To Be or Not To Be

by Ryan North

  “Don’t be so sexist, jerk,” you say, and I’m sorry, but one “don’t be so sexist” isn’t enough to redeem you from a lifetime of being way sexist, even if it is the very last thing you ever say.

  Which, it turns out, it totally is!

  THE END

  * * *

  » Restart? «

  * * *

  Nicely said, Hamlet. I’ve got to give you a few points for that.

  So! Your final score is, oh, let’s say 675 points out of 1000. That’s a solid C+. You took a heck of a long time to kill Claudius, but you DID do the pirate sidequest, which is nice, because it was my mistake to put it so late in the story anyway. We’ll open with it in the remastered edition.

  Okay! Thanks for playing! Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!

  THE END

  ...

  So, you’re still here, huh? Story’s over, dude! Don’t just linger on this page, go re-read the book and make some other choices if you really want to get your money’s worth!

  » Re-read the book and make some new (maybe even better?) choices «

  » Refuse to let it end this way «

  * * *

  * * *

  “Okay,” Horatio says, and you die.

  You are now Horatio!

  You rush out of the castle and down to the docks, where you swim out to Calypso’s Gale and are pulled aboard by the crew. You explain to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern what’s happened, and they launch a surprise attack on Fortinbras’s ship, sinking her easily. When Fortinbras runs out of the castle and down to the docks, you have spider shot fired at him (one large cannon with eight smaller cannonballs attached to it; when fired it spins and tears though basically everything including Fortinbras’s body; it is awesome) and he gets totes obliterated.

  War breaks out between Denmark and Norway. You and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are instrumental in Denmark’s eventual victory, and yeah I’m going over things super quickly here but this was supposed to be, like, Ophelia’s story or Hamlet’s story and honestly I’ve always liked you, Horatio, but I’m already bending the rules like crazy by letting you have your own little adventure here so we’ve got to end it somewhere.

  You be good, my friend.

  No, you know what? Scratch that.

  You be GREAT.

  THE END.

  * * *

  » Restart? «

  * * *

  No book comes together without an author feeling like thon’s in debt to SOMEONE.

  Thanks to MetaFilter for all the terrific advice on how to dispose of a body and not get caught (SPOILER ALERT: there are murders in this book). They have a page just about this, did you know that? They’re one of the top search results for “how to dispose of a body.” And I guess also thanks to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service for not getting me in trouble (yet) after I ran all those searches for “how to dispose of a body” and “I want to know how to get rid of a dead human body” and “gross dead body +how to hide it” and “what if I committed the murder act, how do I ditch the body & not go to jail IT’S AN EMERGENCY??”

  Thanks also to Chef Michael Smith, Emily Horne, and William Shakespeare for the stew recipe (SPOILER ALERT: you can learn to make stew in this book too! It’s not murders ALL the time), for the expansive knowledge of boats and the seas in which they sail (SPOILER ALERT: play your cards right in this book and you just miiiiight gain command of a pirate ship, just...just be cool), and for ripping me off and making this book so famous (but which thank-you applies to which person?? That is for YOU to decide. Yes, even here in this acknowledgement parenthetical it’s up to YOU to choose your own adventure, but I mean come on it’s pretty obvious).

  Thanks to all my artist friends who drew all these pretty pictures in the book. You’ve made death into a visually stunning treat. And thanks to Crissy Calhoun for copyediting this book and fixing all my dumb mistakes! Any that remain I added in afterwards because of brain problems.

  Finally, thanks to Joey Comeau for his skills at chess, Ray Fawkes for his skills at mad libs, my extremely awesome wife, Jenn, for being extremely awesome, and to my brother, Victor, who confirmed over walkie-talkie that the idea for this book was rad.

  And thanks to you, for buying this book or at least picking it up and flipping to this page: that took initiative! As a reward, you get to continue enjoying reading this book!!

  » Okay, I’m ready now. I will choose my character! «

  » Um no, I’d rather read more acknowledgements «

  » You know what? I want to know more about the author before I commit to anything. «

  » You know what? I want to BE the author before I commit to anything. «

  * * *

  * * *

  Gosh, well, I suppose if we’re really doing this, then I also want to thank everyone involved in the series of events that led to me being here today, able to write and tell jokes for a living, which means I’m thanking...pretty much everyone I’ve ever interacted with? And I’m also thanking everyone THEY’VE ever interacted with, for helping to make them so awesome. And if I’m doing that, I should probably thank the people who influenced the people who interacted with the people who influenced me as well, right?

  Thank you, a large percentage of the planet that I’m pretty sure reaches 100%!

  But these people didn’t just pop into existence fully formed. My thanks take a step sideways and begin racing back in time, up past everyone’s parents and grandparents and great-great-great-great-grandparents, thanking them all as we go, further and further, grandparents getting hairier and hairier, until my thanks coalesce all the way back 200,000 years ago in East Africa with Mitochondrial Eve, the one woman from which every single human alive today descends.

