Rodomonte's Revenge (3 page)

Tom shook his head. “I can't.”

“What do you mean, you can't?”

“I have only one life left.”

“And I'm not going to have any!”

“Sorry, Brett, it's too late for you. There's nothing I can do.”

“Tom, you dirty—” A third web shot out and covered his mouth, then his eyes. What felt like a thousand legs prodded and pulled him down, deeper and deeper into darkness. Then he was hanging from his feet with his blood running to his head. Two needlelike pincers pricked his neck. He felt light-headed and bloodless and very, very thirsty. The world went black.

This time it stayed black; the video landscape did not return. Soft padding pressed against the back of Brett's neck. He took off his helmet.

He was propped against the arcade wall on his shoulder blades, his feet sticking up in the air. He watched his friend slowly crawl away from him, swaying back and forth. Suddenly
Tom screamed and fell on his side. He stretched out, lay still, then took his helmet off. “I fell off the mountain.”

“Falling off a mountain is too good for you. Why didn't you help me?”

Tom sat up. “I'm not stupid. That spider had you good.”

“I died. It sucked me dry.”

“Don't get mad. It's only a game.”

The door opened, and Willie stuck his head in. “What do you think of Rodomonte's Revenge?”

“That,” Tom said, “is the best game I have ever played.”

“Let's play again.” Brett put his helmet back on.

“Sorry.” Willie pulled it off. “You'll have to wait in line. Judging by how long it is, you'll be waiting until tomorrow.” He led them out the door. “Don't worry. You'll play this game so much that in a month you'll be sick of it.”

Brett grunted. “I doubt it.”

“We'll see,” Willie said as he showed them out.

“I had the strangest dream last night,” Brett told Tom the next day as they waited for Mrs. Compson, their math teacher, to come into the classroom. They were sitting in the back, where there was less chance of Mrs. Compson's asking them questions; neither was very good at math. “I dreamed I was shooting a fire river's rapids. The front of my raft went under, and sparks flew into my face.”

Tom nodded. “And then the raft burst into flames, sank, and I burned to death.”

Brett chuckled. “Pretty crazy dream, wasn't
it?” He stared at Tom. “How do you know my dream?”

Tom stared back. “The question is, How do
you
know
my
dream?”

“We dreamed the same thing?” Brett shook his head. “That's impossible.”

“It's not impossible; it's just improbable. Maybe we should ask Mrs. Compson to figure out the odds.”

“No. Not in a thousand years.” Mrs. Compson made her students figure out their own questions by assigning them as homework. Nobody needed to know anything that badly.

The door squeaked opened, and Mrs. Compson waddled in. Any room she entered she waddled in; she was built like a duck. She began droning about polynomials without so much as a “good afternoon” or a “prepare to be bored out of your minds.” Brett's mind drifted away. Polynomials did that to him.

He imagined being at the arcade and thought about playing Rodomonte's Revenge again. He was so bad at everything else—school, girls, and sports—but video games were different. Everything always worked in them; everything always turned out the way
he wanted. If classes were video games, he'd ace them. If parents were, he'd ace them, too. If life were, he'd cruise, just as Tom had said.

A loud hum brought his mind back. Two buzz-bugs tore the door off its hinges and blitzed straight toward the back of the classroom.

“Look out!” Brett tumbled off his seat and rolled across the floor. From the clatter at Tom's desk, Brett guessed that he was doing the same. Brett reached for his sword and leaped to his feet, shouting, ready for battle.

Then the buzz-bugs disappeared, and the door was back in place. He and Tom were standing in the middle of the room, clutching their pencils like samurai swords. The class stared at them. So did Mrs. Compson.

“Look out for what, Mr. Wilder?” she asked.

“Uh …” Brett looked at the class, at Tom, at Mrs. Compson. He felt like a first-class fool. “I thought you were going to work that problem wrong.”

Mrs. Compson tapped her chalk against her palm. “I'm pleased to see you finally showing such avid interest, but raising your hand will do.”

“Right. Sorry.” Brett sat back down, his face burning twenty-eight different shades of red.

“You can sit down, too, Mr. Houston.”

“My leg fell asleep,” Tom explained. “I had to stretch it.” He rubbed his knee and limped a little, lying to prove that he wasn't lying. He sat down, too.

“Back to the matter at hand.” Mrs. Compson turned to the blackboard. She could even turn in a boring way. “If X squared minus X plus one equals zero, then to factor it, all we have to do—”

The floor beneath her feet opened, webs shot up to ensnare her chubby wrists, and eight ugly black legs rose to factor her. She plunged, screaming, into the earth.

“Mrs. Compson!” Brett and Tom ran to the front of the room, hurdling desks and students.

The hole in the floor was gone. Mrs. Compson wasn't. She glared at them.

“Is this supposed to be funny?” she asked.

“No.”

“One more outburst from either of you, and you're both going straight to the principal's office.”

“Yes, Mrs. Compson.” They had to wade through giggles to get back to their desks.

