Kill screen, p.1
Kill Screen, page 1
Kill
Screen
BENJAMIN REEVES
Copyright © 2016 Benjamin Reeves
All rights reserved.
ISBN:1461077281
ISBN-13: 978-1461077282
Cover design by Adam Kenney
To those who shaped me into the man I am.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
i
Chapter One
Blood Bath
1
Chapter Two
Sins Of The Father
12
Chapter Three
Digital Garbage
20
Chapter Four
Digital Robbery
29
Chapter Five
Digital Relationships
36
Chapter Six
Press Start To Continue
45
Chapter Seven
Living Stone
54
Chapter Eight
EVI
67
Chapter Nine
The Buried Dead
78
Chapter Ten
Restless Sleep
85
Chapter Eleven
Jack & Jill
94
Chapter Twelve
Round One, Acquisition
103
Chapter Thirteen
Indecision
117
Chapter Fourteen
The Golden Sea
126
Chapter Fifteen
Jack & Dexter
138
Chapter Sixteen
Ghosts
147
Chapter Seventeen
Round Two, Proposal
157
Chapter Eighteen
Responsible Art
171
Chapter Nineteen
Bad Math
178
Chapter Twenty
Subsonic Waves
186
Chapter Twenty-One
Hard to Breathe
199
Chapter Twenty-Two
Round Three, Fight!
211
Chapter Twenty-Three
Death
222
Chapter Twenty-Four
Platform Jumping
232
ACKNOWLEGEMENTS
They say that it takes a lot of people to write a book, and that axiom holds true even for small self-published works like this one. I’d like to thank my college professor Teague Bohlen for being there during this books inception, and for helping it get on the right course early on. My Colorado writers group, you have no idea how helpful you were at the beginning. My parents, Jim and Peg Reeves, for never questioning or doubting my aspirations. My brother Sam for letting me pick his brain when it came to designing the cover. My cover designer Adam Kenney, for putting up with my picky nature and constant redesigns. I want to throw out a special thanks to Warren Blossom for his final polishing edits; you helped make this thing better. And to the rest of my family, friends, and colleagues for reading early drafts of this book and for never telling me it sucked.
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CHAPTER ONE: BLOOD BATH
Dexter’s body was bloated and blue by the time I found it floating in a bath of his own blood. One arm hung over the side of the tub, the slash on his wrist squinting at me like an evil, bloody eye.
Suicide.
It wasn’t my first dead body. It wasn’t my first suicide. It wasn’t my first discovery of a mangled loved one. But you never grow accustomed to sorrow.
Numbed by the surreal, dreamlike quality of the scene in front of me, I sat down on the lid of the toilet next to his husk. The day’s events began to whirl around me like a hurricane.
I had begun to suspect that something was wrong with Dexter when he failed to show up to work. He hadn’t returned any of my calls that day, and by the time I left the office, I was beginning to worry. It was worse than I could have imagined.
He had drawn himself a bath of his own blood.
Dexter and I had fought the day before. In the haze of tragedy, I couldn’t remember most of the specifics. Lately, he’d been taking a lot of time off work, tinkering with a few personal projects. I needed his brain; I needed him to program our game back at the office. He didn’t understand why I made a big deal out of deadlines. He never understood deadlines. That had been our last exchange.
It was a stupid way to end a relationship.
My whole world felt inverted. Earlier in the day, I’d been fretting over a list of bug fixes our middling video game company had yet to implement for an upcoming project. I’d been arguing with my programming team about whether or not we could efficiently stream video off a disc and cursing Dexter for playing hooky. Now, all that passion was drained out of me. Who cared if our game had a bug list as long as my femur? While I was at the office arguing about programming priorities, Dexter was in his bathroom opening his wrists.
His body must have lain there for hours before I finally made my way over to his house to check on him. I knocked on his front door three times without getting an answer, and started to leave – until a gnawing in my gut drove me back. Snatching the spare key from the doorframe, I let myself in.
Dexter lived alone, in a house too big for one person. He’d grown up in a large manor, and I think all the empty space made him comfortable. That night, the dark corners of his home overwhelmed me. How had he ever found peace in this place?
The living room TV had been left on. It splashed random colors across an empty couch. An ad for a local jewelry store spun out soft piano music.
“It’s what your loved ones deserve,” echoed a rich baritone.
There was no sign of Dexter. I wandered the house looking for a life that no longer existed. The bathroom door was shut. Through a crack between the door and the floorboards, I could see the lights were on. A malodorous scent drifted under the door.
I rapped on the towering rectangle of wood in front of me.
“Hey Dex, you in there?”
No response.
I knocked a little louder.
“Dexter!”
Still nothing.
I tried the handle and the door creaked open.
