The Mountain: An Official Minecraft Novel by Max Brooks

Author:Max Brooks [Brooks, Max]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2021-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

One of those questions, a big one, was repeated in the dream I had that night. I hadn’t dreamed in a while, or at least, I hadn’t remembered them. Isn’t that the case with dreams? You have them every night but don’t remember most of them? I did with this one, parts of it anyway. The images were hazy, colorless. I was seated at a screen. Tapping away frantically and, I think, gliding another device across a flat surface. Was I working? Playing a game? Both?

I woke up even more anxious, even more curious than when I went to bed. One question was rising above the others, one that connected to both the dream and King Graham.

“Where do you think we are?” I asked Summer a few minutes into our trek. We were back in the Nether, heading in the opposite direction of our hunt for the small collection of glowstone. We were following the quartz-marked trail, on the watch for ghasts, heading to the fortress called the “Ice Cube.”

“Eh?” Summer didn’t seem very interested. Her mind was, as usual, focused on what was in front of us.

“Where do you think we are?” I continued speaking to her back. “This world, I mean? Do you think it’s another planet? Another dimension?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” Summer replied, as easily as if I’d asked her how to craft a wooden shovel. “We’re in a videogame.”

I couldn’t believe my ears. “You think?”

“Of course,” Summer shrugged. “Haven’t you had the dream?”

The words hit me like an invisible hammer. “Which one?”

She chuckled. “The screen-typing-computer one, of course.”

“Ohmagod, yes!” I hopped next to her, bouncing with excitement. “Just last night! That’s why I’m asking you now! I think I had that dream after looking at your paintings—our paintings, because I have some of the same ones back on my island.”

“All the more reason for it to be a game.” Summer’s voice hinted at boredom. “How else could we come up with the same pictures? And it would explain everything else. The look of this landscape, up there and down here, and the physics of the world. Doesn’t it all feel like a videogame to you?”

“Definitely,” I started to answer, but with just a tad less enthusiasm. Something was knocking at the wall between the back and front of my mind. “But that’s just a feeling.”

“It has to be.” Summer’s tone was practical, inarguable. “Somehow we were pulled here, against our will, like that ‘dude,’ as you’d say, in the old movie you’re always talking about where they fight with glowing Frisbees.”

“Hm,” I muttered, remembering the movie but forgetting the title.

“Or,” Summer expanded, “we might have volunteered. Game testers, or designers. That could be us. We found some way to wipe our memories when we, I don’t know, plugged our heads right into the system.”

“Can we do that?” I asked. “Plug our heads into a computer?”

“No idea,” sang Summer, “but if you can remember every piece of technology from the other world, do tell.”

I couldn’t. And I couldn’t argue that the idea was sound.

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