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When Naomi cedes control of her Nintendo DS to her mother, she doesn’t do so knowing that the platinum-pink console now sits in the hands of Sadie Green, programmer extraordinaire, partial owner and backbone of modern gaming’s most beloved video game studios. She does it because moms get Mario up flagpoles, beat gym leaders, scale impossible platform jumps. And this level was simply impossible.
Sometimes, kids at school make comments about the things that their moms and dads do at home. These comments fascinate Naomi, whose only knowledge of fatherhood comes from these anecdotes. Through them, Naomi has nursed a pet theory. She thinks that in their desperation to make two minds one, parents get hopelessly confused. From what she can tell, the only function moms and dads serve together is to fight. And they fight about stupid things, like who washes dishes and how much TV one should watch before getting off of the couch. Meanwhile, her mom does all of that without complaint. Things just get done - much less “red tape”, as her mom often comments when on the phone with work - when it’s just a mom or dad.
How lucky, to only have one parent.
According to her mother, today is a “bring your kid to work” day. These days always coincide with the ones where her usual babysitter cancels, and secretly, Naomi wishes for them. She loves being in her mother’s office. There is always something there for Naomi to do there, more than there is at home with babysitters who have no interest in being player two on the latest Mario release. One of her babysitters, acutely ignorant to her mother’s day job, once labeled Naomi’s interest in video games as “disheartening”.
“They don’t make you think,” the sitter had tried to explain. “You just sit there and hit buttons. Let’s try a puzzle instead. Your brain is too young to waste in front of screens.”
Naomi recounting this story to her mother and the sitter’s disappearance from her life thereafter were decidedly connected events, though she was not sure what transpired between them.
Today, Naomi hasn’t seen her mother since they arrived. Something something, emergency meeting. Instead, she’s sent her co-worker to babysit, though Sadie is old enough to understand that her mother has no control of whether or not someone in the office looks after her. The fact that he’s there means that he willingly wants to spend time with her. That already puts him several leagues ahead of her usual sitters.
“Hi, Mister Mazer.”
The man waves his hands. “Naomi, you already know that you can just call me Sam.”
Naomi is fascinated by Mister Mazer. It isn’t lost on Naomi that he has a manner of speaking to her that’s rather restrained, as if he’s always afraid to say the wrong thing. It’s one of many quirks about adults Naomi has been quick to pick up on - they get so scared to misspeak that they don’t speak at all. It isn’t a problem Naomi has ever entertained.
What’s particularly unusual about Mister Mazer, however, is the fact that he doesn’t normally speak like this. She’s heard him out and about the office, particularly in conversations with her mother. There’s a levity to the way he speaks then. She thinks of that strange animated show she’s only watched in brief bursts on late-night television, when her mother is delayed at work and the sitter thinks she is asleep. There’s an episode with a bowl cut haired boy in green spandex fighting against another boy in some arena, and he halts the battle halfway through to remove training weights from his legs. They are so heavy that when he drops them, craters are left in the ground. And once he begins moving again, he is so quick that the other boy cannot even see him in motion, and is forced to guess where he will appear next.
If she had to create another theory, Naomi would guess that Mister Mazer is not used to speaking to children. If he didn’t put great concentration into every word that he spoke to her, their conversation would become so alien that Naomi would be forced to constantly guess what he was trying to say to her. In a way, then, he was showing her a kind of respect. So she took care to never point out this very obvious difference in his behavior to him.
“Mister Mazer?” she asks, ignoring his previous statement. “Can I ask you something?”
“Shoot.”
Naomi looks around tentatively. With her luck, her mom would appear at any moment and doubtlessly chide her for the content of her next sentence. “What happened to your foot?”
Mister Mazer’s face doesn’t change, though he does dart his eyes quickly over to the appendage in question, as if he himself has since forgotten. “Shark attack,” he answers gravely. “Amity Island, 1975. I was the sole survivor.”
She wrinkles her nose. “I don’t believe you.”
The corners of Mister Mazer’s lips curl into a smile, but he doesn’t laugh. That’s another strange thing about him, Naomi thinks. For all of his lightness around his coworkers, she has never once seen him laugh.
“Alright, then. What do you think happened?”
