and standing so tall that all Booth’s intentions had fled. He’d waved sheepishly at Mr. Haines, ignored his dad’s questioning look, and gone straight back into the house to make sure his practice uniform was ready for the next morning.
Booth had learned to love playing football. He enjoyed the camaraderie and the sense of power from being strong and making his body do things other people couldn’t do. He learned the thrill of gathering up every little thing that made him angry and channeling all that fury into the hits he made against the other team. He got hooked on the thrill of trying hard and winning. According to his dad and coaches and other old-timers, there were a lot more regulations and restrictions than there used to be, but the game still had heart. People still showed up and filled the stands.
All through high school the pressure to not only love playing but to get good enough to go college and then pro got heavier and heavier. That part, Booth hadn’t liked as much, maybe because heart alone wasn’t enough to make it in the cutthroat of college and pro sports. And heart was the majority of what he’d had going for him. When no college ball scholarships came through and walk-on tryouts were a bust, all that pressure had been off. Booth had felt hugely relieved but equally guilty about feeling relieved.
Leaving Toby’s room—leaving Toby—after he died felt like that times a billion. He couldn’t wait to get out of there, but he couldn’t stand to leave.
Mom remained sitting with her youngest son’s body for almost an hour before Dad gently but firmly covered Toby with a sheet and made them leave the room. “This won’t be how we want to remember him,” Dad had stated, dully but still in that authoritarian way of his.
Remember him for how long? It’s not like we’ll be alive much longer, either.
Booth hadn’t said any such thing out loud. He hadn’t said anything as he fled Toby’s room. He wanted desperately to retreat to his room and pound his fists against make-believe enemies until the furious pain raging behind his eyes went away. But he didn’t want to abandon his parents.
And he was afraid. He could feel the disease that was going to kill him clutching at his breath. Either the house had gotten a lot hotter, or his fever had notched up another degree. Given that it was December in the Midwest, he assumed it was the latter.
I’m next.
Toby was dead. Booth had no excuse to keep avoiding the truth that his own death was impending. One of the most awful things about TRP was that the progression of its stages was viciously consistent. Booth had gotten sick the day after Toby. That meant he pretty certainly had less than twenty-four hours left.
Two hours after Toby died, the news about the Neuroconnect Initiative hit.
They were in the kitchen, waiting for the County Collection Office to call them back. The days of mortuaries and funerals were over. No one broke lockdown for such trivial things as that anymore. The office would come to take Toby, but they were operating on a serious delay. By the time they got here, there would no doubt be two bodies waiting. A week or so after that, his parents would die. Booth wondered if by then there would be anyone left to come for them.
Booth sat at the table, his head on his arms and drifting in that feverish state between sleep and waking. He felt like shit. He wanted to go to bed and close his eyes and sleep until he felt better. But he knew that latter wouldn’t happen, so he was afraid to go to sleep. He thought that if he got into bed and Mom brought pillows in to tuck around him and prop him up so he could struggle to breathe until he died, he might just lose his mind altogether.
His folks had left the news running around the clock ever since the pandemic broke. The excuse was that they needed to hear whatever critical information might come out, but at this point Booth thought they listened more just to hear the reassuring sound of voices. People out there were still talking, which meant there was still some sort of order. Some kind of hope.
Booth ignored the blare of an emergency alert. They’d become so commonplace that they no longer commanded immediate attention. Dad shaking his shoulder was what snapped him out of it. Booth lifted his head from his arms and peered blearily into his father’s face.
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The heavy furrows which had weighed down Dad’s forehead lifted. His eyebrows arched, and his eyes opened in what Booth first read as surprise. “…listen, Booth,” he was saying. “You need to wake up and listen to this!”
Excitement, not surprise. Hope, maybe even.
Booth shoved himself slowly upright to avoid making himself dizzy. “What?”
“You have that game.” Dad jabbed a finger toward the flatscreen in the corner. “That one you spent all that college money on.”
That last sounded less accusatory in tone at least than it usually did. Booth rarely did anything he knew his father wouldn’t approve of, so it always stung extra when he did and his father turned it into a never-missed opportunity to criticize. Yet Dad sounded happy as he waved toward the newscast.
Booth squinted until he could focus and concentrated until the words spilling from the newscaster’s mouth started to make sense.
“Mere minutes ago, Ugly Star Productions broke the news that they have successfully adapted their proprietary Neuroconnect technology to fully upload individual consciousnesses into the multiplayer game which was to be the first to make use of this technology.”
