in your hands, you can almost feel the recoil on your shoulder because everything else is there—the sweat, the noise, the blood…
I’ve played since I was a kid. My mother kept threatening to take the PlayStation away, but she never did. It was back when I was still going to my dad’s every weekend, and she knew gaming was our thing, so I’d only end up at his place after school if I couldn’t play at home. She gave up trying to make me come down for tea. She brought it up on a tray, and when she realized it went cold before I ate it, she made sandwiches instead. I didn’t eat many of those either. I got a kettle and ate Pot Noodles while the next game was loading and stacked the empties outside the door.
It was all I wanted to do. It was all I did do. And it wasn’t just me. There were a bunch of us from school—we’d go multiplayer all evening and smash up zombies till gone midnight. More than once, I pulled an all-nighter, then bunked off double science to sleep in the disabled loos. I spent most of my lessons working out the strategy for that night’s session, and I reckon no one was more surprised than me when I got enough Cs to stay on for A-levels.
I was seventeen when I started playing simulator games. You could take laptops into lessons, and there were loads of study periods where you could do what you liked as long as you were on-site, but if they caught you playing violent games, you’d be in the shit. I raced bikes first of all. Thought I might even get one. Then I flew for the first time, and I was hooked. Commercial planes, fight jets, World War II biplanes—I flew them all.
Everything went wrong when I got to uni. The stuff I’d found simple at school wasn’t simple anymore, and it was easier to stay in my room than go to tutorials and be made to feel stupid. Mum shacked up with some bloke she’d met ballroom dancing, and they turned my room into a walk-in wardrobe for all their sequins. Gaming was the only thing worth getting up for, and I was getting better and better.
“Shame you can’t make a living out of it,” Dad said, bang in the middle of another argument about how much money he was sending me and how he hoped I’d have something to show for it at the end.
Uni kicked me out halfway through the second year. I got a factory job I lost the first week, and that’s kind of what’s happened ever since. Just me, the job center, and a shitty room in a shitty house in the shitty part of town.
Just as I’d hit rock bottom, things started looking up. I made some friends—real friends—and slowly I started to feel good about myself again. I started working out, got some confidence back. I still gamed all the time, but I ate properly too. Even went outside from time to time.
One of my mates put some work my way. They knew I was a shit-hot gamer (their words, not mine), and they needed my skills. They needed me. And—suck on this, Dad—they would pay me for it.
Gaming became my job. Testing out new releases for developers, working out how to hack the system so you could get the full range of weapons without paying for upgrades, then testing it again when they reckoned they’d made it more secure.
I got up each day with a new sense of purpose, and it wasn’t just about the paycheck that meant I could buy some decent clothes, get myself a car at last. It wasn’t even about being part of a team (I still preferred to work alone). It was just having a purpose, having a deadline.
By the time I stepped onto Flight 79, I was a different person. I knew where I was going. I had a seat in business class, among all those people who never questioned their right to be there. I’m not questioning it either—I finally feel like I belong.
I finally feel important.
TWENTY-TWO
10 P.M. | ADAM
There’s a pale moon at the nape of Sophia’s neck, where her thick plait has fallen to one side and where the needle now hovers above her skin.
Don’t move, Sophia…
I can see the corner of her right eye, the lashes dark on her cheeks. Her thumb has found her mouth, which