What. The. Fuck?

I bit my lip.

The box was still there.

Was this a joke? If so, it was a bad one. The situation reeked a bit of experimental treatments and hospitals, and I had had enough of that for a lifetime.

But no, for a joke it was just a bit too elaborate. So perhaps this was just a weird dream. Biting myself had hurt, but I could have dreamt that it was hurting. Or, if not a dream, it might be some hallucinations or brain injury from falling on my head.

Given that I vividly remembered the ground coming straight toward my face after falling off that ramp, the idea of having some weird brain stuff going on seemed the most likely.

But then again, why would I imagine being in a sort of game-like situation? I mean, those stats did very much remind me of the roleplaying games I had played as a teenager. And the purple scan digging through my brain sure had felt real and not something that I really could have imagined in as many vivid details. Or was I in a medically induced coma and doctors were doing brain surgery on me, which my subconsciousness interpreted as a weird-ass magic-flavored brain scan?

If so, there was nothing I could do.

And if not… well, not sure what I was supposed to do if this was something different, something real. It was, frankly, too bizarre to consider the implications. Aliens? A parallel universe? A magical veil parting to connect our world to a world of magic? Or my essence being transferred into a video game? That all sounded like a steaming pile of bullshit. As much as I had always loved my fantasy books and games, I was a realist through and through.

That said… I had read enough litrpg books and stories in which the hero was transferred to a different world to at least entertain the hypothetical question on what I would do in such a case. Not that there was all that much I could do, stuck in some limbo with a weird scanning machine.

But at least I could check out the surrounding, play along for the time being, just in case there was something more to it than hallucinations.

Hedging my risks, or whatever.

Looking more closely at the stats for the first time, I chuckled a bit when I noticed that one-third of them had error messages. I was not sure how the scan worked, but probably it assessed muscle mass, muscle density, and muscle type, and the nervous system of the body… which in my case all were almost non-existent right now, at least compared to other people. Sitting for four years in a wheelchair and not moving anything below the neck on your own volition will do that for you.

Maybe I should have cursed seeing those stats, but I kinda liked how it messed with the system. Whoever had programmed that thing, or magicked it, whichever the case was, probably had never considered encountering someone like me.

At least, my mental stats were overall reasonably good, with complex reasoning, spatial awareness, and willpower the clear standouts. Or at least much higher than the physical stats. Since I had no comparison point, I had no idea what a value of twenty represented. Was it like the top one percent? Or the top ten? I felt confident that I was ranking closer to the top five percent, but then again, I had never done a brain scan of other people.

How do you measure willpower anyway? Weird stuff.

But what was up with the low emotional intelligence? Was I that bad? I mean, I had plenty of friends and all… well, I used to, I guess. Now, almost all my friends were online, like in chat rooms and games like Eve Online – stuff I could play using a special controller. My online buddies were friendly enough, though. Not judgmental and all, like most people in real life. Most people could not take my sometimes-acerbic humor.

Fuck, I guess, maybe the score was just about right. But whatever, they could all go to hell for all I cared. Everyone but Annie, I suppose. And Goldie, my goldfish. Stupid name… I could still crack up on that one. I had called the fish that way, just to mess with people a bit. And everyone tried to give me grieve about it, failing to realize that it was precisely what I had wanted to provoke.

I turned my head to see if there was anything else around the room that could give me some additional hints of what was going on, but nothing stood out. Weirdly enough, the blue box with the stats followed my eyes as I turned my head.

Initially, I had thought that the blue box was some type of hologram, which presumably would make it steady somewhere in space. But, since it was moving, it meant that either it was not a hologram, or it was directly sent into my eyes, by some type of mobile projector. I tried closing my eyes and was startled when I could still see the blue box. So perhaps it was somehow transmitted directly into my head?

Suddenly, the sultry female voice from the first few moments spoke again. “Your probability of survival is estimated at .001 percent; transfer procedure is aborted.”

“What? Wait a moment! What does that mean?” I shouted.

Alas, there was no response.

In the meantime, the room started to lose shape and became a vortex of colors that was swirling around my head, first slowly, then faster and faster. At first, I could make out some images of the room I had been in, but then those images were replaced by memories from throughout my life. The time I had been building a sandcastle with my best buddy when I was five; my mother crying tears of joy when my father came back from a long trip overseas; going out with my first girlfriend; my accident; and many more.

The swirling images made me nauseous. They moved too fast. And they evoked some memories that were better forgotten. First, I screamed, then I shouted for help. In the end, I started to beg.

But I was alone.

No one was going to rescue me. I was afraid that I was going to be stuck here for eternity, reliving the memories of my twenty-something years of life. Over and over. Talk about a personal hell.

