No More Continues: A Book Excerpt

My wife is traveling in Italy and Greece with students for the next two weeks and I'm at home with my two daughters, so get ready for some really weird, delusional posts.

This is an excerpt from my second book: it is still rough, so let me know if you see things that could be straightened out, edited, or rearranged.  

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The room was nearing 90 degrees for the third straight day, but it didn’t matter, Victor was used to the stagnant, acrid air by now.  The garage door was no longer operational, as his father Bert had converted the room into an apartment; albeit; he had left certain aspects of the transformation adjustable and temporary for the make-shift placement of his only son Victor.  That was six years ago. 

As it is, the only breathing the large room does now is through an attic fan, 16 feet up, rusted inoperable with time; gently breathing in and out through its idle blades at its leisure.  The cool July breezes would barely travel three feet through the small space before forgetting that cold should dissipate downward, instead opting for suicide at the first realization of its new dwelling. 

Many objects had committed suicide in this room.  Fleas, dust mites, dendrites, cockroaches, a few mice, legions of spermatozoon, and various varieties of bacterium, yet, despite the widespread loss of life dwelled a living, and surprisingly healthy being named Victor Mort. 

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Victor was struggling to stay asleep.  Deep in the recesses of his brain, he knew he had already missed his 12:30 p.m. deadline to join the Central European server playing a Call of Duty: Mi5 tournament.  He knew that there were probably 100 different players actively playing in it still, but Victor, or VctrSnipeAK47, wasn’t going to join in even if he could rustle up the energy to wake up.  Barely anyone in Europe would challenge him, and even the idea of embarrassingly annihilating Czechs and Italians with a crappy SPAS-12 shotgun wouldn’t improve his fame, and would probably damage his 5/1 kill to death ratio. 

Most of Europe would probably log off once they saw his VctrSnipeAK47 screen-name attempt to sign into the game queue.  Most gamers figured he had some sort of mod; a modified controller that allowed him to shot without aiming, some called it aimbot, newbs simply called it cheating.  But Victor wasn’t cheating.  He was just good; or rather experienced.  He had logged 47 days worth of play in the game in the five months since it was released.  And this was just one of seven active games Victor was perfecting. 

The Xbox 360 was probably the most mainstream of any of his platforms, followed by a seldom-played PlayStation 3; he hadn’t touched it since God of Gears 4 was released in November.  He grew tired of it in December. 

His main hobby, and the majority of his room was made up of four different 30” computer monitors, all linked in tandem so that he had a near 360 degree view of whatever room, or world, or universe that his software took place in.  He was always upgrading his PC so it would be at or near the top of the gaming pinnacle performance.  Parts, wires, screws, hard drives and components that had grown obsolete or burned up in reentry to reality laid carelessly on what used to be his living room coffee table.  His room could easily be subject to a police raid, as usually, at least two or three state or federal laws were being broken, although nothing past a misdemeanor status.  The violations could range from illegal downloading of copyrighted material to possession of trace amounts of controlled substances. 

Victor, despite his tech savvy connections and petty lawlessness, was not a hacker.  He experimented with it a little three years ago after he was frustrated by a clan of Japanese gamers who continued to school him at a popular game.  Victor was sure they were Modding, so he called a friend, Erik, who worked for the leading antivirus software company and together they hatched a worm based on the MyDoom virus, but one that could be shared on an entire network, so that anyone playing off that server would get infected.  Victor used an old computer, and routed through a myriad of IP addresses so that the whole operation looked like it was born in Baltimore, Maryland, over 3000 miles away from Victor’s garagment.  The virus didn’t work as planned, but it did its job of creating chaos and destroying that elite clan.  The next day, Erik was fielding phone calls from all over Japan, helping eradicate his own creation.  Evidently, the virus had reached some of the leading game designers of the industry who were frantic that their home computers, with vital R&D materials were being compromised.    

That fiasco cost Victor his game account, his back-up computer, his IT friend, and hours of lost sleep. He still felt paranoia at times for his role in resurrecting a zombie virus that still gives antivirus programs fits today, and hoped that no law enforcement agency was still searching for the root source.   

