The Arcade

By Aaron Pogue

Dave only ever wanted to make video games.

He learned to code. He got the degree. He ended up programming webpages for local realtors and dentists.

Then the Great Pandemic hit, and his lousy boss fired him.

What's a guy to do?

 

When a girl walks through his front door wearing nothing but a towel and dripping with someone else's blood, he barely notices the gun in her hand. But soon he's caught up in a criminal conspiracy, fighting drug smugglers and human traffickers along the way to level up, rescue the girl, and become a hero.

And somewhere in the middle of it all, he even writes a game.

 

Welcome to the Exelichai Game Arcade, where anything is possible!

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Masked Fox Productions
• Release date: Sep 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215833360

Aaron Pogue

Aaron Pogue is a husband and a father of two who lives in Oklahoma City, OK. He started writing at the age of ten and has written novels, short stories, scripts, and video game storylines. His first novels were high fantasy set in the rich world of the FirstKing, including the bestselling fantasy novel Taming Fire, but he's explored mainstream thrillers, urban fantasy, and several kinds of science fiction, including a long-running sci-fi cop drama series focused on the Ghost Targets task force. Aaron holds a master of professional writing degree from the University of Oklahoma. He has been a technical writer with the Federal Aviation Administration and a writing professor at the university level. He also serves as the user experience consultant for Draft2Digital.com, a digital publishing service. Aaron maintains a personal website for his friends and fans at AaronPogue.com, and he runs a writing advice blog at UnstressedSyllables.com.

Book preview

1.

MY NAME IS DAVE, AND I work for the Arcade.

That’s about my favorite thing I’ve ever said, and it’s only barely true. But it’s my full-time job now, it pays well, and... I couldn’t live this life without it.

The Arcade, of course, is Exelichai Game Arcade. You’ve got an account. Not a gamer? Doesn’t matter. Everyone’s on the Arcade. Do you chat with your friends on Simaphore, or are you chatting securely through Cage? Either way, those services are hosted on the Arcade.

Do you send payments through Midas?

Do you follow celebrities and share memes with your grandma on Memento?

Do you manage your gig jobs and look for work through Placement? That’s on the Arcade.

But it’s so much more than those services. Everyone in the world is walking around with a user account to the greatest thing mankind ever made...and most of them have never even opened the tab.

That’s all going to change tomorrow. But before I tell you about that, I’ve got to catch you up on the news.

See...there was this girl. And a bathroom fan. And kidnappers. And someone shot up my car like in a movie, but I thought I was going to die in real life.

But then I saved the day and got the girl by making a video game. And that’s the story I want to tell you. Before tomorrow, when you binge the documentary on Netflix.

2.

I’VE ALWAYS WANTED to be a game developer, but before the Arcade came along, it was a pretty unrealistic dream. I grew up in the Midwest, born to a lower middle-class family. Both of my parents had college degrees, but Dad was a preacher and Mom taught in the public school system. We were never rich.

I did go to college to become a game dev, but there weren’t any credible game programs in those days (in my region), so I got a pretty generic Computer Science degree, and once I graduated, the only good job I could find was writing PHP for a local shop that farmed out Wordpress websites to small businesses in the area.

That’s a long way from game development. I still tried to work on games whenever I could.

I got Unity and ran through some tutorials. I got the Unreal Engine and ran through some tutorials. I made a couple popular modules in Neverwinter Nights (to show my age) and even took third place in a Game Jam in St. Louis one summer. That was about the highlight of my career.

Nothing came of it. I had bragging rights and a gift card to the Steam store. First-place got PAX badges and some Bitcoin, back when those together were worth about five hundred bucks. These days, those guys are regulars at PAX, and they could buy Houston for the Bitcoin.

They were a good dev team. I never had a team. I had a buddy who could write storyline as easy as breathing, and a guy I met in college would sometimes make me 3D models on the cheap. That’s the best I could cobble together. (And still I took third out of hundreds in St. Louis!)

You can’t build a game without a team. It wasn’t really possible.

