Chapter 41
The Unhaunted House
Player One
Levi was in his house.
Levi was standing in Asher’s living room with his backpack over one shoulder and the cane Asher had replaced — a proper one, not the cheap aluminum — in his other hand, and he was looking at the room the way he looked at new rooms in the game, taking it in.
His eyes moved from the couch to the kitchen to the bookshelves to the TV, and Asher watched him do it.
You’re here. You’re in my house. Your shoes are on my floor.
And the house — his house, the one he’d bought five years ago and slept in and cooked in and built prototypes in and never thought of as anything more than a place his body went when it wasn’t working — was a different place because Levi was standing in it.
The couch was going to smell like Levi. The sheets were going to smell like Levi. The shower was going to have Levi’s shampoo. Every surface Levi touched was going to carry him, and Asher was going to press his face into every one of those surfaces when Levi wasn’t looking.
“It’s nice,” Levi said, and he said it like he meant it.
The house wasn’t what people expected when they heard “CEO” and “wealthy family”.
It was a three-bedroom ranch on four acres, set back from the road, with trees on three sides.
The living room had a leather couch he’d picked himself, broken in over five years, a TV mounted on the wall — good, large, the kind he watched documentaries on or played music through—bookshelves with engineering manuals, neuroscience texts, and a few military histories arranged in no particular order.
The floors were hardwood and clean; he cleaned them himself on a schedule, though it looked like whoever had been cleaning in his absence had used something that left streaks.
It was his. And now it was Levi’s.
“Come see the rest,” Asher said.
The kitchen and the living room, he moved through fast — Levi’s hand trailed along the counter; he sat briefly on the couch to test it, the leather creaking under him, and Asher caught the creak and thought that sound is going to mean Levi from now on.
Those rooms were just rooms. He wanted Levi to see the other ones.
The spare room was empty except for a desk with nothing on it. “This could be your streaming room. We’ll set up your equipment, and I can build you a proper desk.”
Levi looked at him. “Asher, I haven’t agreed to —”
“The light in here is good. Northern exposure. No glare on the monitors.”
He was already past the objection.
The bedroom. His bed was a king-size memory foam mattress, but he could replace it with a California king if Levi preferred. He ran his hand across the sheets. “Feel these.”
Levi looked at the sheets. He didn’t touch them.
He must be overwhelmed.
“They’re good,” Asher said. “Better than yours.” He watched Levi’s face. “I want to get your posters. The ones from your apartment. For the walls in here…I’ve never thought much about decorating. But I liked how you decorated your apartment. It looked like a place that suited you.”
“You want to put my posters in your bedroom?”
“Our bedroom,” Asher said without thinking, because it wasn’t something that required thinking. “The Civilization one. And the one with the knights. They’d look good over the bed.”
Asher kept moving before Levi could say something.
The bathroom was bigger than Levi’s. Tile floor, a vanity, and the shower — glass-walled, a bench built into the far side, two showerheads. Asher had installed the second head himself because one hadn’t felt like enough, and because he liked the project.
Levi stepped into the bathroom, keeping his hand on the doorknob; he glanced down at it. “Asher, there is no lock?”
“No,” Asher said. “I replaced all the interior door knobs when I moved in.”
Levi’s eyes widened. It wasn’t fear…actually, Asher wasn’t sure what his face was saying. “The bedroom doesn’t lock either,” Asher offered, in case that was what the look meant.
Levi’s mouth pressed flat, so maybe that wasn’t what the look meant.
I still have a lot to learn about you. That’s more exciting, I think.
As they moved back through the hallway, Levi stopped at a dark frame on the wall: the shadow box Marianne had made.
She’d arranged every piece with the specific care she gave to evidence, and that was what it was to her: evidence.
Asher walked past it the way he walked past the thermostat.
He hadn’t looked at it directly in years.
Levi was looking at it now, so Asher looked at it too.
“What is this?” Levi asked. His eyes were on the thing at the center — a badge, blue and silver, a musket inside a wreath.
“Marianne put it together. She liked having proof I could function.” Asher leaned on his arm brace a little, a twinge of pain shooting through his thigh where the bedsore still hadn’t healed. “Those are from the military.”
“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.
I was strange — 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? And does it work the way I intended?”