Ash stood with his mouth agape, staring at the towering structure that gleamed like a skyscraper-sized ruby, wondering what monsters lay within. It caught the sun like a crimson mirror, its mirror polish making it look almost wet.
Acres of parking lot sprawled between him and the entrance.
“Pick up your jaw, bro!” Dylan called through the open car window.
“Isn’t it amazing?” Ash said, unable to peel his eyes away. It was so perfect it didn’t look real. It looked like a digital image, three-D modeling by someone ignoring the laws of physics.
“It is quite a sight. Too bad I can’t go with you.” Dylan sounded truly regretful, even though he was more of a fantasy football than a fantasy roleplaying kinda guy. “The boss has me working all weekend.”
“You could call in sick.” Ash glanced over his shoulder with an eyebrow raised. “I got a Ruby Ticket, you know. I can take whoever I want.”
“Tempting, but I’m already on Terry’s shit list and rent’s overdue.” Dylan was referring to getting caught smoking weed out behind Digital Dungeon while he was on-shift. Ash could hardly blame him, though. He’d been there when Dylan’s girlfriend flounced into the store with her new bae. Dylan looked like he’d just taken an atomic roundhouse to the forehead. Ash had chased the two assholes out of the store with a can of pepper spray. Then leave it to Terry to come back from her AA meeting early while Dylan was burning his sorrows. “Have fun, bro. Hope the date goes well!”
Ash doffed his Crimson Castle baseball cap and waved it as Dylan’s Civic, a car that was older than both of them, clattered and coughed away. Then he replaced his cap—it still didn’t fit quite right, too new—but soon enough it would fit like a pair of favorite jeans. He cranked the bill backwards as usual, to keep his thatch of curly hair in line. His was a life of perpetual hat-head.
The parking lot was full of cars baking under the summer sun, the empty shells of quiescent beetles. Here and there, groups of visitors made their way to or from the building, the ones coming out either chatting with wild enthusiasm or shambling with shell-shocked exhaustion. The exit lay unseen around the side of the structure, but the entrance glittered like the front of a casino, and a vertical sign stretched up and down one corner of the building.
KARNATH’S CRIMSON CASTLE
It managed to sound both cool and cheesy at the same time.
It didn’t resemble a castle at all, but as the eyes climbed the almost flawless ruby exterior, its corners and planes seemed to become more fluid, a thing of postmodern curves and asymmetrical planes. The photographs Ash had seen online and in the major game and tech magazines, taken from the ground or from drones, couldn’t seem to agree on what the building should look like. Nor could his eyes, for that matter, because it looked nothing like he expected. Photographs simply couldn’t contain it.
He checked his jeans pocket again and felt the stiff plastic of his Ruby Ticket. When the plain, white delivery van had shown up outside his apartment building, he almost didn’t answer the door. But some intuition had spurred him, and the earnest nonchalance of the delivery driver made him wonder if he was being served legal documents. When he saw the logo on the manila envelope, his heart leaped into his throat.
Months before opening day, the internet forums and chat rooms devoted to Karnath’s Crimson Castle were buzzing with rumors of Ruby Tickets, a free pass that offered the full, immersive experience, including travel to and from the venue. The recipient could bring whomever they wanted, stay as long as they liked, play as many missions and scenarios as they could manage. Even lodging and food were covered, as those were considered part of the game. He wondered if there was a realistic limit, having read all those posts about what people would do if a Ruby Ticket found its way into their grubby little digits.
Ya bro Id just live in ther, some dudebro mouth-breather had said. The real world suks donky balls.
The charismatic extemporizer wasn’t entirely wrong.
All Ash had had to do was fill out a three-line entry form.
He felt like an eight-year-old standing at the gates of Disney World.
