Battlecraft VR Page 5

  Belle scowls at Rupert. “Look. I need to have a chance, at least, to win. Or make a good showing. If I can’t, I’m not playing.”

  Rupert says, “You’re playing. Or you’re in breach of contract.”

  “Good luck getting anything, Mr. Jones. Everything I own fits in a 300-square-foot pod.”

  “I don’t care where you live. You are contractually obligated to play.”

  “I’ll play if we find Marina.”

  “I don’t have time. You find her.”

  Belle crosses her arms.

  They stare each other down.

  Rupert hits himself in the forehead with the flat of his hand. “Oh! Wait. It’s about money. Why didn’t I get that before? You want me to bankroll the search.”

  “That might work for me.” Belle’s surprised it took him so long to get it.

  “Finding missing players is not my responsibility under our contract. You get—“

  “—So far we get almost nothing. We all have day jobs, because otherwise we’d be lined up at the feeding centers. We all live in rooms half the size of your bathroom. Every other team at our level has a team house and a support staff. Our situation is unheard of.”

  “Look. I didn’t expect you to get this far,” Rupert says, and Belle hears the wheedling tone but ignores it.

  “Nobody expected it,” she said.

  “Nobody did,” he says, sounding relieved. “That’s right. I was being a good person, sponsoring a team with women on it. To promote fairness and gender equality in the sport. And now I’m getting punished for it.”

  “Whatever you say,” Belle says, crossing her arms over her chest. In her opinion, Rupert Jones Jr. wouldn’t recognize a lofty intention if it bit him in the ass, but now is not the time to argue about that. “If you don’t help, we can’t look for her. We are broke.”

  They stare each other down again.

  Several people have arrived at the conference room door, and they are brandishing phones and papers. Suddenly they breach the door.

  As if he’s been shoved from behind, a whip-thin man squirts in. Belle sees a vertical blur with red hair slicked back. When he lurches to a stop, she notices a ridiculous beard shaved into elaborate patterns and lots and lots of jewelry—bangles, rings, necklaces, and earrings.

  “Oh, no, Jason,” Rupert says. “You get out. You’re on my shit-list.”

  “You need help, Rupert,” Jason says wearily. “I only said what the board was thinking.” His voice is a deep baritone that clashes with his up-to-the-minute appearance.

  “Look, I know you think it’s your responsibility to feed me to the sharks, being my chief operating officer and all, but I don’t agree. Go away. I’m busy,” Rupert says.

  “Tell me something,” Jason says. “What’s more important than the valuation of the stock? Not your jealousy and egomania, that’s for certain.” He nods at Belle. “Who is she?”

  Rupert looks at Belle, then away.

  “Go away, Jason,” Rupert says.

  “Wait,” Jason says, shoving an index finger at Belle’s face. “I know who you are. You are the captain of his Battlecraft team.” He wheels on Rupert. “Rupert, this is a nightmare. You said you’d stop.”

  Rupert jumps back on the treadmill and starts running. “It relaxes me,” he roars.

  “Maybe if it were a casual thing,” Jason says, switching to a cajoling tone. “But we both know it’s not. It’s serious. Battlecraft is a huge distraction. You watch it too much, you play it too much, and you spend too much time and attention on your team. Your little vanity project. You’ve got to concentrate on the IPO.”

  Rupert is breathless. “I know,” he pants, “I said I’d stop, but...It relaxes me.”

  “You don’t look relaxed,” Jason says, folding his arms. He projects an unmistakable air of ownership over Rupert.

  Rupert slows the treadmill, runs a few more steps, then sighs, turns off the treadmill, and takes up his towel again. “Look, Belle. You’ve got to get out of my office now. And whether to accept it or not, this is your problem. You will play. With or without Marina, you will play.”

  “No,” Belle says. “We won’t.”

  “Face it,” Rupert says, his face reddening. “Nobody thinks we’re going to win. The team has two girls on it! So what if we lose? So what if we’re crushed? We got to the finals with two girls on the team! If you’re embarrassed, you’re embarrassed. Deal with it.”

