The Eternal Sublimation of Noobsoft
All their friends want to go to heaven, and they don’t want to leave Keysplash and Highscore behind. They’re all family, and Noobsoft has determined that if they dive deep enough into dataspace that they never have to come back. They’ve been there enough times to know it’s better than the outside world. The outside world. It’s worse. It’s boring like school is boring, and they stopped going to school a long time ago.
“There’s cops there too. The cops are random,” Lenixgrad says. He looks like a rough outline of a person made up of ones and zeros. The whole crew does.
They’re here because the answer to the question, “Do you want to get high?” is, “Yes,”
Screentweak is the best high there is. None of the crew have been confronted with any compelling arguments against booting up a part chemical/part code drug that blurs line between data and consciousness.
It’s like exploring the bottom of the ocean except you get to understand the bottom of the ocean as if you were the ocean itself, but it’s really actually more than that because you have to imagine that the ocean moves on more than one axis of time as well as on several dimensional spaces that only exist in the abstract for anyone who is not the ocean. Also, you can have sex here and the sex is So. Much. Better.
Keysplash and Highscore’s mother would not approve. She has a very practical conception of sex and what it’s for. She also thinks VR’s profit based product created to distract people. Despite this, Highscore and Keysplash love their mother very much.
“The weather,” Noobsoft says, “is also too random.” The ones and zeros that make up the body of Noobsoft are vibrating, which makes him blur in and out like he’s lagging.
This morning, Noobsoft, whose eyes were the color of dirty clouds that focused and unfocused in confused, jerking, pivots as he wandered around the storefront they all lived in, like a raccoon with rabies.
“Noobsoft? You there?” Asked Key.
Noobsoft said nothing, and after a prolonged silence, picked up his hat and put it on his head, making sure the Starbuck’s logo that’s holding two pistols was pointing outward.
“The deeper you go, the more to know,” he said.
Key said, “You know you’ve been out since before yesterday, right? You’re lucky High’s here to keep you living.”
Noobsoft looked over to Key as he walked over to pour himself some nutri-drink. He said, “When you’ve been as deep as I have, you know this ain’t living.”
“You’re welcome?’ said High, who spent large amounts of time looking after zonked friends.
High is a good brother.
“Whatever,” said Noobsoft, gesturing to the Lenixgrad and Ladderhack. “We’re gonna get high. You want to get high?”
Their mother isn’t exactly what you would call a pleasant person. She often told her daughter and son that only fools chase their dreams. That most dreams got into their heads through ads they don’t remember seeing.
“It’s not what I want, and I don’t like it,” Noobsoft says, and the binary heads of the crew nod in agreement as they unfocus until their foggy numbers roll into each other like clouds colliding in the sky. There’s excitement, moaning, and then climax which loops back into itself, and just when this arrangement seems settled, it all focuses back up again. Each of them avatars of pure and joyous code.
“So, we’re not going back,” Noobsoft’s voice is tinny and filtered. “We’re staying right here.”
Their code disperses again, weaving together, and the whole crew speaks as one. They invite Key stay with them.
“Forever?” Key asks.
Their mom made it clear when they were very young that her love was conditional. Contingent on a certain set of goals that needed to be followed under a specific set of moral conditions. Principally, they needed to make sure she didn’t regret all the time and energy she spent on them. Another was to keep her alive and happy for as long as possible after she became host to a degenerative nerve disorder.
“Unlike VR,” she said to Highscore, “you weren’t created for the purposes of your own entertainment.”
Key and High are getting fuzzy too. Unfocusing. Blending. Reunderstanding what they forgot since the last time they were here.
“So much of us gets left here,” Noobsoft and the crew say, and it’s all very tempting because she’s sure she knows exactly what they mean. Here. Screentweak. The code. There’s part of her here that cannot exist outside of this place.
It’s better. The crew says so, and they show her the frames of code from all the crew she’s known who never came back.
They’re all here. Some of them long dead, some of them still walking around in the world. Here and there at the same time. Waiting to be reunited. To be complete. It’s better. Screentweaked Key is better than anything she could be outside.
The fundamental mathematics of existence in this place allow for the physical exploration of dimensions that only exist on theoretical axes. There are shapes here that prop up all known existence, like Atlas holding up the sky. They can swim through this underpinning geometry, basking in the pure elegance of it. Conceptualizing a complete structure of the universe. Or they can have sex here, or something that seems like a much better version of sex.
But not all of them are here. Key and High, their mom isn’t here, and someone needs to take care of her. It’s that simple, someone needs to take care of her because no one else is going to. Also, what Noobsoft is proposing shouldn’t be possible. Key looks at High and then says as much.
“It’s not possible,” she says. High’s code floats. He’s hard to read. He’s loyal though, or exploitable, according to their mom.
But that’s not the point, is it? This place. It’s not real: this is what Key thinks and has always thought. It’s not real, or at least it’s not real in a way that her mother is real, and her mother would never come here, which is why she can’t stay. Why she wants her brother to come with her. Why they can’t keep coming back.
“So much of you is already here,” the crew says as they drift off into the surrounding code. They’re right, and it’s very convincing.
Highscore also said, “I’ll never leave you and mom. I promise,” the last time she had them over to drink tea.
And she said, “I know,” while hand tremors splattered tea out of her cup.
Key knows they have to get out. They need to grow up.
Though, Key thinks, there is always the possibility that Key could stay and High could go. Their mom had always told them she was interested in seeing which one of them would be more successful. High could do it. He has more potential anyway. Banks way more credits on his live streams. She could stay, and there’d be no guilt because she didn’t make the promise. High did. High made the promise.
He lied. Highscore disperses and goes with them. Is with them. Is them. Moaning while they seep out like blood in the tissues of a thirty-dimensional temporal lobe that hangs over extra-space like the only light in a sea of inky black.
And then they’re gone and not gone in symbiotic selfhood of both non-self and extra-self, and Key can still hear them telling join in the most hopeful and honest tones. Like she doesn’t already know. They’re her family, but they do not need her. There is no need here. There is only the realization that need and hunger make no sense. It’s amazing more of their friends don’t come back. Key’s mom needs her. There’s no one else. She needs to go.
Key unplugs from VR. She walks over to the corner to see the bodies of her friends and brother who are not breathing and who’s hearts have stopped. She’s exhausted. Still feels their code. She’s going to have to explain this to her mom?
Key’s friends, her brother, her Mom’s son, are dead because they decided to un-self themselves. They wanted to stay in a place that was constructed by corporations in order to keep them occupied for profit.
The street outside is filled with people like it always is. The clouds the same. The rain. She sees the sameness so often sometimes it seems painted on. There’s a dullness to it. A limited dimensionality. There’s a greyness to the people who she’s probably seen walk past a thousand times before with faces she never remembers.
She weeps. Tears falling slowly toward the bodies of Noobsoft, Highscore, Ladderhack, and Lenixgrad. She still hears their voices. They tell her she needs to go back. There’s already so much of her there.
Originally from Green Bay, Wisconsin, Saul Lemerond is a dyslexic writer who lives with his family in Southern Indiana where he teaches creative writing at Hanover College. His fiction appears in Bourbon Penn, The Drabblecast, Electric Spec, and elsewhere. He also has work upcoming in Flash Fiction Magazine. You can find out more about him and his work at saullemerond.com.