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I

            One evening in winter, Jux was at the dishpit when he overheard some chatter among the other kitchen staff that seemed to indicate that one could level up various culinary skills as if it were some kind of role-playing game. There were various specific skills associated with major categories, such as chop, chiffonade, and julienne for knifework, sear, poach, and braise for proteinery, and identify, wrap, and label for mise en place. Admittedly, he didn’t hear the conversation clearly because of the noise of the dishwashing machine and the hissing of the power sprayer on the plates, but the idea intrigued him, being a novice player of entry-level role-playing games himself.

            “You want to try my usuba?” Duke was asking Ogre. “It gets you a double experience point bonus on knifework completed cutting vegetables. You’re on prep, right?”

            Ogre eyed the blade. “I am.”

            “You might as well use it, then,” Duke said, offering it to him. “I’ll get regular XP all the same with the stock knives.”

“How do I know it works?” Ogre asked as he accepted Duke’s flat-edged Japanese knife.

            “You’ll hear a distant drum, like ‘ta-tum,’” Duke explained. “You got to listen carefully, though, because, as I probably don’t have to tell you, kitchens can be pretty fucking loud.”

            “Knifework, proteinery, mise en place,” Ogre repeated as he nodded. “What else?”

            “There’s a bunch of skill categories,” Duke said. “Baking—which is a bitch to level up because of the minor skills associated with it. I think fraiser is the real problem for beginners because you have to be precise and patient, but it’s not that hard in the end.”

            “I don’t fuck around with baking,” Ogre said.

            “Fine, fine,” Duke continued. “You do it your way. There’s also maintenance, which governs the individual skills of things like seasoning pans and sharpening knives—”

            “Why wouldn’t sharpening be part of knifework?” Ogre asked.

            Duke shrugged. “Probably because it’s more about knife maintenance than knife use, but, hey, I didn’t make this game, so back off.”

            “Understood,” Ogre said.

            “Right,” Duke continued. “So, yeah, knifework, proteinery, mise en place, baking, maintenance… oh, there’s also sauce, which can also be tricky because of emulsion, but roux and deglaze are a piece of cake. I actually topped out on sauce this week, at least when it comes to what techniques are available at my level. And I didn’t even exploit.”

            “What level are you?” Ogre asked.

            “Twenty-seven,” Duke said proudly. “More than halfway there.”

            “Halfway to what?” Ogre pressed suspiciously.

            “There’s a level cap at fifty right now,” Duke explained. “They might raise it, but at least I’ll unlock new techniques when I get to thirty… anyway… it’s so cool. Right. I forgot about marinade, which depends a lot on your chemistry level—oh, shit, did I tell you about player attributes, yet? Marinade connects to your chemistry level because of acidification, primarily, but there are other things to consider as well. Just like in baking there’s bases, like baking soda; how well you do on that has to do with your chemistry level. Just about everything we do in a kitchen is about chemistry, so acids and bases and how you use your knowledge of each not only to cook but also to clean and put out fires, which is part of maintenance, I think.”

            Ogre held up the knife. “So when do I start cutting up this onion?”

            “Hold on,” Duke pleaded. He began counting his fingers. “Knifework, proteinery, mise en place, baking, maintenance, sauce, marinade. Oh, sanitation is one of them, like food storage and dishwashing. Oh, there’s presentation, too. Like how high can you pile the greens, right?”

            Jux, who had been listening, froze in the middle of swabbing a wide colander. “Where’d you hear all this?”

            Duke thumbed back at the prep station wall, on the other side of which was the restroom. “Chef at Porky Punch was going on about it all evening last weekend,” he said. “Apparently they’re trying to develop some kind of electronic badge or something you can earn to show off on your resume.”

            “What the fuck is an electronic badge?” Ogre cried.

            Duke shrugged. “Internet shit,” he said. “He said you didn’t need to have the app to start, but that you should get it.”

            “I just got a smartphone,” Jux said.

            “There you go,” Duke said. “You should totally get playing. Every knife you wash is worth three times the experience points you get from cleaning just about anything else. The major exceptions are scrubbing burned cheese off ceramic, which gets you double XP, and unclogging the drain, which gets you two-point-five XP.”

