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EVERYTHING had changed. And it was too much to hope that it might change back someday—that things could be flat, square, smooth again, as they used to be. It wasn't even clear that hoping for such a thing was right anymore.

Life had gone beyond what it used to be, like a sleeper who wakes after a hundred years and prays for the new world they find themselves in to be a dream. You can't sleep your way back to the old days, and you can't return to bird's eye simplicity once you've tasted the thrill of the side-scroller. For a profound amount to be gained, a profound amount had been lost.

She cried often, but secretly. To everyone she met, she smiled. She was aware of an invisible audience, its nature inscrutable, watching her husband's every endeavor. He was on a quest, a grand adventure through landscapes filled with impossible, garish, mysterious objects. The ghosts harried him frequently, in various guises, but she, his wife, was sent to comfort him only on occasion, to support and egg him onward. The moment he left her side, she was wracked with emotion: loneliness, impotence, an ironic appreciation of the irrelevance of her presence. The only one she shared her feelings with was Inky, but they were only able to steal brief minutes together here and there before his duties impelled him onward. He was even forced to fly a vehicle across the sky, propelled by a whirling blade—it was a miracle it could even stay aloft in this world of gravity, in which the floor demanded continuous loyalty and the direction up was all but taboo.

Ms. Pac-Man's saving grace was that she was seldom in the limelight—only a minor figure in the saga of her husband. A piece of her resented having been called at all for such a task, and wondered what kind of beings would place such seemingly infinite value on a creature such as he, while assigning her to the periphery. But on another level, she enjoyed knowing that she was active and not forgotten, yet still able to see her ghostly lover from time to time. He took her bringing her fruit, which she ate decadently and slowly, thinking of him, though deep down she knew that she wasn't hungry anymore.

Inky confided, on one of his furtive visits, that he, too, felt insulted. "We're forced to play cookie-cutter copies of ourselves," he groused. "As if one Inky, one Blinky, one Sue isn't enough. I fly a plane through the sky; I hurry back behind the sky itself to fly another. It isn't what I would have chosen, even if I wished to attack him."

"I suppose you must be forced to ask yourself: does your identity matter anymore?"

Inky looked down as he hovered. It was like a sigh in the cessation of words and expression, but soundless. "There aren't many choices left to me."

"Only when you're working, my love. Only in the spotlight. Here, with me, you have a world of choices." He looked skeptical, so she prodded him. "Go on—say something I would never expect!"

He took the injunction seriously, and thought about it. "Bagels… are like power pellets… with holes!"

Ms. Pac-Man laughed merrily. He hadn't had to work so hard at it. Even at his most predictable, Inky was always surprising her. Yet even his random, unprompted utterance still had to make sense. Power pellets with holes indeed!

As time went on and the false story unfolded, Ms. Pac-Man longed more and more to leave this land created in her husband's image—as she had been once—and return to the long black corridors she had known for all her life. But she dared not leave, for fear she could never return. And despite their troubles, she found she did not want her husband to fail.

Why was that, she wondered? Did she still feel love for him, even now? Did she simply see herself too faithfully in his featureless features?

This was a question she asked Inky when he next came to her little niche, in case he had an answer she had missed. He thought for a moment, and then said: "You aren't used to failure."

This confused Ms. Pac-Man. "But—aren't I? Didn't I cause my son to lose one of his lives? Didn't I fail to stay in love with my husband? He was supposed to be my perfect match. The way I see it… I've failed at the foolproof."

Inky neither blanched nor raised his voice, for it was not in his nature to do so. He sat with her through those spacious hours—as quiet as the paths once were black—and explained to her his theory of how the world was ever branching into billions.

"How is it," he asked, "that you never once died when it was your turn to pick up the dots?"

Ms. Pac-Man answered carefully. "…I was careful?

"You did not die," said Inky, "because it was possible, however unlikely, for you not to."

She savored her puzzlement. "I don't understand. It is possible that many things can happen."

"And we should understand them as if they do," Inky replied. "You died millions of times while traversing those mazes. Many of those deaths may even have been caused by me. But in those worlds where you died, there was no future. In the world where you first succeeded in your mission with no loss of life, fertile ground was sown, and a million other worlds took root."

She loved it when he spoke in long sentences, which he was so rarely brave enough to do. "And if I again face peril, only one of those worlds will survive?" she asked.

"As far as we are meant to know," he said.

