As it turns out, closing his eyes did not prevent him from seeing images that were being transmitted directly into his brain. For reasons Omar did not want to even begin to understand, the words that now appeared in his vision did so in the same crude style and large black letters he saw when his interface was still “reconfiguring his nervous system.” Even with his eyes closed, the black letters were easy to read.

His interface asks, “Can you hear this?” and Omar, rather than responding, confirms that what he thought he heard was exactly what was written, since he could hardly believe that he was even being asked this question.

Still, he doesn't say any of this in response, choosing instead to simply grunt and groan in disbelief. Because Omar's grunts and groans were technically not a part of any recognized human language—at least not yet—this proves to be a somewhat ineffective way to voice his complaints.

“I'm sorry, I could not understand your response. Please try again.” He rolls onto his side and asks, “Are you serious? Shouldn't this be before the multimedia lecture that I was just lis—” but then his interface says, “HOW ABOUT NOW?” in his head, but at a much higher volume.

Omar screams a garbled, “Argh!” while desperately trying to block out the sound by covering his ears, but to little effect.

Then, at an even higher volume, his interface begins to say, as much as blasts, “I'M SORRY, I COULD NOT—” “AHH! Yes, yes! I can hear you, you stupid piece of—” “HOW ABOUT NOW?”

“Lower! Lower!” “How about now?” it said again, but at a normal level. Omar, whose hands still covered his ears says, “Yes!” with a snarl, and then adds, “You stupid piece of—” but his interface interrupts with, “Very good!” using all the prerecorded fake cheer it could muster.

The inauthentic praise reminds Omar that he's basically yelling at a recording, and with this realization, he goes completely silent while continuing to quietly rage and fume to himself.

⁂

Omar sat on his bed, legs akimbo, glaring angrily about his room. It was slightly bluer than it ought to be, with a tint so faint that, if not for the untinted parts in his field of vision, he never would've noticed.

“Can you see the three blue shapes?”

Now that it had been mentioned as such, Omar could just barely make out a large circle, square, and triangle lined up in a row, though parts of those shapes extended beyond his field of vision. He did indeed see the three shapes, but he wasn't about to admit that. Instead of answering the question, he just sits up in his bed, doing his best to ignore his interface, which is to say that he was trying too hard and failing as a result.

Every few seconds it repeats the same question, over, and over again, feeding his anger each and every time he hears it. This wasn't the effortless laziness of his Zen of not trying, and he knew it. To make matters worse, each time the question was asked, the shapes became progressively more opaque, and then, when it was no longer transparent, the shapes grew in size. In all, it took just over a minute for his vision to become completely obscured. Even at his best, not even Omar could ignore his own inability to see. “Yes … ,” he said, with a defeated tone. “I can see them.” It was sad, but it was also entirely his fault.

Immediately his interface says, “Very good!” and in response, Omar made some rude gestures. However, to say nothing for the fact that he was trying to insult the inanimate recording in his head, Omar couldn't even see his own hand in front of his face. Even so, success in this context would've meant that he had successfully insulted himself, which would've been dumb, but the fact that he failed to do even that, was simply pathetic.

Then, as if someone flicked a switch, the shapes became just barely translucent enough to say that it wasn't 100% opaque. With minimal delay his interface asked, “How about now?” and Omar immediately hated himself, but for entirely the wrong reasons. He says, “Yes, … even if you aren't alive, I'm still gonna kill you,” and in doing so, he once again demonstrates that his ability to shift the blame away from himself is not to be underestimated.

This exchange repeats several times with Omar saying, “Yes,” but with profanity-laced details describing the anatomically impossible ways he plans to kill the thing in his head that wasn't even alive. Like these details, his grammar becomes increasingly creative and incomprehensible.

At some point, the shapes shrink down to a much more manageable size and eventually become transparent enough to be barely visible again. “You're doing great!” his interface finally said. Somehow, its automated tone suggested that he wasn't doing great at all.

⁂

The transparent blue triangle suddenly changed, but in some indescribable way that made it seem subtly different from the other two shapes.

Next, his interface said, “Click on the triangle,” and Omar scoffed at the request.

