His Own Devices

By Douglas Wynne

When an occult cabal activates a psychic trigger in a popular video game, a countdown to chaos begins.

 

With her husband deployed abroad, Army wife Jessica Ritter finds herself navigating the pitfalls of parenting on her own. That includes moderating her ten-year-old son's screen time—a task that becomes all the more challenging when YouTube sensation Rainbow Dave releases an addictive new iPad video game. Gavin knows he isn't supposed to keep secrets from his parents, but when his achievements in the game unlock personal messages from Dave instructing him to embark on real world mini-quests, he can't resist.

Rainbow Dave is America's cool big brother. A celebrity gamer with a neon Mohawk and legions of fans, Dave is living the dream, but he may also be losing his mind. His anonymous benefactors have granted him a glimpse of paradise between the pixels, and the real world hasn't looked the same since. Now, wired with a head full of unholy revelations and a crate full of dangerous devices, he's on a mission to help his fans "level up" at a live event. Scream Time is coming to town, and it may be too late to stop a deadly game.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Douglas Wynne
• Release date: Mar 4, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201750466

Book preview

PART I:

THE MOTE

And why does the universe touch your skin, and throw light on you?

To see you, player. To know you. And to be known. I shall tell you a story. Once upon a time, there was a player.

–Julian Gough, Minecraft End Poem

1

JESSICA’S FIRST THOUGHT  is that she’s alone in the bed; her second is that the washing machine is banging against the wall on spin cycle. But that can’t be right. She didn’t put a load of laundry on before bed. So what’s that thudding? She tosses the rumpled sheet aside and props herself up, blinking as the vacancy hits her with double force. Even in sleep she knows Matt is deployed, but where’s Gavin? She’s been letting him sleep in her bed this week because of his nightmares. Did he wake and return to his own?

She gets up, swaying a little on unsteady feet, her skin prickling in the air-conditioned room. Maybe he was cold. But he likes the AC, begs for her to turn it on even when they don’t need it. He’s more likely to just burrow into his threadbare security blanket—the one Matt brought home from his first tour in Afghanistan—than to leave when the room gets too chilly in the night.

The blanket is missing too, suggesting he’s not in the bathroom.

Jessica listens anyway, for a flush or the sound of water running in the pipes. The thudding that woke her has ceased, but she’s sure it was really there, not merely the remnant of a dream following her into the waking world like a mosquito slipping into the house on her carbon trail before she can shut the screen door behind her.

Real, but not the washer. So what was it?

Now she’s awake. And maybe the gooseflesh on her arms isn’t entirely from the temperature of the room.

She opens the bedroom door, letting the cold air out and prompting Cooper, their elderly Corgi, to perk up on his plush bed and utter a half-hearted growl. The dog’s hearing isn’t what it used to be, but the fact that Jessica is suddenly up and wafting stress pheromones is enough to make him take it on faith that something’s wrong. He used to put on more of a show over nocturnal noises when the man of the house was away, but lately he’s been slacking, leading Jessica to wonder if it’s because the dog senses that she’s become the pack leader. Right now, though, with that frost of dread blooming under her skin, she feels like anything but.

The thudding in the wall starts back up and she breaks into a run. Down the hall to Gavin’s room, Cooper barking at her heels.

She finds the bedroom door open, just a crack revealing a wedge of darkness beyond the reach of the hallway nightlight. She almost pauses at the threshold, the notion flitting through her racing mind that she should knock before entering. But he’s only ten—too young for privacy. And then she’s through the door into the darkened room, and what she finds there stops her in her tracks.

Gavin sits on the bed, his back to the wall, the security blanket draped over his head reminding her of a Halloween sheet ghost without the eye holes, his inscrutable face glowing through the finger-worn fabric, lit from below by the tablet resting in his lap. His body jerks with convulsions, the back of his head rapping against the wall, the mattress bouncing on its springs.

Jessica’s breath hitches in her chest. Cooper barks—a sharp sound that snaps her back into action—and then she’s on the bed, tugging the blanket off her son, afraid she’ll find him bleeding from his nostrils or his ears or, God forbid, his eyes, as if the radiation from the device in his lap could fry them in their sockets. An insane notion, but it comes to her readily this deep in the night, so close to her own troubled dreams.

