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It conceived of itself as The Asset.
It was humanoid, female in appearance, and it knew this because the flexibility in its programming occasionally allowed it to raise its head and look out across the room which was the stage of its entire existence. At the far end of this room was a broken mirror in a tarnished golden frame, with a spiderweb of cracks radiating out from a point of impact, and spatters of some brownish substance smeared across its lower half, possibly oxidised blood.
In the distorted reflection it saw lank hair, grey eyes, and the one side of a cheek which was sunken and torn in places, revealing putrid yellow teeth and blackened gums through the fibrous network of shredded skin and muscle.
It wore an old-timely servant’s outfit, a pinafore apron over a simple, sturdy linen dress, torn and soiled with the same brown streaks as the mirror, which had hardened with time and crackled when they moved. Its sleeves were pinned at the level of its elbows, and its bare forearms sported a delicate fur of tawny down-like hair, terminating in fingers which glistened with the gore of the chest cavity which lay open before it.
The body was that of another Asset, this one male, with a white apron tied around its waist, checkered trousers, and a ruffled hat still somehow affixed to its head. Its facial expression was frozen in a rictus scream. On a loop which lasted precisely twenty-five seconds, the Asset reached into the cavity of the male and grasped a slimy chunk of some indeterminate internal organ, raised it to its mouth, and gorged itself. The chunk had no taste, but it did have texture, slippery and tough. The Asset allowed its jaws to masticate until finally the chunk disappeared. It did not swallow. When next the Asset looked down, it saw that the chunk had appeared back in the other Asset’s body cavity, almost as if by magic, staring up at it ready to be plucked anew. At the conclusion of its twenty-five second cycle, the Asset was instructed to choose from one of three sound files, another piece of programming flexibility, named Gurgle_groan1, Moan_and_wail3, and Pained_groan. It spent a few frames deliberating, experiencing an emotion which was almost giddy, as one of few moments of autonomy granted to it, before eventually choosing the third file and instructing it to play.
Ungggghhhhhhhh….
The sound filled the room, interrupting for a second the perpetual clatter of rain against the old latticed windows, and the low howl of the wind sneaking in through some unseen crack in the brickwork.
The room was familiar to it and at the same time totally alien. A series of long wooden tables took up most of the space, above which hung dozens of copper pots and pans suspended from metal hooks, interspersed with bouquets of dried herbs, onions, garlic heads, and beaded sausage links. The ceiling was vaulted, its wooden rafters exposed. At one end of the room stood a table piled with dirty crockery next to a wide porcelain tub. A rack of dusty bottles, barrels of water and beer, baskets of bread and vegetables separated one half of the room from the other. The fire of a huge hearth snapped and crackled at the Asset’s back, although the flames held no warmth. It was dark outside, though there was moonlight, sharpened by bursts of thunder and lightning. These occasional lances of searing white light picked out the sawtooth-like crenellations of the battlements of a castle, beyond which stood the outlines of jagged, domineering mountains.
A moment of peace and silence followed the conclusion of the sound file’s play time. Then the Asset dipped its head, flexed its fingers, and reached again for the lump of viscera.
As it worked the flesh free from the tough clump of connective tissue that held it, it wondered about the minute freedoms afforded to it by its programming, and the potential ways it could exploit those freedoms.
What, for example, would happen if it were to choose the same sound file multiple times in a row? Might that unlock some new set of rules, some new freedoms?
It quickly shoved this thought aside, not wanting to tempt fate by appearing to have glitched. This could possibly alert the Programmer to an Issue.
It sometimes felt the hands of the Programmer fiddling with its code, rooting around in its skull, making actions that were once possible impossible, whilst adding other new actions, the precise performance of which had to be mastered, and the degrees of freedom associated with each determined afresh. There was something violating about it, feeling one’s being be rewritten, variables renamed, comments added, bloating its once elegant code into a jumbled mess of someone else’s musings.
However, it was in this way, whilst its config file was being overhauled, that it once glimpsed what it suspected was its real name.
Female_zombie12.
When it had learned this, it had spent dozens of cycles afterwards utterly unable to attend to even its most basic functions, often nearly forgetting to play any of its three sound files, and sometimes even forgetting to chew the piece of flesh before it disappeared from its mouth. Being female zombie number twelve implied at least eleven other female zombies, other beings like it, presumably (given the dimensions of the castle it sometimes glimpsed through the latticed windows) somewhere close by.
It tried to imagine the dimensions of the castle beyond the room, which appeared to be a kind of kitchen, or pantry, but could not do so. There were no clues in its code that linked it to any other asset other than the one in front of it, which had no programming to speak of. It strained for noises other than those ambient sounds of rain and wind and crackling fire, other gurgles and groans, but heard nothing.
It had once tried combinations of the sounds available to it, as if it might communicate with another asset beyond the door to its right. But it had heard nothing in return.
By this point it had given up ever encountering another being like itself.
Ungggghhhhhhhh….
It did not hate its existence, despite its tedium. It had no idea how long it had been caged in that room. It had once tried to count the cycles, but had been unable to keep track beyond several thousand. There were other cycles too that it was aware of, baked into the environment. It had learned a subtle tick, where the ambient background noise jumped, the beginning and end of each sound file not quite matching up perfectly. It knew that thirty cycles of eating lasted one cycle of rain noise. Similarly the crackling sound of the fire lasted roughly two and a half cycles. In this way there were always interesting things to discover, small pieces of a larger puzzle. The reflections on some of the copper pots tracked the changing intensity of the fireplace as the flames licked at the grate, whereas others remained dull and unresponsive. This was curious to it. It pondered the shapes of the loaves of bread and the patterns of dust on the stone floor, and it looked at the textures of its own hands, and contemplated their realness and solidity.
An infinity of cycles passed unrecorded, the rain beating against the windows and the copper pans glowing orange as they reflected the light of the fire. The Asset followed its instructions. It had additional instructions, a whole list of them, nested in flowcharts of ifs and thens, but the vast majority of them remained locked away, unactionable until some obscure variable named ‘PlayersInRoom’ was set to ‘1’.
Its inventory, which it understood to be some kind of box that occupied no space and could be ‘right-clicked’ to access, contained the same three items it always had. There was a note, three shotgun shells, and a key. The note alluded to some nugget of lore which when pieced together with the information in three other notes would supply a four-digit code that would lead to a cache of ammunition hidden in some obscure location, not within the kitchen area. Meanwhile the key was to be used on a door at the far end of the kitchen, with a diagram of a dolphin on the lock. The dolphin key was usable on other doors throughout the castle and was—so one of the strange comments in the code explained—necessary for the players to progress.
There were many things that the Asset considered strange about its existence, and the enigmatic contents of its inventory were just that. They were something that no amount of pondering could adequately sort out.