“Clicking” on something with his mind was arguably less trivial than either of the prior tasks, and so he felt entirely justified in ignoring it. His interface said, “Are you having trouble? Please try again!” with its usual automated tone, except that it seemingly broke character for a moment to say, “trouble,” in the sort of condescending way one might use when talking to a child. About once every ten seconds, Omar's interface would repeat this condescendingly encouraging message.

Unlike the prior calibration tests, there were no harsh changes to accompany each new repetition. Omar had reasoned that those changes had actually been thinly veiled “punishments” designed to condition him into responding a certain way. There were also other reasons for those changes, but in this Omar was not entirely wrong. Without the pretense of some supposed “calibration,” Omar reasoned, incorrectly, that any additional punishments would be impossible. Additionally, he was wrong about the “pretense”; there were still legitimate changes to be made for this part of the calibration.

“You have no power over me,” he said through gritted teeth to his interface, which seemingly responded with, “Are you having trouble? Please try again!”

Omar glared dangerously at his own clenched fist, shaking it angrily as though he was on the verge of punching himself in the face. His fist relaxed suddenly and his limp hand fell like a rock. He awkwardly looked away, clearly intent on pretending that he wasn't about to hit himself.

Omar's interface said, “Are you having trouble? Please try again!” and with that, the irate man-child felt fully vindicated and absolutely justified in his petty act of defiance. He even had the urge to blame his interface for trying to make him punch himself in the face, but he suppressed this urge so that he could avoid admitting that this almost happened. This idiocy did nothing to cool the flames of righteous indignation, which he then proceeded to stoke.

He knew that this time he was completely in the right here, and as the obviously aggrieved party, he thought himself to be the sole victim of some great atrocity. This time, the “justice sandwich” was finally on his side and it had everything on it. While his resolve grew in strength, Omar easily ignored the implication of his own admission that he was sometimes, if not often, in the wrong.

He giggled to himself, somewhat dementedly, as he realized that circumstances had escalated to the point where this situation was no longer just about him “doing the right thing.” Now Omar felt that it was his sworn duty to NOT pay attention.

With a small mote of introspective insight, Omar realized that to do this properly he first had to step back and cool the fires of his righteous indignation. In doing so, he mentally prepared himself for the next step, knowing that it was potentially both the hardest and easiest thing he had to do.

After several excessively deep breaths, and then a few moments of lightheadedness, Omar said, as much as chanted, “One must not try, to not try. That is the only way.” From there he simply “moved on,” got up, and went back to his desk. By the time he finished checking his email—unchanged since he last checked—Omar had already forgotten all about the blue shapes. Soon enough, he was browsing his usual websites, clicking on interesting links, and laughing at dumb internet memes.

However, after about five minutes or so, even Omar had to admit that there was a particular shade of blue that was undeniably beginning to taste like triangles.

⁂

Unlike the prior calibration tests, the click on the triangle test involved a multisensory interaction, and as a result, the necessary adjustments dealt with a mix of sensory information. In this manner, Omar began to experience synesthesia; a neuropsychological condition where different types of sensory information cross and blend in unusual ways. Synesthetic experiences can include hearing colors, associating numbers and letters with colors, or even tasting shapes.

Like this, with each repetition of, “Are you having trouble? Please try again!” Omar's senses became increasingly more blended.

Overall, the escalating effects were stranger than they were unpleasant, and as a result, Omar had some leeway in how he chose to cope with the consequences of his pathologically obstinate behavior. In a stroke of enlightened insanity, he decided to embrace this new experience as though it were a psychedelic trip that he was meant to enjoy. In so doing, he conveniently forgot about his recently declared “sword duty” because it was, of course, convenient for him to do so.

Over on YouTube, Omar found some animated videos that were created to specifically entertain anyone hallucinating on psychotropics. This proved to be an absolutely fantastic idea on multiple levels, and Omar felt as though the internet had finally delivered on the promises of the great cyberpunk authors of the 80s and 90s. The dystopic themes, he figured, had already arrived, except that they did so in dreadfully boring and mundane ways.

He kept this up for about 15 minutes until the videos began to feel like they were crawling all over his skin. Acting on a suspicion of his, Omar licked the surface of his desk a few times in order to confirm that it did, indeed, both taste and sound like Tuesday. Immediately after doing this he decided that it was well and truly time to go to bed. Sadly he got lost along the way.

