LevelUP: an 8-bit novel by Micah Joel. Author's definitive online edition.
Support independent authors! Scroll to the end for details.
< back | ⬆️ | next >0-8: Retro
Sometimes the past stays buried for a reason. The crushing sense of loss surges over Max before receding enough for a shuddering breath to escape. He wipes his cheek.
Molly wordlessly asks if he’s okay.
She towers above him—he’s on the floor. “I…” Max’s voice breaks, and it takes several more breaths to compose himself. The smell of musty carpet and old paper fills his nostrils. A fresh torrent of memories threatens to drown Max afresh. He used to come to places like this. With dad. Before Damage.
“I just remembered,” Max whispers.
Molly leans down to hear what comes next.
“We need the cartridge.” He gestures toward the NES. “It has specific programming. You were right, Molly. There are two separate pieces to be put together.” He looks at Molly, who nods solemnly.
“Hemera has it…” Max’s thoughts trail into a dead end.
At this, Miyamoto leans in closer. His eyebrows arch in an expression that pleads for the rest of the explanation. Max isn’t used to having anyone hang so closely on his words.
“My dad gave it to me, but I never knew what it was for. I’d never even seen a NES before today. The cartridge, it, it was buried at the bottom of my locker.” Max sighs. “Was being the operative word.” He turned to Miyamoto. “Hemera took it. She took everything.”
“Now what?” Molly asks.
The look on Miyamoto’s face doesn’t align with any single emotion Max can recognize. A hint of a smile, perhaps, with an edge of wistfulness set against a dusting of wry twinkle. “Tell me, young man, what would it mean to you if you did have it?”
Bitter anger flares in Max’s gut. “What’s the use of asking?” he asks. Maybe he’s out of sorts from the ripped-off-scab of his dad leaving him, again. He pauses to collect himself, to prevent the spark from exploding into a raging fire. “We don’t have the stupid cartridge, so what’s the use of talking about what it would mean?”
“Max!” Molly says.
Miyamoto makes a placating gesture, as if to say, let him go on. He walks a brisk lap around the room, hands folded behind his back, leaving Max and Molly in relative isolation to talk.
“Did I ever meet him?” Molly asks.
“My dad? Let me think. Yeah, you had to have met him, but you were pretty small.”
“What was he like?”
“He was the most important thing in my world,” Max says. “He was funny. He had a pun or a joke for everything. Had a unique twist on any imaginable subject. When I was very young, I remember when he lost his job. I could tell he was worried, but in front of me he always stayed upbeat.”
“That sounds a lot like you,” Molly says. Then, “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“Sorry for what you had to go through.” Molly’s eyes widen. “Do you think that’s what Hemera was looking for?”
Max can’t keep up with Molly’s leap in logic.
“The cartridge!”
Max can’t account for the excitement in her voice. It’s as if she’s seeing… Max follows her gaze, and his eyes settle on Miyamoto, approaching, strolling as slowly as he ever does, cradling a gleaming rectangle in his hands. Max needs to look twice to believe it.
Something flat, boxy, and gleaming like gold. Max reaches out, and his finger presses against solid plastic. It’s real. He pulls his hand back like from fire. It’s tech, but not the kind that makes everything worse.
He turns it over in his hand. There’s no question. This is it. Every scratch and worn bit of paint on the edges is exactly where it should be. This is his cartridge. “How?”
Miyamoto’s face darkens. “A certain chief executive stopped by here, not long before you did. She brought me this. She was inordinately interested in understanding everything she could about it.”
“What did you tell her?” Max asks.
“I told her that I didn’t have the hardware to do anything with it,” Miyamoto says. “Not that saying so prevented her from stubbornly insisting that I think about it overnight.”
A moment passes in silence. Then the three of them seem to come to the same unspoken conclusion at the same time. Max settles the NES on a patch of desk not covered with books and papers. Molly straightens the console, so it’s perfectly aligned with the desk’s edge.
“Are we ready?” Miyamoto asks.
Max lifts the door covering the cartridge slot, then stops. He hands the cartridge to Molly. “You may have the honor, madam,” he says.
A look of concentration in her eyes, Molly slides the cartridge home. She tests the spring action of the connector a few times, then clicks it into place. Max hesitates with his thumb over the power button, then presses it with a satisfying click.
The red LED winks on and the CRT blossoms with crazy blinking rectangles and horizontal bars. Is it a hidden message he needs to decipher? It looks completely random, and it shifts around too quickly to get a sense of some underlying pattern. He’d be hard-pressed to extract any meaning out of it at all.
“Why isn’t it working?” Max asks.
Miyamoto lets out an exasperated sigh. “You youngsters have missed out on so much.” He powers it down, pulls out the cartridge, blows across the metal contacts[6], and pushes it in again. Max mashes the power button and the game console springs to life.
The title screen lights up, gently quivering as if it were projected onto a screen in a wafting breeze.
The image draws on the screen one line at a time. It’s a vicious scarab with imposing black pincers, rendered in pixelated 8-bit glory. Max has seen this before. “What do Humans First have to do with this?” he says.
Letters form below the image.
PRESS ME
“Controllers,” Molly says.
“Hang on, it’s not done yet,” Max says.
More letters animate into place, but with glitches. The display seems unstable, like the whole thing could stop working any second.
STARTTA TO
“It’s is a secret code,” Max says.
More letters:
KEY CONTINUE
Max scratches his head. It almost, but not quite, makes sense. What does it mean?
PRESS ME STARTTA TO KEY CONTINUE
footnotes
[6] A narrative necessity, but if you’ve got NES hardware, never actually do this. The moisture actually helps corrode the contacts.
ℹ️ Support the author by purchasing your own professionally formatted paperback or Kindle version of this novel. Also, subscribe to get 3 free books.
Got feedback? 👍👎 All humans welcome to send email to my first name @micahjoel.info — put "8bitnovel" somewhere in the subject.
Copyright 2018, 2019 Micah Joel. All rights reserved.