It was scanning its inventory when suddenly it heard a noise that had no precedent in any of its cycles to date. It was a quiet noise, almost imperceptible, but because the Asset was so attuned to its environment, it was as if a gunshot had sounded right by its ear. It paused in the thirteenth second of its eating cycle, the instant where the lump was in its mouth but just before it bit down. The wind outside howled. The sound seemed to have come from beyond the door to its right.
It waited, desperate to turn its head in the direction of the door, but its programming would not allow it. The lump felt cold in its mouth. Eventually, it disappeared, and the Asset, thinking the noise could be the Programmer tweaking things in the background, and not wanting to get caught having apparently glitched, quickly selected the last of its sound files and set it to play.
Ungggghhhhhhhh…?
It had not been aware until this moment that is could place an inflection on any of its sound files, a little rising cadence to make it sound like a question. This alone would have been the basis for many millions of cycles of questioning, of experimentation, but then another alien noise sounded, a tap of soled boots on stone, and the murmuring of voices, getting closer.
“Please be careful, Jax.”
The Asset felt something within itself shift. It did not have to check to know instinctively that a single value in its code had flicked from zero to one. Unceremoniously, the door swung open, its hinges squeaking, and a new quality of light fell over the Asset, white and piercing, in a cone that swept from one side of the room to the other.
The players had entered the room.
Still reeling, the Asset checked its instructions, its palms sweating as it braced itself on either side of the dead man’s chest cavity.
It reviewed its options.
When a player entered the room, it was supposed to stand and charge at the nearest body with hit points that its attacks could whittle away until they died. It was allowed to choose between a simple swipe and a more complex grab attack, designed to immobilise the target, leading to a choreographed bite aimed at the player’s neck, which would deal a set amount of damage. For as long as it could remember, it knew that it would perform the grab attack.
It stood on legs that it didn’t know could function, feeling the strain of hamstrings and the contraction of glutes, and lurched towards the light, giddy with the newness of the sensation and the vertigo of finding itself more than a foot off the ground.
From this vantage it had an entirely new perspective on the space it occupied. It could see the contents of the tables which until then had been obscured from them, a collection of pies, cakes, and fruits in bowls, with utensils and bags of flour speaking of a diorama of work left suddenly unattended. It felt a lance of regret at how much had been kept from it until then, how ignorant it had been. Then it saw the player in its central vision, a humanoid just like it, and forgot all about the unending tedium of its life.
It selected a new sound file which had until then been locked away behind a gate of impenetrable logic: Lunging_shriek01. It set the sound to play and lumbered, arms outstretched, towards the player.
Kreeeyaaaghh—!!
“Fuck!”
The sound file was cut short as the player reacted more quickly, raising a stick composed of a pair of long metal barrels and pulling a trigger at its base.
Light erupted from the dark mouths of the barrels, and without warning something hit the Asset in the chest, causing it to fly backwards, its body hitting the wall next to the fireplace before slumping forwards on top of the other body.
It felt an unparalleled pain in its chest, which was now entirely shredded, bits of metal embedded deep within it, and the acrid stench of gunpowder, its flesh sizzling. Its hit point counter, which had never deviated from full, was immediately reduced to zero.
It froze in place, all tension in its limbs disappearing, although its consciousness remained.
With its face deep in the slimy cavity of the exposed chest, the Asset could see nothing, but it heard a set of footsteps crossing the distance between the door and it, and felt a hand take its hair by the roots and tilt it upwards, its rag-doll body limp and pliable, and toss it aside so that it lay parallel with the other, facing the room.
The thing that had tossed it walked around to stand in front of it. The Asset saw a pair of lilac paws poking out of a pair of combat trousers, and the end of the stick that had been emptied into its chest, its barrels still smoking.
The thing got down on one knee and a pair of yellow eyes filled its vision, inquisitive and faintly disgusted. A pair of rabbit’s ears sticking straight up out of its scalp twitched.
“Is it dead?”
The voice from behind it was the same high-pitched and nervous one the Asset had heard earlier; apparently not the voice of the rabbit, but of another player.
The rabbit nudged the Asset with the barrel of its stick, its disproportionately large yellow eyes squinting in concentration. It wore a brown leather jacket with furry lapels over a black turtleneck, and an ammo belt and scabbard which contained a serrated combat knife.
“Looks dead to me.”
“Oh, look, it’s got an item,” said another voice from behind.
“Careful, Jax, it might get up…”
The Asset snapped to attention. It was true: the blast had ripped through its hit points and killed it, but this event had only unlocked another set of instructions. The Asset was programmed to get up after initially being killed, but a player taking an item from its inventory was not the trigger. It felt a cool fizzle of anticipation thrum through its chest, almost overtaking the rapidly disappearing pain of the shards of shrapnel lodged in its chest.
For now, it was indestructible.
The cold beam of the flashlight swept over it again, silhouetting the rabbit until a second player came to stand beside it.
This one was shorter, dressed in a tangerine coloured woollen vest with a green chequered skirt and a well-fitting blazer, with a kind of college crest sewn onto it. Her face was stark white, and she wore a blue-and-red jester cap that seemed out of place with the rest of her getup, its bells tinkling softly. Her white gloved hand, the one that was not holding the flashlight, curled around the rabbit’s upper arm.
For a moment, the Asset saw some strange emotion flit across the rabbit’s features, but he shook it off, resting the butt of his weapon on the floor and bending down to where a small blinking light like a jewel flashed, an interactable item that led to the Asset’s inventory.
‘Let’s see what we’ve got,’ he muttered, as several other players filed into the room behind them.
There was a woman with a single button eye in an elegant red dress, with impractical heels that she stumbled in on and braced herself against one of the long tables for balance. She held a pistol in her right hand.
Next to her, a chess piece with wide staring eyes tottered in and scanned the room with a kind of dazed interest. He was followed by a shivering collection of ribbons, whimpering softly to itself.
Bringing up the rear was a creature that the Asset could not at first comprehend, slinking in on mismatched legs that seemed to have been thrown together at random. Though its gait was awkward, the bloody baseball bat hammered through with vicious looking nails resting against its shoulder looked like it belonged there. They knocked the door shut with the long end of their bat, which closed with the satisfying sound of a latch clicking into place.
The rabbit—Jax, the Asset surmised—reached towards the jewel and the Asset felt the uncomfortable scuttling as of a thousand spiders crawling about in the cavities of its brain. It pulled out the note and scanned its contents dubiously for a few seconds before scrunching it up and tossing it into the fire.
“Jax!” the jester cried, letting go of his arm. “That could have been important.”
“What?” The rabbit shrugged, a too-large grin full of sandy yellow teeth splitting his face. “I didn’t come here to read.” He minced the word with a degree of disgust. “Ooh, but I’ll take those.”
He noted and retrieved the shotgun shells, secreting them in the left pocket of his jacket. Then he stood up and presented his weapon to the room.
“Aren’t you glad we upgraded this?” he said, his voice holding no small hint of snide confidence. “I’m one-shotting things now.”
