Multitasking

Babylon’s sky was the only sight humanity would ever see that could truly convince them they had left their world of origin. Even the celestial ocean swimming with stars was still their world, despite being inhospitable. The hanging gardens themselves could be felt and thus understood, but they were just grit forced deep into a wound and healed over. The realm itself was foreign, and they were all immortal because they didn’t belong there.

As such the endless fields of orange and gold clouds, while breathtaking and sometimes even breathkeeping, eventually wore on the soul like the unblinking eyes of a disapproving parent. The only refuge was heading for the core of the gardens where there were walls on all sides and mindless chatter about nothing could bring them back to a sense of normalcy. Except the weather. They couldn’t make soothing small talk about that, as Babylon didn’t have any.

Various people from different places and times retained their magical or technological powers that helped them attain the gardens, and sometimes they were turned to attempts to replicate the blessedly mundane aspects of the Earth. Someone inexperienced had tried to make rain in the central marketplace, just a little drizzle to corral them under the awnings and bring them closer to each other; it had gone wildly wrong.

There was downpour in some places, but only as tight cones like waterfalls. The effect was more like a massive pool on the level above them springing a leak. Goods were washed out of their stands and broken, debris floating down temporary rivers that quickly overpowered any shallow drainage canals built into the walkways. Everything cloth hung as heavy and dark as it could, haggard in their constant dripping.

Beautiful clothing and rugs draped over lines became significant obstacles to the few people who hadn’t abandoned the flooded market. The extra seconds it took to lift their deceptive weights and get under them could make all the difference in which party possessed the treasure chest fought over. To think its seller hadn’t bothered to take it with him when fleeing the rising waters.

Such dampness made the lightning conductor a double-edged sword, as the bolts he ordered about could easily spread through puddles and streams to multiple enemies and allies alike. Still, the firework archer and the burned witch both had their fiery and explosive abilities suppressed by the same factor, so he was all that was left to help his friends with the ranged aspect of their battle.

And help was very much needed. All four of them, conductor, blooming scarecrow, snake charmer, and werepanda, were bogged down in the seafood section, with some of the fresh wares even managing to slither by and swim away underfoot now that they had escape routes. It reminded the conductor of the canals of his home Ys, but that was centuries ago by the accounting of his own heartbeat.

He hadn’t taken the form of a trumpetfish in a long time, but if it came down to it he could, abandoning his fellows in the hope of escaping with the rest of the aquatic life to some deep and hidden reservoir of the gardens, built by unknown hands, or something like hands.

Never. That was the coward’s way, and he’d already proven he would never succumb to it, as had his musicians on that fateful night when the vile princess opened the gates. It was supposed to be a celebration, and no wall of water was going to stop that. Even as everyone around them panicked and morphed into their gills and fins the orchestra kept playing, narrating the approaching disaster.

Defiantly the conductor had raised his baton to the heavens, only for lightning to come down and strike him. When he next awoke he was in the tower of the king, tended to by a handmaiden who was not authorized to fish burnt smoking old men out from the balcony but had done so anyway.

Foolish it was to think that the bolt had been a conduit, transporting him up to the tower as it took off for what turned out to be the immortal sky of Babylon. Something had taken him and placed him on the rising edge. Marimorgan’s hands were too busy catching tears. For his part the conductor believed it was his dearly beloved and departed, the flying mermaid. Somehow she still lived, or one like her.

He never voiced this theory so as not to create false hope in the remaining people of Ys. It was healthier for them to blend into the throngs of the gardens, become a new people. Integration would bring healing. The conductor thought he believed that, yet here was putting himself in dangerous situations, trying to raise funds in his battle against the royal family, who of course had no interest in becoming any sort of new people.

The enemy, whatever their cause, was there for the same thing. He didn’t recognize any of them, and he thought he had already memorized the entire population of the gardens. Soon they would learn the floating structure they all resided in was so large that parties could land on different balconies, form societies, send out exploring parties, and still not run into any of those who had lived there for centuries.

Their party was an even match of four, of which he also took note. The gardens seemed to love the number four; it popped up everywhere. Among them was a half petrified man, a hulking jester wielding an executioner’s sword, a glassblower who had weaponized their craft with magic, and a man who was perhaps Norumbegan who signaled the others by drawing symbols in smoke.

With the chest in their possession, for now pressed against a wall by the snake charmer’s back as he loaded poisonous serpents into it, a fine surprise gift should it be stolen away, their strategy turned to cornered defense. Werepanda’s bulk was equal in muscle, hide, and fur, so he took position in front of the rest, beating his chest and roaring in an intimidation display.

