The scanner beeped at 07:02, and Max Brouwer hated the box before he’d read the label.
Third pallet of the morning.
Shrink wrap, a DC Duiven sticker, forty-eight units of Iron Vanguard 7: Collector’s Edition.
Each box was the size of a microwave.
Inside, he knew, was a plastic soldier with enormous shoulders, a steelbook, a download code for a “Founder’s Skin” and no disc.
The disc hadn’t been ready.
The game came as a download instead, and the download, as of five that morning, was 140 gigabytes and still crashed if you opened the map in mission two.
Beep.
“You’re doing the face,” Kevin said from the next lane.
“I don’t have a face.”
“You’ve got a face.
It’s the one you do before you explain something.”
Max scanned the next box.
Beep.
“Two hundred and nineteen euro,” he said.
“For a statue and a voucher.”
“It’s a nice statue.”
“It’s a nice statue of a game that doesn’t work.
They put the roadmap in the box, Kevin.
On paper.
They printed the promise that they’d finish it later, and you paid for the ink.”
Kevin was twenty-three and had pre-ordered the Collector’s Edition with his staff discount.
He kept stacking.
“Patch is Thursday.”
Patch is always Thursday.
The distribution centre was a hangar the length of three football pitches, the kind of building you saw from the A12 and never thought about again.
Yellow lines on the concrete.
Qmusic leaking out of speakers somewhere up in the roof, too faint to follow except for the jingles.
Max had worked there two years and four months through the same uitzendbureau, on contracts that renewed every six months by email.
The email always opened with Goed nieuws!
and always came with slightly fewer hours.
He finished the pallet at 07:40 and wheeled in the next one.
Controllers, limited edition, in the same gunmetal and orange as the statue.
Eighty-nine euro each.
The listing promised “enhanced haptic immersion.”
Beep.
At ten, his scanner flashed a message he’d never seen before: SEE TEAM LEAD.
* * *
Ilse’s office had a window onto the floor and a plant that turned out to be plastic once you sat close enough.
She had a mug that said WORLD’S OKAYEST MANAGER, which Max suspected someone had given her as a joke she hadn’t got.
“Max.
Thanks for coming in.
Sit, sit.”
He sat.
She turned her monitor a few degrees towards him, then back again, as if she’d changed her mind about showing him.
“So, you know Hall C is getting the new picking system.”
“The robots.”
“The automated solution.
Yes.” She smiled at the plant.
“Which is great, honestly.
Good for everyone’s backs.
But it does mean we’re looking at the planning again, and from the first of next month we’d like to move you to evenings.
Sixteen to half eleven.”
“How many hours?”
“Twenty-four.”
“I’m on thirty-two.”
“You’re contracted for a minimum of twenty,” Ilse said gently, and turned the monitor slightly towards him again, as proof.
Max looked through the window at the floor.
Kevin was holding up a controller box to the light, admiring it.
Sixteen to half eleven.
The gym was evenings.
Every class that mattered was between seven and half nine.
“Okay,” he said.
“It’s not personal.”
“No.
It’s a robot.
It doesn’t know me.”
She laughed, then checked his face to see if that had been allowed, then laughed a bit more to be safe.
* * *
Lunch was a cheese sandwich from home, eaten in the canteen at a table under a poster about lifting with your knees.
Max opened his phone to check the patch notes for Iron Vanguard 7, out of spite, and found an email instead.
Re: Application: Junior Gameplay Programmer
He knew before he opened it.
The good ones never started with “Re:”.
Dear Max,
Thank you for your interest in Northlight Forge and for the time you put into your application.
We were genuinely impressed by the passion in your portfolio.
Unfortunately, for this role we require a completed HBO or WO degree in a relevant field.
We encourage you to follow us on LinkedIn for future opportunities!
Kind regards,
The Talent Team
He read “genuinely impressed” twice.
Then he opened the portfolio link in his own sent folder to see what they’d been genuinely impressed by.
A software raycaster he’d written at fifteen, in C, on a laptop with a broken E key.
A physics sandbox where you could throw bricks at a wall and watch it come down properly, mortar and all, at sixty frames a second on hardware from 2014.
A small 2D engine with its own level editor.
And Super Mario Bros.
Redux, a hack of the original NES cartridge written in raw 6502 assembly, which kept every pixel of 1985 and fixed the things that had annoyed him since he was eight: a checkpoint halfway through each castle, a less unfair 8-4, Luigi with his own jump, and a two-player mode where you could both be on screen at once.
Forty-one thousand downloads on a romhacking forum, and a polite letter from a Japanese law firm.
The talent team had looked at all that for maybe ninety seconds, or a filter had looked at it for none, and then someone had pressed a button.