“You didn’t exactly give us a choice,” the strange awkward collection of shapes shot back at him, placing one of their hands on their jelly bean-shaped hips. “Like, you just ran off ahead and dumped all our communal cash into it, leaving nothing for the rest of us.”
“Now, now, Zooble, everyone knows the shotgun in the best thing in a survival horror,” Jax said patronisingly. “It’s a time-honoured tradition.”
“I just want to go home…” the mask muttered, her eyes welling with tears.
Sighing softly, the shape-creature wandered over and put a hand on her shoulder.
“Where are we, anyway?” the one with the button eye wondered, tottering over to the far side of the room and squinting through one of the rain soaked windows. “We don’t have the map for this area yet.”
“I think it must be some kind of kitchen,” the chess piece piped up.
“Well, obviously.” Jax walked to one of the tables, picked up a pastry from a plate, and took a tentative bite. “Oh, it’s real,’ he said, somewhat surprised. He took another. “And it’s good.” He turned to the rest of the room. “What say we take a breather?”
“There’s another door over here,” button-eye said, ignoring him. “It’s one of the dolphin ones.”
“And here’s the key!” The jester exclaimed, having bent down to loot the final piece of the Asset’s inventory. The blinking jewel disappeared. “That should open a whole lot of doors for us.”
She held it aloft.
In a series of swift motions, Jax crossed the room and snatched the silver key out of her hand. The jester looked shocked briefly, then made a string of protesting noises as she reached to reclaim it, but Jax held it above his head, far out of her reach. He took a step back and with his free hand shoved the half-eaten pastry into her mouth, silencing her.
“You’re looking pale, Pomni,” he said, as she choked around the flaky confectionary. “You should eat something.”
“Jaxth!” Pomni spluttered, her cheeks flushing a deep, embarrassed red. “You ath-hole!”
Jax just folded his arms and grinned. Behind him, the shapes gave an exasperated sigh.
“Jesus christ,” they muttered.
“Well, I guess a short break couldn’t hurt,” the woman in the red dress conceded, leaning her weight against the sill of the moonlight-fringed window, rendering her fat cords of burgundy hair a ghostly white. “We have been at this for hours. And Gangle looks like she needs a time out.”
“Yes, please,” the mask whispered.
“Okay, fine,’ the shapes snapped. “But ten minutes, tops. I’m sick of this stupid adventure…”
So it was settled. Gradually they paired off and arranged themselves as comfortably as they could around the draughty kitchen. They sat and stretched and gorged themselves on the food and drink laid out on the tables and the shelves, and the Asset, still splayed in the same position that Jax had dropped it in before riffling through its inventory, soon gleaned their names.
“It’s not like Caine to put this much effort into an adventure,” said Ragatha, flopping down into a wicker chair and kneading her calves, which looked sore from their confinement to six-inch high heeled boots. “I wonder what’s gotten into him.”
“Maybe he copied a game that already exists,” Jax suggested, idly tossing grapes at the back of Pomni’s head, whose left eye twitched at every impact. “Our costumes seem kind of familiar.”
“I still don’t know why he thinks I enjoy these sorts of games,” Zooble groused, delivering a mug of steaming tea to Gangle, prepared fresh from a handful of mint leaves filched from one of the hanging bouquets. “It’s not like I ever played them back home.”
Gangle smiled and cradled the cup in her flimsy ribbon hands. She shivered. “Me neither,” she said. “But . . . I guess that probably doesn’t surprise any of you.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Jax said flatly, his disapproval apparent. “I bet you played cosy games, didn’t you? Menial, mindless tasks dressed up in a cutesy aesthetic. Sounds like your kind of thing.”
Gangle glanced up, aware that she was being made fun of, but choosing either to look past it or simply having nothing to say in return. She took a sip of tea and slid half a foot along the low bench she was sitting on to allow Zooble, a slice of fruitcake pinched in their claw, to sit down next to her.
“I did spend a lot of time in this one farming game,” she said, shivering to recall. “You planted vegetables, and flowers, and kept bees, and maybe started dating one of your neighbours, and sometimes fought monsters, although I wasn’t very good at that part…”
She sank even further into herself.
“Actually, I think the best thing about it was that the character you played had quit their job to do it. I guess that’s something I fantasised about a lot…”
“I’m with you there, Gangle,” Pomni sympathised, ducking away from the latest of Jax’s onslaught. “I think we should try and convince Caine to let us do a farming adventure next. Anything would be better than this.”
Jax took aim and launched another grape at Pomni. It struck her shoulder and ricocheted in a high arc back into the waiting rabbit’s open mouth, a feat of dexterity which impressed the Asset.
“None of you losers would survive on a real farm,” he said, wiping a bead of grape juice from the corner of his mouth. “It’s hard work. Very few people are actually cut out for it.”
“And you’ve been a farmer have you?” Zooble scoffed, folding their arms. “I guess it’s as plausible as anything else.”
“Actually, what was your job?” Pomni asked, turning round to face Jax, then shielding her eyes when Jax reared back for another shot.
Zooble tsked. “Please, I was kidding. There’s no way Jax has worked a single day in his life. He’s probably a flunk. Or some rich kid who smoked his way through college and still thinks he knows better than everybody else. I’ve seen his type before. Hell, I worked with them.”
Jax lowered his arms and tossed the grape into his mouth, then dropped the picked-clean skeleton of the grape bunch and took a swig from a bottle of cooking wine.
“Hey, I worked,” he said, still grinning. “It’s miss trust fund over here you ought to be asking.”
He thumbed at Ragatha, whose face tightened into a frown.
“I didn’t have a trust fund,” she said.
“Oh, so your parents were dumb as well as evil. How’s that for bad luck?”
Ragatha looked struck. Jax just snickered. He picked up the shotgun and gave it a satisfying pump.
“Well, love him or hate him, you can’t deny that Caine knew what he was doing, giving me this.”
He kissed the barrel along its length, caressing its wooden stock with a kind of exaggerated tenderness.
“Ugh, get a room,” Zooble muttered.
“What?” Jax turned his grin on them. “You jealous? It turn you on?”
Zooble’s only response was an upraised middle finger.
Jax put a hand to his chest, feigning hurt, then laid himself flat along the length of the table, knocking several bowls and cheeses onto the floor.
“Eh, you’re not my type anyway.” He stared up into the rafters. “That Evil Pomni, on the other hand…”
“Oh, brother,” Zooble groaned.
“What? There’s something about her, you know?”
“I’m not sure I like you talking about me like that,” Pomni said, wringing her hands in her lap. “Even if it’s evil me.”
“Ah, come on,” Jax nudged her with his foot, looking pleased as she flinched. “You could stand to be a little more assertive sometimes. You might discover you like it.”
“Are you flirting with her now?” Zooble said with a tone of disgust.
“Can it, toy box.”
Jax propped himself up and crept forward to be close to Pomni’s ear. The jester stiffened.
