Virtually Undead Read online

  Ralph had a tendency to daydream, a tendency that had led directly to his being fired from four different jobs in the past seven years. Ralph never intended to be a fuck-up. In fact, he tried hard to concentrate on what he was doing…but what he was doing was so very, very boring.

  Ralph had a degree in accounting, the pursuit of which, in Ralph’s opinion, had been a total waste of time and money, but it had seemed logical at the time. His father and older brother were also accountants. Accountants made good money. Accountants kept the books balanced for important companies. Accountants interpreted tax laws for the large majority of citizens too intimidated by the whole process to figure out for themselves what they owed to the government.

  Ralph’s father had pushed him to follow the old man’s lead, and having fixed on nothing else that he would rather do, Ralph had done so, graduating from CCNY with a degree in accounting.

  His IQ had carried him through. His lack of interest limited his options.

  Dungeons and Dragons had changed all that.

  Mary Stradling had been a small, thin sophomore, on a summer internship at Ralph’s first, unlamented, company, with a passably pretty face, perky little A cup breasts and unshaved armpits, which for some kinky reason had filled Ralph with a sort of shivery fascinated lust, and who for reasons unknown had taken a liking to plump, awkward Ralph Guthrie. Mary Stradling had been into gaming, so naturally, Ralph Guthrie got into it as well, mostly so he could get into Mary’s pants but then, after his initial objective had been achieved, because he liked it.

  No, he didn’t like it. He loved it.

  Gaming was a whole new world, a multitude of new worlds. Best of all, a significant minority of the players were just like him: smart, a little awkward, not quite fitting into the modern world, with active imaginations. Typical nerds. A good number were borderline autistic.

  Not all of them, of course. Most were ordinary human beings who just liked games. A good few were even socially adroit. A fair percentage were into it primarily to meet members of the opposite sex (a bonus, for sure), and certainly that’s how Ralph had started, but the ones who stuck with it were into the game. Really into the game.

  They were alive in the game. They were powerful in the game, in ways that they just never would be in the so-called “real world.”

  As time went on, technology improved and opportunities expanded, D & D, the board game, inevitably morphed into D & D online, and that’s where things really began to pop. Imagination was all very well. Imagination was great, but imagination was so…imaginary.

  The first games were played on paper, with game pieces that existed only in the player’s mind, nothing more than a list of attributes. This was before Ralph’s time, of course, but he knew the history. Then along came cutouts. You could arrange cutouts in all sorts of ways. After that, colored rollups with glossy surfaces, maps of the landscape, indicating what went where, along with erasable markers that could be used over and over again, each time making things a little different.

  And then, as the gamer community, and the market it represented began to grow, the money came in. Plastic trees, plastic houses, plastic cathedrals and castles and abandoned ruins, where an enterprising gamester could hide orcs and ghosts and dragons and monsters of every description. Plastic landscapes. Plastic figurines of all sorts, and they were all cheap—cheap to manufacture, cheap to buy.

  Plenty of people still use them today: games played by a group of gamers physically sitting around a table. Dungeons and Dragons, and all the ones that followed, like Traveller, Paranoia, and hundreds of others can all serve as a ready-made theme for a party. Get together, drink, play the game, have fun, and if you’re really, really lucky, you might get to go home with somebody new. For the awkward nerd who has trouble interacting with other people, particularly other people with a desirable set of sex organs, whether different or the same as one’s own, it was a perfect, ready-made opportunity.

  And of course, the best reason, for most, is that the game itself is fun, and there’s nothing wrong with fun. People love having fun, and doesn’t love make the world go round? Or, wait…that isn’t the saying at all, now is it? Ralph snickered to himself.

  Nope. Money makes the world go round. A lot of people have tried to argue against this point but every one of them has lost. It isn’t fun and it isn’t love. It’s money.

