Glitch Boxset

by Victor Deckard

  The night air was filling with shrill screams of mutants spawning all around me, but I totally ignored them. Those materializing in front of my fast car I just ran over, not bothering to drive around them.

  In the distance, I saw the UFO came to a hover. Then a purple beam appeared below the UFO. Although the beam had just shot up in the sky, the UFO was still hovering above it. I knew I had only about half a minute to reach the beam before the UFO flew away.

  Since I raced across the desert at the maximum speed possible, I couldn’t accelerate any further. By my calculations, if I drove without incident, I should reach the beam just in time.

  Finally, I reached the base of the purple beam. I slammed on the brakes, bringing the car to an abrupt stop a few feet from the beam. Throwing the door open, I leaped out not bothering to close the door behind me. I ran toward the beam as fast as I could manage. The purple glow filled my field of vision as I got closer to the beam. My stamina was draining fast. The UFO was still above hovering. It could fly away any minute now.

  Finally, I got within the beam and skidded to a stop. Nothing happened at first. I tilted my head back to look at the UFO to see it still hovered above the beam. I must have gotten inside it in time, I thought, so why nothing’s happened?

  And then I suddenly felt my body being beamed up. Some invisible force lifted me off the ground and pulled me up the purple beam and very fast at that. I looked up once more. A section at the bottom of the UFO quietly slid aside and I was pulled through the opening.

  Once inside the UFO, I was brought to a hover. The hatch slid closed. Then the force that held me in the air ceased and I dropped a few feet down to the floor, banging my head on the hard surface.

  “Dangit,” I muttered to myself. “You shouldn’t treat your passengers this way.”

  No one answered me, of course. There was nobody in the chamber save me.

  I looked around as I got up. The chamber I found myself in was small and empty. The door at the far end of the room was closed and wouldn’t open.

  Through the soles of my boots, I felt the floor start vibrating. The UFO definitely had just begun moving.

  I stood still in the middle of the room, wondering where the UFO was taking me.

  Chapter two

  It wasn’t long before the UFO reached its destination. The vibration ceased and the door I had noticed a few minutes earlier slid open. I had no idea what to expect, but I was ready for anything. My hand on the butt of my pistol protruding from its holster, I walked over to the door and stepped out.

  I found myself in a chamber. It was so small it could barely accommodate the UFO. In the center of one wall was the only door. It was closed. After I discovered nothing of interest, I crossed the room to the door, which slid open into a short corridor with very white walls. As I walked down the corridor, I thought that although the game was set in the post-apocalyptic world, there was nothing post-apocalyptic about this place. It was very clean and neat. It looked quite like a setting for a Sci-Fi flick.

  I reached another door. On the screen of the control panel were large, bold red letters that read CLOSED. I tapped the touch-sensitive screen but nothing happened. I waited a second and when I was about to turn around, the door hissed in the wall as the word on the screen changed to read OPEN in green letters.

  I found myself in another hallway identical to the previous one. I followed it and soon reached a four-way junction. I stopped wondering which way to go. However, I didn’t have much choice. The door to my left as well as the door in front of me were closed. The door to my right hissed open, inviting me to enter another corridor. Which I did. At the next junction, the door to my left hissed open while the three other doors stayed closed. It was obvious that someone was leading me somewhere. Probably into a trap. But I had no choice but to obey.

  Eventually, I ended up in a room. Once I entered the room, the door behind me hissed closed with a distinctive click of the electronic lock mechanism. The red letters reading CLOSED appeared on the screen of the control panel. I walked back to the door and tried to open it. Of course, it wouldn’t open. Someone wanted me to be in this room for some reason. Guess it was time to finally find out was what going on.

  I turned around and walked deeper into the chamber. I stopped in the center of the room and looked around the place.

  Along the wall to my right was a bank of futuristic workstations. In the center of the wall was a huge screen that hovered above the others. The only thing on it was two words: STAND BY.

  But I didn’t walk to the computer screens. Instead, I turned toward the wall opposite from the one with the screens. There was a huge rectangular window set into the wall. I crossed the floor to it and stared out. The window was facing a mammoth blue globe hovering in the vast blackness. It was the Earth. Which meant that the UFO had brought me to the X-shaped space station.

  It was odd. I knew for sure that no player could enter the space station. It was outside the playable zone. Yet I was here. And I still was in the game. I know that for sure because the HUD––the experience bar, HP, and other elements of the user interface––was still before my eyes.

  Then it occurred to me that the developers had probably been working to add the space station to the playable zone for a while. Perhaps after the game updated next time, players would be able to visit this place.

  But why had I been brought to this place? For what purpose? I had no answer to the question. The space station seemed to be uninhabited to me. There were no monsters to fight or NPC’s to interact with.

  However, this place couldn’t be completely desolate because someone had opened the doors for me to go through and led me into this room for some reason.