Should have done the diploma.
He’d been seven, in the last year his parents were both in the same house, when his dad brought home a dead office PC and said, “If you can get it running, it’s yours.” It took Max three weeks and a lot of YouTube.
It took him another week to find a folder of shareware on an old CD-ROM in the back of a drawer, and that was the end of the other parts of his childhood.
At nine his oma had walked him into a kickboxing club behind the shopping centre in Presikhaaf, because a bigger boy kept taking his bike, and told the trainer, “He’s a big lad and the others go for him.
Make it not matter.” Max had been the fat kid, properly, whatever his oma said about stevig.
Strong as a door, but he couldn’t run a lap, so he’d learned to be quicker than everyone over the first two metres to make up for it.
At fifteen he started growing and didn’t stop until one ninety-four.
The footwork came along with him.
At eleven he was at the library every Wednesday afternoon, reading a C book somebody had left a coffee ring on.
At thirteen he’d made his first game where a thing moved and another thing chased it, and he’d shown it to Sanne, who was eight, and she’d played it for an hour and lost every time and said, “Again.”
Havo had been fine for maths and a disaster for everything that involved writing essays about poems or showing up.
He failed fourth year once.
Their mother had walked out when Sanne was three and sent a card most Christmases.
Their dad worked on a platform in the North Sea, four weeks on and two off, and on the two off he sat in the chair with the television on and didn’t ask anybody anything.
Oma did what her knees allowed.
Somebody had to be at the school gate at three, check the spelling homework, sign the forms, make the money last to the end of the month.
Max did all of it, from about eight.
School was the thing that gave.
In the second go at fourth year he stopped going, and nobody at home noticed, because nobody at home was looking.
That was eleven years ago.
He’d been coding every day of those eleven years, and training most evenings.
He was very good at both, and he had no paper that said so for either.
On the canteen TV, bolted high in the corner, a talk show had the sound down and the subtitles on.
A banner along the bottom said #FREEKAYLA: HAS AMERICA JAILED AN INNOCENT MOTHER?
A woman with very white teeth was crying on a sofa next to a photo of two small boys.
“She didn’t do it,” said Mirjam from Returns, at the next table, pointing with her fork.
“Honestly.
Watch the documentary.
The police had it in for her from day one.”
“She searched ‘how long to drown a child’ the week before,” Max said.
“It was in the trial.
The doc skipped it.”
“That was explained.”
“By who?”
“By the documentary.” Mirjam looked at him as if he’d kicked something.
“Four million dollars they’ve raised.
You don’t raise four million for a guilty person.”
“You raise four million for a good story,” Max said.
“Those boys don’t get a crowdfunder.
Nobody’s crying on a sofa for them.”
Kevin, who’d sat down with a tray, looked from one to the other and decided to eat his soup.
On the screen a singer Max vaguely recognised was saying something into the camera with her hand on her heart.
The subtitles said I just know in my soul she’s innocent.
In her soul.
Max watched the photo of the two boys come up again.
The jury had eleven weeks of evidence, and she has a soul.
He finished the sandwich.
The poster said LIFT WITH YOUR KNEES, NOT YOUR BACK, and showed a cartoon man with a box and a smile that suggested he’d never lifted anything.
His phone buzzed.
Sanne.
Sanne: zondag eten bij mij?
5 uur
Max: ja
Sanne: echt?
niet weer “druk”?
Max: ja echt
Sanne: neem geen bloemen van de AH mee
Sanne: je neemt bloemen van de AH mee hè
Max: misschien
Sanne: en ik moet je zondag iets vertellen.
iets goeds.
denk ik
Sanne: niet raden
Max: ok
Max: je bent zwanger
Sanne: MAX
* * *
The gym was in an old carpet warehouse on an industrial estate in Arnhem-Noord, between a tyre place and a company that rented out bouncy castles.
FIGHT FACTORY ARNHEM, in red vinyl letters someone had cut out by hand.
Inside it smelled of rubber mats, sweat and the tiger balm Coach Rinus put on everything, including, people said, his breakfast.
Max got there at ten to seven, wrapped his hands on the bench and didn’t talk to anyone.
That was normal.
Nobody expected him to.
Tuesday was the mixed class.
Ten minutes of skipping, then Dutch-style kickboxing combinations on the pads, then takedowns off the cage wall, then live rounds.
Rinus was sixty and walked like his knees had opinions, and he’d been a Dutch champion back when that meant you trained in a garage in Rotterdam and got paid in envelopes.
“Brouwer,” he said, during the rounds.
“With Dennis.”