Ms. Pac-Man valued Inky's thoughts as much as she valued him. Over time, she came to believe most of what he said. She simultaneously realized that she had no way to leave her husband's quest unless she was willing to doom the worldline she would thus create to non-existence. If she left the appointed structure of her world, whether involuntarily—as by repeated deaths—or by her own volition, all would be null from that point on.

"I do not wish to make this happen," said Ms. Pac-Man. "It is contrary to my nature."

"It is contrary to all nature," said Inky. "Yet it is in your power to do it nonetheless."

"But do you want me to do it?" she asked, near tears.

"I am but a humble servant of the existence in which I live. If I become part of a null worldline, I will accept my fate happily. If that is the choice you make, then, since I will no longer have the game to serve, I will devote all my attention to you."

Null? Perhaps a better word would be, 'Unchaperoned'.

She waited until her husband came to her again, looking for support in his quest. She smiled at him, and smiled at the track outside that he was meant to follow. It all amused her in a way it had not before, because it was all part of an elaborate vision that she knew would soon no longer be. Or at the least, it would no longer matter, and that made it more beautiful.

Junior was with her; the two of them were meant to wish Pac-Man good luck together. She said the words; this time, for once, she brought herself to mean it.

Pac-Man seemed genuinely touched. "Thanks, Pepper," he said, smiling and turning a cheek. She smiled back: did he think he had won her back? Let him think that—it was too beautiful an idea to disrupt.

"Mom," said Junior, once Pac-Man had gone.

"Son."

He eyed her sadly, irately. "You're going away, aren't you?"

She nodded. "I'm not trying to leave you. You understand that, don't you?"

Junior looked up at her with an expression that was unreadable, but for its sadness. Spite, perhaps.

"I'm not even doing to it to leave him. That's what I want you to understand."

"Then what?"

"Destiny," she told him. "I'm doing it to say goodbye to destiny."

He stared. She didn't know how much he understood. She never had been able to figure out how much he understood. "Goodbye, Mom," he said, not without a certain coldness.

"Goodbye, son."

She was the first to turn away. It was hard to do, but easy to know which way to turn. She still had a deep memory of the four directional world, unfettered by gravity. Two of those directions were still represented here in Pac-Land; the others were open and wide, and all but invisible unless you chose to make an effort and face them. She faced them. She passed into the endless, sideways blackness, and felt herself drop from one level of existence to another. From the existence meant to be to that which was ignored. From light into darkness. From purpose into a yawning, boundless pit of obsolescence.

Things seemed brittle at first, and she was afraid the old curved walls would start to fall apart. But they regained focus after a little while. Her way of seeing things had just changed—that was all. She floated through black pathways and took leisurely turns, gradually beginning to ask herself where home was.

And eventually, she found it. Her own nursery—the field in which she had been created. And nearby, the home she had shared with her husband, and later her son, for years. She discovered that she was as she had been, no longer tall or complex. Her fripperies had faded, and she was herself again. Alone, yes, but not lonely. She was a pioneer. This was the unchaperoned land, an old place made new by the departure of destiny. Its nature had changed in some ineffable way, and she was set to explore that until it could be defined. She would wander every inch if she had to.

Was Inky's theory correct? It was hard, maybe impossible, to say. Certainly she had left the spotlight, and most likely it would never shine here again. That much she could feel in her innards. But whether it was due to her own desertion of destiny or the simple passage of time, she could not say. Was the higher power forever gone that had directed her life until now?

Only time, it seemed, would tell.

She knew, though, that Inky would come soon. His chance would be harder to take, since he was more essential to her husband's adventure than she was, but he would not desert her—she was confident of that. So she mourned neither him nor any other thing. Instead, she sought about in leftover levels and abandoned alleys, looking for one thing only—power pellets. Once swallowed, a power pellet never respawned, and as such, they were rare these days. She located them slowly, but time seemed to fly; and soon it turned out there were dozens and dozens that had been left behind, for one reason or another, in one place or another. When these were depleted, would there ever be any more?

She sent the question winging on its way. It wasn't a worry she intended to entertain.

She mapped out the remaining power pellets in her mind. She committed their locations to memory, then designed a course by which she could visit them all, as fast as possible. She improved her course and flitted along it hour after hour, pulling back just short of each pellet, yet imagining herself picking them up, speeding along on powered sprees, splurging on the biggest lodes. Where was the longest chain that she might pick up without ever powering down? That became the basis for a new course, and a new fantasy.

