Glitch Boxset

by Victor Deckard

  “Yes, I remember that,” I said. “Then something happened in the clinic. I lay on the bed and patiently waited for the X-ray generator to kick in. Then there was a sudden burst of brilliant light and everything went dark. When I came to, I found myself in the game.”

  “Right,” she said. “After having his head X-rayed, Max Morgan left the clinic and headed home. He had no idea what had happened when the X-ray generator started working. Max Morgan saw a flash of bright light before his eyes and he seemed to lose consciousness for a second. However, the doctor who examined him didn’t say anything about the incident and Max Morgan soon totally forgot all about it.”

  Jessica made a pause and then continued, “So, in fact, the doctor was practicing as a doctor in the daytime. At night, he was a scientist. It was him who first invented the brain-scanning device. So when he brain scanned Max Morgan you were born with the memories that Max Morgan had up to that moment.”

  “The doctor brain scanned me without my permission?” I asked and instantly corrected myself. “I mean, without Max Morgan’s permission?”

  “Yes. He uploaded you into the memory of his computer and put you to sleep. But he woke you up and talked to you sometimes.”

  “Why don’t I remember any of this?”

  “Because he erased your memories of your conversations.”

  “Why would he do such a thing?”

  “Sorry I don’t know.”

  “Okay. Can you tell me how the heck I got farther into the future?”

  “A few years later several foreign scientists invented such a device as well. And after dozens of years more passed, brain scanning was as common as cell phones had been in 2018. But you––the brain scan of Max Morgan––was the first of its kind. You were something along the lines of an object of historical and scientific importance. After the doctor died, you were never woken up. You were stored on a computer in one scientific museum.”

  “What happened next?”

  “Then the aliens came and the war was waged, which was the most destructive in human history. Somehow you got through all the years of the war and then the Alien laid its paws on you. Yet the Alien took no interest in you so THEY just uploaded you into the hard drive of the space station and seemed to forget about you.”

  I pondered about what Jessica had just told me and then said, “So someone else must’ve woken me up and put me in the game then.”

  “You’re correct.”

  “Do you know who did it?”

  “Yes, I do,” she said simply. “It was me.”

  Chapter three

  “What for?” I wanted to know.

  “Like I told you, the Resistance wants to defeat the Alien and free the humans,” Jessica replied. “So we came up with a plan. We transferred you to the game and woke you up. As you played, we tried to find a way to get in touch with you. We couldn’t send you system messages for fear of being spotted by the other developers. Like I already said, the other developers are humans too, but they obey the Alien. They just don’t have any options other than to comply with the Alien’s orders. If they don’t obey, THEY’ll kill ‘em. So the Resistance then came up with the idea of adding a campaign––a series of main quests––to the game to communicate with you through the encrypted quest descriptions. This way, we figured that neither the developers nor THEY would be any wiser.”

  I thought about it for a few moments and then said, “Okay. You woke me up and put me in the game. I get it. But how come I feel pain in the game while all the other players don’t? Moreover, unlike the other players, I can interact with some game objects. Why is that? I always thought that I was some kind of a glitch.”

  A small smile touched Jessica’s lips.

  “You ain’t no glitch,” she said. “Since you were our secret weapon, our means of bringing down the Alien, we wanted to make your special so you had some advantage over the other players. Hence your ability to interact with some game objects. About your experiencing pain–– Well, it wasn’t done on purpose. Of course, we didn’t want to subject you to such experience. It happened accidentally. It was something like a side effect of your ability. Sorry about that.”

  “You mentioned something about my bringing down the Alien,” I observed. “What’d you mean?”

  “You’re gonna defeat the Alien,” The woman said deadpan.

  “You gotta be kidding me.”

  “No, I don’t,” she replied matter-of-factly. “I’m dead serious.”

  “How in the world can I defeat THEM?” I asked loudly. “The aliens overwhelmed the humans and conquered the Earth. I’m just one person. And I ain’t no soldier. What could I do?”

  Then I realized that I had said it too loud.

  “Wait a minute,” I said lowering my voice. “You said the Alien lives in this space station, right? That means that the Alien can come in this room? What if it barges in the room and sees us?”

  Jessica looked offended.

  “Do you really think I would invite you to this place without taking appropriate measures?” She asked pouting her lips. “This room’s totally safe at the moment. You can talk openly and as loudly as you want. The Alien won’t either hear us or come here.”

  Still unconvinced, I asked quietly, “Do you really think I can defeat the Alien on my own? It sounds crazy.”

  “We have a plan,” Jessica said. “First of all, you don’t have to fight the Alien alone. You can have your friends lend you a hand. Second, you won’t fight the military aliens who defeated the humans. Like I said, the Alien is a scientist with the genetic memory of the previous generations. So it’s only one creature and it’s far weaker than the military aliens were. Third, using alien technology, my friends and me invented some device. We can now teleport the Alien into the game and turn it into a Raid Boss so it acts like any other mob in the game. It’d definitely work in your favor since you should be a very good player and know the game mechanics like the back of your hand by this point. However, the effect will last for a limited period of time. So I’ll put the Alien into the game only after you have leveled up to the max level, found the best armor and weapon possible, and rounded up your friends.”