            Jux looked over and down at the soup container that was presently being repurposed as a service knife container half-filled with sanitizer solution under the cold side line.

            “Save it,” Duke advised. “Download Testaments of Flavor first.”

II

            So it came to pass that, only about half an hour later, when Jux saw the ebbing of a wave in the night’s dishes coming to the station, he went out back to the dock for a break and downloaded the Testaments of Flavor app onto his new smartphone. Between puffs of a cigarette, he created an account and worked through the initial tagging of personal attributes which, the game stressed, would deeply inform his experience in the game and should reflect as accurately as possible his estimation of his own characteristics and general knowledge in several categories.

            “What the fuck,” he muttered, puffing, looking over at the light of the back storage room connected to the kitchen before diving back into the setup of the game on his phone.

            First were personal characteristics: dexterity, brainpower, physique, swiftness. The base rating for each was 5 out of 20, and he had only twenty additional points that he could use to spread across these categories and so improve his estimation of himself. After sucking on the cigarette until it was just about depleted, he punched the “continue” button with a sigh, estimating himself (as limited by the game) as possessing 8/20 dexterity, 15/20 brainpower, 7/20 physique, and 10/20 swiftness.

            Then there were areas of knowledge he had to self-assess: chemistry, rhetoric, design. These were unlike the previous in that they were based universally at two out of ten, with only six additional points available to customize and, theoretically, make a character of one’s self that one could own. So he flicked his cigarette across the dock, completely missing the repurposed ten can in the corner by the gate, and hit the “continue” button claiming 4/10 chemistry, 7/10 rhetoric, and 5/10 design.

            “Fuck it,” he muttered as calls emerged from the kitchen for him to return and take care of a wave of dishes that one of the servers had brought in from a recently-cleared table. “Master’s degree in literature has to get you seven out of ten on rhetoric, at least.”

III

            Jux had propped his phone where the dishpit counter met the wall away from the thickest of the muck as he slogged through the barrage of arriving dishes from the front, and the application was open, so he could see something indicating level progress. Service plates were dipped and swiped and loaded, cups and bowls loaded immediately, flatware tossed into a stainless steel hotel pan half-filled with hot soapy water to soak, each action fractionally boosting his XP in one area or another.

            In the midst of it, he found himself looking over at the phone and several times half-drying a finger to swipe it back awake to see where he’d leveled up, or not. After not that long, he realized that the toils of one night wouldn’t be enough to acquire the experience points necessary to level up that much, if at all, and this was irritating. Why couldn’t one just do a shitload of dishes at the dipshit and then get some cred? Why was it taking so long? Was the game not completely processing all the work he was doing?

            After a look over at the knives in the bucket, he suddenly came upon a strategy he thought would get his stats up quickly. He would farm some experience by cleaning, dirtying, and then cleaning knives again. He tested this hypothesis by taking a grimy chef’s knife from the delivered steel container, swabbing it with a flimsy green pad in the sudsy warm water of the right sink, plunging it into the rinse sink in the middle, swiping it through the sanitation sink at the left, and then promptly dropping the knife onto the rubber mat on the floor only to pick it right back up and repeat the process. When it had been given the final bath in the water with the sanitizing solution, he looked at the app and saw that, in fact, he’d earned twice the experience points in the process, six times more than he’d have gotten for cleaning just about anything else in that amount of time.

            So he did it: he power-leveled. A lot. Oh, here’s that old dirty knife again, let me just dip it in here and then here and then here and then—oops! Got to pick that up and clean it again. Dip, dip, dip, and… oops! Over and over for at least forty-five minutes, as actual dirty plates and flatware and other knives and boards and containers of various sizes, sometimes along with their corresponding lids, increasingly cluttered the stainless steel surface of the dish station. Eventually he had to slip the smartphone into his pocket because the accumulation of dishes to be done became so treacherously messy that he couldn’t see the screen, let alone believe that it would remain unscathed. But he could feel it in his pocket as he kept redirtying the blade—the phone vibrated every time he leveled up his knifewashing skill, and slightly more intensely every time the dishwashing skill improved, and he thought, with each little jiggle against his thigh, that maybe, just maybe, he was hearing the ta-das of far-off drums.

