Circuit World

by Daniel Pierce

  I almost jumped back but did not have the time to as sparks leap to my skin, crawling up my arm. A coil of some golden energy lashed out and wrapped around my wrist like a questing snake. I wanted to scream—I tried to scream—but found that I was unable to.

  The world fell away in the next instant. My senses were overwhelmed by a kaleidoscope of light and pain—not just of sight and touch but also of sound, smell, taste, and spirit. It was a brief occurrence that would be impossible to truly describe to someone who has not experienced it, and to this day I am uncertain of if I would want to go through it again.

  When it was over, I heard a booming sound like a digitized trombone announcing my entry into whatever the hell land I was teleported to. It had all happened in the span of a few seconds: bedroom, kaleidoscope, trombone-boom, grassy field.

  I gulped in air in a futile attempt to collect myself and jumped at the sound of a menacing voice coming from behind. “Delicious!”

  Without even thinking, I whirled around and severed the head of a creature using a scimitar I was not even aware of wielding.

  “What the fuck!” I shrieked, taking a step back.

  The creature was clearly humanoid but in no real way human. It was more of a cross between a zombie and a person, covered in wrinkly ashen skin and devoid of eyelids as far as I could tell. It wore a chainmail and some tattered rags for pants, cut off above the knees. Gravity took a moment to catch up to the decapitated body, finally bringing it down next to the thing’s head some five seconds after I had ended its life. I hoped it was an enemy. It certainly looked the part, and its unconventional greeting gave me no reason to believe otherwise.

  Its nailed mace rolled from the hands at the end of its scabby long arms to my feet with a pool of black blood soon to follow, coating the dainty blue flowers around us. I heard a sound that I do not quite know how to describe—kind of like a metallic pop with a bit of an echo proceeding after—and was startled at the sight of a neon-blue two-dimensional screen appearing to my right—the same color that glowed inside the black egg-thing in my room. The screen read:

  Exp: 60

  Kill: Mangler

  Search?

  “This isn’t real,” I gasped. “This can’t be—”

  Search?

  “This—Jesus Christ—this isn’t—”

  Autoloot engaged. 4br coins.

  The sound of metal clinked in my ear. I felt the blood begin to drain from my head. Looking up, I saw the sun begin to spin. Looking down, the ground rushed up to meet me.

  It was getting dark when I awoke, still in the foreign prairie from before I passed out. Further inspection showed that it was actually a valley of sorts, but that was of negligible concern compared to everything else.

  The Mangler thing had disappeared when I came to, leaving nothing behind to study. I had killed the thing in the blink of an eye. One might say it was done with rogue-like efficiency. I was no longer wearing the plain blue t-shirt and shorts I had on in my room. My house clothes had been replaced by a mail of battle leather and leggings which provided decent flexibility.

  In my right hand, I no longer wielded my imitation katana but a very real scimitar like one might see handled by some Hollywood desert-marauding character. In my left hand was a small knife with a rounded tip.

  I took a seat where I stood to try and soak it all up. I had killed that thing in an instant, harnessing battle tactics that I did not even know I had. The move was familiar enough though, that was for sure. My rogue characters started out with such a move in a lot of the games I played. It was a sort of psych-out slash that was supposed to make an opponent think you were retreating when actually you were about to spin around and slice him when he began to pursue. I loved that kind of move. In the game I had been big on for the past year, it was called Reverse Slash, and I used it quite often. I had seen it done thousands of times, but I had never pulled it off physically myself. I had never tried to until right then with the Mangler. It proved effective, that was for sure.

  I sheathed both blades and leaned back on my arms, looking up at the sky as it transitioned to night. There was no moon, I noticed. I was never much of an astronomer, but the stars looked different to me. It was always a quiet point of pride that I could even pick out Orion’s belt—or at least what I thought was Orion’s belt. I had actually seen that combination of stars a night or two ago but could not find them as I lay there in the grass. The realization was a little unnerving.