  “No,” Belle says quietly. “I’ll blow this team up from the inside first.”

  “I’m not giving you any more money,” Rupert says.

  “Good decision,” Jason says.

  “Shut up, Jason,” Rupert says.

  “How did you get to be where you are? You’re incredibly short-sighted,” Belle says. “And you’re not as smart as you think you are.”

  Rupert’s mouth falls open and Jason grins before covering his mouth with his beringed hand.

  Belle leaves the office, and for the second time in two days, she shoves her way through the eerily smooth people, barreling into the elevator.

  She’s done with Battlecraft. No one ever thought they could win anyway. No one—with the possible exception of Marina and Nick’s dotty old grandpa, and maybe William, who is moony and upbeat about everyone and everything. With Marina gone, the Untouchables are sunk.

  ∆∆∆

  Harold had spent the night at his daughter Helen’s—Nick’s mother’s house—and then had gotten on the road in his old truck to go home to Dayton. He loves Helen to pieces and he gets along with her better than he ever has, but he doesn’t want to stick around while Helen complains endlessly about Nick failing to finish his PhD thesis. She thinks he’s wasting time on “that crazy game.” How had he raised such a conservative daughter?

  It’s a six-plus-hour drive out of the metropolis and over the Cascades on old highways, since the interstates are now reserved for self-driven vehicles.

  He bumps along until he reaches Washington’s desert plateau, where he can drive on the best available roads. The same is true of the wheat fields and low hills still farther east in the Palouse.

  During the drive, Harold has plenty of time to listen to his jazz playlist, as well as to think about all kinds of things, including the Untouchables’ predicament and his unsuccessful attempt at fixing it.

  He also thinks about the people he met at Rupert Jones’s conference room. In particular, he thinks about that actress, Gemma…what had her last name been?

  He’s been thinking about women a lot lately. Maybe it’s because Meta has been gone for more than two years.

  Two years. It’s a long time, and he’s been lonely.

  He misses her every day, but every day his longing for female companionship increases.

  He finds himself staring at women’s body parts even more than he had when he was a young man. Whenever he catches himself doing it, he looks away and scolds himself. He feels like the worst kind of creep—an old one.

  Still, if a woman reminds him of Meta, who’d been a warm, happy blonde with a plump figure, he gets caught up in his memories and has a hard time tearing his eyes away.

  He gets home to a house that’s too quiet, defrosts some lentil soup, and eats it with a whole bag of potato chips, then tosses and turns all night.

  Up early the next morning, he decides to visit Hazel’s Bakery in Dayton, and the woman he’d dated that one time—before he was ready to date—comes in.

  She’s a local winery owner, younger than he is, a sophisticated California native, and she’d been very forward on their date. He’d run away at the end of the night and never called her again, and now she smiles at him and makes a suggestive noise and wiggles her hips, and he feels himself lose his composure.

  He's still so embarrassed about his failed date, he sits in his truck on the street and waits for his heart rate to go down.

  When he's calmer, he goes by McCauley’s Mercantile and says hello to his old work cronies there, buys some groce
ries, then picks up his prescriptions, visits the feed store, and lays in a few fence posts and other supplies at the hardware store. The house is stuffy and hot when he gets in.

  There’s still a small shock of disappointment when there’s no Meta waiting for him. It’s a reflex that won’t seem to ebb. No delicious aroma of pork shoulder from the pressure cooker, none of her country-rock music on the radio, no greeting, no noise at all but the ticking of the ancient wall clock, a clock shaped like a cartoonish coffee percolator that Meta had inherited from her mother.

  He sits alone in his kitchen eating lasagna he’d taken out of the freezer and heated up, along with some fragrant crusty rolls he’d bought at Hazel’s in town. It’s a delicious meal, but he’s lonely. He thinks again of the woman he’d met in Rupert Jones’s conference room.

  Her name was Gemma...something. Gemma Gosman?

  He picks up his tablet and launches a search for “Gemma G., Alien Invasion.”

