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WHEN SHE AWOKE, it was to a faint sense of importance.
Something was keeping her from obscurity, from eternal placidity. Something nearby mattered. Whether it was an errant ghost, a stray item from her son's toybox, her son come to comfort her or her husband to claim her, she did not know. The notion that it might be something exotic and utterly new glanced across her mind for only long enough to tease her.
This bewildered her. She had not expected to be important anymore. But then, she had little way to know how long she had spent in obscurity.
It had felt like sleep, this descent beneath the spotlight. Had she wandered mindlessly for so long that her turn had once again come? Was she even now being called again to the spotlight? She was not ready—not in the slightest.
And yet, she told herself, body slipping meekly back into motion, if it was her time again, that would at least be a solution to her problem. That would be something new. It would be a wonderful blessing, albeit a terrifying one. Perhaps the new development would keep her husband at bay. Perhaps it would provide her with fuel to run again.
But no. She could already tell this was no new theater of action. What tickled her senses was something small and finite, like herself. A single thing, orbiting the limits of her consciousness.
No, not orbiting. Hovering.
She fled; that much came automatically. Only then came the realization that it was a ghost—and with that, the questions.
Why was it here? What would incite one of the four ghosts to abandon its comrades in the spotlight, shirking the chase? Had some glitch or twist in the story sent it careening away? Were Junior's mazes smaller now, with room for only three enemies? Somehow this seemed impossible. In such a case, would not the superfluous ghost remain just out of sight, ready to resume its part? Its presence here, so far from the field of action, made Ms, Pac-Man shiver.
Was it even one of the four? She darted nearer, clearing her mind enough to exercise caution and identify the familiar movement pattern from afar, even before he entered her line of vision. Yes—it was Inky, the blue ghost; that was clear enough. But what was he doing here?
Well… trying to catch her, naturally. That much was clear. Ghosts chased them, and always would—that was their purpose in life, unchanging and perhaps unchosen. But why in the world had he descended so far from the spotlight? Ms. Pac-Man was not the object of interest currently—that was her son. Besides, what hope could one ghost alone have of catching her? Tactical strength lay in numbers: for one ghost to split off and pursue a secondary target would only weaken the remaining pack. And his quest was futile: Ms. Pac-Man was swifter than the blue ghost and he could not corner her. Each junction offered multiple routes to freedom and only one leading back to destruction.
Perplexed and a little frustrated, she sped from the ghost and went down another level. She was alone there for a while, but then the flickering sense of importance returned and she knew the ghost was near. Yet the sense grew no closer, and Ms. Pac-Man's perplexity grew. He was following at the limit of her ken, but he did not approach her!
Was this some glitch of solitude, a malfunction born from Inky's inexperience in solo hunting? He was always the one to hover at the edge of the pack, awaiting a mistake. Rush the flank and cut off the escape—but what sense could that make when he was alone? Did he have no other repertoire? Or was whatever anomaly had caused him to stray from the pack also responsible for his inability to give proper chase?
She drew to a halt against a wall, driven (for once) by curiosity. The ghost indeed kept a safe distance, flickering about. He made occasional inroads, but darted back each time. How strange! Was he not planning to kill her? Did he intend to catch her unwary? But then, it would be hard to imagine her less wary than she'd been a few minutes ago, and he hadn't swooped in for the kill.
This behavior was not strange—it was pathological. The blue ghost's pattern of movement was more disturbing than his presence here itself.
Not knowing what was to be done about it, Ms. Pac-Man ducked down another level, and then another. She waited there until she felt the tingle of an enemy approaching, then onward she went. Would five levels at once be enough to shake him? It was not. The feeling returned, and deeper she descended, and soon the investigation faded into something familiar: Flight. Running. Escape. She paused to consider how things were developing.
It was not so odd that she did not feel afraid. The threat pursuing her was minimal: she had no gems to collect and no limitations on which direction she could flee, and there was only one attacker in pursuit, and he was perhaps the least formidable of the four. What was odd was that she did not feel hopeless. The sense of emptiness ahead and sterility behind was at least held at bay for now, as Ms Pac-Man flew downward from an assailant whose purpose was an aberrant mystery. She welcomed that. She did not dwell on the fact that she felt relief, lest it dissipate. She simply observed it happily, from the outside, edging inward. She spiraled down into a dungeon whose walls grew closer, and felt the funny tingle from an assailant she could not explain, and she felt that somehow, in some strange way, there was after all newness in the world.
