Peter smiled back at the glittering four-sided high-score board that hung from the ceiling. The smile faded from the board and grids raced and collided across the screen to form the ranking charts per game and genre. The loop took 30 full seconds to cycle and he’d already been standing there for a minute, but he just couldn’t believe it. At the very end of the loop, the arcade showed an aggregate rank of locals who had played and charted on every game.
1. [TFC] Whylie
2. JACE_95
3. Pareidolon
4. SubaKING
5. H3r0_Pete
Peter has been coming to this arcade for a while now. He played everything: the ticket games, the racing games, the lightgun shooters, the 3D games, the cabinet version mobile games, the Japanese rhythm-and-dance games, the fighting games, the beat-em ups–everything.
“Excuse me, sir,” a voice said behind him.
Peter picked up his feet and hopped himself around. A teenage girl with skin like the cheese at the crust-end of a pizza held up a paper cup with a straw in it.
“Do you need some water sir? You’ve been standing there for a good minute.”
Peter laughed and thanked her, “sorry, I was just taking in that sight. It’s not every day my name gets up there.”
The girl faked a smile and walked back to the service counter where an older man was leaning and chatting with a corded phone to his ear. It was like he was trying to tell Peter, hey, you’re on my list and I’m just waiting for you to give me a reason to call somebody about you. I hate you, Peter, I hate you so much–or at least this is what Peter imagined.
Peter sipped the water given to him and went over to one of the small multi-cade machines which were farthest from the sunny windows and of murky legality. He pulled his chip-card out of his shirt pocket and stabbed it into the receiver until it blinked. These things took the magic out of paying for a game–nothing beats slapping a few quarters down those old orange return coin slots–but they sure made everything more efficient. The reader showed “10 credits deducted: 509 credits remaining” and the controls became responsive. Peter couldn’t remember the last time he consciously pocketed his chip-card. His hands were already at play, driving a pixel line across a screen. Everything that he was didn’t matter, but for the line.
He didn’t remember finishing the game and swiping his card again. He was now playing Puzzle Attack. Bubble Bobble. Kid Dracula. These didn’t count for the ranking. He noticed the sunny windows at the other end of the arcade had gone dark. He swiped his card one last time and laughed at the credit display. Nice.
For a moment his mind drifted back to the rest of his reality, away from the consensual dream screen in front of him, and he thought about things that made him feel like his insides were going sour and his eyes were filling with ice water. He tapped his way to an anime fighter with one of those gibberish titles like Adverb Noun Verb: Iteration the Next or something. He liked those because they were flash. A few quarter-circled forwards and the screen was full of pulsing effects and what seemed like one of the six voice actors in all of Japan shouting at the top of their lungs.
“YOU LOST THE WAY!!!”
Peter stepped away from the gratuitous sound barrage and decided to go home. He popped a sleeping pill at the end of his drive. He was in the door when it started to pull at him, down to undress, down into bed, down into a deep sleep. He stayed there for a while before sinking down further, further still, so far that he passed from the black to a plastic chair he tried not to think about. The sun was outside, scalding the trees into releasing pollen. He was at a desk with a piece of paper in front of him. He didn’t look at it.
He couldn’t look at it. Peter slammed his hands over it. He knew what it said, he knew it by heart. A feeling like machine screws going into his nerves seized him. It felt like he had a burning pocket of gas in the back of his throat that was sucking the heat out of his ends. Someone was behind him and when Peter turned around, he saw this face mouth words that made him gasp cold air and snapped him back up to reality.
He didn’t need to check the clock. It felt like 3 A.M. so it had to be. Peter closed his eyes and tried to go down again but he knew better than to try too hard.
It was dawn soon enough and he stopped pretending to sleep. He had a post-it note with recommendations. It was just the phrase “SLEEP HYGIENE!!!” repeated six times. He looked at it while he brushed his teeth every morning. It had lost all meaning to him a long time ago even though he understood what it meant.
The day passed with little fuss and he was back at the arcade. The top rankings had stayed. Peter watched the big smiling business logo go through its winking animation and couldn’t help himself. He watched the loop and noted he could do better at the dance games. He stuck his chip-card in the reload machine just to see the total again. Nice, still.
Peter walked over to the corner of the arcade with the spacious dance arcades and went to the intersection with the stand-up lightgun games. There was some new licensed Japanese game that was a dance shooter. It was stupid expensive, something like 15 credits a round for usually no more than a minute of gameplay. Peter liked it though, it was novel and good for a warmup. He swiped his card and noted the total at 454.
The cabinet was three flatscreens set up in a triptych with two pairs of tethered pistols. Peter pulled the guns and immediately the music started pumping and Hieronymus Bosch looking monstrosities started to flood over a medieval wall in the short introductory cutscene. The announcer over-enunciated:
“WAAAN. TWOOOOO. FEEL IT!”
And Peter was off. He pulled the triggers and waved his arms around in an exacting cadence, making mooks explode into cheese wheels to the beat of the aggressive jazzy soundtrack. Proper beatkeeping reloaded his guns and he shot flawlessly past the first boss. This was as far as he got; the money trick to this game was the soundtrack was eclectic and he never survived too long on the second level due to the shift into experimental French House.
He holstered the pistols and was hit by his lack of sleep. He held his temples as the air went out of his muscles and he forced himself to the café area where the teenage girl looked at him with worried impatience.
Peter didn’t ask for any but a basket of cheese sticks was placed in front of him, along with some water. The girl held her expression as he turned away from him. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten.
When he reached for a stick his fingers crinkled the paper and suddenly he remembered his nightmare full-bore. The air lost its taste and the world lost its color. He felt like frozen meat.
After what felt like an hour he gripped his hand and ate a cheese stick. It tasted dim. He thanked the girl and went home. The sun was still out.
Peter didn’t remember any of the getting home parts. There was this not-noise filling the air. It felt like when you hear a machine vibrate. He was sitting on the edge of his bed looking at the painted wall in front of him. He was back in that room, back in that chair, back with that paper in his hands.
Peter didn’t remember going to sleep or going to work, but he did realize he had made it back to the arcade. He was—where was he going here? He felt like he wanted to move. He stuck his chip-card in a dance-rhythm game where he pounded his feet to a song. That seemed to make sense. He racked a high score and his game name showed up on the machine’s leaderboard. H3r0_Pete, it said. He smiled at that.