Miguel was staring at his screen, making his pencil do the wobbly thing when his phone rang. “Bueno?” he answered, pulling his headset off when it clacked against the screen.

“Qué haces?” Gary asked.

“Nothing, waiting for Billing to get their asses in gear.”

“Ah, still at work?”

“Of course.”

“When the boss man asks for you to work late, you say…”

“…de nada. What’re you doing?” He could hear people talking and some glasses clicking in the background.

“I’m at The Spider House, waiting for people to show. When you getting here?”

“Never. Carolina’s sick and Maria’s going grocery shopping whenever I get home.”

Gary sighed loudly and dramatically into the phone. “Puta madre.“

“Hey, since I have a few minutes and I got you on the phone, I’m gonna run some games by you before I buy them.”

“Claro, dime.” It sounded as if he was walking away from the noise.

“Howard Croft and the Cult of the Sun.”

“That’s right up your alley. You like the adventure stuff with puzzles.”

“Starflyer.”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“Too kiddie. It’s a good game, but it’s cartoony and kinda out there. You have to be looking for that kind of game to like it.”

“Subversion.”

“Ah, yeah, probably not. It’s a great game, really well done graphics and the engine is amazing, but you won’t like it.”

“Yeah?”

“You don’t have any control over what happens, the characters do.”

He furrowed his eyebrows. “How is that possible?”

“The company, Jayu I think, created this amazing engine that runs real-time simulations. The characters act just like real people, with full backstories and free will. It’s crazy. I played it a couple of times and thought I was watching reality TV.”

“It sounds boring.”

“Yeah, not really your thing, I know. But, I loved it. Too bad it didn’t get great reviews and Jayu got bought out by PearlAbyss. They were planning on doing one in space and a post-apocalyptic one.”

“I’ll get Cult of the Sun, then.” He looked at his computer screen. “Billing just came through so I gotta go.”

“Sweet. Tell Maria I said ‘hola’. Hope Lina feels better.”

“Claro, gracias. Hasta luego.“

Miguel didn’t buy Cult of the Sun, though. He realized while he was waiting for another sign-off that the last three games he’d played had been pretty much the same thing and realized he was bored with that for the moment. He read a little more about Subversion, noticed it was on sale through Steam, and bought it.

The one thing he liked about working late is he didn’t have to sit in rush hour traffic. Miguel was home by seven-thirty. As he was shucking off his shoes, he heard Maria talking to someone on the phone.

“Hola, mis amores,” he said loudly. Usually this would get at least Carolina to run to him, but no one did.

He walked to his daughter’s room and peaked in to see her curled up under her blankets. He knelt next to her bed and kissed her forehead, letting her sleep a little while longer. When he came back to the kitchen, Maria was grabbing her purse and phone, but stopped to kiss him.

“Okay, so the doctor called with the results and Lina has the flu. Ricky is sleeping over his friend’s house. I put stuff to give her on the counter while I’m out. Anything you need this week?”

“No…wait. Those spicy chips.”

“Oye, you have to watch those. You’re starting to look a little soft in the middle.” For emphasis, she poked his stomach. To be honest, his wife was filling out a little, too, but these were things you didn’t say out loud, especially not when she had two-inch long manicured nails and the tendency to use them. He didn’t mind during sexy times, but a set of gougers like that on his forearm was enough to remind him to hold his tongue.

Instead, he smiled and waggled his eyebrows. “You know you love my dad bod.”

“Si,” she admitted, giving him another kiss. “I’ll be back two hours tops.”

Once she was gone, Miguel reheated the tamales and sat at one of his desks in the garage. This one had a computer that was dedicated to his VR machine, another big reason why he had chose those titles instead of console games. He began the download of Subversion while he finished his dinner.

He scanned the info screen. He estimated that his setup should easily handle the requirement, despite having a massive engine download that would take almost a half-hour. The summary listed it as a PSWRPG, something he’d never seen before. He’d played EVE:Galaxy and about a million role-playing games, but nothing that crossed both.

“Subversion is a PSWRPG, harnessing the RATP-13 engine to give each and every character in the game free will and memories. Your journey starts with your choice to tailor the game as much or as little as possible. It is recommended that you take a few minutes to…“

He got bored and began surfing the internet on his other computer until his download finished. He put on his goggles with attached headphones, wiping a smudge off the lenses, and gloves, then stood in his genie-circle, the rolling elliptical gel pad that created textured surfaces for VR.

“Welcome,” the game said, cheery Medieval music playing. It gave the standard choices on a load menu and he selected “New Game”. He was inundated with a page full of drop-down menus. “Main Character” was the first, so he looked at that page.

“Please note that it will take several minutes to hours to propagate the game, depending on your computer’s specs.”

“Chinga madre,” he said under his breath. He tapped his hand in mid-air and began to put his own last name into the slot when he felt something reach out and grab his leg. He startled, almost yelling, and whipped off his goggles. When he looked down, he saw his daughter, Carolina, in Super Gatita pajamas with a huge wet spot in the front.

“Papi, I throwed up,” Carolina said.

