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pointing your finger at people?” Stan said.
    “It’s not that easy,” Martin said. “You have to shoot them in the head to kill them. Or get close enough to chop their heads off.” He made a flicking gesture with his hand. “If they touch you, they turn you into a zombie.”
    “You do this in public,” Stan said disbelievingly.
    “Nobody knows what I’m doing,” Martin said. “I played for months and nobody noticed. And they don’t know they’re zombies. I just—” He pointed his hand. “Bang. Splat. The sound effects are awesome. The glasses use bone conduction speakers, so you actually feel the back blast.”
    “That’s . . . awful,” Barbara said.
    “The entire sound design’s incredible. Sirens in the distance, people screaming, gun shots. The game could actually get you to duck. Totally insane. And the gameplay. You don’t level up like in other games, you don’t get more hit points or better weapons. It just gets more and more intense. The apocalypse keeps snowballing. I mean, I kept playing, and more and more zombies appeared on the streets. Even the buildings started to change. Like, crumbling . Cars burning, corpses on the sidewalk. I’d walk into the 7-Eleven and there’d be a headless corpse slumped against the beverage cooler. The guy at the register would have bullet wounds in his face.
    “And the zombies kept coming. Some days—some days the streets were filled with the dead. Gray faces on everybody. Way too dangerous to leave my apartment. I’d snipe from my window, or go down to the front door and try to clear a path . . . but sometimes there were too many of them. Impossible. Some days I’d have to wait for hours for a lull, just so I could get to work.”
    Stan said, “Why didn’t you just stop?”
    Martin shook his head at the stupidity of the question. “There’s no—how do I explain this? There’s no break, no pause between levels. You don’t even have to save progress. They’ve removed all reasons for stopping. You can go all day, all night.”
    “Until you starve to death,” Harrison said.
    “So what?” Stan asked. “Just take off the damn glasses. Why is that so hard?”
    “You don’t know what it’s like,” Martin said. “To be immersed like that.” He looked up. “Every other game, there’s this wall . The screen that keeps you out, and you can’t get to the other side, no matter how hard you try. But this—I was inside. All the time. And it was amazing.”
    Martin looked down at his hands. Or rather, the eyeglasses were aimed at his hands.
    “And then I started seeing things.”
    “Right,” Harrison said. “ Then you started seeing things.”
    “No. Things that weren’t supposed to be in the game.” Martin shook his head. “It wasn’t just the standard monsters anymore. I saw this thing. It wasn’t a zombie, it was . . . I don’t know. White, slippery skin. Too many arms, too many fingers. Like a lizard, but . . . weirder.”
    “Ah,” Harrison said knowingly. Which annoyed Stan immensely. Ah what?
    “I could barely look at it,” Martin said. “It wasn’t just one thing. Well, it was one thing, but overlaid on itself. All lizards.”
    “Like seeing it from all angles at once,” Greta said.
    Martin looked up. “Yes! Like that! But not just space—like I was seeing it over time.”
    “ Nude Descending a Staircase ,” Dr. Sayer said.
    “What?” Stan asked.
    “It’s a painting by Duchamp,” Barbara said.
    “Why don’t you google it?” Harrison asked Martin. “We’ll wait.”
    “I know what she’s talking about,” Martin said. “These things are like the woman in the painting, but . . . worse. They move. I get nauseous looking at them. And the people have no idea that these things are right next to them. But I could see them. They left afterimages, like trails. Wakes. So even when they weren’t in front of me, I could tell where they’d been. There were tracks everywhere through the city. We were overrun.
    “At