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V

"Tell me, Mr Kent Do you hear voices right now?"

I nodded. "They are hiding in the traffic noise."

"Can you describe them to me?"

"Man and woman, both sound young and old at the same time."

The psychiatrist and I were in a small office in the downtown Oakfort police station. Exactly how inspector Quinn had managed to pick up a shrink with such short notice was a mystery to me, but he certainly looked the part. He was in his late forties, wore horn-rimmed glasses and sported a salt-and-pepper beard, and he smoked a pipe. Dr. Anthony Burris was the perfect stereotype of a professional, and I disliked him from the moment we shook hands.

"What are the voices saying to you?"

"They are telling me, you are one of them."

"ME?" Dr. Burris looked slightly bemused. He lit his pipe, and a scent of cherry-flavored Cavendish filled the room. I was tempted to tell him not to smoke, get up, stand right behind him and shout

Smoking kills, motherfucker!

That ought to give him an impression of just how real the voices can be.

"I never thought my life was interesting enough to make me one of them." He smiled and made a halfhearted attempt at a laugh, but I noticed the flame on his burning match tremble slightly.

"Do you understand why we are having this discussion, Mr Kent?"

Sometimes, when you catch a shrink off guard, he will slip into the authoritative I am the doctor and you are my patient, mode. This one was no different.

"I've seen shrinks for the past five years," I said. "I've grown used to these little talks. You've got my journal; you know I'm unreliable."

Anthony Burris leaned forward. He spoke to me as if he believed I was hard of hearing.

"You were witness to a murder. The ONLY living witness. Your eyes have seen the killer, but your brain has superimposed layers of false information on top of his real face."

Dr. Burris unfolded a map of the human brain on the desk. The cortex was surgically sliced into neat little pieces, individually colored in pastel with roman numerals attached.

"When you saw the face of the killer," said Burris. "Your eyes sent the image through this here part of the brain." He pointed to an area on the map that carried the number XVII and was colored light green. "From here, the nerve impulse travels through Brodman areas B18 and B19." He pointed to two other brain slices, colored in shades of light red and pale yellow. "At some point along the way, your brain made changes to the original input. If we can strip away those extra layers, like peeling an onion, your input could be vital to our investigation."

I sighed. "What do you want me to do? I saw zombies. The murderer was a zombie and so was the third person."

"Retrace your steps," replied Burris. "You must go back to the convention and retrace your steps. Find out what really happened."

I think I nodded. Concentrating was growing difficult. Sometimes the voices are clear and outspoken, other times they hide in some background noise. Today they stayed put, and only leaped out with any passing noise.

"Don't answer him!" a car drove through a puddle and made a splash.

"He's one of them!" someone closed the sliding door of a van.

Dr. Burris kept talking, while I found comfort in looking at a begonia in the window. Oh, how I'd love to crawl into that plant, curl up inside a flower and hide among the pistils. I'd go to sleep like a hibernating bear, and not wake up until inspector Quinn had caught the killer. I was so tired I kept drifting off, thinking of a thousand other places I'd rather spend the morning.

"The magic wand?" The sound of Burris' voice snapped me back into the present. Had he changed the subject? Had I answered any of his questions? I wasn't sure.

"What about that magic wand?" I asked.

"Was there anything inside of it?"

"Inside?"

"Did it contain anything?"

The question struck me as odd. Why would a magic wand contain anything. A wand is only a piece of wood. "I was being chased and shot at," I snapped. "I didn't stop to look at the wand. I'm not even sure that it was for real."

Burris nodded and smiled, but his hand clutched the pipe hard. So hard, the tip of his index and middle fingers turned slightly white. I could care less about the wand. I only wanted to know who had put a slug of lead in my leg, but I got the impression Burris had a different agenda:

My safety was only secondary to him; Dr. Burris wanted to find the wand.