Not expecting the question to be thrown back at her, Naomi considers her potential responses seriously. How does one go about losing a foot? Her mom scarcely lets her misplace a jacket before scolding her to hang it back where it belongs. “Well, I think you…”
Mister Mazer raises his hand to her face in the universal motion of “stop”.
“Hold on a second, I’ve got an idea.” He hops outside the office door and comes careening back in shortly after with a stained whiteboard on wheels the size of him. In chipping-paint print on the side: “PRPERTY OF HARV”. Naomi briefly wonders who Harv is, but Mister Mazer is shoving a marker in her hands before she can think to ask. The marker is much newer than the board - given the feel of it, Naomi reckons he’s just opened a new pack. She’s an art supply savant of sorts, given that she’s been drawing practically since she had the grip strength to hold a crayon.
“Start writing ideas on the board about what you think happened.”
“Why?”
He shrugs. “Just something your mom and I used to do. And, frankly, I’m curious.”
Her mom is first bemused and then angered - Mister Mazer’s provided context to be credited to the change in expression - to return to the room and see a board full of things like “falling down the stairs”, “failed human sacrifice”, “immortality pact with the devil”, and “car accident” listed on the whiteboard. But Naomi avoids a scolding by the grace of Mister Mazer’s laughter filling the room with such raucousness that her mom can’t help but join him, too.
“Naomi,” she says, shaking her head, “whatever am I going to do with you?”
“What are you reading for school?” her mother asks, the cover close enough that she could read it herself. Naomi guesses that this is an attempt at conversation. Given that the due date for her mother’s project is growing ever-closer, they share less and less of them these days. Naomi isn’t even allowed to visit the office. Apparently, the crunch is too great for anyone to have the time to entertain her. But sometimes, when she lets herself get a little too angry, Naomi thinks it’s because her mom wants the space from her.
Naomi studies the cover of her book, forgetting what it was she was even reading to begin with. She decides against telling her mother this, who is already far too worried about a few slipping grades on her report card.
“The Illiad.”
“Oh.”
The air tenses like a squeezed muscle, and Naomi’s brain rattles with curses. This is one of her many qualms with her mother - at random, Naomi will become acutely aware that she’s said or done the wrong thing, and is never quite sure what it is. Living with her mother is a constant game of Minesweeper, and Naomi can’t stop misclicking.
Her mom raises a coffee cup to her lips, which Naomi knows for a fact is stone cold. Her mom needs something to do with her hands when she’s nervous. “What’s your favorite part so far?”
“None of it. I haven’t started yet.”
“Well, you should. I’m sure it’s due soon. And,” her mother adds, as if an afterthought, “I’ve heard it’s really good.”
“Do you love my mom, Mister Sam?” Naomi asks, knowing that her mother won’t return to the office for some time. He barely reacts. It’s as if Naomi has just asked him what the weather was like today.
“Sure. Don’t you?”
She pouts in turn. “You never answer my questions.”
Mister Sam doesn’t skip a beat. “First, I need you to give me questions worth answering. You’re too smart to be asking something so obvious.”
Naomi can at least appreciate forthcomingness, which is a currency her mother is increasingly lacking in these days.
“What was he like?”, she imagines asking next. Naomi spends an increasing amount of time around the office, and while she is old enough to know that Mister Sam should be incredibly busy, he somehow always manages to make time for her. She can’t say the same for her mom. That superhuman ability of hers to do everything at once that Naomi had once greatly admired was fading before her eyes with every year that passed. Whether it was the world or her mother that had changed was to be determined; no theory she came up with was quite developed enough to answer that.
“What was mom like, growing up?” It’s the safer question.
“Brilliant, but stubborn. Sentimental too, sometimes to the point of absurdity. We had a lot of fights. Has she ever told you that we went years without speaking to each other?”
“No.”
“I don’t always agree with your mother,” he says, apparently uninterested in giving Naomi the details of their past troubles, “and God knows she almost never agrees with me. But given the opportunity, I’d always come back to her.”
Mister Sam taps her forehead in what Naomi believes to be an unusual show of affection.
“That means you too.”
"By technicality?" she jokes. He doesn't laugh.
"No. By merit."
She lets her mom think that she’s the first one to tell her what happened to her dad. Given that Naomi has had access to Google practically from the time she was old enough to control a mouse, she has long known. Her mom has left out most of the gorey details, but it’s a rounded-enough story that Naomi is confident she can feign ignorance about that.
