Entanglement

By Gibson Monk

Gamer kids take on big tech, deep state agencies, and perhaps an even more sinister force in the sci-fi thriller Entanglement - it's a race against time to figure out a vast conspiracy and put their memories - and reality - back together.

Collectible card game expert Zander Branch looks out at the start of his adult life and sees mostly delivering pizzas and taking community college classes. The only thing he's looking forward to is the launch of Mirror, an augmented reality video game offering real prize money. But that all changes when the mysterious Tokyo Kim walks into The High Castle, the local gamer haven, bearing a mysterious card emblazoned with a mythical creature from a game that no one, not even Zander, as ever heard of. It all seems like a minor mystery until Zander's friend, Davies, disappears. And it's not an ordinary disappearance - no one seems to remember Davies except Zander and Tokyo Kim.

But Davies is just the beginning; other bits of Zander's reality also start to change. Is he going crazy? Is Tokyo Kim the cause or the cure? Is Mirror affecting the minds of its players? With his friends Waylin Strong and Tonya Book, Zander has to figure out what's going on, dodging tech giants and government intelligence agencies along the way.

Entanglement is a story of friendship and coming of age, in which a group of gamer buddies explore the relationship between games and real life. Along the way they take a humorous and affectionate dive into gamer/geek culture, the history of video games and computers, and quantum physics.

*Note on the text: the lack of chapter divisions is intentional and reflects the original artistic wishes of the author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098301361

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©2020 Gibson Monk. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial

uses permitted by copyright law.

ISBN: 978-1-09830-135-4 (print)

ISBN: 978-1-09830-136-1 (ebook)

Contents

This is how it starts: Red/black, red\black, red/black. Heads\tails, win/lose.

Epilogue

This is how it starts: Red/black, red\black, red/black. Heads\tails, win/lose.

I could almost see the colored sides of the token rotating in slow motion as it hung in the air. It all came down to this. Red, I win the game and wipe the smirk off Parker’s face and take his best card. We played for stakes at The High Castle, not just bragging rights. Though that was important, too. Parker had beaten me too many times to count, but I had maneuvered him down to a last play even though his deck was quite a bit better than mine. And even though my fire-type card was at a natural disadvantage to his water, it didn’t matter. Red, and it was all over.

Of course if it came up black it was all over, too. Except then I would be the one who had to forfeit my card, and I suppose at that moment I was kind of praying for some cosmic justice to shine through right about now, because Parker could afford it. He could afford pretty much anything.

And I really couldn’t.

I was hoping, though now I’m not sure why, that whoever was watching the match was pulling for me, if only for that reason alone. Plus, Parker was kind of a jerk. But how much did it really matter?

Even now I think it mattered a lot, even if it wasn’t in the way that I thought at the time. I mean, don’t we all have those moments, especially when we’re competing with someone else, whether it’s sports or video games or card games or who gets the boy or girl or who gets invited to the party – when we get that feeling of something secret coming to light, of finding something out. About that great secret, yourself. That you might get at least a clue for that big question, Who am I?

In the end, I think it’s the whole reason we play any kind of game. To see what happens.

To find out how it ends.

The High Castle Game Haven was something like a home away from home for me, and for all the gamers that huddled behind the musty dark of its comforting walls. The storefront was nothing much to speak of, just another segment in a non-descript strip mall, sandwiched between some Middle Eastern deli run by a guy named Abdul or Mustafa or something, and a corporate paint outlet store. I would occasionally get a falafel there – the deli, not the paint store, and every once in a while a crumpled tumbleweed gyro wrapper or two would appear on a gaming table. I suppose most of the people who shopped the rows of outlets passed by The High Castle without giving it a second look, and even casual video gamers who wandered in expecting racks of shiny new games and consoles took a few glances around at the retro arcade machines (a Pac-Man/Galaga reissue, and an actual Super Mario Bros. lovingly restored), the banks of Alienware PCs, the stacks of used and collector priced tech from decades ago, and turned around. And let me just tell you that the guy who ran The High Castle went deep into gamer museum territory – not just old Sega Dreamcasts or Atari Jaguars; we’re talking really obscure stuff like Telstar Geminis and Bently Compuvisions. Then there was the glass case full of collectible video game cartridges like Atlantis, Mega Man, Mike Tyson’s Punch Out, and, set on velvet and bathed in LED lighting, a still-in-box Tengen Tetris.