The boy shudders in her arms as she untangles him, his forehead knocking against her temple.

Is he dreaming? Thrashing like the dog running in his sleep?

With arms under his shoulders and knees, she drags him away from the wall, the same way she moves him when he falls asleep in the middle of her bed during story time. Only now it’s not the dead weight of a sleeping boy, but a kicking thing that barely resembles him, fingers hooked into claws and eyes rolled back into his skull. She can see the whites in the murky dark by the faint glow of a streetlamp filtered through the curtains. She should have switched the light on when she entered, but now she’s afraid to let go of him. Something knocks against the floor—the iPad tumbling out of the tangled blanket.

An icy shimmer plays over the ceiling for a second. She catches a glimpse of black feathers tumbling across the glass before the magnetic case slaps shut with the familiar click.

Jessica realizes she’s trying to hug the tremors out of Gavin. A futile effort. She needs to stop and think, get a grip, or she’ll do the wrong thing. So far, all she’s accomplished is to stop him banging his head against the wall. The terror of helplessness, of not knowing what to do next is closing in, making it hard to breathe, and she curses Matt for being half a world away.

She lets go of the thrashing body and turns away from the bed, grazing something with her elbow as she rises and knocking the lamp from Gavin’s nightstand. She paws at the wall. "Shit, shit, shit . . . " Her fingers catch on the switch and the lamp comes to life on the floor, lighting the room from the wrong angle and splaying the silhouette of a plush penguin across the ceiling, the beak looming above them like the blade of a scythe. Gavin writhes on the bed in his pajama pants, chest bare, lips blue, drool glistening on his chin in the stark light. From his throat, a long, guttural sound escapes: CHORRRONZZZON.

She tilts his head back and probes the airway for an obstruction, flattening his curling tongue. The airway is clear, but she runs her hand over the sheet anyway, feeling for crumbs or clues to anything he might have swallowed. There’s nothing. He doesn’t snack in bed, and the years when he might have swallowed the sort of random toy part the labels are always warning about are far behind them.

Not choking. So, what is this? Something she won’t understand until a coroner finds it? She pushes that bright red possibility back down where it came from. Her fingers, twined in his hair, are tingling now. She realizes she’s not breathing enough either.

"God damn it, Matt."

Her husband would know how to handle a seizure. Is that what this is? Gavin has never had one before.

She needs to call 911, but she’s afraid of leaving his side to grab her phone from the charging station on her nightstand.

Breathe, she tells herself.

Panic will not help him. She listens to that assertive voice—her daytime voice, the voice of her stronger self who knows how to handle a crisis even if she doesn’t know what to do for a seizure.

You need to make a dash for the phone.

She starts to relax her embrace and almost can’t do it; considers carrying him down the hall in her arms, bringing him with her to the phone, but that’s ludicrous. He’s too heavy.

But as she releases him, she realizes the convulsions have ceased. He’s breathing again, blinking, and smacking his lips. She can see his irises as she wipes the sweaty hair from his pale brow and feels the tickle of his eyelashes fluttering against the heel of her hand.

Baby, are you okay? Are you all right? Say something, Gavin.

Gavin’s eyes track to the side, following his roving hand over the tangle of bedding. Searching for his security blanket? His probing fingers grow more agitated, and for a moment Jessica is afraid another seizure is coming on. Or that the first one never ended, but just got stuck for a second like a glitchy video. Then she realizes what he’s groping for, and for reasons she doesn’t yet understand, the knowledge chills her.

Where is it, Mama? Where’s the iPad?

2

JESSICA SITS IN  the pediatrician’s waiting room flipping through a stack of outdated magazines, but soon gives up on the hope of finding distraction in their pages. She tucks Gavin’s hair behind his ear and watches the clock. At ten, he’s old enough to not take any interest in the grubby toys scattered on the carpet of primary colors.

