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“This game rocks.” Casper crouched behind a low wall in front of a dirt road that ran through a cinderblock town, and listened to small-arms fire and exploding grenades.

Most of the buildings were perforated with large holes or were missing walls, and Casper could see figures materializing inside. One second there was nothing, and then, instantly, there was a squad of men in rags, loaded-up with combat gear.

Pickup trucks with tripod-mounted heavy weapons in their beds passed in groups of three.

Most of the men carried AKs, and were dressed like caricatures of third world militia. Some of them hefted rocket propelled grenade launchers and ran with cloth bags on their backs, full of bulbous-tipped ammo. Casper watched one fall to a sniper's bullet from nowhere. There was another body beside him, and in death they assumed the same pose. Exactly the same. Identical. Looking closer, Casper saw that their outfits were identical too, before one of them slowly sank, passing through the dusty ground, and left no trace that he had ever been. They only made it twenty yards from where they spawned before getting fragged. Spawn-killing is so cheesy, Casper thought, making a note to avoid the path those two had chosen.

He heard Catherine's voice from outside the game, and it sounded like she was all business. “Where are you?” she asked.

Catherine couldn't see the game because Casper was wearing the only working headset that Atanaas the pimp had in his van. They struck a deal to rent his van and gaming rig for the same hourly rate as he charged for the girls, although he'd been a little more reluctant to rent out his gaming rig to strangers than he was to rent out the girls. It was obvious which the frag-loving pimp was more attached to, but money was money, and since they paid well, Atanaas had left Casper and Catherine alone in his van with his gear for twenty minutes.

“Tell me what you see,” Catherine demanded.

Casper was driving the pimp's FragNet rig because Catherine couldn't hold a real pistol and a simulated Kalashnikov at the same time and she didn't trust Casper not to run. “I'm outside Spawn,” Casper said.

An unmarked attack helicopter flew three hundred yards in front of Casper's position, and hovered low, chewing away at an unseen position with its turret-mounted chain-gun until it loitered too low for too long, and took heavy weapons fire. Smoking and spinning uncontrollably, it dipped below the buildings, and a fireball followed by dense black smoke marked the spot where it crashed. Near the pillar of smoke Casper could see the blue, partially collapsed dome of a mosque and its sole minaret.

“Can you see the mosque?” Catherine asked.

“Yeah, I see the mosque. It's ahead a little over three hundred yards ahead, on my two o'clock.” A glowing chevron with the words, 'Objective A - 312 yards' hung over the mosque.

“Avoid the mosque,” Catherine advised, adding, “We don't have time to wait for you to respawn if you get fragged.” The sound of the weapons chatter, and the excitement beckoned to Casper, and he crossed the street in the direction of the mosque anyway, since he knew Catherine couldn't see. “Go left,” she advised, “Avoid the main battle. Tell me when you can see the West edge of town.”

“Wilco,” Casper acknowledged, some disappointment evident in his voice. Casper loved historical first-person-shooters, and he'd never even heard of this one. “What's this one called again?”

“Surge.”

“Is this supposed to be Iraq 3, the corporate contractor war?” he asked. Catherine didn't bother to answer.

He crossed two more blown-to-crap blocks. The models were a little crude, but this was a homebrew mod running on an old game engine, and for homebrew it was Sweet. There were a few other AK toting figures on this block just camping, waiting for someone to walk into their sights. Casper jogged across another open street, and dust kicked up around his feet as faraway, newbie snipers wasted ammunition. He crossed through one of the larger buildings to the next block. Then he saw movement across the street. Contractors.

They were wearing vintage body-armor and had expensive, American-made Barret rifles. The Contractors were ducking in and out of cover, moving up, in two by two cover formation. A black-clad, helmeted figure poked his rifle over a half-wall trying to get a bead on something, anything. Casper guessed he hadn't gotten a kill yet, and was eager enough to do some stupid shit to get one.

Through the swiss-cheese wall Casper could see an entire squad unwisely forming up behind the over-eager player. An insurgent's RPK machine gun opened up from a window directly above Casper's position. Casper flattened himself to the dirt, and crawled to the thickest, least shot-to-shit piece of wall he saw. He couldn't resist a peek; there might be an easy frag.

The RPK had the entire squad of Contractors pinned across the street. The insurgent machine gunner above fired burst after burst, and Casper watched perfectly shiny cartridge casings fall in front of him and disappear after they bounced off the dirt like it was concrete.