But to me and all the regulars who sat on folding chairs or the coveted old office chairs that could spin and were upholstered with thin faux leather worn away by ample buttocks, The High Castle was a refuge. A place where you were understood and could make yourself understood. A place with a language all its own. It gathered pretty much everybody in the area who knew that The Hunger Games was pretty much a total rip-off of Battle Royale, and usually preferred the latter. Or at least everybody knew that that was the right answer, even if we really liked The Hunger Games and hadn’t yet gotten around to actually reading Battle Royale. Because we were waiting to read it in the original Japanese. Really.

But when it came down to it, it was the fact that most people had never heard of Battle Royale, and we had, that was kind of the point. That made something ours.

People say that The High Castle got its name one of two ways. The first and lesser known theory starts with the idea that the owner was a huge Blade Runner fan, the classic Ridley Scott cyberpunk flick (or neo-noir if you want to get fancy) with Harrison Ford. That part of it at least was very likely true, judging by how often the movie was playing on the big screen that hung over the gaming tables. The reasoning was that that if he was so into Blade Runner, he was into Philip K. Dick, who wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which was the book that the movie was based on, and that PKD also wrote a book called The Man in the High Castle. Ergo, The High Castle. But why not Electric Sheep Pen? Or Android’s Dream?

Anyway, though the big screen was often devoted to Blade Runner, there were a lot of other screens, too, lining the walls, the latest video games flashing into the eyes of a dozen kids like me, their reflexes digitized and sent whizzing back and forth over high-speed LAN lines and out onto the internet. I hate to date myself, but this was right around when Overwatch had gone silver, so it was dominating the screens at the moment.

I say kids, but at least half of us could vote and had jobs or were in college and all that. But we all came for the stale air, the smell of adrenalized sweat and lax hygiene, the open and mostly empty pizza boxes stationed at random. A piquant hint of cat box, too. That was Doom Kitty, the little black stray who was now the store mascot.

The second theory about The High Castle’s name was that it was pretty easy to score a little something-something if you knew who to talk to. Which I didn’t, because that’s not my bag. Or my friends. Clean as a real Virginia farm boy interviewing to join the FBI. Really.

If it matters, that’s where The High Castle was, but if you know anything about Virginia you know it’s pretty much two different places, the old Virginia of rolling green hills and Civil War battlegrounds, and the concrete and steel sprawl spilling out the back end of the Boston-DC Interstate 95 metroplex corridor. I remember reading in the cyberpunk bible, Neuromancer, how William Gibson talks about BAMA as the Boston-Atlanta metropolitan area, and while we weren’t there yet I could easily see how what had happened along I-95 would soon steamroll down I-85, too, which meant that whatever was left of the little patch of Virginia grass that lay out of town would soon get swallowed up.

Red, it was going to land red. I could feel it. I was having too good a run, I had scorched my way through the early rounds and beaten better decks (better players, too) than Parker’s all day long. If there were any justice in the world it was coming down red.

So I was thinking, red/black, win\lose.

But the other thing that I was thinking, something way back in my head, maybe in that instinctive, reptilian part of the brain, was adult/kid, kid\adult. Man/boy, boy\man.

Because here I was, just about to graduate high school and go out into the wide, wide world, and I still didn’t know. Didn’t know how to feel. And somehow I was thinking that day that whether I won or lost really, really mattered. At that moment, almost eighteen, relatively smart and healthy, with my life stretching out in front of me, I believed whether a token came down red or black really mattered.

Maybe it did.

And I certainly remember what happened next as the token clattered to its final say on the fold-up table, perhaps buffeted by the currents of butterfly wings across the world.