The odd details are the ones I remember most. The floor’s noisy squeak as I stepped forward. My own distorted reflection in the bathroom window. The once white threads of a bathmat soaked pink as they broke above the surface of a red pool.
I didn’t see Dexter at first – he was invisible to me. All I could see was the deep redness of his bathwater. I knew there was something wrong with the scene, but I stared into the tepid bath for a long while before my brain was able to put the pieces together. I felt like my mind was running through sludge. I couldn’t process the colors and shapes in front of me. Then I looked into Dexter’s bloody third eye, and reality came into sharp focus.
My friend was dead.
He looked like a gutted fish. He had spread his life across the bathroom tiles. Bloated and blue. The razor blade sat on the island of his belly, in the middle of a red bath. Dexter’s blood had swamped the bathroom floor. One arm hung over the side of the tub. The open gash in his wrist winked at me as if I had just been hit with the punch line of a terribly offensive joke.
Numbed by the surreal dreaminess of the moment, I passed the rest of the night in a haze. There were phone calls, flashing lights, and EMTs. I remember the parts, but I don’t know how, where, or when they fit together. The TV remained on; playing an old eighties movie about a woman on a suicidal vengeance quest. The police brought questions and paperwork. The EMTs took the bloated, blue corpse away in a body bag. I left a half-brewed pot of coffee and a trash can full of vomit in the kitchen sink.
When there were no more questions or flashing lights, I was left with my memories and regrets, and the inescapable image of a winking bloody eye.
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When I was eleven, my grandfather took me sailing off the coast of his home in Branford, Connecticut. It was the last day we’d ever spend together. Half a century of sailing experience couldn’t save us from the storm that sprang up halfway through the day. We spent hours trying to get back to shore – rain poked our eyes as icy winds cut though the polyester of our windbreakers. A series of ten-foot waves turned our boat on its sails, and by the time the Coast Guards pulled me out, I’d lost sight of my grandfather. The Atlantic had swallowed him. His body was never recovered from the depths of the sea.
It’s the kind of memory that haunts a boy for his entire life.
I barely remember it.
From the moment that first strong wave sent me to my ass to the moment I woke up on a cot inside a Coast Guard’s rescue station, my memory is a blank slate. Like a spliced film, the scenes didn’t line up. There was nothing between the cold slap of ocean water and the warm scratch of a thermal blanket.
It was the first time I had experienced loss. It was my first lesson in the frailty of the mind’s recorder. My memories – especially the ones preceding a death – act like my grandfather’s wrecked ship. They are moments from my past that only exist as shattered images and sounds. S ometimes they sink into the night, disappearing with the waves. Sometimes they wash up on shore in fragments, cluttering my psyche. And sometimes they bring back extra debris – buried tragedies that I wish would stay lost in the brine.
I didn’t know it yet, but Dexter’s death would be this last kind of memory.
I remember a lot of things about Dexter. He was smart. He was funny. He hid his intelligence behind a goofy exterior. There was something irresistibly charming about the guy. Dexter was a freckle-faced computer programmer who’d inherited his short temper and drinking habits from his father. He was a math genius, an ambitious programmer, and a terrible golfer.
Once a month, we’d fire hollow, depleted uranium slugs at one another using electromagnetic rail guns – we played Quake at a doughnut shop turned LAN gaming center. We were bound together by our love of gaming. Years before, we’d both obsessed over hacking into various Bulletin Board Systems across the country. We loved discovering new games to play on those BBS boards. We would sneak into the college computer lab at night just so we could play multi-user dungeons using the schools servers.
After college, we decided to make our own computer games. We started a development house called Electronic Sheep. The name was Dexter’s idea of a joke. To everyone’s surprise, we had made enough money from our first project to keep the doors open. Now Dexter was gone and I’d have to run the company by myself.
I sat alone in the office and let these memories devour me. I hadn’t gone home the night before. My apartment scared me after dark, and I’d always been more comfortable at work. But even surrounded by the soothing hum of computers, I found no comfort.
I couldn’t sleep – that was not unusual for me. I often have trouble sleeping. Some call it a disease: insomnia, the sleeping disorder. I believe they call it that because one’s life must be out of order if they aren’t sleeping.
I call it penance – I don’t deserve the rest.
That night, I tossed and turned for hours on one of the couches in our lobby. When the sun rose, so did I. I retreated to my office, closed the door, and through the cracks in my blinds, watched people filter into the building. Outside my office door, I could hear the studio come to life as people went about their daily routines, making coffee, checking voicemail, and chatting about their adventures from the night before. Soon I would have to tell them that their boss was dead – that he’d killed himself.
I didn’t feel up to the task. How do you deliver news like that?
