To Be or Not To Be

by Ryan North

  “I know,” Laertes says.

  “It’s if I murder you,” you say.

  “I KNOW,” Laertes says.

  Anyway, this whole thing is weird and messed up, and I’m not really sure how we ended up here. I wanted to tell the story of a young lady who became a queen, but somehow it’s turned into The Story of the Most Successful Serial Killer Ever Who Murdered Everyone in a Town, But Left Her Family Alive for a While, Because Then She’d Have Someone to Picnic With.

  This story has a subtitle:

  You Cray, Ophelia.

  THE END

  * * *

  » Restart? «

  * * *

  You respond by copying her move exactly, moving your king’s pawn up two squares too.

  Gertrude quickly jots down something on a piece of paper you hadn’t noticed before. “e4 e5,” it reads. Beside it she writes, “Copying my moves??” Oh man! Busted!!

  “I like to record my games,” she says. “For posterity.”

  “Oh,” you say.

  Gertrude moves her queen diagonally as far as it’ll go, through the hole opened up by her pawn’s movement. “Qh5,” she writes.

  She looks up and notices your attention.

  “People say you shouldn’t use your queen too much in the early game, but what can I say? I love being a queen!!”

  “Also, I love using them in chess,” she adds.

  Your move, Ophelia.

  » Bring out my horsey on my right to protect that little pawn (Nc6) «

  » Continue copying her moves! I can’t lose! (Qh4) «

  » Bring out a pawn to threaten her queen! She can’t boss me around! (g6) «

  * * *

  * * *

  “That’d be a decent move,” Gertrude says, “if you weren’t about to lose.”

  “That’d be decent trash talk,” you reply, “if trash talk bothered me, which it doesn’t.”

  “Oh well,” Gertrude says, and she moves her queen to take the pawn it was threatening in f7.

  “Qxf7#,” she writes. She looks up.

  “That means you lose,” she says. Aw man!

  THIS SUCKS, Ophelia!

  » Checkmate «

  * * *

  * * *

  Gertrude looks at you and smiles.

  “Did you know,” she says, “that not only have you lost, but you’ve lost in one of the fastest ways possible? I’m actually kind of impressed.” She moves her queen to take the pawn she was threatening.

  “Qxf7#,” she writes. You’ve just lost the game, Ophelia! I’m gonna give you 15 points for losing so quickly, but I don’t think that’s gonna help, like, at all!!

  » Checkmate «

  * * *

  * * *

  You move your king up a square, and Gertrude moves her rook to match. “Check again,” she says, marking down “Rd5+.”

  You keep this up, moving your king up to get out of check, as Gertrude moves her rook to keep pace, putting you back in check. But you’ve run out of road: any more moves forward and Gertrude’s king will put you in check.

  At this point, Gertrude’s written down “Kb4 Rd4+” and “Kb3 Rd3+.”

  What do you do? Chess is hard, man! I wish I could help you, I really do. But while all the cool kids were outside playing chess, I was cooped up inside, studying how to make imaginary people say things! They called it “creative writing,” but they never warned me it would end up like this!!

  » Reverse course (Kb4) «

  » Cut to the left instead (Kc2) «

  * * *

  * * *

  You back your king up, but rather than following with her rook, Gertrude moves her king forward.

  “Kb2,” she writes. You’re not in check for once, so you take this chance to promote your pawn to a queen.

  “Yes!!” you say as Gertrude writes down your move as “c7-c8Q.”

  “How’s that taste, Queenie??”

  “Oh, it’s okay. Shame she can’t help you win though,” Gertrude says, moving her rook to stand between the two kings. “Rd3-b3+,” she writes.

  You move your king to the right, and she moves her rook to follow. You move your king back to the left, and she moves her rook to follow you again.

  Oh crap. She can keep you in check for as long as she wants. And if you move to the left, she’ll take your queen after you move out of check. So your queen IS useless after all. What a waste!

