I studied the modest pile of twigs and dead leaves, fairly certain that it would serve as good fuel to start a fire, but doubtful that it would last long without a bigger source of fuel for the flame. My stomach cried out again. The fish flopped at my side, giving me the impression that it just wanted to be put out of its misery.
“Well, let’s see what this’ll do . . .”
It wasn’t long before I realized that starting a fire with flint and steel was more difficult than prior experience had led me to believe. The steel was roughly in the shape of an oval and large enough for me to wear around my fingers like a set of brass knuckles, though it was not thick enough to use as such. I was not sure how best to grip it, so that was how I decided to treat it. The flint was a jagged brownish stone of varied shades—darkest in the center and gradually turning lighter as it fanned out to the sharp edges. Holding the steel steady around the fingers of my left hand, I took the flint in my right and rubbed it against the metal as if I were trying to sand it down. Nothing happened except for the scraping noise one would expect to hear.
“Hm . . . uh, let’s try that again,” I said.
I had no luck the second time. Or the third time. Or even the tenth time. It seemed like the fates just were not on my side with it.
“There must be something I’m missing,” I said. I looked to the fish and asked, “You wouldn’t happen to know how this works, would you?” It flopped.
I held my hands over the debris and tried a few more times. I expected to see sparks with or without the tinder, but saw none either way.
“The fuck?”
I pulled it back and really put some force into it for my next handful of attempts. The only response I got was that same scraping sound. I was really starting to get fed up then and began slamming the metal and rock into each other, not expecting any positive result from that, but more or less just trying to vent my frustration. It seemed as if the instant gratification of this game world had disappeared all of a sudden.
The fish continued to flop at my side, in no apparent hurry to die from its world-shattering change in environmental conditions. “Shut up.” It seemed to be laughing at me, but that was more likely due to my habit of personifying things. Spending the majority of my time sitting in a room in the dark by myself had a tendency to make me talk to anything and everything. I guess it helped me to keep from going crazy. Or perhaps it was a sign that I was beginning to go crazy. Either way, I did not blame the fish for being rude.
Trying a different approach, I took the flint and angled it before swiping it across the steel once more. Still, nothing happened, but it was never good to give up after a first try. At the same 45-degree angle, I brought it down a second time and almost jumped with joy after finally seeing a few sparks scatter in the air above my curled fist.
“Told you!” I was satisfied with simply pumping my fist a few times.
I tried it a bit more just to get the hang of the motion. That was definitely the trick: running the sharp edge of the flint against the steel. I supposed that maybe it was either breaking off metal flakes or specks of stone. The sparks flew bigger and brighter. It got to the point where I could pull it off without fail.
“Told you!” I shouted again, bringing the two objects together once more and adding a thoughtful “Fuck!” after I missed the next attempt and felt the sting of the stone slicing the middle knuckle of my left hand. I wasn’t certain who could hear, but it didn’t matter. I swore and cheered like I was online.
I flung the flint to the ground and pulled the ring from my hand, tossing it next to its partner in crime. I had really cut my knuckle. In a virtual world. Not only did it actually hurt, but it was fucking bleeding. In a virtual world. I was losing blood. In a virtual world.
The implications of this uncomfortable discovery invaded my mind. I felt pain. Could I die in here? Not even just from physical harm, but if I let my thirst or hunger go on for too long, would I die? It was a sobering thought. More reasonable to assume was that the program allowed me to feel pain in the same mysterious way that it allowed me to feel the ground beneath my feet or taste the water in my mouth. Perhaps it could allow me to feel all these sensations but had some sort of safety mechanism in place that prevented things from getting too serious. I wanted to believe that but was not willing to bet my life on it.
“All right, you fuckers.” I dismissed my worries for the time being and turned back to the task at hand, taking the flint and steel up firmly in each paw.
In one swift motion, I struck the bladed edge of the rock against the metal and allowed the sparks to eat into the pile of underbrush at my knees. Several bits ignited, and the embers slowly consumed leaf and twig, trailing along the length of whatever lay in its path. Remembering what I had seen in probably over a dozen movies throughout my life, I flattened my hands and began gently fanning the embryonic blaze. As the flames really began to come to life and lick the air above, I exhaled a slow, steady stream of breath, sharing with it my own life force to help it grow. When I was confident that it would last for a while without any more of my help, I sat back in the grass and studied my handiwork.
It was the first fire I had started without a lighter, and, even though I was trapped in the confines of a virtual world, bound to its laws and physics, it was a decently satisfying experience. Several minutes passed, and the fire appeared to stop consuming the tinder. For the longest time, it just danced there, seemingly content with its current size and situation. This was clearly not how a fire behaved in real life, I noted, and in a weird parallel way, this thought comforted me because here was an example of the limits that I was hoping that the program imposed on itself. Hopefully, if this game was programmed to stop a fire from burning under certain conditions, it would prevent its players from suffering too much if things went too far.
