COWBOY / DUELLING / ABANDONED METAVERSE entry by Skrubly, group P.u.P. Felix Collins was standing in front of his desk, looking out across the river from the twenty-third floor of the building that bore his name. The evening sun just peeling back behind the mountains cast the river with an opal sheen of salmon and rich yellow, leading his eyes up to the skyscraper opposite stamped with a large letter M. The M was for Myers and it was exaggerated and thick, implying a bridge truss or brutalist palace. "What a dumb person would think something strong looks like" Felix said out loud to the empty room, repeating the words he had said to Myers himself thirty years previous. A slight cough behind him made him turn. "Sorry sir, but we received a response." said Kingsley, his assistant. "What did he say?" asked Felix. He honestly hadn't expected a response at all, let alone so soon. "He says, 'Meet at the Library at eleven'. Would you like me to prepare a lift?" Kingsley said. "No, that's not necessary. That's not the Library. I can meet him. Tell him 'Message confirmed'" Felix said, unclenching his hands. ---- They had met on the last day of summer before first grade, a September that had lingered in summer longer than it should. "Hi, my name is Randy." said the boy who had come across the road and Felix, sweating from trying to move impossibly heavy cardboard boxes said "I'm Felix. We just moved in." "Do you want to come over and play?" asked Randy, and after that they were best friends in the way that is effortless. Despite their appearances - Randy with his short wavy brown hair, Felix with spectacles and freckles and dirty blond hair - they were largely of the same mind. Relentlessly curious, inquisitive and always attempting to one-up each other in their knowledge of anything they saw. Systems, processes, economies - words that they didn't yet know but were fascinated with how everything around them worked. One summer they sat with Randy's telescope and surveilled their neighbors, which after a little while became boring because of course their neighbors were not spies or sleeper cells, they were boring suburban families. Felix said "We should write these things down." "Write what down?" asked Randy, scanning from window to window in the culdesac behind the backyard. "You know, everything. The license plates, the cars, when they come, when they go." said Felix. "Maybe there is a pattern. Nobody is going to open their window shades and let us see in, so let's look at what we CAN see." After that, they were obsessed, and began sleeping in shifts, filling notebook pages with the date and time of every observation. "Maybe we'll crack an unsolved crime!" Randy said, and Felix stopped and thought. "Maybe we will be the first to actually discover there is a crime being committed." Their surveillance game came to an end when they asked Mr Wallerstein why every Thursday he went to work in his Ford Tempo but came home at 10:30am in a Chevy Cavalier and then left again at 11am. They couldn't understand why Mr. Wallerstein got so upset at the question, but they found out the answer the next Thursday. That Thursday Mr Wallerstein left in his Ford Tempo, then walked back to his house and hid in the bushes. When the Chevy Cavalier parked in the driveway at 10:30am, Felix said to Randy "So this is a crime but I'm not sure we should report it", and Randy agreed because he didn't need a telescope to see Mr. Wallerstein chasing the man who owned the Chevy Cavalier up the street, waving a crowbar and screaming. Shortly after, Mr. and Mrs. Wallerstein got divorced. ---- Their curiosity finally found a focus when they went to their first video arcade. Even though it had only opened in the mall a year before, it was like a mildewed cave of monowave screeches, flashing seizure tests, and cigarette smoke. If anything was the modern equivalent of the Pleasure Island, this was it. "I don't even care if we turn into donkeys" Felix said, the frenetic explosions reflecting from his glasses. They played all of the games, competing for the highest score in Skee-Ball, the furthest screen in Pacman - and each found their obsession. Randy ran his fingers over the screen printed graphics on the sides of the cabinets, the large fanged insect on the side of Centipede that looked nothing like the small pixels of the game itself. You've got to show them what it could be, you've got to sell it, he thought. Felix had his feet stuck to the floor, staring at one of the employees who had opened a pinball machine. Underneath the playfield of lights and bumpers was something far, far more interesting, a nightmare of wires and solenoids and relays, a industrial maze, irresistable. All I want is to know this, Felix thought, knowing that there was no way he could convince his parents to buy him a broken pinball machine. ---- "You make it, I'll sell it" is what Randy said when they were teenagers, and Felix knew that he could. He knew that he could himself build it, and he certainly knew that Randy could sell it. He had grown into the dazzler, the man with the sales plan. He had financed their trip to Comdex, paid for their scratchy suits, entirely on selling recycled term papers to the local college students, arcade token slugs repurposed from laundry coins from an abandoned laundromat, and cartons of knockoff cigarettes he