Name: N/A
Level: N/A
Experience: N/A
Health: N/A
Stamina: N/A
Mana: N/A
Body: N/A
Sense: N/A
Mind: N/A
Intuition: N/A
Yin: N/A
Yang: N/A
Stat Total: N/A
Beep!
Before Jonathan Clark is aware that he’s awake, before he sees the light sneaking past the blinds, before he feels the sweat beading his skin from a night of dreams he won’t remember, almost before the alarm even goes off; his hand shoots out, blind, fumbling till his fingers find the smooth screen of his phone.
He snoozes the alarm in less than three seconds and slips back into oblivion.
Beep!
Sleep being timeless, Jonathan has no knowledge of how much time has passed, or even that this isn’t the first alarm. He reaches out and shuts it off.
Beep!
He shuts it off.
Beep!
He shuts it off.
Beep!
He shuts it off. He’s maybe twenty, thirty percent awake at this point, aware only of the comforting warmth of his bed and his hatred for the shrill noise trying to pull him from it.
Beep!
He shuts it off, but a moment later there’s a pounding at his door.
“Jonathan?” his mother’s voice. “It’s already eleven, you need to get up! You have work today.”
Jonathan blinks, rolls over, eyes beginning to adjust. He sees the bright stripes of light on his bed, the shelf with the models of giant robots he hasn’t touched since he was twelve, the clothes scattered across the floor. His phone is in his hand. He doesn’t remember picking it up. He'll go get ready for work in a minute.
No games on here of course. He opens Reddit instead. Nothing new or interesting on the home screen. Ditto on the “For Me” tab. Same for r/Gaming.
He heard once that guys in AA, the ones who are serious about sobering up, won’t even go into a bar. They won’t go to a party with alcohol. Like, it’s not enough to give up drinking, you have to give up even looking at drinking. That’s what they have to do, that’s how you beat addiction.
Jonathan thinks about that a lot. Sometimes he even deletes the Reddit app. Stupid thing to do. He can just use the website, and, he always downloads it again anyway.
He presses the “new” button on Reddit. One last dive. He’ll get cleaned up and go to work, right after this.
There’s not much to see. Pics of brand-new games and systems. Iterations of memes he’s already seen. Rants about the state of games today. A picture of a sky. White, fluffy clouds against a background of brilliant, perfect blue. No scenery, no horizon, the camera must be pointed more or less straight up.
He almost scrolls past it. I mean, it has to be miscategorized, right? This guy meant to post in r/sky or r/photography or something and got the wrong group. But there's something off about the photo. Someone else might not have caught it, but Jonathan has spent more time looking at digital skies than the real thing, and there’s something about this one, a trace of artificiality he can’t put his finger on, that makes his gut say, “screenshot”.
Still no big deal. He’s played Breath of the Wild, he’s played The Witcher III, he’s played Elden Ring. A lot of games have good skies these days. The highest praise you can give graphics is that they look just like real life, as if being like real life is the point, as if the point of games isn’t to be as different from real life as possible. Still, a sky you would mistake for the real thing is nothing new and he’s about to keep scrolling or, better yet, put down the damn phone and go to work.
Then he sees it. There’s a butterfly in the clouds. Not a, popcorn, what-does-that-cloud-look-like-mama kind of butterfly, but a damn good one. It’s side on, flying away from him so you can see the bottom of one wing and the curving outside rim of the other. They mirror each other, the patterns inverted, the near wing made of puffy cumulous clouds with gaps of blue sky for markings that are echoed on the other wing in reverse, wisps of cloud against a negative space of sky that only takes on the contours of a wing when you take into account the gray cloud edging in the foreground. It even has antenna, two long contrails sprouting from the head.
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
It’s probably art then. Photoshop. Good, but not really Jonathan’s thing. He’s never heard of a game that puts butterflies in its clouds, and it's too precise, too perfect for real life. Still, someone put it in r/gaming, didn’t they? Maybe it’s not a mistake.
He taps the image. 0 upvotes, 0 comments, almost no context, just the image and, far enough beneath it Jonathan almost misses it, a link. He taps it.
Reddit pauses for a moment, and he’s directed away, finds himself in the app store. It’s a game, apparently, called Seven Gates. No reviews. Less than a hundred downloads. Just the title, a small square image of that butterfly in the clouds, and the install button.
He doesn’t do it consciously. No thought takes place. His thumb just reaches out on it's own and hits the button. It goes pale, downward arrow replaces by a rotating circle of dots.
“Jonathan!”
He jerks up. Even though his mom can’t see, couldn’t possibly see, he flips the phone down, finger finding the power button and shutting off the screen. The app store goes blank but he’s already up, reaching for his clothes.
“Coming!” he calls.
People always think that anyone who games must be good with computers. This is why his dad is always asking him to fix his laptop. This is why teachers used to get him to help them with their projectors. Jonathan himself believed it until halfway through his first semester he got his midterm back in CS 113 Introduction to Computing.
Jonathan is not good with computers. He doesn’t even like them that much, he just likes what they let him do, who they let him be. About all he can do is bluff programing competence. He bluffed long enough to get a job working the help desk at Kopernick's Electronics For You.