She slept blissfully. She slept for a long time. When she woke, it was because someone was approaching. A ghost, yes. A blissful feeling, no. This was not the visitor she had expected.

"Hello, Sue," she whispered to herself. Then she swiftly roused herself and fled the corridor where she'd been sleeping, rising to top speed. She didn't know where she would go. A flare of orange met her eyes as she turned the corner.

"Home-wrecker," Sue growled as she rushed forward. Ms. Pac-Man was so startled by this insult that she paused for a full second before remembering to turn and flee. What home had she ostensibly wrecked? Sue's, or her own?

She would establish a safe lead, then enter a labyrinth between complexes and move unpredictably. In this way, she would lose her pursuer. She'd done this before, not infrequently. Then, and only then, would she give herself the luxury of thoroughly thinking through the epiphet Sue had directed toward her.

The feeling of being pursued did not quell. Ms. Pac-Man's surroundings changed, but there was no sense of gain, of safety. In horror, she asked and answered a question all at once: What had happened to her natural speed advantage? It was gone. Somehow, in this place, in this old, new world, she was no faster than a ghost. She confirmed it by counting the moments after she passed landmarks until Sue did: their speeds were precisely matched.

Oh, no.

Inky was right.

With no quest, no spotlight, no great challenge to govern them and set the rules, the two females were physically equal. This must be their primordial state, she realized. What she thought of as her normal advantage over the ghosts was actually a gift given, a mantle bestowed, so that she and her family could comfortably seek for treasures and collect stones with a reasonable expectation of being able to elude their predators. If she was normally faster than Sue, it was because she was intended to be. But now, she had left the system… as had Sue, apparently. And the gift was gone.

Normality had never been normal. It had been granted. This was the true normal beneath what she had known.

This was bad, she realized. And as she traversed the great labyrinths, and Sue followed unerringly every turn she made, Ms. Pac-Man corrected herself: This was very bad. Normally, Sue's habits would motivate her to fly off in some other direction, preparing an ambush, or to try and find a shortcut, or to gloat and speed off laughing, satisfied with a measure of intimidation. Now, that too was gone. Had Sue's personaity been stripped from her, or had she only shed a handicap preventing her from devoted pursuit? Or—the other possibility—was she simply taking things more seriously than she'd ever had cause to before? Had Sue finally achieved the single-minded focus she'd desired for so very long?

With but a hair's breadth of speed advantage, Ms. Pac-Man would eventually lose her pursuer. But they had been running for thirty, maybe forty minutes, and the ghost was exactly seven-and-a-half body lengths from Ms. Pac-Man. That figure had not changed. Nor, Ms. Pac-Man noted wryly, had a ten or twenty minute reversal occurred. No, of course not. Those familiar moments in which the ghosts all suddenly reversed course were the purview of stages, of specific challenges. That, too, would be too generous a gift.

Well, then. It was good she knew where all the power pellets were, wasn't it?

She went for her own long-abandoned fortress. The complex where she'd had her own time of glory, years before. She knew it well. Its wrap-around tunnels still gave her a sense of exhilaration; it felt amazing to experience left becoming right, or vice-versa. And there were pellets there as low as the fifth floor.

She could feel the ghost's mood growing grim as the fortress loomed. Sue said nothing more, but her intermittent growls became a constant sound, as if it were the hum of a new world order with Sue herself its overlord.

They ascended the complex. There was no meandering around the early mazes. The white stones were long gone and both pursuer and pursuant knew their business. Ms. Pac-Man rose to the last of the three azure levels and went for the single pellet that remained in the upper right corner. She hesitated a moment before swallowing it, hoping that Sue would shy away. Ms. Pac-Man did not want to give up even one of her potential hugs with Inky if she could help it.

Sue gave no ground. Ms. Pac-Man swallowed the pellet.

To her astonishment, Sue neither turned nor hesitated. She collided directly with Ms. Pac-Man, and was swallowed before either could blink.

Ms. Pac-Man stopped and watched. Sue's eyes were cold and did not waver even as they were soaked away to Central Control.

It was in that instant that Ms. Pac-Man experienced a clammy dread… only to be replaced with the full weight of the emotion. It wasn't unlike how she'd felt in the deep basement of her son's complex, believing that Inky would kill her… but it was a slower-burning dread. Yet it was surer. Sue would not be belayed. She would come for her quarry. She was willing to be swallowed a thousand times; she would give chase. Since her speed was equal to Ms. Pac-Man's, it was feasible to do so. And since she had nothing better to do, there would, it seemed, be no end.

