To Be or Not To Be

by Ryan North

  “Let’s make this a drinking game!” he says.

  “Um,” you say.

  “If you make the first hit,” Claudius says, “then we’ll both take a drink.”

  “Okay,” you say.

  “But if Laertes hits you and you only make the second hit,” he says, “then we’ll both take a drink too.”

  “Okay,” you say.

  “Ooh! And if Laertes hits you TWICE before you make a hit, so you only make the third hit, then we’ll both take a drink.”

  “I’m not sure if I should get drunk during a fencing match,” you say.

  “I’ll put a pearl in your drink, hah hah, there’s nothing suspicious about that!” Claudius says.

  “Not really super thirsty either way,” you say.

  Claudius stares at you.

  “Can we fence now?” you say.

  The fencing match begins! Laertes moves towards you, sword at the ready. What do you do?

  ☠ Go for his upper body!! ☠

  » Attack his lower body!! «

  * * *

  * * *

  You decide to attack his upper body, but hesitate. Maybe the lower body is better after all? He wouldn’t be expecting it. You’re about to change your mind and attack the lower body when you get hit on the back of the head with a piece of dirt. The audience is heckling you! With dirt!! This makes you mad, which makes you attack his upper body after all!

  You jab and thrust towards Laertes’ upper body. He deftly parries, blocking your every attack and returning them with attacks of his own, using your own momentum against you.

  This isn’t as easy as it was on the pirate ship! It seems like Laertes really knows what he’s doing?

  Every time it looks like you might make a hit, Claudius seems really excited and raises his glass. Wow, that is one thirsty usurper to the throne!

  Finally, and not without quite a bit of luck, you land a glancing blow on Laertes’ left shoulder!

  “Got you!” you say.

  “Nuh-uh!” he says.

  “Ref?” you say.

  “Am I the ref?” says Osric. “I am? Oh. Yeah, that was a hit. Palpably so!”

  “Hooray!!” Claudius says. “Let’s drink! Hamlet, come drink with me! Look, I put a foreign substance in your drink!”

  “I’m in the middle of fencing here, Claudius,” you say.

  Claudius looks crestfallen. He lowers the drink as the fencing match begins again.

  ☠ Go for his lower body this time!! ☠

  » Go for his upper body again!! «

  * * *

  * * *

  You aim for his lower body and Laertes is unprepared for this and you totally score a hit right away!

  » Nice! «

  * * *

  * * *

  “Got you,” you say.

  “Okay, okay. You got me,” Laertes says.

  “Our son will win,” says Claudius calmly.

  “Um, hello, I’m not your son!” you shout in reply. Just then, your mom calls you fat and lazy and offers you a napkin to rub off your sweat, because she thinks you’re so fat you’re already sweating out of your forehead from just one little fight.

  Whoah! Where’d THAT come from?

  “What the butt, Mom?” you say. “Where’d THAT come from?”

  “Whatever,” she says and holds up the goblet Claudius poured for you. “Look, I’m ironically drinking to your good health and fortune!”

  “Don’t drink that!” Claudius says.

  “I drinks what I wants,” your mom says, and then she does just that, drinking what she wants.

  “Aw geez, that’s the poisoned cup. It’s too late for you now,” Claudius says.

  » Say “WHAT?!” «

  ☠ Pretend you didn’t hear him ☠

  * * *

  * * *

  Really? You’re gonna pretend you didn’t hear your stepdad — the one you’re here to take revenge on, I remind you — when he says he just poisoned your mother? When they invented “choose your own path” books, I’m pretty sure they were assuming you wouldn’t choose to be insane! So thanks for proving them wrong, I guess!

  Okay, you ignore him, and since this is YOUR adventure, everyone else ignores him too. Why not, right? You and Laertes continue your fight. At one point Laertes says that what he’s doing is almost against his conscience, which seems like a weird thing to say in a friendly non-fatal fight like this, but you ignore that too! Hooray! Your ears are useless!

  You fight back and forth, and at one point your swords clash in front of you and there’s a moment of silence as both of you try to overpower the other. This is your chance to say something awesome.

  “Bring it on,” you try to say as grimly and badassedly as possible, but somehow it comes out as “I pray you, pass with your best violence. I am afeard you make a wanton of me,” so...oh well?

  Pushing as hard as you can, you manage to force Laertes’ sword aside, but in the fighting that ensues he manages to cut you on your arm. Enraged, you break the rules of swordfighting just a little and kick his hand, sending his sword flying. In response, he kicks at your hand, sending your sword flying to the exact same spot. You both scramble towards the swords, trying to re-arm yourselves.

  » Take the left sword «

  ☠ Take the right sword ☠

  * * *

  * * *

  You grab the right sword while Laertes grabs the left. In the flurry of swordplay that ensues, you cut Laertes on his leg while at the same time Laertes cuts your leg. It is a perfect symmetry.

