Press Start to Play (7 page)

Puzzled, Sam took a step back. The graphics used to render the figure were much more like those from the start screen than the surrounding blocky desert and mountains.

It was a toddler, dressed in a red romper suit and carrying some flat, rectangular object in its left hand.

“Hel-lo,” Sam said, his voice soft.

chshh, chshh

Had he done it? Was this advancing child some sort of clue to the end of the game? His game-player’s instinct told him it might be; he recalled a certain randomness to many of the solutions to old-school games. Even better: How funny would it be if after all that walking, the solution to the game was to just stand still?

He thought about the small shoe that someone had reported on one of the forums. Sam stepped toward the screen and saw that the child, now a third of the way between the top and bottom of the television, was wearing only one shoe.

Sam didn’t feel a rush of excitement upon piecing this together. He’d noticed something unsettling about the child on the screen. He couldn’t be sure if it was just bad design, but the boy—it was obviously a boy now—looked almost skeletal. The romper suit wasn’t packed with pixelated puppy fat. Instead, it hung so loosely on the child that it appeared to be blowing to the left in a nonexistent desert wind.

There was something wrong with the child’s face too. And this, unless the creator was unhinged, had to be some mistake in the programming. The drawn skin and the gaping mouth were reminiscent of famine victims that Sam had only ever seen on news items and in documentaries.

The child raised its one empty hand and reached toward Sam.

Appalled, Sam stepped backward and put his foot squarely on top of the MSII. The desert was replaced by a series of wavy lines, then the screen went black. Sam got his footing and realized he’d turned the console off.

He fought the urge to yell. He couldn’t believe what he’d just done, the time he’d wasted. But when the rage subsided, Sam was surprised to find he was also relieved: he could start the game afresh and wouldn’t accidentally play all night without a stock of supplies. He thought of the note that had come with the game—
Don’t forget to eat!
—and smiled. He was starving. He could grab a cup of tea now too.

He went to tell Jamie about his exploits but when he stepped out of his room, he found the whole house was pitch-black. He turned on the landing light and went downstairs. Jamie wasn’t in the lounge and when Sam turned on the television to bring up the menu, he realized why. It was half past four in the morning.

“The game was meant to be a satire,” the woman opposite Sam said. She took a sip of her coffee and pushed a loose strand of gray hair away from her eyes.

Sam typed
satire
into a document entitled “Lorna Fry Interview” on his laptop. He nodded, took a sip of his own coffee, then shook his head after understanding what it was she was saying. “Really?”

“Oh yeah. I wanted to bring down the industry from inside. Very idealistic stuff. Seems a long time ago now.” Her eyes flicked down to the nurse’s uniform she was wearing. “So I sold a game called
Duck Shot
, which I made enough money from to start my own little company. And when I say little, I mean it was just me and one other bloke. Because of
Duck Shot
, we were never short of offers for the games we made. Nintendo put out
Means of Production
, a Mario-style game where you had to overthrow your capitalist overlords.”

“Yeah, I loved that one.”

“You’ve played it? Interesting and impressive. What about
Freedom
?”

“Oh, I loved that.”

“You know, the only thing they didn’t let us do with that one was call it
The Nazi Killer
.”

Sam laughed and typed
The Nazi Killer
. “No way. They were fine with the other stuff, the violence, et cetera?”

“Oh yeah, just not the literal description of the main character’s job.” Lorna took another sip and looked at her watch. “With
Desert Walk
we wanted to be subtle. We wanted to satirize game playing itself. My worry was that we were seeing kids spending more and more time playing games as a hobby. Great for the industry, but what about the kids?”

“Never harmed me,” Sam said, offering a confident grin that definitely did not say “I’ve just spent every night since Saturday wandering around your satirical desert.”

“Don’t get me wrong: I’m not anti-gaming or anything. I think these people taking their shoot-’em-ups into the real world more than likely had a screw loose in the first place. But I reasoned if Moore’s Law continued to hold through the nineties, soon consoles would be able to simulate real life, and I wanted to raise philosophical questions about that. So we designed a game where nothing happened. Literally nothing. And worse, it happened in the middle of nowhere.”