Black.

I look up in defeat just as the origami unicorn on Blade Runner flashes on the big screen.

Then there’s Parker smirking with his perfect orthodontics and his expensive short-spiky boy-band hair cut and clear skin, and I wonder if he’s a natural gamer at all, or whether he’s just some guy coming into our world to rub our face in something. His folks were really well-off, which meant he was really well-off. I’m not saying all rich kids are jerks, but Parker was the kind of rich kid who threw spare change in the trash. In front of you. During the Great Recession.

Good game, he says as he lifts my card into his deck.

Prick. The worst thing about it all is that he’s being congratulated all around. Which I suppose is the proper thing and everyone at The High Castle appreciates a hard-fought game. I would call hacks but it was my token and my thumb that sent it riding gravity’s rainbow. It just didn’t come up right for me. Go figure.

If I were inclined to self-pity, which I was, I could say that nothing ever did. That wasn’t completely true, but it seemed true enough generally. And it seemed really true lately. I was going to graduate in the upper-middle of the pack at my school, and my SATs were pretty good but not great. If I were someone else – say, Parker, I’d be looking at an autumn with the leaves falling from well-manicured trees against ivy-covered brick at a place like UVA or maybe even the ass-end of the Ivy League like U Penn. If I had a really good sob story maybe Harvard, or at least Brown.

But I didn’t, so it looked like a couple of years of community college and then we’ll see. If I busted my hump maybe a tech job at someplace, racing to squirrel enough away for when I got outsourced because I had become too expensive to employ. Plus, there was my mom. She had been sick for a long time, as long as I can remember, but I’d rather not talk about it right now.

I suppose I should take the time to mention that I really don’t know why, or even how, you’re reading this. Maybe for you what happened is a recent memory, or maybe it’s distant history. Maybe you want to know about how the world changed so much so fast, and what a few kids messing around in a game store had to do with it. Or maybe you don’t remember it quite the way we do, and all of this will sound like science fiction to you. I’m not saying that because we didn’t figure out what was going on; I’m saying that because we did. I know that’s confusing, but you’ll see.

I felt a familiar slap on the back.

Tough break, kid. Waylin said, then turned back to the video screen scrolling Counter-Strike and executed a perfect kill-shot.

Waylin Strong was, to my genuine surprise and probably his as well, my best friend. His grades were a lot worse and his SATs just a little, but sometimes I got the impression that in addition to being able to pound me to dirt he might, just might, be smarter than me.

The thought was unbearable. If that six-two, two-ten ox with a jaw like a shovel actually had a better brain than me it would prove the lack of justice in the universe once and for all.

Thought you had him, he mumbled, sucking the remains of an elaborately fru-fru coffee drink that was his regular and for which I gave him continuous flack.

I absently stacked my humiliated deck. He had the better cards, I muttered. Who doesn’t, I added, feeling justifiably sulky.

Yeah, but what’s the point of winning if your cards are that much better?

It wasn’t Waylin. It wasn’t Parker. It wasn’t any voice I recognized. It was beautiful and musical, and it was female.

I looked up and there she was. I had seen her from afar, as they say. For a couple of weeks she had been dropping in to The High Castle. Not often, and she didn’t say much. But of course rumors had started.

Honestly, it was probably the fact that she was actually, literally, from Tokyo, that far-away capital of the virtual realm, what made pretty much everybody at The High Castle, guy or girl, swoon. Really. The mystique, if you will. She wasn’t entirely unaware of it and certainly seemed willing to capitalize on it, because she went by Tokyo Kim.

