Chapter 3

When we had chosen where to set up our camp, we had done so with purpose. The Pink Flamingos had decided to act as the protectors of Easter, the small town that new players spawned into. Unlike games from when I was alive and constantly aching, these new players were all dead.

Everyone who entered Wicked West by way of Easter was coming into a brand new world. It was, quite literally, their birth into their afterlife, and most of them experienced it the same way that I did: a gunshot to the face.

That’s a shitty way to be born and I wanted to do what I could to make sure that didn’t happen. To facilitate that, the camp needed to be closer to Easter than not.

That was the road that I took Winnie on. As we walked, I wondered if it looked like I was talking to myself, a ghost, or just another player. That all hummed in the back of my mind, but Winnie was at the forefront.

Once we were a hundred yards or so from the camp, I let my smile drop for the first time in a while.

“Please,” I begged in almost a whisper as Winnie walked on my left, “promise me that you aren’t dead.”

We hadn’t even made it to the dirt road that led to Easter when she surprised me, stopped, and grabbed my hand.

“I promise you that I am not dead,” she smirked, but her eyes were wet, “not yet, anyway. I am alive. I live in Darden Valley and I have a cat.” She shrugged. “Well, he’s a kitten. I just got him.”

I hugged her again. I was never going to stop hugging her. We were both tearing up, but we managed to hold back the waterfalls this time.

When we broke the embrace, I asked, “What kind of cat?”

My granddaughter shrugged again, “I think he’s got some Tabby in him, but I really don’t know. He was a rescue.”

“What’s his name?” I asked.

She restarted the walk toward Easter and I had to catch up. “Nope,” she said. “Not telling you that. You’ll laugh at me.”

“Winnie,” I explained, “About twenty minutes ago, I thought you were dead and here you are alive and well. I can promise you this, I won’t tease you over anything for at least another twenty minutes.”

She sighed and stopped when she got to the actual road.

“Fine,” she said. “I call my kitten Doctor Coot.”

I snickered. “That’s adorable. It will make his day. You should tell him.”

Winnie’s face took on a darker look and I was suddenly very scared about what she might say next. As if she was about to tell me she had been lying and she was actually dead.

“No one is coming for them.”

“What?” That phrase didn’t make any sense to me. “Coming for who?”

Winnie gestured back toward the camp. “Coot and Bear,” she answered. “No one from their families is going to create an avatar for Wicked West.”

“What?” I demanded. I was furious on behalf of my boys. How dare those people even consider themselves family if they aren’t even going to opt in to visit. “Why the hell not?”

“You never used to cuss like this,” Winnie smirked as I caught up and we started down the road toward the town.

“You never used to be this old,” I spit out. “Don’t bury the headline. What’s going on?”

“I don’t know all of it,” Winnie said. “Eve didn’t say much. There’s a lot of laws and legal stuff around what she can and can’t say about a dead person’s personal relationships. Especially now that dead people don’t necessarily stay dead.”

“We aren’t zombies,” I mumbled.

“No, you aren’t.” She agreed. “Zombies would be easier. At least they don’t have autonomy, like wishes and dreams and feelings and stuff.” Winnie shrugged. “Eve said Bear’s mom is the only one in his family who is physically capable, but her religion won’t let her do it.”

“Religion? What does that have to do with it?”

“Things have gotten weird since you … uh, died,” Winnie said. “Is that cool to say? You don’t have some post-life trauma or anything with the word do you? Should I say, ‘joined Wicked West,’ instead?”

The answer to that question was that I hadn’t even thought about it.

“Died works,” I answered quickly. “How’d things get weird?”

“Well, weird regarding life and death surrounding the entire EveNet business model.” In my silence, she explained. “EveNet did something entirely new. They gave people an afterlife, or at least sort of. A large group of people see it as the machines stealing souls to put them into the game environments. At best, they think of it as robbing Heaven of what’s rightfully God’s. At the worst, they think the machines are using the souls for some nefarious purpose.”

“That’s batshit,” I said.

“That’s people,” Winnie countered. Having lived through the early half of the 21st century, I knew she was right. “Either way, that’s not everyone or Stream-Time and EveNet wouldn’t be the billion-dollar businesses they are. Even so, that means Bear can’t see his mom. She doesn’t even think he’s real, just that he’s a copy of who her son used to be.”

I hated everything about this. People in our world will take every reason they can to put themselves and others through more pain for insubstantial concepts than for any other reason. Even if he was just a copy, what wouldn’t you do to see and talk to even the memory of your passed away son one more time? She’s not only hurting Bear, though, she’s hurting herself and leaving the hole in her heart there a little longer than it needs to be.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Or maybe I’m wrong. I hate that thought, too. What if she’s right and we aren’t really people and instead are just copies with access to a database of a specific person’s memories? I keep wondering about how real I am and keep coming back to one phrase that probably means less in today’s world of artificial intelligence than it meant back in the day.

I think, therefore I am.

It should be enough for me, but it isn’t. I’ll always come back to wondering if I’m real or just a wooden kid in a toy shop. Maybe that’s why Winnie’s referring to me as dead didn’t bother me. I don’t know if I am.

“What about Coot?” I asked, but I figured that I already knew the truth.

Winnie shrugged. “Eve didn’t say much. Only that she had to give him a letter in person.”

That made sense, in an unfortunate way. Coot was in a unique situation. He hadn’t always been an old, toothless, goofball. Before he died, he had been Miss Iowa, with the sash and everything. She’d had a handful of doctorates and a dream, but no one took her seriously because she was pretty. Instead of seeing that as a disadvantage, she had wielded it like a superpower. When she died and got to the character creation screen, she had come to the conclusion that death didn’t mean she had to give up her being underestimated. She picked an old, prospector-looking, toothless man and it worked out exactly as her being gorgeous in reality had. Coot literally had “Doctor” in his username, and everyone still treated him like the dumbest man who entered the room, while I used him as the de facto planner of all of our missions. Or, at the very least, I ran every idea by him that I had so that he could point out the flaws before we all died horrible deaths.

