Lost in Arcadia: A Novel Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  CONTENTS

  THANKSGIVING, 2025

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  THANKSGIVING 2037

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Sean Gandert

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by 47North, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13:9781477848531

  ISBN-10: 1477848533

  Cover design by Shasti O'Leary Soudant

  For Jacob Corona

  CONTENTS

  THANKSGIVING, 2025

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

  THANKSGIVING 2037

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  THANKSGIVING, 2025

  Gideon tells me that back then dad was almost never around. And after I hit elementary school, mom was so busy catching up with work that she was mostly gone too. But I guess when we were still living in the old house—where the door to mom and dad’s room scratched against their king-size mattress every time someone entered and me and Gideon shared one bedroom so that Holly could have her own—we used to have this sort of mandated family time every week. Mom always thought the five of us didn’t spend enough time together and was so afraid that we’d turn out like her family that she made staying home on holidays and Friday evenings compulsory. None of our friends could come over for dinner. Dad wasn’t allowed to code at the table. No to everything but the family. I don’t even remember when she came up with the idea, but even dad treated these nights seriously after he came home late to an evening of family time and it resulted in one of their big, annual fights. From then on, if he needed to stay late on family nights, first he’d come home, loosening his tie (Holly says he liked to call it his “corporate noose”) and joining whatever activity we’d decided on that week without complaint. Only when family time had definitively ended would he head back to the office for another all-nighter.

  We’d put on sweaters, go to the den, and pick out something to play from the game closet. The den was always freezing or sweltering, an addition to the house that had never been insulated. Holly used to say that if you stayed there long enough during the winter, like to watch all of the Saturday morning cartoons, you’d lose feeling in your face and wouldn’t even know that a trail of mucus was running from your nose to your chin. She liked to complain that you shouldn’t be able to see your breath indoors, but mom just said that if she had a problem with it, she could always watch less TV. Depending on their moods, this would either be ignored or lead to an ugly argument.

  Inside the closet was an entire story of games, some of their boxes dating back to before we were born. Trivial Pursuit from 1978, a RISK set with wooden pieces, puzzles we had neither bought nor opened. My favorite part of the closet was an entire shelf of dad’s old DnD books, filled with terrible black-and-white drawings of dwarves and dragons and buxom princesses. He didn’t play anymore, but he didn’t have the heart to sell them, so they sat there. I used to get them out to stare at them, even before I knew what they said. Below them were fantasy games, like the one I wanted to play that night, HeroQuest or something like that. But my brother was with me and he wanted to play Sorry!, which I always hated because it was all luck and no skill. The two of us were arguing, then he pulled out the Sorry! box and said that because he was older, he got to choose. According to Gideon, I grabbed at the box, and as I tried to pull it away from him, he let go and I fell backward. The top flew off, launching plastic pawns and cards into the air, primary colors cascading across the room.


  Gideon says he noticed that I hadn’t gotten up after falling to the carpet, and it became clear that I was struggling to breathe. He didn’t know what to do, so he started pushing on my chest like they do in movies. Mom and Holly came in to see what all the noise was about, and then mom screamed for dad. Gideon says that he kept pumping on my chest and yelling at Holly to do something, but she was frozen in place, staring. Mom was on the ground comforting me and trying to clean up the mess, worried about dad slipping on the pieces.

  “Do something!” she screamed when he entered the room. He pushed Gideon away, who’d given up on the chest-pushing business and was now brainstorming how he could duck the blame. Holly cried and called 911. Dad asked Gideon what he’d tried so far. Gideon said he’d pushed on my chest like Bruce Willis, and dad just got pissed off.

  Gideon says that dad tried another round of Heimlich-ing me but decided it was futile, so he opened up my mouth and thrust his finger down into my throat, trying to manually yank out a green pawn lodged in my windpipe. Everyone waited and waited and finally an ambulance arrived, with mom crying and Holly watching, standing perfectly still while they removed the pawn, placed me on a gurney, and put an oxygen mask around my face.