            Then, probably an hour in, when the delivered refuse plates and containers and pans were so stacked that even Duke and Ogre and Abuse were whispering about intervening, Jux was directing the same blade out of a two-hundred-and-thirty-second dip in the sani when it slipped out of his grip, banged against the side of the backsplash, and fell, blade down, right at his feet, landing forcefully handle-up into the air and blade down into the rubber of the mat not an inch away from his left shoe. After a little grunt, he crouched down and warily unstuck the blade from the mat, vividly conscious of his every move, watching the edge of the blade to ensure he didn’t somehow manage to cut himself as a result. However, that is exactly what happened, somehow, just as he was turning back to the sink to clean it again. Somehow, indeed, even though he was gripping the handle, it seemed momentarily impossible to grip and he actually fumbled with it for a moment, like he was trying to grip a slimy wet fish, and then the edge lacerated his middle finger, immediately drawing a smile of blood.

            “Fuck me,” Jux whined, dropping the knife into the sudsy sink and stomping over to the paper towel dispenser.

            “What happened?” Abuse asked. “You gak yourself again?”

            “Yes,” Jux complained.

            “You got to be more careful,” Ogre said.

            “Thanks for the tip,” Jux said, washing the wound.

            The dispenser’s cover had been removed because the sensor tended to malfunction and, even when it worked, would only pump out a couple of inches of paper towel, so he tore a long swath of paper towel from the exposed roll and began wrapping it tightly around his middle finger. Then he walked out to the bar.

            “What is it with him and the knives?” Duke contemplated aloud as he swiftly brunoised a fat yellow pepper.

            “Beats the hell out of me,” Abuse said. “He’s only been here like four months and he’s managed to cut himself twice as many times as I have in seven years.”

            “Maybe he shouldn’t touch the knives, then,” Duke suggested. He deftly scooped the tiny perfect cubes up with his chef’s knife and deposited them into a clear plastic ninth container that was already half full of similarly-cut green and red peppers.

            Jux returned and walked straight to the ice machine to grab one of the rolls of plastic wrap. The paper towels swaddling his middle finger were now secured with several passes of scotch tape. As he began wrapping the finger log with plastic, everyone stopped what they were doing and stared at him.

            “What the fuck are you doing?” Duke asked with a frown.

            Jux looked over innocently. “Wrapping my finger so I can do the dishes.”

            “You look like you’re flipping us off with a rolling pin,” Duke said. “Why don’t you just use a finger cot? You can wrap that, too, if you want.”

            Abuse’s eyes widened. “We have finger cots?”

            Duke ticked his head toward the shelf above the rinsing station. “In the first aid kit.”

            “Since when do we have finger cots?” Abuse asked.

            Duke shrugged.

            “I haven’t seen finger cots around here since like 2006,” Abuse said. “Tati was too cheap to spend three bucks on another pack.”

            Jux was eying them strangely. “What’s a finger cot?”

            “It’s like a jimmy hat,” Duke said, “but for your finger.”

            Jux’s nostrils flared. “But why?”

            Duke glanced at the monstrosity on Jux’s finger for a moment and then began the fine dice of another pepper.

            Jux shrugged and swiped a palm down across the plastic wrap to sever it from the roll, but his aim was imprecise and the side of his hand was raked by the serrated blade housed in the cardboard packaging. “Goddamnit!” he blurted, wincing at the fresh red abrasion.

            “What are you doing?” Ogre cried.

            Abuse slapped a sani-soaked rag onto the cutting board at cold side and walked over toward the back room. “I’ll get the bleach,” he said. “Again.”

            “Fuck,” Jux muttered. “I can’t believe this. Hey, look, it’s not really bleeding…”

            “Doesn’t matter,” Abuse called from the back room. He emerged with a spray bottle that had the word “blech” crudely inscribed with black permanent marker on the side. “That’s food wrap, so we take proper precautions. Bloodborne pathogens, et cetera.”

