In the Court of the Yellow King by Tim Curran, Cody Goodfellow, Gary McMahon, C.J. Henderson, William Meikle, T.E. Grau, Laurel Halbany, Christine Morgan, Edward Morris Page A

now.
    Time. He glanced at a clock and groaned again; he was over an hour late to work. He was afraid to talk to his manager, Pierre, so he decided to call Beau and Donny to tell them he’d be in late. But his head pounded so much from the hunger that yowled in his belly, he knew it was better to just tell them he wouldn’t be in today.
    Before calling his friends on his computer’s vidscreen, he went to put on a fresh t-shirt and sweatpants, and that was when he spotted his love organ curled on the worn carpet beside his bureau. It had blackened and shriveled in death, its taint of decomposition masked by the stench of his own waste.
    He dumped the starved love organ into the trash zapper, too, then called his department at work.
    Beau came on the screen, and immediately blurted, “God, Giff, you really had me worried! Where have you been?”
    Only an hour late and Beau was this worked up? Trying not to sound irritated, Giff told him, “I feel horrible, Beau... can you tell Pierre I need the day off?”
    “ Again? Giff, I don’t know if you’re going to have a job left when you get back.”
    “What do you mean, ‘again’?”
    “This will be the fourth day in a row you’ve been out. Don’t you know that? Are you on drugs or something, Giff? Do you even know about Donny? I was beginning to think the same thing happened with you. Pierre has been calling you and calling you... we were getting ready to come out there and look in on you.”
    “ Three days? ” Giff croaked in his still parched voice. Then his befuddled brain backed up a few steps. “Wait... what happened to Donny?”
    “Oh God, you don’t know. Oh God, Giff...”
    “Tell me,” Giff said. Though he did know, in fact. Had seen it, in fact.
    “Donny shot himself yesterday. At home. He shot his poor wife Tessy first, and then he shot himself. He left some crazy note painted on the wall of his living room, I guess.”
    “Something about a... Yellow Sign?”
    “I don’t know, Giff; the forcers haven’t released that to the public. Why, did he say anything to you about what was going on in his head?”
    What was going into his head, Giff thought. “No,” he replied.
    “You know what I think was wrong with him? And what’s wrong with you, too? It’s that blasting game. I played it.... I know how crazy it is. Why do you think they announced they’re shutting it down?”
    “Shutting it... down?”
    “You really have been out of it, huh? Yes, Giff. Go look at the news on the net. I think that game poisoned Donny, and it’s poisoning you, and—”
    Giff ended the call abruptly, and navigated to a popular news site on the standard net. He did a search on Gra nd Theft Hovercar , and right away came up with a press release from the company that had created the VR game. It was as Beau had said: effective immediately, the game was going to be made unavailable due to a virus that had somehow been introduced into it. Intentional sabotage was suspected, but was still unproven. The virus, which had not yet been pinned down, had created “unfortunate irregularities and distortions in game play.”
    “No,” Giff said aloud as he read this announcement. He was distressed almost to the point of desperation. Shut down Gr and Theft Hovercar ? It was like hearing his own death sentence pronounced. At the very least, like hearing himself sentenced to live the rest of his life locked in a tiny cell, all his freedom forever denied.
    He retrieved his interface disks from the corner of the bathroom sink, pasted them back on his temples, returned to his computer and tried logging on to the game.
    He was successful.
    G rand Theft Hovercar had other ideas about being shut down.

    He was spawned in the game standing on a fire escape platform, three floors up from street level, at about twilight. He recognized the neighborhood: it was the mutant slum dubbed Tin Town, which was always a good place to go in the game if you wanted to end up fighting for your avatar’s