  BUT wait, isn’t there a rule that if you repeat the same move three times you can call the game a draw? Let me check. Hold on, I’ve got a rulebook for chess here somewhere. Just a second.

  Just a sec.

  Okay, yes: there is such a rule!! So that’s what you do, sending your king back and forth over again. After three repetitions, you declare a draw!

  NICELY DONE, Ophelia!

  » Stalemate «

  * * *

  * * *

  You put the sword away, and Gertrude continues pressing her attack. You fight back passively, dodging all you can, finally dodging your way out through a window and backflipping to the ground below.

  “I’ll find you!” Gertrude yells after you. “There was no time limit on our promise! I’ll continue trying to kill you until the day I die!”

  “Of natural causes!” she adds.

  You spend the next several days dodging her attacks and traps. They get progressively more ingenious until one day you break a twig in the forest, which sends a log careening towards a stack of logs, which knocks the logs over like dominoes, which sends a boulder down a hill and off a cliff, which hits a see-saw, which sends another boulder up in the air, which comes down on your head, killing you instantly.

  “Nailed it!” Gertrude yells. “Man! I KNEW that had an small chance of working!”

  So! Your final score is 66 quadrapoints and one passive-aggressive gift of a book called Sherlock Holmes Teaches You How to Get Less Stinky at Chess Already.

  Don’t worry about that one, Ophelia. It’s on me!

  THE END

  * * *

  » Restart? «

  * * *

  It does kinda rule, huh? You realize that, WOW, there’s a lot of stuff down on the ocean floor that no living human eyes have ever seen! And while your dead ghost eyes won’t actually change that fact, there’s still lots of cool stuff to explore.

  You eventually travel all the way to the Mariana Trench, the very deepest part of the ocean, over 547 fathoms below sea level! Here the water above presses down at over a thousand times standard atmospheric pressure, and the temperature is just above freezing. There are xenophyophores here, which are honest-to-God single-celled organisms so big you can see them with your bare eyes. Why, here’s one that’s over 10 centimetres long! This is nuts. This whole place is nuts, and you’re learning so much!

  You give up on your revenge plan and instead devote your (after)life to being a marine biologist and oceanic cartographer. And it turns out Ghost Marine Biology is pretty advanced compared to Alive Human Marine Biology, due in no small part to how you can hang around on the ocean floor for as long as you want and can’t die. Nevertheless, you write several seminal ghost books on the subject including Look at This Weird Bug Thing I Found and Gross! Life on the Ocean Floor and make many hundred thousand ghost dollars.

  THE END

  * * *

  » Restart? «

  * * *

  “I’m sorry, but I still feel like this marriage to Claudius is inappropriate,” you say, tenderly wiping away some of his gore off her face. “I am emotionally upset at this.”

  “Yeah, I mean, I can see that,” she replies.

  “I’m going off to be a ghost now,” you say “and I want you to be as happy as you can be. I’m sorry it didn’t work out between us, and I’m sorry I died, but I want you to know that I’m happy and I want you to be happy. Be the best Gertrude you can be, okay? And I’ll see you when you die. As a ghost. Because we’ll both be ghosts. I think I’ll be able to deal with this then.”

 
“Got it,” she says.

  You float down through the bed and into the ground, where you spend a lot of time learning about rocks. They’re really neat! Did you know that there’s all these different sorts of rocks?

  After a while you realize that if you make yourself corporeal while underground, the same “two chunks of matter can’t exist in the same spot at the same time” explosive correction works on the rock too! But instead of exploding, the rock compresses, melts, and then instantly cools around your body, forming a hard, strong, glassy surface. It doesn’t take much to go from that to the realization that if you stack this process, you can build tunnels of arbitrary size super easily! So you build a tunnel between Denmark and England, and it’s really good for the economy!

