꩜. Nautilus

I will recount all this one day. The telling of the story will nearly make it worth living through. When I tell the tale, I’ll be tempted to embellish. Maybe I will dress my flaws in a gossamer of good intentions. I should leave exactly the right amount of mess. Only enough to feel real. I should not make myself too difficult to like. And maybe I will draw the Tough Shells closer at the start, just to make each deterioration or loss more palpable.

These are the first impulses of one who wishes to thresh narrative significance from garbled hurt.

Well, they were the first impulses. The present is/was a long time ago. Time is a fluid in the place I have become. Memories aren’t hazy low-res images here; they’re as real as any other experience. I can live the same day a dozen times and it’ll feel just as immediate on my thirteenth run-through. Some days I’m in more than others. I am a house of many rooms and also its inhabitants. Sometimes I get a glimpse through the window of a home belonging to someone else. I don’t understand it very well either.

I have come to understand one thing: certainty is an anchor. When the walls shift and the doors change their locks, the rooms where the furniture stays put become precious. They hold me together. This is why I hate to be honest. This is why I cannot deviate, even when I’d like to spit-shine the details.

Even so, I can’t leave it like this.

---

After the burn, my eyes keep running. They have so many reasons. MultiCo’s trustees—the real ones, this time—drag me to an office deep in the building and keep me locked in there for what feels like hours. They ask me about the game, Barley, everything. From then on I am kept in my room. I don’t do much of anything. Campe stays by the door. I am deaf and blind to the outside. If Pops or Rahmat try to reach me, I’m not informed.

Edmondo summons me a week after the game. Campe brings me to his office and takes her leave. Alone, I am smaller than ever among the grandiose furnishings of Edmondo’s suite. He looks down at me, and he does not ask how I have held up since the attack, or offer condolences for my treatment.

He says I am fortunate. He says I have the opportunity of a lifetime. He says there is a new game, and it needs players.

I say I do not believe him.

No, he insists, it’s true, and Sonnet has already signed on for this new venture.

I don’t ask about Barley. I don’t know whether she’s running free with her comrades or having her brain quarried by Vaiiya. I don’t know which I’d prefer to learn.

Instead, I ask about myself and why he would ever trust me.

Edmondo tells me I have been fully cleared.

And CNS?

An opportunity, says Edmondo. The MultiCo consortium has already begun to transform the pirate broadcast into a profitable fad. They have flooded the virtual storefront with hacker-themed cosmetics. They have produced a range of advertisements designed to appeal to rebellious fantasy. They have explained the interruption as a special event and declared the game’s outcome as the first-ever case of dual-champions. All of this to lay the ground for something else. A special game show in mockery. A show where cashouts are replaced with computer terminals and contestants don’t steal, they hack. A show with bigger teams, bigger stakes.

The gods have arranged the details. Ranzio and Ospuze will co-sponsor an all-star lineup. Proc, Skillish, OppenHyper, Sonnet, Google. Everything is ready to go. The announcement campaign will launch in a matter of days. Edmondo tilts one of the roundscreens on his desk to where I can see it. He shows me a logo with a rounded animal shell appendaged with several golden tentacles. Says it’s meant to meld our old logo with Ospuze iconography. He calls it a nautilus.

I don’t think about the nautilus, or Barley, or CNS, or any of the chaos swirling. I don’t think about Pops, Rahmat, or the places I might have called home. I think of myself among idols.

Here is everything I wanted. The best of victory and defeat. A way to win and keep striving upward. A career trajectory that makes perfect sense. My future orders itself into a brightly-lit tunnel. My brain sizzles. I can’t catch my breath.

I tell Edmondo I’ll join the team, of course, though I am not sure I was given a choice.