Not knowing what else to say, feeling suddenly very self-conscious, Sam said: “So
Desert Walk
is, sort of, a practical joke?”

“Not
sort of
. It was.”

It felt like a cork had just been pulled from him, and weeks, months, and years of enthusiasm were gushing out. He forced a laugh that sounded more bitter than he’d intended.

“So all those people on forums, all their theories, the legends…There are going be some pissed-off geeks out there.”

Oblivious, Lorna carried on: “Looking at all the games around now, especially the ones with clocks telling you how much time you’ve spent playing…Wow, I mean, we’re a step away from plugging ourselves into
The Matrix
, really.”

“So can
Desert Walk
be completed?”

“Oh, now, if I told you that, I’d have to kill you,” she said.

“It can’t, can it?” There was desperate hope in his voice. Lorna mimed closing a zipper across her lips. “Okay, well, tell me what all the objects in the desert are about. Do they have a point? Are they clues?”

Lorna shook her head. “No, before we released the game we decided we needed a way to sell it to the suits; they wouldn’t have been happy with a game where nothing happens, so we hinted at a possible ending and put in a few objects that players could ‘find’ if anyone did decide to check it: a cactus, a rusty old van—”

“A kid’s shoe.”

She frowned. “Don’t remember that one. I remember a cricket bat…There’s a few others. Maybe there was a shoe.”

“What about the hungry kid?” Since Saturday, Sam hadn’t managed to find the gaunt child again, although he’d traveled in much the same direction he had done before and even stumbled across the same cactus—or at least he thought it was the same cactus.

“Pardon?” Lorna said, although from her tone, Sam understood she’d heard him the first time.

“The hungry kid. What’s he about?”

Lorna sat up straight, her face stiff and wary. “Are you being funny?”

Not liking the rapid shift in the tone of the interview, and feeling protective of his remaining enthusiasm, Sam tried changing the subject. “Let me ask something else, then: Why was the game pulled?”

She glared at him and said nothing.

He tried changing the subject again, not understanding what was happening, what he had done wrong. “Okay, you’re a nurse now, I take it? Why did you leave gam—”

Lorna stood up and put on her coat. She was leaving.

Sam panicked. He tried to say something to rescue the situation. “Sorry, did I say—”

“You’re a piece of work, aren’t you?” she said, ejecting the words like insects that had flown into her mouth. “Hungry child? Why was the game pulled? Did someone put you up to this?”

“Honestly,” Sam said, holding up both hands. “I don’t know what I’ve said.”

Lorna looked down at her coffee mug, then back to Sam, then at the laptop, then back to the coffee. Sam knew exactly what she was thinking, so he shut his laptop and turned to put it down on the floor out of harm’s way. He heard her sigh, but when he turned back to face her, she was already through the coffee shop door and out onto the high street.

In the following days Sam wrote three apologetic emails to Lorna. It wasn’t that he felt anything remotely close to guilt over what had happened in Manchester (how could he if he had no idea what he done?), he just didn’t want anything to affect the publication of his blog about
Desert Walk
. Her revelations were going to generate a lot of traffic and there was potential for them to etch his name in the history of gaming, even if on a personal level they had deeply upset him.

He couldn’t bear to play the stupid thing now. He packed up the MSII and put it back in the cupboard. Even if there really was a way to complete the game, he had no intention of being the subject of a stupid prank anymore. Two decades was long enough. He came close to throwing the game away, standing over the kitchen bin for a good minute with the cartridge in his hand before reminding himself how much it had cost him in both sleep and cash. Perhaps he’d sell it on for a profit when his blog revived interest in the game.

The game wasn’t done with Sam, though. The sheer amount of time he’d put in during the first week had scarred him to the point of it dominating his dreams. More than once he awoke in the dark hours before dawn, his hands still clutching an invisible controller, the sound of electronic footsteps echoing in his mind.

He hadn’t seen much of Jamie. Days after his last email to Lorna, he bumped into him in the kitchen and reported that the kettle was back in commission. “Did you complete it in the end?” he said when Sam broke the news that the
Desert Walk
days were done.