  I took in a deep breath of air and thought some things over. The egg. The package. The email. The flashing green console. The kaleidoscope . . . It all pointed to one thing: I was inside this Circuit World place. It was an outlandish idea. It did not really even make sense, but there was no other way I could explain my situation. I was in Circuit World. Beta testing it, I supposed. Well, I had accepted the challenge, but I had certainly not expected . . . whatever the hell this was.

  I sat in silence. Time did not seem to matter. Eventually, a tiny reddish moon found its way into the sky, from where I did not take notice. Perhaps it simply appeared out of thin air.

  I laughed and shook my head. “I’ve really got to get stricter with my spam filter . . .”

  2

  I slept there that night in the valley. The gentle blades of grass were my bedspread, the dainty flowers my pillow. I awoke at dawn, startled, and was reminded of the numerous times during sleepovers in early childhood. It took me a few seconds to remember where I was and what had happened.

  The events of the preceding day had been a blur. The memories of it all were hazy and out of focus, like a fading dream, yet here I was, lucid once more and still in this strange world. This strange digital world, as everything had led me to believe.

  I yawned and stretched, taking in a massive gulp of the crisp morning air. The sun was twinkling at me from over a hill in the far distance. My stomach grumbled, and the sound was promptly followed by a pang of hunger. It was enough to remind me that the only thing I had consumed in the past 24 hours was a can of Hwangso Gong. Even then, my taste buds pined for that citrusy sweet flavor. If someone had asked me then, I would not have been able to tell them the last time I woke up without one of those cans in my hand. It had taken the place of my morning coffee over the past year or so.

  Despite my stomach’s insistence, I sat there for a while longer, thinking things over. This was not your typical virtual reality experience. I had definitely never experienced anything like it before. That email wasn’t lying about it being the most immersive VR experience ever.

  Unless someone snuck up behind me in my bedroom, knocked me out, and dragged me to some Matrix-style life support chamber that fed this reality into my brain via some node grafted onto the back of my skull, all that was delivering this experience to me was that little egg-shaped thingy I stuck my hand on. I could not make any sense of that. As far as I knew, there was no technology in existence—especially not gaming technology—that was so minimally invasive and could still provide the user with anything close to what I was seeing and feeling in this virtual plane. Maybe, I thought, the military might have some prototypes of stuff like this, but nothing in the gaming world. I would have known. I was subscribed to every gaming magazine worth mentioning and was a prominent contributor on a handful of well-known forums.

  Thinking about all that made me a little paranoid. I began to wonder if this was some kind of military experiment. Surely, I thought, they would not test this kind of stuff on citizens without someone such as myself being made fully aware of what was going on. There would be waivers to sign, non-disclosure agreements, and stuff like that. But then again, what did I really know about my government and the kind of liberties it took in protecting its freedom? If something needed to be done to further the military’s goals, were minutiae like personal freedoms and consent really of any concern? Whatever was going on, I was strapped in and the ride had already started. I just hoped to get off in one piece when it was all said and done.

  The c
onstant babbling of a stream found its way into my attention, and I suddenly became aware of how thirsty I was.

  “Water?” I said, thinking of one of my favorite movies. “You mean the stuff that’s in toilets?” My friends and I had all taken to energy drinks over the past couple years and we often liked to joke about what a large part of our lives they had become. Our desire to drink plain and simple water was at first pushed to the wayside and then swept from the table entirely—but now, my thirst was intense, and my body was demanding actual water.

  The stream was running just on the other side of a small hill not far to the right of where I sat. It was wider than I expected, and I was willing to bet there were some fish swimming in it.

  There was a sort of plain dirty brown rucksack thing I had been teleported in with in addition to my weapons and clothing. I pulled the strap from over my back and sat it in the grass a few paces away from the water.

