“You were in the military?” Levi asked, stepping closer to look at the arrangement.
“Infantry. Then I did the Green to Gold program to become an officer and transitioned to research.” Asher pointed to the center badge that Levi was staring at, “That one means I saw combat, but it was not much. I never even fired my weapon.”
“Asher, how old are you?” Levi asked quietly, still staring at the shadow box like the answer was going to change the math on something he’d been calculating.
“Thirty-five.”
Levi’s jaw worked. Asher could see the number landing — the distance between twenty-one and thirty-five. There’s no way Levi would have an issue with that. Asher still looked young, so it didn’t matter. Plus, they had already lived a lot of lives together, however short. And he knew Levi well enough to know he wouldn’t get caught up in the superficiality of something like what year he was born in.
“That one means I finished Ranger School. The wings mean I jumped out of airplanes,” Asher said cheerfully. “I’ll be honest, I dislike the sensation of falling for that long.”
Levi looked at the shadow box for a long time, then he turned and walked back to the living room without a word.
The house was settling around them in that different quality of quiet that came with acreage and distance and no neighbors that Asher loved. The TV was off. The kitchen light was on, casting a warm stripe across the floor. Levi was on one end of the couch, Asher on the other.
Levi had been quiet since the hallway. He sat with his cane across his knees and his eyes on the dark TV, and Asher could see him doing the thing he did with new information — turning it, checking it against the other pieces, fitting it into the map of a person. The person was Asher. Asher waited, and liked the waiting, because being the thing Levi worked that hard to understand was its own kind of being wanted.
“You said you built the game to feel something,” Levi said. He didn’t look over. “You played a dating sim this afternoon and were confused by it. You don’t —” he turned the cane a quarter-turn against his knees — “you don’t actually understand games, Asher. So how does someone who doesn’t understand games build one?”
It was a good question. It was the kind of question Asher loved, because it meant Levi had been carrying the pieces around and the pieces hadn’t fit, and he wanted them to fit. Asher shifted his weight from where the sore on his thigh had its own slow heartbeat under the bandage.
“I didn’t build a game,” he said. “I want to be careful, because I don’t want to lie to you, and the easy answer is a lie. Other people built a game. I built something else, and a game is what they wrapped it in.”
Levi looked over at that.
“I went into the Army at eighteen,” Asher said. “To prove I could function. That was the whole reason — I’d been told something was wrong with me my entire life, and the Army was a place where the thing that was wrong with me had a use. I deployed. Three tours. Nothing dramatic; I never fired my weapon. But the training was the part that —” He stopped. Levi was still quiet and Asher wanted to be gentle with the quiet. “Some of the training used simulation. Virtual environments, augmented overlays, the immersive end of it. Tools for teaching people to make decisions under stress without the stress being real. You put a soldier in a room that isn’t there and you watch what his mind does.”
“And you found that interesting?” Levi asked.
“It was the most interesting thing I had ever seen until I met you.” The words came out faster than he meant them to; he heard them and reined them back, because Levi’s shoulders were still up. “Sorry. Yes. I found it interesting. I decided I wanted to understand how it worked, so I did the Green to Gold program — the Army sends you to college, you come back as an officer. I went to MIT. Artificial intelligence, because that was where the field was moving. I spent a lot of time in the game lab.”
“MIT has a game lab?”
“It does. I met people there.” Asher’s mouth did something close to a smile. “I’d find them and ask them questions. They thought I was strange. Iwasstrange — I’d ask very specific things about how a player’s attention could be held and they’d want to talk about whether the thing was fun. I didn’t care if it was fun. But they were good, and when I finished my service I called all of them, and I told them I had an idea, and they liked it. We made a company. Loosely. The vice president was the one who cared about the parts I didn’t — distribution, a console, a household name, a plan for after it worked. He wanted to be ready to sell it the day it became real.“ Asher lifted one shoulder.“I never wanted to sell anything. I never wanted a cent. I only ever had two questions about the whole project, the entire time, all those years.Does it work?Anddoes it work the way I intended?”
He looked at Levi when he said the last part. He couldn’t help it.
“I went looking for a feeling,” Asher said. “Or to kill a fear. I didn’t go looking for a game and I did not go looking for a person.” His voice had gone quiet and certain, the precise register, the one for things that mattered. “I came out with you.”
Levi was looking at him with an expression Asher couldn’t fully read, but he understood, dimly, that the thing he’d just said as the happiest sentence of his life landed in Levi as something else. He didn’t know which parts. He set the not-knowing aside to turn over later.He’s here with you still. Be satisfied with that.
So he changed the subject. “Do you want to watch something?”
“Sure.” Levi’s voice was rough. He cleared it. “Yeah.”
Asher picked up the remote. He had every streaming service and never cancelled any of them, but he didn’t open those. He opened the video app, and his account, and the long list of the only thing he actually watched.
Manufacturing videos. How things were made — float glass, ball bearings, fountain pens, the machines that made other machines. He found them soothing. Process without people. A thing going into one end of a system and a correct, finished thing coming out the other.
But not the straight ones. He scrolled past those to the channel he kept coming back to, the one where some man had taken the factory footage, stripped the original narration off, and recorded his own — and the new narration was confident, authoritative, and gloriously wrong. Asher couldn’t have said why it worked on him. He’d found it eighteen months ago and watched most of it twice.
He picked the one about ball bearings and pressed play.
On screen, the narrator, in a voice of total authority, explained that ball bearings were harvested. That the spheres were the eggs of a docile industrial animal and the factory’s job was mostly to keep them calm.
Levi made a sound.
Asher looked over fast. He thought, for a second, that something was wrong — and then he understood that the sound was a laugh, a real one, surprised out of Levi and caught halfway behind his hand.
