The plan was on. Pac-Man and his wife sat in two opposite corners, as topologically symmetric a pair of locations as they could find. The target was Pinky--Ms. Pac-Man’s opinion had been worth that much without her having to explain herself. They were waiting for Junior to arrive. He was still a level down, still enjoying his last throes of improvisation and daring before confining himself to the strict script that his calculating parents had written for him on the next floor. It had turned out to be necessary to do it this way, since every attempt they had made to coordinate their elaborate plan on the fly had failed. All four ghosts had to be controlled precisely, or one of them would gum up the pattern and there would be no simultaneity in their gobbling of the pellets, or in their capture of the quarry. And from any intermediate state, it was impossible to perform any comprehensive calculation without the condition changing radically before it was finished. The only choice was to use an entire level as their canvas. And so it was--every move they would make had been planned precisely, along with the exact event that would spur them to action in every case. The ghosts would be forced to go along with it, forced to act as their nature required. They all knew well that when all factors were controlled precisely, there was no randomness in the universe. Except, of course, when it came to fruit--. Ms. Pac-Man believed that in her own complex, there had been no way of knowing what kind of fruit would appear when the universe saw fit to grant her that familiar boon. There were seven choices, each as random as the next, she felt. Her husband had disagreed, saying that if all else could be predicted, surely this too must be deterministic; it must merely depend on too many factors to calculate. A tabulation of elapsed times; an obscure digit in the ever-mounting score--it was impossible to say, and yet this was one issue where the couple had never seen face to face.

Ms. Pac-Man wondered if there was more randomness in store for them today, should they succeed in their mission to kill a ghost. She wondered if a can of worms would be opened in the spot where such a perversion of nature occurred, and if those worms would behave rationally, or randomly. A moment after she thought it, she wondered which outcome she would prefer. The question caused her to shudder.

She was still wondering when the level began. Now there was no freedom but thought, and only a small percentage of that could afford to be focused anywhere but on the plan. She brought herself to bear on what she was doing. Junior was darting around the bottom frame, clearly remembering his tasks capably... there he went, and that was Ms. Pac-Man’s cue to head west. She did so and waited at a three way junction. One move down and twelve to go.

A ghost zoomed by and she ducked out behind it and curved around south, waiting on the bottom edge. Twelve seconds later she headed east along the long corridor to her station; a scant distance away sat the power pellet that was her ammunition, her supply for the strike. It shone like a warning light in her eyes. Twice she was called upon to dart out and zip up and back a nearby corridor, the purpose being to draw the more aggressive ghosts nearer. Then she sat in the corner and waited for the strike to begin.

Sue’s face became visible in the distance. Up Ms. Pac-Man went without pause for thought, since even the slightest pause would mean one dot’s length of discrepancy. She turned and there it was before her, and before she could reflect she held the power--the potent feeling consumed her, that knowledge she had held a thousand times that she was capable of wreaking vengeance on those who tormented her. It was different this time. This time it felt like she was the one on the side of evil. Somehow beyond the innocence of nature. As disturbing as the very first time she had seen a ghost and realized that it was her enemy.

She zipped along her appointed course, north, west, north, west, south. There was a feeling that told her that she and her relations had indeed taken up power pellets at the exact same moment; it was not any sense she could identify which told her this, but that meant it was a new one. This fact scared her. It hinted that there was actually something to this act, some new force behind it, and as she finished her twelfth move and found herself waiting only seconds ahead of Pinky’s southerly escape from her son’s advance, she realized that her excitement had not come from the desire to destroy the ghosts. That had only fueled her rage, but it had left her. Her continued excitement had been born of two things: the love of a challenge that all three family members shared, and her desire to prove her husband wrong.... She had wanted the plan to fail.... She shrieked, knowing that it would not....

Her reflex was too strong. At the last moment she willed herself to turn back and let Pinky pass, but there was too much momentum built up by this time for a small force like one creature’s will to stand in its way!

The four beings came together. One blinking ghost and three yellow crusaders. They caught Pinky just as he was turning white in the final stage of the foreboding blue-white cycle that signaled the return to normality. But normality did not come. Instead, that white light that filled the ghost spread and exploded in an instant. It was impossible to say what was where, or who was who. There could be no accounting of viewpoint or identity amid the maelstrom of perception that hummed, jolted and sizzled its way across what had to be the entirety of the universe. Only dimly could patterns be felt: the same stuff that made up the numerals of that eternally changing quantity, the score, was splattered all over the place, in between pieces of things and people, walls and symbols. Here and there were things that should not exist, spaces which were not space at all and could only be called glitches for lack of a more profane term. And all of this changed tic by tic, countless times in the span of a second, all of it over again. Whatever feelings existed were multiplied manifold, dread sank exponentially into new pits of emotional reservoir, all feeling was blended, and then it was over. Every moving thing that had been brought back into existence wanted nothing but to be still, and so it was. Everything had been erased. Positions, levels, dots, and even the score...the score was a primordial zero.

Everything was the way it had been at the beginning...except for two things. Memories. They were still there, waiting for the soul who dared to look. And the fourth ghost. There had been four, hadn’t there? All the signs pointed to it, all the structures were built for four. But anyone could tell that there were only three. Blinky, Inky, and Sue...and there would clearly never be any knowing what color the fourth one had been, or what had been its name.

