She awoke to the faint sensation of importance.

Something was keeping her from eternal placidity. Something nearby mattered. Whether it was a ghost errant from its normal course, a stray item from her son’s toybox, her son come to apologize or her husband come to claim her, she did not know. The thought that it might be something exotic and utterly new only glanced across her mind.

She was bewildered. She had not expected to be important any more. But then, she had no way of knowing how long she had spent in obscurity.

The thought chilled her. Had she banished everything, all thoughts and all actions, only to lose untold years of her existence? Had it come so far that it was her time again, her turn? Was she once more to be in the spotlight? She was not ready.

Yet at least, she told herself as her body slipped meekly back into motion, if it was her time again, that would be something new. There would be new elements and new developments. Perhaps her husband would be kept away while she risked her own life. Perhaps there would be some change, some dramatic new twist, that somehow would fix things. It was inconceivable, but so was the world. Time had the potential to cleanse all records so long as it kept her alive.

But this was no new theater of action. She felt it even through her mix of feelings; this was something finite and small. A single thing, no larger than herself, in passing.

Hovering.

It was orbiting at the limits of her senses. The pattern was familiar. The feeling was distinctly uncomfortable. Its presence here was inexplicable. It was a ghost.

She fled. That was the first part, automatic; then came the question. Why had one of the ghosts abandoned her son in the spotlight, given up its chance to catch him and its duty to try? Was it even one of the four? Yes, she decided, darting toward it for a moment and perceiving it more clearly. It was Inky, the blue ghost. What was he doing here? Well, trying to catch her, naturally. That was obvious. But why in the world had he come so far away from his post? Why would he delve so many levels down just to launch a solitary effort against Ms. Pac-Man when her son, Inky’s natural enemy, was already distracted by his quest and besought by the ghost’s three comrades?

In frustration she sped away from the ghost and descended another level. She was alone again for a minute, and then the flickering sense of importance returned. The ghost was following her at the edge of her ken. He was not drawing closer. Doubly puzzled, she drew to a halt against a wall to test this. It was true--he wasn’t coming any closer. He wasn’t there to kill her. Unless it was his plan to catch her when she was unwary--but it would be difficult for her ever to be less wary than she had been just minutes ago. And he hadn’t come for her then.

And he wasn’t coming now--just orbiting her, making occasional inroads and flitting back again. He was behaving like a true specter for once. But then, she reflected, this one had always been the shy one. His way had been to rush ahead at her flank and cut off her escape, but not to approach too boldly--in the big picture that was just as vexatious. Still, in the past he had sometimes run straight for her--just not as frequently as the others. His current behavior was pathological by comparison. Ms. Pac-Man was disturbed by the blue ghost’s strange pattern of movement more than his presence itself.

She went down another level. And then another. And then another, and there she waited until the ghost’s approach began to irritate her consciousness, and then on she went. She passed the exit to the complex; it presented itself to her like an unsolicited gift, and for some reason she passed it by. There were levels above the way she had come in, and there were negative levels below, perhaps uncountably many. She had chosen to delve into her son’s basement.

She was back to an existence of running, but it was a strangely minimal remnant of her prior life. Unlike in her heyday, the stalker she ran from aroused no fear in her. She could easily dodge a single ghost--especially one which seemed to be shyer than ever. It would be wrong to say that there was no emotion in this activity for Ms. Pac-Man, but what emotion she felt was distant and numb. She felt about her endless descent as she would feel about receiving the scent alone of something she expected to taste. The corridors were black and empty. There was no goal. No amassing score. No floating pretzels and no daring escapes. No sound. It was easy to keep ahead of the ghost that was chasing her, but so long as she stayed in her son’s complex it would be impossible to end the chase.

She didn’t know how this would end. Privately, she entertained the notion that it never would.

If she wanted to escape, she probably could. One ghost was no real obstacle. She could go back the other way. She could take a tiny risk, slip past the blue ghost and reach the exit again. She could run once more on the outside, saddled with all the fears she bore before, plus the painful fact that her son would even not have her for company.

Instead, she fled downward.

The levels became smaller rapidly. 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 that they could not be contained at once within the senses. But all that stopped some distance below the first level. They became smaller. Blockier. Simpler, with fewer loops and fewer tricks to get away. More trivial. Like a tower, with the emphasis more on the vertical than the horizontal; leading only downward.