Dennis was a carpenter, a hundred and eighteen kilos, and had once lifted the back end of Rinus’s Opel out of a ditch.
Max was ninety-six kilos and squatted a hundred and eighty on Fridays, but most people at the gym forgot he was big, because he never moved like it.
People on the bench stopped talking.
Dennis came forward the way very big men did, heavy and honest, and Max let him.
He took the jab on his gloves, slipped the right hand, changed levels and was on a single leg before Dennis had finished throwing.
Dennis sprawled.
Max didn’t fight the sprawl.
He let go of the leg, came up behind the elbow, turned the corner and was on Dennis’s back by the time the big man understood that the takedown had never been the point.
Dennis stood up with Max on him like a rucksack.
Max locked his hands round Dennis’s waist, dropped his hips and lifted all hundred and eighteen kilos off the floor for a second, just high enough to take his feet away, and sat him down again.
Dennis rolled to escape.
Max went with the roll and came out on top in mount, knees tight, not even breathing hard.
Rinus clapped once.
“Time.”
Dennis lay on his back on the mat, laughing.
“How,” he said to the ceiling.
“How, every time.”
“You keep giving me the next thing,” Max said.
“I’m not giving you anything.”
“You are.
You just don’t know which thing.”
Afterwards, while Max was unwrapping his hands, Rinus sat down next to him on the bench with a grunt.
“Hoe oud ben je nou?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“There’s a show in Germany in November.
Amateur, but there are scouts.
You’d have to cut a bit.
I could call someone.”
“I can’t do November.
They’ve moved me to evenings.”
Rinus looked at him for a while.
“Then quit.”
“I can’t quit.
It’s rent.”
“You’re a heavyweight who moves like a flyweight.
You’ve got the best scrambles I’ve seen in thirty-five years.
I’ve trained men who fought in Japan, and you’ve got better transitions than all of them, and you spend your days putting boxes on shelves.”
“Scanning them,” Max said.
“Robots do the shelves.”
Rinus didn’t laugh.
He patted Max twice on the knee, the way you’d pat a car you couldn’t afford, and went to switch the lights off.
* * *
He lived in a room in Malburgen, on the south side of the river.
Fourteen square metres above a man named Ruud, who sold e-bikes out of his garage and had opinions about the bin rota.
Six hundred and forty euro a month.
A bed, a desk, two monitors, a window that looked at another window.
At half nine, showered and starving, he logged into Skyborne Legends, because the first season had started that afternoon and he wanted to be angry about it accurately.
QUEUE POSITION: 14,388.
ESTIMATED WAIT: 47 MINUTES.
He made a pan of pasta and ate most of it out of the pan while the number went down to 9,102 and back up to 11,450.
Max put on his headset and opened the recording software.
“Hi.
It’s Max.
This is Insert Rant, it’s a Tuesday night, and I’ve been in a queue for half an hour to play a game I already paid seventy-nine euro for.”
The channel had 1,183 subscribers.
He didn’t know most of them.
One of them, a guy in Leeuwarden called Gerbrand, commented on every video with the exact time stamp where Max had been most correct.
“While we wait, let’s look at the shop.” He alt-tabbed.
“This is the Celestial Wings Bundle.
It costs 2,400 Shards.
You can’t buy 2,400 Shards.
You can buy 2,000 Shards for nineteen ninety-nine, or 2,800 for twenty-four ninety-nine.
So, to buy this pair of wings, which do nothing, you need to give them twenty-five euro, and you have 400 Shards left over, which is not enough for anything, so it sits in your account like a coupon for half a croquette.
That’s not an accident.
Someone sat in a meeting and made that number.
Someone’s whole job was that number.”
The queue said 6,014.
“Also, the battle pass has a hundred tiers.
I worked out you need to play about two hours a day for the whole season to finish it.
That’s not a game you’re playing.
That’s a part-time job you’re paying for.
They should send you a payslip.
They should send you a payslip that says Goed nieuws!”
He stopped and looked at the window across from his window.
Someone over there was watching a cooking show.
“Okay.
Different thing.
Halcyon Works, the studio that made Moonfall Keep, which is the game I played the entire summer I was ten, laid off six hundred people this morning.
Last week their parent company announced record revenue.
The CEO’s quote in the press release says, and I’m reading this out, ‘We are realigning our creative resources around our highest-conviction opportunities.'” He paused.
“That means Moonfall Keep 5 is a mobile game with stamina.
I’d bet my rent on it.
I wouldn’t win much, but I’d bet it.”
“And while I’m here.
Lumen Pictures is remaking Starfall Rangers.
You know, the cartoon.
Saturday mornings, 2006.
