by Yuli Ban
Copyright © 2018, Yuli Ban
The right of Yuli Ban to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by his under the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
This work is copyright. Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part maybe reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Because I am a grahzny bratchny, I triple-spaced this entire story and it’s probably something like 45 pages in all actuality. Don’t trust me ever again, for I am a stupid greedy Homo sapiens sapiens who only wants your money and quite possibly your children’s money. If they have children, I’ll be taking their money. In fact, your parents owe me money. As do their parents, and so on until I am satisfied which is never going to happen so you might as well sign off your entire bloodline to me. And there isn’t a goddamn ounce of creativity in this story. It features a dreadfully generic video game world with unformatted stats and copious amounts of young adult angst.
I wrote this story in about one week while listening to terrible nü metal rather than any actual biker rock or stoner metal. In preparation, I watched a few classic biker B-movies like ‘___’ and ‘___’. I’ve never had sex and have no intention to do so until they invent fully autonomous sexbots because I am a misogynist in denial whose search history is filled with incels, redpillers, and communists.
I am a hack fraud and without therapy, my behaviors will only deteriorate in the future. As I will not stop writing stories, may God have mercy on all our souls. And that means you. No, not you, I mean the pretty one.
Contents…
Load Game…
Badmotorfister…
The Omega Male and the Tsundere…
Faster, Pussycats…
Get Your Kill On…
BALLS TO THE WALL…
I, Godfucker…
Commercial Break…
(Re)Load…
Doomsday Dealers…
My Only Friend, The End…
Load Game…
The truth revealed itself to me like a red crack exploding through my brain. RPG statistics floating in the air, glimpsed out of the corner of my eye, hanging off of a cold screen with no interactivity. The repetitious act of grinding, farming for gold, looking for loot, following an epic story that existed only for one person. My own face controlling a body that looked exactly like mine with sexier details to satisfy someone else’s fantasies. Words written by someone else falling from my mouth. Gorgeous women without conscious minds of their own following a script whose words only appeared as I looked at the page, a script that imprisoned them to follow me without reason. A tragic backstory I wouldn’t explain until convenient for the plot. I was in a LitRPG harem novella. Funny as Hell, it was the most horrible thing I could think of.
And yet the moment I embraced awareness of my fate, it slipped away from me and I awoke on a sandy road— an amnesiac.
I freaked out. This wasn't prison. This wasn't my house. This wasn't even the same state. No, I woke up in the desert. It had to be one— there were the dunes, cacti straight out of the old Hanna Barbera cartoons, and the salon buildings in a town just a few hundred feet away. I wiped away stinging grains from my forehead and pushed myself to my feet. Up above, the sky looked like the one I knew and yet I felt the uncanniest sense that something about it was wrong. You ever look at something and think it’s out of place but you can’t figure out why? Yeah, the sudden change of scenery messed me up. I felt like one of those chimpanzees that scientists stuck virtual reality headsets onto, the ones who didn’t expect to shift from a sterile white laboratory to one of Saturn’s moons because the asshole labcoats rushed to steal their reality before they could prepare.
So why wasn’t I freaking out more than those weak little staggers? Well, before I passed out, I saw my best friend die. Took a bullet to the chest and fell out sprawled on the floor, complete with that freaky twitching and eyes rolling to the back of his head. And as the pod closed, I saw my sister too. That was in a dilapidated slum.
So how the hell did I get here?
It took me several minutes and I spent a few of those in a motionless daze just trying to register what happened. I kept rubbing my eye to catch tears that weren't there. Goddammit, my best friend got killed! My sister was going to be brutalized. If I wasn't lost in the middle of nowhere, I would have broken down. I guess things were just so crazy, so unexplainable, that not even those things really fazed me and I was moving entirely on autopilot.
I stumbled to my feet and made my way to the town, whose name on the sign read as "VICTORY". How ironic, because I felt defeated. As I walked towards it, the gravity of the whole situation hit me and I broke down on the side of the road. Just to not waste time about how much of a mess I was, I'll skip about thirty minutes to when I collected myself, slapped myself in the face, and moved past the sign.
I jumped when this word loaded up on the bottom right of my vision:
Oh god. Whoever chose that font should have been flogged. What even was that, a bunch of spaghetti slapped together? If I stared too long, would it become 3D and suck itself into my brain? But then I realized that it shouldn’t have been in my eyes to begin with. I reached out to touch it, but my hand disappeared behind the letters. When I touched my face and rubbed my sore eye, I realized then that the word was literally in my eyes.
That's when it finally hit me what had happened. I was in a video game. My sister's technology really worked. Against all odds, against all technological limits of the day, she actually managed to do it.
That had to have been what happened, I kept telling myself. That's why she wanted me to hide in the pod. She was sending me into virtual reality where I wouldn't be found by the government. Except that didn’t make any sense to me— if I were in a video game, then my body still lay somewhere in reality. At some point, they’d check for unexplained power losses and find me. There was no escape. But then I started thinking about the many inefficiencies that the regime suffered from and how they were apparently nowhere near as all-powerful as they liked to promote. Though I was defenseless on the outside, my body needed very few provisions.
