Jason bolted and ran around the corner as fast as he could. He felt the burlap bag sway with his momentum. Because he was unarmed, and because his crime was a crime against property, and not a threat to anyone, Jason felt confident that the cop wouldn’t shoot him with his shotgun, or so he hoped.

He dashed around the corner and leaped up to catch the fire escape. He was surprised by how high he jumped. In the game, Jason had worked out on the mannequin, grappled with the cop briefly, but had actually done little to fully exert himself, other than the confrontation with the Dominican hoods the other day. The extending ladder rolled down and snapped out at full extension. Jason jumped up to catch it, and pulled himself up just as the cop came into the side street on the run, and two more squad cars came racing down the street. The sun had set, and it was dark now, which gave Jason an advantage in fleeing the cops, and he needed the edge.

The cop’s flashlight raked across the fire escape, then over Jason and his burlap sack, which had the annoying habit of rattling as he bounced up the steps. “Freeze!” the cop yelled. “Hold it right there!”

Jason was running up the steps of the fire escape, and although he could hear that the shouting cop chasing him was winded, Jason was in good shape, having reached the point where he could jump rope continuously for twenty-five minutes in the real world. When he scrambled up onto the rooftop he saw the two new squad cars parked outside the liquor store, with their lights flashing, and the first cop was still a ways down, struggling to climb the stairs. Jason ran to the other side of the roof, and looked down into the alleyway, when he saw yet two more police cruisers coming into the alleyway from opposite ends.

He was safe on the rooftop for now, but he was trapped, especially because all he had was a sap, and there was no way he could shoot it out. Due to the quarantine, and the lack of people out and about, it seemed that every cop in town had nothing else to do beside chase down the guy who robbed a liquor store, so he was going to be vastly outnumbered very soon.

Jason looked at the building on the other side of the alley. How far was it from this building? Twenty-five, thirty feet? So now he was in Matrix territory. He wasn’t in a video game as much as he was inside a dream, and all the conditions were created in his own mind—his grandfather had said so. Jason didn’t need a code, or a hack, because the whole damn thing was in his head, created by his own mind.

Nevertheless, when he looked across the alley, it seemed like a loooong way across to the other side. And that was the problem with dreams, because for every dream he had where he could fly, there were a dozen other dreams where he couldn’t run, or moved like a fly in amber, or his gun wouldn’t fire as the monster closed in on him, or his bullets hit like marshmallows. He hated those dreams where he was weak and helpless, and even a gun in his hands was just as ineffective. He was forced to wonder if it was true that any dream world he created was just as likely to sabotage him, make him a helpless weakling, as it was to make him a superhero with superhuman powers.

Okay. Jason took a deep breath, and remembered the line from The Matrix: “Do you think that’s air you’re breathing?” He ran across the rooftop as fast as he could and launched off, sailing through the air between the two buildings. One arm windmilled, clawing at the air as though it would help him, and Jason remembered his grandfather saying, “Whatever you can do in the real world, it will be amplified in the game.” To his amazement and sheer joy, Jason found himself soaring across the gap between the two buildings, but came up short, and slammed into the side of the other building near the roof.

He managed to catch himself one-handed, with one hand clutching the rim rising over the roof. Jason quickly pulled himself up and rolled over the edge of the rooftop, just as the cop came onto the roof of the building he’d left, and shined his flashlight over the roof, and then down into the alleyway. Jason could see the glare of revolving red and blue lights, and hear car doors opening in the alley below, despite the never-ending racket of the annoying alarm.

Jason crawled across the rooftop, but felt a wetness in his pants. Due to the sound of a clanking slosh, he realized that at least one of the liquor bottles had broken on impact.

“Do you see him?” a voice called from the rooftop across from him.

“No, nothing,” a cop replied from the alley.

“He must have gone over the edge here. Search those bins, and the back doors.”

Jason made his way down onto the next building and across the tin rooftop, then up onto the roof of the next building. Jason decide to move over the rooftops as much as possible as he headed back to the rescue mission. Once the police sealed off the area surrounding the liquor store, and poured manpower into that area in an attempt to trap him, he was home free, because he was already outside of their cordon. Something troubled him, and if he were in a different comic story he would have chalked it up to his spider sense. He paused at the edge of the roof and crouched behind an air conditioning unit to scan the roofs behind him.

On one of the rooftops he’d just left, a monkey sat atop an exhaust vent with an onion-shaped rounded fan, which resembled a minaret. The moonlight gave him a clear view of—what was it? Here Jason cursed his lack of knowledge of primates. Just as he hadn’t known the difference between a capuchin and a spider monkey, he was slow to identify the monkey as a baboon, more specifically a mandrill, with a thin, multicolored snout dominated by two fangs, and a smooth, padded rump. The mandrill dipped its long fingers onto the rooftop, then brought them up to its snout to sniff them. The baboon immediately looked in his direction.