Okay, it wasn’t just mystique. She was flat-out hot. Raven-black hair with a gamer-girl purple streak that started at her widows-peak, eyes that swept up at the corners without makeup. Not every girl can pull off bangs, but she sure could, or at least half-bangs, whatever you call that; she wore them only on the left side so that the widows-peak would still show. Did she look kind of like Keguri from Inuyasha? Maybe more than a little. I’d heard she was half Japanese, and she looked it, with the high cheekbones and delicate skin, the maybe ironic Hello Kitty t-shirt stretched just right. She wasn’t showing off, though. The Hello Kitty shirt was a size too small and ratty around the edges, so I guessed that it was probably just a favorite shirt. Because the baggy cargo shorts were purely utilitarian. Also, she was wearing black kid gloves, which I thought was a pretty cool neo-Edwardian wardrobe touch, assuming of course she wasn’t covering hideously burned fingers or something. Not that I – or any self-respecting male of the species – would much care.

What I’m saying is that people would notice Tokyo Kim, gamer mystique or no – she’d get a lot of second looks at a car show or a WWF wrestling match. Waylin, for example, was never one to be taken in by mystique, but he sure looked up and sucked his straw till he made that embarrassing end-of-the-drink rattle.

He didn’t even notice as he got wiped out on Counter-Strike.

I, however, am very much subject to both mystique and properly filled-out t-shirts.

I am not, however, and never have been, smooth with the ladies, as they say. Less charitably, as Waylin often put it, I had weak-ass mac.

She took Parker’s seat across from me, bumping the corner of the table with a characteristic lack of grace that reassured me that being a gamer was not just a borrowed façade, but went deep down.

I shrugged. Thanks, I said. See? Smooth.

I kid you not, random clouds of vape-smoke were hovering over her head like a halo.

I’m Zander, I said. I’ve seen you around. You’re Toky…

Call me TK, she said, almost dismissively.

First intro, and I already had gotten past her regular handle to the real deal. Well, not real deal, like her driver’s license name. But the inner circle name, I suppose. I was desperately thinking of something clever to say when she leaned in.

So, I hear that you’re the one to talk to about rare cards, she said.

I tried not to seem obviously surprised, but I’m sure I did. Um, I said, stalling. Well, I don’t really deal. I’m not…um, not really a collector. I left out the why, which was that my financial situation varied from near-broke, to plain broke, to broke-ass. Right at this moment, for example, I just happened to be broke-ass.

Okay, okay, so I was mostly broke-ass.

Tokyo Kim furrowed her dark brows. I expected she spent a lot of time getting them just right, and it was appreciated on some level. By someone like me, not someone obvious like Parker, or even Waylin. Sorry, bro.

No, she said. Her voice was pitched on the lovely lower register of lady-voices. I don’t mean stock, she went on, with a certain amount of distaste. "I mean that you know about cards."

This was getting interesting. I suppose it was a little exciting that it was my big brain that was being sought out. Be cool, Z-man, be cool. Sometimes I called myself Z-man.

Sometimes out loud, even, but it never caught on. A couple of years back I had tried out Ender, and sometimes I use X-ander online, but that’s more interesting in German. Zander, it seemed, was the best I could do with Alexander.

Yeah, I said, because I did know my CCGs. That’s collectible card games for all you noobs. The granddaddy was of course Magic: The Gathering, and almost everybody’s heard of Pokemon by now.

And check this out: Pokemon was actually a video game before it was a card game, by the way – also, check this out, Nintendo was a company that made playing cards, like old-school cards for poker and gin rummy and bridge – so them becoming a video game industry leader was kind of like if Bicycle or Hoyle or whatever company made Uno had become Atari or Microsoft. But then again, from what I’ve come to understand, Japanese companies have something of a longer lifespan than American companies. An individual Japanese person might be prone to commit suicide, but a collective entity like a corporation didn’t walk into the light so easily. But you see the irony. Nintendo the card game company becomes a video game company and introduces the video game Pokemon which then becomes a card game. Full circle.

But in this world of digital everything, why I had a thing for good old paper-printed CCGs might take a little explaining.

You see, me and my mom moved a lot after dad checked out, though we never went too far. Mostly around the Beltway (that’s the freeway surrounding the outer rim of DC, and I’m pretty sure one of the layers of Dante’s Inferno), sometimes inside, but usually north, south, east, or west. Maryland, Virginia. Pennsylvania, for a while, though that was farther than usual but still close enough to a commuter line into the city. All the apartments pretty much looked the same. Fox Run, Glenn Meadows, Turtle Cove, whatever. For some reason two descriptive words were better than one, unless of course you had a the, like The Meadows.

