Otherworld

by Jason Segel

  My nose leads me through the building’s marble foyer and into a sumptuous banquet hall under a domed roof. There are hundreds of beautifully set tables, but almost all remain empty. In the center, residents in chefs’ coats and hats are tending to three monstrous beasts that are roasting on spits. Smoke from the fires twists upward like a vine toward a vent in the ceiling.

  “Have you ever tried buffalo?” Margot asks the group. I haven’t, but right now I want to more than anything in the world. “Our guests rate it very highly.”

  “Guess we’re taking a little break,” Gorog remarks as I pull out a chair at one of the tables. Before my ass can slide into the seat, a resident sets a plate in front of me. Ignoring the utensils that have been provided, I dig into the meat piled high in the center. And it is divine. In fact, it’s the best stuff I’ve ever eaten. I smell it and taste it and feel the grease it leaves between my fingertips. I wash the meat down with the beer someone hands me, which leaves my brain buzzing, and keep shoveling buffalo into my mouth.

  I hear Carole tsk. “I see someone forgot their table manners,” she drawls.

  “No judgments,” Margot trills.

  When I glance up from the bone I’m gnawing, I realize that Carole wasn’t talking about me. There’s a couple sitting about ten tables over. Empty plates are piled up around them, and the floor near their table is ankle-deep in bones. The woman, a blonde in a Grace Kelly dress, picks up her latest plate and licks it clean. When it’s a sparkling white, she puts it on top of the stack and one of the residents places a full plate in front of her.

  Arkan is heading toward them, his armor clanking. “Emma?” he calls, but the woman doesn’t acknowledge him. She’s holding another plate to her face when he reaches her.

  “Stop eating!” He grabs the plate and hurls it to the floor, where it shatters.

  “No judgments,” Margot chirps for the second time.

  Arkan bends forward to examine the woman’s face. “Not Emma,” he mutters, and then stomps away.

  “Gorog, what in the hell are you doing?” I hear Carole whisper angrily.

  “Getting this all on camera,” the ogre responds.

  My eyes turn to Gorog, and I find him aiming the camera of a tablet-size device in my direction. I can’t figure out where he got it, until I see there’s one at every place setting. Which seems unbelievably strange.

  “Stop,” I demand with my mouth full. I reach out a hand to snatch the device.

  “Too late,” says Gorog as I take it away. “I already sent the video to everyone you know.”

  I’m about to kick his ass when I remember that he doesn’t actually know anyone I know. “Hilarious,” I try to say, and end up choking instead.

  “What’s the deal with all the cameras, anyway?” Gorog asks Margot.

  “If you don’t record your fun, how do you know for sure that it happened?” Margot jokes. Or at least, I think she’s joking. “Our guests like to share their experiences in Imra with their friends and family back at home—and we encourage them to do so. It’s excellent publicity for Otherworld.”

  I’d love to make a snarky comment, but I’m too busy chewing to think one up. I finish the last bit of food on my plate and find a new one in front of me. I should stop, but I can’t.

  “Dude,” says Gorog. “Your avatar is going to explode.”

  “Now, now,” Margot chides. “He’s just enjoying himself. If the rest of you aren’t hungry, why don’t I show you a little bit more of Imra, and your friends can catch up with you later.”

  “Friends?” Something seems to have set off an alarm in Carole’s head. “Wait a second. Where’s Arkan?” she asks. I glance around the room. While Gorog was filming, the red knight disappeared. “Hang tight,” Carole tells me. “We’re going to go find him.”

  I’m still chewing as they rush away.

  —

  I have no idea how much time has passed—or how many plates I’ve been through. I feel a bit fuller than I did when I got here, but if anything, the need to eat has only grown. My hands simply aren’t fast enough to deliver the food to my face. I’m on the verge of getting rid of my five-fingered middlemen and lifting the plate straight up to my lips when I notice that Carole’s returned. She’s standing a few feet away, staring right at me.

  “You’ve got to come with me,” she demands.

  “In a little while,” I tell her. “I’m still starving.”