            “Et cetera,” Jux corrected, articulating with a hard “c.”

            “I don’t care about that,” Abuse told him.

            “Nerd,” Ogre chuckled.

            Jux was now washing the injury on his hand, making sure not to get the finger log wet. “I hope you don’t expect me to take that seriously,” he said, “coming from someone who plays a real-life RPG about restaurant skills.” As soon as he’d said these words, he made a very serious face and immediately wrapped his hand copiously with paper towels and collected his phone from his pocket. He unlocked the screen and stared in horror at the app, which was showing that he’d lost a substantial portion of his skill leveling progress because of “multiple hazardous incidents.”

            “Multiple hazardous incidents?” Jux cried.

            “Sounds pretty accurate, dude,” Abuse said.

            “Oh snap,” Duke said. He set his knife down and cornered the island to look at Jux’s phone. “I heard about this.”

            “What?” Jux asked. “What? Are you telling me you can level down in this fucking game?”

            Duke held up a hand. “It’s like a penalty,” he said. “I didn’t think it worked, though. A lot of people I know who play—”

            “How the fuck does it know what’s happening?” Jux asked. “It was in my pocket. Is this fucking game listening to everything that’s going on?”

            “Could very well be so,” Ogre said sagely.

            “That’s it,” Jux said, tapping at his phone’s screen. “I’m uninstalling this shit. Leveling down. That’s bullshit.”

            “I think it’s trying to incentivize safe and effective practices,” Duke said.

            “To hell with that,” Jux said. “Just because I screw up it doesn’t mean that I’m essentially worse at something than I was before. This is bullshit.”

            “It’s just a game, dude,” Abuse cautioned.

            “I fucking hate RPGs,” Jux said, shoving his phone back into his pocket. The motion was so reckless and forceful that he partially dislodged the cast of paper towel and plastic on his finger. “I don’t even know why I try. Honestly.”

            “Hold up,” Duke said, coming around the island toward Jux. “Can I see it?”

            Jux held up his fat-wrapped finger. “What, this?”

            “Your Testaments,” Duke said.

            Jux sighed and pulled his phone back out and navigated to the app before placing the phone on the prep station so that Duke and Ogre could take a look at his character skill sets along with him.

            “Do you mind?” Duke asked, pointing at the phone.

            Jux breathed deeply.

            “He doesn’t want you to find his porn,” Abuse suggested.

            “There’s no porn on this phone,” Jux claimed.

            Abuse stripped some viscous membrane from a chicken breast. “Every phone has porn on it.”

            Jux squinted across the kitchen at him. “Is that supposed to be some philosophical assessment about the ubiquity of digital information sharing?”

            Abuse did a little dance that involved slow, deep pelvic thrusts, clenched fists, and a slightly ajar mouth with protruding tongue.

            “I don’t want to see your porn,” Duke said. He reached down and swiped around in the app for a minute before bringing up a summary of recent activity. “Goddamn.”

            “What?” Jux asked.

            “You got over a thousand XP in one hour,” Duke said. He glanced around the kitchen. “Jesus. You trying to get yourself killed?”

            Jux swallowed. “What?” he asked. “Why would you wonder that?”

            Duke picked at his chin. “You’re power leveling a little too hard,” he said. “You’re going to break your game.”

            Jux looked worriedly at his phone.

            “Blood,” Abuse muttered.

            “What was that over there?” Ogre called.

            Abuse turned slowly. “I said,” he said, “Blood. It’s still the greatest game of all time. And it will continue to be.”

            “No,” Jux said, shaking his head. “That’s just not accurate.”

            Ogre shook his head. “Of course it’s not accurate,” he said. “Everyone knows that Harvest Moon is the greatest game of all time.”

            Jux was shaking his head now. “No,” he said. “No, no, no.”

            “Oh, really?” Ogre challenged. “And what do you think is the greatest?”

            “Tetris,” Jux said with confidence.

            A high-pitched noise emitted from Abuse’s mouth that eventually turned into “I don’t know.” He looked up at the ceiling. “I have to admit that’s pretty high-quality, but it’s no Blood.”

            “Blood sucks,” Jux told him.

