Chapter Two

Dirge

"Hey, End!"

"Don't call me that!"

"But its your handle! Everyone needs a handle, man!" the boy's handle was Mac because his real name was Macmillan McMoria and he was an Apple geek.

"Then think of a less stupid one."

"End is... you know... the End! Of life! Of everything! Of the Universe, man!" the tall, pale-skinned boy with cobalt blue dreadlocks and a sleeveless leather jacket waved his tattooed arms in a vague motion that Lunarian assumed he truly believed to be an accurate representation of a Universe-wide Apocalypse, "That all things must come to!"

"An end is also someone's butt."

"If we'd wanted to call you Someone's Butt we'd have called you Someone's Butt." said the other girl, who had coppery skin and red hair, and wore a t-shirt and baseball cap with the Game Over logo on, something she had been given by an emergency relief team in Bulk Departure when she appeared on the Screen not wearing clothes, tried to gamble away some Continues for clothes and lost. Her name was Twinkie, for a reason she still had yet to satisfactorily explain to Lunarian.

Lunarian herself was tall now – very tall. She had sprung up like the Continue Shop's sales after a mass genocide. Not that the Continue Shop ever organised mass genocide on purpose. They organised themselves without help, not unlike Dirge Rock concerts. She wasn't exactly wiry. She was what wiry would be if the wires were organised by someone who was very good at separating out wires to stop them getting tangled and tying them together in a way that kept the necessary ones close to each other. She had neatly cropped her hair to rest around the nape of her neck and wore a top hat over it, as well as a black dinner jacket with a silver brooch in the shape of a skull and crossbones. She had the appearance of a voodoo queen, sneaking her skeletons into the feast. She looked her age. Not many people knew it, but she would spend the next few centuries looking that way. She had already discovered that physical appearance was fully under your own control on the Game Over Screen. It had to be that way, so that people could be reconstructed when they appeared with no arms or legs, or in their component parts, or with disgusting flesh eating diseases that would distract the staff when they were trying to register them.

"Thank you." said Lunarian in a flat tone.

"Hey, End!" repeated the boy.

Lunarian sighed, "What?"

"Hydover are playing in the Boxes tonight!"

"Yes?" Lunarian nodded to confirm the information. Band times were the only things she had trouble finding out about. They were organised behind the scenes, without the consent of the staff of Game Over, and the Computer didn't bother storing information about anything so trivial as a human form of entertainment.

"You gonna be there, right?"

"Unless I have something else I need to do."

"What the hell else do YOU have to do?" the girl yelled, "You know where we get the green mushrooms this week?"

"Warehouse 3 has a fresh supply. They haven't locked their second auxiliary waste tunnel."

"Eww, we gotta go through the trash again?"

"It serves you right for using 1-Ups recreationally." said Lunarian, "You could cause a shortage, you know, and then people who actually need them to revive won't be able to. If you were found to be the cause of this, you could be..."

"Removed from the screen, yeah, I know." she sighed, "Spare me the lecture."

"It could also cause you data damage, if its one of the imitations being circulated, or make you vulnerable to a virus."

"Then help us find pure ones!"

"Its also possible to become tolerant to 1-Ups." said Lunarian, "This can cause problems when you resurrect."

"What do you care about that? You tell us all the time that you're not returning to life!"

"Which is why I do not touch 1-Ups or Continues."

"Which do you not understand, the concept of enhancing your enjoyment of an event or the concept of enjoying yourself at all?"

It was a common theory that Lunarian was an android, that she didn't have emotions. They had never seen her demonstrate any, except for her fascination with and fear of deletion that verged upon paranoia and obsession which didn't prove a thing - even machines didn't want to be deleted. She could just be a faulty android. An android Dirgehead wouldn't pretend not to be a Dirgehead, though, or be seen dead hanging out with a bunch of stupid fleshy meatbags. Maybe she didn't take Green Mushrooms because she genuinely couldn't enhance the music any more than it was logically possible to, not because she couldn't feel joy, or because she had a pathological aversion to disobeying authority. Maybe she didn't feel joy because there was no space left for anything else but the finality of the danse macabre. Maybe she didn't live in the independent district – or anywhere else anyone could find - because she knew somewhere better. You never knew whether to worship her as some kind of paragon of the old school spirit (which was difficult, as Dirgehead culture was still quite new back then) or shun her as an informant. Not that Lunarian would understand the concept of an informant or why it was bad.

Lunarian was just damn difficult to understand.