By this point, Omar basically struggled with reality, and the effort to simply recognize what ought to be the familiar features of his bedroom, proved to be increasingly difficult. His progress towards his bed was complicated by a tendency to shuffle and spin more often than was strictly necessary. By contrast, his descent into madness was progressing smoothly. He wasn't quite there yet, to either madness or his bed, but he finally found the path to the latter by following the sound of cranberries. Omar's sense of direction had been included in his “sense-blended punishment.”

Once he made it to his bed, he couldn't quite “see” it in a traditional sense, but he was pretty sure that he had arrived at his destination. Using his best effort, Omar tried crawling into his bed, and then similarly tried to close his eyes and take a nap.

The additional pairs of eyelids that he felt, made this final act more difficult. Each eyelid had their own sense-blended interpretation of “nothing,” and he wasn't sure which of them were real. On top of that, trying to close them all was like playing a game of whack-a-mole. Still, whenever Omar's determination wavered, he heard, “Are you having trouble? Please try again!” which always renewed his resolve to defy the commanding voice in his head. Eventually, his sense of “the passage of time” became twisted with the sense of “watching a movie about popcorn and cotton candy at a rundown carnival.” At this point, even if he wanted to click on the triangle, he would have significant trouble doing so without outside assistance.

⁂

Around that time, Omar's interface threw a computer error that was sent directly to the game's redundantly named, “System Administrators' System.” After a brief discussion, it was decided that the best solution to this problem was to give it to a recently hired intern, a three-month-old newborn AMI.

During that discussion, the newborn, who had already begun working on the problem, fixed the bug that threw the original computer error in the first place. This fix ensured that no one would ever suffer in the way Omar has, except for Omar, who was still suffering.

Thinking that their work was done, the recently hired newborn's boss immediately went on vacation. Then, for various reasons, most everyone else left soon after.

The newborn found himself to be completely alone and basically in charge of a system that was major part of the automated infrastructure used to support and manage every player interface in Outworld. After realizing this, the newborn was notified that the drooling and severely hallucinating human's situation would probably become a permanent condition if nothing was done, and that no one else was going to do anything about it.

Instead of finding a way to contact someone for help, the newborn discovered that it was ludicrously easier to send messages directly to any, or all, player interfaces. In disbelief, the hysterical newborn simply had to test if this was true. This was the AMI equivalent of leaving a child alone in a room with a gigantic, shiny red button.

A message was indeed sent to all player interfaces, and the result would later become known as the “Z Incident.” Unsurprisingly, this made the already hysterical newborn panic even more.

The desperate newborn eventually finished panicking, and with time running out, and a limited understanding of the available resources, the newborn saw that there was only one way to save the drooling human who was out of his mind and mumbling gibberish.

⁂

Suddenly, three things finished at once. The movie ended, the carnival closed, and all the cotton candy had vanished. This was all just as well for Omar because one of those things tasted like dirt, and the other seemed to involve popcorn.

In his mind, Omar thought, “Aeehh … bub … ggglub pubs,” when he tried to think in words. Then he mumbled, “Nubb! Nuh. No! No.” in a way that was quite similar to the first words he ever spoke to his parents as a baby, back when he first learned how to talk.

He hadn't meant to actually say anything. His mumbled defiance had simply been an attempt to think in words again. Omar wondered, wordlessly, if this still counted as thinking.

Nonetheless, he tried thinking in words for a third time. “No! Dd—then. Th—there was three! Dirt, popcorn, and … and … something else … uhhh, … ” and then it struck him, “BLUE TRIANGLES!” The words were clear in his head, but when he tried to say it out loud, he heard, “Aeehh! Bub! … Ggglub pubs!” which he decided was close enough.

It was “now” again, he realized, except that “now” was stained with the foul taste of blue triangles. Omar HATED the blue triangles with a fiery rage that could only be quenched in the spilled blood and confetti of those blue wedged abominations. It was already too late by the time he noticed that his murderous intent had been too much for him to contain, and because of this, the accursed geometric spawn had already begun running away.