            “Fuck you,” Abuse said. “You just don’t like it because you’re not good.”

            “I have to admit that Tetris is better than Blood,” Ogre said.

            Abuse frowned at him. “You’re taking his side?” he asked. “Him?”

            Ogre shrugged. “I’m not saying Tetris is better than Harvest Moon.”

            “Can we please get back to this?” Duke asked, examining Jux’s character specs.

            “I fucking hate this game,” Jux whined.

            “Seriously,” Duke continued. “I mean you have to take this game seriously. There’s talk that built into the coding or whatever is some kind of like adaptive difficulty thing.”

            “What the fuck does that mean?” Jux asked.

            “It’s like,” Duke began. “It—so, I don’t understand how this game actually does what it does, it just does it. But, so, you level up skills and everything, right, and every time you level up a skill, you get a little bit of general XP that goes toward raising your character’s overall level. Right?”

            “Hey,” Ogre said with irritation, “you’re the one telling us to play it.”

            “I know,” Duke said. “So that’s how it works, essentially. Level up skills individually, and when you end up leveling up the character, you have attribute points to allocate. That makes your character, you know, better, so that you’re more prepared to deal with higher difficulty scenarios.”

            Jux and Ogre were staring at him. From the other side of the island, Abuse was staring, too. A thin signal of smoke was rising from the breast cutlets searing in the pan.

            “You increased six levels in an hour,” Duke said with concern.

            “So?” Jux asked. “That’s good, isn’t it?”

            Duke shook his head. “First of all,” he said, “you didn’t allocate your available attribute points. That means you’re operating against greater difficulty but you haven’t buffed out your character.”

            “Fine,” Jux said, reaching for the phone. “I’ll just put a bunch of points into chemistry or something.”

            “It’s not just that,” Duke said. “I mean, yes, you should definitely use those points as soon as possible, but you didn’t really earn the XP authentically.”

            Jux projected an injured look. “What?” he cried. “What do you mean? I really did clean the knife every time.”

            “Yeah, I saw what you were doing,” Duke said. “You were cleaning the knife, yes, and it registered that in the app, but it’s not like the normal business around here would ever require you to clean a hundred knives in thirty minutes or whatever you did. You found an exploit.”

            “Are you trying to tell me I cheated?” Jux asked.

            “It’s not cheating,” Duke said. “You just discovered an exploit, and you exploited it.”

            “So what’s the problem, then?” Jux asked.

            “The problem,” Duke said, practically whispering, “is that you leveled up unnaturally, and even when you distribute those attribute points you earned, you probably aren’t prepared to deal with the increased difficulty.”

            “Goddamn it,” Abuse said, tonging a blackened chicken breast from the pan. “Can you please take this conversation outside?”

            “Wait, wait,” Jux said, staring at the screen on his phone. “Here’s this difficulty thing again. Do you mean it’s more difficult to level up the higher your level is? Like you need more XP every time or something?”

            “It is like that,” Duke explained, “but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the kitchen. Your kitchen. Your experience. You’re already level seven, right? In one night? How do you think someone can get all that experience legitimately? You’re just making it impossible for you to keep playing, and you might get hurt.”

            “Like actually hurt?” Jux asked.

            Duke looked at the wrapped finger and the abrasion on Jux’s arm.

            “Are you trying to tell us that this game can make the job harder?” Ogre asked. “Make the actual kitchen more dangerous?”

            Duke nodded gravely. “I think so.”

            “That’s a crock of shit,” Ogre said. “Jux just cut himself because he always cuts himself.”

            “Not out of, you know, self-harm—”

            “Listen to me,” Duke said. “I already told you that I don’t really know how exactly this app works, but people are taking this shit real seriously. There’s rumors that one of the line cooks up at Caffe Prozor power-leveled his sauce skill by heating up a bunch of pans and systematically deglazing each one over and over again with rakija.”

            “So what happened?” Jux asked.

            “After doing it for like two hours, he maxed out his sauce,” Duke said. “Then, the next day, he was trying to make a hollandaise—just a fucking hollandaise—but it kept breaking so he was like fishing around for some ice cubes or something and ended up slipping in a puddle of water and bashing his face into the ice machine. Lost two teeth and got a concussion.”