  “No. Now,” she insists. “Arkan’s in trouble.”

  “Get Gorog to help,” I say, annoyed that I have to stop chewing long enough to speak. “He’s bigger than I am.” I don’t bother to add that I never liked Arkan much anyway.

  “Gorog is helping. He’s keeping that robot lady busy while I come to get you.”

  “Margot isn’t really a robot,” I say. “She’s a—”

  “I don’t give a damn what she is!” Carole shouts so loudly that even my fellow diners look up. How long have they been here, I wonder uncomfortably. She lowers her voice and continues. I notice that she’s trembling. “This place isn’t right. There are strange things happening here. Get up,” she orders.

  “I don’t know if I can,” I tell her honestly.

  She puts her hands on her hips and her nostrils flare. “You said you came to this place for a reason. What is it?” she demands. “Do you even remember?”

  “To find Kat,” I mutter with a mouthful of buffalo. The words mean something, but I can’t seem to put it together.

  “That’s right. You came all this way to find your friend, and now you’re just going to sit here in this resort from hell eating virtual meat? Your friend could be three doors down from here, and you’d never even know it. Are you in love with this girl or what?”

  I never said anything about being in love with Kat. But what other reason would I have for being here? Carole’s words cut through all the knots that were keeping me tied to my seat. I glance down at the pile of food on the plate in front of me. It’s fake meat made from fantasy beasts. But it’s been my sole obsession for what might have been hours now—hours that I could have spent going after Kat. And yet, even now, I crave it. My fingers are aching to snatch one more piece. And that urge is terrifying. This is what Otherworld does to you, I realize. It gives you what you want. The only way I’ll make it through is if I remind myself that there’s something I want much more than anything else. I want to find Kat.

  I push my chair back and stand. I think I’m hungrier now than I was when I sat down, but somehow I summon the willpower to make my way across the room to the exit. Outside, Carole and I pass dozens of open doors as we wind our way down the red spiral path, deeper and deeper into the volcano. There are gambling rooms decorated like Vegas casinos that have drawn reasonable crowds—and nightclubs that are practically empty. I can’t understand why some of the rooms are so much more popular than others—until the answer hits me. I should have figured it out from the start. Most of the guests here aren’t from the White City. They’re wearing a headset and playing a game. They don’t have disks attached to the back of their skulls. The headset players can see Otherworld and throw dice with their haptic gloves, but they can’t taste the food or feel the massages. And dancing in haptic booties, while totally possible, isn’t much fun.

  There’s really no reason for parts of Imra to exist at all—unless they were designed for guests wearing disks. When I have a little more time on my hands, I’ll have to figure out what that means.

  “Come on,” Carole urges me as I pause in front of a man slumped against the wall. “You’re going to see a lot more of that where we’re going.” There’s drool dripping from the side of the man’s mouth. I assume he’s drunk, which means he’s got to be wearing a disk.

  When I turn to follow Carole, I step on something. It rolls beneath my foot and I lose my balance and fall against the railing. We’re much closer to the lava now, and I can feel its heat radiating upward.

  “What the…,” I mumble, picking up the objec
t that nearly sent me plummeting into the flames. It’s an empty syringe. It didn’t occur to me until now, but I guess if the disk can make your brain taste buffalo, it can mimic the effects of your favorite drug, too.

  “Watch yourself. They’ve got a bit of a litter problem here at the Last Resort,” Carole jokes grimly.

  That’s an understatement, I learn as we continue down the spiral path. Bottles and Baggies and cigarette butts are everywhere. Imra has been open for less than a month, but it already looks like hell on St. Patrick’s Day.

  “This is it.” Carole has stopped at a pair of open doors. Smoke pours from the entrance like a fast-rolling fog. She takes one of my arms and together we forge inside. The waiters and waitresses must be navigating by echolocation, because the place is too dimly lit to see clearly. But I get the sense that the room is a maze of leather chairs and masculine furniture. Before he wrote me off as a lost cause, my dad once took me to the Harvard Club in Manhattan. This is what his fancy-ass club would look like if its members were Hells Angels and Russian gangsters. Milo Yolkin famously attended Harvard for all of three weeks before he dropped out. If this is his idea of a joke, I think the two of us would get along beautifully.