  Her face appears in front of him, along with the correct spelling of her name: Gemma Gosnold.

  There are hundreds of thousands of entries about her.

  So she is famous. Or at least more well-known than anyone else Harold is personally acquainted with, unless you counted Rupert Jones Jr.

  According to her IMDB page, she has acted in 96 things. Her fame proceeds mostly—or entirely—from the television series Alien Invasion, which had lasted just a couple of years on an obscure streaming channel, yet somehow spawned a fandom that has persisted for thirty years.

  Gemma’s character, Chagrin the evil lizard queen, seems to have been the main reason for the show’s ongoing popularity.

  He reads about Gemma far into the night. It’s like disappearing into an endless but fascinating maze, one web page leading to the next, until he notices the time at the edge of the screen and realizes it’s past two.

  He has read six bios about her, her Wikipedia entry (which seems to have been written with snarky glee by a son she’s estranged from), and several dozen very old, somewhat old, and slightly more recent puff pieces in the entertainment press.

  He’s traced her appearances at cons—Comicons, sci-fi cons, every type of con, it seems, where she is seen most times of the year.

  He’s listened to podcast interviews with her, in which she recounts the same two or three amusing backstage anecdotes from her time filming Alien Invasion. Her favorite story seems to be about the male lead on the show, Peter Bay, who went onto bigger and better things, starring in a series of superhero movies and then making a career as a director of several popular television series on Amazon and Netflix.

  Harold begins watching old clips from Alien Invasion on YouTube and finds it silly but pretty darned entertaining, especially when Gemma is on the screen torturing Peter Bay with her talons and long sucker-tipped tongue or threatening to mate with him in order to introduce her evil alien DNA into the human genome.

  He makes himself exit the rabbit hole, and then he goes to bed and dreams about Gemma.

  Not painted blue and flinging her disgusting alien sucker tongue at her victims, but as she’d been at the meeting, graceful, articulate, energetic.

  Captivating.

  What a silly old man I am, he thinks, when he gets out of bed at four to drink water and take aspirin for his sore knee.

  I’m acting as if I know this woman, a woman I’d never even heard of until two days ago, a woman who probably didn’t notice me, wouldn’t know me if she saw me again. A woman like Gemma Gosnold would certainly never consider even a single date with an old farmer.

  Harold falls into a reverie, remembers a book of poetry Meta had loved—a poem about Paris and its bridges—and he shrugs. It’s the middle of the night, he’s disturbing no one here alone in his little house in the Palouse, and he puts on some Chopin and pours himself a bourbon and sits in his chair and allows himself to wander through Paris in his imagination.

  He’d been there once, with Meta for their thirtieth wedding anniversary, but in his mind now he is walking rain-slicked streets with Gemma, and they are strolling through the narrow lanes near the Hotel George V, talking and laughing, and he can feel her long, warm hand in his, see her blue eyes straight on—she’s about his height—a tall woman, and he can smell her perfume, something with lavender and coconut.

  As he nears sleep in the chair, feeling calm, safe, and almost happy, he gets an alert and tunes into an early-morning talk show. He’s surprised to see William on the show, being interviewed about the semifinal game. And then he thinks of a way he can help his grandson Nick and his friend William and the rest of the Untouchables.

  That decided, he’s off into dreamland, where he and Gemma are laughing on the banks of the Seine, watching cherry blossoms fall like rain.

  ∆∆∆

  Just after dawn, William is riding along in one of his autonomous delivery vans, adjusting the route on the fly, checking his inventory, and trying to forget about what he’d said to the reporter on YourStream Today.

  She’d trapped him into an admission. He’d admitted that Marina had been missing for a week, and they didn’t have the resources to look for her. He’d said a few other things, too, that would likely annoy, if not enrage, Belle, but he didn’t want to think about that. He groans, frustrated with himself and the situation. Whether Belle likes it or not, their priority has to be finding Marina.