Not as if he’d ever had the chance to go to Disney World. He and his mom couldn’t have afforded a single day, much less a whole trip. He knew, because he’d begged her for months, and finally she had broken down and spelled out the dollar signs for him. She managed to break it to him in the kindest way possible, given her habitual directness, telling him no way, no how, would she ever be able to take him to Disney World. For them, she said, the county fair was a stretch, and that was if she could get the time off. The worst part was he knew how ashamed she’d felt about it, right up until the end.
But now, here he stood before the ultimate gamer-amusement-park-funhouse-escape-room experience. More real than reality, the ads said.
He knew the specs from dozens of articles he’d read over and over. An escape room funhouse utilizing a combination of Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality, thirty-three stories high, sheathed in gleaming scarlet. The composition of the exterior was a well-guarded secret. The more he read about the Crimson Castle and its enigmatic inventor Alistair Marquand, the more he wanted to know. He could go on about it for hours to anyone willing to listen. By now, his online friends knew better than to bring it up.
All this alone would be enough make his heart flutter like a butterfly the size of an Impala hubcap, except that...
She was coming.
DocHoliday666. Twitch goddess. Champion first-person shooter. Babe extraordinaire. Smart enough to be a neurosurgeon. All he really knew about her, beyond her online persona, was that her name was Ivy.
He turned and scanned the parking lot again for any sign of her.
* * *
Ivy saw the enormous, garishly red structure over a mile away. It dwarfed everything around it, surrounded by a moat of concrete parking lot. It looked like the lair of some demented, post-modern wizard.
Ellie glanced at her from the driver’s seat. “Are you sure you want to do this? I mean, you barely know this guy.”
“That’s why you guys are here,” Ivy said. She didn’t have to add in case he turns out to be a creep. But moreover, what she could never tell them was that they were her parachute in case he turned out not to be a creep—and she totally lost her nerve.
She and Ash had video-chatted a few times, and he was really cute. Seemed pretty smart, too, if a little on the slacker side. The weaker factor in this dating equation was whether or not she was ready for any sort of romantic entanglement. She wasn’t a Mr. Right Now kinda girl.
Her chrome fingers looked so delicate when she flexed them, almost elegant. Miraculously, she could even feel them. They didn’t feel or move quite like biological fingers, but she could manipulate things, grip things, lift things. When she looked at it, flexed it, she felt like a Terminator. She hadn’t yet tried to drive with it, though. Mother—aka Doctor Louise Simpson, neurosurgeon and inventor, darling of the medical establishment and swimming in research funding thanks to what she’d done to her daughter—had warned her it would take some time for her nervous system to assimilate the new connections.
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A clearing of the throat from the backseat heralded her brother’s declaration. “Well, I’m here to be Mother’s spy.”
Ivy rolled her eyes. “James, you’re here because you’re sixteen and still need a freaking babysitter.”
James slumped sullenly in the back seat. “Yeah, well, that wasn’t my fault.”
“It never is,” Ivy said. “What did she promise you?”
“Driving lessons.”
Ivy growled, “How mercenary of you.” And how practical of Mother.
“Now, don’t argue, you two,” Ellie said. “I’m sure James has many fine qualities.”
James brightened at the vague intimation of praise. “Really?”
Ivy hated it when he got all moony-eyed whenever Ellie noticed his pitiful existence. But he wasn’t lying either. Their mother made Ivy babysit today so that James could report back on her mental state. The question was: would he give their mother an accurate report, or could Ivy convince him otherwise? That remained to be seen.
Ivy’s heart sped up as Ellie pulled into the parking lot of Karnath’s Crimson Castle.
Ellie breathed a sigh of appreciation. “That thing looks—”
“Like something from another planet,” James said. “It’s hideous!”
“I think it’s gorgeous,” Ellie breathed. “Look at those lines.”
“Okay,” James said, “maybe not hideous.”
Ivy looked at the ruby-red skyscraper and thought they were both right. Glimmering blood-red, catching the afternoon sun like a mirror, and so oddly shaped, eschewing any obvious symmetry. The parking lot was near capacity, even though the place hadn’t been open but a couple of weeks.