  I wonder how many guests are actually in the club. You’d definitely need a disk to appreciate this section of Imra—unless you’re here for the scantily clad waitstaff. The waitress in front of us appears to be missing most of her skirt. She disappears suddenly, yanked into a banquette by an unseen hand. I guess that means there’s at least one person here who’s enjoying the wares. Now I’m stepping over two bodies that lie sprawled on the floor. Just beyond them, a man in red armor is sitting on a stool with his head slumped down on the bar.

  “He won’t get up,” Carole explains.

  “Hey there, buddy,” I say, doing my best to speak bro as I pull out the stool beside Arkan. “What’s going on?”

  “Why can’t I find her? Why isn’t she here?” the knight slurs.

  “Who are you trying to find?” Carole asks. “Tell us. Maybe we can help.”

  “You wouldn’t know her.” He’s not just drunk, he’s absolutely shitfaced. He must have been working pretty hard to achieve this level of intoxication. He couldn’t have been at the bar for more than a couple of hours.

  “Come on,” I try again. “This isn’t a good place to take a nap.” I can only imagine what horrible things might happen to someone who passed out in a place like this. I feel eyes on us, and I turn around. Three men have claimed chairs nearby. The hulking avatars seem pretty damn menacing. And I remember what the Clay Man once told me—the most dangerous creatures in Otherworld are the guests.

  “I’m never leaving,” Arkan whispers to the bar.

  I lean closer to his ear. “I know how to find the exit,” I say. “I can get you out of here. You can go back home and find the girl you’re looking for.”

  “Go away,” he says.

  Carole groans. “What do you think?” she asks. “Should we let him sleep it off?”

  I’m tempted to abandon the knight and let him stay on his barstool. The man’s clearly got problems that can’t be solved by sending him back to the real world.

  “We can’t leave him here,” I say with a sigh. “It’s not safe.”

  “Why not?” Carole asks. “You said this is a game. What’s the worst that could happen?”

  I don’t want to tell her, but she deserves to know. “If we were wearing headsets like most of the people here, Otherworld would just be a game. But we’re not players. We’re guinea pigs. The disk technology we’re testing is totally new. I don’t know what would happen if one of our avatars was injured or died. When I first got here, my guide warned me to protect my life. He said I might not get another.”

  Carole grabs me by the arms. I can feel each of her fingertips pressing into my flesh. “Oh, dear God, please tell me you’re joking,” she pleads. I shake my head. “You mean we could really die in this hellhole? I could be eaten by a goddamn goat and never see my family or friends again?”

  “I don’t know,” I admit.

  For a second Carole looks like she might burst into tears. Then she grabs one of Arkan’s arms. “Take the other one,” she orders. “We’ve got to get him out of here.”

  —

  We manage to drag Arkan through the club and out to the walkway. He’s remarkably heavy for a bunch of code. Carole is struggling under his arm, so we set him down by the wall. I’m catching my breath when I spot Gorog approaching us with the widest smile I’ve ever seen.

  “Dude,” he says. “You are not going to believe what they’ve got on the lowest level.” Then he glances nervously at Carole.

  “Give me a break,” Carole snaps. “I’m not your mom. You think I haven’t seen a few things in my day?”

  “I’m pretty sure you’ve never seen anything like this,” Gorog says, growing bolder. “It’s like a giant orgy down there. I’d bet there’s a thousand people at least, and a bunch of them are going at it like…” He looks over at Carole again, bites his lip and grins maniacally.

  Carole rolls her eyes. “And yet you came back to hang out with us?” she says. “How sweet of you. Now make yourself useful and help us with Arkan.”

  The ogre comes to us and hoists the knight over his shoulder fireman-style. “For your information, I’ve been very useful today. While you guys were paying for Arkan’s beer, I found the way out of Imra. Margot’s waiting for us.”