Casper knew the RPK's suppressive fire didn't have the same tactical effect in the gameworld as it did in the real world, and that if he chose this moment to run, then the Contractors would still pop up and try to score a frag. It was just too tempting to resist when the only penalty to getting shot was simply respawning in the rear of the battle with a slightly degraded K:D – kill to death ratio.

Casper was in a hurry; he didn't have that luxury.

“Are you there yet?” he heard Catherine ask.

“Almost,” Casper lied. Every time the RPK gunner paused, one of the Contractors would decide that the insurgent's ammo drum was empty and that this was the chance to frag the machine gunner. They died like that, one by one. Casper thought they were all dead, so he ran flat out across the street, but when he did, the last, unseen Contractor couldn't resist trying to cap him with wild auto-fire from his Barrett.

Casper tossed a 'nade, and managed to steal a frag from the RPK gunner, whose bullets were already tearing the Contractor's body armor to shreds when Casper's grenade detonated. It was larcenous, but shit, man, Casper thought, I gotta get at least one.

He ran flat out, down a narrow space between buildings, and then down a short hill. He was clear of the town. There was nothing but identical shrubs and boulders in the open terrain. It was bordered by cliffs too steep to allow player ascent. “Okay, I'm there.”

“Finally,” Catherine said. “Okay, Ms. Aziz, see the tunnel set into the cliffs? Go through, and tell me when you're on the other side.”

Casper ran. When he emerged on the other side of the tunnel, in another section of the map, he saw fields, a dry riverbed that was really just a ditch, and huts, lots of mud huts. A smaller, grayed-out chevron hovered over the huts and named them, 'Objective E'.

There was no movement, save a goat tied to a post that repeated the same grass-eating animation every ten seconds or so. Casper shot it and got credit for a second frag. He laughed at that. “I'm outside a village. I shot the goat.”

Catherine rolled her eyes. Everyone shoots the fucking goat. “See the bridge over the ditch? Go to the middle, and tell me when you get there.”

“Yeah, I see it,” The bridge was a curved Asian design, and looked like it should be in Japan instead of Iraq. Casper recognized it as a model borrowed from another game about ninjas. “I'm there.”

“Okay, listen carefully because you have to do this right, or the game server will drop you and ban you,” Catherine warned him, before giving him an undocumented sequence of commands.

Thousands had played this homebrew mod, but only a few knew the real reason why it existed.

“Drop your primary weapon,” she instructed, and Casper watched his rifle fall to the wooden bridge, without any bouncing, and stick like glue.

Sloppy code, he thought.

“Good,” Catherine said, “Now drop your secondary weapon,”

Casper watched his sidearm fall beside the rifle, and stick to the bridge.

“Good, now throw an HE grenade at your feet, and crouch before it detonates.”

“Really?”

“Really. Do it quickly,” Catherine commanded.

Casper threw the grenade straight at his feet, and it stuck to the ground in the same surreal manner as the guns. Casper crouched over the grenade, just before it detonated with a bright flash and boom. His view was now from the ground. “I'm dead.” he said, disappointed.

“Wait,” Catherine advised.

He couldn't do anything but wait, and then the ground rose up, and Casper sank into it just like every dead body did in this gameworld.

There was darkness everywhere below him. Nothing. He was falling into Nothing. Casper looked up and saw an utterly unobstructed view of the gameworld. He could see the far off battle for the mosque and the explosions and the tiny bodies. They were far away, but he could still make out hundreds of them, pressed against the ground in what appeared to be less than ten distinct death poses.

They were sinking into the ground, too, but the bodies from the battle stopped and hung in mid-air after a descent of only twenty or thirty feet. They hovered there in a sort of limbo and collected in what would have been great piles had they not been overlapping and occupying the same space. After about a minute, each fallen body blinked out of existence, but there were always more dead falling slowly to limbo before vanishing.

Casper fell far beyond them into the blackness at the speed of a parachuting man. As he got further from the surface, the sky disappeared from view first, then the buildings were gone. Then the living were gone and the hovering dead, too.

He was alone in the black. Without any point of reference, there was no longer any sense of motion. Casper felt inexplicable trepidation and a lump in his throat. It's just a game, he told himself silently, but the symbolism of his otherworldly descent into Nothing had an effect on Casper. He shuddered and then twitched involuntarily when he heard Catherine's voice ask, “Do you see it yet?”

