Setup: Please follow the numbered steps precisely—failure to do so will result in degenerate play and embarrassing Internet posts.
She liked farming; he preferred stabbing things in the neck. They always sat at separate tables, never together because they both played with yellow: the color of the sun, of bananas, a certain flower, happy faces; yellow: the color of liver failure, of pus, a hobo’s tooth, cowardice. Beyond this they were barely aware of each other. She knew he was there because he was comfortable around women; he knew she was there because of the unfortunately insistent wetware in his head that was constantly pointing out that her shape was THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE UNIVERSE, a living, breathing Venus of Willendorf constantly snagging the corner of his eye. That, and she said things that made him smile inside.
But on this night they arrived simultaneously late at the Are You Game? café, a bright, well-lit place, appointed in blonde wood, spacious, yet pleasingly cluttered like a benevolent wizard’s study, smelling of subtle cleaning products, gurgling espresso, and washed bodies. It was trafficked mostly by young, unattached professionals and a small, but hard, knot of grumpy wargamers possessed of gray beards and social mores that might have been shockingly progressive when they were young but were now, buried as they were under a mass of calendar pages, vaguely unsavory. They gathered, that ancient coterie, to silently squint at the most unappealing games imaginable—four-color paper maps with stacks of carefully trimmed cereal-box cardboard squares—meetings punctuated by frequent smoke-breaks where the primary topic of conversation seemed to be upcoming funerals.
And so, through the sin of unpunctuality, it was just the two of them—and the Disaster Twins, the two guys no one ever played with if they could help it. They weren’t twins, exactly, but they made no effort to not dress alike, all the while sporting identical barber college haircuts. Perhaps they cut each other’s hair. Simultaneously. It was hard to tell. One of them was an unabashed nose-picker who would have done well to channel that fastidiousness into other areas of hygiene; the other held eye contact too long and too hard, the way tigers watched crowds at the zoo—only without the comfort of a glass-and-steel barrier. From all this it would be easy to assume that they were merely neurodiverse, processing the world differently at a fundamental level, but it was more likely they were choosing—as much as one can call it a choice—to be the living symptoms of a parade of fucked-up Christmases, Santa a no-show, or drunk and gropey when he was there, and the kind of person that might come out of all that. Times two.
She looked at him, and the Twins. “Well,” she said, “if we’re gonna do this, we might as well farm.” She indicated a copy of Loam Lords: 1401 AD on the table.
The Twins groaned. He shared their sentiment but kept it to himself.
“1401? Everyone knows 1937—‘Golden State’—is the superior version,” said one of the twins with a snotty lilt.
“Yeah,” said the other one, “the one with the retard and the rabbits.”
“Charming,” she replied. “Look, none of us are happy about this. But we make do or no one plays anything.”
He raised a hand slightly. “I’m—a little bit happy,” he said.
She raised an eyebrow slightly. “Don’t get too happy,” she replied.
They sat and unboxed the thing. Everything was double-sleeved in bespoke plastic like a dubious boner at Howard Hughes’ grandma’s house. You could spill an entire beer or murder an incontinent hagfish on it and still resell it as mint.
She fumbled a shuffle and cards sluiced across the table. “Jesus, sleeves?” she said, “Someone’s afraid their game’s gonna get the herpes.”
He glanced at the nose-picker. “It might.”
Of course everyone knew how to play—who doesn’t know how to play Loam Lords? It was, after all, the game that had cracked the code for heavy strategy gamers and casual non-gamers alike. High rollers and wheelchair-bound luminaries fought million-dollar duels over it in Vegas even as Internet celebrities noodled with the bits while frying on MDMA. It was every baby’s first game, and great-grandpa’s last; it was the only non-chess game known to have caused a chess master to cane another one into a coma. It had decisions so meaningful they made grown men weep, and yet it was so accessible that even the stupid could wrap their insufficient minds around it. It was quantum mechanics with a sparkly-pink pistol grip.
Setup was perfunctory—eight hands wove the thing precisely, perfectly, out of the chaos of box contents; the first player was obvious, and wordlessly chosen, the first card-fall and chit-push a combination of historically safe opening and shockingly novel gambit. Gasps and nods all around. And so they played, the game neatly compressing time and hypnotically transporting them into separate heavens of pure thought, math giving rise to movement and music, to dance and worlds, and a distantly ticking cosmos...