The fish was still flopping near my leg when I finally managed to resurface from my thoughts. It no longer looked like it was mocking me.
“Well, my friend, are you ready for the next stage of life?”
I grabbed it by the tail and paused, unsure of what to do next. There was a sudden feeling of empathy that came over me then. If I had to kill and eat it, that was fair, I thought. That’s just nature. But here I was about to burn the poor thing to death. I couldn’t think of many worse ways to go, especially for a fish. In my head, I knew it was nothing more than data—just bits of code programmed to behave a certain way and keep track of their state in the world. I knew that. But it looked and felt real to me, and the thought of burning it alive made me feel like kind of a psycho.
I pulled the thing away from the flame, where I had it hovering inches away from agony, and sat it in my lap. This was the first time I felt as if it were actually looking at me with those big fish eyes.
“Hey, man,” I whispered, “this really isn’t anything personal. I just”—I was interrupted by my stomach grumbling—“need to eat. You understand.”
I looked around and reached for the little round-ended knife I’d teleported in with. That would be more humane. I held the blade right up against the creature’s throat area and paused, watching the stream babble by to my left. My breath ceased until I saw fishes burst through to the surface. There were only two this time, not three like before. Logically, that made sense since I held the third in my hand, but that was not the way many games behaved. The fact that I plucked this creature from the environment made it seem all the more real, all the more alive.
I looked into its eyes as I gave in to the rumblings of my belly and quickly slid the blade across the wriggling thing’s underside. It spasmed for a few brief seconds and fell limp, not to move again. Its eyes still seemed to be looking at me though, and I was once again left wondering if there was anything behind them to begin with or if the innerworkings of this world were just made up of more advanced illusions compared to the game worlds I grew up in.
Then came three splashes, breaking the silent trance I had lost myself to. I looked back to the running
water, waited, and saw three fish burst through. They were just as they had been before I fished mine out. Now that it lay dead in my hand, it seemed as if it had respawned in the water. I gasped.
“It’s just a game,” I whispered. “It’s just a really convincing game.”
I fried the fish, and not a moment too soon. When I was ready to consider it fit for consumption, the fire began to shrink and then disappeared, leaving nothing but a momentary puff of smoke trailing behind. It all happened in the span of ten seconds.
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
The fish was succulent, and my whole mouth lit up before I even started to chew. It had been years since I had eaten plain fish, so I don’t know how it compared to the real thing, but I could have eaten that fish every day for the next 20 years and not grown tired of it. Perhaps it had a lot to do with the satisfaction of catching and preparing my own food, but that fish tasted damn good.
“Jesus, where have you been all my life, baby girl?” I licked its savory residue from my lips and was tempted to go after the scales I had shaved off of it. “I’m totally fine with this just being the entire game right here. Fish World. Taste Bud Heaven Orgasm Land. Grassy Meadow Where You Can Also Fish Simulator. Whatever the fuck—I just want these fish to be a thing for like . . . the rest of my life. And even if that meant I’d die tomorrow, I was fine with that because I’d already had this fish and there was nothing more fulfilling left for me to experience.”
I flopped down to the grass, still giddy over everything that was happening. I felt like a newborn, or like I’d just gotten really high for the first time. I ran my arms and legs across the ground as if I were making a snow angel, feeling each tiny blade tickle me as I passed it by. Then I saw something that I had not noticed earlier.
I spun around, still sitting in the grass, and watched a thin streak of smoke ascend to the sky from the other side of a hill.
“Is someone over there?” I whispered. As an avid gamer, I not only had a habit of speaking to inanimate objects, but I was also fond of both narrating my actions and voicing my internal monologue. Plus, it always served me well for the web film series I recorded.
I scrambled to my feet, swept up my things in both arms, and bolted for the source of the smoke before I even thought to put my rucksack on.
3
From the hill I could see a growing fire and a tall, slender figure stooped over it. Only when I hurried closer did I realize that it was a beautiful young woman tending the flames. It was not the long brown hair reaching down to her waist that gave her away but the gentle curving out of her hips that revealed to me her nature as she bent, her back to me, adding tinder to the fire.
My approach was hasty and clumsy. When I was within talking distance, I saw her start and reach for the knife at her hip as she stood and turned to me with a single swift motion. I skidded to a halt and regarded her silently as she took me in with her big almond-shaped eyes.
I felt like a foolish kid looking at this gorgeous creature. She was probably near my age, but her beauty made me feel as if she knew all the secrets of the world that I would never comprehend. This was not a girl, no. She was a woman. A proud, miles-out-of-my-league woman. There were many like her in Laguna Hills, California, but I would never consider myself worthy enough for such a lady to give me more than a passing glance. Internet fame only made one so appealing. Girls like her never seemed to care about my popularity, and the ones that appeared to always had an agenda of their own, trying to get more followers for their social media sites and their own web series’ by having little old me honor them with a shout-out or a guest appearance for one reason or another.