They’ve recast Captain Rook so he’s not Rook anymore, different face, different history, and rewritten the story so the Rangers were the bad guys all along, and the head of the studio, Darren Kell, said in an interview, I’ve got it here, ‘If the old fans don’t like it, honestly, they’re not the audience we’re making this for.'” Max leaned back.
“Imagine running a bakery and putting a sign in the window that says people who liked our bread can go somewhere else.
If you want a new hero, make a new hero.
Give him a great story.
People will love him.
Stop borrowing somebody else’s and painting over him so you can lecture the kids who grew up with him.”
He took a breath.
“Same thing with the Kayla Brandt circus, by the way.
I know that’s not games.
It’s the same machine.
Somebody made a documentary with nice music in it and now four million dollars and half of Hollywood think a woman who was convicted on evidence should walk out, because the story felt better than the facts.
Nobody’s raising four million for the two kids.
That’s what makes me angry.
Not her.
Us.
How fast we pick the story over the truth if the story’s got good lighting.”
He talked for another few minutes about sequels made by committees of people who’d never played the first one, and about how there used to be an end to a game, a screen that said THE END, and nobody asked you to log in tomorrow for your daily reward.
He knew he sounded like his own grandfather.
He didn’t care.
QUEUE POSITION: 312.
“I’m in.
I’m going to play it now.
I’ll probably hate it.
Doei.”
He played Skyborne Legends for two hours.
The flying was good.
That made it worse, somehow.
There was a real game under there, a good one, made by people who had obviously stayed late and cared about how the wind felt.
Then you landed, and a pop-up asked if you wanted to see the store.
At half eleven he closed it and opened the emulator.
World 1-1 came up, blue sky, brown bricks, the little tune he could have hummed in his sleep.
Forty-one years old, that cartridge, and it still loaded in under a second and asked nothing of anybody.
He’d been working on a Redux patch for weeks.
The new mid-castle checkpoint had a bug: if you touched it while you were big, the game respawned you small and wedged inside a wall, kicking at nothing.
“Yeah, I know,” he told Mario.
“I know you do that.”
He found it at ten past one, in the assembly.
He was writing the player’s size to the wrong byte of memory on respawn, one address off, so the collision code thought it was dealing with a much shorter plumber.
Two lines fixed it.
He touched the checkpoint forty times, big and small and on fire.
Mario came back on his feet every time.
He sat back.
Nobody was there to show it to.
He didn’t mind, much.
* * *
On Saturday he needed a USB-C cable, because Ruud’s dog had eaten his, and the only place open late enough was the big electronics store at the edge of the centre.
The games section was at the back, past the fridges.
Max didn’t mean to go there.
He went there.
The shelves were mostly cardboard.
Not boxes with games in them but flat cards on hooks: gift cards, top-up cards, season passes, “Ultimate Upgrade” codes for games he’d seen at the DC.
A whole wall of numbers.
Twenty-five, fifty, seventy-five, a hundred.
A few actual game boxes stood at eye level, and he picked one up and turned it over out of habit.
On the back, in small grey type: Internet connection required.
Includes optional in-game purchases.
Next to him a father in a Vitesse scarf was crouched in front of the cards with a boy of about nine.
The boy was pointing.
“That one.
Papa.
That one.”
“Fifty euro?
Jonas, that’s a lot of money for a, what is it?”
“It’s V-Coins.
For the season.
Everyone has it.”
“What do you get for it?”
“Coins.”
“And what do the coins do?”
Jonas thought about it with his whole face.
“You can buy the pass.
And then you can unlock stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“Skins.”
The father looked at the card the way Oma used to look at parking meters.
He reached for it.
“Sorry,” Max said.
“Sorry.
I don’t want to, I’m not, but just so you know, the pass is nine fifty in coins and the rest is for the shop, and the shop changes every day so he’ll want another card in two weeks.
They design it like that.”
The father stood up slowly.
He was quite a lot taller than Max had estimated from the crouch.
“Do you work here?”
“No.”
“Right.”
“I just.
I know how it works.”
“Okay,” the father said, in the tone of a man who had been told the right thing by the wrong person in the wrong place.
He took the fifty-euro card off the hook.
Then, after a second, he put it back and took the twenty-five.
Jonas stared at Max like Max had killed a dog.
“Sorry,” Max said again, to the kid this time, and went to pay for his cable.
He biked home along the Rijnkade with the cable in his pocket and the window of that conversation still open in his head, replaying it.
A nine-year-old now thought he was a creep, and the wall of cards was still there.
Somebody should just make a game.
A whole one.
And sell it.
And then leave you alone.
He’d thought that sentence before, maybe a thousand times.
He’d never once thought about it as a job he could actually get.
