Chapter 50 #2
For a second, he couldn’t figure out what he was looking at.
Not because the image was abstract — because the image was familiar, deeply familiar, in a way that took him a beat to locate.
Seven figures, small in the frame, sitting and laying in the grass of a clearing, all looking up.
Above them, a sky that was the kind of dark-blue-into-black that happened on a night with just moonlight and no clouds, and across the sky — streaking, soft, the kind of streaks that looked drawn instead of photographed — a meteor shower.
The forest. The first loop.
Levi had loved that night. He had thought, at the time — quietly, into his own chest because there was nobody to say it to yet — this is the best moment in any game I’ve ever played. He hadn’t told anyone. All seven of them. Together. Looking up at the meteor shower, when things were still good.
Except the picture wasn’t just a picture. He was three inches from the print now and the grass was characters. Black, repeating, dense and uniform. He squinted. Ones and zeros.
The grass was binary.
He looked up at the sky. The dark blue, the deeper black above it.
He moved his face closer and the sky was binary too — the same tiny black characters, rendered at different densities to produce the gradient.
The seven of them — binary. The meteors streaking across the upper third of the image — binary, but a different binary, red, the only red anywhere in the print, the meteors drawn in red ones-and-zeros that the eye registered as light from a distance.
Levi’s hand went to his mouth.
He stayed crouched. The print was made out of digits. The whole thing. Every figure, every blade of grass, every star in the sky behind the meteors. He moved sideways along the bottom edge and the digits kept going, dense and uniform, an entire image rendered character by character.
“What is this?” Levi asked, his throat tightening. “Asher. What…what is this?”
Asher was beside Levi now, not quite kneeling, just crouched with a hand on Levi’s shoulder.
“I wanted to put something gentle up there,” Asher said.
“In the c-suite. Like you do. You, um, you bring flowers and you put art on the walls and you make it a room where people live and I —” The uncertainty was still in his voice.
“I wanted to try. I’m not good at gentle, but I wanted to try, because you’re good at it and I — I watched you do it and I wanted to do one.
I’ve been talking to Paul about what to make. For a long time. Months.”
“It’s the meteor shower.” Levi’s voice was thick. “The first run. The forest.”
“Yes.”
“Why this one?”
“Because.” Asher paused. He was choosing words. Levi could feel him choosing words. “I watched you all watch the stars…you looked happy. It was the happiest you were in there… before I showed up. So that’s the one I picked.”
Levi was crying as he looked at the image.
The boy he’d been in the forest, watching a sky that wasn’t real, surrounded by people he didn’t yet know were people, didn’t exist anymore.
It had been nearly a year since that happened, and Levi could barely remember what it felt like before Asher’s hands closed around his throat for the first time.
“Is this —” He had to swallow before the rest came out. “Is this the game’s code? The render data?”
Asher’s voice changed. The uncertain note got bigger. “Please don’t be mad.”
“Asher.”
“Don’t be mad. Promise me you won’t be mad first.”
“What did you do?”
“It’s — okay. So.” Asher started talking faster, like he was trying to get it out before he could change his mind.
“Do you remember when I asked you about Ethan’s PS4?
And you told me about which games you watched him play and which ones you tried to play with him?
I—I went and got it down. From the shelf.
I know you said don’t touch it, but I had to—and it’s okay, I promise.
All the data is still there. I even cleaned up the inside, because it had a lot of dust in it. ”
Levi couldn’t speak.
“I took the save data and I converted it. Every save file from every game on his console. The whole library. I converted it all to binary.” Asher gestured at the print.
“That’s what the image is made of. Every digit on the print is part of Ethan’s saved games.
The grass, you guys, the sky — all of it. ”
Levi’s hand was shaking against his mouth.
“And the red parts —” Asher’s voice was getting softer, less sure.
“The meteors. The red is the games you played with him. Or watched him play. There — there aren’t very many of those, but I marked them differently in the serialization, so they would come out red.