“In layperson’s terms, Brenda?”
Booth listened, processing the animated, too-fast speech of the newscasters. They read and re-read the statement Ugly Star had released. Slowly, Booth put the full picture together. The technical explanations went over his head, especially in his fever-induced haze. But essentially, Ugly Star’s tech could scan everything in your mind that made you who you were and convert it into digital form. Your personality, your memories, your entire consciousness could basically be uploaded to their servers.
You could live, even after your body died.
What they had quickly labeled a total upload didn’t seem like a huge stretch. Even before, they’d planned to do limited mapping, complete with all the privacy policy restrictions and so forth. With a total upload, they simply removed all the restrictions and moved everything out of your physical brain and into a digital one. Given how much of an uproar there’d been about establishing those restrictions to begin with, so that the game could get into your brain and learn every single thing about you, maybe removing them should’ve been more concerning. Under the circumstances, no one seemed to give a shit.
Ugly Star announced an early release of Redemption Wars, starting immediately. Their servers had limitations, geographic and capacity-wise, so they set up priority parameters. Anyone with an existing pre-order at the time of their announcement was guaranteed a spot on their regional server. After that, it would be first come, first serve, with queue restrictions in place to avoid overloading servers. December 15 was announced as the deadline by which anyone with a priority pre-order who wanted to upload had to do so in order to keep their place.
The strategy was clear. If you were sick, then you logged in and uploaded, because you’d just received your death sentence. If you weren’t sick yet, then you’d have to decide by December 15 whether you wanted to opt out of your real life and upload anyhow.
Booth stared at the ongoing hubbub on the flatscreen. The newscasters had moved on to talk about how Ugly Star Productions had been an unknown before Neuroconnect and Redemption Wars, and how wondrous it was that they’d so ideally positioned to save a large percentage of humanity from near-certain extinction. That segued into the conspiracy theories already popping up—that the end of the world was a hoax created by Ugly Star to get people to sign over their digital souls and upload themselves for some nefarious purpose. What purpose that might be, no one seemed able to answer.
Because there aren’t any answers.
Toby’s death was not a hoax. The burning in Booth’s lungs was not a hoax. And however suspect some of the things being done with Neuroconnect might be, none of them mattered more than Booth’s current situation.
“I have a pre-order.” He spoke to no one in particular. Mostly he was testing to see if it still seemed real when he said it out loud instead of just in his head.
“You need to go.” Dad said it so harshly that Booth leaned sharply away from him. But Dad wasn’t scowling, and his hands were flat on the tabletop, not clenched.
Mom had sat up straight in her chair, a box of tissues and piles of crumpled ones on the table in front of her. Tear trails stained her face, but her eyes, like Dad’s, had lit up.
“One of you should take it,” Booth said.
They wouldn’t. He knew before they objected that they wouldn’t. Another wave of relief and guilt over feeling relieved washed over him.
“No.” Dad shoved his chair back and stood. He reached for Booth’s arm like he intended to drag him to his feet before remembering that he hadn’t been able to wrap his fingers around Booth’s bicep for years now. “You go. You need to go. Now.”
Before it’s too late.
No question which phase of the strategy Booth was on. If you were sick, you logged in and uploaded because you’d received your death sentence. And Booth’s was mere hours away.
Mom’s face wavered through wildly swinging ranges of emotion, from hope to understanding to renewed grief as she realized she was still going to lose both her sons. Even if Booth lived, he’d be beyond her reach. But her mouth set in a determined line, and she stood up, too.
“No,” Booth instinctively objected. “I mean, yes. I’ll go. But you can’t… I don’t want you to have to sit through that again. I’ll go in alone. We’ll say goodbye here.”
His voice cracked on goodbye, but all in all, he felt pretty calm. Maybe that was the fever, turning his brain to mush and making it impossible for him to feel all the terrible feelings he should be feeling. Maybe it was just trauma shock of some kind.
Mom cried, although Booth could tell she tried not to. Dad shook his hand and then hugged him, too. Dad’s lip quavered, and Booth couldn’t look either of them in the eyes after that. I love you and I love you and I love you. Booth held his breath and clenched his jaw until it hurt to keep from sobbing out loud.
Not for the first time that day, Booth fled the room.
If his life had been a football game, this was the point where Booth would tackle the hell out of the opposing QB and his team would win. He couldn’t see how that was going to happen this time, but as he stumbled half-blindly into his bedroom, he kept frantically trying to think of a way.