It was all in the Tulip. The technology, the records, the scientists. The Twins. Up there at the top floors, what, sixty-seven? Sixty-eight? She’d been rather distracted the last time she was in the Tulip, hard to recall the exact floors where the Twins lived and looked out over the concrete and haze of the city.

A single skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan.

Her breath came out in a cloud of ice crystals. She looked around, feeling obscurely guilty, but no one in the sparse crowd of tourists or the crew at work around a steaming manhole was looking at her.

Under her breath, Plath made a sound. It was the sound of a slow-motion explosion.

Lystra Reid watched Plath as she looked up at the Freedom Tower and knew exactly what she was thinking. Exactly. She was contemplating destruction, yeah, yeah, yeah. Destruction. She was envisioning it already.

That was quick. But then, if you want great results, hire great people. Even if they are a wee bit nuts.

Lystra had a Starbucks latte in her hand. One of the things she would miss, she supposed: convenient and at least somewhat drinkable coffee. There were things about this game space, this paradigm, that she would regret losing. But it was never good to become complacent.

Time for the 2.0. As there was a Grand Theft Auto 6, there must inevitably come a day when GTA 6 was done and a GTA 7 must be born. Even the greatest game

was eventually played out. When you had squeezed all the fun out of Portal you needed a Portal 2, 3, 4 …

“Yeah. Yeah.”

She shivered—it was cold—and tossed the cup into a trash can. Her newest tattoo was itching, and she scratched her rib cage discreetly. She was just thirty feet or so from Plath. Plath was, what, fifteen years her junior? But they could have been sisters, perhaps, in a different world. Maybe, come to think of it, they would be, in this new game Lystra was creating.

She acknowledged her own loneliness. Emotional honesty did not frighten her. There had been a price to pay for becoming what she was: rich, successful, powerful beyond what anyone would guess. Arguably at this point, the most powerful person on Earth.

No, the truth never scared Lystra.

Lonely? True. Strange? True, yeah. Yeah. Crazy? Well, once upon a time, yeah, but no longer.

She closed her eyes and replayed the memory of seeing madness overtake Sandra Piper. God, that had been intense. The eye-stabbing thing, wow, that was the kind of detail you got only from seeing things firsthand.

She remembered a girl trying to strangle herself with a bedsheet. Crazy people did crazy things. Back in the day, back in the old days, yeah. But never anything to match the weirdness of watching a famous actress stabbing her own eyes. Now that was crazy.

Sad to think that she would have to retreat soon and watch the endgame play out from a distance. But not yet. There would be many rich, visceral experiences to come before she headed south.

And then?

And then she would play the new game and win that as well. Or not. She might not master the new game. She might even lose.

The idea made her smile. Her father had taught her to understand that life was a walk on a tightrope and death was the ground. Sooner or later, no matter how agile you were, the ground would claim you.

He’d been full of gloomy pronouncements back in the old days, sitting in lawn chairs outside their trailer as the carnival shut down for the night. They would sit there, the two of them, the man and the child, as the lights went out on the Mad Mouse and the Ferris wheel. They would sit and sip their drinks—bourbon for her father, unsweetened iced tea for her—and acknowledge the nods and the weary greetings as the other carnies headed for their own digs.

The nights had almost always been warm and muggy. The carnival mostly played the south: Baton Rouge, Bogalusa, Hattiesburg, Vicksburg. She’d seldom been cold, which was maybe why the cold attracted her now. Cold was clean. Hot was sweaty and dirty.

Back then, back before the train wreck that was in her future, Lystra had wanted two things: For her mother to come back. And to be able someday to take over a couple of the sideshow games. An old man named Sprinkle operated the coin toss, the dart throw, the water pistol, and the ring toss. He let his games get shabby, refusing to spring for so much as a few cans of paint.

Lystra thought she could do better. She could make the games livelier and more profitable. The key was to make them a bit easier. Let the marks take home a teddy bear occasionally; it was good advertising. Run an honest game, attract more players, pay out more in prizes—but offer more levels, more depth, and make more money in the end.

“Yeah!” Lystra said to no one. It made her smile to think how even then, even when she was a lonely seven-year-old, she was ambitious.

But yes, lonely. She had always wanted a younger sister. Someone like Plath, maybe. Someone to look up to her. Someone to talk to and play with.

Even a brother would have been welcome.

Interesting thought.

“A game within a game?” Lystra muttered under her breath.

Would it add spice? Yes. Would it complicate the overall plan? She walked it through step-by-step in her mind and concluded that it would have only a small downside risk.

Tags: Michael Grant BZRK Science Fiction
Source: readsnovelonline.net