This woman could have taken my life right there while I stood like a statue, enchanted by her grace and poise. When my breath finally returned to me, I hurried to sheath both my blades and return my sack to its rightful position at my back, hoping that would help to make me seem at least a smidge less foolish in front of this angelic being. Her hand was still on the hilt of the dagger at her belt as I did this. I watched it cautiously, taking no more time than necessary to tuck my own weapons away.
Her clothing was of secondary importance to me, but I was finally able to notice it. Her outfit was like nothing I had ever seen in the real world, except for perhaps in passing at a gaming convention where people dressed like their favorite characters from different fandoms. She was wrapped in giant, deep green leaves, or at least a fabric made to look like giant leaves. They had been sewn in certain places—under her arms and near the waist—to fit her like typical clothing would. The leaves at her shoulders had been folded and hemmed so that the entirety of her slender bronze arms were on display. The top half was drawn together at the waist by the tattered dark brown leather belt which held her knife, a trowel, a few pouches, a leather satchel, and there were some corked glass jars dangling from it at the mercy of little threads. Some of these jars contained liquids of varying shades of amber, like sap or maple syrup, while others were empty. There was not much below the belt left to cover her long, fit legs, save for about a hand’s length worth of leaf tips fashioned into a shape resembling a short skirt. It was something I would expect a fairy to go prancing around in, but this proud woman was clearly no fairy. She looked as if she could kill me in a moment’s notice. More accurately, she looked as if she intended to do just that if I didn’t pipe up and give her a reason not to.
“Hey,” I forced myself to say, almost tripping over my tongue in the effort. I half-raised my right hand in a semi-wave gesture. “Are . . . uh, are you beta testing, too?”
Her brow wrinkled. She slowly removed her hand from the knife, apparently realizing that I meant no harm, and straightened her posture, looking less like she was about to end me but still hardly more approachable. She looked me up and down, confused.
“What do you mean, stranger?” Her voice was effeminate, yet powerful. She spoke with the regal authority one would expect of a queen.
Her question caught me by as much surprise as my question seemed to catch her. That response presented two possible realities to me: she was either an NPC, a non-player character whose behavior was determined by code, responding in very predictable ways to input from her environment as well as that of other players; or she was another beta tester like myself, only she was instructed to roleplay her character as if she actually were a living, breathing member of this virtual world. If the latter were the case, I expected that she might even be one of the developers working on the game.
It would make sense that such a person was assigned to guide me while I roamed about this fully-immersive experience, nudging me in the right direction so that I could be sure to explore all that the simulation had to offer. As I had already discovered, it was easy to get trapped in the web of minor details like the taste of the fish I had just eaten. Surely, the developers did not want me spending my entire time here eating dumb fish in an empty prairie while I could be conquering kingdoms and slaying dragons and ghouls and whatnot.
The more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed that this seductress was simply a fellow programmer sent here to guide me along my journey, the Virgil to my Dante. If that was indeed the case, she surely did not look like this in the real world. Certain types of gamers—and almost always male gamers—were fond of choosing sexy female avatars for whatever fucking reason. I always stuck to my assigned gender and had a hard time understanding why any guy would opt for some dainty little chick when he could be a big burly dude.
The few times I asked, the guys in question told me that they would rather be watching a hot piece of ass run around for hours on end than some guy’s hairy butt—like they were trying to make me sound gay for making my character male. I could kind of see where they were coming from, but I was the kind of person that liked to put himself in the game, so I always designed my character to look like a shredded version of me. It was just more personal and engaging that way.
“What do you mean?” she asked again. Her hand was back on the
knife.
I decided it would be best to play along. “Oh, nothing—I was merely confused, friend. My name is Si1ence.” I extended a hand to shake.
Slowly, she reached out and wrapped the fingers of her right hand around my right forearm, and I did the same in return. Her skin was smooth like velvet, but I knew such seemingly defenseless aesthetics meant nothing in the gaming world in terms of power. I hoped that, if there was another person behind this stunning mask, I would be forgiven for glancing at the allure of her cleavage, neatly wrapped and accentuated by the leaves forming her top. I wanted so badly to touch them then. Surely, it would not come with the consequences of doing such a thing in the real world, but the idea that I was being observed kept my hands at bay. Perhaps there would be time for that later.
“I am called Faun,” she said, ignoring my stares. “What are you doing here, Si1ence? I am not used to seeing wanderers dressed like you in these parts. Where do you hail from?”
“I . . . uh—was going to ask you the same question. What are you doing out here in the middle of nowhere? And by yourself, I might add.”
She grinned, flashing pearlescent teeth. “These lands are close to my home. This is not ‘the middle of nowhere’ as you said. It is along a road my people use to travel among the cities of this zone.”
She pointed to my right and I saw a well-worn dirt path running not too far from us. Further behind her—way off into the distance—I saw the trail shrink into nothingness and disappear, presumably reaching all the way to the hint of forest I could barely make out on the horizon. There was nothing but rolling hills and grassy fields between there and where we stood.
Circuit World Page 3