Her pod had been placed on a pneumatic shipment right before the government arrived, and there was no doubt they didn't know anything had been sent. They’d rack their brains trying to figure out how I disappeared before eventually marking me as little more than an unknown mystery, someone no one other than faceless bureaucrats would ever know existed.
I beat a tree's trunk and rested my forehead against it, angry that she couldn't be there with me. We were together through so much.
Her and my friend, we were three amigos... And now all that was gone forever.
Understandably, I was pissed and wanted to break everything I saw. I didn't even want to believe that I was in the game for a while, but once I forced myself to accept it, I wanted to test out its physics for destruction. See how well built it was. I kept passing back and forth between acceptance and denial. Guess the stress pushed me a little too far past my breaking point and I tried too hard to skip the five stages too quickly. When you’re not feeling rational, you start thinking you can pull the moon out of the sky and punch hard enough to create canyons. Now imagine that grief stacked on top of finding yourself trapped in a video game. Nope. There it went again— couldn’t accept it anymore and my mind rolled with the ‘kidnapped and sent to the Sierra Nevada’ possibility. Real strange how that happens. Why
was it happening? Because for some scrub who thought he knew better, you couldn’t actually live inside a video game. Full-immersion virtual reality doesn’t exist. If this was a simulation, who’s to say that reality wasn’t also a simulation? I hoped that was true because then that meant the government could be turned off with a press of some computer god’s button. Sure, I wouldn’t exist anymore, but neither would they. And there went my grip on things again. Never question too many things at once when you’re overcome with grief, because then anything goes and start sticking with whichever explanation gives you the most comfort.
A car passed me by. A banger, some '70s Impala or something— I wasn't the best with cars, but I know the basics of the culture. Just looking at the piece of junk told me that it was either out of place or I was outside of a real seedy town. When I jogged over to check for anything I could recognize and use to place my current whereabouts, I quickly understood that it had to be the latter— there were so many shingled roofs, rusty fences, and half-assed neon-lit signs that I wouldn't have believed it if it were in the cheapest '60s biker movie. And to complete the sleazy look of the place, there was a platoon of men with scraggly hair and denim jackets standing outside the one building in town that had more than just the basics. A neon-pink pinup girl flashed her legs, the lights poorly simulating animation, while ‘XXX’ ran down a vertical sign that hanged over the entrance. All of the leather-boys kept to themselves and didn’t so much as give me a glance, which was fine by me since I didn’t like the rows of motorcycles lined up behind them.
‘Could it be…? Nah.’
An honest-to-god not-making-this-up tumbleweed rolled over the road. I stopped it with a kick and smushed it with a stomp. My foot broke through the surface and several individual dried stalks of grass flew off and away with the wind. I had to shake my leg and drag my heel to get the thing unstuck.
“It’s barely holding together,” I thought out loud. Now, a tumbleweed not immediately breaking apart seems like a bizarre baseline to use to figure out if things are real, but I recalled that many video games had not meaningfully progressed physically. Oh sure, the graphics got lifelike— Grand Theft Auto VII was the shit before the government banned the entire series— but those little things still escaped the developers. You know, the physics. Leaves that clipped through small objects. Water that didn’t properly react to every little nook and cranny in the world. Rain leaving puddles, but when you used a trainer to keep the rain going indefinitely, it never flooded. Things like that took us out of the simulations and games. Something as pointless as a tumbleweed should have either clipped through my leg, suffered from a badly rendered squash effect, or shattered at the slightest touch.
I felt satisfied in knowing that I definitely wasn’t in a video game, but oh there it went again and my brain wished that the simulation would turn off. Not even because of grief. The ugly-ass aesthetics, the old banger Impala, the gaggle of longhairs crowding around a cheap brothel, and polished motorcycles outnumbering the local wildlife and plant life combined brought back images of a nasty old game I played a few times just for laughs, a game with the same dirty aesthetics and late '60s tint to the world.
My face fell into a frown when I saw even more legions of parked bikes. ‘Is this town one giant whorehouse for bikes?’ I said, "Oh please don't tell me they made an MMO outta this shit." If true, Hell awaited, and I was about to ride to it for retribution of my past sins.
Not that I thought it was possible for more than a few minutes at a time, but I wondered about how which game my sister had sent me into. Figuring it out was going to be a chore. And when I thought of what I had to do to find out where to go, a menu flashed in front of my face. I fell back on my ass— also had to check my ass later to make sure I didn't really mess myself up, because that menu came out of nowhere.
Like with the town name, it existed in an ether just before everything and followed my eyes.
The layout was simple enough:
Then I unleashed a string of curses. Actually, it was more like a tapeworm of vulgarity because it never stopped coming out and I felt disgusted by having it all in me. And when I thought I’d gotten it all out, I found a few more swear words spat them out too. Once I finished my tirade, it started up again as I spewed cusses that never existed before. Thankfully, the bikers had gone into the brothel so I didn’t risk summoning one of them over for a brawl by accident.