---

VI

I returned to the convention center after my meeting with Dr. Burris. Today was the last day of the Oakfort Games Con, and I only hoped Burris was right. I hoped retracing my steps from yesterday could somehow uncover the truth about what happened. Outside the center, I took an additional 50mg of kisantex on top of the 50 I'd taken only two hours, figuring I'd rather feel lethargic than go through another episode. I entered through the same door as I did two days earlier, and swore to take it easy this time. I headed straight for the newsstand and bought a fresh copy of Dungeon Magazine. The barbarian, the red dragon and the Valkyrie on the front page cover did not move or change in size or looks. The big-breasted Valkyrie had a mouth that was halfway open. Her eyes were sultry and asking me to tear off her brass bikini and grind up to my ankles while the barbarian watched. The artist had drawn her that way, to make the reader grow horny and buy the magazine, but I observed the metrics of her tits from a purely technical angle. When I'm on meds, nothing happens below equator. Zilch. My dick is reduced to a urethrae, and my mind clouds over like I have a bad head cold. Still, I was happy and confident the double dose of meds would keep an episode at bay.

I passed the food court and remembered I still had some unfinished business with a kebab. I double checked that the hand-painted sign read Kebab and Coke, five "Gold pieces, like it was supposed to. Two customers waiting in line ahead of me, ordered the one single food item available from the menu, both with a side order of fries. When it was my turn, I got the impression the sales assistant looked at me for a long time - too long for the casual glance over. He looked out of place too, among the convention goers. This one was muscular, almost professionally so, and his way of handling the food items didn't seem natural to him. He took my order and prepared it with his back turned, being awfully slow in preparing my food and drink. I handed him a fiver and left with my tray. I walked around until I found an empty cafe table at the far end of the food court, where I sat down to enjoy my meal. But when I took a sip of my coke, it had a faint, unpleasant metallic side-note.

"Don't drink it!" the General's voice suddenly called out.

"I thought I had Kisantex'ed you fuckers into oblivion."

"He's put poison in it," replied Karen.

Well, Screw the coke, I thought and pushed the cup away. I was thirsty, but Karen had warned me about poison the day before and she had been right, even though the poison turned out to be a lump of lead. Maybe poison was her own way of saying danger?

What about the kebab? Can I at least have my kebab?

Karen and the general went quiet for a few seconds, before they replied.

"He put poison in that one too. He poisoned your food while he had his back turned."

Really?... REALLY?

I took a small but careful bite of my kebab, and found this too was tainted with the same metallic taste as the glass of Coke. Either the short-order cook was lousy at his job, or my annoying companions were right: someone was trying to poison me. I pushed the tray away and browsed the convention flyer. What exactly I was looking for was anybody's guess. The only clue I had to work from was a single name, Kendall Duran - a games designer who had come to promote his board game. The convention had him booked at stand I26 under the name of_EnDurance Games_, next to Pelligellus Games at I28. The stand at I26 was vacant of course, so I browsed through the games on display at his next-stand neighbor. Pelligellus carried mostly fantasy inspired table-top games, with a few war-games in between.

"Ever played Moonzone?" asked the guy behind the counter. I estimated him to be in his mid-twenties like me, but he wore a long beard in braids that made him look like an aging viking.

"I guess I was looking to buy a copy of Future Battalion," I said and looked around, but didn't see that title on any of the boxes.

"Aww man!" Said the vendor. "That was Kendall's last game. Did you know him?"

"I've... bumped into him."

"Did you hear he got mugged and shot, right outside the convention center?"

"No, that part was new to me."

"Mike Ayers." he reached out to shake my hand. His shake was surprisingly timid for a guy his size, and his palm was soft.

"I did illustrations for the Moonzone card game," he said.

"Daniel Kent, "I replied. The guy was visibly proud of his Moonzone game, and I figured that buying a copy would put me on his good side.

"We knew something was not right with Kendall, when he tried to sell_Future Battalion_ at two hundred fifty a pop," Mike said while he stuffed my copy of Moonzone into a plastic bag.

