“That explains the bugs,” he said and rolled his eyes.
That hurt more than it should have. Maybe he should take some ibuprofen.
Eh, in a minute. He pressed the SKIP button at the bottom.
Your story begins as a humble—
“Skip.” Justin groaned. “Jesus. Enough with the freaking narrative. Gimme some gameplay.”
The game obliged. The screen went black and when a new visual appeared, he stood in a field of tall grass. Birds called somewhere, he could see mountains in the distance, and there was a stand of trees over to his right. He looked around and raised his hands—one of which, he now saw, held the most battered, rusty sword he had ever seen in his life.
“Oh, come on,” he griped. “Really? Where the hell did I get this thing?”
“Fatigue penalty,” the AI announced. A red minus 1 floated through his field of vision.
“Fatigue penalty?” Justin asked, annoyed. “Are you kidding me with this? For this freaking sword?” He punctuated the words with several shakes of the disappointing weapon.
His reward was a flurry of minus ones.
He sighed.
“You’ll notice you’re not very good at this yet,” the AI said, and he could swear it sounded smug. “Do be careful to not put your eye out with that, adventurer. And would you like me to direct you to the nearest doctor for a tetanus shot?”
“No. Thank you.” He rolled his eyes. A snarky AI. He might like that a little more if his head didn’t hurt so much.
Amber hunched over the screen, watching with Nick and Jacob, when DuBois entered with his party-size bag of popcorn. He popped a piece of caramel corn in his mouth and chewed before he licked his fingers.
“How is it going?” he asked.
“Not great,” she said. “He skipped all the narrative. This does not bode well.”
“Everyone skips that stuff,” Nick objected.
“He’s not exactly in any condition to skip it,” she pointed out.
DuBois had frowned at the monitors and he now went to the table behind the pod. He readied a syringe, approached the IV drip, and seemed surprised when he noticed everyone in the room watching him.
“He’s ‘awake’ now,” the doctor explained and made finger quotes. “So he’s aware that he’s in pain.”
Mary Williams made a strangled noise.
“This will help,” the doctor told her confidently. “It’s not narcotics or opioids, merely good, old-fashioned naproxen.” He returned, stripped off the latex gloves, and picked up his bag of popcorn. “Now, let’s see what you do next, kiddo.”
“Would you like a tutorial?” the AI asked. Justin might be imagining it but it sounded like it was enjoying itself.
“No,” he told it. “I’ve played enough games, thank you.”
“Are you sure?” it pressed. “You haven’t done so well thus far.”
“Are you finished?”
“Maybe.” The sense of amusement rippled in its voice.
“Tutorials are for noobs,” he insisted. “Plus, good game design should be intuitive. Aren’t I supposed to review the game design here?”
The AI might as well have shrugged. “It’s your funeral,” the voice said and disappeared.
On-screen, words appeared in shimmering bronze. Quest 1: Scavenge Food.
Justin looked around. There was grass, of course, but nothing that looked particularly edible. He didn’t see any bushes or anything that glittered with the usual quest-item sparkles, so he set off toward the trees. As he walked, he could hear the faint sound of a stream somewhere reasonably close.
He hadn’t gone far when the grass rustled nearby. Although he scanned the area cautiously, he didn’t see anything noteworthy and so kept walking. After another few steps, a rabbit darted across his path.
Rabbits. Apparently, the food was rabbits. Hopefully, this complete disappointment of a sword had some kind of edge to it. He crept forward as carefully as he could and, at the water’s edge, saw his quarry drinking from the stream. Carefully, Justin raised the sword and brought it down.
The animal disappeared and was replaced by two vaguely realistic drumstick icons, which floated into the middle of the screen, flashed, and vanished. On the left side of the screen, a bag icon flashed as well.
“Tutorials,” he muttered. “Who needs ʼem?”
SCAVENGE FOOD: 2/5, the screen read.
“Congratulations,” the AI announced, “you have achieved Bunny-Slayer, Level One.” The words also appeared on the screen in gold.
Justin had played games like this before. Whatever you did, you got better at it. If you fought with daggers, you leveled up daggers. If you chose persuasive dialogue options, you learned to convince people of your point of view.
Apparently, by the end of this, he would be a bunny slayer extraordinaire. He went in search of more rabbits and muttered, “Be vewwy, vewwy quiet…”
The next two only dropped one drumstick apiece, a process that reminded him a little too much of wandering around a different computerized forest, killing boars for their livers—and finding, in the process, dozens of inexplicably liver-less .
The real question, he decided, was how the rabbits had gotten the drumsticks. Maybe they had killed birds for them. Perhaps they had an advanced society that trapped, murdered, and cooked turkeys, #.
He snickered quietly but it cut short when he heard a growl from behind him. Turning swiftly as the hair on the back of his neck prickled, Justin came face to face with a wolf.
The thing about wolves was that you didn’t realize quite how big they were until you saw one up close. This one was easily three and a half feet tall at the shoulder, and its eyes glowed a demonic-looking yellow. It growled again and lowered its head.
