Authors: Daniel H. Wilson,John Joseph Adams

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I call him Hakim because that’s the name on the front of the store.

He’s standing behind the counter inside the shop. Jamie still hasn’t answered my question. “Have you been in here?” I ask him. I’m curious if he’s seen what I’m about to do. I assume he knows all the game’s secrets better than I do.

“Yeah,” he says. “All the time. This is a bonus mission. You barely have enough time to get here and then to the next objective. But…when I come here, the place is already leveled. All this stuff is scattered everywhere. You enter through a gaping hole in that wall.”

I know what he’s describing. I’ve gotten here late, when people die or I do something wrong, and when I turn the corner at the end of the long road, a drone comes out of nowhere and blows the place up with a rocket. You can just barely see the boy standing on the sidewalk—a little gray smear—when the orange flash erupts.

Standing in front of Hakim, I run through a series of dialog options until I can ask to use his bathroom. He hands me what I guess are the keys—the game never says. When I go to the side door that leads out the back of the shop, it now opens. Out here is the game within a game. My little solace. A walled-off courtyard with five raised planters. And inside each one, a mix of flowers and vegetables. My flowers. My vegetables.

Living in the city in the real world, Jamie and I don’t have room for a garden. But after hours of running around in this game, figuring out how to control my character, just trying not to die over and over, looking for something to do while feeling trapped at home with April every day, I stumbled onto this place. Really, I was guided here. Any other way you go, people die. If people don’t die, you end up here. It’s that simple.

“This is wild,” Jamie says, his voice subdued.

“You should have seen it when I first got here,” I tell him. “It was all weeds and brown dirt. You have to buy flowers and vegetables out front and plant them in here. And if you don’t keep them watered, they’ll go away.”

I select the first canteen and use it in front of the nearest planter. It makes a gurgling noise, and the flowers straighten a little. They seem to brighten. Jamie is dumbfounded, and I see the garden through his eyes, with all that color coming at once, rather than gradually, as I’ve watched it unfold. All of the city is white crumbling walls, brown dirt, and the black char of fire and explosion. The only color to be found is the foul splattering of red around the bodies when something goes horribly wrong. Here, all the colors dance together. They sway in the breeze, a kaleidoscope of hues.

“It’s crazy they would even put this in here,” Jamie says. “Maybe to make the Predator strike more meaningful, or something?”

I water the second planter. And then the third, which is full of peppers and beans.

“And the plants go away if you don’t water them?” Jamie asks.

“They wilt,” I say.

“But how does it remember? How do you save the game without getting to the exfil point?”

“What’s the exfil point?” The word sounds familiar. I recall the loud sergeant yelling something about that once.

“It’s where you get extracted. After the air strikes. If you die before you get there, you have to start over. And if the time runs out, the level just ends and you have to start over.”

“Oh, yeah. That’s what happens.” I water the last planter, then take out the rifle and use the knife to dig out weeds. The knife on the end of the barrel is also used to make furrows during the planting. “At some point, while I’m here in the garden, the game just ends. But I never play for more than an hour anyway.”

“But it remembers what you did,” Jamie says, almost to himself.

“I guess.”

When I’m done with the weeding, I step back to admire the garden. I could pick the tomatoes now and sell them to Hakim, but if they go another day or two, I’ll get more for them. It’s so hard to wait. And just looking at them makes me want to go to the kitchen and slice the ones from the market and make a sandwich.

“So this is all you do?” Jamie asks. He laughs to himself. “You play this game to grow flowers?”

“Not just that,” I say. “I also scrubbed all the graffiti off the walls in here.” I turn the character around to show him. “And I picked up all the trash and took the loose rubble that was in that corner and hauled it through the shop and to another alley.”

“You cleaned graffiti,” Jamie mumbles, like he doesn’t believe me.

“Yeah. Every wall was covered. It comes back now and then. There’s just this one spot where it won’t come off.”

I go to show him, when there’s a low grumble in the game. I would have thought it was his stomach or April messing her diaper if I hadn’t heard it a hundred times.

“It always thunders,” I say, “but it never rains.”

“That’s not thunder,” Jamie tells me. “It’s the air strikes across town. You’re so far out of position—”

He stops as I find the place on the wall with the black paint and try scrubbing it away. My character makes the right animation, rubbing a rag over the spot, but the marks remain.

“What is that?” Jamie asks. He cradles April and leans forward, studying the TV.

“It’s the only spot I can’t get clean,” I say. “There were other markings over top of this. Everywhere, really. Once you get the flowers and vegetables up and sell enough to Hakim, he gives you a bucket and a rag and asks you to clean up back here. If you do, you get squash seeds and beans. But these marks won’t go away. I keep wondering what might happen if I get all the walls perfectly clean—”

“Those are numbers,” Jamie says.

I make my character stop scrubbing. The marks look like Chinese to me. Little clusters of hashes.

“You read Arabic?” I ask, even though I know—like I know where every misplaced thing of his is at any moment—that my husband does not understand an ounce of Arabic.