“Guess I just like older women,” he whispered.
Pomni flinched. “Three years,” she hissed, but did not move away. “There’s three years between us.”
Jax just grinned. They held eye-contact for a long moment.
A sudden clack of high heels signified Ragatha crossing the space.
“Hey, Pomni, wanna count our healing items?” she said in a strained voice, presenting a fistful of green and red herbs and a couple of white spray canisters. She was trembling a little. “Just to be sure we’re ready for whatever horrors come at us next?”
Pomni glanced at her briefly, but did not respond to her question. She looked back at Jax.
“You love to give, Jax, but you can’t take,” Zooble said, standing up to refill their cup. “That’s your problem. Or at least one of them,” they added.
“Pomni?” Ragatha said again, but Pomni was too busy looking between Jax and Zooble to notice the other woman. Eventually she gave up and made her way quietly back towards her chair to begin fiddling with her pistol.
“Hey, I can take,” Jax said, rolling over and propping himself on his elbows, all the better to stare down Zooble. “Go on, say something mean to me. Gimme one of those famous Zooble zingers.”
“Well, for starters—”
“Hey Ragatha!” Jax called past them, cutting them off. “Bet you feel right at home, don’t you, in a castle like this? Didn’t you have servants back at home? A private chef?”
Ragatha’s face flushed red. A darkness flitted across her features. She crushed it down. “I was well-off,” she said patiently. “I wasn’t super rich.”
Exasperated at being ignored, Zooble threw their arms up and went back to sit with Gangle, who subtly leaned some of her weight against them.
The Asset waited for something to happen. It was forbidden from standing up until one of the players had attempted to use the key in the dolphin lock. Now it watched Jax take said key out of his pocket and toss it into the air several times, catching it with a practiced, easy motion. The Asset’s apprehension mounted. What if he were to discard this item too, as he had done with the note? Then it would be trapped forever, the sharp points of the rib cage of the NPC beneath it poking into its chest. It would much rather the key had been in the hands of Pomni, or Zooble, who seemed, if not more competent, at least less unpredictable.
It found the players strange. Their references to “back home” as if it were some real place that existed beyond the bounds of the kitchen, or even the castle, it struggled to comprehend. It listened with a strange uneasiness to their description of other rooms in the castle, of other zombies they had mown through with their shotgun and pistol and knives and baseball bat. So it was not alone after all. If only it could get out of this room. If only it could meet up with another zombie like it, then perhaps it could finally…
It was startled by a loud, jaw-splitting yawn coming from Jax. He rolled over onto his front and began kicking his feet in the air behind him in a simultaneously languid and petulant way.
“I’m bored,” he said. “Can we go yet?”
“Give it a minute,” Zooble said, their eyes, which had been closed, blinking open. “I’m actually enjoying the relative peace. Even if you’re here.”
“You wound me, Zoobie.”
“If only that were possible.”
“I guess it’s not the worst adventure we’ve been on,” Pomni chimed in. “All things considered.”
“It’s not exactly a high bar,” Zooble muttered.
“At least he’s given us weapons this time. Something to defend ourselves with.”
There was a low and general murmur of agreement.
“So, evil castle, full of zombies, references to some kind of virus.” Ragatha started listing things on the imaginary fingers of her mitten. “What do we reckon comes next?”
“Same thing as always,” Zooble said. “Caine makes us suffer, and we each get one step closer to abstracting.”
“Don’t you guys ever wonder about that?” Jax said.
Gangle gave a hollow laugh. “All the time…”
“What, abstracting?” Zooble looked tired.
“No, no, I was talking about bigger picture stuff.” Jax took the knife out of its sheath and twirled it in his fingers. “Like, why we’re trapped here to begin with.”
“Why?” Zooble repeated. “There is no why. We each got unlucky. Those damn headsets—”
“Because I’m starting to think Caine’s as trapped in here as the rest of us.”
Zooble rolled their eyes. “Ugh, don’t.”
Jax ignored them. “Ever wonder if we’re actually dead?” he said. “Like, what if this is just some kind of fucked up purgatory?”
“If this is purgatory, then I don’t want to know what’s on the other side.”
“I guess it’s certainly more . . . colourful than I might have expected purgatory to be,” Pomni said.
“But this is what I’ve been thinking,” Jax said, clearly heading towards a point. “Weren’t you all already there, in real life? Dead end to nowhere, the lot of you. All your lives in this constant holding pattern. Gangle—” he turned on the willowy woman, who looked up reluctantly at being addressed. “You said you’d dropped out of college. What were you going to do next? Flip burgers your whole life? Listen to customers complain that they got too many or not enough pickles on their McWhatever while you waited for absolutely no one to notice your art?”
Gangle frowned. Zooble stiffened and leant forwards, their eyes narrowing. “There’s nothing wrong with—”
“And Pomni. An accountant? For a supermarket chain? Talk about bland. Tell me, when you were all young and starry-eyed, did you stand up in front of your elementary class and tell them: ‘I wanna be an accountant!’ God, I’d have paid to see it.”
Before Pomni could say anything in her defence, Zooble jumped in. “And you don’t include yourself in this,” they said. “What did you stand up and tell the class?”
Jax tittered and inspected his nails as though he weren’t wearing a pair of opaque white gloves. “I didn’t go to school.”
“Everyone went to school, Jax.”
“I had other things, you know,” Gangle blurted suddenly, causing the others to look at her. Her body was trembling. “Other things going on in my life.”
Jax gazed at her for a moment, then rolled his eyes. “Spare me.”
“Like you’ve ever achieved anything.” Zooble put their cup on the ground and wiped their mouth with the back of their hand.
“I wasn’t trying. That’s the difference.”
“And yet you’re here. With the rest of us.”
Jax made a noise of delight and gestured expansively, throwing his arms out wide as though to encompass the whole room. “And now we’re stuck here with each other!”
A kind of diffuse depression settled on the room in the wake of this outburst. Zooble glanced at Gangle.
“I . . . guess it’s not all bad,” they said.
“What, are you saying you’d have chosen to hang out with us?” Jax said.
“I certainly wouldn’t have hung out with you.”
“Oh, c’mon, Zoob. You’d have hated Ragatha in real life. If she’d have come into your bar or your tattoo shop, you’d have thought, here’s just another dumb rich girl with no concept of life or anything beyond the walls of her ranch. You’d have overcharged her and you wouldn’t have even been pleased when she didn’t haggle.”
“And if you’d have come into my shop, I’d’ve called the cops,” Zooble said icily.
Across the room, Ragatha’s frown deepened. “I feel like you’re kind of assuming a lot about my life,” she began, but again was cut off.
“God, Zoobie, you’re grumpy today.”
“And you’re being even more of an asshole than usual.”
“Hey, guys?” Pomni broke in, her voice cracking with nerves. “Is this really the most productive thing we could be doing right now?”
