Life went creamy.
And Lady Luck screamed in pain one last time as the gibbering thing inside burst through her skin. What a horrorshow to put before the populace. Cookie Luck, turning herself inside out! Becoming her own skeleton.
That’s the way! That’s the way!
That’s the way the cookie crumbles! —Blurbflies
With a blank and another blank.
A double-fucking-blank.
Dotshit!
Losing prize. The dreaded Joker Bone. Often talked about, never before seen. This was the Joker’s very first appearance in the game. Being a winner was now being a loser and vice versa. And all the Dark Fractals were just another bunch of winners, having lost; their lonely bones as lovingly clutched by the lovely Celia Hobart coming up with pips. Nobody spoke in Hackle’s house, nobody spoke in Manchester, until Jazir breathed, ‘Thank the spices!’ and the whole of Manchester echoed his cry. Their bones were all fully numbered.
As somebody somewhere…
Joe was trying to calm his players. ‘People, please… there is no need to panic. None of us has won.’
But Daisy couldn’t say anything; too scared and too shaken to speak. The idea that somebody somewhere… and it could so easily have been herself, claiming the booby prize.
Jazir said it for her: ‘Some poor sucker, somewhere… just won themselves a nasty.’
‘Somebody, somewhere,’ called out Tommy Tumbler, from the city’s screens, ‘just won themselves a special prize for the double-blank. May the gods of chaos have mercy upon your loser’s soul.’
As the skull puppet laughed over a million televisions.
PLAY THE RULES
12a. In the event of a double-blank, AnnoDomino must allow every player an equal chance to lose.
12b. Every player but the loser shall win.
12c. There shall be no escape.
Play to lose
Keen for the game taxes, but fearful of the populace becoming too addicted, the Government had specified that the nation’s dominoes must contain a rare chance of losing, and losing badly.
Hence the Joker Bone. A prize you didn’t have to collect, because the prize came looking for you. The skull beneath the skin came prowling for the winner. And the prize for a double- blank was an unknown. Some punters claimed it was financial ruin, others that you ended up in jail. Some happy souls even claimed that the booby prize was none other than death. Death by numbers, turning the winner into an all-time loser.
Of course the Government got it completely wrong: the chance of losing so badly only made the punters play to win even harder. That being the nature of the human soul.
Play to lose
Somebody somewhere…
DJ Dopejack was at his computer, working the AnnoDomino channel on the Burgernet. The giggling figure of the Joker was still dancing on the screen, but something else was getting to the rogue Dark Fractal, and he couldn’t quite figure it out.
What the fuck was nibbling at him? Certainly not the fact that all his bones had come up dotted. He was glad to have lost. OK, he was nursing some bad bruises courtesy of Nigel Zuze and the League of Zero. And they’d stolen his wallet and all his papers, his notes on the game, and they knew where he lived now, but that wasn’t the problem. No, but something about the way the Joker Bone was dancing on the screen. It was scary, even just watching the animation, but that wasn’t it. Something else… something to do with the movement…who would have thought it, the way a skeleton could dance…
Dopejack worked at some more keys, until he brought up the AnnoDomino menu bar. There he found his favourite icons. Ways in he had worked hard to uncover over the last week.
PUBLICITY
RESEARCH
GAMSETHEORY
HISTORY
RULES
STRUCTURE
Most of it was iced with trivia: PUBLICITY, for instance, produced rates for buying a blurbvert. The RESEARCH button revealed slick details about the latest products: a new strain of burger, a new kind of cop, a new breed of blurbfly, plans for the Domidome. Nothing meaty. GAME THEORY; learned papers on the rulings of chaos. Stuff for Hackle to lose himself in, not the DJ. HISTORY; a whole load of shit about the dominoes being invented back in Italy, like the eighteenth century, man. And a list of the previous winners and their chosen bones. And this week’s winner, just coming in: blank-blank. The dreaded double-blank. Hope one of the Fractals caught a packet, ha ha. Finally, RULES was just that; weighted on the bone side.
Dopejack would help himself if he only knew what was troubling him. STRUCTURE was what he wanted. He pressed on the icon, bringing up menus within menus. Dopejack was on the nail with these nested icons by now; silver surfer of the fractal cursor. Loading up with his latest strain of the game’s hackergene, he dragged a domino icon into the stack of menu, hatched it till the flies swarmed out and started eating their way through the doorways. Fat on their mother, how they buzzed! Too bad Jazir had shown him the way, the stupid bonesucker.