got from his uncle in Ensenada. Felix pushed his glasses up his nose, and opened a new file. "What are we going to call it?" he asked, and Randy said "Legends of Morag". Felix and Randy worked for a solid year, writing stories, drawing ever more elaborate maps, creating the backstory for Morag, an entire world for their characters to inhabit. Then Randy said, "We've got to make this multiplayer. This has to work over a modem. We can't just be another D&D knockoff, we have to have real people playing with each other, writing their own stories." Felix balked; everything had been meticulously crafted and balanced as a single player game. How would they even manage all of these different people? On whose computer? But Felix figured it out, and now the Internet was losing its capital letter and the entire world, at least, the world of people that owned a computer, opened up to them. But money ruins everything. ---- "You wouldn't be anywhere without me!" Randy shouted, Felix staring dead-eyed through him. "Without me, there would have been no Morag, there wouldn't have been anything for you to sell. And I can find a sales guy." Their thirties were like other people's twenties, discovering all of the things that they'd ignored or too scared to try. But they both had money, they both wanted more, and now they were each a wall to be knocked through to get what they thought they wanted. They split the company in two, each vowing to destroy the other and claim the true legacy of what they had built together. So they built their own walls, their own fortresses, facing down across the river. They were both right, in a way - both companies successful, ups and downs, in their own special ways, employing thousands of people and making millions of dollars turn into billions. ---- "Message confirmed. Right." Randy said, getting up from the chair in the middle of the white, empty room. "Let's see.", and he pushed the chair back, placing the visor on his head, punching the button, and the walls fell away, replaced with the digital static of a translated memory. ---- Felix put on the visor, sighing. After all of these years, returning to that place - it had been his creation, his hope for reconciliation, dormant for so long. He knew the address, or rather his fingers did, and he was wary when he punched the button and now he was on the scuffed tile before the entrance, the darkened maw of the arcade ten feet in front him with the dull flourescent sign above, serif capitals spelling THE LIBRARY with the din of machine gun fire and laser cannons seeping out. Nothing to do but walk, to see what the old man wanted. ---- In the back, near the pinballs, past the tank and submarine games, Randy Meyers stood in a circle of yellow light on one side of a low, glass-covered diorama. Inside, two small figures, one on each side, separated by a miniature landscape of cactus, brown boulders, and a tin shack, facing each other down with raised pistols beneath the flaking enamel of their cowboy hats. "You look like shit." Felix said, and it was true, because Randy's avatar wasn't the young, sparkling salesman that everyone had seen on endless television interviews and advertisements. Instead it was as close to the truth as digital could get, a 78-year old man, bald, and hunched. "That's because I feel like shit" Randy said, reaching down to grab the pistol shaped handle. He moved, and the small figure in the diorama swung back and forth on a wide semi circle, moving behind the cover of cactus and rock. "So let's do it. Let's settle it, one game for all the marbles." Felix stepped forward and took hold of the controller. "Ok. Fine." It was an anachronism when they had played it the first time, almost seventy years ago, completely electromechanical. When a shot landed, the gunfighter would collapse like one of those little pushbutton toys where the animal was held up with string; press, and it colllapsed like a ragdoll, before springing back upright with tension after a few moments and the game continued. Back and forth, a simple game to ten points, where two old men forgot the tremors in their hands, the pain in their joints, until Felix's gunfighter fell for the last time. Felix looked up at his nemesis, the boy, then the man that he had been so jealous of for so long. "Well, I guess that's it." "It is. It's all yours, Felix." said Randy. "But you won, you get all the marbles." Felix said, confused. "I agreed to it. You won." "'There are no pockets in shrouds', Felix." Randy said. "They say I've got a month, maybe. But it's already spread from the pancreas, it's everywhere, it's eating my spine, it's going for my brain." Randy coughed, "Maybe it was all of those bootleg cigarettes", and he laughed. The avatar didn't show the tears breaking and rolling down Felix's face, but his cracked voice was obvious "I'm sorry. I'm sorry for everything, for the jealousy, for the resentment." "So am I. What isn't filled with cancer is filled with regret, but what else is there?" he shrugged, spreading his palms open, the wrinkles like cracked paper. "This is where it started - " Randy said, and Felix completed the sentence " - and this is where it ends." Two old men in a circle of light, both gunfighters slumped liked dolls, their pistols empty of time.SAUCE00Cowboy / Duelling / Abandoned MetavSkrubly P.U.P. 20221023¹*PÔIBM VGA