“He fought incredibly hard to stay with us,” her mom says with a practiced carefulness. Naomi wonders how many times her mother has rehearsed this exact conversation in her head. Was it going the way she wanted it to? “It just wasn’t enough.”
“I’m sorry, mom.”
Her mom looks surprised, perhaps less for the undeserved apology and more that her daughter has actually listened. The two have grown increasingly distant over the past few years. Naomi suspects the sharing of a mass trauma is her mother’s desperate attempt to reel in the driftwood of their relationship - something to share and commiserate over.
Some years ago, when her mother had allowed her to purchase guinea pigs from a local pet store, Naomi had asked the employee whether it would be better to take in cagemates. She had her eyes on two separate pigs, whose only interaction with one another might have been catching a glance of the other from across their plexiglass cage barriers.
“The trauma of moving to an unfamiliar environment,” the employee had answered, “will force them to bond, no matter what.”
Naomi feels ill.
“I think it was the thought of meeting you that kept him going for so long,” her mother soldiers on.
Naomi has a dedicated Youtube playlist dedicated to her father, and all of the titles look something like this:
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Unfair Games: The Life (and a Death) of the Modern Gaming Juggernaut
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TOP TEN “WTF” MOMENTS OF GAMING HISTORY!
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[OUTDATED] Bittersweet Mapletown Easter Egg
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THEY SHOT HIM?! - Youtuber Reacts to “TOP TEN “WTF” MOMENTS OF GAMING HISTORY”
So on, so forth. All that was left of her father were a few cremated remains her grandparents had shown her once and some megabytes. She preferred the megabytes. They allowed her far more freedom in sculpting an image of the man that had contributed to giving her life. The ashes introduced a sort of finality to his existence that Naomi felt uncomfortable dwelling on. Here, online, her father’s story was infinite - told by makeup-drenched girls posed in front of christmas lights, or stony men wearing snapbacks. So long as someone was alive to tell the story, so too was her father.
One of the downsides to having a mother in the tech industry is that she knows what internet history is.
From the safety of their home’s upper banister, Naomi watches her mother click silently through the playlist on their shared laptop. Gymnastic lessons and an early introduction to the Metal Gear Solid franchise has taught Naomi how to shift her weight enough that her approach through the creaky house is properly masked. Her mother continues to stare at the screen, entirely unaware that she is being watched. Then, she clicks out of the tab, closing it entirely. She hadn’t opened a single video. Naomi retreats upstairs and waits for the fallout to arrive in her bedroom, unwilling to bear the responsibility of uncovering it herself.
Her mom calls for dinner - take out, as per usual these days - talks about work, asks about school. Practiced motion of conversation come and go before Naomi is released once again to her room, where she immediately collapses onto her bed. There was no mention of the playlist.
New theories awash in her mind.
Maybe her mother understood Naomi’s curiosity, and didn’t feel the need to draw attention to it. Maybe she didn’t know how to check who had made the playlist, and therefore looked over Naomi’s channel name emblazoned on the corner of the webpage. Maybe work has her mother’s head so clouded, she doesn’t have the time to address what she saw. Maybe she stopped caring a while ago.
Maybe one of the upsides to having a mother in the tech industry was that she would be too busy to ever acknowledge your internet history.
She dreams that night that her father has been trapped in the body of a hawk.
"This is just like Animorphs," she explains to him, and her hawk-father tips his head in the janky manner that birds do, inquisitive. "It's this book series about kids that transform into animals. They can only be one for an hour, though. Otherwise they get stuck forever. Did you mean to get stuck?"
He raises his head and hacks violently, spitting a pellet directly into her outstretched hand. Small animal bones poke out of it at random. Something compels her to squeeze it. Like a geode, it cracks open under the pressure of her hand. revealing a small strip of paper inside. She unfurls the fortune cookie vomit's offering, and reads it aloud.
"You remind me of your mother."
"Is this from you? Did you write this?" Naomi asks the bird, half-curious and half-accusing. But the bird is long gone. She now stands in an empty office at Unfair Games, the only thing left a single computer monitor. When she draws closer to it, the monitor catches her reflection. Her mother stares back at her.
Naomi startles awake, covered in a thick, oppressive sweat.
