January 27, 2010
Drone Wars: Revelations Level 21:15
Alone in the attic the boy looked through old boxes in search of his original issue childhood Pray Station. He remembered how magical it was when he first opened the Operating Manual. "To start push 'Start' button," the first line read. Version XIX Pray Stations were far more sophisticated than the old model, but he liked the arcane user-interface of his boyhood toy. He brushed off the dust and opened the box. All around him electric candles lit up. The bright and shiny face of Jesus Christ welcomed him on the alter screen with a beaming smile.
"Revelations level 21:15" blinked on and off. The boy read the passage: "The angel who talked with me had a measuring rod of gold to measure the city, its gates and its walls. The city was laid out like a square, as long as it was wide. He measured the city with the rod and found it to be 12,000 stadia in length, and as wide and high as it is long."
When he pulled out his old joystick his heart launched itself against his ribs with such a jolt he felt the need to place his free hand over his breast as if some extra effort were required to hold the organ in place.
"The Suicide Party?" the boy scoffed, remembering what his old man had said. On the news the story was abstract, funny because it made no sense. In his father's study he realized it was no joking matter, his old man was dead serious.
"We are willing to die for our beliefs," the man's frail voice rose to meet his son's disapproval.
After it finally sunk in that his old man felt as strongly about his position as he did, his son recoiled in horror. "You're kidding me, right?" he almost pleaded.
"We would rather put a gun to our head," the righteous earnestness in his father's manner sent a shiver through the boy, "Than contribute our blood and sweat to such a criminal enterprise."
"You're drunk," the unmoored teenager had stuttered. "How do you expect to form a political party if your members drink the proverbial 'Cool-Aide' every time they disagree with something?" He was utterly perplexed, overwhelmed by a sinking feeling he had never experienced before, and as he kneeled at the console of his Pray Station, he hoped beyond hope that the video game could somehow realign the shards of his reality.
His old man's words rang in his ears. "If that's what it takes," he had waved a half-empty whiskey bottle over his head and declared his party's position in a purposeful voice his son didn't recognize, "Then that's what it takes."
It seemed to the teenager as if reality had sprung a leak, and as the water table lowered on his Pray Station monitor, a whole new universe revealed itself before his eyes. All along under the waterline of the game's 3D world there had existed a vast necropolis he had never imagined possible.
What materialized on the screen was, however, not a heavenly diamond-studded golden city but something far more sinister. What took shape was a satanic vision of monolithic slime-covered architecture that dripped as it emerged from the depths of the dark sea to reveal itself to the light of day for the first time in millennia. Slowly, as the water drained from the sea, the lifeless metropolis came into view. Titanic arches and domes oozed algae as they rose into the air. To him his father's newly acquired belief system was as impossible as the terrible geometry that now climbed up all around him.
Almost the entire necropolis was made visible -- all except for one last temple at the end of the city, still partially submerged under the placid surface of the black pool; goop, he realized with fright, was for centuries all that separated his world from this hellish edifice.
Cryptic symbols, lurid hieroglyphs, and skull-like faces leered at him through the sloppy film of muck that covered the moldering walls. He chocked back the smell of rot and decay. Swarms of bats harassed him at every turn. They rushed passed him in blind flight. Rats, so many rats. The vermin scrambled between his virtual 3D legs. Slowly and painstakingly his avatar felt its way along the crumbling, damp corridor.
On screen, bony spires reflected up at him from glassy puddles. He saw himself slipping and sliding down gigantic, slick wet slabs of stone. "Sonora," he pronounced his dead mother's name softly. Her murder was devastating, but he had never missed her so much as he did now.
"Washed in the blood of a lamb," was the phrase his father repeated. The son mouthed it in disbelief, and held up a photograph of his dead mother he had placed beside the keyboard. " Washed in the blood of a lamb?" he made it a question and put it to the picture.
Without warning the giant steel rings of the chain that held up the drawbridge upon which he stood snapped with an ugly sound and clattered along the cobblestones of a great wall as they dropped into the abyss bellow him.
The game was on.
He was plunged into a lightless netherworld filled with predatory phantasms he had never known existed before. Amidst the shadows of cyclopic columns were creatures so far beyond description they could not possibly have been born from human imagination. Giant white-haired Sasquatch-like robots and even more frightening apparitions lurked menacingly among the shadows.
With a final thrust into his consciousness, the frightful edifice of the temple at the end of the city was fully laid bare before him. A number of mammoth laser-cut stone blocks from the highest reaches of the dead city narrowly missed him as they crashed to the ground. There wasn't much time. He replaced his mother's photograph beside the electric candles of his Pray Station and squeezed the handle of the joystick tightly. Alien Abominable Snowman robots or not, all he knew for sure was that horrible hostile demons were closing in fast.
In a flash he realized the freakish phantasms had not come for him. They had come for his father. The old man was the one who had summoned the eons-old wrath of these alien space creatures with his idiotic, nihilistic selfishness. Instinct took over. His avatar edged its way through the dead city and loped up the oversized mud-smeared granite blocks that led to his dad's study.
Despite protests from his 3D old man -- who, true to life, simply couldn't understand what had come over his son -- the boy pulled him out of the chamber.
His son kept referring to some temple. "We have to get there as fast as possible," the image of his boy kept saying.
"What temple?" his virtual old man asked peevishly. This was new, this talk of a civilization of alien death-worshipers.
"Right ahead," his son answered. "Almost there," he tried to reassure his drunk father who was dragging his feet the whole way. "Can't you see it? Right up ahead. Only a couple of more steps that's all," the boy pleaded.
"Hear the gong?" his son asked his old man. "Hurry now," he dragged his father behind him. "Any hope of salvation, any at all" he tried to explain, "Means we have to get to the alter before the third and final gong."
With every step forward the terrible temple loomed larger until it all but blotted out the sky. The two of them looked no bigger than miniature toy figurines at the base of the enormous steel doors. Once inside it took a while for their eyes to adjust to the dark. Arched ceilings seemed to rise forever into infinity. Each hall they entered was larger than the last.
"Faster," the boy yelled at his old man. "We have to go faster if we are ever going to get there."
"Get where?" his 3D dad was losing his patience.
"There," the kid pointed to a staggered pyramid in the middle of the great chamber.
In order to get to the next level of the game they had to first scale two sizable walls. It was not easy. His old man was in pretty bad shape, but they finally made it to the base of the pyramid. All they had to do afterward was climb the twenty thousand steps to the top. An array of incredible creatures harassed them. The boy fought them off one at a time with a slew of primitive weapons. Once safe they paused momentarily to catch their breath. The floor was far beneath them yet the ceiling looked no closer than before.
In the middle of the pyramid's flat capstone a block of granite stood before an altarpiece of devilish design. It was on this stone before this altarpiece the boy wanted his virtual 3D father to lie down and bare his chest.
--Daniel Mendel-Black, copyright 2010