            Jux looked warily at the ice machine.

            “It’s not about the ice machine,” Ogre said.

            Jux inhaled deeply. “And I was fucking with the knives.”

            “It’s not like a knife is going to come flying off the rack at your face,” Ogre said. It was somehow comforting.

            “Thanks,” Jux said, “but, all the same, I think I’m going to uninstall this bitch.”

IV

            Late that night, when the front of the house was quiet but for the squeaking of towels against the edges of wine glasses that the bartender was shining and the back of the house was as clean as it was going to get, Duke and Ogre and Abuse were out back at the dock with Jux, who was gripping his head and staring down at his phone. They were all smoking except Jux.

            “I just don’t get it,” Jux muttered.

            “Maybe it’s something in the terms of service?” Duke asked.

            “But what app have you not been able to uninstall?” Jux countered. “I deleted Facebook and then when my phone updated there it was again, but at least it went the fuck away in the meantime. This one will literally not allow itself to be uninstalled.”

            “We know,” Ogre said. “You’ve been talking about it for an hour now.”

            “Well, what do you expect?” Jux cried. “Apparently this game can do you some sick bodily injury.”

            “Technically, the game isn’t injuring you,” Duke said.

            “Are you defending this shit?” Ogre asked him.

            Duke tapped his cigarette and shrugged. “Just saying what’s true,” he said. “You slam your leg into the island, well, that’s not the game’s fault. It’s you and the island.”

            Jux flexed a leg.

            “How’s it feel?” Ogre asked.

            “Tender,” Jux said.

            “I’m not trying to insult you here,” Duke continued. “I’m glad you didn’t break your leg, to be honest.”

            “Who breaks their leg by bumping into the island?” Ogre asked.

            “Jonathan Rigby,” Abuse said.

            Jux inhaled. “Jonathan Rigby?”

            “Leopold!” Abuse announced.

            “Back in his role as,” Jux supplied, “Leopold!”

            Abuse shook his head. “You’re completely fucking it up, dude.”

            Jux winced and went for a drag on a cigarette, but he didn’t have one. Duke held out a rumpled pack of Lucky Strikes, but Jux just stared at it.

            “It is called a cigarette,” Abuse narrated. “Only the finest, which all of the world will see upon the return of Jonathan Rigby as… Leopold!”

            “Leopold!” Jux echoed.

            “Stop doing that,” Ogre suggested.

            Duke was still holding out the pack. “Are you going to have one of these?”

            Jux stared at the pack. The cellophane wrap was glistening in the ambient light of the parking lot’s lamps. “Is smoking part of the game?” he asked. “Like using a lighter, maybe?”

            “Torching the crème brulee must be part of chemistry or something,” Ogre posited.

            Duke shook his head. “It’s your chemistry level that affects your ability to torch,” he explained. “Torching is part of presentation, which connects with both chemistry and design.”

            Ogre nodded. “That makes sense.”

            “So,” Jux continued, “having a cigarette is outside of the scope of this game?”

            Duke pointed his lit cigarette at him. “You know,” he said, “that’s pretty brilliant. As it is now, I don’t think there’s enough in the game about the, you know, orbital experience worked in. How you work your smoke breaks, capitalizing on staff meals, that kind of thing. Where you parked. That could get real interesting.”

            “So industry life simulator,” Abuse offered.

            “More like industry life enhancer,” Duke said.

            “To be clear,” Jux said, “I was not suggesting that the scope of this game be expanded.”

            “So did you get it deleted yet?” Abuse asked.

            Jux held up his phone. “No,” he said. “There isn’t even an uninstall option. The button is grayed out.”

            Abuse nodded sagely.

            “What?” Jux asked.

            “I think you’re going to have to throw your phone into the sewer,” Abuse said.

            Jux looked down and sighed. “I just bought this thing.”

            Abuse blew out a maelstrom of smoke. “Told you that pop-out keyboard was a mistake.”

            “What does this have to do with the keyboard?” Jux cried.