  I turned around to face the bank of the workstations in time to see the mammoth screen blink. The words STAND BY disappeared to be replaced by an attractive middle-aged woman. Her shoulder-length raven hair was tied into a ponytail and she was wearing a blue sleeveless blouse and jeans.

  When our eyes met, a friendly smile touched her lips.

  “It’s so nice to finally meet you and talk to you face to face,” she declared.

  “Don’t think we’re acquainted,” I observed. “Would you mind telling me who you are?”

  “My name is Jessica Brown,” she replied. “I’m a programmer. I’m one of the developers who are working on the game. I have a few close friends, who are also programmers. My friends and I like to call ourselves the Resistance. I’m the leader of our small group.”

  “The Resistance, huh?” I cut in.

  “Our goal is to defeat the developers and THEM in order to free all the humans,” she finished and went silent, awaiting my reaction to her words.

  All I could say was, “Eh, what?”

  “I know it’s so much to take in. My friends suggested I go easy telling you about all this. Probably I shoulda paid heed to their advice.”

  I couldn’t take it anymore.

  “What the heck are you talking about?” I snapped. “The Resistance? Fighting the developers? And who the feck are THEY you keep mentioning?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. The woman looked sorrowful indeed. I even felt bad for her. “Guess I should start from the very beginning if you like.”

  “It’d be great if you could do this,” I replied.

  And she told me everything.

  There had been a devastating war between humans and bloodthirsty aliens in the real world in 2118. The aliens came from outer space and attacked the Earth for no reason at all. They killed most humans and left our blue planet in ruins. Only a handful of people survived.

  Then the aliens flew away. But not all of some. A small group of scientists preferred to stay to experiment upon the humans who had survived the war.

  Now I knew that when Jessica was talking about THEM, she was referring to the alien scientists living in the X-shaped space station. Jessica also told me that although the alien scientists referred to themselves in plural
form, it was actually a single organism. This creature bore the genetic memory of all the other scientists who lived before it, which allowed the creature to have the vast collective knowledge of the previous generations. Jessica and her friends had this creature pegged as THEY or simply the Alien.

  So the alien scientists had been experimenting upon the survived humans. They created a so-called Virtual Reality Capsule, or VRC for short. The VRC was a sophisticated computer system maintaining a huge virtual world populated by the survived humans. Before the humans were inserted into the VRC, the Alien erased the humans’ memories of the war. The Alien then had them brain scanned, meaning the creature copied humans’ consciousness and personalities into a data format. After this was done, the Alien eliminated all the people having the physical bodies.

  Jessica, her friends, and all the other developers of the game were brain scans as well, but unlike all the other humans, they didn’t live in the virtual world inside the VRC. Instead, they existed in the computer system of the space station because the game was controlled from this place. However, the Alien had closely been watching the developers all the time in order to make sure that they behaved obediently. So the developers couldn’t do anything to free people living in the virtual reality inside Virtual Reality Capsule or even get in touch with them to tell them the truth about what was actually happening.

  Jessica and her friends, however, formed the Resistance, which goal was to defeat the Alien and free all the humans. They hadn’t achieved any success, though. They had to exercise extreme discretion so that not to pop up on the Alien’s radar. If THEY would learn about the Resistance, THEY would erase Jessica and her friends’ brain scans from the hard drives of the space station. In other words, THEY would kill them.

  So now the human species lived in the VRC as virtual representations. There were about 5 thousand people in there. They had knowledge neither about the war that had devastated the Earth nor about themselves being not real human beings but their brain scans living in the virtual reality.

  Then Jessica fell silent. I heard a hiss and saw a section of the wall in front of me slid open. A long platform slid out of the opening. It contained a metal box the size of a computer tower.

  “This is the Virtual Reality Capsule,” Jessica explained.

  I walked over to the platform to get a closer look at the VRC. It didn’t look like much. Just a metal box and nothing more.

  “So a few thousand people live inside this thing?” I asked skeptically.

  “Yes, you’re correct,” Jessica nodded.

  I fell silent for several minutes, staring at the VRC and reflecting on what the woman had just told me. I could hardly believe this story. Yet at the back of my mind was a thought that it was the truth. Jessica hadn’t made the whole thing up. She was dead serious and didn’t play tricks on me. Just one look at the grave and sincere expression on her face could tell you that.

  “But what about me?” I wanted to know. “And about the game––” Then it suddenly dawned on me. “Wait a minute,” I turned to face the big window to look at the enormous blue globe of the Earth. “If people live in the virtual reality inside this box––the VRC or whatever––wrongly taking it for the real world, then the game must be––”

  My voice trailed off as the full realization of what was happening sank in.

  “Yes, you guessed right,” Jessica answered. “The game ain’t taking place in the virtual world. Instead, the players play the game in the real, actual world. On the Earth.”

  “But how can this be possible?” I asked perplexed. “I mean I can see the HUD, the stats of various weapons, nicknames and levels of other players. It’s so much like a video game.”

