Balenger paraphrased the rest of the quotation. “Especially your future, which you’re never going to have. Who’s the guy who said Plato was wrong about everything being an illusion?”
“Aristotle.”
“Well, say hello to Aristotle.” Balenger put his finger on the rifle’s trigger.
“It won’t mean anything unless you know what you won.”
Thinking of how grievously Amanda had suffered and how near he’d come to losing her, Balenger yelled, “We won our lives!”
“Not merely that,” the Game Master told him. “After all the obstacles you overcame, you proved yourself worthy.”
“For what?”
“The right to kill God.”
“Kill God? What are you talking about?”
“Kill me.”
Balenger was stunned by the enormity of the concept.
“This is the only way it can happen,” the Game Master explained. “With massive effort, a character needs to take control of the game when, in theory, only the creator has the power to control it. The character becomes so heroic, he defeats God.”
“You want me to kill you?” Balenger asked in disgust. “Is that what your sister meant when she said she finally understood the real purpose of the game?”
“I need someone worthy,” the frail figure repeated. “The Doomsday Vault.”
“What about it?”
“If conventional reality exists, the threats that make the Doomsday Vault necessary show how badly the universe was conceived. Nuclear annihilation. Global warming. All the other possible nightmares. Better that the creator never invented anything. Even God despairs.”
“A suicide game,” Balenger said, appalled.
“Now I’ll swoop and soar through infinity.”
Balenger remembered that Karen Bailey had used similar words. “Like a falcon?”
The boy-man nodded. “I heard Karen tell you about the cubbyhole.” He shuddered. “Is she dead?”
“Yes.”
The Game Master was silent for a moment. When he resumed speaking, his puny voice shook. “It was inevitable. When she learned how the game was designed to end, she refused to allow it. You needed to stop her. But she still exists in my mind. Now she, too, can soar and swoop through infinity.” Tears trickled from beneath the Game Master’s goggles. “She stayed with me during my entire six months in the hospital.”
Balenger remembered Professor Graham telling him about Jonathan Creed’s breakdown.
“I was so determined to take games to their ultimate perfection, I concentrated so hard that I went longer and longer without sleep, four days, five days, six days, and on the seventh day, my mind took me somewhere else.”
He cringed. “For half a year, I was catatonic. I didn’t know it, but Karen sat next to me all that time, whispering my name, trying to bring me back. I never told her where I went.”
“Professor Graham said you called it the Bad Place.”
The puny figure nodded. “It was unspeakable. For those six months, my mind was trapped in the cubbyhole.”
Balenger realized that he was holding his breath. The nightmare implied in the reference to the cubbyhole struck him dumb.
“I sat scrunched in the dark, terrified, no food or water, the stench of my shit suffocating me. But this time, I was alone. I didn’t have Karen to stroke my head and tell me she loved me. I tried to convince myself that the cubbyhole wasn’t real. But how could I know the difference? My cramped body and the darkness and the hunger and thirst felt real. My fear was real. The shit was real. I told myself that I could concentrate on anything I wanted, and if I did it hard enough, that would become real. So I concentrated on Karen. I imagined her whispering my name. Soon, far away in the darkness, I heard her faint voice pleading ‘Jonathan.” I yelled. Her voice got stronger, calling my name, and my mind went to her. I woke up in the hospital with her holding me.“ More tears trickled under his goggles. ”But, of course, that wasn’t real, either. I never left that cubbyhole. All this is another game in my mind. I never left that cubbyhole the first time. I’m still a boy sealed in that cubbyhole, trapped in my mind in that cubbyhole. Pull the trigger.“
The anguish in what Balenger had just heard overwhelmed him.
“Think of how much Amanda suffered because of me,” the Game Master said. “Punish me. Punish God. ”I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.“ Where’s that quotation from, Amanda?”
“Moby Dick,” she answered. “Ahab chases the white whale around the world. But Ahab thinks everything’s an illusion created by God. Basically, Ahab’s chasing God himself.”
“You don’t disappoint me. Go ahead,” the frail figure told Balenger. “You have my permission. Destroy your creator. Strike the sun.”
Balenger couldn’t move.
“What are you waiting for?”
Balenger became conscious of his paralyzed finger on the trigger.
“ ‘Myself am hell.” Where’s that from, Amanda?“ the Game Master asked, his features impossible to read because of his goggles.
“Paradise Lost. Lucifer describes what it feels like to be banished from God.”
“Suppose God’s in his own hell. Do it!” he ordered Balenger.
“And reward you?”
“Kill me!”
“You identified with me in the game. You told me I’m your substitute. Your avatar. I’m you.”
“Tall and strong. God in bodily form.”
“If I shoot you, it’ll be like you’re shooting yourself. I won’t do it.”
The Game Master tried to sit straighter, to seem larger. “You defy me?”
“If you want to commit suicide, have the guts to do it yourself. Otherwise, I’ll get an ambulance up here. They’ll take you to an asylum.”
“You betray me?”
“They’ll put you in a padded room, a different version of the cubbyhole, and give you a real taste of hell.”
“No,” Amanda told Balenger. “He needs to pay. But he also needs help.”
“The only help I need is what you’re holding in your hands,” the boy-man told Balenger.
“No.” Balenger lowered the rifle.
“Like Lucifer and Adam, you disobey me.” The Game Master considered Balenger. Although goggles hid his eyes, Balenger felt the pain behind them. “You have one last chance to change your mind.”
Balenger didn’t reply.
“In that case,” the tiny figure said at last.
He reached for a button.
“Hey.” Instinct made Balenger try to stop him. “What are you doing?”
“We’ll all go to hell.” The tiny figure pressed the button.
Balenger felt a spark of apprehension speed along his nerves. “What’s that button?”
“You proved you’re not worthy.”
“What do you mean, ”we’ll all go to hell‘? What did you just do?“
“Have the courage to end it myself? Very well. If you won’t accept your destiny, I’ll finish the game for you.”
With mounting terror, Balenger stared at the button.
“In a minute,” the Game Master said, “the world ends the way it started.”
Almost every remaining light went out. The only illumination was on a console before the Game Master’s chair: a digital timer whose red numbers counted down from sixty.
“With a bang,” the Game Master said.
“You son of a bitch, you’re going to blow this place up?”
“The game failed. So did the universe,” the puny voice said in the darkness.
Amanda turned on the flashlight, but its illumination was weak, its batteries failing. Balenger groped in his knapsack and raised the night-vision binoculars. He saw a green-tinted version of the boy-man sitting in his game chair, staring through goggles toward the timer. Toward infinity. The spectral green made him look like something in a video game.