“Where, mijita?” he asked in a soft voice. Please not the bed, Madre, he prayed. Anywhere but the bed.

“On the floor.”

Thank you, Madre. “Okay, give me one second and I’ll take care of you.”

He put the goggles back on and clicked the “random” button in the corner, then hit the “start” button at the bottom right. A time came on for twenty-eight minutes and two seconds. Perfect, he thought.

After a quick shower, a change of pajamas, and a cleaning and airing out of Lina’s room, she was back asleep. He was about to return to the game when Maria returned with the groceries. She had gotten him the chips and he opened those while he helped her put away groceries.

It was an hour after Miguel had started the generation that he was able to get back to his computer and check on it. It had finished and he was idling on a screen rotating the view of a clearing his character was standing in, waiting for instructions.

Once he snapped his fingers to show he was ready, the music swelled and he gained control of the character. “There are two essential controls we recommend you read about. Would you like to learn about your character?“

He crooked his index finger to show the affirmative. He could spend a few minutes familiarizing himself with things now that he had the time. “In Subversion, you play a powerful character who can influence the world around them. We suggest you take a few moments to see what is available to your character.“

A menu popped up on the right with several drop-down items. It contained spells, all whih seemed classic and elemental, though a few were mental capabilities, and a few were random abilities.

“Your character has their own created history. The game is set to create dialogue for you to read. If you wish the game to speak for you, toggle the Automatic Speech ‘on’ in the Settings menu.

“There are certain places where your character is not allowed, called dohyo. These include dungeons, encounters, and boss battles. This is to stop you from helping your characters at crucial moments of the game. Should you happen to be stuck in a dohyo, the game will take control of your character.

“Would you like to learn about lakitu?“He crooked his finger again. “Lakitu are creatures that record what your characters are doing unobtrusively. You will be able to observe your characters at any moment of their lives and their journey so that you won’t miss anything. Please note that the game does censor certain situations in compliance with national laws.”

He laughed at this. Guess there wouldn’t be any porn in this game, especially not after the whole Kimmi Crystal Mod fiasco.

There was no more instruction, so Miguel opened the lakitu menu. A bee buzzed in front of his face and a picture-in-picture opened next to him. He was an old, white guy with a long beard and dark blue robes with stars and moons, a typical wizard outfit.

He took a few steps forward, noting that the game reduced his speed, and a prompt typed across the upper-right corner. “Journey to Fallamari and convince the Chosen One to take the Quest.” There was a teleportation spell to Fallamari under his menu and he chose that, noting that his mana bar did drop by a third.

The screen blackened, then flashed to white before bringing in colors and sounds. He was on a dirt lane with wheel ruts. He had forgotten to turn the scent off, so he got a big whiff of grass and cow manure, followed by the acrid smell of ash and burnt wood.

A summary typed out in the corner of the screen. “Caertonn Jimson, the Chosen One, has just discovered that his family was killed in a fire. Now is a prime opportunity to nudge him onto his Quest.”

Dios, his whole family? That’s rough, Miguel thought. He opened a gate and walked up to see a blond kid, probably sixteen or seventeen, standing in front of the burned out house with sunken shoulders.

He placed his hand on the boy’s shoulder and the game fed him suggested dialogue. “My dear boy, I am so sorry,” he said, his voice replaced by a creaky, aged one.

“They’re gone,” the boy said.

Miguel, as the wizard, consoled the boy about his family, then ushered him into taking on this quest. It was a little jarring; while it felt almost like acting, it also felt a bit like puppeteering. Most of the time he stood still, but he threw in a hand raise or a shake of his staff every once in a while to seem realistic.

Though, why was he bothering? This kid wasn’t real, he was just pixels. The smells were pumped in from tubes that ran up the safety bar and the ground’s texture from the electrical pulses that hardened the gel inside the pad. It felt real, though. There was something uncanny about the boy’s expressions, for instance. It took Miguel a moment to realize they reached his eyes. That was something other games hadn’t mastered yet. They could make the musculature of the face precise for a smile, they could even get the eyes to crinkle and the face to soften, but the little flash of thought you could see in the minute details around the eyes were still a decade or so off. Except for this game.

Suddenly, a cow mooed and the boy was off for the field behind his house. Miguel followed, moving one step for every three he took. “It is imperative that you get him to open the book,” the screen flashed in red. “Characters will not achieve goals, gain levels or skills if they have not opened the book.” So, he hobbled along, listening to him jabber about restoring the farm and raising the animals. Finally, finally, the boy looked at the book and the lakitu’s picture-in-picture lit up with stats. At least Miguel had gotten one thing checked off.

It was the boy’s realism that made Miguel take a step back in the situation. When he’d sold cell phones at the mall while he went to college, his laid-back approach had lost him some customers, but allowed him to make more. And with those he knew that you had to plant some seeds and watch things grow. In this case, it might be literal.

It was still frustrating, though. He had spent close to a eighty dollars on this game only to sit around and watch some kid stomp around in shit. He tapped his fingers, thinking he was going to go back and try again, only to come up empty on the right words. “Puta madre,” he said and used a teleport spell to head to the wizard’s fortress before logging off.