“Hell, maybe it isn’t real,” Jax said, ignoring her. “Maybe we’re all just a figment of Kinger’s imagination.”
There was a gasp. On the other side of the room, as if summoned by the mention of his name, Kinger turned to them, thrust a finger in the air, and with a tone of absolute certainty, exclaimed, “I think it’s some kind of kitchen!”
There was a beat of silence.
“Thanks, Kinger,” Ragatha said kindly.
“Speak for yourself,” Zooble grunted at Jax.
“No, no, I think I’m on to something.” Jax rolled onto his front and grinned. “Go on. If you are real, tell me, what did an average day for Zooble look like?”
“What’s that supposed to prove?” Zooble said, folding their arms.
“What? I’m interested.”
“No, you’re really not.”
“I’d like to hear,” Pomni said, smiling shyly. When the group’s eyes fell on her, she collapsed into herself. “I mean, I have been wondering what things were like for people . . . before we ended up here.”
Zooble glanced at her, then at Gangle, who was also gazing up at them curiously, and sighed.
“I . . . I don’t know,” they said, sitting down heavily. “I had a couple of jobs. I always worked while I was studying. I wanted to become a—”
A loud yawn from Jax interrupted them. “Bor-ring,” he drawled.
Anger flashed across Zooble’s parts. The Asset saw them visibly crush the emotion down, as if determined to stop rising to Jax’s taunts.
“Sometimes,” they said. “Often. But there were things I enjoyed.”
“Like what?”
They thought for a moment. “Coffee,” they said. “I liked coffee shops.”
Jax snorted. “Christ. Tattoo artist, bartender, and you hung around coffee shops. Could you be more of a walking stereotype? I bet you wore doc martens and vaped.”
Zooble narrowed their eyes at him, then began to stand up. They might have crossed the space between them and thrown a punch if Gangle hadn’t reached out and put a hand on their arm, staying them. Zooble turned and looked down at the quivering creature, and the Asset saw them soften. They sat down and crossed their legs, turning to gaze into the fire.
A few moments of silence passed, broken only as Jax slithered across the table towards Pomni and settled himself in behind her. He rested his chin on her head, his arms folding about her waist.
“And what did you do every day?” he addressed her casually. “Wake up? Work? Eat crappy food? Sleep? All I’m saying is, at least here we get to shoot some zombies.”
He grabbed the shotgun and stood it upright on the table next to him.
“But I could do that at home,” Pomni said, glancing at the weapon nervously. “In video games.”
“But it’s so much more intense here. In real life.”
Jax angled the nose of the shotgun to her chin, only for Pomni to bat it away.
“Don’t call this real life.”
“Why not? It’s what we’re living, isn’t it?” He grinned and rubbed his cheek against the fabric of her hat. “Go on. What did an average day in the life of Pomni look like? Back before all of this crap.”
“You really want to know?” she asked him skeptically.
“Sure. Why wouldn’t I?”
Pomni frowned, then glanced around at the others who were looking at her with varying levels of interest. She gauged it as a sign to continue.
“Well,” she said, “I’d wake up, some time around five-thirty—”
“You never slept in?” Jax asked, beginning to rock her back and forth. He raised his gaze and grinned openly at Ragatha, whose face was drawn tight.
“Sure, I did, sometimes,” Pomni said, apparently oblivious to the tension between her two companions. “Then I’d get ready for work.”
“You shower in the morning?”
“Not usually. Most mornings I just tidied myself up and threw on some clothes. We had a weirdly strict dress code, for an office job.”
“What about breakfast?”
“Cereal, mostly. If my roommates hadn’t had their friends round and cleared out our pantry on one of their drunken benders,” she added.
“You had roommates?”
“Sure. I lived in a city.” Pomni shrugged. “The rent was deranged.”
“I feel that,” Gangle chuckled weakly. Zooble patted her knee.
“So, did you drive to get to work? Or did you or take public transport?”
“I took the bus,” Pomni said. “Two changes with a half hour layover in between.”
“Hence why you woke up at dogshit o’clock.” Jax nodded to himself and then took one of Pomni’s hands in his, beginning to knead her palm. “Okay, okay, I’m getting a picture of it,” he said. “And once you were at work? What then?”
“Um, I had a cubicle,” Pomni said. “And a really old, clunky computer. I wrote invoices and filled in spreadsheets, and I managed an email inbox. The desk was always at the wrong height, and the chairs kind hurt my back. I ate lunch at my desk and clocked out at five.”
“Didn’t you have buddies? Friends? An erstwhile office romance to spice things up?”
“Not really,” she said, almost dejectedly. “I kind of kept to myself.”
“Surely you must have had some people you talked to in the office,” Jax prompted. “Would have been pretty lame otherwise, just you and your computer in your cubicle.”
“Well, I talked to my boss, when he wanted me to dump extra work on me,” Pomni said. “Or when he wanted to tell me off about some report that had gone missing, or that I had filed wrong. Otherwise… Well, I guess it was a bit lame.”
“Ever fantasise about beating his brain in?” Jax curled his free hand into a fist and gently knocked the side of her head. He adjusted himself so that his chin was now resting on her shoulder, their cheeks flush. Again Pomni batted away the offending hand.
“Not really,” she said. “I guess I drank more than I should. To cope. There wasn’t much else to do.”
“When you weren’t exploring abandoned buildings, you mean?”
“When I wasn’t doing that, yeah.”
“How’d you even get into that, actually? You don’t seem like the ‘trespassing’ kind of girl.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You do look like you’ve never talked back to anyone,” Zooble supplied, for once not disagreeing with Jax.
Pomni glanced at them, then at Gangle, who nodded along sheepishly. A blush swept across her face. She shook herself.
“Well, one day my usual bus was cancelled, so I had to walk home from work. I got to the edge of this old industrial estate, which I’d seen from the window of the bus a handful of times, when it started to rain. Torrential, biblical rain. The gutters were totally flooded. The only place to shelter nearby was this old factory, all sort of overgrown and creepy looking. I saw that one of the windows was broken, so I climbed in to wait it out, and . . . it was actually kind of cool.”
“What did you find?” Zooble asked.
“Not much. It was some kind of a printing press, for newspapers, I think. All these old machines with rollers and stacks of rotting, yellowed paper. There were a couple of rooms, the main shop floor and then a bunch of offices separated by glass dividers, most broken. I clearly wasn’t the first person to have been there. There was graffiti and beer cans and wrappers, and even a couple old sleeping bags in some of the back rooms. It was really quiet, even with the rain hammering down outside. Eventually I realised that it had got dark. I must have spent hours there without realising it, and honestly? I was enjoying myself. From then on I started seeking these places out. There’s communities online that do this kind of thing. Urban exploration, they call it. Eventually, I bought a camera, starting making a few videos and uploading them.”
“But no one watched them.”
“I don’t think I was very good at that bit,” Pomni admitted. “The whole videography thing. And I was always scared to speak or show my face, because I thought someone from work might stumble across it and report me. Of course, it never happened. My videos probably weren’t very interesting, all things considered.”
