Night Gamers

Once upon a time.…… in a par­al­lel uni­verse, 30 sec­onds ahead us, a life form achieved the abil­ity to travel at 186,000 miles per sec­ond. These crea­tures trav­eled in pairs and were able to attain this speed by send­ing a burst of psy­chic energy from one to another which would be slung back to the other at 10 times the speed at which it was received. Geo­met­ri­cally accel­er­at­ing until reach­ing the speed of light, and at that instant the psy­chic energy was trans­formed into light energy. The pim­ple rid­den pink­ish skin color of their small stump­ish bod­ies went trans­par­ent as they became smaller and smaller till dis­ap­pear­ing with a flash of blue light.

Hav­ing trav­eled for 30 sec­onds they arrive back on Earth, only now in OUR uni­verse. For­tu­nately for them, unlike the time trav­el­ers in Ter­mi­na­tor, our neigh­bors are able to main­tain their abil­ity to lev­i­tate in both uni­verses. Rather than crash­ing in a heap on the asphalt, they enter our uni­verse hov­er­ing in air above the exact spot they were in on Earth when they left their uni­verse. One of the few draw­backs being the chance of a col­li­sion with a bird or worse a plane.

Upon arrival here, they are at first a clear blue in day­light and appear to glow a bluish color when arriv­ing after dark. But their skin color soon returns to its rather sickly pink hue.

Those arriv­ing here dur­ing day­light hours quickly real­ized their del­i­cate pink skin would not tol­er­ate the more intense infrared rays of the Sun in our Uni­verse. While the NIGHT GAMERS had no need of cloth­ing, as we know it, in their par­al­lel Uni­verse, it became clear they would need some sort of pro­tec­tion while here.

After spend­ing the after­noon in the shade of a hol­low tree, the two NIGHT GAMERS went in search of food as night fell and stopped to drink from a gar­den of morn­ing glo­ries that had been coaxed open by the full moon. Nec­tar was the only food source they had ever known and hav­ing no need to con­sume any liv­ing plant or ani­mal served to reen­force their Bud­dhist view of life as they moved through the envi­ron­ment dis­turb­ing as lit­tle as pos­si­ble with the belief they should encounter all things in the order that life expe­ri­ence would present them.

The pair left the gar­den fully fueled with faces cov­ered in bright yel­low pollen and found their way that first moon lit night to a toy fac­tory in the out­skirts of a small town located in the Fin­ger Lakes area of upstate New York.

As luck or faith would have it, this toy fac­tory was known through­out the coun­try for its Teddy Bears and upon glid­ing through an open sec­ond story win­dow, the pair could see illu­mi­nated in the cool lunar light these furry crea­tures in var­i­ous stages of com­ple­tion lying on the long wooden assem­bly tables.

Hov­er­ing above a sec­tion of the wide table they looked down at the flat furry, yet to be filled brown suits. Slip­ping into their new duds they found the bears eye cov­ers had yet to be painted allow­ing them to see per­fectly through the clear lenses. They had only to retract their probes for a per­fect fit.

Hav­ing been a rather event­ful day and night they curled up in a very comfy half full box of fin­ished Teddy Bears and soon drifted off into dreams of their home­land Earth.

Our trav­el­ers are awak­ened by a strange vibrat­ing sound and find them­selves still sur­rounded by furry friends but in total dark­ness. They are in car­ton A-768 packed in the back of a semi, snaking its way down state through the morn­ing mist to a toy store in New York City. Com­fort­able in their sit­u­a­tion the two drift back to sleep after extend­ing their probes out through an untaped cor­ner of their con­tainer for some fresh air.

By evening box A-768 has been unloaded to the receiv­ing dock at the rear of the toy store and wheeled inside to the isle of stuffed ani­mals where it will be unpacked first thing in the morn­ing, before the store opens.

A few hours later the two are lifted out into the brightly lit store and bound together with a white plas­tic con­nec­tor through the furry ears of their suits. Almost as soon as they are placed on the shelv­ing with the oth­ers under the “SPECIAL 2 for 1″ sign, the NIGHT GAMERS are in the dimly lit inte­rior of another con­tainer. A paper bag being pulled back and forth by the small damp hands of two broth­ers rid­ing in the back seat of a yel­low cab crawl­ing its way down 7th Avenue.

The boys jump out in front of an aging, but still ele­gant, cast iron build­ing on Green street and run up the steps, through the door and up the stair­way to the sec­ond floor hold­ing our trav­el­ers in the bag between them into the loft and up the lad­der to their bedroom.

The sides of the bag rip open in sev­eral direc­tions at once as if explod­ing like a house in a hur­ri­cane and the NIGHT GAMERS find them­selves in a zoo of plush animals.

As dusk arrives once again soft rays of light rake the boys room and fade into the shad­ows to wait for another morning.

The boys are soon asleep and the trav­el­ers are free­ing them­selves from their teddy bear ware in the dark­ness. A warm orange glow from a neon sign across the street runs like a rib­bon across the floor, up the side of the bed and qui­etly on to the boys faces as the NIGHT GAMERS hover on either side of the head of the boy clos­est to the window.

THEY ARE READY TO PLAY !

This is the one and only rea­son they have risked their lives tra­vers­ing an unknown pas­sage to our universe.….….….THE GAME !
Think of the boys brain as a kind of X-box and the boys mem­ory, thoughts, feel­ings, etc., as the soft­ware with which the Night Gamers will con­struct a game to play each other.

The NIGHT GAMERS have devel­oped Elec­tro Pulse Synapse Manip­u­la­tion, EPSM for short. Work­ing through the audio canal they are able to directly tap into and access every­thing con­tained in any electro-chemical func­tion­ing brain, regard­less of species. Emit­ting a series of ultra high fre­quency audio sig­nals, to which the brain responds and trans­forms into elec­tri­cal pulses, they are able to tra­verse the nuro net­work. Kind of like com­mu­ni­cat­ing in html code with­out a key­board or speak­ing in 1’s and 0’s. Any­way, on this most basic level of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, the dif­fi­cul­ties involved with mul­ti­ple lan­guages and trans­la­tion sim­ply do not exist. Another inter­est­ing aspect of the process is absence of learn­ing as we know it, once a Gamer is in, he has access to all the knowl­edge con­tained within that given brain. Not unlike hav­ing instan­ta­neous total recall of an entire per­sonal library of thought and experience.

An exam­ple might be if the NIGHT GAMERS had stopped by a pond that moon­lit night Upstate and hooked up to play a frog, the game might have revolved around pro­tect­ing an amphibi­ous ter­ri­tory with all the splash­ing, hop­ping and needeepin two frogs could muster on a warm early spring evening. “FROG WARS”.… never mind.

The first GAME begins as the NIGHT GAMERS slowly extend their probes and gen­tly insert them into the ears of the sleep­ing boy. Once a Gamer is in, he has access to Every­thing con­tained within that given brain.

Search­ing thru the data, past the boys favorite col­ors and ice cream fla­vor, they came upon a school report he just fin­ished writ­ing about the Wright broth­ers flight of the Kitty Hawk. The game that emerged from the data would require the player to build a vir­tual work­ing model of the plane, learn to fly, and stay aloft for five min­utes. The first one to do so wins.

As the chal­lenge began, the heads of the two play­ers appear to glow in shift­ing col­ors and as the frenzy of the game increased, so did the bright­ness of the flash­ing col­ors inside their heads, till the walls and ceil­ing of the small room echoed with the razzle-dazzel of a county fair on the fourth of July.

It ended in a draw, but the Night Gamers took their names from that first game in our uni­verse, Wilber and Orvil.