LevelUP: an 8-bit novel by Micah Joel. Author's definitive online edition.

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Chapter Fourteen

1-1: A New Game

Dizzy. Looking down is all it takes. His shabby high-top sneakers, in a superposition of flat pixels and comforting physical three-dimensional solidity, rest atop a repeating sea of jaggy red pixels. Conflicting signals from his eyes and the HUD give the world an unsteady shimmer as if everything around him subtly vibrates. Taking a cautious step produces an obnoxious tromping sound, and amidst the ensuing shift in perspective, he nearly loses his feet, not to mention his lunch.

Max wrinkles his nose. The air’s filled with a sickly sweet chemical aroma, close to that which seeps from the Colossal Cave, though with an edge of clean-air-after-a-thunderstorm. A barrel labeled OIL glows with an uneven orange flame. Smells far better than an oil fire, though. Intoxicating. It even gets in his mouth. Whatever this place is, it assaults all of Max’s senses. Beyond that, he can’t get a thought out of his head: how is Dad here?

His brain wants to declare that this just a dismissible daydream, but he can’t bridge the gap reinforced by the tyranny of his senses. Instead, Max focuses on familiar inner sensations; controlling his rapid breathing, the hammering pulse in his temple. He’s not going to let himself throw up.

“Why couldn’t it have been one of the Muses?” the pixely avatar of Hadley Root bemoans. “Word of advice—never look down. You’ll just make yourself wooz out. EYES UP!”

Max’s head snaps up, unable to resist the force behind the command. Bright red construction girders stretch into the softly glowing black sky. They creak as if something heavy high above shifts around.

Why all this?

“You are probably asking yourself, why all this, blah, blah, blah,” Pixel Hadley says, wagging his head. “Well, knock it off. Concentrate, boy!”

“Concentrate on what?” The ground convulses as a huge barrel hisses down the rails of a ladder and bounces off the floor. It pivots and hurtles directly toward Max.

“That,” Pixel Hadley says. “Jump!” Hadley launches off the ground, sailing upward until the soles of his feet are higher than his head was. He arcs over the barrel and comes lands smoothly on the other side.

In Max’s experience, gaming consists of text-based stories, with interactive commands like, “Take key” or “leap over barrel.” And Pixel Hadley called out a verb just before he— “Jump?” Max says. Nothing happens. “Jump?? Jump!”

Zork, this is not.

“Jump, moron!” Pixel Hadley screams.

Just…jump? He thinks about his calves tensing up and letting fly. He thinks about launching skyward. With a sproing sound, Max rockets upward, knees nearly grazing the onrushing barrel. The red girder above rushes toward him, laws of gravity and physics flexing like a slinky.^[11] Max covers his head, but impact doesn’t come. In fact, he sails even higher, landing on the level above. Molly used to talk about platform games. Finally, Max understands exactly what that means.

Pixel Hadley’s head pops up from a ladder. “Nice.” Bit by bit, the game world grows more familiar, or at least less uncomfortable. The ‘real’ world—the room where Molly awaits, fades in importance. “Do you know the parable of the caterpillar?” Pixel Hadley asks. Max shakes his head. “He was walking just fine, until one day someone asked him how he managed to keep track of all those legs. He started thinking about it and was never able to take another step again.”

“I don’t get it,” Max says.

“Caterpillars get squished,” Pixel Dad says. “Quit trying to think about how to move, or jump, or dodge obstacles. Stop thinking and start doing.”

“Wait, obstacles?”

“Can we at least make it to the top without getting pasted?” Pixel Hadley says. “This way.” He runs along the upward-sloping girder to another ladder at the far end.

“Climb!” Pixel Dad says. “Don’t look behind either.”

Before the words completely land, Max glances behind him, and there’s a monstrous flaming apparition—the remains of the barrel that he leaped over, now writhing like a flaming amoeba—creeping up the slope toward Max.

Some sliver of Max’s mind strains to reconnect with his body back in a cramped room, a solid ceiling not far above his head. So, climbing is an…odd experience. When he first grabs on to the ladder rung, he feels the emptiness of wrapping his fingers around nothing. But the sense of climbing quickly becomes second nature, and Max ascends to the next girder.