Whoever was behind the jester’s thick caked face paint laughed in turn, deep and wheeling like something falling down the black chasm of its own insanity. It was plain he was there for violence, the gold inconsequential. He swung the square tip of his sword low, sending a ripple through the pooling rain toward them as the only warning.

It didn’t actually reach their feet, with the lightning conductor realizing why when he took a step back and heard a crunch. Their healer the scarecrow was pulling heaps of straw from her own body, careful only to avoid the glowing pink-red flowers that held her life force. She threw them to the wet ground, and with wild gesturing encouraged them to stand on them.

She couldn’t speak with a mouth merely stitched on, but her intent was clear. The straw would insulate their legs somewhat from an electrical attack. She wanted the conductor to go all out, to use his Zeus crescendo. The plan was beyond desperate, but she never would have suggested it lightly, considering she was at the greatest risk of simply bursting into flame and being obliterated.

“We’re in agreement,” the snake charmer hissed from the back. “Do it!” The strike in Ys had rendered him more than unconscious after it traveled through his raised baton and into his body. The serpentine creature of the live sky had coiled up in his chest and now lived there. When he moved his baton as he used to, conducting the final movement of his final symphony, he could encourage it to lash out and strike with searing fangs.

“Make way!” the conductor warned the werepanda, but something was amiss. The furry beast’s black arms were lax at his sides, his jaw slack, his last roar having turned into a gelatinous yawn that flopped out. “I said make way! We’re out of time!”

They could see no spell upon him that would vex him so, and in their desperation trusted it was part of some preconceived plan. The werepanda was not an intellectual when inhabiting his furry and fanged form, but when outside of it he was a brilliant tactician. Sometimes the man would make a decision that the beast would enact, but only like a pet following a trigger its owner had reinforced many times.

He would lunge out of the way at the last moment. Yes, that had to be it; he used his great bulk to block their foes’ view of what was coming. The conductor closed his eyes and brought forth the final movement of the symphony from the recesses of his mind. Drums rolled in dark clouds that the gardens never suffered. A harpy flock of flutes swooped and transformed into gnashing wind.

The nearest concentrated columns of rainfall lit up like the pillars outside the courthouse of the gods, each issuing a blue-white bolt as cracked as any canyon, as thick as any sea serpent. They converged at the commanding tip of the conductor’s baton, which he brought down in front of him.

Electric stampeding forces blasted their way, splashing crater by crater, toward the werepanda and those on the other side of him. The time came for him to leap aside, and passed. The raging parade of shocks was already through him by the time the others realized something was wrong, but they had to deal with the side effects of the attack themselves.

Such raw power left them all reeling and unable to control their bodies. The snake charmer’s pets dropped off his shoulders and twitched. The scarecrow was outlined in campfire orange as every one of her edges was singed and gave off white smoke. The strike had explosively transformed much of the water on the market tiles into steam, so all they could see ahead of them were silhouettes.

The large one before them slumped to the side and fell, and four others were revealed past it, growing. The jester’s laugh came over them like a second darker mist, its oily cloying sound seeping into their ears and bones. The executioner’s sword approached, but it didn’t need to taste the panda’s blood; he had helpfully absorbed the brunt of the attack and protected the jester and his accomplices. The chest was theirs.

“What the Hell Marco!?” Handzy shouted at him as she slapped the table, accidentally pushing herself away from it on her wheeled chair. She struck the second granite table behind them as her question echoed out into the cool warehouse of stone slabs.

“We lost,” Plusplus said numbly, wheeling away much more calmly on dainty shuffling feet. “I basically lit myself on fire.”

“Yeah, that… that wasn’t good for us,” Flippers agreed. “We’re in the loser’s bracket now. They were streaming this on the game’s main channel too, so I think-” He closed the game and opened a browser with a few pathetic clicks on his gaming mouse overloaded with bells and whistles, like opening a can of beans with a titanium scalpel. “-Yeah, about 60,000 people just watched us kill ourselves. Nice.”

Marco didn’t say anything, even though he was driving the werepanda brawler that cost them their only shot. He was too busy to say anything. A quiet Granslam was a deeply disturbed Marco, so his teammates crowded around him to see what was amiss. His screen was still alive with many colors, but they were not the shades and textures of the hanging gardens of Babylon.