  The water was cool to the touch—not freezing, but not warm enough that I felt I’d be comfortable swimming around in it. It felt like water though. It danced like water, too, glimmering in the morning sun. The graphics of this game—if it was even accurate to call it that—were beyond belief. I was there—touching the water, feeling the gentle breeze, breathing the air.

  I looked toward the sun, and my eyes tried to retreat in response to its brilliance. I cupped my hands together and scooped up a bit of water, and then tossed it ahead of me. Most of it fell back to the stream, but some of it was carried for a few seconds by the breeze. I had learned a bit about game design during my time as a student programmer. I wasn’t really taught anything having to do with game design, but, rather, I looked up random stuff on the subject purely out of curiosity. This water’s behavior defied my understanding of how videogames worked.

  Just to be sure, I scooped some more up in my right hand and drizzled it onto the grass. The droplets that stayed to rest among the blades did not vanish, as one would expect of a game. Each one stayed put as if it were its own individual entity in the game world. To someone who does not play games or understand much about programming, that might not seem significant, but I had to actively try to prevent my jaw from falling open after witnessing it.

  I was in a daze for a few moments trying to comprehend the computing power necessary for a game to account for every individual droplet of water. The leaves told a similar story. I pinched several of them between my fingers and pulled them from the ground. They answered my call and came free, roots and all. In every other game in existence, a player could not do something like this. The ground is the ground. The grass there is little more than a picture if it’s anything more than a picture. Usually, it’s just an illusion to try and simulate a sort of depth or texture in the game world that is not really there. You cannot even interact with it. The same goes for bodies of water. A pond is a pond. A river is a river. There are no droplets of water that the player can take from those bodies of water and interact with, but-- the stream I was looking at was not simply a stream. No, it appeared to be a combination of millions of droplets that flowed together to make a stream, each droplet with its own physical properties somehow simultaneously accounted for by the GPU running the game.

  Those thoughts hit me like a tidal wave. The kind of computer needed to calculate those kinds of physics for an MMO would have to be the size of a warehouse. There would be billions upon billions of individual entities to account for, and, as far as I was aware, nothing like that existed outside of government-funded experimentation environments, which again aroused my suspicions of military involvement.

  I took a clump of dirt and chucked it into the water. The current carried it away out of sight. There was a splash that soon followed the plop of the clod I threw. I turned just in time to see the tail of a fish disappear beneath the surface. My stomach rumbled again.

  “Time to go fishing!” I shouted.

  I stood abruptly, feeling the kind of excitement a child might feel when waking up on Christmas morning; a kind of excitement I had not felt since the days of my early youth and had never expected to feel again; a kind of excitement that my pursuit of nostalgia constantly brought me near but never quite allowed me to touch. Being in this wonderful new place that defied logic felt akin to discovering a new sixth sense I was not aware that I had. I imagined that this must be how a blind person would feel if they woke up one day and were suddenly able to see. I had heard the color blue described to me all my life. I had felt blue things, smelled them, tasted them, but I had never truly experienced blue because I could not see it until now. And now, looking at this digital water which was a perfect representation of the real thing—even better than the original if I dared say so, a high definition version of high definition—I felt as if I were actually seeing blue for the first time. I had lost my religion shortly before going off to college, but in that moment, I was tempted to say that I’d found it again because there was no other way to describe my feelings as anything other than spiritual.

  Despite my initial hesitation to get acquainted with the water, body and all, I leapt in, eager to see what else this game world had in store for me. If there were fish, I was determined to catch them and see what they had to offer.

  As if in answer to my enthusiasm, several more broke through the flowing curtain of the stream, too fast for me to react to. I waited a moment and saw the action repeated. It seemed that there was a certain rhythm to their movements. Splash! Pause. Splash, splash!

  I would hear three splashes at very specific intervals, then a long pause, and it would happen again—and all in the same spots. I had to wonder if the fish were getting recycled. Perhaps the same three would travel a bit, jump, and then sort of teleport back to where they started and do it again. It seemed like a boring existence, but I doubted they minded much.