When he chanced to glance up he kept his eyes on her eyes, but not too much; it’s like the sun, like looking at the sun. You only get a couple seconds. No wonder perceptive women thought all real men were rape-beasts—but hadn’t he read something about how it wasn’t his fault? That there were ancient monkey circuits whose only job was to wait and wait and wait and then fire like mad when they saw breasts? Circuits that were cultivated, like carnal bonsai, by higher-order Puritan programming, reaching down through the murk of evolutionary history to pull it out by the roots, but instead strangely reinforcing it, making it smaller, but far tougher, bent against the wind? And so heterosexual American males got erections when they saw a baby eat.
Besides, the article was probably written by a lecherous old adjunct professor on his way out the door astride one too many sexual harassment complaints, peer reviewed by other creeps who realized they were going to need something for their lawyers to wave in the faces of an irrational jury. “Blame God,” they’d say, “blame the muck we rose from. Blame Science.”
“What are you doing?” she asked.
He jumped. “What.”
“It’s your turn.”
He looked at her blankly.
“Sow, reap, prima nocta, something, anything.”
He blushed, scanned the board, nudged a cube without really thinking—and kicked the game square in the nuts.
“Seriously?” yelled one of the Twins, “Seriously? You’re gonna ship sorghum now?!”
“Sweet Jesus,” breathed the other Twin.
“I’ll—I’ll take it back,” he said.
“Oh—oh no, no takesies-backsies. If you’re taking it back then I’m taking like my last ten turns back, shipping fucking sorghum.” The Twin spat the words. “Like you haven’t been playing this game your whole fucking life.”
“Disrespectful is what it is,” said the other Twin.
He didn’t look at her again as she used the last of the game to wipe his mess off the board with their stupid faces, tripling all their scores.
1: If you’re reading this you’ve already opened the box, so we’ll just skip that part.
How to describe her beyond a simple sigh?
She wore her long, thick hair in sculptural braids that were never the same twice; her deep, bright eyes taking it all in from behind minimalist glasses; her curves draped in loose blouses and skirts that were just this side of Renfaire garb: wide belts, pouches instead of a purse, knee-high leather horse-riding boots. She smelled of vanilla, peaches, and sometimes peppermint. The total effect was intoxicating, amplifying, the difference, he imagined, between merely looking at cocaine and freebasing with a comedian. She was Richard Pryor on fire.
And it made him wish he were that brave. He wore what the other engineering students wore in college, what they still wore at work entirely out of habit: whatever their mom bought them, whatever they found in the drawer, paired-up and color-coordinated, blue with blue, brown with brown, nothing black at all. A frisky day might involve cargo shorts and flip-flops with socks, like Cool Craig down in Compliance Testing. He was a dork, too, but somehow he could put it in a box and get laid. They would have built a solid-gold statue of him, to the absolute limits of the catastrophic intersection of mass, malleability, compressive strength and structural integrity (which was precisely 3.14158 meters tall, including, of course, his upraised arm calling all dorks forward to bang) if they hadn’t hated him in equal measure. There were only two thoughts whenever Cool Craig sashayed into a room:
1) That’s totally what I’m wearing for Frisky Friday, and
2) I bet his alarm clock is a blowjob.
It only took him three weeks to realize that being on time meant they would never play together again—on account of the lack of overlap in their preferred gaming styles, and that whole “yellow” thing—so on the fourth week he began to show up late on purpose. It was a carefully calibrated lateness, 17 minutes past the hour, the precise moment they had first found themselves at the same table. It may have been the purest of chance, or an artifact of her situation—the amount of time it took to neatly fold someone else’s work mess so it could be unpacked in the morning, or catching every traffic light between there and here, or even how long it took her to make and eat a hasty sandwich. And so he bet it all on reproducibility, spending those extra 17 minutes—after he was ready to go—sitting bolt upright on his couch, rubbing his adrenal glands smooth like worry stones.
For another three weeks he arrived precisely late—where he would notice she was otherwise engaged and then peel off as the Disaster Twins mucked their game of Magic and vectored for him. Three long weeks of no gaming whatsoever, which was the non-gamer equivalent of not breathing until you get brain damage. He could actually feel himself growing stupid, a sensation that began to gnaw at his resolve.
On the fourth week, she met him in the parking lot.
2: Carefully place the board in the center of the play area; having read that, you are legally prohibited from contacting us for a replacement if you screw it up.
