Away We Go - Emil Ostrovski Page 0,23
vodka, drop in a couple ice cubes, sniff, and wince.
I’ll never understand why Marty and Alice do what they do. What good is all that work when you’ll probably go away long before you finish your footnotes, have your name listed on AwayWeGo alongside your already departed friends and peers, right beside this month’s list of Age of Rome’s high scores?
Speaking of Age of Rome, I load the game up to distract myself from the mediocrity of my dinner.
No, Age of Rome, I don’t want you to challenge my AwayWeGo friends to beat my campaign score.
No, Age of Rome, I don’t want you to post my battle results to my AwayWeGo profile.
No, Age of Rome, I don’t want to give you my Social Security number.
By the time Marty stumbles back to the apartment, I have Jerusalem under siege and I’m in quite good spirits, but I’ve barely touched my food. I tried to buy Jerusalem. When that didn’t work, I sent my trusted General Flavius Something-or-other to sort the bastards out. Noble Flavius died on the way to the Holy Land. His son Decimus has taken the father’s place and seems the capable sort, judging by the one-square-inch picture of him in the corner of my screen.
“Marty-guy!”
“Oh,” he says from the foyer. “Hello, Noah.” Always so formal, Martin, with his hellos and good-byes. You’ll never get a “see ya later, alligator” out of him, tell you that much.
“Come ’ere, I need your help.”
He surveys my screen with a slight frown.
“Egypt’s got a couple armies closing in on you—”
“We’re not at war with Egypt, though. Egypt and I are bros.”
“And they’ve got a navy right near your harbor.”
“I’m not at war with Egypt, though,” I say. “I just paid them fifty thousand florins the other turn . . . Fifty thousand florins, Martin. Fifty thousand florins don’t grow on trees.”
That’s when he notices my bottle of vodka.
He shakes his head, smiling reluctantly. “Should’ve known.”
“You and me, Marty-guy. Two sides of the same coin. Like, you’re heads and I’m tails. Together we’re worth twenty-five cents.”
“Noah.”
“What?”
“Screen.”
I turn my attention back to the screen. My virtual enemies are pouring out of the gates of Jerusalem in hopes of catching me by surprise and—largely—succeeding. I throw Marty a death glare.
He shrugs. “I tried to warn you—”
A half hour and two shots later, I have a Pyrrhic victory on my hands. Jerusalem is mine, but the great legion that Rome sent forth is largely gone. Within three turns, Jerusalem falls to Egypt, Egyptian navies blockade my ports, and the accursed Gauls, whose forces I never quite finished off, descend on me from the north in my moment of weakness.
I enlist mercenaries who turn on me.
I build ships that cannot breach the Egyptian blockades.
I send out diplomats who are turned away.
The fate of my empire appears increasingly bleak, so I drink increasing amounts of vodka to compensate, until it increasingly occurs to me that Marty-guy’s sobriety is an unacceptable state of affairs that must be rectified with all due haste.
“Hey Marty-guy,” I say, cupping a hand to my ear. “You hear that?”
“Huh?”
“That’s the sound of one guy. Drinking alone.”
He undergoes a very brief internal struggle, because he cares that Alice doesn’t like drinking. “Okay,” he says.
“Alice is sleeping,” I point out, as if this should assuage any possible guilt.
I pour him a shot.
Just then, as the combined might of the Gauls, the Parthians, the Egyptians, and the Carthaginians storm the gates of my Rome, I get a pop-up message:
***CONGRATULATIONS NOAH FALLS***
SARAH AND JACOB FALLS HAVE TRIBUTED YOU
10,000 AGE OF ROME FLORINS.
SEND A THANK-YOU CARD
TO THEIR MAILING ADDRESS FOR ONLY $7.99?
Mom’s voice, her laugh, that red door, how hot the metal knob got on stifling summer days. A diorama we once made together for school. It had something to do with a giraffe. Should I buy her a thank-you card with her own money? Is a giraffe diorama worth $7.99 and a son’s discomfort?
“It’s not just Alice, though,” he says, and I know he means our parents. What would they think of us? Marty worries about stuff like that.
As for me, I X out the pop-up immediately and don’t speak for a time. I do nothing as my Rome is sacked and burned, and a part of me wants to cry, for all those imaginary empires we work so hard to build on the backs of virtual slaves and micro-transactions, gifts from parents we last saw when we were nine, empires that in the end must succumb to