“See... see what?” Casper was embarrassed at how shaky, how uncertain his voice was. He would have been more embarrassed if he'd seen Catherine smiling her thin-lipped grin because she knew exactly where Casper was, and she had a good idea why his voice shook.

He thought he saw something, then it was gone, making him doubt his vision.

It was there, he was sure now, an almost imperceptible glint. It became a solid dot of light, then it became a shape. His eyes held it tightly, grateful for its form in the void. It grew larger, and as it did, his eyes were able to define it. Casper was falling slower now, and falling, he could see, towards a church.

It was plain, made of wood, and its surface appeared weathered and worn. The texture of the crackled paint was more sophisticated than everything in the gameworld above it. In the crude Iraq 3 Surge gameworld, the basic texture patterns had been simply tiled over the buildings and the landscape, and the edges were blended by the software to hide them. Here, there was only one building, and Casper could see that great care had been taken in its modeling and texture.

It demanded, not only understanding, but also a sense of poetry, to create an algorithm that successfully generated a pattern capable of passing, even for a moment, as the wabisabi, weather-crackled paint of an old New England church. An algorithm capable of creating the illusion of reality's seemingly random pattern, a mathematical order that can produce a sense of Wu Li, a pattern of organic energy, the order of chaos, is a rare thing, indeed. Discerning human eyes, steeped for many years in the weirdness and wonder of the world's unpredictable nature, cannot explain this random order, but they know it when they see it, and they know it can't be easily faked.

Casper felt the poetry of it, and he thought, Serious Kung Fu.

As Casper settled to the ground softly and silently, he found that he was still crouched on one knee, just as he had been as the grenade exploded. The church was beautiful, entirely inexplicable, yet simultaneously, paradoxically undeniable. Rising to his feet, Casper responded with a singular utterance that described the experience of its apprehension with more completeness and verity than most theologians had ever managed when describing anything of that nature. “Awesome,” he said out loud, “Fucking Awesome.”

Catherine could sense what Casper felt, and she noted that she'd never really felt it herself. There was envy in her heart. “Well,” her voice prodded him. “What the hell are you waiting for? Go inside, you idiot.”

Casper walked forward and reached for the handles of the two wood doors, both covered in the marvelous crackled paint that reminded Casper of crashing waves, authentically broken-in bluejeans, and the shapes of sand dunes, all at once.

He cast the doors open without any fear, and inside was a modest church interior bathed in streaming sunlight that poured through narrow, tall windows. Casper wondered why the light had not been visible from outside the building. There was an altar and a pulpit, as he expected. There were rows of pews, and the grain of their oiled wood shone in the sun with such complexity and depth that Casper's eyes actually focused an inch inside them. When he reached out to touch the curved back of a pew, he was surprised when his hand made contact with the wood before he expected to. “It isn't real,” Casper told himself, “It's a game.”

“Players make a game real,” said an unnoticed man in black. He sat in a pew in the second row, with his back turned to Casper, who suddenly realized that he'd spoken his thoughts aloud.

“Who are you talking to? Is he there?” Catherine demanded. “Give me that.”

She ripped the headset from Casper's eyes and ears, and, like he'd been cruelly woken from a dream, he was back in the pimp's van, shaken both by the abrupt rudeness of the transition and the sorrow he felt at being ripped from that sublime place.

Catherine held the headset to the side of her head, and experienced the gameworld with one eye and one ear. This way, as she spoke to the man in black, she could keep an eye on Casper. Catherine spoke like she was ordering a pizza, and said, “We are lost sheep, one is white, two are gray, one is... wild.”

Casper couldn't hear the man in black respond, and he didn't like only hearing one side of a conversation, so he ignored it. He already missed the strange, hidden piece of the gameworld that he'd been torn from, and he reached for the jade bowl in his pocket, tapping the ash out on the floor of the pimp's van. Casper slid a piece of the pipe's bottom aside, along carefully carved grooves, to reveal a storage cache. He loaded a freshie and quickly lit it.

“Mrs. Murphy's Chinese Theater,” Casper heard Catherine say as he exhaled, and filled the van with a better smell than it had. “Thank you, we are grateful,” Catherine said to the unseen. She cut the connection to the FragNet server and glared at the baked car thief with all the hatred she harbored for the unjust god who had never reached out to her like she thought He had just reached out to Casper.