There were now so many people living on our planet that the available essential materials and resources necessary for survival such as food, water, shelter, transport, and so on became very scarce. The quality of life worsened by every passing year.
The population had been growing so exponentially nobody could tell how many people there would be on Earth and what human life would be like. There was no actual precedent people could examine so that to get some clues for possible consequences of such rapid population growth. People just didn’t have enough knowledge to predict if such a great population was sustainable since it had never transpired before.
Due to the lack of knowledge, people were totally unprepared to deal with the consequences of the overpopulation of Earth.
Now people suffered from the dire effects and problems of overpopulation.
Natural resources such as fresh water and forests had been depleted. Rainforest now covered less than 1% of our planet’s surface due to the excessive vegetation removal, logging, and deforestation.
Also, environmental pollution caused many animal and plant species to go extinct. Human activities such as marine pollution contributed to destroying natural systems necessary for the survival of various animals. Most of the world’s freshwater sources had gotten polluted, which caused the mass extinction of many fish species.
As to people themselves, the quality of life had gotten drastically diminished. Such necessities of life as food, water, clothing, and shelter became very scarce. It all resulted in lowering humans’ life span. Overcrowded living conditions, malnutrition, and pollution led to the emergence of human diseases, which spread extremely fast in overpopulated areas.
Sure enough, the overpopulation also gave rise to high levels of unemployment, lack of which unavoidably led to elevated crime rates and violence. The limited resources caused people to form gangs raiding stores and fighting one another in order to obtain necessities, such as food, water, and money. The crime rates were so high the police just couldn’t do a thing about it. They couldn’t prevent it from happening and constantly failed to protect people against criminals. There were so many thugs in the big cities police officers were outnumbered at least ten to one.
Then the authorities seemed to find a way to deal with the overpopulation. They invented Battle Royale Online, a virtual reality video game where up to one thousand players killed one another off until there was only one survivor in the game. Aside from fame and glory, the winner was given one million dollars.
As to the rest 999 players, who weren’t so fortunate, they, well, weren’t allowed to continue with their lives. When playing a virtual reality video game, the player’s physical body lay in a special life-supporting pod while his or her mind wandered around the virtual world. When the game finished, the 999 losers had their life support deactivated. In other words, they got killed.
After the Battle Royale Online game was invented in America, it became very popular because of the prize and the simplicity of the game. One didn’t have to have any special skills to become the last man standing and no player had any sort of advantage over the others. Battle Royale Online gave every player an equal chance to win. Due to all that, it was no wonder that many were willing to take a chance to win one million dollars.
Shortly afterward, similar last-man-standing virtual reality games started to appear all over the world. Unlike Battle Royale Online, which took place once in a while and allowed up to one thousand people to participate in the game at a time, other similar games quite differed in rules.
The Chinese counterpart of the game took place way more often than the American one and it allowed up to one million players to participate in the game at once.
The Russian last-man-standing game had a different set of rules as well. The Russian game was more violent than Battle Royale Online. Russian players had not only to kill but also to torture one another in order to score points. At the end of the game, the survivors were graded based on their performance and awarded one to ten stars. The player who ended up with the most stars was named the winner and the others were executed.
As I strode through the rainy streets, I thought about Jennifer. She was a smart girl. She was totally right about the odds of being the last man standing. To win you not only would have to be a very good player but also a lucky one. There was too much going on in the game. However experienced player you were, a thousand different things could go wrong in Battle Royale Online.
Yet I was willing to take that chance. There were two reasons for it.
First of all, when I was a teenager, my father had disappeared without a trace. Then my mother had gotten in a car crash half a year before, which left her in a comatose state. I would never have decided to play Battle Royale Online if my mother hadn’t gotten in a car crash.
I had to make monthly payments for my mother’s life support. If it was to be deactivated, she would die. When she got in the crash, she had knocked her head on the dashboard, which caused a brain tumor. It could be removed but the operation was very expensive. It cost about a quarter of a million dollars. I couldn’t afford it and there was no way I could earn such a huge amount of money. I had been trying to think of an idea of how to get the required sum but no bright idea occurred to me yet.
It was almost five months since the crash. According to the law, people like my mom were totally useless to society. Relatives or friends of those in a comatose state had to pay for the surgery in five months, otherwise a patient’s life support was shut off. Such were the rules of this cruel overcrowded world.
So I had once lost my father. I wasn’t all that keen on losing my mother too. I was eager to do anything to save her. By the beginning of the next month, my mom’ life support would be deactivated and she would die unless I earned the sum required for the surgery. Yet there was no other way for me to get a quarter of a million dollars. This was why I signed up for Battle Royale Online. This was the only way to get the money. I would never have decided to play the game had my mother not gotten in a car crash.