And the blackness fleshed out and began to seem more powerful. In Ms. Pac-Man’s addled mind it came to lose its potential to be filled; it stopped being so much empty space and came more to be space that was filled with emptiness. Crammed with emptiness, densely. There was no room to imagine anything else. It was like the shock she had received on her own two hundred twentieth level, so long ago, when the walls of the maze had vanished from around her, leaving nothing in her sights but herself and the four predators she danced with minute by minute. A child’s conception of her reality. A black screen containing nothing but a yellow circle and a cyan blob. A primal trace.

The levels came to an end. She realized, with the same sensation that accompanies recognitions of deformity, that the maze she was in lacked even that most basic amenity that all the others had possessed, a downward exit. Nor had it any loops at all: not one. The significance of this clutched onto her--there was no way back around. She was trapped by a single ghost.

She had thought that during this long pointless pursuit she had felt no emotion. Now the one that she had felt numbly throbbed strong; but equally strong was her sudden fear. She didn’t know what to do. Somehow she had squandered her chance to dodge the ghost; something in her had compelled her to hold her course downward, eschewing the exit, until she reached a point where escape was no longer possible. She fell back into the deepest of the room’s passages, a dead end; the ghost came for her. She prayed for a twenty minute reversal; he held his course. The ghost came in sight. He came to the last junction.

He stopped.

She had to feel her own heartbeat to make sure the world hadn’t frozen. She felt certain for one moment that the same glitch to take 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. The blue ghost had stopped dead only three body lengths from her face.

His eyes were 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. After all, this was an unnatural occurrence. She didn’t know what might start it going again and she didn’t dare to test it. Instead she watched it, praying still that a reversal might yet take effect. Even if the ghost did turn its eyes from her, though, it would be of no use if it remained forever frozen in place. She would be locked into this tiny cell forever, suicide her only option. It was true that during her time of glory she had had three lives; a single death would not have been the end. But she truly didn’t know whether that was still the case in a place so far removed as this.

The ghost, however, was not frozen. It backed away from her. It backed away, and that, again was new; ghosts invariably moved in the direction of their eyes. Ms. Pac-Man sat motionless, and watched as the ghost moved away--just as smoothly and silently as it had come, but watching her all the while. It paused at the end of the corridor; and had it not stopped in place only moments before, this alone would have caused Ms. Pac-Man great shock. The ghost turned the corner and was gone. Its quarry, however, was not moving; she stayed in place, tucked into her little dead-end, for five full minutes, and that, under the circumstances, was a very long time.

When she finally could feel no further trace of the aberrant ghost, Ms. Pac-Man humbly retraced her path, still too confused to feel real relief, and peeked out of what she now knew to be the bottom level of the complex. The ghost was gone.

She moved with equally increasing confidence and speed upward, making her way toward the exit of the complex as directly as she knew how. She relived her eerie feelings on the way up at double time, and was astonished when she tried to make sense of them. Ms. Pac-Man was feeling light. She couldn’t say why, but--she had needed something new, and she had gotten it, and although it was a terror that literally came within inches of claiming her life, it--somehow--had elated her.

She had studied puzzles for a time while her husband was working in one of his more obscure missions with a deformed rascal named Pal--they had not heard from Pal since. He had let her know of cases where an insoluble puzzle had become soluble with the addition of an extraneous, seemingly unrelated factor, such as Pal himself. 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.

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 of no guarantee to 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 encountered 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 it was her most strident thought as she made her way up out of the basement. She was not one to wither dead away in the wake of danger--she would build from it, somehow. The key point was that she had been desperate for something, anything new--and she had witnessed it. Now it was her task to claim it for herself.

She emerged from the complex not knowing 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 on either side in clashing colors, she felt more than she could see. There was less visual distraction and more visceral sensation, a prerequisite to the type of mental focus she was seeking. Her problem took the place of the corridors in her mind. White eyes. Black pupils. A blue body retreating from her, pupils locked. A pause just before her death. Another at the corridor’s end. Strangely familiar behavior. If she didn’t know better, she’d say the ghost was in love.

She wondered whether 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. She wondered what had triggered it, whether it had been an action of her own, and whether she could control it. She had no clue, and quickly came to realize that she had no method of testing any of these questions but for going back to her son’s theater of action. Back to where the ghosts roamed freely, with vim.

She did not want to put herself in danger again. She quailed at the thought of dodging around her son and his enemies--for they were his enemies now, and not hers--trying to experiment with them while explaining to her son why she had to be there, trying in vain not to interfere with his adventure. She knew that it would get her nowhere, that she couldn’t go back. All she had to work with were the ghosts, the unlikeliest of tools, and she knew that she would gain nothing by going to them. So her wonderful novelty was practically useless after all.

She proceeded in a single direction until she came to a wall, and there she stopped, and there she slept, barely escaped from despair.

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