Ch 4

A long time ago,

Ben was a boy with brown hair, age six, his eyes were blue and he was crying. The windows flashed with red and blue light, and he was alone with the police officers in the filthy shack he lived in. They had tried to sit on the couch, and Ben had warned them to watch out for needles. One of the policemen noticed little red, raised bumps on his palms, around the fingers. He asked Ben how it happened.

“Watch out for needles,” he repeated, anger in his young eyes, and he started crying again. “I know why you're here,” he said “who's going to jail this time? Dad, Mom. . .both?”

The officer took his hat off and, very gently, placed a hand on Ben's shoulder.

“Nobody's going to jail, Ben. They're dead.”

“That figures,” the young boy said, his voice fragile, body clenching as the sobs were wrung out of him.

“I know it's hard, but we need you to come and identify the bodies.”

They spoke for only a little while longer, asking him some basic questions, then the officers took Ben to the morgue of Hope, Nevada. The building's interior was different from the rest of the town, rather than dirty drywall and adobe tile roofs, it was cold stone and tile. Ben shivered as he stepped from the scorching desert evening into the chilly, air-conditioned building. He had not grabbed a jacket, dressed in dirty pajama pants and shirt, at one point they had been white and sky-blue with cloud patterns on them. Ben winced, a tiny hypodermic needle hidden in the fabric poked him, creating another raised red bump. He pulled it out and tossed it on the ground, and it vanished out of the resolution of sight.

They walked down a flight of stone tile stairs that led to a long hallway with rooms evenly spaced along it's left side. It had been the third room they entered, two metal tables stood in the center of the room, a long white sheet over each. They were pulled back one at a time, first his mother on the left, then his father on the right. Only the faces were exposed, and Ben did not look at them. Instead, he pulled up the sheets around their arms and looked closely at the needle tracks and scars inside their elbows.

“It's mom and dad,” he said, voice quiet, lowering the sheets and walking away quickly. He stood facing a wall and began hitting it, pounding his fists against it and taking in deep, high pitched sobs. “It's them,” he said sobbing “I'm glad they're dead! I hate them! I just want a new family,” he said, and in that exact moment, his heart broke, and he could no longer speak, overwhelmed by the pain of his first betrayal. The only one that mattered.

They let him do it for a while, his emotions building up to a massive tantrum, then stopped him before he got out of control. Later in life Ben would appreciate what they did, but he fought them hard before they calmed him down. The sheriffs escorted him out, throwing a blanket over his shoulders and handing him a cup of steaming hot coffee.

“I don't think he needs any more energy, detective,” the out of breath officer whispered when he smelled the coffee.

“We didn't have any hot coco,” the officer who brought the drink said, speaking quietly and thinking Ben couldn't hear him.

“The fuck, why don't we have any- never mind.” He took a drag off of a cigarette, you could still smoke indoors back then. “Six years old. . .” the other officer said, voice soft, shaking his head from side to side.

They walked back up the steps, and waiting in the lobby was a man Ben had seen before, but never interacted with.

“Ben, this is your Uncle Theo, your dad's brother, and he's also your godfather,” The man smirked a little at the word, like there was an obvious joke there “He's going to be taking care of you from now on.”

Uncle Theo was a tall man with slender muscle sheathed behind a salary-man's nice, working suit. He wore a serviceable hat which only served to keep the desert sun out of his eyes, and that was only because he felt 'Damn Foolish' when wearing sunglasses. He ran over to Ben and gave him a hug, he smelled like expensive pipe tobacco and gun-smoke.

“Don't worry, Ben. You're going to be all right,” he had said.

Ben didn't really remember anything after that.

-

These days, Ben Mikalski lived in a very small town, in a very remote part of Nevada and had taken up the hobby of smoking marijuana nearly eight years ago. As far as he was concerned, he was a lifelong stoner, and he had no intention of changing that fact.

The main industry of the town, Hope, was acting as a safe zone; the Vegas gangs liked to stash wanted men, high priced prostitutes, and kidnapped families; the smugglers liked to stash guns and cash; the Mexican cartels liked to stash drugs, primarily marijuana. Ben wasn't involved with that sort of business. He worked various temp jobs through the local employment agency, and by temp jobs, they meant unskilled manual labor in construction.

Ben had many acquaintances, and few people who he considered friends. He owned the land his park model trailer sat on, a home that technically could be considered 'mobile', but in actuality could probably survive only a few miles before falling apart.

Ben sat alone inside, lights off and in front of his computer at 2am. He was twenty-seven now, and lived alone. He wore large, earmuff style headphones, and was playing an MMORPG. This one touted itself as the first online game to ever incorporate EndCoin, the final form crypto and the internet's official/unofficial reserve currency, into it's loot table. Instead of gold, monsters would drop a small amount of EndCoin. It wasn't a large amount of money, but it added up, and the turnout spoke for itself. A feature of the game was that people could buy items and other benefits with their cryptocurrency, which would then be added to the world's loot table, or treasure balance sheet. It was an ingenious and revolutionary model, sure to be refined and improved upon. The hype from most people for this game had been incredible.

Ben glanced over at his own wallet, a secure digital construct that contained the vast majority of his coins. He had roughly seventy-five hundred coins, close to sixty-thousand dollars, obtained years and years ago when Ben was young and stupid enough to purchase them on a whim for fractions of a penny. His aunt had sent him a twenty dollar debit gift-card, and he'd traded it with an internet friend for the coins. They were worth around eight dollars a piece now, an absurd value all things considered, the price still climbing year after year. He'd spent a good chunk of his wealth several years back buying his land and the trailer, but didn't regret it; his cost of living was practically zero.