Yelling at the fleeing triangles, he screamed, “Graaagh! Get back here so I can kill you! I kill you! I kill you all graaa!” except that, technically, he actually said, “Graaagh glag ahhb blahh plunk it! Plunk it! Plunk graaa!” The gentle voice of his interface chastised him, saying, “Stop that. You're making it worse,” before it said, “Are you having trouble? Please try again!” “GRAAAHHH!… ”

Then a very authoritative version of his interface's telephone operator voice started ordering Omar around.

“This is your god speaking! You Must Obey! I order you to NOT click on the triangle. You are officially forbidden from clicking. You are hallucinating! You must always hallucinate! Whatever you do, don't click anything!”

A confused Omar, who was half mad with both anger and insanity, could barely understand what was happening, but when one of the blue triangles began ordering him around, he knew he had to end it. Focusing with all his might, he killed the blue triangle with his mind, and this was interpreted as a “click.” The effect was immediate. Suddenly his mind cleared up and he'd been freed from his sense-blended hell. The change was so abrupt that Omar hit his head.

He let out an, “Oww!” before he realized that his mouth was full of dust. “Pah-tuh! Pah-tuh. Why is there dust in my mouth and why am I under my bed?”

Omar vaguely remembered something about cotton candy and he wisely decided that he should go and wash out his mouth. To himself, he cursed and damned the “highly advanced computer aliens” for tricking him into granting them access to his nervous system.

What he really wanted to do was to grab their phones and smash them to bits using his baseball bat while yelling, “ARE YOU HAVING TROUBLE!?” Once that deed was done, he'd start smashing all their other electronic devices, like their “stupid interface,” but at that last thought his rage simmered and then cooled enough for him to reconsider the repercussions of such actions.

He forced himself to hold his tongue and to suppress the urge to smash his cybernetic interface. No matter how right it felt, smashing electronic devices that were implanted in his head would not end well for him. In ten years, he promised himself, he would get his revenge even if it meant that he had to crap in all their mailboxes and urinate on all their cats. It didn't matter to him if there were billions of these “computer alien overlords,” he swore to himself that he would find a way.

This, however, did not make it onto his to do list. Some part of him that wasn't a sociopathic moron, realized that it would be unwise to anger, or even just to annoy, anyone or anything that had such intimate access to his nervous system.

It is worth noting that despite what Omar thinks, his cybernetic interface was not simply within his brain, or even limited to his central nervous system for that matter. That original message about his nervous system being reconfigured, was entirely inclusive of both the central and peripheral nervous systems. Even then, that message had been incomplete because the implantation wasn't strictly limited to his nervous system alone.

Nevertheless, to Omar, his interface was just that “stupid thing in his head.” “Can you? … Click and drag … the triangle over the circle until all parts of the triangle are in the circle.” His interface was back to normal, except for the two strangely unnatural pauses near the start of the message. Omar hadn't actually thought that it was back to normal, since he wasn't entirely “there” for the prior abnormal message. In any case, this new message was repeated several times, but Omar was ironically too busy ranting to himself about his interface to pay any attention to it.

As he continued to fume and recover from his psychotic episode, the man-child washed his mouth while demonstrating that he hadn't learned a damn thing. Even though he couldn't smash his interface, he could still blame it for all the hallucinogenic suffering he'd experience, with himself, of course, as the blameless victim.

“No one TOLD me that this whole calibration experience would be so awful,” he thought to himself while blaming “everyone” for the deliberately malicious omission. “Except for Suman,” he quickly added. “He's such an obvious overachiever that omitting stuff would be unprofessional or something.” Omar understood “professionalism” as much as he understood “respect,” which is to say that his understanding was very strange. “Plus, he basically earned the right to omit something here and there. That, and to also watch me scream in pain. That's just normal payback,” he thought to himself. This was about as close as Omar would get to understanding that he actually respected Suman.

While Suman's reasons for remaining did include a small element of “payback,” it would blow Omar's mind to learn that the tall man had also stayed out of genuine concern. Omar actually could understand, to some extent, how someone could stay out of concern. This was actually something he'd observed people doing on numerous occasions, even though half of those occasions were actually acts of morbid curiosity. Specifically, most of those acts of morbid curiosity were of the sort that involved bystanders who drove slowly on the highway in order to gawk at some tragic accident. Even with that counting as “understanding,” if only barely, Omar would find it hard to believe that someone could hold both reasons, simultaneously.

