Read by William Foxton
When his remarkable talents had first been spotted, Sami el Zafar was just thirteen. Or possibly fourteen. Sami had arrived in England from Syria with no passport, no family and no English. He was given a place at the local secondary school and by all accounts he’d had a tough time fitting in. No surprise in that, all alone in the world and having witnessed who knew what horrors back in his war-torn homeland. He didn’t speak much about it. He didn’t speak much about anything.
It wasn’t until one day at After School Club, the repository for kids whose parents didn’t trust them to go home on their own, that Sami’s skills were discovered.
After School Club was set up with tables for students to complete homework or to read quietly but also, under certain conditions, to use the school’s PS4. Sami never got to use it, being too shy and non-verbal to ask, and too weird to be invited by anyone else. So Sami would stand and watch the other kids playing, hovering behind them and humming. It used to irritate the piss out of them.
That was not what happened.
Sami made what at first sight appeared to be a suicidal move, landing in the notoriously contested drop at Tilted Towers, thrown into a melee of other players charging about, building ramps to the sky and shooting each other in the face. Rather than getting shot within seconds as everyone had expected, Sami ran and hid and built, and seemed to be able to find chests as if operating an internalised pinpoint geolocation system. He no-scoped three players before anyone watching had even noticed they were there. He trap-boxed a Ghoul Trooper so fast the screen was virtually a blur, a blur that ended with Ghoul Trooper576 eliminated and an uneasy feeling descending over the watching crowd of dumbstruck teenage boys. Twenty minutes later, for his final move, he triple-ramp-pushed a Teknique and a Black Knight, neither of whom appeared to have a clue what had hit them before they were clinically dispatched.
The events of this bizarre afternoon were retold over and over again, because of all that was to happen to Sami afterwards, and although the accounts differed in the details, they all agreed on one point - what happened that day when Sami played Fortnite was a total balls-out mindfuck. This boy who’d arrived in the country six months earlier with nothing but the clothes he stood up in. This boy who’d spent most of his life in a place without the basic infrastructure that could supply him with running water, an education or even reliable Wi-Fi. This boy who did his most advanced school work with a Pritt Stick and a pair of blunt-tipped safety scissors. This guileless klutzy refugee kid had faced off against ninety-nine other Fortnite players who probably spent upwards of five hours a day glued to their screens, and he’d lasered them all like a pro.
Sami’s remarkable feat soon came to the attention of Tyrone, one of the teaching assistants at the school. Tyrone played Fortnite himself but as a decidedly ancient twenty-six-year-old, he knew his days as a player were numbered. But he could see that Sami was in possession of some next level talent and saw an opportunity to help bring on the new generation. And maybe make some money.
After watching Sami play a few more times, to be sure his faultless game wasn’t a fluke, Tyrone put the wheels in motion to enter him for tournaments with cash prizes. He had to convince some people that Sami was the real deal, which meant putting him up against a bunch of players with names like DoomB8nga, DrKimcheez and TwitchThotSoHot, and exactly as Tyrone had said he would, his young protégée creamed them all. Within a month Tyrone had seen to it that Sami qualified to take on the world’s best at the Summer Skirmish tournament at TwitchCon in San Jose.
At TwitchCon, Sami sailed through the first few rounds of the tournament, and Tyrone had started to grow in confidence that his boy was in with a shot of taking down the big prize. By the end of the second day Sami had succeeded in earning considerable respect for his hyper-aggressive and intuitive gameplay while simultaneously marking himself out as a three-sigma oddball among an entire conference of socially awkward weirdoes. But it was the last day of the three-day event that saw Sami hit his peak. In the final game of the tournament, needing only two points to take the overall crown, he’d fought an epic battle with the fans’ favourite i-killzurboy, bringing the conference centre’s five thousand strong audience to their feet in a frenzy of screaming, finger-and-thumb-jammed-against-forehead loser signs and ludicrous dance moves. One second before Sami was taken out, he managed to one-pump i-killzurboy, giving him his fifth kill of the game and the vital points he needed. Sami walked off stage with the grand prize of $250,000.
When Sami and Tyrone returned to London it didn’t take long for their story to get picked up by the gaming community, and soon everyone wanted a piece of the refugee wondergeek.
Tyrone soon discovered that Sami was not the easiest of clients to work with. Sami was not naturally outward-facing, and in interviews and public appearances it was Tyrone, who’d quit his job as a TA to manage Sami full-time, who had to do most of the heavy lifting.
Then something happened that no-one had expected. Sami became a political football.
