Chapter 7: Game Over

Chapter 7: Game Over

PLAYER ONE READY!

The words pulsed on the screen, a neon death warrant. The low, rhythmic beep of the heart monitor sound effect was a countdown clock, each beat a measure of Claudia’s borrowed time. Jonah stood frozen, his hand hovering over the controls. His desire was singular, a desperate, primal need to win, to defy the parasitic system of this building and save the life of the terrified woman who had warned him. But the obstacle wasn't the machine. It was the thirty-nine years of failure and inadequacy that had led him to this moment. It was the ghost of a seven-year-old boy who had already proven he was better at this.

His palm was slick with sweat as he finally gripped the plastic ball of the joystick. It felt alien, wrong. Not the worn, familiar handle of a chef's knife or the comforting weight of a sauté pan. This was the tool of his childhood humiliation, and it felt just as clumsy in his grasp now as it had then.

The game started.

The screen depicted a top-down view of a sterile, white corridor. A small, pixelated figure with blonde hair—Claudia’s avatar—stood in the center, trembling. The beeping heart monitor was her only soundtrack. From the edges of the screen, the shadowy figures in surgical scrubs began to slide into view, their movements smooth and predatory.

“Run,” Jonah whispered, his voice a dry rasp. He jammed the joystick forward.

The on-screen Claudia lurched into a clumsy, stuttering run. The controls felt sluggish, syrupy, as if he were trying to move through water. His panic was a roaring fire in his chest, turning his thoughts to ash. He was supposed to dodge them, to find an exit, a power-up, something—but the game offered no instructions, no tutorial. There was only the hallway, the hunters, and the hunted.

He fumbled with the buttons, one marked ‘STRUGGLE’ and the other ‘HIDE’. He mashed the HIDE button. The little figure dove behind a gurney that had just appeared in the corridor. For a moment, she was safe. The heart monitor beeped steadily. Jonah’s own heart hammered against his ribs in a frantic, syncopated rhythm. He could do this. He just had to be calm.

A doctor-figure glided past the gurney, its red eyes sweeping the corridor. Jonah held his breath. But then, another appeared from the opposite direction, stopping directly in front of the gurney. It paused, as if it could sense her there.

The whisper returned to his mind, no longer the dry, mocking tone of the building, but David’s reedy, childish voice, laced with a feigned disappointment. “You were always bad at hiding, Jonah.”

The on-screen doctor lunged. The Claudia-avatar burst from cover, and Jonah shoved the joystick wildly to the side, sending her careening into a wall. The heart monitor beep quickened, becoming erratic. A sound of digital panic.

His incompetence was a physical thing, a tremor in his hands that translated directly into the game. The frantic, clumsy movements on screen were a perfect mirror of his own internal chaos. He saw a branching path ahead—left or right. He chose left. It was a dead end.

A wall of white tile filled the screen. He was trapped.

The memory of losing to David in this very arcade crashed over him with the force of a physical blow. The same hot-faced shame, the same feeling of being utterly outmatched, the same clumsy fingers refusing to obey the commands of his brain. He had lost then because he was a petulant child. He was losing now because he was a panicked, broken man. It was the same failure, just separated by thirty years and a body count.

The doctor-figures converged on the cornered avatar. They moved not with speed, but with a horrifying, deliberate certainty. Jonah slammed his fist on the ‘STRUGGLE’ button, over and over. On screen, the tiny figure flailed, her arms pinwheeling uselessly as the shadowy forms enveloped her. The screen zoomed in, close on her terrified, pixelated face.

One of the figures raised its hand, the impossibly large syringe gleaming under the harsh, digital lights.

“No,” Jonah choked out, his fingers still mashing the useless button. “No, please…”

The syringe plunged down.

The screen went white for a split second, a flash of sterile lightning. The rhythmic beeping of the heart monitor was replaced by a single, damning, continuous tone. A flatline.

The sound cut out. The white flash faded, leaving the screen black. Then, two words, written in a massive, blood-red, 8-bit font, burned into the darkness.

FATALITY!

The single word hung there for a long moment, a final, brutal judgment on his effort. Then it, too, vanished. The screen went dark. The machine’s internal light died. The low, synthesized hum of the arcade ceased.

Silence.

A profound, absolute silence that was more terrifying than any noise. The oppressive, watchful energy of the arcade was gone. And with it, something else.

Jonah stood perfectly still, his hand still resting on the dead joystick. He waited for the whisper to mock him, for the phantom skittering of cockroaches to crawl up his spine. He waited for the wave of self-loathing and despair to consume him.

Nothing came.

The torment was gone. The constant, gnawing presence that had been his companion for days, the psychic parasite that fed on his fear, had simply vanished. In its place was a vast, hollow peace. It wasn't relief. It wasn't joy. It was the serene emptiness of a crater after the bomb has dropped. The terrible serenity of a battlefield after the last soldier has died. He had failed. He had lost. Claudia was dead.

And he was free.

The realization was the most horrific thing he had ever experienced. The curse had not been lifted; its purpose had been served. His turn was over. The system had gotten what it wanted.

He slowly, mechanically, pulled his hand away from the controls. The plastic was now cold, inert. He felt a presence behind him and turned.

Standing in the aisle, bathed in the faint, residual glow of the other silent machines, was David.

He looked exactly as Jonah remembered him: small and pale, with a shock of vibrant, curly red hair and wide, unfocused eyes that seemed to see something far beyond the confines of the spectral arcade. He wasn't menacing. He wasn't angry. He wore a small, polite smile, the expression of a quiet child who had just finished a pleasant round of a game.

The ghost of the boy he had once shoved in anger now looked at him with something like pity. David took a small step forward, his form shimmering slightly, and extended a pale, translucent hand. It was the exact same gesture from thirty years ago, an offer of sportsmanship at the conclusion of a match.

Jonah looked from the ghostly hand to David’s empty eyes. He was in a state of shock, his mind scrubbed clean by the sudden absence of torment. Numbly, like a man in a dream, he raised his own hand and took the ghost’s.

The touch was impossibly cold, a deep, chilling cold that seemed to sap all the warmth from his body. It felt like shaking hands with a corpse pulled from a frozen lake.

David’s polite smile widened slightly as their hands met. His reedy voice was soft in the crushing silence of the arcade.

“Good game.”