Some door nearby had to have a lock or a place to hide. First, he checked the door across the hall. Of course the handle didn't budge. He thought he already knew that. The next room down the hall was a bathroom, and that wasn't going to help.
The next door was more than just locked. It wouldn't even budge. It had a handle, but the handle felt like a prop in his hand. It was very solidly there, just a piece of backdrop.
What was funny was that it made a rattling sound even though it didn't move in the slightest. He didn't have time to examine it further. He had to get to the next door.
Just as he reached another locked office, there was a flurry of fresh shooting. It sounded like two or three different guns firing at each other this time. Adrenaline flooded into his system. Scuffling madly, he went to the next door. This one didn't even have a handle; instead, there was a smudge on the door, where the handle should have been, resembling a badly mapped JPEG.
"What the hell," he muttered, before ducking as more gunshots slammed past his ears. A team of five security guards turned a nearby corner. As Jerry looked on, one of the guards fell to the sound of six or seven shots. He was dead, no doubt.
Panic gripped him at last. He started running frantically, feeling at the walls for any escape, any hole in the system.
He found one. One moment he was in a dimly lit corridor; the next he was surrounded by a vast, brilliant white. He didn't have time to look around.
"God damn it. Killed by the Guardians."
His joints went comically floppy and he sank into infinity.
***
"What's that one, Tom?" Karen asked, peering over into his cubicle.
"Oh, just a little character programming," he replied with a wry smile.
"A little? Man, that looks complicated." In fact, it was one of the most complex things she'd seen on a screen, and she didn't exactly know what language it was in. Tom had always been way ahead of her, way ahead of everyone in the office. If he weren't always so distracted with his own projects, he'd probably have left them all behind years ago.
"It is," he said in response. He'd been frantically at work on something for weeks now, though Karen guessed he spent very little time doing his designated work on the game. "It's ... very complicated. I don't know if I really understand it, but it works."
"What works?"
"Jerry."
"Just a character?" she asked. His enthusiasm was catching, and she felt curiosity bubbling up in her.
"Just a background character you might not even see."
"He's breaking the game!" she blurted out a little too loudly.
The programmers around them paused in their work, heads turning and fingers halting. Then they went right back to their screens.
"It's his job," Tom said. "He's a game tester in a game. He's perfect."
"Perfect?" Karen asked. Her mouth was drying out. It couldn't be. A character couldn't think like a person.
"Perfect," he repeated.
Richard Poskozim is a freelance contributor for The Escapist.