“No, it’s Vollis. An alien language. After the eighth mission, the Vollis invade and you start using their plasma guns and sonic grenades to really kick some ass—”

I shoot him a look and make sure April is still asleep. He mouths his apology for cursing around her.

“Anyway,” he whispers, “your ammo with those weapons counts down in their language. Those marks spin like a clock. It’s easy to read. Do they ever change? Can you step back so we can see them all?”

I make the character step back. “I don’t think they change,” I tell him.

“What are they doing on this level? The Vollis don’t invade until you get to Kabul.”

“Why are there aliens in this game?” I ask. Though I seem to recall seeing him fight aliens and zombies with his friends. I just assumed it was some other game.

“It’s ten digits,” he says. “Do you think that’s a phone number? Maybe it’s a phone number.”

I laugh. Jamie thinks every series of numbers in his games might be a secret number to call to unlock another level or an extra life or something. One of the friends he plays with is a guy named Marv who he called randomly, and when he explained why he called, it turned out Marv was a gamer. Now, he’s another friend Jamie talks about like he’s known since high school but has never actually met in the flesh.

“The first three numbers are three one seven,” Jamie says. “That sounds like an area code. I’m calling it.”

I try to talk sense into him, but Jamie passes me April. I do everything I can to keep her from waking while Jamie digs out his cell phone and moves closer to the screen, dialing the number.

He listens to it ring. And then, without warning, he hands it out to me.

“Here,” he says. “You found this place. You have to talk to them.”

“I don’t want to talk to some random person,” I say. I cradle April and turn my shoulder. Jamie sits down beside me and holds the phone close to my ear, but angled so he can hear as well.

“You talk,” he hisses.

The phone is ringing.

“I don’t want to—” I hiss back.

There is a click on the other end. I don’t want to have to tell someone why we called the wrong number. April stirs and kicks in my arms, waking up. I can’t let go of her to shut off the phone. Jamie has his arm around me, his head close to mine so he can hear. And then, before I can say hello, can apologize, can tell Jamie to hang up, a voice announces itself, low and ominous:

“Congratulations,” the voice says. “You’ve reached the Department of Defense. Is this Donna213?”

It takes me a moment to remember that this is my screen name.

I nod. Then manage to say, “Yes.”

“Good. Now listen to me very closely—”

“What is this?” I ask. “Some kind of joke?”

April starts crying. Jamie won’t hold the phone still. He’s covering his mouth with his other hand, his eyes wide and disbelieving.

“Not a joke, ma’am,” the man says. “Listen to me carefully. Your country needs you.”

Hugh Howey is the author of the acclaimed post-apocalyptic novel
Wool
, which became a sudden success in 2011. Originally self-published as a series of novelettes, the
Wool
omnibus is frequently the number one bestselling book on Amazon.com and is a
New York Times
and
USA Today
bestseller. The book was also optioned for film by Ridley Scott and is now available in print from major publishers all over the world. Howey’s other books include
Shift
,
Dust
,
Sand
, the Molly Fyde series,
The Hurricane
,
Half Way Home
,
The Plagiarist
, and
I, Zombie
. Hugh lives in Jupiter, Florida, with his wife, Amber, and his dog, Bella. Find him on Twitter
@hughhowey
.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

John Joseph Adams

Many thanks to the following: Jeff Alexander, Jocelyn Miller, and Andrea Robinson, for acquiring and editing the book, and to the rest of the team who worked on the book at Vintage Books at Random House; my coeditor, Daniel, for being an enthusiastic and astute editing partner; Seth Fishman, for being awesome and supportive, and for finding a home for this project (writers: you’d be lucky to have Seth in your corner); Gordon Van Gelder, for being a mentor and a friend; Ellen Datlow for revealing the mysteries of anthologizing; my amazing wife, Christie; my mom, Marianne; and my sister, Becky, for all their love and support; Masumi Washington, Nick Mamatas, Samantha Shea, Rob Weisbach, and Deirdre Smerillo for helping wrangle authors and/or contracts; and last but not least: thank you to all the writers who agreed to be part of the anthology, and to all the readers who make doing books like this possible.

Daniel H. Wilson

My thanks go to all the contributors to this anthology and to Ernie Cline for furnishing a foreword—it’s truly amazing and humbling to be a part of such a talented science fiction community. Speaking of, I feel incredibly lucky to collaborate once again with the supremely organized and keen-eyed John Joseph Adams. I deeply appreciate the work put into this anthology by our editors at Vintage (Jeff Alexander, Jocelyn Miller, and Andrea Robinson), and the vote of confidence from my editor, Jason Kaufman, at Penguin Random House. Thanks must go to my agent, Laurie Fox, for making all of this possible. And of course, all my love always to Anna, Cora, and young master Conrad.

Finally, thank you to all the people out there making video games. Part of my life has been lived in your worlds, and I have acquired many treasured memories, friendships, and lessons in the time I’ve spent wandering your imaginations.

PERMISSIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to print the following material:

“The Relive Box” by T. C. Boyle, copyright © 2014 by T. Coraghessan Boyle. Originally published in
The New Yorker
(March 17, 2014). Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author.

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