It would be easy for historians and biographers to look back into the life of Victor Mort and decide that this was the moment when Victor would crawl away from society and hide inside the shell that was his room.  But life, even in uninhabitable places like a Victor’s room, is much more complex than history majors or bad journalists give it credit for.  Even Victor didn’t know the exact causes to why he rarely stepped foot from his room.   Plenty of talented people hole up and have creative moments.  But more often recluses become insular and try to perfect something that is only beautiful to themselves.  Brian Wilson never wrote a song as beautiful as In My Room, even though ten years later he did actually lock himself into his room; J.D. Salinger never published anything after 1963, even though he continued to write for the last 47 years of his life; And Axl Rose neither brought democracy to China, nor a decent album to listen to, when he waited 14 years to deliver a new Guns N’ Roses album.   

Likewise, few would ever appreciate the kind of artist Victor Mort had become.  Innately talented were his instincts, reflexes, eye hand coordination, concentration, his dedication to his craft, his studying of the maps and weapons and skills of various characters with the dedication of the best generals to ever wage war on mankind.  It was a glorious sight, to see Victor’s CGI first person character in camo, warlock gear, futuristic garb, space suit, or whatever the game designers had established as dress, running through the visually stunning landscapes created on equally powerful computers by other skilled artists, casually, slyly, expertly dismantling the other teams game-plan, dispatching lives like a pest exterminator.  It was so cinematic, that every so often, game developers and producers would let Victor test their game platforms before they were released to the general public.  They would record his devastation of their gamebot characters and use it as a promo demo of the gameplay. 

Sometimes these demonstrations created controversy in the online world, as the lowest intelligence lifeforms on earth, YouTube commenters, would say that there was no way these demos were played by a real human being.  These same commenters, avid gamers with no educational sense, also claimed the holocaust never happened, cats the highest form of entertainment, and that Barak Obama was probably brothers with Osama bin Laden on other video clips.  These commenters were also recluses from mankind.  Not because of choice, they had been alienated because of their stupidity, pushed away to the side of society which had given up on disciplining their impulsivity, correcting their illogical delusions, and educating their wrong-thinking brains.  So now they sit in basements or attics or garages or state hospitals or correctional facilities and use their free time to spread their insanity like an internet virus through grammatically abhorrent and intelligence free posts on forums and blogs and any website with a comment section. They take pleasure in the anonymity of the internet.  They have no Facebook friends, as nobody who could put a picture or a name with the diatribes of these knuckledraggers would ever want to associate with them ever again. 

Unfortunately for Victor, it was these Cro-Magnon men who had made him a legend in the virtual world.  Their posts about his exploits, skills, techniques, potential ways he cheated, all turned Victor’s various screen-names into lore.   Victor had grown tired of these noobs; unskilled unintelligent gamers, and no longer enjoyed sneaking up and knifing them, or getting a headshot with a close quarters weapon just for the sake of the complete disadvantage it gave him.  Like an NBA player playing with his right arm behind his back against a middle school baller, it still was really no contest.  So once Victor mastered the controls and options of whatever game he was playing, he preferred to play in only closed server, invitation only matches against the best players in the world. 

Today’s match against players in Central Europe would’ve been a good teaser for tomorrow’s matchup against the English clan playing COD: Mi5.  Because the game used British secret service as its inspiration, it inspired every bored Arsenal FC hooligan, every Ian Fleming fanboy, every Guy Richie want-to-be to spend every weekend mastering the game to again prove the superiority of the British Empire.  The best had screen names with a clan name of –Bond or -007 or –Jaws, even

-pssyglre.   The best player Victor had ever played had the name WayneRooney#MU, and even though his clan stunk, that guy played Victor head to head as hard as his soccer famed namesake played for the British National Team. 

The room stunk.  Even Victor was aware of it, even in his semi-sleep state. He needed to take a shower.  Mentally, he had found a way to phase out the high temperatures, the stagnant air, the slow decay of microwaved food, but his own stink was bearable for only so long.  It could be forgiven in the midst of a tournament or timed level.  Rarely would the arms rise above the relaxed state, holding the controller or keyboard or contraption in the reclined position.  His body, however, still found the room unlivable.  Its glands expelled what little protein rich water was available through the pores (for Victor was often dehydrated), which rapidly invited bacteria, who loved to feast on the briny solution in dark unpleasant areas.  Animals are attracted to this smell, and even some humans believe that their mate’s chemical smell, or pheromones may have played a distinctive part in their pairing up.  But Victor’s smell was the leading cause of the suicidal tendencies in his room; no animal or mate would ever find it appealing, yet bacteria thrived on it.