"Hydover is good enough music not to need its effects enhancing." said Lunarian, looking bored by now, "Poor quality music is not worth listening to."

Mac nodded his agreement. If they were out of Green Mushrooms, he probably more or less knew what he was agreeing to. It was the one thing they could all agree on: the music. Game Over's music. The final curtain that streamed inexorably through the Universe and the zombies who were vessels for it. That was what Dirgeheads did. They settled on the Game Over Screen, listened to the music and wrote their own versions, cranked up to 5 until they overheated and set the Game Over Screen on fire with brighter shadows of itself.

There was something about the music on the Game Over Screen that said, not 'everything you know is over' but 'you can never go back'. Otherwise, people would stop coming back. It was, as Mac said whenever he tried to explain it, the difference between over and Over.

"Then you'll be there?" he asked.

"Of course."

"Awesome!" he said, "See you later, End."

Lunarian crawled into the ventilation shaft – she didn't like using the main passages – and went to find some more Game Gear batteries, as well as to see what else she could discover and inform the central computer that Hydover were playing. The staff didn't approve of their music but the computers could sometimes be persuaded to surrender a few sound channels from the local background music control systems. They liked Hydover. They understood the natural overlying flow of the ambient music and didn't try to bend it too much. They also told her that there were several shoals of fish and a pod of dolphins in Bulk Departure.

She had never seen a dolphin before, so she went to look. They were relaxing to watch. They reminded her of screensavers, the way they just swam around in patterns she couldn't decipher. The staff were amusing to watch as well, as they tried to work out what to do with the large glass tank in the middle of their environment. While dolphins were commonplace on the Game Over Screen, they didn't usually turn up in great enough numbers to be redirected to Bulk Departure. In the end, they decided to sprinkle the Continues into the tank like fish food, hope the unusual lighting conditions wouldn't cause them to reverse age or something and just leave them to do whatever else dolphins needed to do on their own.

That evening, she was there, slightly too early for comfort as usual, sat on top of a pile of wooden crates, one of the remnants of the old industrial district that this used to be, back when the Game Over Screen was under construction. The stage used to be a platform for lifting larger objects to the higher levels, although nobody could reactivate whatever it was that would send the contents upwards, either physically, using antigravity or short range teleportation, which would have made an awesome special effect. She let her long legs dangle over the side of the crate and leaned over her Game Gear as if to shield it from the unknown force she sometimes felt was coming to take it away, snatching her own soul up with it. She didn't quite feel comfortable in this atmosphere, a changeover between the wistful abandonment of the empty district, when the old beta souls could populate the place, and the moment when the music began to play and a death as vibrant as life filled the place. People were milling around, chatting, drinking, listening to the backing music that was just about audible and wasn't really worth her turning the volume of the Game Gear down for. It had its own contribution to make.

"Hey, End, reserving a space for us already?"

She paused the game and looked up. It was Mac. Mac was there when she looked around a lot more than usual lately. She wasn't sure why.

"I bought you a drink." he said. She looked at it. It would spill over the Game Gear, the way it was positioned now.

"Nice sound there." he continued, "Better than the shit playing now."

She moved the drink out of the way. Hoisting himself up onto the top crate, he sat himself down beside her. She could get mildly drunk on her own, with Game Gear waves.

"Not that I need to tell you this kind of thing," he said, "You know better than me. You always get the music right. You're, like, the End... hey, End?"

"What?" she was becoming increasingly irritated by her nickname.

"What are you gonna do?"

"What do you mean?"

"Its gotta go somewhere."

"It already has. Its gone here."

"You're really not ever leaving the Screen, are you?" he said after a short pause. She shook her head.

"Hey, End..."

"Please stop calling me that."

"End, you a flatliner?"

"WHAT? No, I am NOT a flatliner!" her eyes contained the dark fury of an iris deadlock opening into the deletory void, "Don't go spreading rumours like that! You'll get people deleted. I can prove I'm not anyway, so you'll only be getting yourself and your friends deleted."

'Flatliner' was Dirgehead slang for someone who had run out of Continues. There were several of them hiding in the community. The Dirgehead community wouldn't report them unless the staff already knew and were threatening other members of the community. Lunarian had never told them how many Continues she carried, or anything else about how she had died. It was etiquette not to ask, except that everyone found out sooner or later, like what crime you had committed to put you in prison. Lunarian already knew that Twinkie had been shot in an argument about gambling debt and Mac had been hit on the head by a computer falling from a very high shelf.

