The Spirit of the Game

(continued)

By Rik Hunik & Jo McKee

While we ate, Davey babbled on about how he did it. "The technology is still way too slow for action games of any sort so I suggested card games and board games. They said, 'Who wants to play those simple games? Why waste the technology?' I said, 'What if you could play with famous people? Or famous dead people?'"

"Or dead loved ones." I saw it now. I know Mom never quite got over Daddy's death, but she was a victim here. Willing enough, but still a victim.

"Yes," Davey agreed, nodding rapidly before stuffing a chunk of ham into his mouth. Despite his recent success he was still, deep inside, that pathetic, eleven-year-old boy crying for his Daddy. And now he had discovered a way to bring his Daddy back, even if he had to steal and lie to do it. "The idea was to pick an old actor, like Humphrey Bogart, and load his image and voice into the computer from as many sources as possible. The simulations looked really good, but they acted flat. So I thought, what if it was someone I knew intimately, so I could program the simulation more accurately than I could from random film snippets."

"Why not just use an actor?" The ham was delicious, but I didn't have much appetite.

"Too expensive at this stage. Later, after the technology is developed and we get some publicity, actors will be lining up for us." He chugged half a glass of cold milk. "I started loading Dad's old videos, tweaking the program as I went along. After a month I had it almost acting like Dad, so I took it home to test it on Mom."

"He's perfect," Mom said, wiping her mouth with a napkin. She still had more food on her plate than I had started with and she showed no signs of slowing down.

Davey smiled at her. "Not quite perfect yet." He looked at me and shrugged one shoulder, the one away from Mom. "I had to make a few adjustments this morning, but he's looking pretty good now, isn't he?" He grinned proudly.

I nodded, glad I couldn't see it. "It's very close now," I admitted. Davey always was a bad liar, and my training made me better at detecting lies. Actually, this was more an omission than a lie. There was something he wasn't talking about, something that disturbed him.

I let it slide, and the conversation moved on to more conventional topics, like jobs and education, and the latest crisis in the news. For a while we were almost like a normal family, except for the interactive holoprojection of a deceased man in the next room, which Mom kept looking at, itching to get back to her game.

By the time I reached high school, I knew my family wasn't normal. When I started studying psychology in university, I discovered how far from normal my entire family was. The more I learned, the less I wanted to know. Not all mothers are stubborn, redneck Baptists who will do anything for their boneheaded son, but that's what I got stuck with. I had to go through therapy to gain some confidence and point myself in the right direction.

Mom said, "I'm stuffed. I have to go and lose some weight now." She laughed at her own crude joke as she got up and headed to the bathroom. When I was young, she frequently embarrassed me in public with coarse comments like that. Who wants to hear about her bowels?

Davey began clearing the table and loading dishes in the dishwasher. I still had food on my plate. I always was a slow eater, unable to gulp my food like the rest of the family, and I was even slower than usual today. When I indicated that what I had on my plate was enough for me, Davey began putting the leftovers away. When I finished eating, I got up to help him, but he pushed me out of the kitchen.

"You don't know where anything goes. You would just get in the way. Go sit in the living room for a while. "

I didn't bother to argue. I sat on the couch and looked at the simulation projection. It did indeed look very real as it sat there puffing its pipe.

"It's not polite to stare." It sure sounded like Daddy, too. Despite my initial resistance, I found myself wanting to accept him. Then I realized there had been no flicker of static. That meant it had already been watching me. The thought gave me the creeps. I didn't say anything, and I didn't look away.

He shook his head sadly. "You're as stubborn as your mother."

I snorted. Nobody is as stubborn as my mother, and Daddy had always been adamant about that. I continued to stare intently, but I was certain now. "You're not my father."

He smiled at me just like I remembered from my childhood, then blew out a cloud of smoke. "Of course I am. You'll see that when you join me." The pungent smoke stung my nostrils.

"I don't plan to."