Tyrone and Sami received an invitation to some discreet offices in Whitehall. The Government of the day, having recognised that Sami appealed to a demographic that they’d hitherto failed to connect with, plied the pair of them with food and drink, with promises of meeting the PM, and with earnest entreaties to do something worthwhile for the country, all of which rebounded without making a dent. Then one of the younger members of the team said they felt certain that if Sami got on board with the programme they could make some calls and get him turned into his own Fortnite skin – gamer immortality. It worked. Soon Sami was being taken on tour around Britain in a huge bus with his picture on the side, to meet the people, to show them his talents, to ring the bell for hope and change.
If Tyrone had found representing Sami on the gamer circuit hard going, his new handlers found managing their client when meeting the non-gaming public required some innovative tactics. Sami was a nightmare to work with and when faced with questions about his rise to fame from such humble beginnings he would make openly racist comments about other Syrians, whom he clearly regarded as venal, feckless and asinine, although these were very much not the words he used.
And then, Sami vanished.
For two weeks he went dark. No-one seemed to know where he was.
The story that most people believed was that he’d been nabbed by Google’s Deep Mind crew. Ever since Sami’s extraordinary gaming ability had come to light, a number of organisations had been keen to have a look at what was going on inside his head. So for two weeks it was thought that Sami was having the shit MRIed out of him in some off-grid facility in order to look for clues buried deep in his neural networks. When Sami showed up again, two weeks to the day after he’d dropped off the radar, he didn’t have much to say about where he’d been except that the snacks had been really, really good.
After he’d reappeared, Sami’s handlers had decided to use him for a final big push to win the hearts and minds of the British people. They would stage a ‘public moment of hope’. The president of Syria had been invited to the UK and the show-piece event would be a meet-and-greet outside Number Ten with Sami brought along to be reunited with the father of his homeland and show that young or old, everyone mattered.
When the time came for Sami to shake hands with the Syrian president in front of the world’s media, everything ran like clockwork. The president shook hands with Sami, and when that had gone off smoothly, in a carefully orchestrated spontaneous-looking move, the president opened his arms to invite a hug from his poor lost kinsman. And then just as fast as Sami had trap-boxed the Ghoul Trooper all those months ago, before anyone knew what was happening Sami had punched the president of Syria in the stones with every ounce of his teenage might. It made the top story on every news outlet that night and for most of the next week. It became the most viewed YouTube clip of all time.
After that, Sami disappeared from public view again, this time for good.
By the time the truth about Sami came out everyone had lost interest. It was a former Google employee who confirmed that the Deep Mind guys had snatched Sami and explained why after two weeks with him they weren’t interested in him or his brain.
The real reason why Sami had been able to play a game that required so much skill, when he’d never played it before, was because he had in fact played it before. A lot. It turned out that when he wasn’t going to school back home in Aleppo, because his school had been destroyed by shelling along with all the other schools, he’d been befriended by a British squaddie stationed nearby. The squaddie had seen Sami searching through rubbish heaps, and had taken it upon himself to help. To begin with he brought him food, then some clothes and a few toys. Then he’d managed to get hold of a PS4 and set it up for Sami within range of the base’s Wi-Fi. When Sami had been telling his friends at Deep Mind about this, he’d estimated that he’d started playing Fortnite when he was about ten years old. It didn’t take the powers of their AI to work out that this meant, what with Sami having no school to go to, that he’d spent somewhere in the region of six thousand hours honing his Fortnite skills. Which was why Deep Mind didn’t think they could learn much from him. He was good at Fortnite not because of some neural aberration but because playing Fortnite was pretty much all he’d done for three years of his life.
The ex-Googler said he thought he knew why Sami had gone for the Syrian president too. The squaddie had visited Sami now and then when he was off-duty, playing Fortnite with him and chatting. Or at least the squaddie had chatted and Sami had apparently listened. One of the things Sami had recalled about those days was that his soldier buddy had often said that if he ever got the chance to meet the president of Syria he knew exactly what he’d like to do to him. The squaddie hadn’t got the chance to meet the president of Syria, but Sami had clearly never forgotten his old friend’s greatest wish.
(c) Callum Jacobs, 2020
Callum Jacobs is a psychology teacher, a sightrunning tour guide, and a fourth-level stone balancer. When not doing these things he can be found lying diagonally on his bed reading, or listening to a podcast. He lives with his wife and two children, who are all smarter than he is.
William Foxton is on his gap year and will be studying French and Spanish at the University of Oxford in 2020. He enjoys storytelling, stand-up comedy and being reminded of how young he is. He recently won The Moth StorySLAM and will not shut up about this.
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