"I told you, its so I don't run out of batteries."

"Then why don'tcha go an' live in a battery factory? There's a big one where I come from. All the batteries here are dead anyway." she gave him a questioning look, "Its a joke. You know, Game Over Screen. Dead. Hey, End..."

"What?"

"Are ya gonna work for the Screen?"

"Am I going to WHAT?"

She looked genuinely surprised. Nothing much surprised her. He smiled, a small acknowledgement of a minor victory. He had elicited two emotional responses from her today: surprise and anger. He had almost broken the world record.

"Why would I need to work for them?"

"'Cause the Staff are the only people who don't ever leave Game Over." he said, "An' 'cause you're almost halfway there already. You know everything about this place, man. They're sayin' that's why you're learnin' all this stuff. Especially about the law. An' why you don't leave. You're either runnin' from somethin' – most likely the axe – or you wanna work for 'em."

"WHO is spreading these rumours?" she yelled, "Its dangerous to spread rumours. People start thinking things that aren't true. You should all get your facts straight."

"That's why I'm askin'."

"I just want to be on the Game Over Screen, okay? I like it here. There's nothing for me outside." she wrapped her arms around her legs. She felt herself shivering a little. The cold was returning. The cold and the silence. The dreadful stillness... the dull, blank space in time when nothing was happening... the grey was shrouding her eyes again... her hands growing numb as she lost connection with her body as well as her mind... she reached for her Game Gear. Her shaking hands loosened the battery case and two of the batteries fell out, rolling off the crate and falling. Mac caught them for her and presented them in the palm of his hand like keys to a magic kingdom. She took them, placed them back in their sacred alcoves and turned up the volume to maximum. The digital sine wave cut through the fog like a broadsword of solid blue light.

"I don't believe you're here for no reason, man." he said, "Not you. Twinkie says none of us are here for nothin'. The staff think we're a buncha dropouts, kids with nowhere else to go, but Twinkie says we're death's new chosen people. They're on their way out. Game Over ain't those lines of letters an' numbers any more, man, its a song. We gotta get ready for when we take over, man. You're the one. You're the true Dirgehead. They're all sayin' it."

"They say a lot of things." she smiled at him, an odd, slightly eerie smile, like that of a doll, "But, if you think that's my destiny, I don't think it will be fulfilled if I work for the Screen. In fact... I don't think you understand what it means to work for the Game Over Screen at all."

"Hm? What's this? Some more Lunarian knowledge?" she hated that 'Lunarian knowledge' was a thing, although at least it was a time when they used her name.

"Game Over staff look powerful, but they have less control over what they do than anyone in the Universe. They're peripherals of their computers." she held up her Game Gear as if it was an example, "Servitors of the control systems of the Universe. If you want to have a destiny at all, you should stay clear of them."

"Good advice." said Twinkie, who had walked up to them, "Guy from way back got run over by one wheeling a trolley once. Broke his ankle. End, you okay? Need batteries?"

"I always carry enough batteries."

"If WE want a destiny at all..." echoed Mac, "Are ya sayin' ya really aren't one of us?"

"We are all. None. Of it." she said, then her eyes pixellated and she was in a trance.

The band began to play.

The first few notes, crystal clear as a winter's night sky, brought with them a tidal wave of darkness. Soon they were adrift on a sea of unending ending, the heavenly ecstasy that was synchronisation with the sine wave of the Universe. Lunarian's world dissolved into an infinity of pixels, as many as she could divide by zero when she chewed the Null, that rose up and were yanked offscreen into the forces that played in the gaps between spaces. The repetition was all. The circle was unbroken. The zero. The endless zero...

She felt a mind touch hers. In her third eye, it looked like a crackling oblong of several overlapping shades of blue. She recognised it as her Game Gear, connected to her by a link stronger even than when it was directly fused to her central nervous system during the critical period. She had allowed it entry into her soul and now it would dance around her eternally in its own flight pattern, remembering the heady days of high Haldorcia when it had wings and was free. When she walked upright through corridors of purple steelglass, every step matching the system clock of the Universe perfectly.

There was another mind too. A mind too vast for her to comprehend, one that couldn't fit inside the whole space of the song. It brushed against her. Her vision of it was only a moment of it, a byte of its memory banks, but then that was more than the entire Universe was right now. But as it lingered over her, she grabbed onto it and clung on with all her strength to avoid being crashed by the gravity of its existence or flung into the outer darkness, not knowing where she was going, only that it was the way to her answer... the egg in the sky...