  He’d wanted to call Nick as soon as he’d finished that vidphone interview, but then there was a GPS crisis in his fleet—stupid Maps bug—and if he wants to make enough money to pay rent and eat, he has to make sure the products are delivered on time.

  His van is stalled in traffic, and his mind wanders again to his first meeting with Belle. He’s reminded of it whenever he has doubts, and after that interview and the meeting at Spigot, the doubts are coming hard and fast. It was in the old Victrola, a coffee house on Capitol Hill. He’d been playing Battlecraft seriously for a while, joining a team now and then, but never making it past early tournament rounds.

  He had been watching Belle’s Twitch stream and admiring her gameplay for months before he had finally talked her into meeting him in person.

  He wanted to play on her team.

  At that first meeting, though, she’d been prickly, reserved, uncompromising, and dismissive.

  Finally, he’d talked her into giving him a chance, and he’d performed well, earning a coveted spot as mid-range sharpshooter.

  Belle sometimes reminds him of the stepmother he could never please.

  He wonders if being on her team is worth the pain.

  It will be worth it if he’s right about the team—that if they can reach their potential, they’ll be able to beat anyone.

  When Nick calls him, William picks up immediately, projecting Nick’s image into the air in front of him. “I’ve got a plan,” Nick says.

  “A plan is good,” William says, “but we need money, too. I wish I could help, but I’m so overextended I can’t see my feet.”

  Nick grins.

  “After they saw your interview, Harold and the fan club came to the rescue,” Nick says.

  “Man, he gets up early in the morning,” William says. “That’s amazing. But how are we going to convince Belle? You know how she is when she makes up her mind.”

  “It’s going to take the two of us working together, man,” Nick says. “I’ll meet you at her work, the Downtown Espresso on Fourth, in an hour.”

  ∆∆∆

  The coffee shop where Belle works the early shift is in the Belltown neighborhood, a high-density area of exclusive high-rise condos alongside low-income apartment complexes, feeding centers, and drug treatment programs. Living on Basic in the city is tough, but it is doable, even if you don’t have a job, now that tiny apartments and social services and most essential medical services can be obtained for free.

  Belle had chosen the early shift at Downtown Espresso because it left her afternoons, evenings, and nights free for practice, but also because in the early mornin
g there are few young techies and bankers and artsy advertising types out on Belltown’s streets. At 7 a.m., middle-aged hipsters mix with elderly residents of assisted-living high-rises and down-and-outers, perching on the café’s sturdy antique chairs around scarred wooden tables, drinking the famous dark brew with velvety foam on top. Marv, a guy who lives in one of the facilities that house chronic alcoholics, shambles in. Marv is always smiling and he’s always dirty. Belle suspects he spends most nights in the bushes near the freeway tunnel entrance despite having a perfectly good room to sleep in. Belle hands him coffee and a fresh almond croissant from the case, then waves away his credit chip.

  The next person in line is William, grinning like a fool. She feels herself wanting to grin back, but she pushes down the impulse. What the hell is there to be happy about?

  He pays for a small coffee and nods at a table. She takes off her apron.

  “I’m taking a break,” she says to Patrick, the bear-like barista, who is pulling coffees at speed behind the giant espresso machine.

  Smiley William pulls out a chair for her.

  Here it comes, she thinks.

  She’s messaged everyone to tell them she’s done with the team. Now it's time for the backlash.

  Several people in the coffee shop smile at William and wave. He nods shyly at each of them. Belle’s surprised. Are people recognizing them from the Battlecraft stream? Nobody in the shop at this hour—just past seven in the morning—looks like an VR sports fan—but then lately it seems almost everyone is.

  She joins William at his table.

  “What are you doing here?” Belle says.

  “We need to talk,” William says.

  “Meaning what?”

  William pats Belle’s hand. She pulls back and stiffens. William quickly puts his hands in his lap. He looks stricken.

  How can a person live like that, Belle wonders, flying on a unicorn of happiness one moment and tumbling into a pit of misery the next? She prefers to keep a fortified barrier between herself and other people’s emotions.