Miguel took off his glasses and gloves and sat down at his computer. Did that usually happen? He moved and took to the forums to check it out, searching the topics for anything related to “main character refusing to do Quest”. The closest he could find were a few about the main character not doing side quests that the player wanted them to do, but nothing about the game stalling.

He opened a new account and started a new thread. He doubted he would get a response, since most of the others were a few months old, so he forgot about it until he went back to work on Monday and checked during a break.

Vxmp_Free [2/17/46 01:36] r you sure you did it right? u spoke with the MC?

12IghtIVow [2/17/46 10:21] I had problems a few times with my characters. I had to use some spells to torc the forest so he didn’t master H & G like he said he wanted to.

12IghtIVow [2/17/46 10:22] The MC.

Duro_Puro [2/19/46 13:08] Spells! Thanks, I’m going to try that tonight.

Yeah, there had been a bunch of spells on a side menu. And while he guessed the game’s creators hadn’t meant for them to be used against the Main Character, they should still work for his purposes. There was a fire spell that would wipe out his crops, but Miguel felt a bit bad about that. And the poor guy’s family got killed in a fire, so it might actually send him over the edge. He cast “Blight Crops” and “Disease” before running out of mana. He waited several minutes, but nothing happened.

Maybe the game is buggy, he thought. He wrote a quick email to PearlAbyss and received a response the next day.

“Hello, Miguel,” it began. “We have looked into your concern about the stability of your game and are pleased to inform you that there are no integrity issues. While a stubborn main character certainly doesn’t make for a fun game, we assure you that everything is working according to our standards. We suggest giving the main character some time or resetting the game for an additional cost of $19.99.”

Further hunting on the forums showed that some of the spells took a while to work. The ones he had casted were “unpredictable” and had taken somewhere in the ballpark of several days to several months to finally perform.

Miguel was stuck, then. Running through his options, he decided to buy another game and wait until the spells destroyed his home. So, he waited. And waited. Winter ended and grilling season came on, then the hurricane warning and flash flood yeehaw period, followed by jungle as fuck, then a point in time when it got to a cold so bad it came dangerously close to making people want to wear pants without chanclas. The whole cycle repeated itself. Miguel would pop in once in a while to see what Caertonn was doing, but it was always working in his field or picking berries or some boring shit he’d turn off after a few minutes.

It was almost two years later when Miguel turned on his system to play another game and he saw something pop up on his Steam account.

Achievement Unlocked: And Now Your Journey Begins

He didn’t recognize the badge that went with it, so he clicked on it. He almost choked on his soda when he saw it was from Subversion.

“Finally,” he said and popped in the game.

“And Gilghest can take his request and shove it up his ass. He shows up two years ago and tells me to do something, then doesn’t show up to help or to even shoot the shit again, and I’m supposed to do exactly as he says? He can go fuck himself with his staff.”

Well, it seemed he had pissed someone off. He quickly looked at the three of them, noting matches with all but the minotaur, who was their healer.

“What?” Kine asked, looking between them. “Fuck, he’s right behind me, isn’t he?”

“Greetings, Kinenhael,” he said, reading the text across his vision. “Glad to see you are hale and hearty. As for your suggestion, I believe I will pass on the cypress suppository.”

“Heh, Gilghest, so wonderful of you to drop by.” Under his breath, he added, “Finally.”

He agreed. Finally. “I came to check in on the Chosen One and his boon companions. My boy, I’m so glad to see that you finally heeded my advice and started your journey.”

While he spoke with them, a thought occurred to Miguel. He realized that he had the power to end their lives right there and then. One Cone of Fire spell would toast the four of them in a few moments. Then, he could restart the game fresh with a more obedient main character.

Ah, but it really wasn’t his style. Miguel had definitely played some dark characters in his life, but those were usually after a clean playthrough. He preferred to restart his games once something went wrong, which was a burr in his side with Subversion, and he liked to play the good guy. He’d played Alliance characters in World of Warcraft. He’d never sacrificed a sidekick when he played Chibisama as a kid. Hell, he’d never even thought about throwing that damn penguin off the world in Super Mario 64. Good and clean while he explored the game for the first time, darker the second.

Even though this pendejo had already wasted years of playing time, even though they weren’t real and wouldn’t care, Miguel couldn’t bring himself to cook them and restart. However, he would feel no guilt if they met their own end because they were stupid or outplayed,. That was different. That was just game mechanics. That happened all the time.

As Gilghest, he had other perks besides spells. He could read up on the quests and see which ones would be straightforward and which would be tricky. And from where he was standing, he saw one that might get them brutally slaughtered by a gnoll. “There’s a particularly good one not too far that way.” He said, using his staff to point northeast of their position.

“That would backtrack us a little,” Caertonn said, “but I do see a gold marker up ahead.”

“You are on your way to a bright future, then. I will check in with you from time to time to see if you need any help, but I assume you will grow strong and skilled in the months to follow. Take care and good luck.”

He turned and smiled as he teleported to his island. When he got home from work the next day, he’d watch the footage and watch as they encountered a gnoll who never let people leave his camp alive.