“What's going on?” Tom whispered as soon as Mrs. Compson had turned back to the blackboard.

“I don't know.”

“We have to talk to Willie.”

“Right after school.”

When another buzz-bug knocked the door down and pinned Mrs. Compson's screaming, waddling body against the ceiling, Brett closed his eyes and pretended it wasn't there. When he opened his eyes, it wasn't.

“I want to make sure I understand this,” Willie said. “You two are seeing elements of the game when you're not playing it.” He was sitting at the computer, monitoring a game in progress. Two older guys, probably bankers who had called in sick to work on their lunch breaks, were stumbling around the game room like intoxicated orangutans.

“It's like the game doesn't want to be over,” Tom said.

“And you both see the same things?”

Brett nodded. “At the same time, and more and more all the time.”

“What do you mean?”

“He means that a buzz-bug is chewing on your ear right now,” Tom said. Brett nodded. It wasn't just chewing on it; it had almost chewed it off.

Willie touched his ear. It felt fine. He shook his head. “You guys need a psychiatrist.”

“Maybe, but we didn't need a psychiatrist yesterday. We were fine until we played Rodomonte's Revenge.”

Willie sighed. “The computer records all game results. When I look at yours and find nothing abnormal, will you see a doctor?” Brett and Tom agreed, and Willie nodded. “As soon as these two guys are done, I'll run a diagnostics check.”

“Can you fix it?” Tom asked. “Can you fix us?”

“If there's something wrong with the program, it will be tough. No one knows how it works. I was there when it was created, but Rodomonte's Revenge was designed by computers.”

“Computers programmed your computer?” Tom asked.

“It was the only way to develop the game. It's too complicated for human designers.”

Two muffled screams leaked through the window. Both bankers fell over at the same time. Willie typed something on the computer, went to the door, talked to the bankers for a minute, then showed them out. He walked back to Brett and Tom, shaking his head. “Poor guys. They never even got past the first fire river.”

There were more important things to Brett than bankers playing hooky. “Run the check,” he said.

Willie typed
DIAGNOSTIC ANALYSIS: ALL GAMES
on the keyboard. The screen overflowed with numbers. Willie studied them. “Hmm, that's strange.”

“What's strange?”

Willie pointed to the screen's top line. “There's a variance in the first game. That was you, wasn't it?”

“That was us.” Brett stared at the numbers.
They might as well have been hieroglyphics. “What kind of variance?”

“We'll find out in a second.” Willie typed
EXPAND ON DIAGNOSTIC ANALYSIS: GAME ONE
. The screen filled with numbers and words.

Brett pointed to a sentence that read
GAME INSTALLATION MODIFIED
. “What does this mean?”

“I don't know.” Willie typed
EXPAND ON INSTALLATION MODIFICATION
. He sat back, rubbing his chin. A single sentence darted across the monitor's top line,
INSTALLATION MODIFICATION: GAME WAS INSTALLED INTO PLAYERS RATHER THAN INTO THE SYSTEM
.

The blood drained from Willie's face. “Oh, no.”

“What do you mean, ‘oh, no'?” Tom asked. “I don't like ‘oh, no.' ”

“If this sentence means what I think it does, ‘oh, no' means the computer used the helmet electrodes to put the game program into your minds.” Color came back to Willie's face; now it was gray. “The program has been sabotaged. Instead of your being in the game, the game is in you.”

Tom gasped. “That's why we're seeing buzz-bugs and tunnel spiders.”

Willie nodded. “Eventually everything you see, hear, and do will be part of the game.”

“How could something like this happen?” Brett asked.

“Maybe we can find out.” Willie typed
WHO PROGRAMMED THE MODIFICATION
?

PROGRAM MODIFICATION WAS PART OF THE ORIGINAL PROGRAMMING
.

“The computers did it.” Willie typed
WHY?

A single sentence ran across the top of the screen,
ORIGINAL PROGRAMMERS WANTED TO LIVE
.

Willie sat back. “The programming computers don't want to be just game computers anymore. They want Rodomonte's Revenge to exist beyond this arcade. And they're using you to get there.”

“So they want to share our lives?” Tom asked.

“They want to take over your lives.”

“That's crazy.”

“It's worse than crazy,” Willie said. “Rodomonte's Revenge is a part of your minds now. If something happens to you when the game takes over—”

“Then it happens to us in real life.” Brett shuddered. He didn't want ears like the mangled
one he believed Willie had. But there was something even worse than that. “So if we die in the game—”

“Then we die in real life.” Tom shuddered, too.

Willie studied them long and hard. “You're going to play Rodomonte's Revenge again whether you want to or not. This time there won't be any second or third chance. This time you play for real.”

Willie closed the arcade early. He told the disappointed line of customers that Rodomonte's Revenge had a slight technical malfunction that needed fine-tuning; that was like Noah telling his neighbors he was expecting a little rain. After he'd locked the gate, he led Brett and Tom into the game room. He took the gloves, helmets, and boots and set them along with the boys' coats beside the computer.