* * *
On Sunday morning the rant video had 212 views and four comments.
Gerbrand from Leeuwarden had written 14:32 this.
THIS.
Under that, someone with no profile picture had written ok boomer, which Max felt was unfair at twenty-eight, and under that, someone else had written he’s not wrong tho.
Ruud was in the garage when Max came down with his bike.
He had an e-bike upside down on a stand and a cup of coffee balanced on the saddle of another one.
“Max.
It’s your week for the green bin.”
“I know.”
“It goes out Monday night, Ruud.”
Ruud squinted out at the sky.
“You’re going out in this?
They’ve said onweer.”
“It’s sunny.”
“That’s how it starts.
My brother-in-law in Zevenaar, nice day, sunny, he goes to the Gamma.
Comes out, hail like knikkers.
Twelve dents in the caravan.”
“I’m not taking the caravan.”
“I’m just saying,” Ruud said, and went back to his e-bike.
Sunday was warm and close, the sort of heat that sat on your arms like a damp towel.
Buienradar had a yellow warning for thunderstorms from three o’clock.
At half two the sky over Arnhem was mostly blue, with a long grey bank lying low over the east, out towards Duiven and the DC and the robots.
Max went to the Albert Heijn on the way and bought flowers.
Seven ninety-nine, orange and something purple, wrapped in plastic with a little sachet of plant food taped to the side.
He hung the bag on his handlebar.
He biked up onto the John Frostbrug.
He always forgot how high it was until he was halfway up, standing on the pedals, with the Rijn going wide and brown underneath.
Cars hissed past on his left.
A man on a racing bike in full Jumbo-Visma kit overtook him without effort and without looking.
At the top Max stopped against the railing to get his breath back and pretend he hadn’t needed to.
From there you could see most of the city.
The Eusebius tower.
The roofs of the centre.
The green of Sonsbeek somewhere behind it all, where he used to take Sanne on Wednesday afternoons when she was small, to throw bread at the ducks they weren’t supposed to feed.
Klarendal, where she lived now, was out to the east under the grey bank, which looked closer than it had ten minutes ago.
His phone buzzed in his pocket.
He took it out, assuming Sanne.
It was the romhacking forum.
New reply in: Super Mario Bros.
Redux (v1.3).
kleinemo_07: played Redux with my little brother.
he’s 7.
first time he ever beat 8-4, because of the checkpoints, he screamed so loud the neighbours came round lol.
are you going to do more?
zelda next??
please make more
Max read it.
He read it again, the way he’d read “genuinely impressed,” except this time he didn’t feel stupid at the end.
He’s seven.
He typed with his thumb, the flowers bumping against his knee.
Tell him congrats.
There’s a fix coming for the checkpoint bug.
And yeah.
Zelda next.
I’m going to do the whole lot properly.
He looked at the last sentence for a while.
Then he left it there and pressed send.
He thought about the evening shift, sixteen to half eleven.
Mornings free.
He could train at the open mat at ten and still have three hours every day for old cartridges.
Maybe Rinus would run privates at lunch if Max paid him in something other than money.
He could finish Redux.
He could start on Zelda, the first one, and give it a map screen that told you where you’d been and a sword that didn’t feel like a toothpick.
He could do Tetris with a hold button and a proper randomiser, the way it should have been in 1989.
He thought about Sanne, and whatever her good news was, which was obviously a baby, whatever she said.
He’d cut the crusts off her sandwiches for eight years.
He was going to be an absurdly good uncle.
He thought about the things the two of them had never had.
A mum at the school gate.
A dad at the table at six, asking how your day was and listening to the answer.
One house with both of them in it and nobody leaving.
That was what Max actually wanted, under all the ranting.
He’d never said it on the channel.
A house, a wife who stayed, kids who’d play Redux on the sofa with him and lose and say “Again.”
“Okay,” he said out loud, to the river.
“Okay.
Fine.
Let’s…”
The world went white.
There wasn’t a sound.
Or there was, but it was so big that it was the whole world instead of something in it.
He didn’t feel the railing or the bike or the flowers.
He felt every hair on his body stand up at once, all of them, and then he didn’t feel anything.
A cyclist coming the other way said later, to the regional news, that it had come out of a sky that was nearly blue.
That it hit the top of the bridge like someone had dropped it.
That there had been a young guy standing there with his phone out, and flowers.
The flowers had been from the Albert Heijn.
Sanne noticed that, at the funeral, and cried harder than she’d expected to, and then laughed.
* * *
It was dark for a long time, or no time at all.
Then, in the dark, something spoke.
It sounded like a voice.
It sounded pleased with itself.
Booting.