Jonathan’s already five minutes late when he walks through the door. Hardly matters, there isn’t a soul here. Why they make him come in at noon when it seems the customers only start to show at two or three, he will never understand. The only people at the desk are DJ and Kat. DJ is on the customer side of the desk, leaning against it hard enough folds of his belly billow up and flop across the top. Kat is standing so far away her back is actually against the wall.
Not this shit again.
DJ turns his head as Jonathan approaches, chins quivering.
“Jonny!” he says “I was just telling Jailbait about Skyrim. Can you believe she’s never played?”
Jonathan hates being called Jonny, but probably not as much as Kat hates being called Jailbait. It takes a special kind of person, he thinks, to see a skinny teenage girl lost in her too-big hoodies, too-long hair, and huge, buglike glasses and decide to call her Jailbait.
“Skyrim’s more than ten years old, dude,” he says. “Kat was just a kid when it came out. She probably grew up with Fortnite and shit.”
“Minecraft,” says Kat, so quietly probably only he can hear.
“Weeeeellllll,” DJ says, drawing the word out long, jowls, flapping, like Jonathan's pissed him off somehow, “guess that makes sense. You played anything good recently, Jonny?”
“You know I haven’t.”
“Too bad. The new Zelda rocks.”
"Don't you have shelves to stock or whatever it is you do around here?"
"Fuck you, Jonny."
"Fuck you, DJ."
With one last shit-eating grin, DJ turns and lumbers off. Silence descends on the help desk. Jonathan lets his eyes slide across the Kopernick's. The stacks of merchandise. The empty aisles. The big signs with bold letters proclaiming SALE SALE SALE that never go away but are only moved to different parts of the store. He stretches. Yawns. Damn he’s tired.
“You don’t game, Jonathan?” asks Kat.
“No,” he says.
“Oh.”
Silence. Kat’s looking down, fizzy hair falling across her face.
Shit. Kat is absolutely necessary at the help desk, because she actually knows computers. She can code. She can crack the skin of a laptop or tablet and work on the gleaming insides, a surgeon of silicon and wire. She goes to some kind of special school for gifted kids and begged her mom to drive her here a couple of times a week so she can work a job fixing computers. When Kat’s not there the help desk goes to shit. Jonathan’s thought more than once that he's only here to keep Kat from getting too nervous and translating for customers who can’t hear her tiny voice.
“Ok,” he says, “I used to game a lot. Too much. So much I flunked out of college and moved back home and promised my parents I'd quit. I have to see a therapist and stuff. DJ brings it up because he’s a dick.”
“Oh,” says Kat.
Silence.
Double shit. He’s just made it worse. Why can’t he ever say the right thing? The seconds tick by. Kat plays with a frayed cuff on her hoodie. Jonathan finds he’s bouncing on the balls of his feet, makes himself stop. He pulls out his phone. No new messages. No new emails, except one from the fencing club at school announcing an upcoming tournament. They're the last holdout from college, the one organization that keeps emailing him no matter how often he tries to unsubscribe. There are no games. Not even Candy Crush. Not even Solitaire. He swipes back and forth through the pages of apps that aren’t games, until something catches his eye. A blue square with clouds in the shape of a butterfly.
Seven gates. He’d almost forgotten. He should just delete it, unopened. He really should.
His thumb hovers over the icon.
Maybe he’ll just take a look. Just to see what it’s about.
He hits it.
An explosion of light and color. He can’t see. Everything is too bright. The phone isn’t in his hand. He grabs for the desk. It’s gone. He’s leaning forward, he pushes back to keep from falling, too hard, he’s stumbling back, he’ll hit the wall. There is no wall. Jonathan falls, lands right on his ass. It doesn’t hurt. There’s a hard, slapping sensation like he’d gone over backwards into a pool, but no actual pain.
Jonathan’s breathing hard. He sits there on his butt, hyperventilating, and finally his brain figures out what his eyes are seeing. It’s a sky. Blue and bold with fat, puffy clouds trailing across it and a sun as bright as any he’s ever seen. He blinks. It’s still there.
This is crazy. It’s crazy. Is he crazy?
He looks around. He’s on some kind of terrace, the paving stones cracked, edges worn smooth with time. Surrounding him stand statues of huge and imposing beasts. He turns and looks behind him. There’s a ruined castle carved, from the looks of it, right out of a mountain peak, towers fallen, trees growing up through holes in the roof. No sign of Kopernick's anywhere
Impossible. He’s dreaming, he must have fallen back asleep after his mother called and he’s dreaming the whole thing.
A crumbling balustrade lines the edge of the terrace and beyond it, there's nothing but sky. A cool wind blows against his skin. The air is thin and pure in his lungs. Somewhere, a bird lets out a high, alien cry. If it’s a dream, it’s the most detailed one he’s ever had.
Something moves. He looks up. It’s just some clouds drifting across the sky. They do seem to be moving more quickly than normal clouds, though. One cloud crosses another, and for a moment, he sees it. A butterfly in the sky. The picture on Reddit, but a thousand times bigger. Its antenna are tall as skyscrapers. Its wings big as oceans. It flaps once, and is gone.
“Holy shit!” he says. “I’m inside the game!”
A rectangular blue box pops up in front of his face, supported by nothing. It contains a single line of text.
“Welcome to Seven Gates”