“There’s something I want to try,” she said as they strode purposefully toward the café, “but the designer’s kind of a dick.”
“Oh, a game,” he said too quickly, then, “What makes you say that?”
“Internet would know, but I don’t wanna look. Kids, racism, something like that. Either way, he was found dead in Bangkok of misadventure poisoning.”
He squinted. “Someone poisoned him?”
“No, it’s—” she hesitated, “—the polite way to say ‘autoerotic asphyxiation gone wrong’.” Her pronunciation was delightfully precise.
“So you mean autothanotic asphyxiation,” he replied.
She broadcast a quick emoji, eyes rolled above a small smile. His heart caught it like it was eggplant and peach stamped over by unicorn and the red, double-underlined 100, all of which he slapped away hard, replaced with a brief sum of Holocaust survivor tattoo math to keep himself steady.
Once inside, they cut straight to the pyramid of loaner games, tall enough that it made his palms sweat.
“Here we are,” she said, pulling a box out from under the pile. Lesser games clunked into the gap.
“‘Star farm’,” he read aloud.
She gave him a look. “That is not how it’s pronounced.”
He looked again. “Sure it is. ‘Star farm’.”
“Read it,” she said.
“‘Star farm’.”
“Read it!” she demanded.
“‘Star farm!’” he exclaimed quietly.
She threw her hands up over her head and shouted “STARFAAARM!” at the entire room.
“We’re game,” said one of the Disaster Twins.
The four of them sat together out of common courtesy, and the distant twang of empathy, and a little bit of social anxiety, and a feeling—held weirdly out of phase by all of them—that they were making friends. The box lid came off with a loud fart, and the Twins snickered; he hated himself for his reflexive approval.
Beneath an archaeology of baggies, the board was one of those scary six-folders where no matter how you tried to unfurl it there was always at least one panel hanging by nothing more than paper and glue and angst. What started with two hands quickly involved all eight, and to no good effect, the Disaster Twins struggling to invoke mad shearing forces even as he and she worked to minimize them; no one present had an ownership stake in the game, making half of them super-careless and the other half super-careful. The overall effect was like watching a crow with a broken wing trying to get into a brightly colored snack bag. Miraculously, they got the thing flat without a tear and only the merest hint of profanity.
Laid out, it was quite a thing to behold, beautifully rendered, a massive art piece first painted on canvas by a delayed suicide, then delicately overlaid with game-boundaries, selection boxes and subconsciously evocative icons. It was the sort of spread that made a True Gamer’s breath catch in the throat.
Half of the board was lavish with an asteroid bubble farm, a dome of life on a lonely rock, bright with bucolic colors, sectors for fields and crops, cube corrals and control panels for monitoring atmosphere, water tankage, soil pH, and orders for programming the limited number of robot brains to plow, sow, reap and load outbound shuttles; the other half was dead space, a forbidding void where a science fiction protagonist’s parents might go missing, a minimalist star-sprinkled black, sectors for outbound shuttle lanes and occult enemy vessels, dice docks and control panels for monitoring station integrity, railgun tracking, nuclear munitions, and orders for programming the limited number of robot brains—shared with the farming side—to scan, intercept, direct weapons fire and recover inbound shuttles. And the whole shebang, for some reason, bounded entirely by a whimsically-scrolled roll-and-move track around the perimeter.
As the eye lingered, further details emerged, creating the illusion of descending toward the station, nose pressed to the fogged glass of a rad-hard porthole. The landscape was alive with tiny activity, people and thinking machines working hand-in-glove to produce the raw foodstuffs necessary to make million-credit hamburgers for distant pockets of human life where scarcity and circumstance allowed for the neat intersection of need and greed—you think you wouldn’t do much for an apple, but you’d be surprised at the indignities you’d suffer if your only other option was yet another bowl of your fellow colonists’ hydrolyzed feces. And there, in a nascent star-lit orchard, stands a robot offering that red, shiny apple to a human in an orange jumpsuit and straw hat, the look in their eyes the whole of human history come to this moment. This is a goddamn space apple, and you will pay handsomely for it.
“Damn,” someone breathed.
“I know,” one of the Twins said, “roll and move? Really?”
“And paper money,” said the other one, throwing a fat wad of varicolored cash on the table, a kaleidoscope of tiny portraits of the first—and last—robot president staring enigmatically back at them, “Cool.”