  THE END

  * * *

  » Restart? «

  * * *

  “Let’s kill him with stabs,” you say, “as there are indeed swords, like, everywhere.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Hamlet says. “Okay! So here’s my plan: we wait until he goes to church, ALONE, and then we —”

  “— stab him?” you ask.

  “No,” Hamlet replies. “We don’t kill him then because his soul will be pure. Instead, we fake your death, which causes —”

  “Wait, what?” you say, interrupting.

  “Hold on,” Hamlet says, “I’m just at the good part. We fake your death, which causes Laertes to get mad, and then he challenges me to a duel, and then DURING the duel Claudius and Laertes try to poison me — they are secretly on teams — both with the poison-tipped sword Laertes has AND with the poison-filled goblet they keep offering me, but my mom drinks it instead so she’s dead, then Laertes and I both end up dead too.”

  “Um, Claudius didn’t end up stabbed in your plan,” you point out.

  “Oh, well, I stab him just before I die,” says Hamlet.

  “Sweetie,” you say, “I love you but that plan is stupid. It’s not even a plan, it’s like — it’s a series of mistakes that results in everyone being dead. You would really do all that on purpose?”

  “I guess,” Hamlet shrugs.

  “Okay, well, here’s my plan,” you say. “We go out with Claudius while he’s drinking and get seen by everyone, only SECRETLY we’re drinking ginger ale instead of booze. Then when Claudius is drunk, we loudly announce we’re going back to your place to kiss together in private and also maybe get naked, who knows, because we’re young and crazy! But instead, we hide on the path to Claudius’s place, and when he stumbles down the road towards us, we stab him and leave. Then we show up at the drinking hall again with kiss marks on us and I say, ‘Hamlet, you’re the prince...of my heart!’ and you say, ‘I’m an Opheliac!’”

  “Your plan is good,” says Hamlet, “though it does lack inaction and needless tragedy.”

  “Normally those are bad things,” you say and Hamlet laughs at you as if you just said that light is both a wave and a particle. (I mean, it is, would you know that?? Anyway the point is Hamlet reacts like you said something crazy, that is the take-away here.)

  “I’m serious,” you say.

  “What,” Hamlet says, flatly.

  “I’m serious, inaction and needless tragedy are typically seen as bad things,” you say.

  Well, long story short: somehow, since childhood, Hamlet thought the opposite and is REALLY EMBARRASSED to find out he’s been wrong all these years. He says, “Why didn’t anyone ever tell me?” and you say, “I don’t know,” and he says, “Aw geez, I must’ve looked like such an idiot for most of my adult life” and you stay silent because yeah, awkward.

  At the end of all this, Hamlet agrees with your plan, and as you walk to the drinking hall where Claudius usually drinks, Hamlet keeps saying things like “Man I always wondered why dictionaries were always so accurate except for their definitions of ‘inaction’ and ‘tragedy’!!”

  » Arrive at drinking hall «

  * * *

  * * *

  It’s not yet booze o’clock, so you and Hamlet set yourselves up in a quiet little corner and start drinking the ginger ale you picked up along the way. While you wait, you talk about your feelings but HAH HAH, THE ADVANTAGE BOOKS HAVE OVER REAL LIFE IS YOU CAN SKIP OVER THE BORING STUFF, SO HERE WE GO.

  Suddenly, it’s later! Claudius walks in the door! “I’ll have some booze,” he says, “in celebration of my new wife and kinghood.”

  It turns out Claudius drinks like a fish, which is an idiom that means he drinks a lot, not that he extracts oxygen from the alcohol he inhales and then expels the remaining alcohol out holes in the side of his head. Soon, Claudius is falling-over drunk, and they’re sounding the trumpets that are normally sounded to let all and sundry know that the head of state is wasted.

  “Okay!” you say. “Now let’s tell everyone we’re going home to make out!”

  “Already on it,” Hamlet says, and he stands up. “Attention, everyone! I am going home to kiss my girlfriend on the lips.”