It was a digital collectible card game, with characters springing out of the cards as soon as each one was played and automatically doing battle with those played by the enemy. All of them were enmeshed in the gaming community enough to know it was called Archetypes, though the trio hadn’t played it before. It took Marco shouting and bursting into tears for them to realize he had just lost that game as well.

Without a coherent word he scrambled out of his chair, rolled onto the granite table, and sobbed into his cupped hands. Only when his breathing became more like a human and less like a malfunctioning vacuum cleaner did the others start in on him.

“So do we get some kind of explanation?” Handzy demanded. “I’d sure as hell like to know why our giant wild panda decided to roll over and die, like he enjoys being on the endangered species list.”

“I thought I could do both,” Granslam said, croaking between the words. He pulled his hands away and stared up into the fluorescent lights like he was waiting for a valkyrie to descend on their rays and take his fallen body to Valhalla.

“Both?” Flippers asked, incredulous. “You were playing two games at once, with hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line?”

“The Archetypes tournament this week has a first prize of fifty K. It’s a card game, so you take turns, and you have a lot of time for each turn. Five whole minutes. I can shower and eat breakfast in five minutes if I’m really trying...”

“You were hoping to take your turns while you were in respawn,” Plusplus reasoned, “but you weren’t dying in the gardens. Until the end...”

“That’s… that’s!” Jenny couldn’t get out anything more than that, except the hairs she ripped from her temples. Their only wiggle room had been ripped away over greed, over stupidity, over teenage boy arrogance. “Why would you do this to us!? You don’t even need the money like I do! If we don’t win I’m getting shoved off the only path I’ve ever cared to walk Marco! I could wind up with my brain melting under a customer service headset because you thought you could do both!?”

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“Your Dad’s just going to give you a job here if you need one,” Flippers argued more calmly. He put his hand on Handzy’s back to console her while she struggled to suppress the red blooming all over her cheeks and forehead.

“I don’t want his money,” Granslam said weakly. He looked like he was about to liquefy and become an invisible coat of sealant on the granite slab. “I want to make my own, and I can, if everyone would just let me.” He should’ve been concerned over whether or not Handzy would let him live, let alone keep all his fingers intact enough to game again. To contain her rage she stormed out into the warehouse, letting the rocks absorb everything she radiated.

Two tented slabs provided her a place to sit. Doing so was extremely unsafe, and she would’ve gotten an earful from Mr. Vallet if he had been there to see it. Only Flippers saw, and he joined her under their shade, crossing his legs and throwing one arm over her shoulder while she steeped in a hot sulk like a teabag with a foul flavor.

“We’re not out of it yet,” he said to bolster her. “He screwed up, but everybody does. We need to forgive him.”

“You want to forgive him!?”

“I want to forgive him in time to practice for the next match,” he reasoned, looking away, into a black hole in the granite’s many colors. “This sucks, but it’s where we are now. Let’s just move on and try to be friends. If we win it’ll be like nothing ever happened. Winning erases mistakes. It eats bad decisions, just like we’re going to devour whoever they put up against us next.”

“You’re right.” She sniffled, tilting her head back to keep a stream of hot snot from ruining the moment further. “We only lost because one of our players was so sure we would win that he tried to play in two game tournaments at the same time. That’s… badass? Just don’t tell him I said that.”

“All of your secrets are safe with me,” Flippers promised with his hand over his heart. “In turn just don’t tell anybody I’m not as much of a winner as the rest of my squad.”

“You’re a great assassin. If I was going to get murdered I would definitely want you to be the culprit,” she joked. Now it was his turn to blush. Both of them stood to get out of the awkward pool they’d just created, and hit their heads on each side of the granite tent respectively. They both emerged hissing and rubbing their scalps. “Ow ow ow shit ow. We really shouldn’t have sat there.”

“This place is a deathtrap,” Flippers agreed. Together they returned to share their utilitarian hope with Plusplus and Granslam.

Yet it would take more than hope to keep them in the Hangers-On Open. More than 60,000 people had indeed seen their baffling defeat where one player looked struck dumb at a crucial moment. 64,883 people to be exact, though only a handful of them mattered, as they were with the organizers of the tournament and the developer of the game itself. They were the setters of rules, and the enforcers.

Video game audiences talked to each other, did so quite a lot, and it didn’t take long for a fan of Hanging Gardens of Babylon to shoot the breeze with a fan of Archetypes. Word reached the arbiters that the same username had been playing two e-sports tournaments simultaneously.

While this was not explicitly against any bullet point within the rules, it could be broadly seen as against the community sportsmanship standard clause, which Granslam had agreed to by clicking on the button at the bottom of the registration page without reading a single word of the document aside from ‘agree’.