"Sounds pricey"

"Board games like that retail at forty bucks. Fifty max. But two hundred fifty is far out and insane."

I guess that makes two us, I thought. Mike Ayers was keen to talk and I was in no hurry, so I hung around while Mike showed me his selection of table-top games. It became evident Kendall Duran was no novice to the games industry. Over the past ten years he had grown from an unknown games developer with Droid Disaster as his first title -a checkers-like game with a sci-fi theme. A series of experimental titles finally put him on the track that would ultimately prove his strongest. During his last six years in the business he produced a whole series of extremely accurate war games, So accurate in fact, the military used his games for tactical training purposes. All with the exception of Droid Disaster. It wasn't a war game, and it wasn't a very good one either. But Kendall insisted his distributors always kept a copy of it up for sale. It was his baby, his firstborn. It was the one game that launched his short but successful career. Today that box was gathering dust on Mike's bottom shelf, rubbing shoulders with Pizza Mania.

"Talk about going full circle," Mike said. "It's almost poetic. Kendall started his career on a weak note, and ended on a weak note."

"But take this one." Mike showed me a heavy box illustrated with a tank on the box-top. "Bombs over Baghdad. You can play either as the Iraqi army or the US. This game has a cool winning tactic of teaming the 173rd Airborne Brigade with the Kurdish rebels outside Kirkuk, and you know what? It actually worked in real life. Secured the whole northern Iraq. Man, Kendall sure knew his tactics."

"About_Future Battalion_..." I tried to keep Mike focused.

Mike only rolled his eyes. "This rich army dude came in and bought every single copy. Put two thousand bucks, plus change on my counter, right there."

"He must have thought the game was really good, then."

"That's the craziest part" said Mike. "It's not one of Duran's best games. It's unbalanced."

"How'd you know? Does it say on the box:

Parental Warning, this game is unbalanced as fuck?"

Mike laughed, and pointed to an area of the convention center packed with tables and chairs. A number of people sat bent over various games, most of which featured a large number of cards and counters.

"That's the demonstration area," said Mike. "All new games are out there for trying out."

"So, you didn't sell the demo copy to that military guy?"

Mike looked a little hurt by my suggestion. "Somebody was playing it. I'd never sell a promo while it's in use." He pointed at a table in the playing area. Some kind of tabletop game was spread out on the table, but the two chairs were vacant.

"Wanna have a go?"

I nodded and we sat down by the single surviving copy of Future Battalion. Mike looked around, searching for something. I could tell he was growing annoyed when he didn't find what he was looking for.

"Someone must have stolen the damn rule-book," he grumbled. "And there's a unit missing too."

"How can you tell there's a piece missing?" I asked.

"It says so on the box. Both sides have exactly 32 pieces at their disposal. There's 32 beige pieces right here, but only 31 gray pieces. Gray side is missing some unit or other."

Mike left the table, while I searched for the missing piece, but he soon returned with a dog-eared copy of the instructions. "Can't play the game without rules," he said and began to set up the pieces. "A game without the rule-book, is only a box of plastic toys."

Future Battalion was a combination of hex based strategy game, with a R&D phase on top. You could hire engineers to develop new weaponry, with a line of futuristic "FMw" weapons being the most exciting. Each piece was molded in gray or beige plastic, half an inch tall, and with the name of each troop stamped on the bottom of its base. "Grenadier," read one piece. "Marksman" read another.

Medic, engineer, rifleman, FMw gunner. All tiny play pieces in plastic.

"Is that FM, like on the radio?" I asked.

Mike grinned. "FMw weapons was Duran's latest idea for a game mechanics. They make your ears explode, melt your brain and make your eyes pop out." Mike put his hands to his eyes to simulate the event of eyeballs leaving their orbit.

"POP!"

"But he sure needed to nerf them."

"Nerf?"

"That's like, decreasing their powers. Once you get the fmw tech, you win the game," Mike said. "No game lasts for more than twenty minutes."