Someone flipped open the rulebook.
“Does… anyone know how to play?” he asked.
The Twins gave him the I thought you did look, and she shrugged.
“We’ll figure it out as we go,” she said.
He died a little inside.
“This’ll be interesting,” said one of the Twins.
“Always is,” said the other.
As they started sorting through the baggies, he noticed the game wasn’t sleeved.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa—everybody,” he said, “the game isn’t sleeved, so be super, super careful. What are you—”
She paused, halves of a deck bent backwards in anticipation of the weaving waterfall. “Shuffling,” she said.
No no no no no, something inside him screamed.
He took a deep breath. “You have to pile shuffle.”
She slowly tilted her head to one side. “Pile shuffling isn’t shuffling. It’s pile sorting. Use your math, nerd.”
He gurgled. “Look I know you’re right—but the cards!”
“The cards will be fine,” she said, riffling a scrotum-clenching waterfall and return bridge. “They’re made to be shuffled.”
And so they learned the game in the worst way possible, one person reading inexpertly from the rulebook while everyone else interrupted with their own interpretations and assumptions brought in from other games and a vast experience with games in general, everyone convinced of the superiority of their own mastery, most of it right—after a fashion—but the wrong parts were really wrong, so much so it can be said they didn’t really play at all.
The game began with one of the Disaster Twins lighting off a nuke, to which other one replied by lighting off two, “Just to see what would happen.”
“Well, what you’ve done,” she said slowly, “is waste three nukes while irradiating this entire swath of crops.” She hovered a splayed hand over much of the arable land beneath the dome.
“Sorry,” said one of the Twins without meaning while the other stamped a hard-edged resource marker across the board like a child’s thimble rounding Go.
The rest of the business went as you might expect: two alpha gamers and two desperate damage control drones at each other like people with hands around throats in a house fire, pulses dwindling beneath fingers better served by calling emergency services, but no one willing to be the chump who let go first... So they burned in the plasma flash that breached the hull completely, the explosion reversing as the farm rudely evacuated itself into space. Four more alien destroyers decloaked in the debris cloud, within 500 meters, strafing the fleeing shuttles with impatient smart munitions, signals lost one by one as a chorus of screams became a band, and then a trio, a cruel duet, a solo—heartfelt and affecting—and finally the solar radiation hiss of an unheard John Cage piece.
It was unclear exactly what the aliens did with the survivors holed up in the emergency shelters, as the game handled that hideous denouement behind a mercifully blunt YOU HAVE LOST curtain.
After a bit of nonsensical math the final tally showed a score of… √-1.
He and she cleaned up the game in silence as the Disaster Twins bickered over the details of the After Action Report, finding fault almost entirely in the fact that while she had farmed alone she had done so ineptly; and that the two of them could have handled the defense of the station if only he hadn’t interfered.
He tuned them out, replacing their hectoring with the artistry of her hands, small birds in flight, moving with practiced ease across the gamescape, perfectly proportioned, smooth, scarless, the color of good health, her nails done in a sparkly gunmetal, not chewed to nubs like his were.
“Somebody’s gotta get home and bludgeon the ghoul,” one of the Twins blurted.
He fumbled the moment, watched it fall away, sickeningly, to shatter against reality. “Excuse me?”
“You know,” said the other one, “wander the labyrinth of the Internet until the ghoul peeps out, get your hands around his neck and beat him until his ichor spatters the flagstones. Then see if you level up. Basic D&D, my friend.”
He flushed, tried to say something in the negative, found the pipeline between his disordered head and his tongue to be hopelessly jammed with competing verbal activity. He looked at her and felt like he always did. She frowned.
“He won’t level up,” said the other Twin.
3: Shuffle them decks till it hurts—till their edges are worn smooth, their backs curled, their faces greasy with hand-jam; if you use sleeves, don’t.
He stopped going to game night. Being near her was an exquisitely specific pain, proof he was incomplete, like finding out you were supposed to have three arms but you only had two and a freshly-shorn, unresolved stump, nerves still vibrating with the shock of disconnection. Part of him wanted to go back to the stump-blind past where he could just sleep and eat and work without knowing, without feeling—whatever this awful thing was.