The meteors were the moving parts of the image and the games you shared with him were — they were the moving parts of him, I think.
The parts that touched you, and continue to touch you. ”
Levi sat down on the floor of Asher’s office because his legs weren’t working and he just sobbed, trying to wipe the tears away faster than they were coming so he could keep looking at a meteor shower made of their shared games.
Levi’s chest was doing something that wasn’t pain or joy, but sat in between the two feelings like a pressure he did not want to let go of.
“Why?“ Levi managed.
“Because you did it.” Asher sat on the floor with him. “The smartest people I have ever known couldn’t get me out…and you did. But it wasn’t just you, it was…your brother too. All the things you learned from him, even when you were too scared to play with him—”
He stopped. He was being careful with the sentence. Levi could see him being careful.
“If he hadn’t been your brother, I would still be in there, I think.
So I thought — if anyone’s going to get them out, it’s going to be the Mercer brothers.
Both of you. He helped you become someone who could do this.
So he’s going to be part of the rescue too—” Asher gestured at the meteor shower. “He’s the light in this.”
He paused. He looked at his hands, then added, very quickly: “It’s stupid. I’m — I’m sorry, I think I got it wrong, I was trying to be romantic and I think I picked something — it might be too much, I should have asked, I — I can take it apart. I can have the file deleted, I can —”
Levi grabbed his shirt with both hands and pulled Asher toward him.
Asher came easily because Asher always came easily when Levi pulled, and Levi kissed him on the floor of his office next to a four-foot-tall framed print of Ethan’s video game saves arranged in the shape of one of the happiest moments of Levi’s life.
The kiss was wet and bad and full of the snot of someone crying too hard to kiss properly. Asher made a small sound against his mouth — surprise, maybe, or relief. Levi didn’t care. He kissed him again.
“It’s not wrong,” Levi choked out against Asher’s mouth. “Asher. It’s not wrong.”
“I got it right?” Asher said as he pulled away.
“You got it right.” Levi was still crying as he laughed at the stupid look on Asher’s face, the one that happened when Levi would randomly tell Asher he loved him. “You got it so right, you — Asher, you idiot, you got it so right.”
They sat on the floor of Asher’s office for a while.
Levi held Asher’s hand and Asher held Levi’s hand, and Levi looked at the seven figures in the grass and the red meteors above them.
Ethan was a part of this, in a strange way, in the only way that was still available — by being the material Asher Kane had used to try to be kind.
Levi wiped his face. He looked at Asher. Asher’s reading glasses were a little fogged from the closeness. His mouth had Levi’s snot on it.
“You’re going to hang it up there?” Levi asked.
“If you want.”
“I do.”
“Okay, baby,” Asher murmured and kissed Levi’s cheek. “Should I hire someone else to do it? I don’t know if they would want me in there.”
Levi laughed. “You’re so weird.”
“I know.”
“You’re so weird and I love you so much.”
“I know. I love you, too.”
They sat for another minute, then Levi wiped his face again with his sleeve and the two of them stood up.
Levi leaned the painting carefully back against the side of the desk, image-side facing in this time, the way Asher had had it, because the image was for the room upstairs.
Not for visitors and it wasn’t for the lawyers Asher met with and it wasn’t for anyone but the six people who couldn’t see it yet.
“Come on,” Asher said. His hand on the small of Levi’s back. “Let’s go home.”
They walked toward the elevator.
In the elevator, Asher rocked back on his heels and then forward onto the balls of his feet.
Back and forward. Back and forward. Levi recognized the motion — Asher did it when he wanted to do something and was running a check on whether the timing was right.
Asher had once done the same motion with his feet while laying down in bed, asked Levi what is the appropriate length of time between someone crying and an unrelated topic.
Is it minutes? Hours? The next morning? I keep guessing and I can’t tell if I’m guessing correctly?
Levi had said you’ll get a feel for it and Asher had said I would prefer a number and Levi had not been able to give him one.