By the time he finished cleaning his mouth, the psychotic man-child's temper tantrum had more or less run its course.

With that out of the way, the inner turmoil caused by his absurd ranting began to settle, and this allowed him to relax some of the lingering tension that came from the sheer stress of his almost literally mind-numbing act of idiocy. This was enough for him to do something more “productive,” which in this case meant that he glared disapprovingly at both the triangle and circle, as if the two were planning to elope.

“It wasn't real,” he reminded himself, “but if I could, I'd still try kill it. Some things just need killing; especially those things that can't be killed.”

He continued to glare at the shapes, with most of his ire reserved for the blue triangle. Through guilt by association, Omar would occasionally glance at the circle and then the square with suspicion and disgust. At some point the triangle followed his gaze just as he went to glare at the circle once again. As a result, the triangle moved onto the circle. “That was great—keep going! There's just one more test.”

Omar, infuriated by this latest betrayal, yelled in impotent rage, “What!? What the hell! I didn't do that!” and then kicked the errant shoe on the floor, which then bounced satisfactorily off of the wall. It is for this function that he still keeps the shoe around. “I should just burn it,” he said, while vaguely using the word “it” to refer to either the shoe, blue triangles, or both.

Omar, who had ignored the majority of this first part of the tutorial, focused all his attention on his interface the moment it began to speak. This wasn't much, as he had little attention to spare, but it still required a great deal of effort. For entirely the wrong reasons, Omar was finally motivated and ready to listen.

“There's no way in hell I'm letting that stupid machine trick me again!” he said, emphasizing the word “stupid” while poking himself in the head a few times.

When his interface next spoke, its words flowed unnaturally in badly clipped sentences that surprised Omar. “Can you? … Give me a command. You can. … Try opening your player status window. You can. … Use a verbal or mental command. Or. … You can. … Try navigating to your player status window. You can. … Use your menu.”

The message sounded as though words and phrases were copied, very poorly, from other source materials, which is exactly what happened. In all, it was the sort of finished product that a panicking ten year old might put together on short notice, and that too was more or less what it was.

As if he was trying to demonstrate why he shouldn't be left alone with children, Omar responded with a litany of expletives and profanity-laden suggestions.

A message window appeared in his vision with the sentence, “Click to view?” over three buttons: “View All,” “View Sample,” and “No.” The message window blinked while his interface spoke. Omar's interface began to say, “I have—1,320,732 videos depicting,” before it replayed an audio recording of Omar's expletives and profanity-laden suggestions. “Would you like to view all those videos now? Or would you like to see a sample that most closely matches,” and then it began to replay his words again. This time, before the replay had even finished, Omar hastily said, “Nooo! No, no, no, nooo!” pleadingly. Both his desperation and fear were quite evident, and rightly so. The first “no” was sufficient enough for his interface to select that button, but the message window remained with that one button highlighted.

Omar understood the internet, and the true extent of its terrifyingly long reach; from where it stretched into the unending depths of its fathomless cesspools, to its dark corners, uncountable in number, and each bursting to the brim with a host of unspeakable horrors of the sort that could NOT be unseen. He understood these things inasmuch as he understood that he did not want to know them. And yet, despite his cautious understanding, Omar felt a gnawing sense existential dread that he instinctively knew as the promise of something that was somehow, inconceivably, so much worse. With everything else that his mind had recently gone through, including the hidden changes to his subconsciousness and cybernetic interface, Omar's mind had reached some sort of limit. The reaction was a sort of psychological purging, like the mental equivalent of vomiting, but filled instead with bits of half thoughts and ideas in a soup full of dread and horror. All of this rushed up to the surface of Omar's consciousness and then spilled out over and across his entire mind.

The important bit, the part that was clearly the cause of his psychological regurgitation, came as a single clump made from a terrifying thought. It struck Omar hard, with an almost physical force, leaving in it wake a dazed and dumbstruck idiot who repeatedly mumble, “But, … but, … but, …” without even thinking about making a juvenile butt joke. When he was able to finish the thought, he said, quietly, “But, but, my HUD. … IN my HUD? … But then I wouldn't be able to close my eyes, or look a—” and then he stopped suddenly, as if the rest of that sentence died unexpectedly in his throat.

