You can play for free. This story was published on September 21, 2023.
There are three little strings of nothing, loopy shoelaces that just are. Together they vibrate in a harmony so precise and so beautiful that, over the contours of several knotted and wound-up dimensions, they sound just like a small dimple in a quantum field. They and many other such strings, sounding like other dimples, are together equivalent in an abstract way to a proton and an electron, bound up and spinning around each other like Tatooine suns, shining a strange kind of yellow light that from far away flickers like an atom of Hydrogen. And this atom, strung along with several others, is the molecule within the cell within the middle of the body of a boy walking in hunched circles outside a diner in Las Cruces, New Mexico, right this very moment.
Jonee and his friend, another boy whose name is Steven and shares Jonee’s mother, are looking for a quarter to push into the diner’s Galaga console. The game has stood in the diner beside the pie display since 1984, and its price has never changed. They have spent the last of their bankroll, and though usually a thorough pillage of the parking lot would fund several missions, today the asphalt is barren. The boys’ necks sweat and sear, and they return to the bench behind the hostess’ podium, defeated. The console replays its demo beside the pies, and a Galaxian bomber is frozen in a tractor beam for the nineteen-millionth time.
There is a nineteen-year-old, still a junior in high school, who prefers this diner on summer afternoons. He has long, dry hair tied in a ponytail, and he wears long t-shirts accumulated from concerts and thrift stores. He is sitting in the booth beside the podium.
The teenager sees the boys and recognizes them. Their mother, the hostess on Wednesdays, is the object of his deep romantic aspiration, and she is sweet to him. He would like to be sweet to her sons, even though she is behind the building smoking and unlikely to know.
“Guys lookin for a quarter?”
They look up. They recognize him. They don’t like the teenager, because he flirts with their mother.
“No.”
They kick their legs over the cushion and look away.
“Okay.”
They sit for a moment. Jonee breaks first.
“Why you got one?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
“But you don need one.”
The boys are confused. For a moment, Jonee’s memory skates across all the riches they’ve poured into the machine. He is insulted.
“Whaddyou mean?”
The teenager shrugs.
“Hey.”
“I said the machine’s free.”
“What’re you talkin about?”
“Jus what I said.”
Jonee jumps off the bench.
“Come on.”
“Wait,” says Steven.
The teenager stirs his scrambled eggs.
“Show us.”
“Sure, I’ll showya.”
The teenager gets up and walks over to the console. The bomber has been reborn and is fighting its way through ranks of insectoid invaders. High scores pixelate across the glass: two are Steven’s, one is Jonee’s. The others belong to the Reagan era.
The teenager hooks his thumb and index finger around the joystick just below the knob. He sets the pads of his third and fourth fingers on the red gunner switch. He shakes his hair back across his shoulder, then he pulls sideways on the stick and starts spamming the switch. The high-score marquee flickers down the screen, and the invaders descend.
Jonee has his lip stuck in his teeth.
“What’re you doin?”
“Hold on.”
The teenager yanks the stick across its swivel and flutter-taps on the gunner switch in machine-fire staccato. The Galaxian ship flies itself across the screen.
“It’s still playing the demo,” says Steven. He pffts through his lips and calls the teenager a name. He trips away to the end of the pie case and pulls down a fishbowl filled with peppermints.
“It’s just the demo,” says Jonee.
“I know.”
“What?”
“Hold on. Watch.”
Jonee stands up on the aluminum lip of the pie case and leans in by the screen.
“Watch the the controls,” the teenager says.
The stick is following the ship. Where flies the digital Galaxian pilot, the teenager jerks the knob in the same direction. When the ship fires, he fires. He keeps close; the click of the plastic controls against their casings measures his reaction time against the flashing pixels on the screen.
“That’s not playing,” says Jonee.
The teenager flips his hair over his shoulder.
“Look.”
The spaceship flinches; then, all at once, the teenager is the pilot. A glitch in the demo has given him control of the ship. He lets the stick glide back and reduces his firing to a measured, practiced cadence. He is playing without a quarter.
Jonee slips off the pie case.
When the boys are teenagers themselves, Jonee is friends with a girl who transferred to their school from El Paso. She has a round face and short bangs cut straight across her eyes, and she’s pretty. She and Jonee drive from school together some afternoons.
“Do you think about what you’re made of?” says Jonee.
“Hm?”
“Like an atom is a proton and a neutron, and those are made of quarks, or whatever.”
“Like turtles all the way down?”
Three long loops of nothing twang in the depth of the vessels that crisscross the back of Jonee’s eye.
“Huh?”
“That’s what my mom says.”
“What does that mean?”
“Like the world sits on a turtle, and the turtle has to sit on something, so it sits on another turtle, and that one sits on another turtle, and so it’s turtles all the way down.”
“Oh. I think there’s something like that with genies, too.”
“Like it’s genies all the way down?”
“Yeah, like they sit on each other and it’s the same kind of thing. Or maybe it’s their lamps are stacked up or something.”
“Huh.”
He pulls into the parking lot outside the diner. He wants to kiss her there in the car, but she pretends not to notice. They go inside and order pie and hash browns until her dad calls, and then she finds her bike in the alley behind and rides home. Jonee puts on a collared shirt and waits tables until late in the evening, and he watches other boys come around the pie case and play Galaga. They fish quarters from their pockets.
When he is forty-seven, Jonee drives a car that drives itself. All cars are required to drive themselves, now. Traffic is smooth and slow in the morning, every morning, and in the mornings it carries Jonee from his small apartment on one side of the city to the large data center on the other, where he’ll pull cables out of server bays and push others into their sockets until four o’clock. He closes his eyes.
Believe it or not, I’m walkin’ on air
The sun over Las Cruces is pink and yellow, like lemonade. It pours down over Jonee’s dashboard and drips over the windowsills. It fills up the car until it covers Jonee’s eyelids, and Jonee pulls the impotent steering column down to his belly. He feels the gentle curve of the highway under his seat and turns the wheel.
Flyin’ away on a wing and a prayer
The car beeps its alarm, and somewhere on the dashboard a pixeled icon shears apart. The tires squeeze against the asphalt for a moment, then they bounce, and the car boosts up into the air. The highway falls away, and the million tiny vibrations that fed up into the frame all fall silent, and only smooth air glides under the carriage. Jonee pulls back on the wheel.
Who could it be?
Ranks of insectoid fighter-ships glimmer above the curving stratosphere like gnats on a wet turtleshell, and Jonee puts his lip in his teeth. He lays his fingers over the firing switch.
The end.