  Fortunately for you, the sword you grabbed had poison on its tip! Life’s full of surprises, huh? And this new surprise is that Laertes is now poisoned. Very soon you’re going to be responsible for an extremely public murder. But don’t worry too much: since it was Laertes’ sword that was poison-tipped in the first place, that means you too are poisoned from that earlier cut! Hooray!

  Okay, just to summarize real quick: you still haven’t killed Claudius, but you have managed to poison your one-time (now dead) girlfriend’s brother, get poisoned yourself, and allow your mother to be poisoned too. If you’re wondering about your score, right now it’s at, oh I don’t know, NEGATIVE 55,000 KILOPOINTS??

  Gertrude collapses from the poison you ignored earlier, and feigning ignorance you say, “How’s the queen?” and Claudius says, “She fainted because you guys are bleeding,” and she says, “NO, I’m poisoned from the drink!” and then she dies.

  “We’ve been betrayed” you shout, and then feigning ignorance again, you shout, “Quick, lock the doors! Let’s find out who did it!”

  Laertes, a man who is dying AS WE SPEAK, is thus forced to spend his last few moments alive explaining to you very clearly and with no big words that your mother was poisoned by the king. He also explains to you that you’ve been poisoned too, but I already told you that. It’s too bad too, because he said it very nicely, all “Hamlet, thou art slain. No medicine in the world can do thee good” while I was all “wooby wooby woo, jokes jokes jokes” (NOTE: I am paraphrasing).

  ANYWAY. Now is your absolute last chance. You have a poisoned sword in your hand and Claudius is sitting here in front of you. You will be dead in 1 turn(s). What do you do?

  LAST CHANCE, Hamlet.

  ☠ Kill Claudius ☠

  » Don’t kill Claudius «

  * * *

  * * *

  YES! YES FINALLY YOU ARE KILLING CLAUDIUS.

  OH MY GOD FINALLY.

  OH MY GOD.

  Okay let’s do this!!

  You stab Claudius a few times with the poisoned sword, but man, poison is slow and you’ve already got it in your system! So then you pick up the poisoned goblet and force it down his throat, all the while calling him “an incestuous, murderous, Goddamned Dane.” Wow. I mean it’s a little racist (at least partially self-racist too, so: irony) but still — wow. It’s a huge dose of poison and he dies instantly.

  What’s that? You didn’t know poison worked that way
? WELL, THAT’S WEIRD BECAUSE I’M PRETTY SURE IT JUST DID.

  Meanwhile, as the poison starts to kill you, Laertes forgives you for the deaths you’ve caused and asks you to forgive him of the same, and you do it. It’s actually pretty classy. Then you call Horatio over.

  “Horatio,” you say, “don’t be crazy and chug the poison too. It’s your job to tell everyone my story so people know what really happened. You need to tell the people.”

  “Okay,” says Horatio, glancing at the surrounding crowd which has already seen this all go down.

  “Oh, and write it down when you do, so future generations will know,” you say.

  “Okay,” says Horatio.

  “Oooh! And make it one of those choose-your-own-adventure dealies,” you say. “I love those.”

  “Right,” says Horatio.

  Suddenly you hear an army marching in! Osric runs in and says that Fortinbras is here and marching on the capital with some English ambassadors. Remember Fortinbras? He’s that Norwegian crown prince whose father died and who decided right away to take action! He’s almost like a parallel to you, only, you know — better?

  Anyway. You’re not going to survive long enough to talk to him. You’re actually not going to survive long at all. It’s time, Hamlet, to choose your last words to Horatio — well, last words EVER really:

  ☠ “O, I die, Horatio. The potent poison quite o’ercrows my spirit. I cannot live to hear the news from England. But I do prophesy the election lights on Fortinbras. He has my dying voice. So tell him, with th’ occurrents, more and less, which have solicited. The rest is silence. O, O, O, O.” ☠

  » “Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.” «

  » “Horatio, I should’ve trusted you sooner. Listen well: there’s a ship named Calypso’s Gale outside the harbour that can help you defeat Fortinbras. Her crew is brave and her captaincy shared by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Go and tell them what happened. With my last breath, I ask you do me one last solid: SAVE DENMARK.” «

  * * *

  * * *

  “Okay,” Horatio says. “I’ll tell them you said, ‘I found Denmark clay, I leave her marble.’”

  “That’s plagiarized from Augustus, first emperor of the Roman Empire,” you say.

  “Yeah, but it’s a pretty classy thing to say, especially for someone in power!” he replies.

  “But I was never actually in power, as I died before any formal ceremony could take place,” you say. “And even if I had technically been king, I could not have yet had any impact, negative or positive, on the nation as a whole,” you say, quite reasonably.

  Then you die.

  After you die, Horatio tells everyone your last words were “Rootie tootie, rub a dub dub / I once did a toot inside of a tub” and then he says, “Wait, wait, no, I just remembered, his actual last words were ‘Hey blabby flabby,’” which isn’t even better, what the hell, Horatio??