Panicked, he stumbled back and he must have tripped over something because in the next moment, he sprawled awkwardly. He hadn’t fallen in real life, he could tell—there was no burst of pain—but his character’s view tilted crazily.
As he scrambled upright, the AI said, “Congratulations. You have achieved Clumsy, Level One.”
“Are you serious with this?” Justin called at the sky.
There was no answer, but unfortunately, there was still a wolf to deal with.
Amber frowned at the screen as bits of data flashed up in sequence.
“I don’t understand,” the senator said quietly in the background. “If he’s playing a game, why can’t we see it on the screen? We can hear him.”
They could, and the dialogue hadn’t exactly been reassuring until now—although they had all laughed at his “Be vewwy, vewwy quiet…”
“His brain is filling in the textures,” Amber explained.
The senator looked bewildered and Nick hastened to explain. “We don’t have an asset of a star, for instance,” he said. “I mean—like, a 3D object in the game. We didn’t model a yellow, five-pointed star and give it depth and make it all shiny. The game says ‘star,’ and Justin’s brain interprets that. It puts in whatever he thinks of when he thinks of a star. Or a field. Or mountains.”
“The game looks different for everyone,” Amber concluded. “Some things, like the AI, are pre-recorded, but for other things, we use the brain. For instance, he’s not really moving but he thinks he is and the game interprets that input.” She raised her eyebrows at a certain line of code. “He’s in the game and he’s leveling things up. It is working. I—what’s he doing now?”
“Being an idiot,” DuBois said succinctly. “Oh, come on, kid, don’t—” He sighed and shook his head as he put a piece of popcorn in his mouth. “He’s gonna get himself killed.”
“Wait.” Jacob looked at the others, all of whom wore identical expressions. “Killed how? You mean in the game, right?”
The doctor looked at them. “I told you this before, didn’t I?”
“Told us what?” Amber asked him.
The doctor shrugged. “The brain is essentially a complex computer. Isn’t that what you said the other d
ay? Well—dying means he goes through a ‘reboot.’ In this condition, I don’t know how he’ll take it.”
A tense pause followed. Jacob looked at the others.
“What is he saying to us?” he asked. His smile was forced.
“He’s saying…” Amber looked like she wanted to stop talking, but the senator showed every intention to start kicking asses if no one answered him. “He’s saying if Justin dies in the game…we don’t know if it will kill him for real.”
The words horrified her and even more so when they heard the sound of the bathroom door closing and Mary walked into the room. From the way her gaze flicked over the group, it was clear she knew something had happened.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“He’s playing the game,” DuBois said. He put a large palmful of popcorn in his mouth. “It’s fascinating,” he added, around his mouthful. “It’s truly fascinating.”
Before the wolf could lunge at him, Justin flailed at it with the sword. He saw the fatigue dialogue take one point from his health but he didn’t have time to pay attention to it before he needed to fling himself sideways. He ended up in the stream, which was on par with his luck. At least pixelated clothes didn’t get completely wet, although the game was somehow realistic enough to make his legs feel cold.
How did it do that?
The wolf thrust forward at him and he decided to work the rest out later. He swung the sword again and felt a jolt in his hands, if not his arms, and a negative four drifted from the wolf’s body.
“Ha!” he yelled. “Take that, fucker.”
Without warning, the wolf jumped. Its paws struck Justin’s chest with an impact he didn’t feel in his body so much as in his mind. The sky cartwheeled and he landed hard with an audible thud and a clatter of his sword. The wolf’s head lowered and its snarl drowned out his involuntary yell before it ripped his arm with its teeth.
He almost felt the pain, the same way he’d almost felt the cold.
“You have been poisoned,” the AI announced. “Negative three health per second.”
“Yeah?” Justin sat and watched his attacker slink away. “So what do I do now?”
The answer, it turned out, was simple. He watched his health tick away—seven points, then four, then one—
“You have died,” the AI said cheerfully as the screen went black.
Chapter Eleven
In the extended pause that followed, Amber and DuBois held their breath. She was fairly sure they were the only two who knew what the few lines of code on the screen meant. Everyone had heard that Justin had been poisoned, but only she and DuBois knew that his character had died.
Maybe, she thought hopefully, no one else would find out.
C’mon, c’mon, c’mon…
It wasn’t her day. The heart rate monitor flat-lined, the EEG spiked crazily before it followed suit, and they could hear the sound as the blood pressure cuff inflated.
“Amber,” Jacob said quietly. “Did he die in the game?”
Amber said nothing and was frozen with horror. She couldn’t be watching this happen, could she?
Before her friend could repeat his question, the EEG scrambled again and reactivated. She exhaled a breath, which sounded too much like a sob for comfort. “Yes,” she said. “He died in the game.”
“Fuck,” Justin’s voice said emphatically.
“Stop swearing!” Mary looked horrified. She glanced at the others and then at the monitor. “And stop dying!”
Nick hid a snort of laughter with a sudden coughing fit.
“If there was ever a time for you to be good at a game, Justin,” the senator said quietly, “it’s now.”
“Fascinating,” DuBois said again. “Did you see that? The way the brain responds to the simple power of suggestion. It is truly extraordinary.”
