Invitation to the Game #3
“And, no, Vivienne, the puzzle is not a room escape,” the voice continues. “But your initiative is commendable. You’ll be cooperatively solving a crime. A series of seemingly unconnected murders.”
She remembers the shelf and turns to see a virtual reality headset.
As if on cue, the voice says, “To your right, you’ll find a shelf with a VR set. Please put it on.”
Vivienne keeps hunting for a way out.
“It seems one of our players is having difficulty. Vivienne?”
The screens flicker. A live video feed appears on the far right one. It’s Marco pacing their living room, waiting for her. The screen splits to show her two sleeping children.
“No…” she whispers. “Don’t you dare—”
“We appear to be having technical difficulties with Vivienne’s room. You’ll have lost her video and audio feed, but she is putting on her headset now.”
Three pictures—her husband and children. And then a fourth appears…of her gas stove, hissing.
She puts on the headset. The hissing stops.
“Thank you, Vivienne. We are ready.”
The virtual reality headset pops to life, and Vivienne finds herself in a bar, watching a middle-aged guy hitting on a young prostitute. The camera zooms in, and she realizes the john is the player she knew only by sight.
“What the hell?” the man’s voice booms through the room speakers.
“Please, we ask all players to observe without comment.”
“But that’s not me. I’ve never—”
“Please observe without comment.”
The man and the prostitute move into the back alley, the camera following. He pushes her against the wall. Then he wraps his hands around her neck.
“What the fuck? That’s not—”
The man’s voice cuts off mid-word, but Vivienne can hear him shouting through the walls—shouting that it’s not him in that picture, not him strangling the young woman, not him walking away when her body falls, lifeless, to the pavement.
“You sick fuck!” another of the players says. “You sick, sick fuck.”
The man continues his muted shouts of innocence, punctuated now by pounding at the wall.
The image changes. It’s still night, but on an empty road, where a BMW idles with its lights off.
“Hey,” a woman’s voice says. “That’s my car.”
The picture zooms in to show a figure behind the wheel. Vivienne recognizes her as one of the players—Kate Lindsey, from sales.
“What?” Kate says. “I don’t remember…”
Kate trails off as a figure walks onto the screen. The car revs, and the man turns. The headlights go on, blinding him, and he dives out of the way, too slow, as the car speeds toward him. Kate shouts, “No!”
A sickening thunk as the car strikes the man. Then it reverses over him and Kate screams that it isn’t her, she didn’t do it, her car is fine—go look, it’s fine.
Vivienne reaches up to fling off her goggles, but the strap tightens and pain stabs through her skull.
The picture changes to a hallway. One she knows so well she can picture every detail of the photographs lining it.
“No,” Vivienne whispers. Tears stream down her face, pooling in the headset. “Please, no.”
The camera pulls back to show Vivienne in her nightshirt. Her eyes are blank, unfocused, as she moves purposefully toward her destination.
She turns into the nursery. Ahead is the crib.
Vivienne squeezes her eyes shut. But it doesn’t help. She still sees the picture, as if projected onto her visual cortex.
She stands over Hannah’s crib. Reaches in. One hand strokes the baby’s head. Then she takes a stuffed dog from the end of the crib.
No pillows for babies, guys. She can have one toy, but it stays out of reach, or she might…
Or she might…
Vivienne places the stuffed dog over her infant daughter’s nose and mouth…and presses down.
Screaming. Sobbing. Wailing. That’s what Vivienne hears. It all comes through the walls, though. Comes from the others. She can’t make a sound. Can’t speak. Can’t think.
No, that’s not true. She can think.
She thinks, I did not do this. Not willingly.
And she thinks, It doesn’t matter. I still did it, and I can’t live with knowing that.
The answer is simple. She will leave this booth, and she will not go home, never go home. She’ll drive to the city. Find a bridge. Plenty of them in San Francisco. Find one and jump.
“Vivienne?” the voice says on the speaker. “You saw what you did.”
“That wasn’t me.”
“We have proof that it was.”
“It was my body, but not under my control.”
“Are you suggesting we used mind control to make five people commit murder?” A dry chuckle. “I certainly hope that isn’t your legal defense. Claiming postpartum depression would be the way to go, though it will cost you your husband, custody of your children.”
“That’s not what happened.”
“No one will believe mind control, Vivienne. And, yet…if such a thing were possible, it would be quite the sword to wield, wouldn’t it? You wouldn’t want to cross anyone who held it.”
She says nothing.
“If someone did wield that power, I bet they could use it for good, too. Erase the memory of what you just witnessed. Would you like that, Vivienne?”
Silence.
The voice continues, “Peace of mind would come at a price. The price of your loyalty as an employee. We would implant a subconscious terror of leaving the company. You would, at some level, understand that if you left, we’d be forced to reveal your forgotten secret.
Should you try to leave, we would need to bring you back in for a reminder.
I can assure you, though, that few need reminders. Very few.”
Fran Lee did. That’s what Vivienne had seen in the older woman’s eyes. Repeated exposure to whatever horror she’d committed while under the company’s control. Exposure and erasure, corroding her mind, disintegrating her memories.
“Do you want us to erase that memory for you, Vivienne?”
No. Consciously or not, she had murdered her own child. She must pay for that.
When she doesn’t respond, the voice says, “Imagine if we don’t erase it. Would you tell your husband? Inflict the horror on him? Or would you abandon him and your children? Rob them of their mother? Destroy their happy family life?”
She cannot return to them with this secret. She knows that. She can’t live with this secret. And yet, how would Marco cope with her suicide, never knowing the reason? How would her children deal with it, knowing only that their mother abandoned them?
You took one child’s life. Will you ruin the lives of the other two?
“Your choice, Vivienne?”
She doesn’t have one. She sees that. No choice at all.
“I’ll take it.”
Vivienne waits as one wall of her booth whooshes open. She steps out to see Kate, shaking her head and saying, “Well, that was lame, wasn’t it?” and one of the guys murmuring, “No shit,” as they all share a smile.
The Game turned out to be an embarrassingly low-tech virtual reality chess match, where they’d had to lift and move giant chess pieces. Erika was right. It needed a design overhaul, stat.
The players swallow their mockery as six board members walk in. The man at the head of the group welcomes them to the team and says they’ll each receive a brief orientation, with details of their new benefit packages. Oh, and there’s one last thing…
“Here at the company, we’re always looking to retain talent.
Yet we aren’t always in the best position to recognize that talent.
You are the ones in the trenches, seeing promise overlooked every day.
So, before you leave, I’d like you each to nominate someone for the next Game.
Consider it the first taste of your new executive power. ”
One of the board members takes Vivienne to a lounge. As they sit, he says, “Do you have a name for us? Or do you need more time?”
“I do but… It might be inappropriate.”
He smiles. “We’ll be the judge of that.”
“He’s talented, brilliant and an insanely hard worker. He’s just not in a division the company often recognizes with executive promotions.”
“Ah, an innovative choice. Always the best kind. You don’t need to make excuses, Vivienne. Just give us a name.”
She takes a deep breath and says, “I’d like to nominate my husband. Marco.”