  “I can explain it to you.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Look at your biochip.”

  I lifted my left hand. An emerald-shaped translucent thing giving off faint bluish glow sat just beneath my wrist on the opposite side of my hand.

  “You mean this thing, the crystal?” I asked.

  “Yes,” the woman answered. “What do you think it is?”

  I looked at the crystal and the Main Menu appeared before my eyes. The Quit button was still inactive.

  “I have no idea,” I replied. “What is it?”

  “It’s alien technology,” she replied. “The HUD, items’ stats, system messages, and all the other stuff that pop up before your eyes are created by this thing, the biochip. If you were to remove it, you wouldn’t be able to see the user interface. By allowing you to see the UI, the biochip makes you think that you’re inside a virtual reality. But in fact, you’re not.”

  I nodded reflecting on what I had just heard.

  “Moreover,” Jessica continued, “about the Resurrection Pods. What do you think about those things?”

  When a player got killed, he or she revived in the Resurrection Pod nearest to the place of their death. I remembered what my friend Flynn had once said to me. He wondered about the reason for the developers’ decision to make a player revive in one of the Resurrection Pods upon his or her death. Flynn told me that in his opinion, to make players revive in one of the pods instead of in some random place of the current location was pretty stupid. I came to agree with him. The two pissed-off player killers––Frozen and Croc––had once stiffed me and then reached the nearest pod where I revived, waiting for me to get out so that they could kill me again. And I couldn’t do jack do prevent them from doing so.

  Suddenly I realized why players revived in the pods upon their deaths.

  “It’s alien technology as well, right?” I asked.

  “Yep. Those things the players revive in called the Resurrection Pods in the game, but in reality, they have another name. Still, let’s continue to call them the Resurrection Pods for the sake of convenience. All the game data is stored on the computer systems of this space station. So when a player gets killed, his or her body almost instantly gets grown inside a Resurrection Pod as the player’s game data gets copied to him or her.”

  “Those pods create human beings in the blink of an eye, huh?” I said skeptically. “It sounds like magic to me.”

  “Not just human beings. Your body is way more sophisticated than that of a human being. That alien technology is so advanced that it does sound like magic to us, humans. Sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. He was totally right.”

  I gave the woman a nod, contemplating on the matter.

  “By the way, all the monsters players kill are also created by the Alien,” Jessica added. “In fact, those monsters have gazillions of nanomachines cursing through their veins. When you deal damage to such a creature, it takes damage according to the Damage attribute of the weapon you use. Those nanomachines can do amazing things. They keep the creature alive, promoting rapid tissue growth, restarting organ functions, and so on. So the nanomachines don’t let the creature die too early. But when you deal damage to the creature, its Health attribute gets reduced and when it reaches zero the nanomachines disable the creature’s vital functions, causing the creature to die. Then the nanomachines explode, completely destroying the body of the dead creature with no evidence left behind.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “Why would the Alien do this? What does it need this game for?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody knows. But my guess is that THEY examine, study us. The game is some kind of experiment.”

  “So people live in there,” I pointed at the metal box called the Virtual Reality Capsule, “thinking that it’s the real world and they play the game, taking it for a mere virtual reality, right? But in fact, it’s the other way around. They live in the virtual reality and play the game that takes place in the real world, which is our planet devastated by the pissed-off aliens. And people didn’t have the slightest idea about all this.”

  “You’re correct,” Jessica answered.

  “Dang, that’s s
o messed up.”

  We fell silent for a few moments. Jessica was first to break the silence.

  “But I know something for sure,” she said, “The biochips, the Resurrection Pods, the nanomachines, and all the other stuff in the game are controlled from here, from the space station. Just imagine, what we could do if we had control over the space station. We could free all the humans and give then new bodies to start a new life on the Earth. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? This is our goal. This is why we created the Resistance. To free the humans and give them a new life by using alien technology. But we need to defeat THEM first.”

  “Wait a minute. I got another question.”

  “Shoot.”

  “How did I get into the future? I lived in 2018 and then suddenly found myself in the game. Who did it to me? Who’s responsible? And how do I get back? My life wasn’t perfect, but I kinda liked it, y’know.”

  The woman refused to talk for a few moments. Then she finally said, “It’s the most complicated part. Hope you’ll understand and won’t freak out.”

  Judging from the grave tone in her voice, I wasn’t going to like what Jessica was about to say. I prepared myself for the worse.

  “You never was transferred into the future,” she said. “In fact, you never lived in 2018. You just retain memories of the life of the guy named Max Morgan who lived in 2018.”

  It finally dawned on me.

  “How do you mean?” I asked in a hoarse whisper. “Am I a brain scan too? Is that what you’re trying to say?”

  “Yes,” she answered quietly.

  “But how can this be possible? I don’t get it.”

  “Let me explain this to you. Way back when Max Morgan suffered from excruciating headaches so he decided to have his head X-rayed for any brain injuries.”