Alistair Marquand’s CastleCorp had spent as much on the media blitz as it had on whatever that building’s exterior could be. Every gamer, VR, and tech website in the world had been buzzing about it for months. Even Architectural Digest had devoted half an issue to it, fraught with speculation about the undisclosed nature of the exterior. There were rumors it was pure synthetic ruby, but Marquand held his secrets tighter than a defense contractor. If that were true, why on earth would something so ostentatious be used as a building material, as if this were one of the Great Pyramids?
Ellie drove around the parking lot for several minutes before she found an empty space.
Meanwhile, Ivy’s heart was thudding against her sternum like her character was on its last ten percent of health and a thousand people were watching live.
“Is this crazy?” Ivy said, unable to rein in a spasm of nerves. Ash was just some online rando, and she was a hot mess.
Ellie said, “Don’t worry. We’re all together. You’ve gamed with him before, right?”
“Yeah,” Ivy said, crossing her arms, observing a band of passing teenagers headed for the entrance. “A ton of times. Doom, GTA, Cyberpunk 2088, Obsidian Gate, even RDR3.”
“What’s ‘a ton?’” James asked.
“A dozen or so.”
James guffawed. “He’s probably a fifty-year-old lesbian.”
“You got something against lesbians?” Ellie said sharply.
James sank bank into his seat sheepishly. “Sorry.”
Ivy suppressed a smile. “Open mouth, insert leg, James. What are you, twelve?” She knew Ellie to be pansexual, but James didn’t. When Ellie and Ivy met, they were both gawky, awkward eighth-graders, but as they had matured through high school, university, and the corporate serfdom forced upon early twentysomethings, Ellie Lopez became the most beautiful woman Ivy had ever met, olive-skinned, raven-haired, with shockingly green eyes and perfect curves. Her stunning beauty had made high school a hell of catcalls, gropy boys, and stalkers, and her tender spirit made sure she took all that toxic misogyny to heart. She could have been a model, but wanted to pursue art and illustration instead.
And what had Ivy grown into? She wasn’t sure.
“Score!” Ellie yelped at the sight of an empty parking place. She gunned the engine and got there two seconds before someone else.
* * *
Ash saw her first, and his heart leaped like an edgerunner with cybernetic legs. Long dark hair with her trademark white forelock, but wearing uncharacteristically normal clothes. When streaming, she wore dark lace and leather, a kind of Old West meets anime bunny vibe. Today though, she wore a bright floral sun dress that caught the sunlight behind her and Doc Marten boots. Her chrome arm caught red glints reflected from the Castle.
His heart went out to her. She was maybe the best known amputee on the internet, although he’d never been able to find any explanation of what happened to her. Her fame had grown like wildfire over the last six months as her first-person-shooter skills became legendary. Few could get the drop on her. She’d first appeared with the name DocHolliday666, streaming game sessions on the Extreme Doom multiplayer servers, tearing through hellspawn and other players with equal ease. She was so guarded it had taken him several team-play sessions to get her first name, several more to determine her relationship status. And then finally, they’d had some video chats outside of the games.
“Be cool be cool be cool be cool....” he breathed. “Don’t screw this up.”
Then he spotted two other people who were apparently with her, and his heart fell between his feet and deflated like a rotten pumpkin. She’d brought back up, not just a third wheel but a fourth as well. Why would she do that? Simple. In case he turned out to be creep, no doubt. He had about a second before she saw him. He could run, back out now. Disappear before she saw him. He could ghost her, flee into his burrow, and nurse his shredded blood pump.
Quick. Regroup. Maybe this could be salvaged. All he had to do was not be a creep. And since he wasn’t, that part should be easy. There were few things more dangerous, both body and soul, to a young woman, especially a beautiful one, than opening up oneself to the horrors of internet behavior. She was just protecting herself, and rightfully so. Respect for that. A couple of video chats did not a friendship make. He took a deep breath and steadied himself. He was the one with something to prove. So be that guy. Be James Bond, not Trevor Philips.
