live there.
How do you think like a human? Go into madness first, probably, and then out the other side….
“Listen! Listen! If you keep going this way, you’ll all be killed! You’re going back into game space! People like me will find you! You’ll all be killed! That’s how it goes!”
And then he died.
It was 6:3. He was lying on his bed with his clothes on, but he still felt cold.
Bits and pieces of his…his previous life trickled through his mind.
Sigourney!
Well, Yo-less would say that explained anything. And now it looked as if he’d be spending every night watching the ScreeWee get killed.
It was bad enough fighting off people in ones and twos. But they were just the ones who were weird or lonely or bored enough to go looking. Wobbler said thousands of copies of the game had been sold. Even if most people took them back to the shops, there’d always be someone playing. Once the ScreeWee turned up again, the news would get around….
And then, one day, long after no one played the game anymore, there’d be these broken ships, turning over and over in the blank-screen darkness of game space.
And he couldn’t stop it. Kir—Sigourney was right. That’s what they were there for.
It was Tuesday, too. It was Math for most of the morning. And then English. He’d better write a poem at lunchtime. You could generally get away with a poem.
He got his coat out of the shed and sponged it off as best he could, and then propped it up by the heater. Then he investigated the fridge.
His father had been doing the shopping again. You could always tell. There were generally expensive things in jars, and odd foreign vegetables. This time there was Yogurt Vindaloo and more celery. No one in the house liked celery much. It always ended up going brown. And his father never bought bread and potatoes. He seemed to think that stuff like that just grew in kitchens, like mushrooms (although he always bought mushrooms, if they were the special expensive dried kind that looked like bits of moldy bark and were picked by wizened old Frenchmen).
There was a carton of milk that thumped when he shook it.
Johnny found a cup in the ghastly cavern of the dishwasher and rinsed it under the tap. At least there wasn’t much that could go wrong with black coffee.
He quite enjoyed the time by himself in the mornings. The day was too early to have started going really wrong.
The war was still on television. It was getting on his nerves. It was worrying him. You’d really think everyone would have had enough by now.
Bigmac was in school. He’d stayed the night at Yo-less’s. Mrs. Yo-less had washed out his clothes, even the T-shirt with “Blackbury Skins” on the back. It was a lot cleaner than it had ever been.
He could feel Wobbler and Yo-less looking at him with interest. So were one or two other people.
Later on, when they were in the middle of the rush that meant that every pupil in the school had to walk all the way across the campus to be somewhere else, Yo-less said: “Bigmac said you pulled him out of the wreck. Did you?”
“What? He wasn’t even—” Johnny paused.
It was amazing. He’d never thought so fast before. He thought of Bigmac’s room, with its Weapons of the World posters and plastic model guns and weight-training stuff he couldn’t lift. Bigmac had been thrown out of the school role-playing games club for getting too excited. Bigmac, who spent all his time trying hard to be a big thicko; Bigmac, who could work out math problems just by looking at them. Bigmac, who played the game of being…well, big tough Bigmac.
Johnny looked around. Bigmac was watching him. It was amazing, given that Bigmac’s ancestors were a sort of monkey, how much his expression looked like the one he’d first seen on the face of the Captain, whose ancestors were a kind of alligator. It said: Help me.
“Can’t really remember,” he said.
“Only my mum called the hospital and they said
How do you think like a human? Go into madness first, probably, and then out the other side….
“Listen! Listen! If you keep going this way, you’ll all be killed! You’re going back into game space! People like me will find you! You’ll all be killed! That’s how it goes!”
And then he died.
It was 6:3. He was lying on his bed with his clothes on, but he still felt cold.
Bits and pieces of his…his previous life trickled through his mind.
Sigourney!
Well, Yo-less would say that explained anything. And now it looked as if he’d be spending every night watching the ScreeWee get killed.
It was bad enough fighting off people in ones and twos. But they were just the ones who were weird or lonely or bored enough to go looking. Wobbler said thousands of copies of the game had been sold. Even if most people took them back to the shops, there’d always be someone playing. Once the ScreeWee turned up again, the news would get around….
And then, one day, long after no one played the game anymore, there’d be these broken ships, turning over and over in the blank-screen darkness of game space.
And he couldn’t stop it. Kir—Sigourney was right. That’s what they were there for.
It was Tuesday, too. It was Math for most of the morning. And then English. He’d better write a poem at lunchtime. You could generally get away with a poem.
He got his coat out of the shed and sponged it off as best he could, and then propped it up by the heater. Then he investigated the fridge.
His father had been doing the shopping again. You could always tell. There were generally expensive things in jars, and odd foreign vegetables. This time there was Yogurt Vindaloo and more celery. No one in the house liked celery much. It always ended up going brown. And his father never bought bread and potatoes. He seemed to think that stuff like that just grew in kitchens, like mushrooms (although he always bought mushrooms, if they were the special expensive dried kind that looked like bits of moldy bark and were picked by wizened old Frenchmen).
There was a carton of milk that thumped when he shook it.
Johnny found a cup in the ghastly cavern of the dishwasher and rinsed it under the tap. At least there wasn’t much that could go wrong with black coffee.
He quite enjoyed the time by himself in the mornings. The day was too early to have started going really wrong.
The war was still on television. It was getting on his nerves. It was worrying him. You’d really think everyone would have had enough by now.
Bigmac was in school. He’d stayed the night at Yo-less’s. Mrs. Yo-less had washed out his clothes, even the T-shirt with “Blackbury Skins” on the back. It was a lot cleaner than it had ever been.
He could feel Wobbler and Yo-less looking at him with interest. So were one or two other people.
Later on, when they were in the middle of the rush that meant that every pupil in the school had to walk all the way across the campus to be somewhere else, Yo-less said: “Bigmac said you pulled him out of the wreck. Did you?”
“What? He wasn’t even—” Johnny paused.
It was amazing. He’d never thought so fast before. He thought of Bigmac’s room, with its Weapons of the World posters and plastic model guns and weight-training stuff he couldn’t lift. Bigmac had been thrown out of the school role-playing games club for getting too excited. Bigmac, who spent all his time trying hard to be a big thicko; Bigmac, who could work out math problems just by looking at them. Bigmac, who played the game of being…well, big tough Bigmac.
Johnny looked around. Bigmac was watching him. It was amazing, given that Bigmac’s ancestors were a sort of monkey, how much his expression looked like the one he’d first seen on the face of the Captain, whose ancestors were a kind of alligator. It said: Help me.
“Can’t really remember,” he said.
“Only my mum called the hospital and they said
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