There were, of course, no meadows or foxes or even turtles.

But anyway, so I got into cards. Couldn’t go the whole boat and buy any really rare stuff, but I had some boxes of quite a few games that had come and gone before I was even born. And I knew pretty much all of them. What I came to realize, after a few turns in retail, is why I gravitated to cards. You can learn a lot about life from working crap jobs in retail, and I recommend it. Not forever, of course, but if you keep your eyes open you learn some basic truths about how things work. In this case, how it’s all about distribution. Were collectible card games fun? Sure. But a lot of games are fun. Why did they explode in popularity all of a sudden? Was it because they had some revolutionary concept, or the best artwork, or represented some new frontier of human creativity? No.

It’s because they don’t take up a lot of shelf space. That’s the main reason they got so popular in the first place. Don’t believe me? Well, then maybe you’ve never run retail inventory for minimum wage.

Look at it this way: you own a game store, and you have to make the call on whether to take a chance on something new. Will you clear a shelf for it? Maybe, maybe not. That’s labor cost, by the way, plus substantial retail space. You’ll have to think about it.

But: will you set out a little display on six square inches by the register? Why the hell not?

And that’s the difference between maybe and why not. So the game store owner, what’s it to him, this new game takes up just a few inches of counter. Either the game was a hit or not, and even if it didn’t run big time it might find a dedicated niche. If it was a total bust you just shipped the (small) load back. Shipping costs back and forth, of course, also reduced by the small size. The very smallness of card games allowed for incredible market penetration.

The same thing allowed me to carry around a lot of different games in relatively small boxes. Whole universes in a shoebox. When you moved a lot and didn’t have a lot of friends – not the kind that stayed around in your life, anyway – that meant something. Maybe I’m a sentimentalist.

As to why I dug the history of all those games, well, I guess something about me is a traditionalist. Hmm. Sentimentalist-traditionalist. Weird. Anyway, I tended to like the first couple editions, whatever the game. It always seemed fresher, more genuine. And actually, I preferred the earlier card games themselves. Like with Magic, you can’t beat the old cards with the literary quotes, like the Edger Allen Poe verses on shades, which were ghost-like creatures in the game:

There are some qualities, some incorporate things,

That have a double life, which thus is made

A type of twin entity which springs

From matter and light, evinced in solid and shade.

That was from a poem called Silence. Or, one of my favorites: For my confession they burned me with fire / And found I was for repentance made. That was a flavor quote on a completely ordinary, defense-oriented white card. Pretty boring stuff, you might think. But that quote (from the Arabian Nights, translated by Haddawy), that’s what made it magic. Not Magic. The game used to use more than a few Shakespeare lines, too. Later editions dropped all that stuff, especially the public domain. Want to know why?

I mean, I could quote some of the attempts at wordsmithing used in the later cards, mostly to make fun of them, but that would bring up copyright issues, you see? That’s why I’m not doing it now: pretty good knock on the fourth wall for a book, don’t you think?

See, you can’t copyright something unless it’s original, i.e. not public domain. So Magic: The Gathering (which is why they stuck The Gathering in the title) started to make up its own, proprietary mythology. Because then they could copyright it. That trick was something pretty much all the CCGs that followed realized they should do, unless they were already borrowing a copyrighted mythology from someplace else, like Star Wars. And of course not just CCGs, but games generally (video games especially) have tended to do this. In the end, you can’t copyright dragons, or elves, unless you make up something like Andremorean Elves or some other garbage like that.

I can’t blame them, really. And in fairness, some of the stuff can be pretty neat.

But, you know, it ain’t Shakespeare.

So I know that you’re thinking. This is a pretty minor point about copyright, intellectual property, etc.

But it isn’t.