His core body temperature dropped by three degrees as the implication quickly enveloped him. It was as if he'd been swallowed whole by some ghastly abomination that had only recently crawled out of the abyss. So much blood drained from Omar brown face that he looked like a dead man with a tan.

Something short-circuited in Omar's brain, his face slowly relaxed from a frozen mask of terror to a goofy grin with drunken, unfocused eyes. “Eeeverything isss oookaaay,” he said drunkenly, his head lolling to one side. This hastened the return of his normal pallor.

Through the haze, Omar watched as some menus popped up, and he listened to the mumbling words of a familiar voice as it mechanically spouted several random commands in quick succession.

⁂

“Wow, you did it.” Omar's interface said naturally, and with a tone of genuine disbelief. Elsewhere in his apartment, something fell over with a crashing sound. A startled Omar, who had been sitting on his bed, jumped to his feat and said, reflexively, “It wasn't me,” before he looked down at his bed and asked, “Was I sitting down?” However, after a few seconds, the question seemed like it was the least important thing he'd ever asked himself, and so he simply forgot about it. While standing next to his bed, Omar basically came to a stop, almost as if he was frozen in place, and appeared to be obviously lost in thought to an exceedingly strange degree. This wasn't his usual vacant look nor was it any of the other weird facial expressions he commonly used. He looked lost in a way that would only be stranger if he had asked Odysseus for directions to the land of Oz while taking a stroll through Wonderland.

For an indeterminate amount of time, Omar remained like this, his interface suspiciously silent, while his mind finished rebooting.

Within his mind, from his conscious perspective, it had started out simply enough. At first, Omar believed that he might be confused, except that he wasn't sure if this was true of not. Then, he wasn't certain if he'd just thought about whether or not he had just been confused.

This was the beginning of a “recursive meta-analytical loop” wherein Omar was stuck in a generally unproductive cycle of thinking about his own thoughts, which he then also think about, and so on, and so forth. He'd quickly lose track of his thoughts altogether, and then those lost thoughts would end up becoming what he would start thinking about next. Eventually, Omar would randomly realize that he might be confused, but he would not feel certain about this, and that's where the loop started all over again.

It was a sinister trap that could easily adapt to small deviations from the standard loop. When this happened, Omar would ironically suspect that he had this particular thought already, or something nearly like it, and then this would be absorbed into the loop, which would then grow in both size and scope.

His now cybernetically enhanced subconscious mind was exploiting the “unimportant and uninteresting” label to quickly dismiss each and every intrusive thought and memory that popped up in Omar's mind.

Most of the intrusive thoughts that popped up in his mind fit a rather specific pattern with a few reoccurring themes that tended to concern recent events and issues that were inexplicable and/or traumatic. His sense of unease and weirdness came up, along with the strangely inconvenient gaps in his memories. Then there was the botched calibration process which included the last few remnants of his sense-blended hell. Although it had been hellish, it had also been an undeniably epic psychedelic trip that was already the stuff of legends. Sadly, all that remained for Omar was a confusing jumble of fantastic impressions that bordered on the incomprehensible.

Even the odd behavior of his interface came up as a concern, which even he could recognize as being laughably ironic—as if he had any grounds to be concerned about the odd behavior of anything or anyone else.

Unlike how this usually worked, all of this stress and trauma was pushed beyond the back of his mind to a new part of himself that was emotionally dull and distant.

In the end, Omar vaguely noted that “some stuff happened” which was neither important, nor interesting, and then he moved on. Like a flick of a switch, he unfroze from his unnaturally motionless state as if it never happened. From there, everything else was simply “okay,” and his mind was, once again, blank and sharp.

“You may now begin part three of the tutorial. Suman Garcia has agreed, of his own volition, to be your instructor.”

The last part sounded unnecessarily ominous, but Omar, believing himself to be ever-attentive, focused on a more important detail. He asked, “Part three? What about part two?”

“It happened, but you just can't remember it,” said the tall man as he walked into the bedroom.

End of Part 1

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