Funny how anxieties evolve. At least germs were a threat she understood when he was younger and more vulnerable, but now she’s thinking about the labels on the video game cases. Warnings for epileptics that game play may induce seizures. She slides her phone partway out of her purse to check her mail notifications, acutely aware of Gavin’s eyes on it. In waiting situations, he usually asks if he can play a game to stave off the boredom, but not today.

The door to the exam room opens and a young nurse in pink scrubs, clipboard in hand, calls Gavin’s name. She records his height and weight on the scale in the hall, asks a few questions and jots the answers on her clipboard, then leaves them to wait for Dr. Sonya beside an exam table covered with a fresh sheet of tissue paper.

Gavin steers clear of the table and takes a seat in a chair beside his mother, his feet swinging back and forth like he’s pumping a playground swing. Like maybe if he can get it swinging high enough, he might jump off and land in the dirt somewhere, leave the exam table in the dust. Jessica can’t say she blames him. That’s where you sit to get poked with needles and gagged with a Popsicle stick.

Dr. Sonya comes in looking better rested than at their last visit in March, when cold and flu season was still raging. She wears a white coat over a gold-trimmed black skirt and ruffled blouse. Jessica has always been amused by Sonya’s slightly garish sense of style. Her own tends more toward blue jeans and jerseys whenever she has to upgrade from flannel pajamas, so she knows that part of her reaction to fancy clothes is the culture shock of stepping outside the comfort of her work-at-home world. She likes the Pakistani doctor well enough, even if they’ve never had a warm relationship. Something about the list of probing questions a pediatrician has to ask at each wellness visit has always made Jessica feel a little judged, but she knows that’s on her. And anyway, Gavin has grown into a strong, healthy boy.

Until now.

Sonya asks Gavin to remove his shirt and take a seat on the table, where she performs a rote examination: eyes, ears, glands, heart and lungs. She lingers a little longer than usual on the eye exam, asking Jessica questions to assemble a full account of what happened the previous night. Jessica has plenty of questions of her own, but Sonya asks her to hold onto them for now while she moves on to quizzing her patient.

Do you remember waking up and leaving your mother’s bedroom?

Gavin shifts his weight from side to side, rustling the tissue paper under his bottom. His gaze drifts over the framed artwork lining the walls—paintings by other kids—and he nods.

Why did you go to your room?

His eyes dart to his mother, but he answers honestly, though with so little volume they can barely hear him, as if incriminating himself quietly will make it better. I wanted to do something in my game.

A video game? On your tablet?

His brow furrows.

On the iPad?

Yes. In Minecraft.

And it couldn’t wait until morning?

The doctor’s tone is light, nonjudgmental. But now it’s Jessica who shifts in her seat, anticipating questions about how much screen time she allows him.

I had an idea for something I wanted to build, and I wanted to do it before I forgot, because I might not remember in the morning. And I didn’t want to wake up my mom.

It’s a construction game, Jessica interjects. She has often rationalized the hours she lets him spend on the game with a set of bullet points she can tick off to other adults when the subject comes up: it’s constructive, it’s creative, it gets them thinking like engineers, the violence is no worse than Legos with everything made of little blocks, and the ambient music is so soothing. Now, though, she catches herself and offers no more of this sales pitch for a game she’s never played.

And Dr. Sonya isn’t interested in the intricacies of the game. She’s more concerned with the continuity of Gavin’s consciousness.

Gavin, do you remember everything that happened between the time you started playing the game and when your mother came into your room?

I don’t know.

Do you remember hitting your head on the wall? Jessica asks.

Gavin’s eyes widen. The game didn’t make me do that.

But do you remember doing it? Sonya asks, holding a finger up to indicate that Mom should hang back and let her ask the questions.

No. But my head hurt in the morning.

Okay. So, there’s missing time from when you were in your room with your game, like there would be if you fell asleep while playing it.

Gavin nods.

What do you remember next? What’s the first thing you remember about your mother being in the room?

Nothing. I just remember waking up in my own bed.

Okay. That’s good, Gavin. You’re doing great with these questions. Does the game have a lot of action? Flashing lights?

No.

How about the task you wanted to finish in the game? Did you complete it?

I don’t remember. I need to check if it saved.