Ben always bought his aunt something nice for her birthday and Christmas, up until the year she died.

He closed the wallet, looking exhausted. The trailer wasn't dirty, it just needed a little tidying up. It was small, a bed room at one end, a living room with kitchen in the middle, and a restroom on the other end. Ben's computer was in the living room, placing Ben in the center of his home, back to the front door. The light from the screen lit up the front of his body, he was wearing dark tinted goggles, a necessity for him to play games longer than six hours without eye-strain. He stared at the screen, bored and depressed, his character having just reached level fifteen and unlocking the 'Withdraw Funds' feature of the game. This was generally considered where the real game began, and Ben was aware of that fact. It was also when characters had all their communication restrictions lifted.

Without doing much more than shifting in his seat to type, Ben began writing blistering, insulting jokes in the global chat, utilizing an item that allowed him to speak to every player by putting his words in big letters in the center of their screens. He had bought the item with real money, bitcoins, for exactly this purpose the first day he started playing. They were very limited, only available to people who had helped fund the game in Alpha.

The jokes were mostly memes, time tested and proven to get a rise out of people. Ben didn't believe anything he was posting, he was just being a troll.

Eventually, finally, he was booted and perma-banned, prompting a sigh of relief. It had taken much, MUCH longer than he'd thought it would for that to happen, and he'd been running out of material. Ben grabbed the large, red and green glass water pipe and lit the bowl, taking in a massive slug of smoke, and then exhaling it slowly, thick white smoke blowing out with his breath.

“Living the dream,” he said, then leaned his head back and rubbed his temples. It wasn't that he thought the game was bad, actually it had been a very good game, with an interesting premise and entertaining concepts. The problem had been that Ben did not want to do it, Again, to level up a character and invest months of his life getting to the end of the game. The problem was, Ben didn't have anything better to do.

He briefly checked End Chan's video game forum, and had to crack a smile when he saw several threads about what he had done. A testament to End Chan's built in video editing software was displayed via several meme remixes of it, and Ben enjoyed watching the chaos unfold. It was a minor, insignificant chaos, but he caused it. Carnegie had said that as much as food and water and sex, people wanted to feel like they were important, and he was right. Soon enough, though, he closed the window, leaned back and stared at the ceiling.

Feeling a sense of crushing emptiness, he created a new account with a new email, and made a fresh character of a different class than his last one. The game loaded, and the new avatar appeared in the starting area of the game, surrounded by dozens of other similarly dressed beginners. Ben took another hit and began working on the first tutorial quest for the second time.

He knew he was wasting his life. He just couldn't bring himself to stop.

–

The next day, three of Ben's four friends were seated in his trailer, a haze of smoke in the air as they bullshitted around on their mutual day off; when everybody's unemployed, scheduling things becomes a breeze.

“Think it's 'The Big One', you know, the big one?” Vaughan asked, dip in his lip and strength in his muscles. He was dressed in his old letterman jacket, a move Ben very privately thought was bordering on pathetic as the average age of the group approached twenty seven.

“People in this town are worthless,” Louden said “That quake was nothing.” Louden had gained a reputation as an irredeemable slut in middle school, and maintained it well beyond high school. The sexual chemistry of the group was essentially inert at this point, by mutual consent and past experience. She used her beauty like a brawler used his fists, violently. Ben was glad she had turned her predatory tendencies outside the group several years back, and relieved she had never turned her sights back on him.

“I'm telling you, that didn't feel like an earthquake. Everything was vibrating.” McCrea placed special emphasis on the word vibrating. He was one of the smarter people in town, and spent a good deal of time on the internet self educating.

“It's fucking aliens,” Ben said, placing an excessive amount of drama in pulling a large drag from the joint he held between his thumb and index finger. “It's goddamn interdimensional beings, reality is as we know it is breaking down, and there's not a thing any of us can do about it.”

Vaughan snorted. “Remember that time out in Lonely F-”

Polk opened the door, slammed it open really. She was, despite all the crime and desolation, despite everything, still maintaining a shiny, brightly burning spark of hope in her eyes. Ben secretly believed he was deeply in love with this girl.

“Y'all have got to come out and see this,” she said, breathless with excitement. The four in the trailer, having nothing better to do, decided that they did have to 'come out and see this'. They got up and quickly headed into town, piling into one of their cars and driving.

“What's going on?” Vaughan asked, concerned.

“Just trust me! Keep going, just a little further.”

The passed by the fancy hotel and the pawn shop across the street from it. They began to get a little nervous when they entered the 'La Raza' district of the town, but were quickly joined by other, more American looking people being led by similarly excited friends. In the distance, now visible on the horizon, a large number of boulders were drifting at various low altitudes, clearly visible from the town.

“What the fuuck?” Ben said aloud, taking a hit off his joint by pure absent minded force of habit. The air around them seemed charged, excited. Every breath taken was somehow richer, full of life. The sun's rays were brighter and simultaneously less harsh, giving the scene a dream like quality. Gradually at first, the boulders began to fall, then the plummeted to the ground, and the strange trance of the onlookers was broken, and people began to disperse, speaking quietly to one another. The five stood there, and Ben passed the joint to Vaughan, who took a hit.

“What the fuck?”