  Thank you, Mitochondrial Eve.

  My thanks speed up, thanking faster and faster back in time, humanity devolving before our eyes. My thanks extend to the first human, pass through Australopithecus, and then on through great apes.

  Thank you, great apes. Without you, none of us would be here.

  But my thanks are still speeding up, tearing through the primates, then the treeshrews, then the placental mammals. We’re 125,000,000 years in the past, thanking everyone we meet. We go back further, thanking the early vertebrates, watching them get smaller, simpler, until there’s no animal life on land and you blink and it’s 2,100,000,000 years ago and we’re thanking the very first cell with a nucleus, alone in the ocean.

  Thank you, very first cell with a nucleus. You’re a neat li’l guy. You started some really cool stuff.

  We watch the cells around us get simpler, more primitive, and then they’re gone. My thanks are rushing backwards almost impossibly quickly through this empty planet when suddenly we’re watching the Earth itself break apart, diffusing into a tremendous cloud of dust and gas. Mixed in here are the beginnings of all the other planets in our solar system, plus all the material that would one day become our sun. We’re 4,568,000,000 years in the past and we are thanking a lifeless hunk of diffuse matter with all our heart. As we’re doing that, it combines itself with a colossal molecular cloud, a stellar nursery from which a whole bunch of suns would eventually form, including our own.

  Thank you, giant molecular cloud 65,000,000 light-years wide. You were probably very pretty.

  The universe around us is contracting, getting smaller and denser and hotter until we’re in a universe only a few metres across and shrinking at an incredibly fast rate. 13,000,000,000 years in the past, we are thanking the entire universe, which right now is mostly superheated plasma with a colossally high energy density. We would hug all that is and ever would be, if we could. But we can’t. So we say thanks instead!

  Thank you, the universe as it existed a mere 10-37 seconds after the Big Bang. If you really are sensitive to initial conditions, then I hope nobody ever goes back in time to mess with you.

  And then, at last and finally, my thanks race just a little past the origins of t
he Big Bang, give secret unknowable props all around, and careen back to the present where you’re here reading this book.

  Hey, thanks babe!!

  I think we covered everyone. All you can do now is:

  » Read about the author «

  » Start the story already! «

  * * *

  * * *

  You choose the “go kill your brother” option. Behind you, Hamlet seems to get interested in your choices.

  Wait a second. You remind yourself that you did actually just kill your brother, and so maybe reliving the murder in front of the court through the medium of high literature is not the greatest idea?

  On the other hand...ADVENTURE BECKONS??

  » Say “Oh wait I meant to choose the skeleton thing” and turn to that page instead «

  ☠ Onward! To adventure and also murder! ☠

  * * *

  * * *

  You are Battlelord Pete, or as you prefer to be called DRAGONMASTER 3000, since you are the master of 3,000 dragons. You are amazing because of all the dragons you control, plus you wear the armour of a skeleton warrior and you wield a battle axe that has the Latin phrase “FACTA NON VERBA” written on it...in BLOOD. You know what that means? That means “DEEDS, NOT WORDS.”

  Holy crap, this book is already awesome.

  You’ve been feeling a little jealous lately because your brother, Gonzago, gets to be king, and it occurs to you, maybe if YOU killed him and married his wife, you could be king instead!

  Maybe you should do that! Or maybe you should just go slay some skeleton warriors.

  To go kill your brother, turn to page 32.

  If you’d rather kill skeletons, turn to page 145.

  ☠ Go kill your brother ☠

  » Kill skeletons «

  * * *

  * * *

  Using your sword, you begin to chop Polonius’s body into smaller pieces. You begin by separating the limbs and head from the body. That completed, you work on reducing the torso to smaller chunks of meaty gore. It’s difficult, disgusting work. Blood gets everywhere. EVERYWHERE.

  You have 3 turn(s) remaining.

  There are a lot of body parts here.

  » Dump body parts out the window «

  » Put body parts into stew «

  » Put body parts into bags «

  » Use twine on body parts «

  * * *

  * * *

  You lift Polonius’s still-warm body to the window and push it out over the edge. It hits the ground with a sickening crack, and you see his limbs and neck now rest at unnatural angles. Blood bursts out from his corpse and gets all over the place.

  You’re now left in a room with a bloody, stabbed curtain, a few storeys up from the mangled body of your ex-girlfriend’s father. This isn’t going to look good if anyone finds you like this! Especially if they should happen to look out the window!

  You have 3 turns(s) remaining.