I stalled as long as I could, slow-cooking with anxiety. Sometime around ten in the morning, I couldn’t stand the heat in my pressurized office anymore, and I bolted from the room. A few animators looked up, startled to see me. No one had known I was in the building.
I cleared my throat like I had something to say. I did have something to say – I just didn’t know how to say it. A few more people looked up. I could feel the terror dripping off my face as I opened my mouth. Then I froze. The words I needed didn’t exist.
“I…” My voice squeaked out one barely audible syllable.
Our receptionist, Amy, came around the corner with a stack of mail. She slowed to a halt as she took in the scene. It was clear to everyone that I was about to make an important address.
“Good morning,” I belted out before turning on my heels and barreling down the hall.
I couldn’t talk to anyone about what had happened to Dexter. I didn’t even want to be thinking about it.
In my embarrassment, I slinked over to Shinji’s cubicle. It was the first place I could think to hide. Shinji Takeuchi was one of ESP’s senior programmers. Next to Dexter, he was our best. Quiet, reserved, and artistic, Shinji’s work was nothing short of genius. Raised in Japan until he was eighteen, Shinji’s tastes were definitively Japanese. His parents sent him to college in the U.S., expecting him to come home after completing his studies, but he’d become friends with Dexter at Cal Tech, and Dexter had recruited him for Electric Sheep.
Shinji worked out of one of the few cubicles in the office. He’d bought the unit himself a few years ago so that he could have privacy while working. I rapped on the side of his compartment, and leaned in. A small television seated on a chair in the corner of his work area played a rotation of Japanese anime that one of Shinji’s friends, had mailed over from back home. When I walked in, it was playing a show called Shin Seiki Evangelion.
A radio on Shinji’s desk whispered a J-pop group I had once mistakenly called a Japanese boy band. Offended, Shinji had given me a nasty look and grumbled for weeks about how “Chage and Aska” were not a boy band. Shinji remained highly focused under the bombardment of stimuli.
At some point, Shinji had replaced the lights above his desk with bulbs of a lower wattage. He preferred working in a dim enclosed space. As a result, the corners of his double wide cubicle were always dark. The lack of light didn’t seem to affect his work as Shinji pounded on his keyboard with the intensity a four-year-old might exhibit with a drum set. The display was almost magical. Lines of code flowed onto his monitor in quick bursts.
On an adjacent monitor sat an early build of one of our levels. I looked over the environment. The art team hadn’t taken a pass on this level’s geometry yet, so the landscape looked like a cardboard model washed-out in grayscale. It would take someone who knew the project inside and out to envision what the finished level would look like. It was going to be our Viking level, but at the moment it resembled a snow-covered field at midnight.
“Hello, Jack,” Shinji said without missing a beat on his keys.
“Hey,” I replied, a little startled that he even knew I was there.
Did he wonder why I was there? He didn’t seem to care. Shinji was one of our first employees. It seemed reasonable that I should break the news about Dexter to him first. I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out.
The sound of Shinji’s fingers against the keys was like a calming metronome. His fixed rain pats came with such a regular beat that it purred over all other sounds in his cube.
I glanced at his thirteen inch, fuzz-spackled TV. Onscreen, a military battleship slipped over glacial waters. From the safety of a glass cabin, two men looked out across a blood-stained sea. For no reason, I felt myself drawn to the show. Through my three-year, B minus study of Japanese, I tried to translate their dialogue.
“No life forms may exist in this world,” I deciphered. “In this dead world of Antarctica. We might even call it…Hell?”
I glanced at Shinji, his fingers pausing over the keys for a moment. Despite the foreign sounds coming from both the TV and radio, the room felt almost silent.
“How’s my translation?” I asked.
But Shinji was lost in a computer problem. Still enraptured by the scene unfolding on the television, I watched a second man, who wore rounded sunglasses, step forward.
“Nevertheless, we humans stand here,” said the man in glasses.
“Only because we’re protected by the power of science,” said the first man.
“Am I close?” I asked.
“You are close,” Shinji nodded.
He swiveled his chair toward me, snatching a can of Diet Coke from the edge of his desk as he robotically brushed a curtain of hair from his thin-rimmed glasses. He didn’t say anything, but I finally had his attention.
“Sorry to interrupt,” I added. “I just came by to see how work was coming along.”
That was a lie. I have something important to tell you about Dexter, I thought, but I couldn’t manufacture the words.
“Yesterday I finished integrating some of the lighting and shadow techniques I’ve been experimenting with.” Shinji stared at me calmly. He had never been generous with information.
“Great,” I said flatly. The small talk was already boring me. I wasn’t going to tell Shinji about Dexter. I was just wasting time.
After a beat, Shinji turned back to his computer, and I started to leave when he added, “But I’ve recently discovered a problem with our AI routines.”