He was guessing now. Levi could see him guessing. The heel-toe, heel-toe, the small click of his shoes against the elevator floor, the visible mathematics of Levi was crying and I have something new and unrelated.
“Spit it out,” Levi said.
Asher’s hand went to his jacket pocket.
“I have something else for you,” he said as he pulled out a small dark jump drive — the kind that plugged into a USB port, compact, nothing special.
Except the casing. The casing was familiar.
Black matte polymer, contoured, with an etched triangular symbol on the side that Levi recognized because they had spent hours staring at identical symbols inside Dr. Faine’s sanitarium.
The building had been collapsing around them and Asher wasted time grabbing it because it had—
“You didn’t,” Levi said.
“I had the casing 3D printed from the game’s render data.
Exact replica. Same dimensions, same weight, same finish,” he said excitedly, turned it over in his fingers.
“There’s an actual drive inside. I put the rendered footage on it.
It’s a full reconstruction — both headset perspectives, third-person composite. ”
Levi stared at the drive. Stared at Asher’s face.
The elevator was descending and the numbers were counting down and Asher was holding a replica prop from a VR horror game with a sex tape on it and looking at Levi with the expression of a man who had just given the most romantic gift in the history of human courtship.
“You 3D printed the hard drive from the game,” Levi said slowly, trying to make sure he understood correctly. “The one you almost died retrieving?”
“Yes!” Asher did that thing where he nodded too many times, grinning.
“And it has that video the insane doctor showed us before trying to kill us?”
“Levi,” Asher’s tone dropped, becoming deadly serious. “It was our first time together. It’s the most important object that has ever existed. I wanted to hold it.”
Levi laughed.
The laugh came out whole and loud and it echoed in the elevator even as the doors opened. He pressed his hand over his mouth and the laugh came through his fingers anyway.
“You’re fucking impossible,” Levi said. “You are an actual psychopath.”
“That’s clinically accurate.” Asher was grinning a grin that had no dimmer. “And I’m going to make you watch it with me tonight. And then we’re going to reenact it.”
“We are not going to —”
“We are. I’m going to set up the laptop at the end of the bed and we’re going to watch ourselves while we —”
“Asher.”
“You’re blushing. Your ears are red. I love when your ears get red. It makes me want to bite them.”
“I hate you.”
“You love me. You told me. In bed. You can’t take it back.”
“I am reconsidering.”
“No you’re not.” Asher pressed a kiss to his temple as he grabbed a fistful of Levi’s hair and tugged gently, guiding Levi out towards the front of the building.
“You’re going to come home with me and watch our sex tape on a replica prop from a horror game and you’re going to like it because you’re as fucked up as I am, Levi Mercer. You just hide it better.”
Levi looked at Asher. At the grin. At the hard drive in his hand.
At the glasses that made him look like a criminal professor.
At the man who had killed his own mother with a scalpel and fed Levi ice cream by choking him and cried in a hallway because Levi said we and painted Ethan’s save data into the shape of a meteor shower, and was now holding what amounted to a sex tape, asking Levi to reenact their first time while watching it on a laptop.
I’m happy.
The thought was simple, complicated, and true.
Happy didn’t mean the anger was gone. Happy didn’t mean the grief was gone.
Happy didn’t mean the visits to the c-suite didn’t wreck him every Thursday or that he didn’t cry in the shower sometimes or that the blips had fully stopped — they hadn’t, though they were rarer now, and when they came, Asher still produced a knife from somewhere and cleared the room.
But he wasn’t alone anymore. He wasn’t staring at a ceiling or feeding himself through a tube. His life was insane, everything about it had been since he put on that stupid headset, but this life was something he wanted to keep living.
He held Asher’s hand as they walked through the lobby, out through the front doors, and the sunlight hitting them was real and warm on their skin as they walked out to the ordinary parking lot in an ordinary world outside of an ordinary building where nightmares had been made real.
Together.
[the end]