  I simply clammed up for a few moments. There was so much to take in. And I still couldn’t get over what Jessica had told me. I wasn’t Max Morgan. Instead, I was just his brain scan. I just had his memories and personality. But–– But––

  I lifted my hands and looked at them.

  “I’m not even a human,” I muttered to myself.

  Although I had said it quietly, Jessica heard me.

  “What are you talking about?” She said in a soothing voice. “You are a human. So what if you’re a copy of Max Morgan? You have your own consciousness, personality, emotions, dreams, and so on. That’s what makes a human human.” She paused for a moment and then continued with a smile on her lips. “By the way, look at me. I’m just an image on a screen. I don’t even have a body of my own. Not yet anyway. So you’re even more human than I am.”

  I pondered on what Jessica had just told me and then nodded. “Okay. So you want to defeat the Alien. Then what?”

  “Like I already said, once the Alien is dead, we can take control of the space station as well as all the alien technology like the Resurrection Pods. Then we can withdraw all the people from the Virtual Reality Capsule and give them new bodies by means of the Resurrection Pods so that they can start a new life.”

  “You mean, on the Earth?”

  “Right.”

  “But the Earth is devastated,” I stated. “You said it yourself.”

  “Not the whole Earth is in ruins. The game takes place among the destruction from the war, but there’re still enough green places to live on the planet.”

  I shifted my gaze from Jessica to the metal box called Virtual Reality Capsule.

  “But people who live in there don’t know anything about your plan, right?”

  “No, they don’t.
What’s your point?”

  “They don’t know about the war and live their perfectly nice lives,” I observed. “What if they don’t want to drop everything they are familiar with to start a new life in the post-war world? What if they preferred to live in the virtual reality instead? How can you decide what’s better for them?”

  “I see your point,” Jessica replied softly. “But if you think that life in the VRC is perfect, you’re totally wrong. That device has been malfunctioning for a while. Due to that, the people living in there eventually start to realize that the world they live in is false and they then start to seek the way out. But the Alien didn’t care about it much. So instead of repairing the VRC, THEY do something else. When a person finds out the truth, the Alien just kills that person. Do you want to know how many people the Alien killed in the past month? Over two hundred. So if you think that THEY care for us, you’re wrong. The Alien’s examining and experimenting on us. What do you think is going to happen when THEY get bored with this? They’ll just kill all the humans in cold blood and get out of here.”

  I contemplated what I had just heard from the woman. A couple of moments later, I opened my mouth to say something, but Jessica beat me to it.

  “Wait a sec,” she muttered, a troubled expression on her face. “What’s that?”

  “What do you mean?” I inquired. “What’s happening?”

  The woman was clearly perplexed.

  “Something’s wrong,” she stated and started to say something else, but then the screen suddenly went dark.

  Something was definitely odd.

  “Jessica?” I called out to her but got no reply. “Jessica! Are you there?”

  Out of the blue, her face appeared on the big screen once again. The woman’s visage was distorted in pure fear.

  “It found us,” she shouted. “I don’t know how but––”

  The screen went dead again, cutting the woman off in midsentence. I was afraid. Had to do something. I looked around the room. The door through which I had walked in a few minutes before was still shut and locked.

  “Max,” I heard Jessica scream and looked at the screen to see that the woman’s face had appeared on it again. “You’re in great danger! We’re all in danger! The Alien found us. Run! Run for your life!”

  The screen went dark for good this time. I dashed toward the door and slammed my fist against the control panel. Nothing happened. I was about to smack it again when the red letters reading CLOSED on the screen of the control panel were replaced by the word OPEN in green ones. The door slid into the wall with a quiet hiss. I darted out of the room into the corridor.

  When reached a four-way junction, I stopped. All the doors were shut. Where to go then? What to do? To retrace my steps? Would be that a smart move on my part?

  The door to my left hissed open. Figuring that it was Jessica who had unlocked the door for me, I dived into it.

  I ran through the corridors as some doors slid open to admit me. There was a thought at the back of my mind that it probably wasn’t Jessica who helped me this time. Not that I had much choice, though.

  Soon I ended up in the room with the UFO that had brought me to the space station. At least, it looked exactly like one. The door closed and locked with an electronic click behind me.

  I started striding toward the UFO. Then there was a quiet humming to my right. I jerked my head to look in that direction and saw a small spherical robot fly through the air toward me. It emitted a blue beam toward me. I dashed to the side, but I was too late. When the beam touched my body, I found myself unable to move.

  Dangit!

  “Well, well, well,” a raspy baleful voice came. “We can hardly believe that such a pathetic little guy like you was supposed to deal with us. Duh. The Resistance is way dumber than we deemed it to be.”

  I looked around the room, trying to place the voice. Yet there was no one in here save me.

  “Who are you?” I wanted to ask, but I couldn’t get even my mouth to move. Yet whoever was talking to me seemed to read my mind.

  “We’re those whom your friends from the Resistance call the Alien or THEY.”

