Genesis Alpha

ONE We were playing a computer game the day it happened. Genesis Alpha. It's the greatest game ever invented, and it's huge, a whole universe filled with thousands of people from all over the world. It's got everything: space battles and swordfights, aliens and elves, planets and cities and underground systems. I can play for hours every day, especially when my brother Max joins me. I play at home after school, Max from a computer lab somewhere on campus. He's older than me, and he's away at college, so mostly we keep in touch through the game. We fought Kreepz that day. They had enslaved the entire population of Yartan 3. The slaves were kept in caves deep underground, mining precious metals from the earth. So there was a lot of treasure to be had, yartanite and black diamonds. The underground cave system was huge, but apart from the big gangsters at the entrance, the Kreepz guards down below weren't all that tough. So we split up. Alezander -- that's Max's character name -- took care of the east side while I did the west side. Alezander had his Bloodstone axe, and I had my broadsword. That's the coolest thing about Genesis Alpha. You can fly around in a spaceship and run around cities with a machine gun, but when you go down on a primitive planet, you wear old-fashioned chain-mail armor and wield a sword or a crossbow. It's got the best of all worlds. I shot through the tunnels, killed a lot of Kreepz, and opened any locked doors I came across, freeing the slaves. They thanked me and rushed off, out of the caves and toward freedom. I emptied out the whole area, filling my bags with stuff. Then I went back to the entrance, still littered with the bones of the gangster Kreepz, and waited for Alezander. We always split everything even. That's how Max wanted it, although it really would be fair that he got the bigger half because he's been playing Genesis Alpha longer and his character is bigger and stronger than mine. But Max always said it was too much bother, so we'd just put the loot in one big pile, pick out any good items we wanted to keep, sell the rest, and split the cash. Alezander never returned. He was still online, but he didn't respond when I sent him an instant message. So I returned into the caves to search for him. Alezander was standing still in one of the guard cells, surrounded by Kreepz bones, and one small Kreepz was hitting him but not doing any damage. I quickly finished it off and then checked out Alezander. Alezander was there, but Max wasn't. If you turn off your computer without logging off first, you freeze inside the game, like a statue, and if you don't return to the game quickly, moss starts growing on you. It's really funny. If you stay away a long time, the statue gets splattered with bird droppings and graffiti and eventually starts to crumble. No moss had started growing on Alezander yet, but his eyes had frozen; he no longer blinked. So I knew he'd been disconnected. I wasn't worried. It's not like it had never happened before. Max would have friends come over and drag him away from the computer and he would just hit the off button, wouldn't even spare the time to say good-bye. Or he'd be playing in class and suddenly have to hide what he was doing from the teacher. It's really frustrating when he drops off without warning when we're in the middle of something important, and this time we'd planned to use the treasure from this mission to raise some cash for more mines and ammo, then fly directly to another place, Toxic Mountain, where we had unfinished business from last weekend. Not today. I kicked Max's statue and went back to my spaceship for a solo mission. A couple of hours later the phone rang. Downstairs, Mom answered. And everything changed. "My God, Max, what happened?" Mom yelled into the phone, loud enough to carry upstairs and into my room despite the closed door, loud enough to break through my concentration. Max hardly ever phonesMichaels, Rune is the author of 'Genesis Alpha', published 2011 under ISBN 9781416965008 and ISBN 1416965009.