To Be or Not To Be

by Ryan North

  You and Ophelia move away from Denmark and settle someplace stable, sunny and warm. You don’t get married, because you never needed a piece of paper to tell you that you’re happy. Ophelia starts a business selling her inventions, and you are able to live comfortably.

  You have two sons, Timon and Pericles. When they come of age, Timon moves to Athens where he does very well for himself. Pericles moves to Lebanon and works on writing puzzle books. You and Ophelia await their letters with interest.

  This is a pretty good family man ending, I gotta say! If that’s what you were going for: nice work, man! You did it!

  THE END

  * * *

  » Restart? «

  * * *

  You go back to Wittenberg U. A few years into your studies, you and Ophelia break it off; long distance was just too hard. With her out of the picture, you don’t go home much anymore. You feel bad about it, but it’s too weird being around Uncle Dad all the time, and besides he was never the kind of person you would have described as “extremely non-creepy.”

  You drift apart from Horatio and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern too, as you start hanging out with your new school friends a lot more. You spend most of your time with one guy in particular, T.J. Macbeth. You’re unlikely friends — he, a jock; you, president of the philosophy club — but that doesn’t stop you. Friends is friends. In your sophomore year you get a place together, just a few minutes off campus, and he starts calling you by a nickname: “Banquo.” He laughs whenever you ask for an explanation, and eventually you just get used to it.

  Anyway, after graduation neither of you can find work, so he invites you come back home to Scotland with him. He says his dad can get you both some pretty good jobs high up in the army. He says there’s a lot of possibility there for advancement.

  You accept. You never do return to Denmark.

  THE END

  * * *

  » Restart? «

  * * *

  You go down to Ophelia’s place and knock on her door. “Who is it?” she calls.

  “It’s me, sweetie,” you say, opening the door and stepping into her room. You haven’t seen each other for a while; it’s so great to see her! You run up and throw your arms around her and you kiss. It’s just like old times.

  You hold her at arm’s-length and look into her eyes. “Listen,” you say, and then you...

  » go murder Claudius «

  » go on to say “I need your help with something” «

  ☠ unbutton your jacket, foul your stockings, take your garters off, and grab Ophelia by the wrist ☠

  * * *

  * * *

  So you walk in on your mom and fake dad as they’re trying to run the country, but it turns out they were talking about you anyway. Polonius is there too. He’s talking to you like you’re touched in the head. Hey! He thinks you’re crazy! MAYBE THAT’S BECAUSE OF ALL THE DUMB DECISIONS YOU’VE BEEN MAKING?

  So in an effort to save this, we’re going to assume that you were just PRETENDING to be crazy, because that way all of this kinda makes sense and nobody would ever suspect a crazy person of committing a murder, right?

  This is literally the best option we’ve got left. This is what you’ve reduced us to. I’ve gone back and rewritten the story so that in your talk with Horatio now you say “I might act crazy for a while, just be cool.” » You can go back and check, it’s totally there. «.

  Okay! So it turns out Polonius considers himself a master riddlemaster, and he’s going to ask you three riddles to determine if you’re sane or not. Riddle the first:

  “Do you know who I am?” he says.

  Since you’re now just ACTING crazy, this gets a little easier. Normally I’d give you the choice between a reasonable answer and a crazy answer, but I figure now you want to pick the reasonable one just to screw things up, and I swear to God there will be a method to your madness if it kills me. So here are your options!

  » Say “I don’t know who you are. Maybe...you’re a pimp?” «

  ☠ I know you’re looking for the option to say “Um, yeah, you’re Polonius” here, but you know what? I like being in charge. Say “I don’t know who you are. Maybe...you’re a pimp?” ☠

  * * *

  * * *

  Oh, terrific! I’m glad that the engraved invitation to choose this option finally arrived in the mail!!

  Alright, let’s do this!

  » Go murder Claudius «

  * * *

  * * *

  You walk around behind the throne so you can look over his shoulder as he reads. You figure that helps your whole “act crazy” thing, because you’d HAVE to be crazy to not know how annoying this is!

  You are now Claudius, King of Denmark! Your nephew is standing behind you being really annoying!

  Hamlet has just given you a book to read and it looks pretty good, actually. And it’s perfect timing, because one of the royal court’s favourite activities is to listen to you read a book out loud! Because it’s history times and there are no computers yet!

  You clear your throat and hold up the book so that everyone in the audience can see.

  “Let us begin,” you say, bringing the book down and reading the cover. “This story is called The Murder of Gonzago: A ‘The Adventure Is Being Chosen by You’ Story!” You look up. “The title goes on for a while after that, but MY first choice is going to be to skip to the first page!” you say.

  There is a smattering of polite laughter.