            “Have you ever used it?” asked Abuse.

            Jux shrugged.

            “There you go,” Abuse said.

            Then Jux manipulated his phone so that the screen slid back, revealing a complete keyboard with tiny, tiny buttons in place of keys. He began mashing his thumbs into them. “I’m using it right now, see?”

            Duke launched himself off the upturned crate and pushed at the phone. “Whoa, there,” he said. “Is Testaments still open?”

            Jux, thumbs frozen, stared at him. “I can’t get it to close.”

            Duke ran a hand through his hair and sucked on his cigarette, staring at the dumpster in the moonlight. “I can’t get it to close on my phone, either.”

            “Should I stop randomly pushing buttons?” Jux asked.

            “When is randomly pushing buttons a good idea?” Ogre asked. “Tell me that.”

            “Wise man,” Abuse said. He drew from his cigarette and then looked hatefully at the cherry as it smoldered right at the filter.

            Jux clapped the phone back together and slid it into a pocket. “Fuck it,” he spat, finally taking the pack from Duke’s hand. “I’ll have a cigarette.” He removed one of the little slim cylinders and passed the pack back to Duke before holding the cigarette and staring up through the slatted shelter at the moon.

            “Well?” Ogre asked.

            Jux looked at him.

            Ogre smiled. “Are you going to light that?”

            Jux rolled his eyes and took out a lighter. As he leaned over to get a good strike on the flint mechanism against the breeze, a swath of hair untucked from over his right ear and swooped straight down into the fire just as he was inhaling to light the cigarette. He felt some discomfort, but the only thing he did was take that first, deep drag and then stand straight to exhale. Then he sighed. “You know,” he said, “this is all just bullshit. How can a phone game make things more difficult?”

            “Shit fucky,” Abuse stammered, approaching with his hands out. Between the fingers of one of them was his own cigarette, completely burned down, so he flicked it across the dock and, uncharacteristically, nobody paid attention to whether or not it made it into the corner can because, well, Jux’s hair was on fire.

            “What?” Jux asked, leaning away from Abuse’s palms as Duke rushed toward the hose.

            “Hold still,” Abuse said.

            “This cigarette smells like shit,” Jux said.

            “That’s because your hair is on fire,” Ogre said.

            Jux stared at him. “Seriously?”

            “Get ready,” Duke warned as he cranked the spigot and searched about in the darkness for the end of the hose.

            Jux took a trembling, casual drag. “Is my hair really on fire?” he asked. “Yes. Yes, it is, isn’t it?”

            “Ready?” Duke asked. “Lean toward the dumpster.”

            “Oh fuck fuck fuck,” Jux whined.

            “Don’t worry,” Duke said. “I got my thumb right here on the spout. It’s going to be like Japanese jungle rain.”

            “What the fuck is that?” Jux cried. “Aren’t there like tsunamis and shit?”

            Duke directed a misty cover of water at him. The sour smell of burning hair soon dissipated after an initial hiss. Then Duke closed the spigot and dropped the hose.

            Jux, dripping, brought the cigarette to his mouth and took a puff. The cigarette was soaked near the filter, but it still had a couple of good drags in it, he surmised. Then he felt the vibration of his phone in his pocket so he pulled it out.

            “I just got XP,” Jux said, swiping here and there. “Chemistry XP, I think.”

            Duke frowned. “You don’t get chemistry XP,” he said. “At least, I thought you didn’t. Chemistry is an attribute, so you’d have to get XP in one of the related skills and that would—”

            “Oh, how I hate role playing games,” Abuse said, shaking his head. “The only good thing about Warhammer is that you can paint the figurines.”

            Duke, Ogre, and Jux all leaned over Jux’s phone.

            “Wait, did you update the app?” Duke asked. “This isn’t the same interface.” He dug around in his own pockets.

            “All I tried to do was uninstall it,” Jux said, looking down at a screen that was apparently informing him that his chemistry attribute had been permanently raised by two points.

            Duke now had his own phone out. “Fellas,” he said, “I think we have a situation.”

            Ogre was nodding. “Like how his hair was just on fire.”