A question came to be within her, a shining gem like a power pellet unharvested, and it grew with each subsequent descent: How will this end? And an odd, perverse piece of her suggested that just maybe, it never would.
It was not hard as if this would be hard to end. If she made an effort to break the hypnotic, almost soothing feeling of this chase, she could easily trick the ghost, wend around him and rise again through the complex. She could leave it and be free on the outside, and she believed the ghost would not follow her there. Even if he did, he would not find her. She could return to speeding the vast in-betweens, saddled with most of her pains from before, plus the fresh, painful fact that her son would not even have her company.
Instead, she fled downward.
Her son's nursery had been built with larger rooms than the houses of his parents. Though they had no tunnels, they were so wide they could not be contained all at once within the senses. It was a somewhat dizzying feeling that stopped some distance below the first level. Below that, the walls drew in and the rooms became smaller. Blockier. Simpler, with fewer loops or tricks with which to get away. More trivial, like childhood, or the world seen through it. It was a tower pointed downward.
Just as the walls grew closer together, so was the blackness around them fleshed out, made somehow darker. Purer. More powerful. In Ms. Pac-Man's mind it came to lose its potential to be filled; it ceased being so much empty space and became, instead, space that was filled with emptiness. Crammed densely with blackness. With blankness. There was no room to imagine anything else. It felt like the shock from when, on her own two hundred-twentieth level, the walls of the maze had suddenly vanished from around her, leaving nothing in her sights but herself and the four predators she danced with minute by minute. A child's reconception of her reality. A black field containing nothing but a yellow circle and a cyan blob. A primal trace.
The levels suddenly came to an end and Ms. Pac-Man returned to her senses. She had fled so relentlessly, so unthinkingly, that she had reached the bottom. It was with the same sense that one uses to recognize deformity that she realized the maze she was in lacked even that most basic amenity that all the others had possessed: a downward exit. Even more alarmingly, it possessed no loops—not one. No loops? The significance of this clutched onto her—there was no way back around. She was trapped by a single ghost!
She had believed, during this long pointless pursuit, that she had felt no emotion. Now she realized that was untrue; she simply hadn't known the name for what she felt. But now a familiar emotion blared loud and clear: fear. She didn't know what to do. She had squandered her chance, her multitude of chances to dodge the ghost; something had kept her from eschewing her downward course, and while she realized there might be a lowest level to this dungeon, she had never dreamed it would be loopless. There were forks, yes, but for any fork she took, the ghost could simply follow.
She fell back into the deepest passage, shielded by the greatest number of twists and turns, and tucked herself into the dead end. The ghost entered the level. He took the passage she had taken. She prayed for a twenty minute reversal; he held his course. He came in sight. He arrived at the last junction.
He stopped.
His quarry had to feel for her own heartbeat to make sure the world hadn't frozen. For one terrible moment, she felt certain the same glitch that had taken the ghost must have taken everything. Ghosts didn't stop! They never stopped, for any reason, under any circumstances! Even while cooped in Central Control they seethed, up and down, ready to roll. Yet this blue ghost had stopped dead only three body lengths from her face.
His eyes were faced toward her.
Even to waver, to see whether she could move at all, was too frightening a prospect for Ms. Pac-Man. At any moment the ghost could come crashing down upon her. It could not be that he had not noticed her there, but perhaps he was lost in thought, as she had been. Perhaps, though his face bore no such expression, this was how he savored his victory. She had never been trapped in a dead end before; nor had any of her family. She did not know for certain this was not how a ghost should behave. Yet it flummoxed and terrified her all the same.
She watched his eyes, praying that a reversal might still take place. Yet even if the ghost did turn his eyes from her, it would be no use if he remained forever frozen in place. A new wave of fear washed over her: if that were the case, she would be locked into this tiny cell forever, suicide her only option. During her time of glory, her time in the spotlight, she had possessed three lives; a single death would not have been the end. But she truly did not know whether that was still the case in a place so far removed as this.
But the ghost was not frozen. He backed away from her. He… backed away… and that, in itself, was new and frightening: ghosts invariably moved in the direction of their eyes. But there was only room in her heart for so many stripes of fear, and this was a relief. So Ms. Pac-Man sat motionless and watched as Inky moved away—as smoothly as silently as he had come, but watching her all the while.