“Maybe too extraordinary,” Tad muttered. He jerked his head and Amber, Nick, and Jacob followed him as he wandered a short distance away from the group. “Look, I don’t know much about…” He waved his hand. “All this stuff. But isn’t there something you can do? Some way to keep him from dying again? Can’t you….” His voice trailed off.
Jacob looked at the screen as he considered the unfinished question and its implications. “I suppose we could put a block on the health bar,” he said thoughtfully.
“Or simply nerf all the animals,” Nick interjected.
“Or both,” Amber summed up.
“That won’t work,” said DuBois.
All four of them turned to look at him. Apparently, his hearing was better than they thought—that, and he had no sense of shame about eavesdropping. He wandered closer to them, still licking caramel coating off his fingers.
“We can’t reboot the entire game while he’s inside it,” Amber said, “but we can change the characteristics of the monsters that spawn live and we can segment his zone and reboot everything else.”
“That’s not what I mean.” The doctor waved a hand. “No, I mean this will only work if there’s the possibility of failure.” He looked at all of them meaningfully as if they should understand exactly why that was true.
“Uh,” Nick said finally. “Why, though?”
“Young man,” he said severely, “I thought you read my research.”
“I did!” He looked mortified and glanced at the senator. “I did,” he assured him.
“I did, too,” Amber said to DuBois, “and I don’t know what you’re talking about either.”
The doctor looked at Jacob for backup and, as a last resort, to the senator. Amber raised her eyebrow. The politician didn’t seem stupid but he also didn’t seem like the type of person who read neuroscience papers between senate votes.
The doctor sighed. “We’re preparing him for real life again,” he said finally. “I thought you must have understood that because your game lined up so well with the conclusions in my paper. Real-life includes the chance of death at all moments. It is imperative that the patient begins normal function between their sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system again.”
“What’s he talking about?” Nick muttered.
“He’s talking about fight or flight,” Amber explained. “Self-preservation instincts. He’s saying that without those, the game won’t make Justin better. Right?” She looked at DuBois.
“I just said that,” he said plaintively. “But, yes. The point is to restore normal brain function. Something that is obviously a simulation and has no consequences for failure will not serve the purpose.”
“Okay, so…” Senator Williams looked as if he struggled to keep calm. “You’re telling me that I have to put my son in mortal danger in order to have a chance at him recovering?”
“Mr. Williams,” the doctor said with surprising gentleness, “you’re not putting him in mortal danger. Recovery from a traumatic brain injury on this scale is…rare. It’s dangerous.”
Amber could have hit him for saying that. She thought she saw the light in the senator’s eyes die a little.
“The reason I did my research,” DuBois said, “is because the human brain has a remarkable capacity to heal itself—if it can be reached socially. Locked away in your own head is a terrible way for most people to be. You’re not putting your son in danger by doing this, you’re giving him the chance to get out of it. What happened moments ago could have happened at any time in the ICU. The only difference is that now, it serves a purpose. It’s reminding his brain how to work.”
Amber stared at him. She hadn’t expected that monologue to turn out inspiring but somehow, it had. She snuck a glance at the senator and saw that even he looked more hopeful now.
“I see,” he said. “Is there anything more we can do tonight?”
“No,” the doctor told them. “We’ve hired nursing staff, so between us and the nurses, there will always be someone taking care of your son. You two should rest.”
“Thank you,” Williams said. He looked at each of them. “Thank you to all of you. Your work is givi
ng my son the chance to come back to us.”
Then, as if exhausted by his show of charming, senatorial thanks, he seemed to collapse in on himself slightly and hunched his shoulders as he went to take his wife’s hand.
“Thank you all,” she told them as well, and her smile was warm.
Justin woke in the same field with the same damned rusty sword—and a health bar that was very low.
“AI?” he asked.
“Yes, Player underscore 009?” The voice was infuriatingly bland and noncommittal.
“My name is Justin,” he told it. If it wanted to be smug, goddammit, it would be smug while it used his correct name.
“Noted, Player underscore 009.”
He sighed and considered his options. “AI, please restart the tutorial for me.”
“I’m sorry, Player underscore 009, that is not an option at this time.”
“Why not?” he asked and anger stirred. He reached up to take the VR headset off but his fingers didn’t connect with anything. In fact, he wasn’t sure he could feel them connecting with the headset.
Now that he thought of it, what could he feel? He wasn’t quite sure.
“May I suggest replenishing your health?” the AI asked. Its smugness had returned in full force.
“Yeah, how exactly am I supposed to—oh, the weird rabbit legs.” Justin jabbed with a finger until one of the packs opened and then stabbed at the rabbit legs, almost deleted them by accident, and finally managed to consume one of them. After the usual sound of video game chewing, his health bar climbed into the green and finally, to full.
“Good,” he said. “Now what am I supposed to do?”
There was no answer, but the marker for his food scavenging quest flashed.
He did not like this AI.
With a sigh, he set off toward the stand of trees and the stream again. When the first rabbit dashed across his path, he raised the sword and waited for the next. With two more weird rabbit drumsticks, his quest was completed.
LEVEL 2 flashed across the screen with a triumphant burst of music.
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