Something about his flat tone tickles Jessica’s lie detector. Did he go on it again this morning? She explicitly told him not to.

Did you feel funny at all while you were playing?

Funny how?

Sonya bobs her head from side to side. Sometimes people feel funny before the kind of episode you might have had. It’s called an aura. And it can be different for everybody. Maybe a dizzy feeling, or just a feeling like something is going to happen. Do you remember having any kind of strange feeling while you were playing your game?

No.

He answers so fast that Jessica knows he isn’t even considering the question, trying to shut down the possibility that his gaming had anything to do with what happened. But she holds her tongue and defers to the pediatrician.

Dr. Sonya pats Gavin’s knee and tells him he can put his shirt back on. Turning to Jessica, she says, "It does sound like a seizure, but they say everybody gets the first one free."

What does that mean?

"A pattern of recurring seizures could lead us to a diagnosis of epilepsy, but a single event doesn’t mean there will be more. That said, we should still run some tests. I’ll give you a slip to take over to the lab for blood work. We’ll check his electrolytes and run a complete chem panel. It’s good to have if we need to choose an anticonvulsant medication. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. The EEG isn’t my go-to for a first seizure, but because he was looking at a screen when it happened, we should do one. It’s totally non-invasive. We monitor his electrical activity while exposing him to a strobe light. If he’s prone to photosensitive epilepsy, it should induce another event."

Jessica toys absently with the flower pendant on her necklace—an anniversary gift from Matt. So, we do a bunch of tests and get a diagnosis if we’re lucky?

If we’re lucky, this was a one-time thing. Sometimes the brain’s wires just get crossed.

Gavin looks from his mother to the doctor. I glitched like a computer?

Sonya laughs, a soft sound, like water. Something like that. If it happens repeatedly, we can also do a CAT scan of your head to see what’s up. But let’s start with just the EEG.

"How could a cat look at my brain?"

Now both women laugh, and some of the tension in the room is alleviated. It’s actually a CT scan, we just call it a CAT. It stands for ‘computerized tomography.’

So, it’s a tomcat scan. My friend Jacob has a tomcat named Hooper.

I have two cats at home. Siamese. They’re feisty. The doctor wrinkles her nose and gets a smile out of him. Okay, Gavin, you’re all set. Why don’t you go and pick some stickers out of the basket? I think we might even have a BB-8 in there.

Kylo Ren?

Take a look.

After Gavin scoots out of the room, Jessica closes the door behind him and turns to Sonya, bracing herself for the battle that awaits at home. So. Should I limit his screen time until the tests come back?

***

Gavin comes to the end of a chapter in his new book and reads the first paragraph of the next while feeling along the couch cushion for his bookmark. Warrior cat books are awesome, so it’s a good thing there are like a million of them. He’s been reading like a fiend ever since his doctor visit because after buying him the latest in the series and filling him with ice cream, his mother hit him with a video ban.

He had a full-blown tantrum when she told him he was cut off until they got all the test results back from the hospital. He knows he was disrespectful, but she kept her cool and didn’t yell back at him. Daddy is quicker to fight fire with fire, but his mom tends to stay calm and tell him things he already knows, like how she understands it was no fun getting poked with a needle at the lab, but she’s doing this to keep him safe.

Cutting him off even after he passed the test with the flashing lights is totally unfair. She couldn’t even explain why she was doing it. She just kept saying she wanted to wait a little while and see if it happened again. Because now his life is a science experiment. Even checking on the gold that’s piled up like snow overnight in Clash of Clans will have to wait until she knows it’s safe, which he guesses is whenever she feels like changing her mind. If she really understood how mean that was, she wouldn’t do it. End of story.

But it’s hard to stay mad at her when she’s worried about him on top of being worried about Daddy. He worries about his father, too. He may only be ten, but he’s not stupid. He knows that when his father is away from home, terrorists are trying to kill him. At times like that, a boy could really use a good video game to take his mind off things.

He goes to the kitchen, drags the step stool to the corner cabinet, climbs up, and helps himself to the giant bag of Goldfish crackers. His mom buys them by the case at BJ’s and Gavin devours them like a mechanical shark whenever he’s gaming or watching his videos.