  After I observed their behavior several times, I stuck my hand out above a spot in the water where I noticed one of them landing. Not five more seconds had passed before they popped up again, and one of them bumped right into where my hand waited for it, but it managed to flop out and into the water again.

  “Sonofabitch!” I cursed, not out of frustration, but rather giddy enthusiasm. I curse just as frequently when I’m excited as I do when I’m angry, if not more so. “Next time, fucker!”

  I stooped down and splashed a handful of water in no particular direction before putting my hand back to where it had been hovering in wait for my prey. Little more than ten seconds passed, and there they were once again. This time, when I felt the scaly sucker land in my palm, I closed my fingers around it.

  “Yes. Victory.”

  It flopped uselessly in my iron grip, as good as dead and eaten.

  “It’s for a good cause, I promise.” I laughed, bringing it back to the shore.

  I took note that the water dried from my clothes and body almost immediately. It was as if my skin and everything that was essentially a part of me was suddenly coated in some kind of aqua phobic spray. The moment my foot touched dry ground, the water that had been clinging to me gathered up into tiny drops and just rolled away.

  “Well, that’s pretty fucking convenient.” I laughed again and tossed the fish to the grass a little further away from the water than where I stood.

  I licked my lips like a hungry cartoon character and noticed how dry they were, which served to remind me of my thirst that needed some serious quenching. I turned and completely submerged my head in the water, gulping in as much as my body would allow. The coolness did not really bother me then, nor had it when I jumped in a moment ago, I realized.

  When I was satisfied, I pulled my head back out and watched the water flee from my person for a second time as if it was wary of invoking my wrath by staying longer than it was welcome. The water certainly tasted like water. That was to say, I would have preferred the sweet citrusy kiss of some good ole’ Hwangso Gong, but this bland refreshment did the job.

  I was drawn back to the fish by its desperate thumbing against the ground. It s
eemed like a kind of trout, about four times the width of my hand, and looked tasty enough for someone in my current situation: on the verge of starving. I had gone fishing with my dad several times when I was really little, but I had never taken much of a liking to it, always opting to bring my handheld games along while we sat in the sun and he laid out like half a dozen lines to increase his chances of catching something. It always seemed so boring to me, and once I reached the seventh grade, he just quit asking me to join him. The payoff never seemed worth the effort expended.

  This type of fishing was different. When I set out to catch something, the results came almost immediately. If I failed one attempt, another would come along a few short seconds later. This was the kind of fishing I could get behind. This was the kind of instantly gratifying fishing for gamers. I wondered how my dad would feel about it.

  “A-plus, Circuit World,” I commended the virtual environment. “A-plus.”

  I opened my sack to see if there was anything in there that would help me cook the thing. I was tempted to just go full Chinese on it and bite its head off. I was tempted to do a lot of things in this simulated world that would not be safe back home. I chuckled at the thought. Back home . . . Was I not home? Was I not lying in a vegetative state in my bedroom with my hand plastered to a pulsating black egg?

  “What do we have here?” I said, rummaging through my equipment.

  There was a small pouch inside of my bigger one. I opened this first and found a bunch of little bronze coins. There were probably 50 or so, but I didn’t take time to count them all. I remembered when I killed the Mangler-thing, the screen that popped up told me I had looted some bronze coins—at least, I assumed that was what the “br.” abbreviation was for. It stood to reason that those coins had automatically found their way into this little pouch of mine. The next thing I pulled out was a coil of rope—a must-have piece of equipment for any rogue worth his salt. I set that aside in the grass beneath the fish as a barrier between it and the stream in case it got any bright ideas. Next, I found an axe, presumably for chopping wood. After that came a few handfuls of forest debris that I assumed would be good to use as tinder, and then I found some flint and steel to light it with. I had never seen flint and steel together as a means of starting a fire in the real world, but I had come across it enough in my time as a gamer to recognize it.