  When I woke up the next day I couldn’t remember anything after dad came home. I was lying down in a white bed with a pleasant humming sound in the background, looking through a plastic sheet onto a silvery roof with tubes above me. I kept lying there, staring at the roof for so long I had time to wake up again. Maybe that’s why it came to mind now, staring up at nothing again, waiting for some indication that everything has worked out.

  Gideon says that he and Holly were sent over to our next-door neighbors, who after hearing about the accident fed them a big meal with turkey and stuffing and all the rest, and even gave them ice cream for dessert. Gideon tells me that was the first time he tried Neapolitan and that it turned out to be a really fun evening after all until he and Holly came home and the only sound in the house was mom alone in her room, crying and crying. I guess that was the first time dad left. He just disappeared, not answering his phone or anything and no one knew where he went off to or what he was doing. He returned before I got home, and everyone pretended it had never happened, but even I knew everything had changed. After that, he kept leaving for longer and longer until one day he just didn’t come back.

  CHAPTER ONE

  TWELVE YEARS LATER

  Devon planned on spending the entire weekend in his room.

  The only real exception would be attendance at the practically mandatory dinners with his mom, the two of them at adjacent corners of a battered and stained kitchen table that could easily seat eight, trying to pretend they had something to say to each other. Missing dinner was on par with smoking pot in the house or getting a large tattoo of a snake on his bicep. Autumn pretended not to care, that she was fine with the only person living under the same roof ditching her for the evening, but Devon had tested those waters before, only to discover her crying when she thought he wouldn’t notice, alone in her overly large bedroom with her face planted into a pile of pillows.

  Other than dinner, he was free to do whatever he wanted. That meant sitting at his computer, logged onto Arcadia.

  After another interminable day at high school, Devon walked through the front door and headed directly into his room, throwing his backpack on the floor by his bed. He pulled his sneakers off with his left hand while his right navigated through a simple but powerful UI he’d helped his dad beta test more than a decade ago, back when it seemed like Arcadia would never be completed. He’d be the first to admit that his room was a huge fucking mess, cleaned maybe three or four times a year under extremely specific circumstances. Autumn appreciated it if the house was tidied before Christmas, even if they weren’t spending the holiday at home, and when someone (almost always a semi-unknown relative) would be staying over.

  Not that any visitors ever saw his room, since even when it was clean, he kept it off-limits. Letting a stranger into your room was begging for judgment, and he was certain there would always be something to snark about, whether it was an old stuffed animal lying in easy view or his poster of Gravedigger, who remained controversial despite mainstream success.

  Since Christmas there had been no visitors, though, and Autumn had been out even more than usual, working on a line of high-concept western paperbacks hitting before the end of the year—so lately she hadn’t even had time to feign disbelief at the room’s disarray. As a result, it was fully his, soda cans covering every flat surface, trash bags overflowing with used tissues, decks of Magic cards scattered across the floor alongside pewter fantasy figurines and dice.

  Although they’d moved in more than eight years prior, after his dad finally acquiesced to Autumn’s demand for more space, Devon’s room wasn’t heavily decorated. Teenagers on television always seemed to have elaborate setups, whole worlds of music and rebellion surrounding their beds in a swirl of safe anarchy, but the only kids who decorated like that grew up to be set designers. In a world with the infinity of games, the infinity of all media sitting right there next to your bed, who had time for that crap—who had time for anything else?

  Three posters hung on his otherwise unadorned walls. The most prominent one depicted Gravedigger, wearing his trademark jester’s cap and looming over a tiny white king in the foreground. It wasn’t a great photo of the rapper, but it was signed, a birthday gift from Gideon three years ago. The other two were pieces of promo art for Arcadia that his dad had given him before the platform was even released. Devon liked them both, even though they said little about either Arcadia or even the launch title they were designed to promote, Kingdom Without a King. The first showed a lord fleeing a mob of peasants at the front of his castle during a storm, and the other featured a beautiful woman crying over two children’s bodies while a knight in the background looked on angrily.