And then I could see a giant vortex in the distance. Colors flashed, images flickered in and out. There were random sounds, almost like avant-guard music mixed with noise from a construction site. In between, there was screeching, wailing, and happy laughter.

The whirlwind of images that was me slowly approached the giant vortex, and only now, I could appreciate how gigantic this vortex truly was. I was like a pebble compared to the moon. What I considered to be just one giant vortex, was actually a million, no a billion or more, little whirlwinds intersecting each other, dissolving and then reforming, ripping each other apart, joining, separating - a random, chaotic process, without a discernible pattern.

Which made me realize that I was not even sure how I could see. I mean, was I here physically? I did not have any arms or hands. All I had were memories, images of happy and sad events, boring, and tragic situations in my life.

Yet I was able to perceive my surrounding somehow.

It was not without effort though - it required a mental resolve to see what was going on rather than drifting along in the shifting pattern of the movements of the vortex. It felt comparable to being in a crowd of people and keeping tabs on your surrounding and the crowd dynamics. Or being on the soccer pitch, pressured by opponents, yet still able to make out that winger running forward, ready to receive the deadly deep pass.

Suddenly a blue box popped up.

You are in the Netherworld, the world of lost souls. Your superior spatial awareness allows you to “see” your surrounding. Due to the successful use of your skill in a new and challenging surrounding your spatial awareness increased. Spatial awareness +1

Skill gains? Seriously? This was a gamer’s wet dream come true.

Fucking weird.

This really started looking like one of those litrpg books that I had been reading on and off. Was this some type of virtual reality then? If so, where was my virtual body? Or was this some sort of avant-garde indie game? And what about a special power, some unique ability that allowed me to blaze through this bizarre world?

Spatial awareness my ass!

Subconsciousness and the potential of suppressed memories notwithstanding, by now I was pretty sure that I was not dealing with a dream, even though it was sufficiently surreal to be one - it was too real, too personal and detailed to be a dream. All the images of my life … most of those I had not thought about for fifteen or even twenty years.

And if it was not a dream… then I needed to do something about that giant vortex because it looked like seriously bad news.

As I got closer to the vortex, images began to shoot across the vast space toward the whirlwind of memories that constituted ‘me’. And those images showed all kinds of snapshots, or snippets, of weird scenes: Giant frog creatures hopping around in a swamp; antlike creatures in armor and some type of gun; short, humanoid creatures with enormous shoulders and giant hammers on their shoulders; a blazing sun, three times the size of earth’s sun together with a strange star constellation; a little garden gnome-like creature that carefully poured multicolored liquids into various glass containers; a girl closing her eyes and leaning in for a kiss; a child crying; storms; fires; smells.

It went on and on.

And these images became part of my own memories, making me wonder whether I had experienced those things, even though, clearly, I could not have. It was the most surreal feeling I had ever experienced.

I instinctively felt that if I allowed all these images to become part of my memories, I would lose my own identity. My hunch was that this is what was happening in that giant vortex with all the smaller whirlwinds. An endless series of creation and destruction of identities, each with a vast number of disjointed and fragmented memories, presumably of millions, if not billions, of lost souls. Just as lost as I was about to become. Unless I did something about it.

I focused my mind on the memories that seemed too foreign and tried to forcefully expel them. I focused first on one of the more bizarre ones in which I was fighting a giant lizard-like creature by swinging a huge ax around.

As I reasoned with my subconscious, that this could not possibly have happened to me, the image slowly grew faint and eventually disappeared altogether.

Success!

Sadly, it was way too slow. In the time it had taken me to eliminate one image from my mind, at least twenty or thirty new images had arrived. This approach was a losing proposition. First, I had to insulate myself against any future intrusion of foreign memories and images. But how?

My first attempt was to simply move my identity away from the giant vortex. Increased distance, I reasoned, would reduce the number of memories that would threaten me.

And I tried.

But how do you do that if you don’t have feet? I imagined some force pushing my little vortex in a different direction, but it is hard to push a spinning object. I could feel that I actually succeeded in exerting some force, but my vortex was too slippery. It would just glide around whatever force I used to push it. I could momentarily move it in a different direction, but then whatever point I was exerting mental pressure on already pointed in the complete opposite direction due to the rapid rotation.

My second attempt was to protect my identity with an impenetrable barrier that enveloped me on all sides, a barrier of pure thought, of willpower, determination. The essence of my identity put up as protection against any foreign influence. My desires, wishes, fears. My sense of humor, empathy, hate. My self-perception. My confidence. My weaknesses. My looks, good and bad. All of these went into the barrier that was me - the essential characteristics that made me what and who I was.

And it worked. The foreign memories bounced off the barrier without being able to penetrate my core being. And finally, I was able to focus on eliminating the hundreds or thousands of images and memories that felt alien to me.