So I spent my weekdays building crappy webpages and my evenings drinking and watching YouTube, and that was my whole life. Then the Great Pandemic hit, and my boss used it as an excuse to fire us all. We all could’ve worked remote, but he had no respect for us. He kept the cute graphic designer and a couple bootlick code monkeys and showed the rest of us the door.

Still makes my blood boil.

The government helped out a little. The unemployment checks were good for a while, but I knew from the first they wouldn’t last long.

That left me stuck at home in my one-room apartment, browsing the internet off my neighbor’s wifi and watching day after day after day slip out of my life.

Out of boredom more than anything else, I started designing a new game. I wanted to make something small, something modest enough to match my abilities. But small isn’t what I’m good at. After a week I had sixty pages of game design documents, a couple hundred files in my Bitbucket project, and a completely broken user interface in need of a full rewrite.

That’s how it always goes with me. It was a Saturday morning in April when I woke up with a little inspiration and a bit of motivation—just enough to open my dev software, but not necessarily enough to get anything done. While I was scrolling through the broken code, trying to find somewhere to get started, my door flew open, and a girl dashed inside.

I don’t bring girls to my place. It’s a bad place. For two hundred bucks a month, there’s room for a bed on the floor, a loveseat and a TV stand for a living room, and a tiny kitchenette with no stove and a half-size fridge.

The bathroom has a shower stall, a toilet, and a sink. The closet is the floor—clean clothes on one side of the bed, dirty clothes on the other. It’s livable, but it isn’t girl-worthy.

And, oh, this girl was quite a girl! Her hair went from brown to blue to blond in big bouncy curls. Her eyes were dark and beautiful. Her body was small and slim and muscular, like a runner’s. I could tell, because she was only wearing a towel. But there was a handgun in her right hand and fresh blood-dripping off her left hand.

She bumped the door shut with her hip, making the seafoam towel ripple distractingly, then leaned her ear against the door, listening intently while the drip from her fingers stained my carpet and lost me a hundred-dollar deposit.

It took her half a minute to pull her attention from the door. Then she cast a glance around and noticed me for the first time. I was cross-legged on my bed in my boxers, with a laptop protecting my modesty and last night’s dinner dried to a plate at the foot of my bed.

She didn’t bat an eye. Please help me, she whispered, with total confidence that I would. He’s crazy. He’s going to kill me.

Who? I whispered back.

My ex. He’s crazy!

I reached for my phone. I’ll call the cops.

No! Her hands came up, imploring me, but I felt the muzzle of her handgun track across my torso. I couldn’t stop staring at her blood-drenched arm. It seemed to be drying, caking on.

She saw me flinch and lowered her arms. I’m sorry. I know what I must look like.

What happened? I asked.

She considered the question for more than a moment. Then she gave up and shook her head. I can’t explain. It would take too long. But if you call the police, they’ll take me away and leave him free to hurt my sister.

She was pretty and small and scared, and I’m a good Midwestern boy. I was all the way on her side. I asked, What can I do?

She weighed the question for a heartbeat, then handed me her gun. Guard the door, she said, If Derrick comes through, put the whole magazine in him. I need to wash up.

She glanced at my kitchenette, then nodded toward the bathroom door (the only door in the place). I nodded back, and she seemed relieved. Before she disappeared through the door, she said, I’m going to need some clothes, too.

"Sure!’ I called back, but the door was already shut, and I heard the shower pipes scream as she turned it on.

I sat there for a moment in stunned disbelief. Then I put away my laptop and started scrambling in my clean clothes pile, praying there was enough for two whole outfits.

I needn’t have bothered. I never saw her again.

3.

IT TOOK HALF AN HOUR for the cops to show up. I heard the sirens screaming and the boop boop bullhorn as they approached the security gate.

That’s the first time I really got scared. I was sitting there holding a stranger’s gun, with no idea what was going on. In a panic, I grabbed a tube sock from the top of the dirty pile and pulled it over the gun like I was stuffing a Christmas stocking. Then I jammed it underneath the pile and slipped over to the bathroom door.

She’d been in there a while. I could still hear the shower going full blast and what sounded like splashing in the sink, too. I didn’t want her to suspect I was trying to take advantage, but I was sure she would want to know the cops were here.