  The mess reached an apex at the desk opposite Devon’s bed, where a monumental desktop computer, three feet high and a foot wide with a translucent cover, was dwarfed only by the twenty-seven-inch monitor that sat beside it. On top of and adjacent to the desktop were figurines of a few of Devon’s favorite game avatars, versions of himself used in Arcadia’s chat program and games, manufactured by an acrylic polymer-based 3D printer and purchased at minimal cost. The only other figurine on his desk was a small ceramic tortoise, given to him by his father probably ten years ago.

  Devon checked in on his clan, the Baby Eaters, who was offline and who was online and what if anything the rest of his cohort were doing. He’d entered his room less than a minute before, but because his computer was never truly off (instead using sleep and hibernation low-power states that he’d customized to keep him logged in to Arcadia), no loading screens were required. Not that he needed to stay permanently in Arcadia—it probably added another fifty dollars to their monthly electric bills and cost half a mine’s worth of annual coal production—but it was worth it not to wait for his computer to boot up.

  Staying logged in all the time was also a show of commitment. All of the higher-ranked members of the Baby Eaters, the primarily Albuquerque-based clan he’d cofounded during the first weeks of Arcadia’s release, were online all the time, even if they weren’t always available. His account’s characters could be called up by any of the other leaders if needed with a bot program, or in direst of circumstances played by someone else. The expectation was that you’d be there when the clan needed you, one way or another, “real life” be damned. Anyone worth playing had their priorities straight.

  Devon left his avatar idling in his digital house while checking his emails and PMs. Most of Devon’s effort in Arcadia, after earning enough “points” (easily converted to and from dollars, but with no monetary value so as to create tax loopholes and leave the platform’s publisher, Electronic Arts, inculpable) to keep buying new games and playing for free, went into his online real estate, building a small mansion and then giving it a classic loo
k and feel that was comfortable and inviting, a place to relax on his own or socialize with the clan.

  The clan’s channel, |3ə—a common space that functioned as chat room and general hangout for members when they were between games—had a few dozen members in it, as always, but no one Devon particularly felt like talking to at the moment, so he pulled open a menu to put on some music before joining in and outlining their plans for tonight’s raid. Although he’d never bought an album, LP covers adorned Devon’s living room walls and a genre-alphabetized collection filled a huge shelf, complete with wood-paneled turntable hooked into a virtual surround-sound set that changed the mix based upon where Devon’s avatar was located. The recordings were high-fidelity vinyl transfers, all so well captured digitally that it had been proven by even the most anal of audiophiles to be indistinguishable from the real thing. Some people preferred more traditional high-bitrate digital feeds, 320 kb/s digital transfers that had been the standard since before he was born, but Devon had heard that these tended to flatten out an album’s highs and lows. Gideon told him once that Gravedigger used a special digital-to-analogue technique that made listening to his tracks on digital recordings more authentic than the physical copies hipsters insisted on buying in stores, a sort of inside joke to the web junkies who made up so much of the rap superstar’s audience.

  Devon liked the little touches that made his house feel more authentic. It wasn’t an ostentatious Victorian manor like Disney’s or a Lovecraftian mess like Steve’s, who considered the point of virtual real estate to be creating a home that couldn’t exist in reality and filled his abode with impossible feats of engineering and rooms with variable gravity. Devon’s place was like the classy Hollywood houses he’d seen in movies, well-lit and spare, yet inviting, with elegant curves on the outside and a sensible floorplan within, containing even completely unnecessary bathrooms and a laundry room. Devon’s favorite part of the house was the bar/lounge area, where he and his friends could get together for “drinks” (which, due to his father’s insistence when designing the alcohol simulation part of the program, actually affected the behavior of their avatars based upon body mass index and “tolerance”) or sit around and play poker at a felt-upholstered table. They could have just as easily met in a standard-issue chatroom, but the lounge, with its pool cues and dartboard, its glass tumblers and abstract paintings, was a nice conversation piece and helped Devon get a reputation in the clan for being classy. He liked being the leader whose avatar wore a blazer and hosted cocktail hours, even though he’d never touched a sip of alcohol in his life and truth be told had been left a bit paranoid about the stuff due to stories that had trickled down to him about his dad, Juan Diego, ever since his disappearance.