The second reason that I had decided to play the game was my past gaming experience. I had been quite good at it as a teenager. Moreover, like the man who had helped me to dispose of the two corpses had said, I was a crack shot. It would surely be in my advantage.
Before going home, I decided to visit my mom.
I got to the hospital and headed for the room when my mother was kept. As always, the place was overcrowded. Finally, I nudged my way toward the tiny room and closed the door behind me.
The room was shared between two patients, my mom and some man. First of all, I pulled the curtain separating the two beds to give my mom and me some privacy. Not that it really mattered considering the man in the next bed was in a vegetable state. I just didn’t like the sight of him. One nurse had once revealed to me that he was a mugger who had attempted to rob some passerby. Yet as things turned out, the latter could handle themselves and turned the tables on the unfortunate criminal, who ended up in the hospital. When the nurse told me this, I got pissed off. I was angry with whoever put my mom in the same room with him and demanded for her to be removed to another room. My demand was never met though. Like I had said, the hospital was overcrowded. There was barely any free space.
I took a seat beside the bed in which my mom lay and looked at her. She was very young. One friend of mine had mistakenly even taken her for my girlfriend when we happened to meet him while taking an idle stroll after a hard working day.
It was quiet in the room. Only the soft, peaceful humming of my mom’s life support disturbed the silence. I just sat there for a few minutes, fondly looking at my mother. She was very pale. The rising and falling of her chest were almost unnoticeable. Seeing her like this hurt me a great deal.
One nurse had once told me that although my mom was deep asleep she could still hear my voice if I talked to her. I wasn’t sure whether it was true. Perhaps the nurse just tried to make me feel a tiny bit better. Yet ke
eping the nurse’s words in mind, I talked to my mom every time I visited her.
So I said, “Hey mom. How have you been? It’s been a while since I last visited you.”
Sure enough, she continued to lay still, without showing any signs of hearing me.
“I’ve been busy of late,” I continued. “Seem to have found a way to earn some money. I mean lots of money. More than enough to cover the surgery.”
If she really heard me, she didn’t show it.
I went silent, not sure if I should elaborate and tell her about Battle Royale Online. Jennifer was right. My mother wouldn’t approve of my decision to put my life on the spot by playing that deadly game. She wouldn’t like it at all. I myself wasn’t sure if it was the right decision.
Yet I was going to play the game anyway.
Once home, I wasted no time in commencing perusing the game guide that one game moderator had given me after I recorded my agreement to participate in the game. After I read the guide twice, I started to read it again, trying to commit the main points and useful tips to memory. I wasn’t going to take any chances. I was hell-bent on winning.
Battle Royale Online was a virtual reality game that blended such elements of a survival game as exploration and scavenging together with last-man-standing gameplay. The game took place on a nameless island and forced all the players, starting with no equipment at all, to scour the game zone for weapons, armor, vehicles, and consumables, as well as to fight the other players while trying to avoid being stuck outside the “safe zone”, which shrank all the while at a steady pace. If a player got outside the circular boundary called the Circle, they was getting hurt and could eventually die unless they returned to the “safe zone”. The last player standing was the winner.
Equipment, which was mostly used for combat, and vehicles were randomly scattered around the island. Weapons and other items often could be found at landmarks on the island, such as within buildings in empty, ghost small towns. Players needed to search the island for any useful items while taking care not to be killed by the others players, which couldn’t be visually marked on the map, requiring the player to rely solely on his or her senses, such as sight and hearing, to spot foes.
Battle Royale Online featured large elements of realism. A single shot to the head more often than not was enough for a player to die. Which was why players had to search the island not only for weapons but also for body armor and helmets.
Battle Royale contestants were only given one life to play. If one died, they died for good, without being allowed to respawn. The equipment of the killed player could be looted by the others.
The game had boundaries, called Circle, which shrank endlessly, pushing opponents together. Players outside the “safe zone” were getting hurt. At the begging of the game, the damage such a player received was little while it grew steadily as the game progressed. At the end of the game, the player who wandered beyond the Circle got lots of damage and could get killed in seconds.
Although Battle Royale Online wasn’t a role-playing game, it had some key elements of one, namely experience and levels. Players gained experience points by killing other players or inflicting damage on them. Accumulating a certain amount of experience caused the player’s level to go up. It was called “leveling up”. The max level in the game was twenty.
After the player leveled up, he or she was given a skill point, which could be used to unlock one of the skills from a so-called skill tree. The skill tree had ten branches and each branch had three skills to choose from. Some of the skills required more than one skill point to be learned. Also, at the beginning of the game, every player’s level was 0. Once a player leveled up, only the first branch of the skill tree got unlocked. To unlock the second branch, one needed to learn at least one skill from the first branch, to unlock the third branch at least one skill from the second branch needed to be learned, and so on and so forth. In other words, to unlock the next branch at least one skill from the previous branch had to be learned.