  Ralph had read accounts of the first big video game tournament, the Space Invaders Championship, held by Atari, in 1980, with over ten thousand participants. It grew from there, a niche, at first, barely noticed by society at large, but then other companies saw the potential and it grew faster. Most people still don’t know that you can get rich playing games. Numerous games, both table-top and online, offer cash prizes. Some of these games, like Bingo, Ludo, and endless variations of blackjack or poker, are simple gambling games. The rules and the laws regulating such games vary from place to place, but there are plenty of them around.

  Most of the rest are games of skill—in this case, ‘skill’ meaning a combination of intelligence, physical dexterity, fast reflexes and luck. There’s Dota, League of Legends, Overstrike, and many, many others, more every year, all holding annual tournaments with prizes worth thousands, and in some cases, millions of dollars.

  By the early 2000’s, esports were followed by millions of fans and making big money, though many consider the word ‘sport’ to be a misnomer. Ralph, and the others like him, could not have cared less. Let the fanatics argue over the words. No doubt that they were games, and lots of games offer substantial sums to the winners.

  Ralph, a disinterested student but not a bad one, had paid attention, back in third grade, when they studied the California Gold Rush. Thousands of miners had sped to California, some by train, some by covered wagon, some by ship, heading for the gold fields, hoping to strike it rich. Most of them went broke. There was one class of people who did get rich, however, reliably, like clock-work: the ones who sold the miners their supplies.

  Every one of the prospectors had to eat and drink and live somewhere. They all needed picks and shovels and pans and tents and clothing.

  Ralph had never forgotten that lesson. You can get rich playing games but you can also lose your shirt. A better way to get rich is by selling the game, and you can make a damn good living by enabling the game to take place.

  It’s been said that if you do what you love, you’ll never have to work a day in your life. Rarely true, of course, because most of the time what we love pays pretty much nothing.

  But gamemasters, the smart ones, do get paid.

  Who would have thought?

  The best ones get paid a lot, and Ralph Guthrie was one of the best. He had started as a simple player, discovered he had a real talent, had quickly become a speedrunner, able to complete a chosen game in record time, then a streamer, with his own fans raptly following his every move on YouTube and Twitch. Now, he was a connoisseur, an expert, a master of all things gaming.

  And in this day and age of modern marvels, the enterprising gamemaster can sit in his comfortable little dungeon in his parents’ three-bedroom high-rise and let his mind roam free, all across the Universe of games: judging, assisting, explaining, adjudicating, enforcing. All hail the Gamemaster, he who is in charge!

  What a rush!

  As a free-lance gamemaster, Ralph fielded a lot of offers. This latest one, for instance, did not, at first glance, look too interesting. Vampires were nowhere near as popular as they used to be. Vampires had been a consistent but rather unimportant sub-genre of fantasy for over two hundred years, but in 1976, Anne Rice published Interview with the Vampire and interest in the hoary old legend surged. Books, films, TV shows, and yes, games, in variation after variation, soon followed.

  Somebody famous, Ralph didn’t remember who, once said that the avant-garde inevitably turns, sooner or later, into the old-garde. Ralph recognized the truth of the statement, and 1976 was a long time ago.

  Ralph was neither an artist nor
a designer of games, but as a player of games, and more importantly, as a master of games, he was intimately aware of the influence that fashion played on games, books, movies and whatever the current social obsession might be. What is in today, is out tomorrow. Like disco, and mullet haircuts.

  Except sex, Ralph told himself. Sex will never go out of fashion. Also, money.

  Vampires had had a good run. BloodRayne, Castlevania, Dark Watch…there was a shitload of vampire games on the market.

  Vampires were no longer cutting edge.

  It didn’t hurt to pay attention, though. You never knew where the next opportunity might come from. It didn’t hurt to listen, and it’s not as if he had anything better to do with his afternoon.

  Still, this latest title…Ralph had his doubts, but he might as well listen to the spiel. No harm in listening, is there? The name was catchy, even if it wasn’t very original. There was something to be said for Virtually Undead.