He paused at the end of the corridor, and had he not stopped in place only moments before, this alone would have caused Ms. Pac-Man great shock. But he turned at the corner, then, and was gone. She dared not emerge, however. She dared not do a thing. Ms. Pac-Man remained in place, tucked into her distant dead end, for five full minutes, and that, under the circumstances, was a very long time.
Finally, when she could feel no trace of the aberrant ghost and the shock had worn itself down, she crept from her hiding place and humbly retraced her path. Her heart returned to a mostly normal pace once she was ensconced again in levels with plenty of loops. She rose with increasing confidence, more and more rapidly, making her way toward the exit of the complex as directly as she knew how. On the way, without consciously wishing to, she relived the eerie happenstance… and was astonished to find herself feeling light. This was the relief of life after the belief that death was certain, but it was more. She could not say why, but… well, she had needed something new, needed it dearly, and now… though that novelty was a terror that had literally come within inches of ending her life… she had gotten it. She had gotten the newness she craved in the world. And somehow… it had elated her!
For a time, she had studied abstract puzzle theory. This was while her husband was off on one of his more obscure missions, working alongside a deformed rascal called Miru—they had not heard from Miru since. With Junior serving as messenger, Pac-Man had told his wife about certain cases in which an insoluble puzzle had become soluble with the addition of an extraneous, seemingly unrelated factor, such as Miru herself. It was a matter of three steps: identifying the nature of the new factor; working out how to use it to affect things external to itself; and determining how this effect could be used to solve the puzzle.
Now Ms. Pac-Man felt she was analogously faced with an insoluble puzzle. It was worse than a puzzle, of course, because it concerned her very existence and boasted no guarantee of a solution, but she had no other framework through which to view it. Her options were stunningly few.
The puzzle she faced was: How can I live without my husband? The new factor she had encoutered was a terrifying pause, and a broken rule of ghost movement. She had no idea how this novelty could be turned to her advantage, but the idea that somehow it might was her most strident thought as she made her way up from the basement. She was not one to wither away in the wake of danger—she would build from it, somehow. The key point here was that she had been desperate for something, anything new… and now she had witnessed it. Her next task was to claim this novelty for herself.
She emerged from the complex with no idea where she was going. Her only concern was speed, which she cultivated so that she could think. With dashed walls flying by, horizontal and vertical in colors that were sometimes cool, sometimes garish, she felt more than she could see. When she flew swiftly there was less visual distraction and more visceral sensation, a prerequisite to the kind of mental focus she was seeking. The walls turned from coral orange to ocean blue, and Ms. Pac-Man's problem took the place of corridors in her mind. White eyes. Black pupils. A body retreating, pupils locked. A pause moments before her death. Another at the corridor's end. Utterly anomalous, yet strangely familiar behavior. There was something oddly easy about making sense of it all, now that she was sailing.
Ocean blue to bold crimson. If she didn't know better, she would say the ghost was admiring her. She wondered if what had happened could ever happen again. She wondered whether it was something modified in all the ghosts, or only the one that had pursued her, or if it was something that had been hidden in them all along.
Bold crimson to cold, dark blue. She wondered what had triggered this strange event; whether it had been an action of her own, and whether she could control it. She wondered whether it was something she could possibly test safely. Suddenly, she realized that she could test none of these questions without going back to her son's theater of action. Back to where the ghosts roamed freely—apparently, all too freely.
Cold blue to salmon pink. She did not want to put herself in danger again. She quailed at the thought of dodging around her son's enemies—for they were his enemies now, not hers—trying her experiments while explaining to her son why she had to be there, even while her work interfered with his. No. It would get her nowhere. She couldn't go back. All she had to work with were the ghosts—the unlikeliest of tools—and she knew that she could gain nothing by going to them. So her wonderful novelty was useless after all.
Yet just the fact that it could exist—that new things were possible in the world—gave her deep hope. And so, after passing from salmon pink to coral orange and coming to a wall, it was deeply that Ms Pac-Man slept, escaped just barely from despair.
A/N: The ghosts in the Pac-Man arcade series behave according to different algorithms, which one might say gives them distinct personalities. Later Pac-Man games and cartoons didn't always adhere to these personality templates, but for this story, that's what I went with. Inky is the shy one, frequently flitting around the outside of things. His original Japanese name meant 'fickle'. In the original game, his name is 'Bashful'—'Inky' is just a nickname.
Miru is a strange helper/hinderer from the little-known Namco game Pac & Pal.
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