Another midnight bike ride, more of these lately, pounding into the dark, gliding from pool of light to pool of light, the physical meditation of the body like a Sadhu’s mortification, unmooring the mind and allowing it to float free
—the car ran the red light at speed; he was dumped back into his body like a shock of ice water, the brakes squealing low on everything: his skinny tires, the GTO’s fat ones, time itself; the reflections of the bright red orbs of the traffic lights floated across the car’s glossy candy coat, languorous as bloody soap bubbles, drifting up the windshield to a frozen emoji—sleepy look of nascent surprise—half-lit in the blue of a raised phone showing some random social media feed, thumb poised over a LIKE button, the confluence of time snapping suddenly 1:1 as his front tire kissed the rear bumper of the car, snatching the bike out from under him and flicking him to black—
he woke at the end of the ragdoll sequence, one final roll onto his back beneath a sky punctured by the hard points of actual stars. Fuck it, he thought inside his ruined helmet, I’m going to tell her.
4: Select the start player using any suitable method; but probably not the first one you thought of, because that’s kinda stupid.
Being bereft of sophisticated moves, he reached all the way back to elementary school for his next one, a folded note he passed to her without fanfare. She took it easily enough, a part of him reporting that her hand lingered a microsecond too long for such a transaction. Her face gave nothing away.
They played at their usual tables, separated by space and approach, and though he tried he never caught her looking at the note. Or at him.
She returned it at the very end of the night, last minute in the parking lot, coming up behind him as he was stacking boxes in the backseat of his car.
“Hey,” he said in surprise.
“Hey,” she said, and handed him the note.
He palmed it like an illicit tip and went back to sorting, his face hot. He could feel her receding into the night.
Back at home—sleepless hours later—he finally bolted from bed, snapped on the lights and looked at the folded paper on the dresser. It was curled slightly with the essence of her, from the pleasant moisture of her hands, from resting against small belongings in one of her impossible pockets. He could almost smell the vanilla, or peaches.
Slowly, he reached for it and opened it in the same smooth motion—
—and just about fainted.
5: Roll the dice to determine zxk17unm.
A week later and seventeen minutes after the hour, they were in the parking lot again.
“Let’s play,” she said with an openness that struck him dumb.
They went straight for STARFARM!, and the Disaster Twins met them there.
“Let’s play!” one of them said.
He and she barked a simultaneous “No!” that shocked everyone.
“Maybe next time,” he said in response to the hard, but familiar, hurt on their faces.
And so he and she sat across from each other at the end of a long table thrumming with activity and began the eternal dance of play.
The world receded by degrees, the problems that are other people, numbers on spreadsheets, doubt and meaning, being a bewildered child in a rapidly putrefying vessel—these things grew small until it was as if they had never existed, replaced instead by a universe where the whole of the rules was smaller than a human mind, a sensation of godhood. In this microcosmic playground they extended, tentatively, the machinery of cooperation; naked, whirling gears seeking their complimentary counterparts in order to mesh without grinding. And in that moment where the expectation was for terrible noise, a fountain of sparks, smoke, the smell of burning metal—there was instead a soundless smoothing out, the glide of machinery connecting with its purpose-built supercharger, action at both ends seamlessly amplified.
It only occurred to him to be terrified later.
But in the all-consuming now they played together, every alteration of the gamestate distorting the whole, causing disparate parts to fall inexorably into place, succumbing to the gravity of the thing. You grip, you twist, and everything slides. When he moved he could feel her reciprocating, and weirdly found himself anticipating just what she needed almost simultaneously with her subtle call. If this wasn’t telepathy, then there was no magic in the world.
How many hours became a murmur of minutes? It was over too soon, having only just begun—when the chatter of recounted victories, defeats, calls for cheap beer and cheaper food, just-one-more-game-somewhere-else rose around them like an obliterating tide. The owner flashed the lights.
They looked at each other with identical expressions, then looked at the board. The mass of cards and cubes and chits and minis and dice were all smeared into the last four-panel page of a graphic novel about people trying to do people stuff where people aren’t supposed to be: growing food inches away from black vacuum and hard radiation—a logistical nightmare anyway—further complicated by an inscrutable alien presence acting on principle, or hatred, or raw instinct.
Perhaps, he thought, the aliens fought for what was curled at the core of this nondescript asteroid—a star-scouring artifact hidden away by a failed civilization; or a slumbering god; or their Voice, stolen by that god, leaving them incapable of anything but annihilation, only understanding the exclamation points of nuclear weapons. Maybe humanity plunked this farm down in a simple graveyard, and the fact that we were absorbing their sacred dead and shipping them off to be consumed by other starfaring apes was an ultimate taboo whose only possible response was genocide. Or they were future humans come back through a web of wormholes to stop the birth of Space Hitler—
“You know why we lost,” she said.