In stillness this did not matter so much. Ms. Pac-Man sat out of time, watching that familiar shadow game, the cave allegory that was the demo. Before her mind, the images moved--her own body among them, its behavior not her own. She only remembered the demo as a dream, and so it left her feeling dreamy. Her instincts told her she would soon be waking up.

His name was Pinky, said a voice into her. It must have been. I only remember his color, but the name fits.

"Who--?" she would have asked, but the thought stuck in her throat, if she had one. She didn’t know how long it was before she felt the call, but it wasn’t long enough. Things had started again and it was not like waking. She was in a room. She was in her home. Her old home, that she had fled. It was her base, the place where she could always be found and where the world had found her again after being destroyed. All the pressure was off, or so it felt. There was no more running for her, for all eyes were off, and she could swim through blackness as an entity whose job is finished ought to do. She saw that the fruit salad had gone, but there was the basket, still as sumptious-looking as it had been when it contained edibles, for it was a gift. The basket felt good to gaze at. She knew that it had been a source of mixed feelings for a while, but now it was unmitigated pleasure, and she wondered why. Could it be that she had forgiven her husband for whatever he had done and they were now happy together?

No. In a swirl of grogginess, she remembered. It was another thing entirely.

Careening down the halls outside her home, she ran into her husband. It was not the terrifying thing of hours past; indeed, she didn’t know why it had ever been so terrifying. If he had represented some evil, that was surely not necessary any more. "Hello, my dear ex-husband," she sang.

"You’re alive! Pepper--you’re confused. I’m not an ex-husband--I don’t even know what kind of thing that is!"

"It’s not a bad thing, dear--nothing to be ashamed of being. I need to go see the blue ghost--is Junior back in his fortress, busy at work?"

"I don’t know! I came looking for you, first of all. I love you."

"We have to go see if he’s there!" she exclaimed. "If he’s there, then so is Inky."

This brought Pac-Man down to earth. "Inky? The ghost! The murderer! Pepper, he’s with them! They’ll kill them again! They’ll kill him until there’s nothing left of him!"

"I don’t think so, husband. They only got him the first time because we were--let’s be honest--because I was a distraction. We need to stay out of our son’s life, my dear ex-husband. Until he’s finished his appointed task. Then, and only then, can we be--a family again."

Pac-Man looked at his wife with an eye toward locating the crazy piece within her and yanking it out. But of course, he could no more see into her than into himself. "We have three more ghosts to kill," he implored.

"That isn’t what I’m interested in doing any more," she told him.

"Will you come home with me and talk about it?"

"That isn’t what I’m interested in, either," she explained buoyantly. "I’m not your wife anymore. But we can be friends."

"I’m frightened that something’s happened to you, my love. You’re not acting like yourself."

"And you are? After that catastrophe?"

He spun from side to side, whirring with excitement. "But it wasn’t a catastrophe! It worked! The fourth ghost is gone!"

"You don’t remember his name, do you," she whispered.

He stared blankly for a second. "No--no, and why should I? I wouldn’t want to."

She lowered her face respectfully and hurried on past.

They took the same route to the complex, but Ms. Pac-Man didn’t even realize she was followed. She had given her regards to her husband and moved on, there was no reason for him to follow her anymore, and he wasn’t the focus of her thoughts anyhow. She didn’t answer when he called her name, called her to stop. She simply rose through the levels, discovering dim recognition when she came to the ones where they had performed their deadly experiment. The moment of silence she dedicated to this memory gave her husband a chance to catch up, but it changed nothing. For a while, they ran side by side, and she looked over as if in surprise to find him there. Part of her surprise was genuine.

"Are you trailing me deliberately?" she asked.

"Are you trying to lose me deliberately?" he responded.

"No, I’m not. Perhaps we simply have the same destination."

"Don’t act like this. I’m nothing if you treat me like this."

"I hope that’s not true--I wouldn’t want you to be nothing." But that was the end of the conversation, at least so far as she was concerned.

When they reached a loftier level than either had ever seen, or indeed, even known to exist, Junior was busy there taking up dots. Nothing had changed for him. Neither death nor universal erasure had fazed him. He was a level-headed kid who knew his mission, his mother reflected. He made his parents seem neurotic by comparison.

"Junior," she called. "I don’t want to distract you, so when you have the chance, if you can be bothered, could you leave a few moments aside for your poor mother and father?"

The child spun around a corner and headed for her, the uncomplicated desire to satisfy visible on his face. "Sure! It’s easy, Mom. I don’t know why I ever thought dodging ghosts was tough! It’s so easy!"

She turned, just for a moment unready for his attention, but then faced him with full understanding. "It’s easier now than it was before. Do you remember why?"

She had him puzzled, and that fact brought pain to her. She winced as he shook in the negative: "Why?"

"Because there were four of them before. They worked as a--a family." She had meant to say team, but the word "family" surfaced too heavily for her to keep it down. "Don’t you remember what we did? How we worked together--how we defiled the laws of our world?"

The youth looked truly sorry that he couldn’t.

"It’s all right," said Pac-Man, speeding up. "We’ll go over it all again. I remember every move."

"That you remember," snapped his wife. "No, we will not go through it again. We have killed a piece of reality, and we were changed for it, and we will not do that again. Because you need my help to make it work, and I won’t do it." They stared at her from twin passageways, bewildered things with pained eyes. She stared back, breathing.

"His name was Pinky," she spat. Then she turned away.

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