Mallory
by Leonard Richardson

Vijay had been playing video games his whole life, but he'd never really become addicted to one until the first incarnation of Fuck Me. Adding an element of real-time strategy to the already-frenetic Gestalt Warrior combined construction, emergent behavior, and blob-themed violence in a way that both Vijay and the Selfish GAME found satisfying.

Game addiction burns hot and fast, unless the game itself keeps changing. Having spawned Fuck Me, the Selfish GAME shuffled its pedigree and came out with Super Fuck Me. This led to Ms. Fuck Me, which begat Fuck Me Heels, Fuck Me Millennium Edition, Let's Have A Meaningful Relationship, and other profane heralds of blob megadeath culminating in Fuck Me Harder, which was too complex for anyone not skilled at earlier iterations. Fuck Me Harder put Vijay's brain through strange transformations and he did not do well on the phone while playing it.

"Yes, hello, Rodney," he said, cradling the fake cell phone against his neck. He reached for the laptop keyboard, waving away the dangling cord that connected the Sabertooth set to his real cell phone. "Is this a random call? 'Cause I'm kind of busy." Vijay had met Rodney at a conference he'd attended only to give a paper about the SimShitty fab layout program. Their only shared interest was making meaningless phone calls to fool NSA data miners.

"Is that noise real?" asked Rodney. "It sounds like glitch metal."

"I'm playing a game," said Vijay. The Selfish GAME did not understand soundtracks or sound effects, and the games it produced were noisefests. Vijay always left the sound on and tuned it out; there was nobody around to bother him about it.

"You're busy-what game sounds like that?"

"Fuck Me Harder."

"Is that the name or..."

"Yeah." Vijay picked up a scroll and destroyed all blue blobs within a certain radius. He instantly regretted this since his own blue blobs had been playing an important role in a pincer movement.

"So, no, it's not an Entropy call. I called you to ask if you want to help me test the radio friendly unit shifter."

Vijay paused the game and stared at the frozen LCD, repeatedly projecting blob movements for the next few seconds before snapping back to the present. "The what now?"

"My signal retransmitter, for Pyromancy. I've been posting about it on my anonoblog for months."

"Oh. I skipped those because I hate circuit diagrams." Actually Vijay had been skipping most of what Rodney posted on his blogs.

"Cretin! So I'm going to try it out on this call. It'll sound like we're talking through a vocoder."

"It's an effects pedal for radio and phones? That's going to get you into Pyromancy?"

"Oh, it's extremely illegal. It clobbers all sorts of FCC rules."

"But you could make a legal one, couldn't you, that worked like the Sabertooth?"

"Yes, I could, if I wanted to mess up my own calls. This one messes up other peoples'. You ready?"

Vijay was neither ready nor un-. "Hmm, how is this possible? Doesn't it use a lot of power?"

"No more than your tiny cell phone needs to broadcast on the same frequencies. RTF circuit diagrams. Here we go!"

Vijay reached for the keyboard again and played half a second of Fuck Me Harder before his headset bleated static even worse than the soundtrack to the game. He dropped the fake cell phone like a piece of bread he'd just discovered was moldy.

The noise stopped. "Hey, you still there?" came Rodney's voice from the Sabertooth.

"Yeah, way to go, mister circuit diagram. You messed with an encrypted phone call and you turned it to garbage."

"No, this is actually good, because it demonstrates the value of voice encryption. I can't overpower someone's encrypted call and change what they're saying. The Pyromancy guys love the public service angle."

"You still want to try it out?" asked Vijay. "Turn off the encryption on your end." He held his thumb to the side of the Sabertooth.

"You can't just turn off encryption!" said Rodney, as if Vijay had suggested removing the condom.

"Why not? You're not going to say anything during the test. Mallory already knows you called me. Who cares if she hears unencrypted noise instead of encrypted noise?"

"Forget it," said Rodney. "I'll buy two throwaway phones and call one with the other."

"Hey, whatever floats your boat. Let me know how it goes."

"Fine. Are you working on anything interesting?"

Vijay took inventory. "I'm supposed to be fixing bugs for my boss. But he's away at a Demo so I'm working on the game. Now that you mention it, I think it would make a good Pyromancy entry."