Her eyes caught his, and flashed with a smile of recognition. She waved, he waved back. So far, so good. That gorgeous smile was real.
As the trio stopped before him, he bowed. “DocHolliday666, at last we meet.”
She smiled, “BoomStick-007, our meeting has been foretold.”
Ash warmed that she remembered his Evil Dead-inspired handle.
The teenager rolled his eyes. “I’m a nerd, and you’re gagging me.”
Ash extended his hand to Ivy. “Ash Reynolds, at your service.”
She shook his hand with her chrome one, hard and unyielding, like shaking hands with a mannequin that moved, but gentle and warm with body heat. “It’s nice to finally meet you in person. This is my brother James and my friend Ellie.”
Ash shook Ellie’s hand, and boy was this woman no slouch in the looks department. A wary hesitancy in her, however, stopped her from meeting his eye.
James’s handshake was limp and a little sweaty. He wore a faded Journey t-shirt that looked vintage 1985, complete with holes, with a shaggy haircut and baggy blue jeans. The spattering of acne wasn’t enough to be disfiguring, but it did detract from a kid who might someday be as good-looking as his sister. Ash did not miss the zit years at all.
“I see you already got the merch,” James said with a smirk, referring to Ash’s baseball cap, as if it made Ash the biggest nerd in the world.
Ash frowned, but suppressed his surge of defensiveness. This little twerp could not harm him. Nevertheless, he’d been dreaming of going into the Castle since he’d first heard about it. “Shall we? Adventure awaits.”
“Dude, do you always talk like somebody with a stick up his ass?” James said.
Ash stiffened and scrambled for a polite but firm rebuff, but Ivy beat him to it. “Good grief, James, be nice. This isn’t middle school.” She turned to Ash. “You’ll have to excuse him. His development stalled at puberty.”
James glanced at Ellie as he reddened and shoved his hands into his pockets.
Ash shrugged magnanimously. “It’s all good. It’s like a dungeon party working out the kinks, right?”
Ivy smiled, “I suppose so.”
A steady stream of people were passing under the glittering marquee. According to the specs Ash had read, the sheer number of individual, customized play areas for each party was mind boggling. The computing power required, not to mention the electricity, to provide full Extended Reality experiences for all of them had to exceed that of some countries.
“Well, let’s rock,” Ash said, gesturing toward the entrance. “I’m excited to jump in.” And that was a perfect mask for how excited he was to be going into this with Doc-FREAKIN-Holliday666.
The hallway leading deeper into the building, thronged with a solid queue of people, was lined on both sides floor to ceiling with video screens. The screens cycled through images from a variety of settings from the medieval to the contemporary to the otherworldly, filled with characters who were investigating ancient tombs, puzzling out labyrinths, fighting aliens, prowling foggy Victorian streets, or fleeing monsters across a castle parapet. A small chiron on each screen read: LIVE GAMEPLAY IN PROGRESS.
As they neared the queue, Ash spotted a roped-off aisle labeled Ruby Ticket Holders Only, which had no waiting at all. “Oh, hey! We’re royalty,” he said as he led them toward it.
They passed from outdoor concrete to plush, crimson carpet, where a kiosk awaited Ash to scan his Ruby Ticket. A moment of panic washed through him that it wouldn’t work, that he’d damaged it somehow, and that he’d be stuck looking like an idiot in front of Ivy and these two near-total strangers. When the scanner flashed from red to green, relief washed through him and put extra bounce into his step. The ropes angled them away from the general admission area to a quiet hallway lit with faux torches.
A life-size animatronic figure of Alistair Marquand, clad in tuxedo and top hat, its handsomely chiseled face waxen yet animated, perfect white teeth gleaming like porcelain, robotic eyes glinting with strange intelligence, greeted them with an elegant bow and a hat-tip. “Welcome, travelers, to Karnath’s Crimson Castle.”