He scanned the board. “I got overwhelmed. Expended too many nukes too early. Sorry.”
“Hmmn,” she said, doing that eyebrow thing.
He woke suddenly in the small hours, pulse quick with realization. They lost because they both kept overextending for each other. Instead of masterminding the end of the game, or take-take-taking and leaving the other person to fend for themselves, they kept shoveling resources—turns, cards, robot brains—to the other side of the equation, thoughtlessly, leaving it in a perpetually shifting state of unbalance. He settled back into sleep’s embrace, intrigued, strangely comforted, because he could see it there, the outline of a vast continent in fog.
He wondered if she could see it, too.
6: You invited her over? Tell your roommate not to stare. On second thought, give him a movie ticket and an inverse curfew. Also, buying condoms isn’t creepy, it’s caring.
“Holy shit, your place is clean,” she said, marveling at the dentist-office presentation of wiped surfaces, perfect proportions, and horizontal spaces clear of stuff.
“And yours... isn’t?” he asked.
“Well, it’s not like the bathtub’s full of poop or anything; more like, ‘lived in’ by three cats and a couple monkeys.”
“I—see,” he said, slightly disappointed, then disappointed at his disappointment.
He produced a serviceable dinner of spaghetti and meatballs from scratch as they spoke deeply, intensely, about games, gaming, and online gamer culture. Over the last of the wine he steered conversation toward the topics recommended by his mom: God, UFOs, babies.
“Goddamn babies,” she muttered, shaking her head.
“What? I thought women... loved babies.”
“Because we have boobs? C’mon.”
“The way they smell,” he said matter-of-factly.
“Like dirty diaper?”
“The way they cut through the armor and go straight to the thing inside us that goes stupid with cute.”
She ignored his unironic earnestness. “Even the ugly ones?”
“There are no ugly ones,” he said.
“Internet says otherwise. Google that shit. ‘Dot dot dot only a mother could love.’”
“And you don’t... want to be a mother?”
She regarded him coolly. “No—”
His face fell; she caught it.
“—but maybe I just haven’t met the right sperm donor yet.”
The evening proceeded as one might expect. They shook hands when she left.
7: You invited him over? Tell your roommate so she can do the thing. Also, condoms, because this guy is clueless.
“Where’s your roommate?” he asked.
“She knows not to be around. We have a system.”
“Oh,” he said with a minor twinge, “You must do this a lot.” He instantly regretted saying it.
“I’m going to ignore that.”
Her place was “lived in”, but not psychotically so; more “Victorian garage sale” than an episode of Hoarders.
She whistled and the cats arrived in sinuous single file and sat in a mild semicircle, regarding him expectantly.
She pointed at them one by one. “Tardis, Artoo, Meeple.”
“Aw, how cute—Meeple!”
“Of course his name’s not Meeple,” she rolled her eyes. “Jesus Christ.”
He looked at the cats and they looked at him.
“Mr. Darcy, Bechdel, and that one has no name.”
“No Name the Cat?” he asked.
“No, he doesn’t have a name. Please don’t refer to him otherwise. It’s rude.”
“Poor guy doesn’t have a name?”
She sighed. “He doesn’t give a shit. He gets pets and treats and the mouse-chow keeps coming; nothing’s going to eat him. He’ll probably die of some weird geriatric cat disease his ancestors couldn’t dream of. A name isn’t even on his list.”
“What do you do at the vet?”
She snorted. “They gave him a number.”
“What’s his number?”
“Nope, not falling for it.” She waggled a finger at him. “You will not call him by a number.”
Secretly, he dubbed the nameless cat c, not for “cat” but as shorthand for 299,792,458 meters per second, the speed of light in a vacuum.
The evening proceeded as one might expect. They shook—
That’s not what happened at all. Exactly how it happened he wasn’t even sure of; all the usual stuff was going on, easy conversation that shifted between light and heavy topics the way a ridiculously expensive sports car might traverse ess curves up and down a mountain, dinner, some wine, then sitting on a magnetized couch that acted on them like helpless nuts and bolts, sliding inexorably closer until they clacked and there was no getting them apart, a change in the tenor of the evening that took him entirely by surprise even as a part of him realized she knew exactly what she was doing.