Believe me, all those days drudging it out in retail were giving me just about the biggest clue I would have for what was coming up next. I just didn’t realize it.

Also, if you’re quick, you might have realized that that’s why digital is even better than CCGs. Video games barely take any shelf space at all, and technically (with downloadable content) they don’t have to take up any.

It does make me wonder, sometimes, that if we’re the digital generation, is it because we want to be, or because someone else wants us to be?

Because we’re not supposed to take up a lot of space.

TK slid the card over to me, face up, her purple-black hair falling over her eyes like a veil. Have you ever seen anything like this? she asked.

That’s when I think it happened, but memory’s a funny thing. Did I see the drawing on the card as one bird first, or did I see it as many? It was like an MC Escher painting, an image that makes sense on one level but is impossible at the same time. But I still don’t know if it was the card or her ungloved hand, or if it matters, because as I put out my hand to draw the card to me our fingers brushed together, and something like a very mild, vaguely electrical (for lack of a better word) sensation went up my arm and spread up and down my spine.

I looked up into TK’s tea-hazel eyes and realized that the same thing wasn’t happening to her, and if it was love then I was screwed. It took a second or two to focus on the card.

The artwork was seemingly crude but strangely elegant, and I could tell that its simplicity was not cartoonish but imbued with great deliberation. Deliberately primitive. In other words, it had a distinctive style. It was a simple outline of a bird, in which were contained the outlines of many small birds of exactly the same shape, repeated as though they were feathers. In the upper right corner was a wavy icon probably indicating fire and another one that looked mostly like a rough stone, and there were inscriptions in two different languages that I couldn’t read.

"That’s kanji, TK said. I recognize that. Japanese. Well, borrowed Chinese ideograms to express elements of Japanese language. But I don’t recognize the ideogram or the other language."

I didn’t either, but I was reluctant to admit it. I took the card in my hand. The cardstock was cheap and a little irregular. It almost seemed handmade.

You have the rest of the set? I asked.

She hesitated. No, she said.

I suspected that wasn’t true, but I let it go. "It seems Eastern European to me for some reason, but I can’t say why. Maybe some variant of HKK. I was bluffing, of course. That’s a Hungarian game that came out not too long after Magic. It’s still running, if I’m not mistaken. I’d say the Hungarian name but I’d probably butcher the pronunciation."

It wasn’t HKK. I knew it, and she did, too, even though I was sure she’d never heard of HKK, which is why I brought it up. I had to show something.

It’s Cyrillic. Waylin wasn’t even looking at us anymore, he was back reeling off rounds in Counter-Strike, virtual brass casings showering from his M4. He must have glanced over my shoulder for just a second. I was a little irritated.

He probably felt bad, at least a little, because he went on, I don’t know what it means. But you play enough war games, especially set during the Cold War, and you get to recognize it when you see it. It’s what the Russians use.

I shrugged and was about to say what TK filled in for me. Japanese and Russian aren’t a common combination.

But there it was.

I’ve seen that creature before, the bird, I said, because I had. In fact, I was getting a very distinct memory in my head of seeing it before. I couldn’t quite place where, but I was pretty close to the name and the mythology. It’s a Simur…Simurgh, I said, trying to sound confident.

Now I could show off a bit. I explained that the Simurgh was kind of like a griffon, to put it in more traditional symbolic language, or maybe like a phoenix, in that there were the elements of magical winged creature of somewhat ambiguous attitude to mortals, and the death-rebirth theme. The Simurgh was more of a Near or Middle Eastern symbol, like from Persia or Armenia or (I emphasized) the Byzantines, which did in fact influence Eastern Europe…you know, like Hungary.

Mythical symbols, and maybe symbols in general, were also kind of my thing, and I suppose that makes a certain amount of sense with my CCG hobby. Some people would look at Waylin’s Starbuck’s coffee drink and all they’d see is an empty cup. But they’d also get some vague sense of allure, or glamour. They might start to want a coffee drink themselves, because it seemed both luxurious and attainable. I saw the symbol, the siren, a beautiful mermaid luring sailors to a longed-for danger; I knew the story of Odysseus on the wine-dark sea.