I knocked lightly. No answer. I knocked harder. I called quietly, Hey! Lady? The cops are here. Still no answer.

I did hear the cops pounding on my neighbor’s door. I heard some patient explaining and probing questions. I couldn’t hear anything they said, but cop voice is pretty distinctive.

I started getting nervous. I banged on the door, but still no answer. I tried the knob and it was locked. On the other side, there were screaming pipes and splashing water, but no answer from the pretty girl.

I thought about all the blood on her left arm. Had it been hers? If she’d ruptured an artery, she could be bleeding out. She might need help. I tried to force the doorknob, hoping the cheap hardware would yield, but all I did was hurt my hand.

I leaned close to the door and said, I’m worried about you! I’m coming in! Then I took a step back so I could break down the door.

I didn’t know how to break down a door. I’d seen it on TV, but I didn’t have a lot of confidence it would work in real life. And if I damaged the door, I definitely wouldn’t be getting back my hundred-dollar deposit.

But she might be dying! I had to try. I took a deep breath, steeling myself.

Then the cop banged on my door. Pow pow pow pow. Insistent. Impatient. Rude. And then the cop voice. Open up! It’s the police.

I’ve already told you I’m a polite Midwestern boy. I’m not a lawbreaker. And I was a little worried that if I busted in on her, she’d be naked and outraged. So, mostly out of cowardice, I did the right thing and opened my door to the police.

First words out of his mouth, before I could even feign ignorance, were, You alone here? He barked it, clipped and demanding an answer.

Uhh.... was the answer he got.

He didn’t like it. He barked a little frown at me, then his gaze darted around the inside of my apartment. When it came back to me, he did the frown again.

You alone here, kid? Or is there someone else in... uh... He’d seen the tiny box I lived in. There weren’t many places to hide.

Thinking frantically, I asked, Is this about the Pandemic? I didn’t think we had a strict quarantine—

It’s not, he said, and now he stopped scanning and looked at me. Hard. I’m not asking again, kid. Are you alone here?’

Yeah, I said, nodding. I tried to look pathetic. I’m always alone. What’s going on?

Disturbance, he said, I’m going to need you to step aside.

Why?

Because your nosy neighbor said she saw a stripper enter this apartment thirty-seven minutes ago, and not come out.

She’s crazy— I tried, but he kept right on talking.

And you keep saying you’re alone here, but I can hear a shower running. He glanced down and back up, a flick of the eyes, and then nodded. Plus, you’re standing in a pool of fresh blood. That’s my probable cause. Now step aside.

He didn’t really wait for me, just leaned his shoulder against the door and shoved me back with it, then crossed my living room in three steps and raised his flashlight to bang on the bathroom door.

Hey! I shouted as loud as I could, in case she could hear me. You can’t come in here without a warrant!

He didn’t answer. He knocked hard enough to dent the cheap wood, announced himself loudly, then busted the doorknob out of the door with the butt of his flashlight. It was real macho.

He kicked the door open with one toe and threw a peek inside. Then he leaned in to get a better look, but it was a room nine feet square. He saw everything.

Then he came back out and fixed me with a severe look. Kid, you’re not getting that security deposit back.

That caught me off-guard. What?

He reached up and spoke into his walkie-talkie. She’s gone, he said. And she left a hell of a mess.

4.

SHE’D GONE OUT THROUGH the ceiling. There weren’t any windows, so she made a chimney.

The sink and mirror were streaked with blood, the bar soap looked like a prop from a horror movie, and the towel she’d worn in—now blood brown instead of seafoam green—was in a wet wad on the floor. Next to all the debris.

She’d used the shower head and plunger as tools. Both were beaten up and broken, along with the chassis of the vent fan, two feet of ceiling joist, a lot of drywall and rotten sub-flooring, and a handful of badly damaged linoleum tiles.

She had carved a passageway through the ceiling into my upstairs neighbor’s bathroom and escaped through it. Naked. In under half an hour.

The cops seemed pretty sure from the start that I was an innocent bystander. Someone said, hah!, he’d let a pretty girl in a