  “Margot,” Carole groans. “I thought you were going to give Robo-Concierge the slip.”

  “Easier said than done,” says Gorog. “She says the boss here has one last offer to make before we go.”

  “Two free nights and a complimentary bottle of champagne?” I ask.

  “And maybe a discount on an orgy?” Gorog adds enthusiastically.

  Carole makes a barfing sound. “You two are hilarious,” she drones. “Can we just get the hell out of here and go home?”

  —

  We follow Gorog to the bottom of the volcano, the knight’s limp body flopping against the ogre’s tattooed back. There are no streetlights down here, just the red glow that emanates from the pool of lava. Margot is waiting for us there with a smile plastered on her face and a tabletlike clipboard clutched in her hand. A spark from the molten rock lands in her hair, but she doesn’t seem to notice.

  “We’d like to check out now,” I inform her.

  “Not a problem,” she replies. “I will pass your request on to Pomba Gira, but I have a quick customer service survey I’d like you to take first. Do you mind? I just need to call it up on the screen.”

  “Who’s Pomba Gira?” Carole asks.

  “She’s the Elemental of Imra,” Margot says absentmindedly as she taps away at the tablet. “She decides who leaves and who stays. Okay, here we are!” She looks up with another plastic smile. “We want to make sure that our guests have had a chance to enjoy themselves fully before they move on to other realms. The data you provide will help us optimize our offerings for future visitors. So how would you rate your experience in Imra?”

  “Best day of our lives,” I lie, figuring it’s easiest to tell her what she wants to hear. “I keep wishing it will never end.”

  “Oh, excellent!” she replies. “And do you all agree?”

  “Sure,” Carole answers. Gorog grunts.

  “That’s wonderful,” Margot says, entering the information into the tablet. “You know, there’s no need for the day to end. You can stay here in Imra as long as you like. That’s the whole idea!”

  “We’re just passing through,” Carole says tersely.

  “Of course.” Margot’s eyes drop back down to the screen. “And which parts of the resort did you find most appealing today? I know you were quite fond of the buffet,” she says to me. “What about the rest of you?”

  “The orgy,” Gorog says.

  Margot looks over at Carole. “Ditto,” Carole drones.

  “Great! Yes, that’s a very popular part
of Imra, we’re already thinking of expanding. And was there anything you were hoping to find here that you didn’t?”

  “The way out,” Carole tells her. “We’d like to see it now. We’re done with your survey.”

  “Of course.” Margot smiles, switches off the tablet screen and steps into the pool of lava. “Pomba Gira will be with you shortly,” she says as she sinks beneath the surface.

  “Wow. Think that could work for us?” Gorog asks, shifting the weight of the knight around on his shoulder. He leans forward over the bubbling red rock and immediately snaps his head back. “Nope, way too hot,” he says, his cheeks as purple as plums.

  “How long are we going to have to wait here for this Pomba Gira person?” Carole asks.

  “I hope you’re not expecting a person,” I say. I’ve never seen an Otherworld Elemental before, but there are entire forums devoted to the ones from the original MMO. “The realms here are all ruled by Elementals. They’re like demigods. So when this one shows up, it’s probably a good idea to be on your best behavior.”

  “As long as she lets us out of here, I’ll be sweet as pie,” Carole says just as the lava begins to swirl and a column of flames rises from its center. Gradually the fire takes a female form and what can only be Pomba Gira appears before us. The Elemental’s skin is the glistening black of charcoal, the hair that cascades over her shoulders is silvery smoke and the dress wrapped around her is ablaze.

  “Whoa,” says Gorog, and I have to agree. She may be burned to a crisp, but she’s gorgeous. So this is the goat man’s mother? He said he was the son of the Elemental of Imra. I’m gonna keep my mouth shut, but this lady could do much better than a goat.

  “You wish to leave Imra?” Pomba Gira speaks softly, like a whisper you’ve barely heard. I would have expected an Elemental to have a huskier voice, but I have to admit there’s more power in this. It makes you draw closer, as if she’s the only one who knows what you need.