  Chapter 3

  “What’s bothering you?”

  Michael blinked. “Huh?” Aside from overwork, lack of sleep and general malaise?

  One of the sad tragedies of a doctor’s life is that the system tries very hard to find well-rounded, well-adjusted human beings, people with empathy and ideals, people dedicated to the best good of all mankind, people who could sympathize with and relate to their future patients. Yep, well-rounded and well-adjusted, also smart, hard-working, highly motivated and focused. Michael had been and still was, a musician. Most of his classmates in medical school had hobbies or interests that they were devoted to. A few had been successful in other fields. Three were lawyers. Five were ex-military. A couple were at least borderline elite athletes, or they had been.

  And then the system took these hard-working, highly motivated people and gave them no time for their interests or their hobbies, not until they emerged from the other side of the gauntlet: four years of medical school and multiple years in a residency program. By the time these budding physicians were done, they weren’t as good at their hobbies as they used to be. They were doctors, totally dedicated to their patients’ welfare, happily willing to go the extra mile, spend the extra hour (or three or four) and do whatever might be needed, even at the cost of every other priority that a normal life possesses, including their spouse and kids, for their patients’ welfare.

  Except that many of them weren’t so happy, at all. Many were burned out and hostile, in fact.

  It was even worse for the academics. Academic physicians were expected to be academics, as well as physicians, which means that in addition to taking care of patients and teaching students and residents, they were also supposed to advance the science and support the institution, which means sit on committees, serve on editorial boards, write papers, review papers, write books, write editorials, apply for grants and do research.

  And try, every now and then, to take a little time to clear the mind and just relax.

  Melody Levine was lushly curved, with an adorable sprinkling of freckles across her button nose, a heart shaped face, red hair flowing past her shoulders and emerald green eyes. She was one quarter Jewish, three quarters Irish, and she looked like a true-blue daughter of the Emerald Isle. Melody Levine had what Michael often thought of as ‘beautiful girl syndrome,’ women so accustomed to other people doing things for them that they came to regard being catered to and pampered as the simple, natural state of the Universe.

  Melody was not used to men paying her little attention. She frowned, imperiously raising an eyebrow.

  Michael yawned. Melody frowned harder. A waiter, carrying a tray full of expensive dishes, stumbled a little, barely avoiding a disaster, his eyes locked on Melody’s face. Apparently, that was enough to salve Melody’s offended ego, at least for the moment.

  Women like Melody, Michael reflected, tend to lead a charmed life until they turn thirty-five or so, and are then completely bewildered when men suddenly stop paying attention to them.

  “Well?” Melody demanded.

  “Well, what?”

  She glared at him. “What’s bothering you?”

  Michael sighed. “Basically, and in a nut-shell, I find my life to be unfulfilling.”

  Melody looked taken aback. “You’re a neurosurgeon.”

  “So?”

  She waved her arms over her head. “You operate on people’s brains. Everybody thinks you’re God’s gift to mankind and you’re rich. How can that be unfulfilling?”

  A fair question. What was that old saying? The heart has reasons that reason knows nothing of. Blaise Pascal. And sometimes you’re in the mood for hamburger, not filet mignon.

  One of Michael’s colleagues had once said to him, “I would enjoy my job a lot more if I could do it a little less.”

  Yeah, but it was more than the ridiculous hours. It was also the fact that too many of their patients just didn’t get better. There was a lot of failure in neurosurgery. The brain lacked the regenerative capacity of most other organs. Also, too many patients and their families either just didn’t get this point, despite having it explained at length, or refused to accept it. They expected miracles. No: they demanded miracles, which is why a neurosurgeon in the State of New York pays over $150,000 a year for malpractice insurance.