  ☠ Read the first page ☠

  * * *

  * * *

  You know what? No. Just no. When you write your own book, you can fill it with all the “let’s have sex in front of my mom and dad” and “hah hah women have different parts than men” jokes you want, but this is my book and I’m unilaterally deciding, right now, that you don’t get to do this.

  Instead, you decide to go stand behind your stepdad and watch him read! How’s that taste? Does it taste like COMPROMISE? Because it shouldn’t. It should taste like FALLING IN LINE.

  ☠ Stand behind your stepdad ☠

  * * *

  * * *

  Okay! You wanted to kill your stepfather earlier, but why not kill Ophelia’s father instead? That’s obviously a really good decision!

  You leave the room with Polonius in tow. You find a nice empty room with a nice curtain in it and tell Polonius to stand behind it. He does. You stab him through the curtain.

  “Oh, I am slain,” he says. His eyes roll back in his head. “Oh, it was much sooner than I expected.”

  Well, now you’ve got a body to hide and it’s not even the body you wanted! Nice going, Hamlet!

  Thinking quickly, you close the door to the room, so at least you won’t be discovered for a while. Unfortunately you forgot that the key is on the other side of the door, so now you’ve locked yourself into the room with the body of the man you just murdered. Whoops!

  Suddenly you hear someone coming down the hall. If they reach this room and find you here, it’ll be game over! You must dispose of the body and/or escape the room before being discovered!

  You have 8 turn(s) remaining.

  » Look room «

  » Try the door again, maybe it’s not really locked «

  * * *

  * * *

  You go and stand on the window ledge. Looking down, you see a five-storey drop beneath you. You jump, fall five storeys, miraculously hit the ground on your feet without breaking anything, trip over one of the body parts you’ve thrown there, fall down, break your neck, squirt out blood everywhere, and die.

  Sometimes when people read books like this where they get to make choices, they get mad that they die for no reason. While your death right after miraculously surviving your five-storey drop COULD qualify as that sort of unfair storytelling, you did also just jump out of a window expecting to survive, so on second thought, no it doesn’t. You’re still dead! And you stay that way...FOREVER.

  THE END

  * * *


  » Restart? «

  * * *

  You leave, promising to have someone come get rid of the body, and on your way out the door you bump into your bros Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. “You wanna get out of here?” you say, and they concede that they would like to party on a boat. You know what? That sounds nice. Sort of give everyone space, you know?

  “There’s a boat headed for England in just a few hours!” you say. You know this because boats to England are kind of a big deal.

  You send some servants to clean up crazy ol’ dead Polonius and another to be there for your mother, and you pack your bags. A few hours later, you and your bros are partying on a boat!

  » Party boat!! «

  * * *

  * * *

  “Well, we’d better not open it,” you say. Flipping the letter back over, you see it’s addressed to the King of England.

  “I guess we should probably deliver it to its proper recipient instead!” you say. That’s exactly what anyone decent would do, right? You’re good people.

  When you eventually arrive in England, you do just that, only it turns out the letter contains instructions sent by Claudius, in which he asks the king of England — king to king — to kill you. So that’s what England King does, really efficiently, and your bros fight for you and they get killed too.

  It was a super dick move by Claudius! If only you could swear revenge on him and then exact it, perhaps by going back and making a different decision? If only that were a thing you could do. If only that were a thing you could do RIGHT NOW AS YOU READ THESE WORDS, DOING IT BEFORE YOU EVEN REACH THE END OF THIS SENTENCE, wow still here, huh?

  Okay, I’m going to make it really easy for you. It’s the page you just came from. Why not go read it? Just — just go back a little; nobody will judge. I’m giving you a do-over. Take it.

  THE END...?? OR IS IT, HOPEFULLY IT’S NOT......????

  * * *

  » Restart? «

  * * *

  Are you sure you want to be a pirate? They not only fight nations; they also fight each other. I mean, you DID just defeat a crew of them, but to be honest you got really lucky. I wouldn’t want to push it.

  » Hah hah, okay, you talked me out of it. To England! Party!! «

  » Hah hah, okay, you talked me out of it. To Denmark! Revenge!! «

  » Um HELLO I already said I want to be a PIRATE «

  * * *

  * * *

  You sail to England and deliver the forged version of Claudius’s note to the king. He sets you up nicely: houses, money, even willing and imaginative sexual partners! Whoah! Nobody said this was EROTIC fiction! More to the point, nobody said this was choose your own EROTIC fiction!!

  You make some really erotic choices, and you and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern party until you can’t party no more. Claudius dies of natural causes several years later. You never see the ghost of your father again.

  You let the okay times roll and never go back to Denmark. People whisper that you’re wasting your potential, living in England with your bros and having flabbergastingly sexualized adventures, but that sounds like the complaints of people who HAVEN’T experienced the joys of having flabbergastingly sexualized adventures, so you ignore them. When you get old, you die of natural causes while doing something way sexy, and I can’t even tell you what that something was, mainly because it’s difficult to reconstruct your exact manoeuvres based solely from the position of your flabbergastingly naked bod.