            Duke dismissed it with a palm. “I’m being prompted to update the app,” he said. “Are you sure you didn’t update?”

            Jux shrugged and sucked fruitlessly at his wet cigarette. “I honestly don’t know what I’m doing, what I have or have not done, what—”

            “Maybe you updated it when you were trying to uninstall,” Duke interrupted. He was speed-running a finger across the screen. “Shit. I don’t know if I want to update.”

            Jux looked over at Ogre and Abuse. “My hair was actually on fire, wasn’t it?”

            They nodded.

            Jux tried again, to no avail, at the cigarette, and then flicked it up into the air.

            “You want a fresh one?” Duke asked.

            Jux shook his head, shedding flecks of water. “I don’t think I should do literally anything but breathe until this app is off my phone,” he said. “Can you delete your account?”

            Duke and Ogre were both looking at their own phones with the app open. In each case, the screen was prompting them to install a software update.

            “See,” Jux said, “I never saw a screen like that.”

            “There isn’t even an option to continue without updating,” Duke noted. “I can’t even exit out of the app, either.” He sighed and tapped the screen to initiate the update.

            “Well, what’d you go and do that for?” Ogre cried. “You don’t know what this update is going to do to you.”

            “What choice did I have?” Duke asked.

            Ogre held down a couple of his phone’s side buttons and the screen whited out momentarily before restarting.

            “Aha,” Abuse said with an approving nod. “Soft reset.”

            “What the fuck?” Duke muttered as he explored the app. “I just earned XP for maintenance.” He looked over at the hose and then at Jux.

            “Here goes nothing,” Ogre said.

            “Are you updating, too?” Duke asked.

            “No,” Ogre said as he manipulated the screen. “What I’m doing is wiping my phone. I want nothing to do with this monkey business anymore.”

            Jux began playing with his phone. “How’d you reset yours?”

            “Volume down and power at the same time,” Ogre said. “You have to hold it for a few seconds.”

            Jux tried this with no success. When he did the exact same thing a second time, however, his phone restarted. Duke was in the process of soft resetting his phone, too. After a few tense, quiet moments, all three of them were standing there with their phones opened to settings and the irreversible factory reset option looming just a touch of a fingertip away.

            “What about my files and stuff?” Jux asked.

            “You mean your porn?” asked Duke.

            “Don’t you back up your data?” Abuse asked. He clicked his tongue. “You have to back up your data, dude.”

            “Not since October, I think,” Jux said. He shook his head. “Whatever. It’s just some stupid pictures.”

            “You mean—” Duke began.

            “It’s not porn,” Jux interrupted. He pressed his lips together and tapped the reset button and the phone whited out again before displaying a progress bar. It immediately jumped to 38% complete and then hung there for a minute. In the meantime, both Duke and Ogre had begun the process on their phones as well. When they respectively got to 38%, they also seemed to freeze.

            “Huh,” Duke said.

            “That app is probably hindering the factory reset protocols,” Abuse said.

            “You don’t know anything,” Ogre hissed derisively.

            Abuse shrugged and pulled out his own phone and began fingering the screen.

            “What,” Jux asked, “don’t tell me you secretly downloaded Testaments of Flavor, too.”

            “No way,” Abuse said, his face illuminated with the light from his screen. “That’s dumb stuff.”

            “Then what are you doing?” Jux asked.

            Abuse held out his phone. On it was an image of a red-haired young woman with her enormous, shapely, natural breasts dangling over a polished wooden banister in a Victorian cottage. She appeared to be giggling.

            “My goodness,” Jux muttered.

            “Tigobitties,” Abuse confirmed. He resumed his private examination.

            “Mine’s up to 53%,” Duke announced.

            “Seventy-two here,” Jux said.

            “Fifty-three,” Ogre added. “Actually, fifty-four.”

            They continued to audibly update each other over the course of the next minute or so before, eventually, they were all finished with their resets and their phones booted back up. They all immediately verified that the app was gone. It was.

            “So that’s it,” Jux said. “Everything’s normal. Fucking game can’t get me now. Right?”

            But he wasn’t sure. None of them were. They couldn’t be.       

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