Think I was done? Even when I thought I was done swearing, I swore and swore and swore some more until my echo had started swearing too.
I got on my knees and screamed, “Why?” Why was the option to leave the game grayed out? What sadist thought he’d get a few laughs from watching me break down? Whoever he was, he got his money’s worth because the cussing couldn’t and wouldn’t stop for half an hour. By the end of it, my lips were sore.
Right when I needed emotional solvency, I started to doubt I was in a game again and laughed as I went, "Oh ho, wait a second. This is just a freak lucid dream, isn't it?" When I told that to myself, I became sure that I had solved the problem. Then I tried to lift off the ground to go flying to test out my dream powers, but all I did was put tension in my shins and do a tiny hop. Even when I tried willing 'fly' into reality, nothing happened. I looked back to the tree I punched and tried to turn it into a giant bacon double cheeseburger. Nothing happened. I turned to a car and thought 'Explode' at it. Didn't explode. The sky didn’t turn to black and the dreary locale didn’t shift to a Neo-Tokyo harem café. The more I tried imagining various power fantasies, the more I wanted them to happen and the more I began to panic as they didn’t. My heart started to beat at my ribs, which shouldn't happen in a dream unless it's a nightmare. But if I were lucid, this shouldn't have been a nightmare at all. I didn't want it to be a nightmare.
Another car passed, and I tried waving it down stupidly before letting it go— what, was the driver going to look at me in the rearview mirror and back up? How lucky I’d have been.
My only option left was to walk into town, which was easy enough to do since I was already a few hops away from its main street. However, though I felt I could have climbed the tree I banged my head against and saw the other side of town, I was still around some sorry excuse for farmland. Several cerulean-colored greenhouses extend a ways down tilled earth, all of them appearing larger than any other structure nearby.
That was one thing I never got about video games, especially modern ones— with the sheer size and complexity you can have, why were video game towns still so abridged? Real towns would extend some distance out, even these biker stop parodies. I thought about that as I walked. That and my sister. Her and my friend. Whenever I came back to them, I felt my eyes get heavy. Goddamn me, it was not easy to even exist at that moment in time. No wonder I couldn’t stop bitching at the universe.
Victory’s a town of silver sheet metal, or at least of sheet metal that would have been silver and red and gold and so many other colors if the pollution and elements had allowed it. Hard times hit like a stripper’s bill: all those sad half-story shops, mechanics whose only jobs were to take apart and rebuild the same old cars, and dirt roads that only led back to the jagged expanses beyond the place’s slim borders. I tried to find one shutterless window. A small serpent of sand trailed me and I could see my faceprint from where I had awoken.
The thing I still could not figure out, of course, was which video game I now called home. There was that one, but I refused to entertain the possibility that humans could have ever fallen so far as to make the attempt. Victory looked like every other satire of dying southwest towns. For all I knew, this was a simulation of a town created entirely for my own entertainment.
That was my new delusion. If I wasn’t psychotic and this wasn’t a lucid dream, then surely I was now living inside my dream video game. As to why there were no catgirls or modern luxuries, I chalked up to the drab starter location.
‘Maybe this is like one of those MMOs,’ I reasoned. Then I remembered about t
he existence of literary RPG novels, or LitRPG as the genre was known. If this was an MMO and I somehow survived, I could get rich turning my story into an autobiographical litRPG. It was at that moment that I silently hoped that I would find a harem, because those made many-a men wealthy. A pipe dream, yes, but it was a good coping mechanism. If only I could have riches, I’d find a way to escape America and live a little more for my friend and my sister.
‘Ah, that was a stupid thought,’ I went as I realized I truly was losing my mind. That I was in a video game at all still didn’t ring entirely true to me, and already I created bizarre fantasies. The first thing I’d need in my new game was a drink. Liquor. Liquor harder than diamonds. I wanted to become the Trashman, so screwed up from pure ethyl that I replaced my blood and brain fluids with alcohol. ‘Please, game universe, at least give me that.’
There was a bar named "The Rusty Cage" and the words were painted onto the overhang of a prefab warehouse. No broken windows. Even the shingles looked pretty clean, and there weren’t many bikes outside of it. In fact, there weren’t any directly outside of the bar— it looked as if they merely used the lot for extra parking for the whorehouse. I went in. My mind fell at ease when I saw wide-screen TVs and smartphones because that meant I wasn't in that awful post-Vietnam hellhole of a video game but instead something much different and more promising.
Actually, I think it was at that point that I first stopped and really took in the fact everything looked so incredibly real. I could mention how I saw the little grooves in the dark brown floorboards or could feel the sleaze in the air like a soup of tobacco and cannabis, but that wasn't it at all. The reality came through so well because of how smooth everything felt. Video games, movies, TV shows— I was used to seeing them on screens in relatively medium definition. I know a lot of people have 4K TVs, but I grew up with a good old fashioned 1080p TV and when I was a toddler, I apparently had a really direly-bad "480p" TV that I'd play PS3 on with my sister.