The Fahrenheit Twins and Other Stories by Michel Faber

Author:Michel Faber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2010-08-19T16:00:00+00:00

MOUSE

He had just leapt through a burning inferno of fire, guns blazing, when the screen went blue. Not funny. Not funny at all. This game was mega difficult, and what it did not need was computer failure.

Manny threw himself backwards in his swivel chair, making it creak. He was hyped-up, sweaty. Playing Runner was a high-octane experience. And what was so frustrating about getting ejected like this was that you couldn’t re-start where you’d left off; the entire quest had to begin all over again.

The action figure in this game – the one you animated with your mouse-clicking fingers – was Lena, a beautiful girl trying to escape from a nameless hell-hole in the former Soviet bloc. Hordes of secret police, guard dogs, soldiers and freelance psychopaths did their utmost to stop her reaching freedom. If you took your eyes off the screen for just one second, BLAM! The programmers were total sadists, definitely on the side of evil. Not one of the 60,000 guys playing the game, from Canada to Korea, had ever managed to get Lena across the border.

The extra incentive of Runner was that every time Lena got attacked her skimpy clothing got more threadbare. Rips appeared in her T-shirt, shreds were stripped off her trousers. A close shave with a grenade could blow her outer layers right off, reducing her to bra and panties. Obviously, the holy grail was to see Lena butt-naked.

But this was where things got hard. Runner was not completely divorced from reality. Lena was athletic, sure, but not superhuman. She got tired, ran slower, got injured. If her brush with an ex-Commie commando or a flame-thrower was too close, she might lose her underwear, but she would also be dead. The challenge was to allow Lena to undergo enough mayhem to get seriously unclothed, but not so much that she was toast and a message came on the screen asking if you wanted to start again.

The best part of Runner for Manny was actually those rare quiet moments when Lena was having a rest. You laid her down and kept watch while she recouped energy points. A digital counter at the bottom of the screen would keep track of her robustifying health. She would breathe deep, her bosom rising and falling, her cleavage shiny with realistic sweat. Her big dark eyes would half-close … And then some mad fucker would jump out of nowhere with a bazooka. It was a good thing Lena was equipped with automatic weapons, knives, kung fu skills, and whatever else an Eastern European lassie needs to survive. Manny was getting the hang of her, the way she responded, how far she could leap, how to make her kick and jab. He was determined to get her to the border one day, because that would be the ultimate thrill, plus he would finally be free to do something else.

Manny focused on the blue screen. It was decorated with the ugly white typewriting characteristic of error messages. Some of it said: ‘Generic host processes for win32 services encountered a problem and needed to close.

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