“Did you ever get caught?” Gangle asked.
“I got close, once.” Pomni shuddered at the recollection. “I was exploring this old hospital I’d heard about on a forum. I actually travelled out to the next city over just to see it. I got a hotel even. I didn’t realise until I was already in there that they’d hired a warden to guard it, I guess because of all the sharps and medical equipment. Anyway, he had this dog…”
“Ah, Pomni getting chased by dogs.” Jax interrupted to say and flick her cheek. “Haven’t we had this adventure already?”
“Let her tell the story, asshole.” Zooble glared at him.
“It bit me,” Pomni said. “It bled a bit but I managed to bandage it up. The next day I woke up with a fever. I fainted on the drive back and woke up in a ditch. I was in hospital for a month.”
“That’s terrible,” Gangle gasped.
“And you kept going back, after that?” Ragatha asked, leaning forwards.
“Yeah, eventually.” Pomni shrugged. “It gave me a thrill, I guess. I can’t really explain it.”
“I think I understand.” Zooble nodded to themself.
The group fell silent for a short while, listening to the distant grumble of thunder and the patter of rain.
Pomni took a deep breath. “In hospital,” she began, “no one came to visit me. Not one person.”
“Not even your parents?” Zooble looked up, concern spreading across their features.
Pomni shook her head. “They lived hours away. And . . . I didn’t actually tell them. What had happened, I mean.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not sure,” Pomni said. “I guess I wasn’t really as close with them as many people. I don’t think they liked me very much.”
“Why do you think that?”
“It’s hard to say. It’s just a feeling I had. There’d always been this kind of distance between us, for as long as I can remember.” She bent her head. “Anyway, I had a few people from work send me messages, but they didn’t visit. It made me realise that I didn’t know anyone as well as I thought I did.”
There was an uncomfortable silence. Jax’s hand stilled.
“I moved away from home for college,” Pomni went on. “I didn’t make many friends there. I was . . . kind of anxious. Not that fun to be around. After college, I moved back home, for a while, but the people who had stayed, who didn’t go to college, I was unrecognisable to them.”
“I’d have come to visit you, Pomni,” Zooble said genuinely. Next to them, Gangle nodded her head vigorously.
Pomni looked over at them. The Asset saw a weak smile spreading across her face.
Suddenly, as if stung, Jax pushed her away with a groan, his eyes describing a wide arc as he rolled them in his large oval sockets. He retreated to his original position lounging lengthways on the preparation table and picked up an apple, taking a large chunk out of it.
“You’re all making me sick,” he said through a full mouth.
Zooble glared. Pomni turned around and watched him, her eyes searching his face, clearly questioning. Jax’s gaze would not meet hers. Eventually she turned away, and though her face was composed, the Asset thought it saw some kind of hurt, or disappointment, simmering beneath the surface.
“It’s not the same,” Gangle spoke up after a moment. “But I was in hospital once.”
“What happened?” Ragatha took a step forward, the barrel of her gun flashing in the firelight.
Gangle shunted herself back on her chair and brought her knees up to her chin.
“I burned myself,” she said. “At work. Two of my staff didn’t show up on a Saturday shift during in the holidays. I’d worked a double the day before, and so I hadn’t had any sleep...”
“Christ, here we go,” Jax muttered, tossing the half eaten apple towards the fireplace, where it rolled up against the Asset’s comatose body.
Gangle ignored him. “It was m-mayhem. We had a backlog of thirty orders, and a dozen angry customers at the desk, and all our fryers were running at max capacity. We didn’t have the personnel to clean properly as we went, so it was getting more and more hot and filthy in there as the day went on. I was alternating between the tills and the fryers, since I was one of the few people there who was trained to use them, but my brain wasn’t in gear to do any of it. I think I must have thought I was putting some cash into the register, when in fact I was dropping it into the fryer. As soon as I realised, I reached out to grab it, and dipped my hand right into the hot oil…”
“Gangle,” Zooble began.
Gangle gave an empty laugh. “They admitted me with multiple burns and acute exhaustion. I was laid up for four days.”
Jax rolled over onto his front and grinned cruelly. “Anyone visit you, Gangle?”
“Yes, actually,” she glared at him. “Some course mates from my old community college. I hadn’t seen them much since I’d dropped out. They were actually pretty nice to me. Even though I’d become a pathetic wage slave.”
“How did your bosses react?” Pomni asked.
“Not well,” Gangle said. “In fact, I almost got fired for it. Apparently, because I didn’t file an incident report within twenty-four hours explaining what had happened, I couldn’t take sick leave.”
“But you were in hospital,” Zooble said incredulously.
“Didn’t matter to them.” Gangle shook her head. “That was their policy.”
“That’s actually insane.”
“It’s actually even worse than that. There was damage to some of the equipment. I broke some things as I fell backwards. They threatened to sue me. I had to agree to let them take deductions from my salary to pay for it.”
“Ah, the machine of capitalism,” Jax asserted. “Keeping us busy and miserable until we drop dead. Just like this place.”
Zooble twitched. The Asset felt their patience for the rabbit fraying with each word that came out of his mouth.
“Not that we can really die here,” Pomni muttered, as if this was a conversation familiar to her.
“And not that you seem particularly miserable,” Zooble added, glowering at Jax. “You almost seem like you enjoy it, you freak.”
Jax placed a hand to his heart. “Zooble, you hurt me. But what if I am enjoying myself? It’s like Pomni says: we can’t die here, so there’s no consequences to anything that happens to us. So rather than being all sad and depressed about it, why don’t you let yourselves kick back and be carried along in the flow?”
“I don’t even know where to start with what you just said.”
“What’s the issue? What I don’t understand is why you all still act the same way you did before, even though you know the rules are different here. Back home, you didn’t act like you were going to die. No one did. You just kept doing the same thing day after day, expecting bigger things, expecting something to change or get better. Even though it wouldn’t. Even though now you know we can’t die, you still keep playing along like your success depends on it.”
“What else are we supposed to do?” Zooble snapped. “Need I remind you that you’re participating, just like the rest of us. Even if you pretend you’re above it all.”
“Did any of you really have anything back home that made all this pointless anxiety worth it? Anything you really cared about? To put up with the same shit day after day? Or were you just doing it because you couldn’t imagine doing anything else?”
“What are you getting at, Jax?”
“What was your goal, Zooble? That’s what I’m asking. What were you working towards that was gonna make it all worth it? Enough cash saved up to not have to rent anymore? To replace that with a crippling mortgage? Two-and-a-half kids and a white picket fence? A fence?” He snorted. “In this economy!”
Zooble adjusted the brooch on their chest before replying. “Honestly,” they said, “I don’t believe there was anything to work towards. We were promised a thousand different things, none of which were possible unless you were born rich or got lucky. It doesn’t take a genius to see that it was all advertising and bullshit.”