  Michael knew that doctors were supposed to have compassion. Also, magic—except that they didn’t. In primitive societies, the shaman was the healer, priest and physician rolled into one. Medicine is the field most closely associated with life and death, and many people regard doctors, particularly surgeons, particularly neurosurgeons, as akin to the gods on high, the power of life and death at their fingertips…and too many physicians, having large and exaggerated egos, encouraged their patients and the public to look at them in just that way.

  Michael sighed. Neurosurgery was a series of technical skills. You did what you were supposed to do, which in most cases was all you could do, and in many, many cases it just wasn’t enough.

  A lot of divorce, alcoholism, drug addiction and suicide in the medical profession.

  The public, who did tend to revere physicians, didn’t want to hear it, and most physicians quickly learned to keep any reservations regarding their job to themselves. Once, a couple of years before, during a long weekend back home, Michael had been hanging out with some of his high school friends. One was now a car salesman, one an electrician, one a lawyer. After listening to Michael’s litany of complaints, the car salesman had said to him, with no sympathy whatsoever, “You don’t expect people to feel sorry for doctors, do you?”

  Michael had given him a moody look and repressed his first response. “No,” he finally said. “I don’t expect people to feel sorry for doctors. What I do expect, is for people to understand that the doctors are feeling sorry for themselves.”

  The car salesman had sniffed. The electrician rolled his eyes. The lawyer, a senior associate in a big New York firm, looked at Michael and gave a tiny shake of his head. Right. Nobody felt sorry for lawyers, either.

  So here he was, thirty-five years old, young for a neurosurgeon, but already feeling trapped by his job.

  Melody Levine was twenty-six, a junior administrator in the Dean’s Office and years away from the sad disillusionment that would inevitably come with losing her looks. She was auditioning Michael Foreman for a larger role in her life. Michael, no dummy, realized this and wasn’t entirely happy about it, but so far, the benefits of being with Melody were outweighing the drawbacks. Though, to be honest, those benefits consisted of only two: the envy of his peers and some truly excellent sex.

  Not much for conversation, however, and demanding, let’s not forget demanding, and Melody’s demands were beginning to wear on him. Melody’s insistence on at least two preliminary orgasms was starting to give Michael a case of chronic temporomandibular joint pain.

  A problem, he realized, that many men would be happy to have, but still…

  Michael had never been the macho sort but he was nobody’s pushover. Some people assumed that
his lack of aggression indicated meekness. This was a mistake, a mistake that Melody Levine was still making. Melody had sized Michael up and thought she had him pegged.

  The restaurant was a mid-sized Italian place in the Village, almost new, with a good reputation, but so far, Michael was not impressed. The pasta was just a bit soggy and the veal a bit tough. The clientele also left something to be desired. A group of three guys in business suits, ties askew, had already downed four bottles of red wine. Their table was covered with empty plates and they were still digging into mounds of linguine, fried artichokes, veal parmigiana and baked clams.

  They had noticed Michael and Melody and were making comments that were too low to be heard but were no doubt lewd. One of them elbowed another, who snickered. The third looked over at Melody and blew her a kiss. Melody, used to attracting attention and accepting it as her due, preened.

  That was a mistake. The guy’s smile grew wider. He shakily got to his feet and tottered over to their table, eyes fixed on Melody. He stopped a couple of feet away, glanced slyly at Michael and looked back at Melody. “Hey,” he said.

  Michael rolled his eyes.

  “You’re gorgeous,” the guy said.

  Melody glanced at Michael, then smiled. “Thank you,” she said.

  “Why don’t you dump this guy, come on over with my friends and me. I’ll show you a good time.”

  “Thank you,” Melody said, “but, no.”

  “Come on. You don’t want to be with a skinny wimp like this guy. Try a real man on for size. Believe me, you won’t regret it.”

  A real man? Once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, this guy may have been a high school athlete of some sort. His shoulders were still broad and there might have been a little muscle underneath the fat, but his chest was slowly descending into his abdomen, his hair carefully combed over a sizable bald spot.