  Everyone applauds, except for Claudius, who falls over.

  You leave, then double back and run towards the king’s chamber, taking pains not to be seen. You find a good hiding spot behind some bushes, where you can see the road clearly but can’t be seen yourself. It’s actually a really nice spot. It’s kind of romantic.

  “Let’s make out while we wait,” Hamlet says. “Oooh, but before we do: what if Claudius takes another route?”

  “This is the most reasonable route for him to take,” you say, “and even if he does choose another route, we’ve got OUR ENTIRE LIVES to kill this man, Hamlet. We can try again another night, and we can keep trying until it happens naturally. Now: it’s kiss time, but keep one eye on the road.”

  It was a nice plan, but it turns out that you do miss Claudius tonight. However! All you’re trying to do is spot a drunk man who isn’t trying to hide, and there’s not that many routes back to the castle. Depending on how much attention you pay to the road, you might catch him another night. In fact, I’ll work out the odds!

  If you pay super close attention: you will catch him in at most 10 nights, nine times out of ten.

  If you pay some attention: you will catch him in at most 100 nights, nine times out of ten.

  If you pay very little attention: you will catch him in at most 1000 nights, nine times out of ten.

  So! How many nights do you want it to take to catch him?

  » 10 nights «

  » 100 nights «

  » 1000 nights «

  * * *

  * * *

  Finally, Claudius walks by drunk, right where you want him to, and you spot him!

  You and Hamlet jump out of the bushes, swords at the ready.

  “What is the *hic* meaning of *hic* this?” Claudius demands, hiccuping in the way non-stereotypical drunk people usually don’t.

  “You’re a pervy murderer,” you say, “and the ghost of the man you murdered has charged us with killing you, so that’s what we’re going to do.”

  “Ghosts?! Those exist?” Claudius says, shocked. “Man! I wish I knew that before I murdered my brother!”

  “He admits it!” Hamlet says, charging at Claudius with his sword in front of him. You do nothing to stop him. Hamlet seems to need this, and you’re happy to let him do it.

  “Is he happy being a ghost? It sounds nice,” Claudius says.

  “WHY DON’T YOU ASK HIM YOURSELF?” Hamlet says, stabbing Claudius right in the body.

  “MAYBE I WILL!” Claudius shouts back as blood squirts out of his new holes. “WE WILL HAVE A GHOST-TO-GHOST HEART-TO-HEART AND WORK THIS OUT. IN ANY CASE I AM GLAD TO HAVE CONFIRMATION THAT THE END OF THIS LIFE IS NOT THE END OF CONSCIOUSNESS.”

  “WELL...GOOD! I HOPE YOU DO HAVE THAT CHAT! YOU NEED TO WORK THINGS OUT; HE IS FAMILY AFTER ALL,” Hamlet shouts in reply, stabbing him some more.

  “I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO IT, ALONG WITH THIS VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY TO THE NEXT STAGE OF HUMAN EXISTENCE WHICH I NOW EMBARK UPON,” Claudius replies a
nd then he’s dead.

  You and Hamlet walk back to the drinking hall and establish your alibi, then you go to bed. The next morning, Claudius is discovered dead!

  » Get away with murder «

  * * *

  * * *

  Good idea!

  The next morning, you and Hamlet get away with murder, and though Claudius’s death is suspicious (suicide via multiple stab wounds is...unusual), there’s nobody they can pin the case on.

  Hamlet is next in line for the throne, but these things do take time, remember? There’s ceremonies to plan and coronation foodstuffs to order and such, so you’ve got some time on your hands. You and Hamlet spend most of the day wandering around trying to be overheard saying things like “Wow, I wonder who the murderer could be, if indeed Claudius was murdered?” and “That information is definitely not within my mind, as I was not involved in this incident.” It’s weird though because I already told you that you got away with it, so it’s not exactly the most productive use of your time, but who cares? Murder! Turns out it’s easy!