There were quite a few tips at the end of the game guide. I read them all, committing to memory the most important ones. For example, I learned that there were helicopters in the game, but even if you never flew a chopper in real life, you could easily do it in the game.
I also learned that the island wasn’t all that big, so at the beginning of the game it was going to be very crowded and usually about fifty percent of players got killed within the first fifteen minutes of the game. Players had to be very careful as well as to take care to find some weapons ASAP at the beginning of the game. It was a very useful tip.
Another tip revealed that players spawned at random locations of the island, so if you decided to play the game with some of your friends, there was really very little chance of your spawning at the same location.
I also learned that getting laid in the game gave you some boosts like increasing your character’s movement speed, as well as health regeneration speed, for an hour and such.
These two tips were pretty funny given it was a player-versus-player game, where every player played alone.
The island had several landmarks such as ghost towns. Each of them had its own name. I examined the map perfunctorily because as told in another tip, the island and its landmarks generated randomly so the map demonstrated in the game guide didn’t exactly match what the layout of the actual island would look like.
I stayed up all night, reading the game guide and memorizing the tips that were seemingly the most important. I knew that it wouldn’t matter how tired my physical body was when my consciousness would be wandering around the virtual world of Battle Royale Online.
The next day I headed for the Battle Royale Online building. As I weaved my way through the heavy foot traffic, I wondered if I should visit Jennifer before starting the game. Then I realized my girlfriend might burst into tears and reason with me again so I decided against it.
A man met me in the lobby and after checking my credentials, he led me down a corridor. The door at the end of the hallway opened into an enormous room filled with people. Some of them were players while the others were technical and security personnel. The man walked me across the room to a closed pod and commenced checking and reading it for use.
While he was doing it, I looked around the place for the second time. There were lots of players in the room. They were my opponents who would soon be trying to stiff me as I would be trying to do the same to them. Some of the players were already lying in their respective pods.
A mammoth screen hung from the far wall, hovering above everything else. The only thing on it was a timer, counting down the minutes to the game start: 13m28s.
I caught a movement on the periphery of my vision and turned my head to look in that direction. What I saw made me gasp. An employee was crossing the room. the employee’s badge hanging by a strap around his neck identified him as Alex. But I wasn’t interested in the guy. My eyes were fixed on the girl walking alongside him.
It was Jennifer.
At first, I thought she had come here to reason with me again. What happened next proved me wrong. The employee named Alex came to a stop before an unoccupied pod and commenced readying it for use. Jennifer stood still nearby, patiently waiting.
I started to cross the room toward my girlfriend. The employee checking my pod asked, “Hey, where are you going?”
Ignoring the man, I continued striding across the room. When I got within a couple of yards of Jennifer, she noticed me and turned to face me.
“Jen, what are you doing here?” I asked.
“What does it look like?” She answered back.
She looked at me with such a bold and defiant expression that it stunned me for a moment. I had never seen my girlfriend act so dauntlessly.
“Are you going to play the game?” I stated the obvious.
“Yes,” she replied, watching me in the eye.
She had such a stern and stubborn expression on her face it scared m
e a lot.
“You can’t do it, Jen,” I said, trying hard not to sound whiny.
“Why not?” She asked boldly. “If you’re gonna play, why can’t I?”
The employee named Alex looked up and asked, “Is there some sort of problem?”
“None of your business,” I snapped at him.
“Excuse me?” He looked stunned.
“I said stay out of it.” I was almost shouting now. Other players, as well as employees within hearing distance, began to cast curious glances at me. At that point, I didn’t really care.
“Jen, you can still leave this place. But if you start playing, you can leave the game only if you win. And you know that the chances of winning are very slim. You told me that yourself yesterday, remember?”
“I leave this place only if you leave too, Jason,” she replied and a pleading expression appeared on her face for a moment. Yet it vanished as quickly.
“Jen, I can’t give up on this and you know why.”
“If you play, then I play too, Jason. End of discussion.”
I thought I knew what was on her mind. She wanted to play the game so that she could make sure I wouldn’t get killed by other players. However, the odds of our meeting in the game were nada. We would spawn at different places and without a possibility to communicate, it would be impossible to find each other. But supposing we somehow met each other and then made it to the final minutes of the game and were the only two players alive, then what? The game wouldn’t end until there was only one player alive. Which meant either I would have to kill Jennifer or she would have to kill me.
The thought sent chills up my back. I attempted to reason with my girlfriend once more.
“Jen,” I said doing my best to sound confident and persuasive, “you’re going to leave––”
“No,” she snapped at me before I could finish.
“Jen, listen to me,” I said raising my voice. “You must leave.”
The Last Player Standing: A Dystopian LitRPG Novel Page 2