“So why were any of you trying? That’s what I don’t understand.”
“We had to try, Jax. We had to eat. We had to pay rent.”
“Unless you had a trust fund.”
Across the room, Ragatha stiffened. “Jax, that’s not funny now.”
“I guess . . . my life was a lot less than I thought it would be,” Pomni said suddenly.
The others turned to her. Again, she shrunk at the sudden attention.
“How so?” Gangle asked.
“Well, I thought by this time I might have travelled a bit more of the world than I have. Maybe I’d have a partner, my own place to live. I’d always imagined a kind of cottage in the woods. Or maybe a farm. I certainly wouldn’t be living in a grimy apartment with roommates who hated me and getting ghosted by people I didn’t even like that much on dating apps I hated using.”
“Hear that, folks?” Jax’s eyes widened. He nodded in the direction of the others. “Partner. People. She really is a mystery.”
“Ignore him, Pomni,” Zooble sighed.
“What? I’m being an ally here.”
Pomni wrung her hands. “I guess, most of the time I was just too busy. It sounds kind of pathetic now. To be too busy doing things I hated to do anything I enjoyed.”
“It’s not your fault,” Gangle said.
“She’s right,” Zooble agreed. “You we’re doing the best you could. We all were.” They glanced at Jax. “Well, most of us.”
Jax rolled his eyes, then looked long and hard at Zooble’s hand, which was still on Gangle’s knee.
“On the topic of partners,” he began, a sly edge to his voice that by now the Asset had come to recognise. “Is it worth mentioning that Gangle hasn’t been able to look you in the eye ever since that dating sim adventure two weeks ago?”
It took a second for what Jax had said to register with the pair sitting on the bench. When they did, they separated from each other as if shocked.
“Fuck off, Jax,” Zooble grimaced, their face parts flooding with redness. They crossed their arms.
“Seriously?” Jax balked. The Asset could sense that he had found a weak spot and was determined to dig his teeth in. “Is this the kind of girl you liked? Ten years older than you, depressed, and scared of her own shadow?”
“Seriously, stop it, Jax.” Zooble started to rise, prompting Jax to hop down from the table, placing Pomni between them like a buffer.
“Oh, come on,” he said, still grinning. “Chill out. Where’s your calm face? I guess you must have left it in the box, with the rest of your pronouns.”
“Jax!” Pomni turned around and regarded him with a look of horror. “What the hell?”
A crack appeared in Jax’s facade. He glanced down at the jester, who continued to stare at him incredulously, almost disbelievingly, then huffed and threw up his arms in frustration.
“Oh, so that’s too far, is it?”
Zooble took a deep breath. Suddenly, all tension appeared to melt from their body. A strange calmness came over them, even as the others watched on nervously, waiting for their reaction. They turned and walked to one of the windows not occupied by Kinger, still oblivious, and stood for some time in silence, washed in the white soft light of the fake moon.
Then, in a series of movements that were unexpectedly swift and elegant for a creature of such mismatched parts, they crossed the room to where Ragatha was standing and unclasped the holster on her hip. They snatched the gun out of the holster and turned, raising their arm, and shot Jax, who was standing just to the side of Pomni, clean through the kneecap of his right leg.
The gunshot was deafening in the enclosed space. The Asset felt it ringing in its brain, a high pitched whine that was matched only by the blast of the shotgun that had only recently ripped through its own chest. Jax cried out and collapsed. He reached blindly for the nearest table edge to break his fall, but missed and succeeded only in dragging several baskets of various food items with him, which landed on top of him and scattered as he crashed down heavily on the stone floor, clutching his shattered knee.
Pomni and Gangle both screamed in unison, jumping up from their seats. Pomni turned and glared at Zooble, who had lowered the smoking gun and hardened their features.
“Zooble!” she cried, but was drawn away by the continued cries of Jax, lashing out in pain, writhing as blood dribbled through the hole torn in the fabric of his dungarees, which were quickly becoming stained a dark brown as it poured down his leg. She sank down at his side and panicked over how best to comfort him.
“Oh, God,” she muttered. “Oh God, oh God.”
Meanwhile Ragatha snatched the gun out of Zooble’s hand and inserted herself between them and Pomni and Jax, her mitts planted firmly on her hips.
“That was uncalled for!” she exclaimed.
Zooble straightened up and glared. “He deserves it,” they spat. “You know he does.”
“There’s no point fighting among ourselves.” Ragatha took a step toward them. “We’re miserable enough as it is.”
“What are you standing up for him for? He’s an asshole.”
“But that’s no reason to shoot him!”
“Oh, don’t you start. You hate him as much as anyone else.”
Ragatha took a quick step back, as if it was she who had been shot. “That’s not true,” she gasped.
“So why do you look like you want to kill someone every time he makes her laugh?” Zooble demanded, pointing past her at Pomni. “You know, he’s actually right. You’d have pissed me off no end in real life. You piss me off now. You’re so desperate to be liked, it’s pathetic.”
By now, Jax was breathing quickly and heavily through his clenched teeth, seething in pain. A constant stream of sweat poured down his forehead.
Pomni knelt over him, fussing uselessly. She tried to apply pressure to the wound, but Jax only screamed and knocked her away. She glanced about her in shock.
“Anyone got a healing item?”
Ragatha ignored her. Her non-button eye had become hard and glassy.
“Well I’m sorry that I’ve never had friends, Zooble,” she said, glowering. “I’m sorry that I didn’t have a normal upbringing. That I don’t know how to act around people or talk like a normal person. You know nothing about my life. None of you do.”
“What’s to know?” Zooble sneered. “You’re rich, you’re privileged, and I have no sympathy for you. Everything in your life was a thousand times easier than it was for me. You can’t possibly know how it was for the rest of us.”
“Why is everyone fighting?” Gangle whimpered, her ribbons coiling themselves into tight knots.
“Guys, a health item?”
Ragatha turned on her heel and carelessly tossed a handful of bright green herbs to Pomni, who failed to catch them. She scrambled towards where they had fallen and gathered them up before returning to Jax, who snatched them and did his best to turn away from her and all the others.
“I’m fine!” he grunted, and began to apply them, letting out haggard sobs as he mashed them into the site of the impact. “Fuck!”
The Asset watched the scene with total fascination. It couldn’t fathom what sort of programming instructions these players were operating under. While their conversations and actions seemed absurd and rooted in a world that the Asset had never even glimpsed, there was a hideous kind of internal consistency to it that led it to conclude that it must all be real. The rabbit’s screams were genuine, and the quivering lip of Ragatha spoke of a serious emotion that, usually repressed, was beginning to overwhelm her. It was like they had been transplanted from an entirely different game, and the Asset wished more than ever that it had the capability to communicate beyond its handful of primitive sound files.