It's another "bring your kid to work" day for Naomi, though by this point she knows enough to not expect to stay by her mother's side all day. She's older now, trusted enough to be on her own under some guise of adult supervision but not old enough to be left at home. The discrepancy used to bother her more, but the further into her Nintendo DS' library she delves into, the less much of anything bothers her. Increasingly, Naomi finds escapism an easier and easier state to slip into undetected. She looks up from the dual screens to find that the sun has long left the skyline. When she was younger, her mother and her played a game in bed where Naomi was to say goodnight to everything and anything she could think of - their version of counting sheep. Naomi had always saved her last goodnight for the sun, when she knew sleep was but a blink away. Now, the DS is the last thing she says goodnight to. Willingly detaching herself from the console means stepping away from the only things keeping her a comfortable distance from the nibbling depression in her chest.
"Long time, no see."
She acknowledges Sam in the doorway of her mother's office with a small grunt. Losing focus right now was not an option. Bowser loomed ominously in the corner of her screen, waiting for Mario's divine justice to be delivered. Sam, for his part, waits patiently for her to finish. When the victory music started playing minutes later, she finally speaks to him.
"Hi, Sam. Where's my mom?"
"Her team wanted to hold an emergency meeting. Nothing exciting. It's going to be a few hours. What are you up to?"
She runs through the plots of a few RPGs she's played lately - mostly fan-translated Japanese affairs she's dug up on message boards. Sam listens attentively.
"That's wonderful, but I was asking about you, Naomi."
"Oh. Well, nothing new, I guess."
"What do you like about that thing so much?" Sam pivots, sensing that the conversation as he had envisioned it is dead in the water. Despite the pointed nature of the question, he asks it in a manner of genuine interest. "Consider it a marketing question on my end."
How to explain to Sam that holding the DS feels like Naomi has been bequeathed her very own miniature theater, characters carved out of nothing more than primary colors and thin air? She opts for saying just that, never one to blunt herself for the sake of understandability.
"You're a natural creative, Naomi. The way you describe things reminds me so much of your mother. Marx, too. Your father," he adds, as if Naomi was being introduced to a stranger in passing.
"I'm nothing like my mother." She was confident the same could be said for her father, though she figures it's probably a wound not worth opening.
Sam shrugs. "So be it. But have you ever considered trying game design?"
"I wouldn't even know where to start."
Sam feigns fake surprise, looking about the room as if suddenly under siege. "My God! Where are we, again? Because I could have sworn we were inside of one of the best game developer offices in North America mere moments ago."
Naomi suppresses her laughter. "Shut up, Sam." She greatly enjoys that Sam is the only adult she's allowed to be rude to without severe consequence. And what kind of teenager misses the opportunity to actively challenge the adults in their lives? He smiles in turn.
"Your mom's shown me lots of your work. Your art style is insanely unique. You've even managed to skip that whole draws-nothing-but-shitty-manga phase other kids in your age group inevitably go through. And if her bragging is to be believed, you've got a pretty solid grip on basic coding. Give yourself some more credit."
"My mom shows you my stuff?"
He stretches into a cartoonishly over-exaggerated eye roll. Naomi briefly wonders if she looks half as annoying when she does the same thing to her mom in a rare moment of teenage self-reflection. "I'll give you thirty dollars if you can get her to stop. It borders on distracting, honestly."
"No deal. I want at least half of your net worth, old man."
"Ah, an entrepreneur!"
Throughout the thread of their banter, Naomi holds onto Sam's comment. Your mom's shown me lots of your work. It felt silly in retrospect, but Naomi had been under the assumption that once her mother walked through the doors of Unfair, Naomi ceased to exist in her mind. Her mother was an incredibly focused woman, and things happened on a schedule for her - she scheduled when to check Naomi's homework, clean the house, change the guinea pigs' litter, when to have meetings. She expressed irritation when things were out of turn. Given Naomi's proclivity for always saying the wrong thing, acting out like the sore thumb she knew herself to be, was it not logical of her to assume that her mother would rather be rid of her at the first given opportunity?
Maybe her theories needed some serious reworking.
As if manifested by thought, Naomi's mother appears in the room, emergency meeting evidently concluded. "What did I miss?" she asks. Naomi considers her usual tactic of diversion - some affirmation of her mother's presence, then back to the DS.
"Actually," she says instead, "I was just telling Sam about an idea I had for a game..."