Back on the couch, he gazes forlornly at the blacked out flat screen TV from which his fuzzy reflection stares back at him. Rainbow Dave will have posted four new Minecraft videos by now and Gavin hasn’t seen a single one.

Even though Doctor Sonya doesn’t have any answers about why he got a case of the shakes that night, at least it hasn’t happened again since, so that’s good. His mom is also happy that they sold a bunch of the rocks he painted with peace signs and words like HELP, CARE, and LOVE. It was fun doing those, and it did keep his mind off his missed games for a little while. Gavin feels good about helping the refugee kids they’re sending the money to in Syria.

When they looked at the Rocks for Refugees fundraiser on her computer this morning, Mom gave him a big squeeze and a kiss on the cheek and told him how much good they were doing for the same people Daddy was fighting to protect.

Stay happy, he told her. Don’t read the comments.

She flashed him one of those wide-eyed looks he sometimes gets when he surprises her. Not all of her Facebook friends agree with helping the refugees. He knows that upsets her, but he’s just glad she’s in a good mood today and has moved on from following him around the house with her phone in her hand, waiting for him to have another seizure.

It’s been a whole week. He’s been good. He’s been patient. It might be time to test the limits of the Great Screen Time Blackout of 2016.

He returns the Goldfish bag to the cabinet and strolls down the hall, bobbing his head and singing to himself. Are you ready? Are you ready? Are you ready to rave with Rainbow Dave?

In his bedroom he gathers what he needs and gets down to business, thinking how lucky it is that Dave came up with this idea while he’s grounded from gaming. Ordinarily, Gavin wouldn’t think it sounded fun. Usually when Dave gives them a build challenge, it’s meant to be done in Minecraft. This week, though, it’s a real-world challenge, one that Gavin can do. And he will only need permission for the last part. What’s even better is that Dave announced it in one of his Real Vlogs, which Gavin was allowed to watch yesterday because those don’t show any gameplay graphics.

It’s as if Dave knows what he’s up against and has picked the challenge just for him.

It takes most of an hour before he wedges a final pillow into place and decides he’s satisfied with his effort. His stomach tingling with the prospect of rejection, he goes to his mother’s office and waits quietly for her to finish the email she’s writing.

What’s up, bud?

Come see what I made. In my room.

You made something? Cool. Let’s check it out.

She stands and stretches, pressing her fists into her lower back, then follows him down the hall. Cooper the Corgi comes to check it out too, but Gavin makes him wait in the hall so he won’t ruin it.

Hey, look at you go, she says with a smile in her voice. You made a blanket fort!

Do you like it?

"An epic blanket fort. I do like it. You see? You can find ways to entertain yourself without electronics."

He shrugs. It was Dave’s idea.

Dave? She looks puzzled for a second, but then she gets that he’s talking about the same Dave as always. The guy she calls Gavin’s Virtual Big Brother. Huh? Dave told you to build a blanket fort?

He told everybody to make one. On his Monday Real Vlog. You let me watch it, remember? I guess on his regular video for Sunday, he made a blanket fort in Minecraft with wool blocks. So then he said kids should try to make a real one and send him a picture of it.

Gavin knows he’s talking too fast, but he’s excited and nervous. His mom crosses her arms over her chest. Not a great sign that she’s open to persuasion.

Can I? Please?

What, take a picture of it?

Gavin nods vigorously, overdoing it and making her laugh.

"Okay. It is pretty cool. Do you want me to take the picture on my phone, with you in it?"

Yeah. Then you can text it to me on the iPad and I’ll upload it to his site.

Whoa, hold your horses, mister. Who said you’re back on the iPad?

Not for gaming, just to send it to him before he gets like a million of them.

It’s not an exaggeration. Rainbow Dave has over ten million subscribers. Gavin knows his mother likes Dave, even though he has a rainbow mohawk, because Dave never swears in his videos, and none of the games or mods he showcases are inappropriate. But . . .

Are the photos just for him, or does he post them on his website or show them in a video?

Here we go. "He doesn’t post fan photos on his web site or