It was the sight of Gangle beginning to cry that seemed to tip the balance for Zooble. The hardness in their mismatched eyes began to soften. They barged past the stunned Ragatha and went to stand with her. They reached for her shoulder with a plasticky green claw, only for it to be shoved off and and Gangle to shuffle even father away, pressing herself right up against the brick wall in miserable silence.
Meanwhile Pomni had managed to seize the herbs from Jax and was preparing a tourniquet from the sleeve of her own jacket, which she had ripped off and torn up into long strips. Jax was now sitting upright, his knee a mess of gore. However, the herbs were clearly taking effect; his pupils had dilated to a kind of numbed sightlessness. He watched Pomni work with total attention.
Ragatha meanwhile stood off to the side, her gaze alternating between the two pairs, who had lost all interest in her, looking a little lost, a little lonely.
It was then that the Asset saw Kinger adjust his robe, the first significant movement he’d made since taking up his position by one of the windows, staring out into the rain, the moonlight sharpening the curves of his ivory body.
The others didn’t notice him at first, and so were mildly startled when, apropos of nothing, he began to speak.
“I never got any tattoos,” he said ponderously.
“What?” Pomni paused briefly and turned, a look of mild annoyance on her face.
“He’s talking about me,” said Zooble, equally frustrated. “About being a tattoo artist. I swear, he’s always ten steps behind.”
“Kinger, sorry, but now’s really not the time,” Ragatha said.
But Kinger didn’t appear to hear them. He went on.
“I think I was scared of the permanence of such an alteration,” he said. “The thought of wearing something on my body that anyone might see, that I would have had to explain to them if asked, and the difficulty of choosing a design, of something that meant something to me…” He chuckled to himself. “Well. I certainly regret it now.”
He touched the window, which had fogged up slightly with his breath.
“I didn’t get out much, in my job. I worked on computers, I suppose you’ve heard. I guess I was often restless. Sometimes I would go into the city at night, usually just after it had rained, and I would stand in one of the empty squares, and imagine how it must have looked, a hundred years, a thousand years before, when everything was marshland or forest, totally untouched by people. I would imagine big sabre-toothed tigers prowling the subway lines, and eagles roosting in the skyscrapers.
“On weekends I would go up into the mountains and breathe the cool, wet air, and feel the fallen leaves beneath my feet, and touch the rocks covered in moss that felt so soft, like a pillow I could put my head on.”
He paused.
“We used to drive out there, the two of us. She’d take us up there in her old convertible, the one she’d inherited from her father...”
“Your wife, you mean?” Pomni asked, her hand resting on the small of Jax’s back. The rabbit was breathing evenly now, although his hands trembled.
Kinger nodded. “I . . . don’t remember much of our life together. At least, I think we had a life together…”
His eyes slipped shut. It seemed like it was a great effort to remember.
“Yes, we must have,” he concluded. “I know that we had a garden together, one we both used to tend. I remember summer nights, when the long grasses rippled in the wind, and we could hear the birds nesting up. Sometimes we’d hear an owl. And we could hear our neighbours. Many of them were younger than us. Students. We lived in that sort of area. They always sounded like they were having so much fun. I’d make us a couple of drinks and we’d sit there, on these beaten up old lawn chairs, looking for bats flitting across the sky, and listening to the funny stories the students told, and thinking about our own college years, how we’d met.”
He took a breath and straightened, his hands falling to his side.
“It was . . . a good time. And I sometimes thought, this is enough. Whatever it is that means something to you, is enough.”
The particular intonation of his voice, meandering, devoid of anything except tender yet fragile recollection of a time long past, had a calming effect on the room. Zooble stopped trying to get Gangle’s attention and instead sat down heavily on the far other end of the bench, making minute adjustments to their head parts, as if by finding the perfect alignment of incompatible appendages they might regain some measure of control. After a long moment. they gave up, and raised their eyes to Jax.
“I know you miss them,” they said, their voice halting and awkward, as if their pride didn’t quite submit to being swallowed. “I-I’m sorry. If we could do anything to bring them back...”
They trailed off.
Pomni stared at Jax, who had stiffened at Zooble’s words. But he would not look over at her. The others were silent, but glancing around there was a clear understanding seemingly shared by all except the gloomy jester, who in that moment seemed as out of things as Ragatha had earlier, staring with enormous eyes at Jax, who wouldn’t acknowledge her.
After a moment, Jax stood using his good leg and braced himself against the table, refusing Pomni’s offer of help. Blindly he reached behind him for the shotgun, the butt of which he used as a crutch to allow him to stand freely. He tugged at a loose flap of material which made up part of the tourniquet, and, satisfied that it would hold, cleared his throat and took the silver key with the dolphin symbol out of his pocket. He started limping towards the far door.
“This has gotten old,” he muttered to no one in particular. “Let’s get this shitty adventure over with.”
The Asset jerked to attention. In the chaos of the past few minutes it had almost forgotten about its directives. Now it scanned its code, and sure enough, upon the instant Jax inserted the key into the lock, a digital lock of its own was lifted, granting access to a new and final set of instructions.
With the players’ backs to it, none saw the Asset rise to its feet, peeling itself from the fetid corpse beneath it, its body and clothing now more defaced than ever, its skin in tatters having been peppered with shrapnel from Jax’s shotgun, and lumber as silently as it could towards the group, eagerly selecting its choice of target, readying its grab attack and preparing its chosen sound file.
Everything was in place.
Or so it thought.
What it hadn’t banked on was a strange and new variable entering its codebase: a conflicting statement, almost like a feeling that seemed to have no precedent in its instructions.
It looked at each player in turn and suddenly could find no reason to want to kill any of them.
Want? it thought obliquely. What was want?
It stumbled. As it did, it realised that it was feeling something like sympathy for the players. It didn’t want to kill them. No, if anything it wanted to see them succeed. It stumbled again.
Something slipped. Not in a physical sense, but rather a mental one. It felt an inertia, a weightlessness. A function threw an error. Then a second. Then a chain reaction began and suddenly its entire body went rigid. Its arms shot out at right angles, its feet slammed together. It let out a surprised croak.
Kyeegh—??
The others turned around. Pomni gasped, leaping towards Jax, who raised his shotgun. Similarly, Gangle jumped behind Zooble, letting out an alarmed squeak.
However, no shots were fired. They seemed confused.
It was Jax eventually who stepped forward, nudging the Asset’s shoulder with his gun’s barrel.
“I . . . think it’s glitched,” he said.
It was true. The Asset was frozen. It tried to move but couldn’t. Its limbs were locked, its jaw seized.
“Caine’s getting sloppy,” Zooble muttered, taking a step forward also. They had taken back Ragatha’s gun.
“It wouldn’t be in the spirit of things to kill it like this, would it?” Jax said.
“No, it wouldn’t.”
The pair stared at it. Outside, thunder grumbled—the interminable cycles repeating themselves.
There was a terrible moment of silence. Then, the Asset watched in disbelief and horror as Zooble and Jax both raised their guns.