Pixel Hadley’s already there, but standing still. “I thought you said to hurry—” Hadley cuts off Max with a gesture—wait. A massive block of granite the size of a dump truck and studded with ivory spikes crashes down, shaking already-unsteady floor beneath them. Seriously? What kind of construction site features…? But then the slab rises slowly back into the air, into a hidden compartment above.

“I thought this was a construction site,” Max says. “What’s with the big rocky crushy thing?”

“Obstacles,” Pixel Hadley notes dryly. “Now!” Hadley dashes through, and Max scrambles behind sticking as close as possible. The trap mashes down again, missing Max by inches.

An actual chunk of rock that size would weigh, what? Somewhere between one and a million tons. What would happen if his pixels got macerated into chunky salsa? Could he actually get hurt here? Could he die in here?

There’s no ladder at the end of this girder, only a huge green pipe. Hadley leaps, throwing in a fancy midair flip, sailing right down the middle of the pipe. Max peers into the inky blackness. Behind him, more of the fire creatures approach, unimpeded by the crushing stone trap. He arranges his feet on the flat edge of the pipe. “Here we go,” he says to himself, and drops.

Somehow, he changes direction. Rising rather than falling, he emerges thrust forward into a place with a cyan sky, dotted with smiling clouds. The ground, as far as the pixel resolution can depict, is made of sturdy macadam, solid under his feet. The ozone smell is gone here too. Pixel Hadley runs far ahead.

“Wait!” Max says, and hurries after him, taking off so quickly that he launches into the air, again with a cheesy sound effect. His character seems good at jumping. He covers more ground this way, so he jumps again and again, pogoing his way through this strange world.

Square bricks hang in the air, supported by nothing at all. Max leaps without looking up, and abruptly finds one of these structures on a collision course with his face. He tries to shield himself, but the brick shifts upward before snapping back as if attached to a spring.

Something golden flashes through the corner of his eye as a chime rings out of nowhere in particular. A sound all too familiar—Max has been hearing it for days. Words scroll across the lower third of his field of view:

INVENTORY

* COIN

Inventory: this he understands. He even figured out the quirk on the original Zork game where your maximum inventory limit was determined by a random number. If you were holding too much to pick up another item, trying again (and again) would usually work.

A few more leaps and he’s caught up. Despite the effort, he’s not the least bit winded. “All this,” he says, gesturing to encompass the whole world around him. “Why?”

“Consider it training,” Pixel Hadley says. “This is just the loading screen. Randomized each time, but ridiculously easy compared to anything you’ll later come up against.” He stops and listens. Max can’t hear anything, but Hadley looks concerned. The way ahead is barred by a locked door, one that looks exactly like the one in the cave. Except filthy black oil’s been spattered along the door frame. It drips, pooling along the grainy sand.

“Loading screen?” Max asks. “So I can’t really die in here. Right?”

“Interesting question,” Pixel Hadley says. “Depends on your definition of die. Now help me find a key. There’s got to be one around here nearby.”

Max kicks a rock out of his way, and a little eight-note jingle plays. A hint uncovered. Pixel Dad looks at him. “Don’t just stand there. Pick it up.”

The space where the rock used to be doesn’t look any different, but Max reaches for it. His hand passes through the ground like it’s not even there. Then it closes around a key. The inventory sound chimes again.

“What do you mean, definition of die?” Max asks.

“Death means you go back to the save point, usually at the start of the level,” Pixel Hadley says.

“That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“The thing is, you leave behind all your inventory. If you’re carrying something valuable, whoever offs you can just take it. Now hand me the key.”

Alarm bells sound in Max’s head. “Why? You’re just a part of the loading screen, right? I’ll just open this door myself—”

Pixel Hadley makes a quick move. It happens too quickly for Max to see, but it ends with a hand holding a long blade a short distance from his chest. It doesn’t hurt, but it does take Max’s breath away. “You’re not ready yet. There are things worse than death,” Pixel Hadley says.

The key and the coin tumble out from Max’s inventory and scatter along the ground. Hadley grabs the key. Everything around Max takes on a reddish tint, growing more saturated by the second.

A heavy ker-thunk reverberates from the door ahead, which swings open, and Pixel Hadley dashes through it.

Abandoned again. At least the first time, his dad hadn’t killed him. Max’s world morphs into a silent void of scarlet.

footnotes

[11] The toy, not the brand of guitar strings, though that analogy kind of works too.

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