Game publishers are vain and paranoid creatures; they can’t accept the existence of any other games that might take up their customers’ money and time. Granslam’s stunt was a slap to their figurative faces, and he was punished as forcefully as was within their authority. Marco Vallet was quickly, by both E-mail and public statement, banned from participating in the Hangers-On Open from that point forward.

The only solace was that he could rejoin the community the following year if he so chose, but even that decision was cynically calculated on their part. Such a limit to the punishments needed to be established should they want to pull it out in regard to a much more famous or beloved E-sports athlete. Banning that kind of person could cost them brand deals and PR, and all over something like homophobic statements or underage sexting. No, a year was plenty of time for them to learn their lesson, make an apology video, and go back to raking it in.

Archetypes banned him as well, so now Granslam had no chance of making a splash in any tournament scene. The empty year ahead of him spelled doom for Handzy’s hopes of a gaming future, and she was finding it difficult to locate the forgiving part of her soul. Afterwards she also learned of her sister’s failure to capture the image of Mangst Breadslaw, so their hatbox of an apartment became a dour mire where nobody bothered to dry their hair after showering.

The Beaucoup Bucks seemed well and truly excluded, as the rules also stated that only people signed up to a team at the beginning of the tournament were eligible to play. More professional organizations had auxiliary members built into their roster, often another full set of four who were more flexible in the roles they could play.

The Bucks had nobody. Their roster didn’t even fill out the application form all the way to the bottom; there was just a gaping painful white space where additional support should have resided.

Though they were technically still in the tournament, they would be disqualified the moment they tried to enter a game lobby with only three members or someone who wasn’t registered.

Despair overtook them, but desperation remained, so they tried the only thing they could think of, switching to a new game. It was called Board State, and it was just as boring as it sounded to everyone who wasn’t Granslam. Up until his stunt it was considered a fun quirk of Marco’s that he played the big dumb brawler in the gardens but preferred intense strategy challenges when playing games on his own.

He suggested the pivot, offering to tutor them all even as he learned Board State himself. It had a few of the same qualities as Hanging Gardens of Babylon: a large roster, abilities with cooldown periods, and character synergies. Primarily it was a decision-making game though, not one of reflex and aim. Players took turns moving their characters like chess pieces, viewing the board from overhead, and making collaborative decisions on a timer.

Handzy kept her mouth shut about how lame it all was to her. Theoretically, fun didn’t matter if it got them into some money, and Board State did have some behind it. There was a weekend tournament on its horizon with a 70,000 pot at the end of its grayscale rainbow.

She couldn’t connect with any of the characters though, and only partly because she was watching the action from above rather than sharing a pair of eyes with them. Board State didn’t have any lore. The gardens was a rich place full of multiple histories; you couldn’t walk down its fired clay streets without kicking aside pebbles that were technically ancient ruins.

The gardens had culture, spirituality, mysticism, magic, evil, and good, and all in equal amounts. The strategy game on the other hand had none of those things. It contextualized things more as a mystery novel or police investigation. The pieces were unknown ‘suspects’ defined only by the limited information had about their actions.

As such they had no identity beyond their play style, no names. They were literally called things like Crush, Snipe, and Sprint. Crush crushed. Snipe sniped. Sprint? He ran an all you could eat Taiwanese restaurant. No, Handzy’s hopes were dashed again. He just sprinted.

Still the foursome tried. They were once again in the warehouse, sitting at their computers, trying to qualify for the new tournament. Their next Hangers-On match was still scheduled for that coming Saturday, as none of them had the heart to officially withdraw. The thought of going back to it gave them more energy than anything in Board State did.

Despite the constant need to strategize, they were so quiet that Marco’s father grew suspicious that they had left without telling him. He appeared in the doorway of the computer room, but quickly clammed up when he saw they were busy. He started rolling along the jamb stealthily as if they all hadn’t spotted him already.

“Relax Dad. We don’t need to focus that hard; it’s not our turn.”

“You take turns shooting at each other?”

“Different game Dad.”

“You didn’t tell him?” Plusplus asked Marco. His grumpy silence was answer enough.

“Tell me what?” The others filled him in on the disqualification, but they kept it vague, pretended it was an unintentional error that they all overlooked, but which Marco happened to take the blame for.

