Davis MacMillan
Jesse decides to get good at chess. There are a few reasons for this. A big one is that it’s out there, in the culture. People are talking about chess. It also, to him, has always seemed like a smart people game, a game he should be good at as a demonstration of his intelligence and seriousness as a person. Plus, it’s a pandemic. There’s nothing to do and nowhere to go. That means plenty of time for the internet.
He’s not the only person with this idea. According to the chess website he uses, he’s one of about three million. So it’s competitive, even at the beginning.
Jesse has a plan though. He’s got a training regimen. More than that he has the willpower to play 100 games a day, and to chase these with chess puzzles and YouTube videos on strategy. He’s got the willpower to force his brain to focus on a board game all of the time. He spends his nights bathed in clips of wan and skinny men talking about the Sicilian and the Nymzo and the Dutch. He plays through old games. He convinces himself (like so many others) that he can find something new in a 100-year-old sequence of moves.
There’s a thing that experienced players say: the more you know about the game the more it reveals itself as unknowable. Jesse hears (or reads) this a lot. For a while it seems woo woo and then one day it doesn’t. He has spent 18 straight hours running through the shadows of moves in his head. It’s not enough. He doesn’t know anything.
It’s at this point that the offer is made. He’s down a YouTube rabbit hole, listening to some GM or other walk through the possibilities of the Vienna gambit. The next video loads. It’s clear from the beginning that it’s not a video. Or it’s a video and more than a video. A shadow appears in the shape of a person. It’s black, and the background around it is black as well, but in a way that seems to buzz. The video comes on with a sound like breathing. The figure speaks. “Hey Jesse,” it says. “Seems like you like chess.”
“I do,” is all he says. Three letters, two words. It’s a phrase that’s changed lives before, but it still seems unfair that it should have the power to destroy his.
What’s the cost? What’s the usual cost in moments like these? His mind, his body, his soul. I’ll have to possess you, the figure says. To get the job done. It’s perfectly safe. You’ll be able to watch. You’ll be able to learn. You can see everything in my brain.
Jesse tries to wrap his mind around the offer. In a certain sense he’s already possessed. Isn’t learning about something, at least something this big, an act of possession? The knowledge comes in and shapes the brain to its needs, pushing everything else aside. The internet is the perfect vehicle for such possession. It’s a funnel of information: amoral and gigantic. Just like fucking chess, Jesse thinks.
The figure goes on. It’s not that I’ll make you better, it says. It’s that I’ll help you understand. Jesse thinks about the fact that the first chess computer was a man hidden inside a box, writing moves on a piece of paper and beeping and booping with his mouth. He thinks that he can become that box but in reverse: a computer inside of a person.
“OK,” he says, condemning himself with one less letter. The figure tells him that they’ll start in the morning. Say your goodbyes.
There’s no one to say goodbye to. There’s not even anything to do. Normally he’d spend the night learning. He’d spend it playing. But he’s about to learn everything. And the thought of playing as himself – with his flaws and failings and the glaring holes in his game – makes him sick. He tries to sleep. He can’t sleep. He sits in silence. He watches the sunrise.
Then it happens. It’s gentle at first, like a glove sliding over his entire body but from the inside. For a while he can still feel himself. Then he can’t. His hands go first. Then his feet. Then even his eyes are someone else’s.
“Ready to begin,” the figure asks. Then it laughs. The computer starts up, the game opens with the gentle pop of a notification. He’s black. White moves its e pawn. The piece clicks into place. He barely has time to consider it before the moves flood in. They come first individually and then in lines. They spread out like the roots of a tree. The possibilities explode like a supernova: not outward but inward with a force that crushes him. They move faster. Pawns and knights and rooks and bishops and the queen all in a blinding glare. There’s no possibility of keeping up. He wants to tear out his eyes. He wants to go deeper and tear out his brain. He wants to go back to knowing nothing.
White moves. Black moves. The options explode in front of him again. If he had control of his body he’d pass out. He can’t. He’s trapped. “Enough,” he says. “Please.” The figure ignores him. It keeps playing.
DAVIS MACMILLAN has had fiction in Wigleaf, Jellyfish Review, JMWW, and elsewhere. He lives in New York.