Jason slowly ducked down behind the air conditioning unit, and realized that the broken liquor bottle soaking his bag and his pants was leaving a very obvious scent trail that the baboon could follow. He whipped off his coat, then opened up the sack with the liquor bottles. He cursed when he realized that all of the bottles were intact, except for the fifth of Jack Daniels, which had broken. Placing the bottles in his coat, he tied up the sleeves and buttoned the front to form a makeshift sack. Jason moved to the edge of the roof and dropped the sack soaked with Jack Daniels and containing shards of broken glass into a dumpster in a side street, then ran across the rooftop and leaped the distance between the two buildings.

Jason had to wonder if the baboon was capable of jumping the roofs like Jason could, but he wasn’t stopping to find out. He raced across rooftop after rooftop, and was forced to jump several times. When he paused and looked back behind him, he saw that the baboon was still on his tail, still shadowing him. Seeing no other option, Jason removed his pants and after making certain there was nothing in them, he dropped them into a trash bin, then climbed down and cut across the street. He stayed in the shadows, moving parallel to the street, until he reached the alleyway behind the Healing Hands Rescue Mission.

Feeling awkward in just his socks, shoes, shirt, tie, and briefs, Jason climbed up the water drainage pipe and crept into his room. He set his coat, which was full of liquor bottles, down onto the table, trying not rattle or make noise that might cause Pastor Roy to question why he heard the sound of bottles in Jason’s room. He slipped off his fedora and red scarf, and set them on the chair. He took off his shoes and socks, then massaged the toes of his right foot after checking for signs of breakage. Leaving his socks and shoes on the floor, Jason unbuttoned his shirt and tie, and draped them over the chair.

When he turned to the bed in the dimly lit room, he saw Sister Jamie, lying sideways on the bed, with her legs hanging over the side. She wore no panties, and her dress was hiked up to her navel to expose her bare muff, while her slim fingers lightly brushed her inner thighs and the plump lips on either side of her slit. Jason wore only his briefs.

Not only had he defeated the mayor’s RAPE goons, and successfully stolen a bunch of quality liquor, but now this slim beauty was waiting for him. If the game was this good now, Jason could hardly wait until all his debt was paid off and he had money in an index fund.

* * *

“Technically, a mandrill isn’t a baboon. They used to be classified as such, but now they’re in their own classification, mandrillus. Regardless, they are the largest monkeys on the planet.” The woman brushed back a strand of wispy, light brown hair from her slim oval face. Her two upper front teeth were prominent, but she was still attractive, and had an intelligence, a brightness in her eyes and a passion in her voice when she spoke that was captivating.

Jason sat in the New York office of the Jane Goodall Institute, and although Jane hadn’t been born yet in the 1920s where The Midas Game was set—she was early by a decade—time was otherwise fluid, with persons and events appearing from almost any era. He had come to Jane Goodall, the world’s foremost expert on primates, to learn about the mandrill that had chased him the other night. And Jason had the gut feeling that eventually he was going to confront Buttafuoco, the city’s gorilla mayor.

“You were probably followed by a male mandrill, who tend to live solitary lives, joining the females and children only during the mating season. They have large fangs, and although they don’t primarily eat meat, they will kill an antelope—one bite to the nape of the neck with their huge canines, and it’s over. If he stares, bobs his head, and slaps the ground, those are threat displays. But the mandrill isn’t the real primate danger.”

“What is?” Jason asked.

“The apes. The chimpanzee and the gorilla.” Jane picked up the cup of tea from the saucer lying on a crocheted table cloth and took a sip.

“Chimpanzees?” Jason asked incredulously.

“Yes,” she said, looking outside the window to view the city, where on a cold day like today, warm exhaust turned to smoky clouds rising from smokestacks and chimneys. “You see chimpanzees dressed in human clothes and talking, acting like clowns in the circus, and now the London Zoo has a chimpanzee tea party every day, which is a huge smash. When I first lived among the chimpanzees, I thought they had more dignity than that, but were gentle, peaceful creatures, and that we as humans could learn from them.”

Jane turned from the window and laughed bitterly. The wisp of hair hanging down her cheek made her beautiful, and she sat with her slim legs crossed. “Then one day I saw chimpanzees chase a colobus monkey up a tree, kill it, and eat it raw. A pack of chimpanzees will hunt gorillas, and kill infants if they can. Chimpanzees patrol their territory and kill intruders, or go into rival groups’ territory and kill targets of opportunity. Infanticide is common, and I witnessed one female kill a rival’s child to cement her rank. So the question is, are we like the apes, or are the apes like us?”

There was a rapping against the pebbled glass of the door.

“Yes,” Jane said loudly enough to be heard through the closed door.

The receptionist opened the door a fraction and slipped her head through. “Excuse the interruption, Dr. Goodall, but a representative from the mayor’s office is here to see you. He says it’s urgent.”

Jason wondered, “What does the ape mayor want with Jane Goodall, and why the urgency?”