“Hey, that really stinks guys, I’m sorry,” Mr. Vallet offered. He saw his son prickling with angry shame; it wasn’t a good time to bring it up. But he was the adult and safety was important. “Mostly unrelated but… these past few days have any of you been walking, running, or sitting under the stone out there?” They all shook their heads. “You sure? My dad senses were tingling. It felt like somebody was being stupid out here.” Their heads never stopped shaking, but Handzy’s and Flippers’s lips did purse noticeably more. “Okay good. I might not be playing with you guys, but I’m on your team too, and I always look out for my teammates.”

He started rolling out of the jamb again, pleased they at least didn’t roll their eyes at his parental lameness. Suddenly, something happened inside the timid mind of Plusplus. He had a very uncommon sputtering outburst, one that caused him to disregard their active game even though it had just shifted to their team’s turn. He didn’t care that the piece Charity couldn’t be charitable without him.

“Oh! Oh no! I just had an idea. Why am I the one having the idea? One of you guys should’ve thought of it, jeez!” Mr. Vallet stuck around to hear whatever this was; he’d rarely heard the kid talk that much, and if he did he was being overly polite or apologizing.

“Just spit it out,” Granslam told him, “it’s our turn.”

“Mr. Vallet’s on our team,” the shy boy said, growing more confident with every word.

“Yeah he just said that,” Handzy snapped, turning back to the monitor to make Ricochet ricochet once again.

“Shit!” Flippers exploded.

“Watch the language,” Mr. Vallet warned, pointing a meaty finger that really wasn’t threatening much of anything at all. If they had heard some of the things that came out of his mouth when he dropped some of the inventory on his toe their parents might not want them coming around anymore.

“Sorry, but Plus is right! You’re on our team!”

“All the way,” the adult agreed smugly.

“Guys we have to qualify,” Marco warned them. “I’m taking the turn for us.” He shoved Flippers’s chair out of the way and wheeled over to take the next mouse, but by then Handzy had gotten the idea too. Three stations abandoned. Marco kept his mind on Charity, on Ricochet, on Venom and Armor. It was not a plan he wanted to hear.

“Marco is the only one of us who’s still seventeen,” Plusplus explained to Mr. Vallet. “The tournament requires you be a legal adult to participate, or be fifteen and have the signature of a parent.”

“Yeah I signed the online form thingy,” he admitted, suddenly and irrationally worried he had signed over some kind of personal bank information to a Russian hacker.

“Yes you did!” Handzy declared. She jumped back to her computer and minimized Board State before Marco could get to it. She pulled up the registration logs for the Beaucoup Bucks on the tournament site and scrolled down:

Jenny Handerly – Handzy

Elijah Marsden – Plusplus

Glenn Delaney – Flippers

Joaquin Vallet – (provided parental consent)

Marco Vallet – Granslam

“Yup, there’s the old John Hancock,” Mr. Vallet confirmed. “What’s the big deal?”

“Marco got banned, but you didn’t,” Handzy said. “You can take his spot on the team. You can play with us. We can still win the tournament!”

“No!” Marco protested, but he let the last seconds of their Board State turn slip by without any action. “He can’t. He hasn’t played a video game in twenty years. We’ll be the laughingstock of the whole scene.”

“We already are because of what… what happened,” Flippers reminded him without getting explicit.

“I don’t want to embarrass anybody,” the adult said, suddenly shyer than Elijah. Handzy wasn’t having any of it; she marched right up to him and grabbed his much larger hands in hers, squeezing them together in prayer.

“Joaquin,” she started, mesmerizing him with his own first name in such a young voice, “we need you. If we don’t win this tournament my dream, my whole life as I’ve imagined it, is over. We need you to play, and we need you to do the absolute best you can. If you don’t I’ll have to go back to school… and I. Hate. School.”

“I would try,” his voice whistled, suddenly flute-like, “but not without Marco’s permission. You’re his friends. This is his game.” They all turned to Granslam, whose hands had abandoned both mouse and keyboard. His expression was impenetrable, somewhere between granite and a hard place.

“You’re still playing,” Flippers tried to convince him with a soft voice, as if a harsh word was equally likely to make him erupt or melt, “but through another layer. Instead of moving the brawler you’ve got to move your dad who will move the brawler. But you have to guide him all the same. We still need you too.”

Even the slabs made more noise than the five humans in the ensuing minute. Finally, with a head that looked too heavy to stay attached, Marco nodded. His teammates collapsed into relief and laughter, with Joaquin joining in.

“So, how many buttons are there?” he asked. His son picked up a keyboard and held it up like a stone tablet from Jehovah. “Oh.”