  » Burn curtain using fire from fireplace «

  » Jump out window, use body to cushion your fall «

  » You know what? I can talk my way out of this. Just be cool. Act casual. «

  * * *

  * * *

  You go and stand on the window ledge. Nothing’s changed since a few seconds ago, and you’re still five storeys up. You jump, fall five storeys, hit Polonius’s body, and break your legs. Blood squirts everywhere, but luckily most of it is his.

  You lie there crying out in pain for your remaining 3 turn(s) until you see a head peering out over the window ledge down at you. “Did you murder that dude and then jump on his body?” he asks.

  You continue to scream in agony.

  “I think you murdered that dude and then jumped on his body!” he says, and ducks back inside the room.

  A few minutes later, you hear voices from inside the room as you begin to fade from consciousness.

  “Since this is olden times, we don’t really have the medical expertise to help with infection, and Hamlet is lying on a messy corpse with open wounds,” you hear.

  “Man, Polonius hasn’t been dead for that long,” you think, but you don’t know that there are lots of gross bacteria in the colon and you burst Polonius’s guts all over the place. Anyway, you get an infection (a couple of them in parallel, actually) and you die, THE END!

  What can I say? It’s a really gross death, THE END, let’s all stop talking about it!!

  THE END

  * * *

  » Restart? «

  * * *

  You try to hit Laertes, but he seems to be moving faster and faster. Or maybe you’re just moving slower? In any case, it’s become harder to hold him off, and eventually he manages to stab you right in the lungs.

  You collapse to the floor and die. Since you’re dead, I can tell you that the blade was actually poisoned, and Claudius put Laertes up to it. Surprise!

  You are now a ghost! And you are a ghost who wants revenge on Laertes and Claudius. Unfortunately, you don’t have a son to do the revenging for you, but you do have your Ghost Dad to help you out! Your dad saw how unfair the battle was and how well you fought anyway, and he believes you were wronged. You are a father-son revenge team from BEYOND THE GRAVE, and you have Calypso’s Gale on your side. How can you fail?

  Well, it turns out the answer to that question is “quite spectacularly actually.” You and your dad are talking over your failures a few weeks later in Ye Olde Ghost Pub. It’s a pretty cozy place. There’s a nice wooden sign hung behind the bar that reads, “There is nothing either good or bad, but drinking makes it so.”

  “Maybe — maybe Claudius will be a good king after all,” you say, trying to put a positive spin on things. “He does seem to really want the throne. Maybe it’s because he can’t wait to put his revolutionary and effective socio-economic theories into practice?”

  “I don’t know,” your dad sighs. “I don’t know.” He takes a long sip of his beer: a cloudy, complex wheat-based sour beer brewed by the ghost of an ancient Roman brewmaster who’s had a millennium to practice his art, the words Carpe Cervisiam printed in elaborate script along the bottle’s side. “What am I gonna tell your mother? I got her only child killed in some harebrained revenge scheme from beyond the grave.”

  “That’s true. Also, I kinda killed Polonius for no real reason,” you say, taking a swig of your beer, a blonde ale flavoured with strawberries called The Secret of the Boo-ooze that you ordered because you liked the cute ninja ghost on the label. “Maybe revenge is harder than it looks.”

  “Or maybe we’re just not that great at it,” your dad says. He stares at his beer for a bit, and then looks up at you. “You wanna do something else with the next few decades? Something — non-revengy?”

  “What?” you ask.

  “I always wanted to be a painter,” he sighs. “But I kept telling myself that the business of being king took priority. I kept saying there was never enough time. That’s not the case anymore.”

  “Hmm,” you say. “Well, to be honest, I always wanted to live forever with voluntary and unlimited access to powers of flight, invulnerability, and invisibility, plus the ability to phase through solid matter. That’s definitely the case now.” You hover above the table and phase your hand through your beer to illustrate your point.

  The next morning your dad picks up a paintbrush for the first time in 40 years. He wants you to pose for him, but you’re excited about your new project too, so you compromise.

  His first painting is one of you, a pin held in your mouth, a sewing needle in your hand, stitching together your new superhero costume.

  THE END

  * * *

  » Restart? «

  * * *

  You try to hit Laertes, but he seems to be moving faster and faster. Or maybe you’re just moving slower? In any case, it’s become harder to hold him off, and eventually he manages to stab you right the eye. There’s a sword literally sticking out of your eyehole.

  Gross, Hamlet.

  Yo
u run around in pain and eventually run into a wall, which only jams the sword into your brain. You die in a pretty spectacular fashion.

  GROSS, Hamlet!

  You are now a ghost! Since you’re dead, I can tell you that the blade was actually poisoned, and Claudius put Laertes up to it. You try to get your Ghost Dad to help you take revenge, but he saw a) how bad you were at revenge when you were alive, b) how you swordfought the wrong guy and did it so badly that you died, and c) how your slapstick death was more hilarious than anything else, and so he decides then and there that he wants nothing more to do with you.