Chapter 8: Can't Be Real, Can It?

All was black. Might have been like that for a long while. A droning, white noise filled the silence. A single point of light gathered off in the distance, rushed towards John, and formed into white text: GENDER?

Was this the game? John thought.

There wasn’t any screen. Maybe perception itself composed the screen. The old man said he would enter the game, ‘enter’ being the operative word. The question had two boxes below, one ‘male’ and the other ‘female.’

John focused on the ‘female’ option. It glowed a pulsating, warm orange. When he pulled his focus away, it returned to the static white. Could John choose to be a woman? He wasn’t about to choose it by accident, only to find no way back.

The ‘male’ text pulsed. John centered his vision on the letters, but nothing happened. They only gathered in intensity and faded back out, ad nauseam. He tried gritting his teeth, nodding, even wiggling his nose. After John concentrated on the word, as if selecting it through pure force of will, he strained his forehead. A double-click echoed in his perception.

“Welcome to Existence,” replaced the text. It faded from view.

A lightness bloomed inside his chest. He solved it. Triumph.

“Open your eyes.”

Light poured in between his eyelids. An ache woke deep behind his forehead. John peered out of slitted eyes. A man’s head, the back of it, shaved to the skin, sat in front of John. Another bald guy occupied the seat beside him. The muted white noise in the void gathered into a roar.

The light became too much, and John closed one eye to block out the light. Two images shimmered into a single one, one eye saw the backs of the men’s heads, the other John found hard to discern. He closed both eyes. Among the kaleidoscope blurs left behind on his retinas, green silhouettes replaced the heads and shoulders of the pair in front. John focused on the guy right in front. A line extended from the silhouette’s head. The man’s supposed facial profile appeared with ‘Pvt. Wate Kuhnhausen - 0’ beside it.

John got hot, too hot.

There is a computer interface on the inside of my eyelids? How am I supposed to go to sleep? What. The. Hell?

The pain from the surgery returned like it had lingered in the bone and muscle itself. John reached up to massage his neck, but his hand didn’t get far. A rattling chain connected the cuffs around his wrists to the ones around his ankles.

Since he couldn’t reach up, John rolled his neck back. The flesh bent with his spine. Seemed like there weren’t any cybernetic attachments on there. John hadn’t a clue of what one would feel like, but he had a decent idea of what it wouldn’t.

The guy to John’s right spasmed. John dared to open his eyes. Light beamed in from the window behind. Still, John forced himself to check him out as much as the pain allowed. The man appeared to be almost sleeping. Muscles under the acorn brown skin of his face twitched and strained inside the same menu void. The light from the window forced John’s eyes shut again. The augmented reality showed his profile in the same green silhouette. “Pvt. Elroy Rowntree - 0” hovered above it.

Behind him, outside the window, a mess of grey outlines flowed by. Each one had its own depth. The AR said, ‘Cocoon City, Existence Station.’ John opened his eyes and struggled to focus on the cityscape outside. Rectangular buildings, their outsides stained orange and brown by acid rain, crowded the terrain. Bowl-shaped reservoirs sat on each roof, no two the same. They all seemed slapped together from mismatched materials, products of necessity, desperation even.

Through the green haze of the air hanging over the city, John almost barely discerned the far spanning ceiling. It curved upward like Hadfield’s but on a much more gradual scale. The place was an O’Neill cylinder, but the space was massive, like the entire population of Hadfield could have lived inside this single urban area.

And it was big enough to fly over. John clenched his teeth. He hadn’t ever flown before.

Where am I?

Four men sat in each row, two on each side of the aisle, with cuffs around their hands and ankles. Everyone wore identical gray sweatshirts. They all had their eyes closed. Most didn’t move. A few strained their faces. Two more men sat at the front, facing everyone else, dressed from the neck down in riot gear like in the history textbooks. One noticed John moving and got his partner’s attention with a light slap to the arm. Both took their helmets from their laps and slipped them on their heads. A quick peek with the AR showed yellow filled their silhouettes, not green. Red skulls and crossbones showed instead of portraits. Where the others had their names, these guys were only ‘guard(NPC) - 10.’ Their hands rested on the black batons strapped to their thighs.

John peered over his shoulder. They were all inside a transport. Of the ten faces on the other side of the aisle, one stood out: Sylvester. He had his head shaved, was taller, more muscular than when they played gutterball, but it was his face on someone else’s more athletic body. The AR said, ‘Pvt. Sylvester Haake - 0.’ It was him. Must have been him.

“Hey.” John spoke with a stage whisper a touch louder than the engines. “Hey, Sylvester.”

Sylvester’s head perked up. With his eyes still closed, he turned his face in John’s direction.

The guard leaned into the aisle, lifted his face shield, and projected his voice. “The prisoner will be quiet.”

John called out louder. “You got to lower your eyebrows to select.”

Sylvester pulled his eyebrows downward.

“The prisoner will be silent.” John ignored the order. The guy was just an NPC.

Just an NPC.

The world seemed to spin around John. He couldn’t be in a game. The idea was insane. This must have been some a fever dream. There were no NPCs. None of this was real.

Sylvester squinted in the painful light. Sylvester focused on John. For a quick flash, his eyes widened.

John smirked. “This can’t be real, can it?”

Sylvester blinked as if clearing the confusions from his eyes. “Huh?”

The guard stood and put one hand to the ceiling to steady himself. “The prisoner will shut the fuck up.”

John laughed. He hadn’t ever heard anyone use ‘fuck’ like a swear word in real life. Sure, actors in historical dramas said it plenty. It was one of those shorthand signals to the audience that the story didn’t take place in modern times, but it was archaic, like a twentieth-century caveman.

The guard took two steps and put the end of the baton to John’s cheek. A spark and a crack leaped from it. That side of John’s face, only one side, seized and cramped. John yelped through grit teeth. All the bald men handcuffed inside shuddered at once. They turned their heads as if looking for the source of the scream, blind mice born in darkness. Inside the AR, shades of crimson painted his peripheral vision. The guard, his silhouette now red, returned to his seat. His partner laughed, muffled from behind the face shield, and slapped his knee like he had just seen an example of comedic genius. In the lower-lefthand corner, a window zoomed in on the head of a humanoid outline. The left cheek flashed. ‘3 electrical damage’ appeared underneath it. The asshole had gotten John in the same place his blood mother slapped him before. The baton hurt real bad, but not even close to that one slap.