  THE END

  * * *

  » Restart? «

  * * *

  “I didn’t murder your dad!” shouts Claudius. “And YOU’RE the one who murdered Polonius!”

  Oh right. There is that.

  “HEY!” you yell. “You killed Dad by pouring poison in his ear while he slept, and then stole the throne by sexing up his widow!” This is a useful thing to shout, as it brings all the onlookers up to speed.

  “You don’t have any proof,” Claudius replies, evenly.

  “Proof? DAD’S GHOST CAME AND TOLD ME WHAT HAPPENED. How’s that for proof? Also, the afterlife exists! I guess he’s proof of that too!”

  “I don’t think —” Claudius begins.

  “MOM, MOVE 15 PACES TO THE LEFT,” you shout. Claudius grabs her by the wrist.

  “She’s not going anywhere,” he shouts.

  Now what?

  » Fire the cannons anyway; maybe you’ll hit Claudius and not your mom «

  » No, that’ll never work! The only way to pull this off is if you launch YOURSELF out of a cannon. «

  * * *

  * * *

  The cannons fire in a great explosion of iron and, uh, fire. Aiming cannons is hard though, and while you do kill Claudius, you also kill your mother. In the shocked silence that follows, the crowd looks at their headless bodies, still standing, until both crumple and fall at the same time.

  The ghost of your father shimmers into this plane of existence beside you. “I didn’t tell you to kill my wife!” he says.

  “Um,” you say.

  “Geez, aw geez,” he says. “Now by the Ghostly Emergency Supplemental Act of Revenge on Corporeal Beings for Personally Witnessed Murder Acts of Spouse or Spouses, I have to kill you.”

  “Oh,” you say.

  Ghost Dad reaches inside your head and, for just a second, makes his ghostly hand slightly solid, shoving a whole bunch of brains out of the way as he does so. I’m sorry, this is really gross. They come out your nose. I didn’t even know that could happen. I’m as surprised as you.

  “Bleh,” you say, dying, your brains getting all over the place.

  You have died and I’m gonna put your score at...apples out of a thousand. Your final choice is to decide how much apples are worth to you, but man, they grow on trees so it’s not like they’re super rare Pokémon cards or anything.

  THE END

  P.S. Pokémon cards are a thing I just invented, they’re pretty fun!

  * * *

  » Restart? «

  * * *

  “I’m Hamlet!” you say.

  “Okay,” he says. “I’m Partario. Nice to meet you.”

  An awkward silence follows.

  “Hey,” says the gravedigger finally. “You know that skull you were eyeing before? That’s the skull of the old king’s jester, Yorick. He poured a flagon of Rhenish on my head once.”

  “Yorick?!” you say, excited. “Rhenish?!”

  » Talk about Yorick «

  » Talk about Rhenish «

  * * *

  * * *

  Okay, you are Ophelia. You are dead.

  Surprise, I wasn’t joking!!

  THE END

  * * *

  » Restart? «

  * * *

  You embrace the madness. You feel your clothes tearing as your body changes, becoming larger, monstrous. Colossal muscles move under skin that’s rapidly darkening to a vibrant shade of green. A few seconds ago, the dirt walls of Ophelia’s grave surrounded you on all sides. Now, looking down, you see your massive legs barely contained within it.

  The world seems smaller. Punier.

  Throughout all this, Laertes has hung on to your throat, trying to choke you. “HAMLET NO LIKE CHOKEY MAN,” you say, picking him up and flinging him over a distant grove of trees. “HAMLET NO LIKE ANYONE WHO INTERFERE WITH HAMLET’S CONCEPT OF PERSONAL AGENCY.”

  You jump out of the grave and land on the ground with a huge crash. You pick up Claudius by the head. “GHOST TELL HAMLET TO KILL KING MAN. HAMLET NOT SCARED OF GHOST BUT DOES AS HE ASKS UNDER OWN VOLITION.”

  Claudius’s head pops like a grape.

  “EW GROSS,” you say.

  Gertrude says, “Oh Hamlet, I always knew you had a gamma-irradiated monster inside you, just waiting to come out and save me when the moment was right!” Horatio and the gravedigger rush up beside you and say you’re the most awesome dude ever. Suddenly, you feel woozy.

  “HAMLET HAVE TO SIT DOWN,” you say. “HAMLET FEEL DIZZY,
AS IF ALL OF THIS IS ELABORATE FANTASY HAMLET’S OXYGEN-STARVED BRAIN ENTERTAINING ITSELF WITH JUST BEFORE HAMLET IS CHOKED TO DEATH.”