And each time Ms. Pac-Man bought herself a minute's relief, it would cost her one precious lover's embrace.

Worst of all, Sue knew it.

The ghost's body reformed in the central box and staggered out. Her voice wasn't slowed down a bit. "Ha, eat them all up, you bow-headed vixen!" she shouted. "Keep chugging them down, and see where it gets you! Yea-hah!"

Ms. Pac-Man sped up to the next level. When she came within eyeshot of the single power pellet there, she began to cry.

There was no more gobbling of power pellets after that. From that point, the chase became a thing eternal. Resting time was not measured in stillness any longer, but in motion. Whatever Ms. Pac-Man wanted to do, she had to do with Sue on her tail.

And there was nothing that it occurred to her to do.

But then came Inky.

It was during one of her black periods. She had fled for so long, without rest, without sleep, that she could no longer think except in tiny spurts, the energy for which she saved up over ever-longer periods. She had never learned what would happen if she did not sleep, despite her curious nature. It had been one of those questions that seemed it could hold no useful wisdom. Now, she barely kept alive the spark of gladness that she did not die, did not collapse over prolonged periods of sleeplessness… except on the inside.

And as for Sue? Her reality was already warped. She no longer spent breath to rant, but her inner life was, no doubt, fundamentally unchallenged.

What scant reserves of conscious thought Ms. Pac-Man had built up were sapped involuntarily at the first flash of cyan. Then the sight was gone. Panicked interally, she spent the next several minutes dodging randomly, aimlessly, trying to remind herself of why what she had perceived was so important. But when the recollection of her lover stood whole, at last, before her mind's eye, she swooned—a spinning hesitation that cost her a full body length's lead. She heard a devious, albeit brief cackle from Sue's winded throat.

She had seen Inky, she knew—yet he had not returned. Had he been so perceptive as to realize what a shock he'd caused her? Yet, surely he knew that to see only a flash of him and then have to wait was thrice as bad as the giddy confusion from which she'd just emerged! Where was he? She found herself tired anew, wondering how in the world she had managed to keep up such a pace for so long. Now every turn she made exacerbated her longing, and she felt her determination slipping. Her place in eternity had been lost, and Sue began to gain

But there he was again, and all was right. She rounded a square's corner, he flew after her, and from the rear of the corridor came Sue's voice: "Your being here means squat, traitor! I've always gone straight through you…and I will again!"

Inky's reply was immediate and unyielding. "On the contrary. My presence renders your presence irrelevant.

"No—nonsense!"

"I have no care whether my life is spent following my love. And ask her, if you will, whether she cares whether her life is spent fleeing from you."

Sue only growled, but Ms. Pac-Man volunteered an answer. "For your information, Sue, my energy is restored. And Inky is right. The terms of our universe are not for us to choose. We did not decide to live in two dimensions, amid square angles and on round, glowing sustenance. We did not choose our forms, nor our families. Yet we live nonetheless, and if we are wise, we live without complaint. So my life henceforth is to be a circus of endless motion? So be it. I will not mourn my rested state, so long as I have Inky to travel with me."

Sue said nothing, but continued to pursue with mechanical precision.

Sixteen hours later, the ghost began to lose ground. She was taking the wrong turn at intersections for fractions of a second. Her eyes darted left and right, even in long corridors with blank walls. She started to jag between the walls intermittently, losing half a body length or more each time. Her ominous growl became an uneven, broken hum, and then it fell silent.

Four hours later, her speed began, very gradually, to fall. Ms. Pac-Man increased her lead.

An hour after that, without warning, Sue reversed course and fled. She was out of detection range in under half a minute. She had been too proud to fall where her quarry could see her.

Inky and Ms. Pac-Man came to a halt. They remained watchful at the branches of a junction, doubtful. Was she about to return? Was it a ruse?

But it was no ruse. Sue was gone. And twenty minutes later, Ms. Pac-Man was in her home, sleeping, while Inky slowly traced a broad square path around her, her trusted sentry.

A/N: There would be many disadvantages to existing in a simple, abstract, geometric video game world. There would be many advantages, too, though... not the least of which is something like immortality.

Pac-Land was a Nam-Co side-scroller that came out in 1984, the same year as the Macintosh computer. It had a very different feel from any Pac-Man game before it. Imagine living your life in Plato's cave and then coming out into the light...!

I skipped last Friday for a science fiction convention. The final chapter will go up next Friday!

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