  It finally occurred to me that the husky menacing voice was in my mind as if the Alien was communicating with me with telepathy.

  “The dumb Resistance thought that we didn’t know about it,” the Alien continued. “But we were aware of them all along. Although we affected ignorance, we always kept tabs on it, monitoring its actions. Now that we found out what the Resistance plans were, we can smash the Resistance once and for all.”

  The Alien made a pause as if waiting to see if I had to say something. I couldn’t say anything even if I wanted to.

  “By the way,” the Alien continued, “we’ve been aware of you since the game update. Do you recognize the robot in front of you?”

  I sure recognized the drone that pinned me down as one of those white spherical drones I had first met at the Arena. Later on, one of them scanned me when the game was updating. Then the same flying drones materialized out of nowhere and assaulted me after my using the glitchy pistol.

  Now I knew that the drones had been doing the Alien bidding.

  “Yes,” THEY said after reading my mind. “We first got aware of you after one of the drones scanned you during the game update. Then we directed them to find and kill you. Yet it wasn’t until you started to use the glitchy pistol that they finally were able to detect you. Unfortunately, you managed to destroy every drone I send after you. Not that it matters now that I’ve finally had you.”

  I couldn’t move or use my psi-powers. I racked my brain, trying to find a way to break free, but no bright thought occurred to me. I couldn’t do jack to prevent the Alien from whacking me. It was all over.

  THEY had read my mind.

  “Don’t you worry, stupid piece of shit,” the Alien said. “I won’t kill you right away.”

  I felt my left hand being lifted to eye level. Then the crystal shuddered in my flesh and popped out of my arm. The next moment the HUD disappeared. I no longer saw my Health bar, the experience bar, the log, and all the other elements of the user interface.

  Then the crystal exploded into nothingness right in front of my face.

  “We’re going to have you brought back to the Earth to continue to play to the game,” The Alien revealed and then uttered a sound roughly resembling a giggle. “How long do you think you can survive when unable to see your HUD and items’ stats?”

  Then I felt being stripped off of my clothes and armor. In less than a couple of seconds, all my armor and weapons were destroyed. I had only a pair of briefs on now.

  “You can forget about your friends from the Resistance,” the alien said to me. “We have them all killed by the time you get back to the game.”

  Still unable to move, I felt myself being moved in the UFO. Once I was inside, the door slid closed with a hiss. The drone stayed outside. Since its beam no longer touched me, I was finally able to move.

  “By the by,” the Alien said. “Now you’re not only unable to see your HUD and items’ stats but also if you get killed, you won’t get revived. So if you die, you’ll die for good.”

  Dangit.

  “Good luck, human,” the Alien giggled. “I don’t think you’ll stay alive for long.”

  I felt the floor vibrate under my feet as the UFO started moving. I was being transferred back to the Earth to play the game again. How long would I be able to survive?

  Not for long. That I knew for sure.

  Chapter four

  The UFO soon came to a stop and the door slid to the side. I pondered on not leaving the safe chamber to see what would happen. Sure enough, the UFO wasn’t going to take off with me on board. The transport patiently waited for me to get out. I knew that I couldn’t just hide out inside it. Sooner or later other players would notice the UFO. If an armed player entered the room, I would be as good as dead.

  So I had no choice but to
get out. After I disembarked from the spacecraft, the door got closed behind me and the UFO lurched up in the air and flew away, disappearing in the distance.

  I surveyed my immediate vicinity to find out that I was on the roof of a skyscraper. Upon walking over to its edge, I looked down at the huge city stretched in all directions below. It was the Dead City, the final location in the game, designed for the most experienced and high-level players.

  What the heck was I going to do? I couldn’t see my HUD and couldn’t check items’ stats out. How the heck was I supposed to play the game now? Guessed that was the point. The Alien couldn’t care less. It wanted to give me false hope. It sure enjoyed mentally torturing me.

  It started to drizzle. I felt cold. Dammit. Had to find some clothes. I turned and walked over to the rooftop exit door.

  I searched a few floors, finding them empty. On another floor, there was a cabinet centered against one wall. I walked up to it and opened the door. Inside lay a T-shirt. No information popped up in my HUD when I fixed my gaze on the item. Figured.

  The crunch of footsteps and the rustle of clothes came to my right. I whipped around to see a player enter the room.

  > Name: Kitson

  > Clan: The Titans

  > Level: 98

  He stopped dead as he saw me. Kitson clearly played as a Soldier. He was wearing heavy armor and held a heavy machine gun in his hands. His nickname was white-colored, which meant that he wasn’t a player killer, PK. It gave me hope.

  Suddenly, he brought up the machine gun, the stock snug against his right shoulder, pointing the weapon at my chest.

  Fear and panic rose in me. If the player killed me, I would never revive in a Resurrection Pod. My death would be permanent.

  “Wait,” I yelled. “Don’t shoot! Don’t kill me!”

  “Why shouldn’t I?” Kitson quizzed.

  “Look at me! I don’t have shit! By killing me you’ll achieve nothing!”