He looked up at the sky. The dark blue, the deeper black above it. He moved his face closer and the sky was binary too — the same tiny black characters, rendered at different densities to produce the gradient. The seven of them — binary. The meteors streaking across the upper third of the image — binary, but a different binary,red, the only red anywhere in the print, the meteors drawn in red ones-and-zeros that the eye registered as light from a distance.
Levi’s hand went to his mouth.
He stayed crouched. The print wasmade out of digits.The whole thing. Every figure, every blade of grass, every star in the sky behind the meteors. He moved sideways along the bottom edge and the digits kept going, dense and uniform, an entire image rendered character by character.
“What is this?” Levi asked, his throat tightening. “Asher. What…what is this?”
Asher was beside Levi now, not quite kneeling, just crouched with a hand on Levi’s shoulder.
“I wanted to put something gentle up there,” Asher said. “In the c-suite. Like you do. You, um, you bring flowers and you put art on the walls and you make it a room where people live and I—” The uncertainty was still in his voice. “I wanted to try. I’m not good at gentle, but I wanted to try, because you’re good at it and I — I watched you do it and I wanted to do one. I’ve been talking to Paul about what to make. For a long time. Months.”
“It’s the meteor shower.” Levi’s voice was thick. “The first run. The forest.”
“Yes.”
“Why this one?”
“Because.” Asher paused. He was choosing words. Levi could feel him choosing words. “I watched you all watch the stars…you looked happy. It was the happiest you were in there… before I showed up. So that’s the one I picked.”
Levi was crying as he looked at the image. The boy he’d been in the forest, watching a sky that wasn’t real, surrounded by people he didn’t yet know were people, didn’t exist anymore. It had been nearly a year since that happened, and Levi could barely remember what it felt like before Asher’s hands closed around his throat for the first time.
“Is this —” He had to swallow before the rest came out. “Is this the game’s code? The render data?”
Asher’s voice changed. The uncertain note got bigger. “Please don’t be mad.”
“Asher.”
“Don’t be mad. Promise me you won’t be mad first.”
“What did you do?”
“It’s — okay. So.” Asher started talking faster, like he was trying to get it out before he could change his mind. “Do you remember when I asked you about Ethan’s PS4? And you told me about which games you watched him play and which ones you tried to play with him? I—I went and got it down. From the shelf. I know you said don’t touch it, but I had to—and it’s okay, I promise. All the data is still there. I even cleaned up the inside, because it had a lot of dust in it.”
Levi couldn’t speak.
“I took the save data and I converted it. Every save file from every game on his console. The whole library. I converted it all to binary.” Asher gestured at the print. “That’s what the image is made of. Every digit on the print is part of Ethan’s saved games. The grass, you guys, the sky — all of it.”
Levi’s hand was shaking against his mouth.
“And the red parts —” Asher’s voice was getting softer, less sure. “The meteors. The red is the games you played with him. Or watched him play. There — there aren’t very many of those, but I marked them differently in the serialization, so they would come out red. The meteors were the moving parts of the image and the games you shared with him were — they were the moving parts of him, I think. The parts that touched you, and continue to touch you.”
Levi sat down on the floor of Asher’s office because his legs weren’t working and he just sobbed, trying to wipe the tears away faster than they were coming so he could keep looking at a meteor shower made of their shared games. Levi’s chest was doing something that wasn’t pain or joy, but sat in between the two feelings like a pressure he did not want to let go of.
“Why?“ Levi managed.
“Because you did it.” Asher sat on the floor with him. “The smartest people I have ever known couldn’t get me out…and you did. But it wasn’t just you, it was…your brother too. All the things you learned from him, even when you were too scared to play with him—”
He stopped. He was being careful with the sentence. Levi could see him being careful.
“If he hadn’t been your brother, I would still be in there, I think. So I thought — if anyone’s going to get them out, it’s going to be the Mercer brothers. Both of you. He helped you become someone who could do this. So he’s going to be part of the rescuetoo—” Asher gestured at the meteor shower. “He’s the light in this.”
He paused. He looked at his hands, then added, very quickly: “It’s stupid. I’m — I’m sorry, I think I got it wrong, I was trying to be romantic and I think I picked something — it might be too much, I should have asked, I — I can take it apart. I can have the file deleted, I can —”
Levi grabbed his shirt with both hands and pulled Asher toward him. Asher came easily because Asher always came easily when Levi pulled, and Levi kissed him on the floor of his office next to a four-foot-tall framed print of Ethan’s video game saves arranged in the shape of one of the happiest moments of Levi’s life.
The kiss was wet and bad and full of the snot of someone crying too hard to kiss properly. Asher made a small sound against his mouth — surprise, maybe, or relief. Levi didn’t care. He kissed him again.
“It’s not wrong,” Levi choked out against Asher’s mouth. “Asher. It’s not wrong.”