"But you will." His eyes glowed red, and a sudden rush of fear, as strong as a childhood nightmare, surged through me. Scientific rationality deserted me, and I knew to the depths of my soul that something evil was looking right at me. Mom came out of the bathroom just then, and I tore my eyes away to look down the hall. "Soon we'll be together," he said. I looked at him again. He gave me a friendly smile and winked at me with a normal-looking eye. Mom came back into the living room before I could say anything more, and they resumed their game of crib. Now I feared that what Mom was interacting with was a lot more than just a program.

I shuddered and went to the kitchen. The dishwasher was running, and Davey was wiping the counter. "What did you do?" I demanded. I had my hands on my hips before I realized they were there.

He looked up, confused.

I pointed into the next room. "What is that?"

He blinked. "It's a digital, three-dimensional simulation of a deceased loved one."

"That's lousy ad copy." I stepped closer. He let go of the wash cloth and tried to back away, but he was already against the counter. I advanced again, thrusting my face within a foot of his. "What did you do to that disc?" He tried to bafflegab me with jargon, but he was just repeating what he had said at dinner. "Cut the crap and get to the point." I glared at him. "Answer my question."

For a big guy, he is such a wimp. His shoulders slumped, his
chin dropped, and he started talking. "You probably won't believe me."

"Quit whining and just tell me." I backed up a step or two but kept him pinned with my eyes.

"Okay." He took a deep breath and straightened up. "Despite all my efforts, the simulation of Daddy was just as flat as all the previous attempts. I needed an edge of some kind, and I wanted to find it before the tech boys did. I found it on the Internet. I followed a thread deep into the occult section and found some spells that were supposed to help live people use CDs and DVDs to communicate with the spirits of the deceased."

"How to be your own medium."

He shot me a pained look before he continued. "It sounded pretty farfetched to me but I figured, what the hell? It won't cost me anything. I'll give it a shot. There was a warning about using the spells at your own risk, but I downloaded the lot anyway and used them as guidelines to work out a spell of my own, tailored to suit my purpose."

Messing around with things he didn't understand. "What did you think would happen?"

"I didn't think anything at all would happen, or I wouldn't have had the guts to go through with it. I just wanted to make the simulation more realistic. Do you think my spell had any effect?"

"Oh, it did, I assure you." My voice was low.

"What do you mean?" His voice was unsteady.

"Tell me exactly what you did."

He sighed and leaned against the counter. He eyed the dining-room chairs, but I was blocking his path. I wanted the privacy of the kitchen for our conversation. His eyes flicked up to mine for an instant, then down, away from my intensity. When he spoke, I could barely hear him. "I took the disc to the graveyard."

"Where did you get the disc?"

"Mom got it in a box of Dad's favorite cereal. She bought it because it had Dad's favorite game on it, but she never used it much and never noticed when I took it. At Daddy's grave I burned a black candle, recited my spell and ran my programs on my laptop. I bled onto the disc, drew symbols with the blood, wrapped it in plastic and buried it for a week during the dark of the moon."

My boneheaded brother had used black magic, without understanding it or even believing in it, and it had worked, but he had no idea what he had done. That scared me. I looked him square in the eyes. "Are you ready to die?"

"Huh ?"

I felt like slapping his face. "Why did you have to go and mess with shit like that?"

"What are you talking about?"

"Your spell. It worked. It didn't do what you wanted it to, but it sure did something." My finger stabbed toward the living room. "That's more than just a program out there. Your machine is occupied by some sort of ghost or spirit."

Davey leaned back a bit and snorted. "And you call me nuts."

It sounded crazy to me too, and I almost gave up trying to convince him, but I remembered those red eyes. There could be a rational, scientific explanation for the red eyes, but I believed it was pure malevolence. I said, "Wel, you are nuts. I've known you all your life, and now I'm studying psychology, so I know you never got over the death of your father. You think it's great that your machine and your program and your magic brought him back to you and Mom, but what you don't know is that he's planning for all of us to join him. And soon."

"How?"

"I don't know, but I know that it scares me."

Davey shook his head. "Daddy would never do anything to hurt us."

I nodded. "You're right. But that's not Dad." I grabbed the front of his shirt with both hands so they wouldn't shake. "You have to shut it off. Now, before it acts."