Not to say I was immune. I wanted a coffee drink, too. I just had some idea as to why, and that it wasn’t just because I liked coffee. To nerd-out a bit, that’s semiotics, but even by this time I had learned to say I like to study symbols and meanings instead.

I had given my mythology spiel about the Simurgh as I studied the card, so I didn’t really know how I was doing with TK, but she didn’t interrupt so she must have been at least interested enough to hear me out.

I looked up. Thirty, I said.

Her left brow arched. Thirty? she asked.

I’m not sure. I know the number thirty is connected to it.

Like four and twenty blackbirds? she said.

Yeah, something like that. I rubbed my face. I remember reading about it in some books a long time ago. And the art looks familiar…

I know what you’re thinking…why didn’t I just look it up on Wikipedia? Well, TK had already brought out her pad and was scanning through the article. Thirty sometimes means that it’s the size of thirty birds or has thirty colors, she said. I skimmed the article over her shoulder. We got a lot of details, some contradictory, but my basic outline was about right.

But none of it was quite right, at least compared to what I had read. We had all the facts about the Simurgh, but we still didn’t have much on what it meant, and how that could possibly relate to the card.

We had too many facts, and no way to sort them out.

And I felt that what I had read in that book a long time ago was closer to what we needed to know. I didn’t know how right I was, then. All I knew was that it meant I had to wrack my brain for the name of the book, and then find the book.

I sat back down facing TK.

So you’re saying you don’t know what game this card belongs to, she said.

Ouch.

"I’m saying that it doesn’t belong to any game. I had decided to be confident about this, and then softened it a little. Not any CCG published, anyway. Maybe you have a prototype card of some guy who was working on a game, or just someone making art in the style of CCG cards. I’ve seen that before."

I’m pretty sure it’s part of a game, she said.

So there was a deck. Well, if there were more cards I could figure out the mechanics and make a pretty good placement of when it was created and maybe even who did it.

TK didn’t seem terribly bothered that I’d figured she wasn’t being completely truthful about there not being a deck. I’ll think about it, she said.

My turn. So where’d you find it? I mean, the card.

By this time Waylin was genuinely curious and was bending over my shoulder to get a good look at the card. He was reaching out to grab it when TK’s gloved hand darted out and snatched it back.

She returned the card and her pad back into her Totoro satchel, and I knew our conversation was coming to a close. Tokyo, she said. Akihabara district. There was a little shop…it’s kind of a long story, and I have to go. Maybe next time.

I nodded and turned back to the big screen. Blade Runner was still playing, Harrison Ford and his android lady riding off in a hovercar into the gray, drizzly sunset. I heard the bells on the door jingle as TK let herself out, but I tried not to glance back.

Hey, she said, and I turned to see her standing in the open door, the springtime brightness from outside framing her in light. Thanks, by the way. I hope next time it comes up red.

And then she was gone.

Sweet babies, Waylin said. He was back on his console and didn’t look away from his screen. Even though everything on it was blowing up, I suspected he wasn’t talking about his game.

You can say that again.

Sweet babies, he said. A big component of Waylin’s persona is an aggressively cheerful attitude. You get her digits?

I, of course, am more of a cynic, so it balances out. Did you hear me get her digits?

Waylin shrugged. Don’t know, bro. Maybe she inks them on her hand and when she wants, she just licks ‘em real good and stamps them on you. Knew a girl who did that, man, swear to God.

Uh huh. I had turned to stare longingly at the door and my eyes started to focus on the bookshelf between here and there. The High Castle actually kept a well-curated bookshelf – part retail, part library, right next to Doom Kitty’s tower of carpet and posts. The bookshelf was mainly manga and comic books, sure, but the top shelf was all novels. Marsh, who owned the game haven,

Reviews for Entanglement

[Elijah · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great characters, funny, timely… fight the power. Sci-fi that challenges, hasn’t gone woke.