She left the lights on, transformed by nakedness, her frame rising proud, as if daring him not to be aroused.
He failed.
She rolled him over, straddled and sat on him. His entire being was wonderfully, horribly, wadded up and yanked out of himself, like a banquet fastidiously laid with white-gloved hands suddenly leaping out a ruptured airlock—you thought you were sitting down to a sumptuous twelve-course meal but instead you got the shock of empty lungs.
She stopped moving and cocked her head at him. “Are you a virgin?”
He hesitated, hated himself for it. “No,” he said. “Not anymore.”
“Oh, honey,” she said and kissed him harder and deeper than he thought possible.
I can’t breathe, he thought, and I like it.
“Now it’s my turn,” she said, and like most gamers he was very good at following directions.
8: GET READY FOR FOREVER
He got them their own copy of STARFARM!, carefully punched, sorted, bagged, laminated and double-sleeved—the thing was absolutely bulletproof, good for a lifetime of plays. In print, out of print, it wouldn’t matter. They had their own copy—never to be played by anyone else—a forever game, never the same twice, a nexus of life stages and memory. At least that was the idea.
She farmed; he stabbed things in the neck. Once, they almost switched roles; once, and almost. But the rest of the time they sat down in habit-worn seats, took possession of their respective unworn bits, and meshed their minds like it was nothing in a way that should make you jealous, right here, right now, searching to see if you have ever known this thing in your life. She managed the farm at the edge of optimal, adjusting deftly to shortages, the timing of lifecycles and shuttle schedules, the occasional burst of radiation and breached hulls. She implored him to spare a returning shuttle, incongruently heavy with unknown cargo, “on a hunch”—it turned out to be stowaway refugees. He managed the never-ending war beyond the interface, feints and ruses, ships decloaking, shuttles returning full of ravenous boarders. He husbanded dwindling nukes, finally convinced her to give up an ocean’s worth of water for a single ice ship—the Assumption of Humanity, starship-class but rigged with rapid-vectoring spaceship motors, a spinal mass driver that could accelerate payloads to a good chunk of c, and the ability to take a pounding the way an ocean swallows storms. She used the calm he afforded to quadruple their foodstuff tonnage.
In celebration, he ordered the five robot brains in charge of the crater-pocked Assumption to execute a pants-shitting flyby of the dome—he switched the screen up for an old-school telescope, wanting the photons burying themselves in the back of his eyes to be real reflected light. He saw her then, in her orange jumpsuit and straw hat, handing the apple to a robot, saying, “Look at what you have done, this entirely unlikely thing, to bring a taste of Earth to a far-flung Earth-child.”
This was the dance of years.
9: Check for game end condition.
It only took six weeks for the cancer to take her.
The whole time, the whole time, filled with the horrible mixture of what they did for each other and the fear of losing it. Of hope against hope, thinking this time will be different because it’s us, all the way up to her final shuddered breaths, a look of blind terror on her face even as he held her hand and wished fiercely, with everything he was, it wasn’t so.
10: I got nothin’.
Something he had never considered: the perfect dance around funerals, guaranteed with every birth—we howled on the savannah, we howled in caves, we howl in buildings and we will howl tomorrow on distant worlds. This was a groove worn deep by your ancestors; even if you don’t know the tune, the groove knows your feet. The first step suggests the next, and so on to the end.
Their families, joined—however tenuously—by what he and she did for each other, brought together now in grief for a long, dull, tearing grind of the grief in others reaching blindly for the grief in him. He endured this black reinforcement until it seemed to suddenly attenuate on its own, and he was alone in their home with the scent of her.
He loosened his tie, stripped it out in a recently practiced motion, discarded it to the floor. He shed his suit coat as he walked to their game room, to the shelves of just the ones they loved, boxes rimmed white with shelf-wear. He ran a finger down their absolute favorites, aware of the slight buzz of texture under the pad, and stopped at STARFARM!, removed it from the shelf and set it gently on the table. The top came off like butter and he began to set it up according to the directions, precisely and without the need for reference—on autopilot, really—until the whole thing was good to go, every last sheet, card, pasteboard bit laminated and double-sleeved. Absolutely bulletproof, good for a lifetime of plays.
It was like she had never been there at all.