"So, it's a race against time?"

"Duran messed up the balance in this one," said Mike. "The weapon descriptions are super accurate, from the AK-47 to the M1 and Berettas. Of course f __m_ w_ is made up, but boy is it OP."

Mike picked out a handful of cards that showed the specifics of every weapon in the game. The cards listed a whole bunch of numerical values I didn't understand, but I guessed they represented calibers and rounds contained in the magazines. I was anxious to see the specs for the_fmw_ weapons, but when Mike put down a few cards, they all showed the same picture: a snake. The image of the fmw rifle had quietly turned into the image of a writhing snake, fmw_grenade - another snake, _fmw bazooka... I felt queasy when the snake on the card came alive and began to move and squirm as if trying to escape the confinements of the two dimensional card.

Psychotic episode on the rise. Just what I needed.

I looked up from the map. The lighting in the hall dimmed, and Mike began to change in front of me. He was still droning on about rules and tactics, but his words no longer made sense. His looks changed from that of a grown man to something childlike. Within minutes, I was playing a war-game with an obese, giggling toddler, and I struggled not to laugh out loud. His words sounded like baby chatter to my ears, while he held up a handful of cards, all of which bore the same snake-like image. When I looked down again, the map too had changed. It was still a hex-map with playing pieces scattered across it, but I couldn't identify what pieces were mine any more. I knew I was searching for something I had lost, but couldn't remember what. Something of great importance. Mike pointed to the hex, where my home-base had been, only a minute before. But this too had changed. I vaguely remembered my base being represented by a drawing of a gray military bunker. Now, all that was left was a large, dark hole in the desert sand.

"This is your home," Mike shrieked in a high-pitched voice, like he was on helium.

• or what's left of it, I thought. I didn't remember losing control of that hex, but I was struggling just to stay focused. I moved game tokens around per random, without knowing what the hell I was doing. When I looked at my home-base again, it had caught on fire. Living flames of dark purple surrounded the sandy pit.

"This is where you become," Mike said.

I didn't remember anything about becoming, from the rules, but maybe I hadn't paid attention.

"How do you become in this game?" I asked.

"Oh, it's easy," Mike replied and his baby-face lit up in a happy, toothless grin. "You'll see."

At least the hallucination of Mike was benevolent. He had not changed into anything ominous or horrible, but thankfully only a large, comical infant. Then it struck me, he was an innocent. My brain had recognized he had no part in the murder and projected him onto my mind as a babbling toddler. He waited for me to make my move, so I picked up a grotesque figurine from a hex next to my home-base and moved into the playing field. The unit was a large hulking creature that didn't look like it belonged in this game at all, but rather something dropped onto the playing field from an unrelated fantasy campaign. While the rest of the pieces were standard army soldiers and tanks, this one was only partially human, with a set of demonic horns growing from a leonine head. The writing on the base simply read

Other.

I was pretty sure the strange unit was one of mine, and Mike didn't object to me moving it around so I placed the figurine a few hexes away from home-base and onto a hex occupied by a single enemy soldier carrying a pair of binoculars.

"That's a human," Mike said. "No fair!" He sounded disappointed, like I had stolen something from him. "The demon is here to protect the humans. Not to kill them."

"The rules don't mention anything about demons," I objected. "You're making this whole damn thing up as we go."

"The demon unit can take the life of a human under one condition only..." Mike explained patiently. I sighed. Now I was being lectured by a four-year old. But before he could finish the sentence, Karen suddenly called out.

"Watch out!" she cried. "He is here."

"What is he doing here?" asked the General.

"He shouldn't be here", replied Karen. She sounded concerned.

"It's too dangerous."

"Guys, you're playing yesterday's tape!" I sneered at the voices. "I know I'm here. I was here the day before yesterday and yes, I'm here today also."

"Not you," said the General. "The tall man."

"He has come for you."

---