  THE END

  * * *

  » Restart? «

  * * *

  You are now Ryan North. This is weird!

  So listen: you just had the idea to write a book where you can play as Hamlet or Ophelia or even the ghost. Right now, the book exists as mere potential. On one hand, you can make it happen, but it’ll take months of work. On the other hand, ideas are like chest hairs: you have so many of them that it’s hard to get attached to any one in particular. Plus new ones are popping up all the time!

  You go skateboarding to decide what to do. You’re getting mad air while pulling off some insanely rad skateboard tricks while also munching on pizza, and it hits you: writing this book is something you want to do. You say goodbye to all the babes and go home to write.

  Almost a year later, you write the last ending for the last version of reality you’ve chosen to put in this book. It’s done. It’s a pretty solid first draft. A few months after that, you’ve smushed it into a pretty solid second draft, and then months after that, a totally rad final draft. All that’s left now is to do a final readover to make sure there are no typos, inconsistencies, or spelling errorrs!

  You grab some snacks, sit down, and bring your draft so close to your face that you can’t really see anything else. And then you start reading.

  » These are the words you read! «

  * * *

  * * *

  You are now King Claudius! You murdered your brother so you could marry his widow and claim the throne, but don’t tell anyone!

  You’ve just consented to read a book that your new son-by-marriage, Hamlet, gave to you. One of the royal court’s favourite activities is to listen to you read a book out loud because yay that is fun and fun things are hard to come by in an era before a way to warm up a house without literally starting a fire inside that house was invented!

  “As I was saying,” you (King Claudius: that’s you! Don’t forget!) say to the assembled court. “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 «

  » Shout “I’M NOT A MURDERER!!” then throw the book as hard as you can at Hamlet’s head, tell the court “I regret nothing,” and make a break for it «

  * * *

  * * *

  You are Hamlet! You just saw your stepfather confirm his guilt about killing your father, because he read a book and chose the options that the murderer would’ve chosen in real life!! He’s definitely guilty; this is entirely reasonable; there is absolutely no other conceivable explanation for what you just saw.

  After Claudius tore out of the room, your mother followed him, and after she left everyone else left too, leaving the room empty but for you, Ophelia, and Horatio.

  “Did you see that? He totally chose the murdery options, and then he freaked out!” you say, really excited.

  “There’s no denying that!” says Horatio.

  “This means the spooky ghost was correct!” you say. Ophelia looks at you for a moment and then opens her mouth to speak.

  Wait, hold on, I can’t remember — you’ve made a lot of crazy choices. Did you and Ophelia break up the last time you saw her?

  ☠ Yeah man, we broke up ☠

  » Actually, before we started reading that book-within-a-book, Ophelia told me we were cool, so we’re definitely cool «

  » Not only did we not break up, I actually WAS Ophelia before Claudius started reading the book! «

  » To tell you the truth, not only did we not break up, but she said she wants to marry me and that I’m the handsomest man she ever did meet. She explained that if you looked up “sexy” in the dictionary, there’d be a picture of me with the caption “We put this here because we knew you wouldn’t want to die without ever having seen such a hunky chunk of man.” «

  * * *

  * * *

  Hah hah, nice try! WHAT YOU JUST SAID IS A TOTAL LIE. And you know what happens when you lie?

  I’ll tell you what happens.

  You hear a rumbling. Ophelia and Horatio run to the window to see what’s happening, but as they reach it the castle floor beneath them crumbles and splits. Your last vision of Ophelia is of her falling and calling out as the roof buckles in, burying them both.

  You stumble backwards, running out the door as the castle collapses behind you. You’re running as fast as you can, tearing down the hallway but still staying only just ahead of the destruction. You leap outside, barely escaping as the castle collapses into rubble behind you. Looking up, you see the storm clouds, lightning crackling between them, thunder shaking the very ground beneath you. The clouds seem to form letters that read “YOU THOUGHT YOU COULD LIE TO THE AUTHOR ABOUT THE CONTENTS OF HIS OWN BOOK? SERIOUSLY??”

  As you stumble to your feet, the earth cracks open beneath you, and you’re left straddling it with one leg on either side as it
splits open wider and wider. Looking down, you see magma and liquid metals rush towards the surface. This gash leads all the way to the earth’s core, and the toxic gases rushing past you as they blast towards the sky burn your skin and make you choke. The planet is tearing itself apart, and moments later, it explodes, killing not just all life on Earth but all life that would’ve lived there in the future, if only you’d told the truth.

  The human race is extinguished. You have scored -1 out of a possible 1000 points and died.

  Also, you lied to a book.

  THE END

  * * *

  » Restart? «

  * * *

  You whistle and sit yourself down on the floor in the middle of the room. That seems a little awkward, so you stretch out on your side, your arm supporting your head and your other arm resting on your hips. There! Nobody could be more casual than you!