“Yeah, pretty much,” Sam said. “Now you can loaf around here all day
and
get your caff-buzz on again.”

Jamie flicked two fingers in Sam’s direction, but Sam became distracted by an email on his phone. It was a response from Lorna. All it contained was an Internet link to a BBC news article. With Jamie still wittering away, he went upstairs to open it on his laptop.

JOHN TAYLOR RETURNED TO PRISON

The headline meant nothing to him, so he read the article. The first few paragraphs were equally confusing, the details of a drug bust in a rough part of Newcastle. It was only when he reached the fourth paragraph that he felt something close to understanding.

Taylor served a fifteen-year sentence after causing or allowing the death of his 3-year-old son Jeffrey. Taylor, along with his partner Amanda, was jailed following Jeffrey’s death in 1992. Jeffrey was found dead by Taylor after a self-confessed five-day “computer game and drug binge,” during which Jeffrey was locked in an upstairs bedroom unattended. Hospital staff alerted authorities when the condition of the child’s body showed signs of severe dehydration and malnutrition.

It took a number of reads to process what Lorna Fry was trying to tell him; each time his brain filtered out more and more of the words around the phrase
computer game and drug binge
until that was all he could focus on.

His limbs feeling heavy and weak, Sam searched online for anything more about the death of Jeffrey Taylor and found very little outside of John Taylor’s rearrest. After scrolling through pages and pages of articles from earlier in the year, he found an article dated 2002 from a local Manchester paper.

AUNT URGES TOWN TO NEVER FORGET JEFFREY TAYLOR

In an interview on the tenth anniversary of Jeffrey’s death, his aunt, the patron of a charity dedicated to helping families in inner-city areas, recalled her feelings about the case:

I think about him all the time. The horror of that room. They found a copy of a book,
The Tiger Who Came to Tea
, in with him. His favourite. They said he’d started eating the pages. I mean, it’s just unthinkable, how hungry he must have been. And how lonely, all that time wondering what he’d done wrong and wondering why no one was coming to help him. I still wonder that now, I mean, the bedroom was at the front of the house. How can no one have heard him? All that time? Why did no one help Jeffrey? He must have been so hungry.

For a while, Sam stared at the wall beyond the flat screen television. Later, he found himself staring at the console cupboard.

Jamie clicked
Send
at the bottom of the online job application form with a practiced carefulness that came with owning large fingers in the digital age. When the screen confirmed the form had successfully sent, Jamie relieved his spine of his considerable weight by leaning back from the coffee table and collapsing onto the sofa.

This would show Sam.

Using the remote, Jamie brought up the television menu screen. It was nearly one a.m. It had taken an hour. Three down, one to go, he thought. But there was no way he’d get through another one without refreshment. With a groan he got to his feet and went to the kitchen. He switched on the light, took out the tea bags, then flicked on the kettle.

Living with Sam had been all right at first. They’d had some good laughs, seen some decent movies, smoked some excellent herb. Sam had really helped him get his head straight about the divorce, and in return he felt he’d helped Sam deal with all the baggage left behind after Afshan. There had been a good balance and it had been like old times, before jobs and money and partners. It wasn’t the same now, though. Sam’s little comments had been growing more and more barbed of late, and Jamie knew he had to get out before he threw a punch at the bloke. That Sam would rather spend time playing a computer game where you walked about in an endless, empty desert for no real reason than spend time with Jamie really was the final nail.

The kettle hissed as the water started to boil. Seconds later both the light and the kettle went off.

“Oh, for f—” He stopped when he heard a high-pitched shriek somewhere above him that ended so quickly his mind immediately began to doubt he’d heard it. His cholesterol-smothered heart started to work harder than it was used to. Jamie hadn’t liked that sound at all. He fumbled his way to the electricity box in the downstairs hall. “Sorry, mate,” he yelled in the direction of the stairs. “Just the kettle again.” He didn’t care if he woke Sam up. He didn’t want to be the only one awake in the house after having heard that noise.