The fact that he felt he could trust me with all of this warmed my heart.

And from the sounds of it, it might have turned some other hearts to stone.

I was going to have to find time to take Coot aside and see how he was doing.

“Well,” I said instead of lamenting my friend’s poor fortune, “maybe you’re here for all of us then.”

Winnie’s head snapped up, just a bit, to look at me before smiling and turning back toward the road. “That’s sweet.” She returned her attention to the path. “You seem to have made a family out of a posse. They seem like nice people.” She chuckled and shrugged. “I mean, I’ve only seen the streams, so they are always murdering and shooting folks, but they seem to do it nicely.”

I laughed and nodded. “They are good people. I hope the world knows what it's missing by them being here.”

“I think it does,” she said. “You guys became the most popular stream overnight just by being yourselves. That kind of thing doesn’t happen normally.”

The last thing I wanted to think about right now was Stream-Time and the raid from earlier. I could see the lights of Easter in the distance as the sun started to sink behind us.

“Well?” I asked. “You get to watch my life on television, tell me more about yours. What’s going on in your life? Do you have anyone special?”

My questions caught Winnie off guard but she kept walking.

“You’re just as bad as mom,” she mumbled before answering. “No, I don’t have anyone special. I was dating a guy for a while, Freddy, but we were going different ways. It's just me and Coot now.”

I let out a long sigh. “Are you really going to vague-book me?”

“Vague-book you?” She laughed. “You sound so old.”

“Bite me,” I smiled, though. “What does different directions mean to your generation?”

This was the kind of conversation that I was worried I would never have gotten with Winnie. At my age, with only a few years ahead of me, I never expected to meet this woman. The child would always be in my heart, but I had resigned myself to never knowing the adult who now walked with me. I almost cried right then, but held back. She didn’t need to see me crying anymore right now.

Even with all of my adapting that I have had to do in the last week, this would take some time to get used to.

Winnie shrugged in response to my question. “We were living in Des Moines, but I wanted to move to Darden Valley so I could work at EveNet headquarters. Freddy didn’t want to move. We weren’t together long, so we both agreed to do our own thing.”

I took that all in, but was interrupted by her next question.

“So, you’ve had some work done?”

“Oh, you should talk,” I countered. “You look, what? Twenty-six?”

“I’m twenty-five,” she smiled. “And this is exactly what I look like, minus the floppy hat.”

“Then, fine,” I let her win, “you look great.”

“So do you,” Winnie said. “That’s my point. Who is this and what have you done with the aged grandmother that I would have recognized?”

I shook my head at her. “Have you not looked through one damned photo album? Seriously, did you think that when I died and you met me up at the pearly gates, that I would have picked something better than saggy butt cheeks and veiny skin?” I waved a hand up and down to indicate my entire self. “This was me in my late 20’s, the me that I always feel that I really am until I look in the mirror.”

“Explain your eyes,” she said.

Oh shit, I forgot about my eyes. Dammit. “Yes, alright, you caught me on that one. But I think it’s pretty good, don’t you? I had the entire character-maker-thingy and the only things I changed were my age and my eye color. I think that’s pretty decent of me.”

“I’m just giving you a hard time,” Winnie surrendered. “Your eyes are very pretty.”

“They better be,” I smirked. “They cost me everything.”

Winnie rolled her eyes. “Your jokes are worse than dad’s.”

“How are your parents? Lori?” I asked.

Lori was my daughter. We used to be as close as Winnie and I had become, and as far as I knew, we still were. When Winnie was born, Lori and her husband, Jordan, had been trying to hold down two jobs each. It wasn’t that we had grown apart, so much as we just revolved around each other, with me watching Winnie and them having to work all the time.

“Mom is good,” Winnie said with a hint of hesitation. “Dad is … dad, hasn’t changed much.” She shrugged. “Mom wanted to do this, but when she found out it could be a full-time gig, she opted out. You’ll probably get a message from her in the next few days, instead. Nothing phases dad. He’s still just goofy about the serious stuff and serious about the goofy stuff, like always.”

It made me happy to know that Lori had wanted to see me. Seeing Winnie had been a flood of emotions, but the one question right behind them all had been, “Where’s Lori?” As for Jordan, Winnie’s father was a nerd who had a lot of emotions and some minor mental health stuff going on. Sometimes he got overwhelmed and he did his best to manage it in a way that made a lot of what he said sound flippant or just plain silly. If you knew him, like Winnie and I did, anyway, then you knew it was just him working through stuff. He had always been a great father to Winnie, and that’s all I’ve ever wanted from him, so I was happy to hear he hadn’t changed.

We were just entering Easter as the sun went down. We walked by the butcher’s table and I found myself suddenly wondering if Winnie’s ghost-like form could smell the meat.

Or the shit. The wild west was gross.

Before I could ask her, a gunshot went off.

Our eyes darted toward the saloon, because of course that’s where it was coming from.

A man stumbled out, shirtless and in pants with suspenders. He was trying to pull his suspenders back on as he aimed the pistol back the way he had come.

“Well, shit,” I said. “Another evening in Easter.”

I checked my minimap on my HUD. He hadn’t turned red for me, yet, but that just meant he hadn’t decided I was someone who needed holes.

That being said, my issue with Easter was that there were seasoned players who liked to kill new players that spawned here for easy experience. I was going to need to know if this man was good or bad before I did anything.

Then he spun, saw us, and shouted, “Ghost,” before emptying his pistol into Winnie.