But they may as well be.
Paul tapped me on the shoulder and I handed him a pack of smokes. He stuffed one in his jacket and packed the other and handed me one after flipping a cigarette around in the pack for good luck. I generally hated smoking, well I mean the body I occupied did, but I liked them after a night of drinking. I put one in my mouth and Paul lit me up, always quick on the draw. He had his own set of ideals he chose to live by, and in a backwards sort of way, I admired that. Sure he believes, like really believes, in bigfoot and nearly every conspiracy theory he reads and is positive our government was infiltrated by cannibalistic reptilian space aliens who perfected active camouflage, but he’s bound to grow out of that mindset.
After I moved out for college, he actually got a job at the local auto shop, which was something. He even managed to move out of his parents’ house, and into a mother-in-law style apartment, located in their backyard. He paid rent and cooked most of his own meals, which, for him, who we thought was definitely going to overdose on something or drive off a bridge in some drunken street race before he hit 21, it was pretty good.
“I almost have it all figured out,” Paul said, his cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth.
“What did you figure out?” I replied, kind of surprised after getting lost in my thoughts. There was something charming about our flat town and the snow. “Where are we even going?
“Just shut up for a minute and listen.” He pulled several wadded up pieces of paper that had been folded over time and again. There were like twenty pages of hand-drawn plans riddled with little diagrams and spelling errors. It was hard to decipher, his chicken-scratch handwriting may have well been hieroglyphics.
“What is all this?”
“The track, dummy, wake up!” he quickly snapped his index and middle finger, hitting me square in the nuts. “Sack tap!” he stated, matter of factly, like it was my fault I was just sack tapped. “Try and keep up.”
I reeled over in pain, wondering why I still visited this fucker. But there it was. I was waiting for it all week. He was still going on about the track and his latest scheme was putting it down on paper. I grew out of the idea about as soon as I finished a couple highschool level math classes. The math simply didn’t add up for a town as small as ours. I tried mentioning it to him, that maybe we should think about moving to a bigger town if this project was going to have any legs at all. And he was always offended.
But I had to humor him, like always. “Sure, it looks cool, but—”
He held one of the pages tracing his finger around what looked like a track. “Check me out, baby,” he ran his finger along the ramps making the sound effects. “Boom around the step up, directly into the dragonback where: BOOM, PLOW, LOOK OUT FOR THE FIREWORKS, big ones! You seeing this shit?”
I studied the plans and sure enough there were explosions all around the track. “So they jump over the fireworks?” It was best to go along with it until he shut up about it, so I played my part.
“Hell ya, baby. This is like the X games combined with a concert and aerial show!” He pointed over at the stage with little figures playing their little guitars, the stage lined with dozens of speakers. I think there was a stick figure in the crowd flashing her tits, but I didn’t want to engage him.
He was getting really worked up. If only he applied this kind of enthusiasm to other parts of his life . . . “Look man, you know—”
“Woah, we’re just talking, spitballing, don’t have to get all Aunt Clementine on me,” he looked at me with a single eye squinting: a little to stop the smoke, a little to stop from seeing double. He lit one cigarette into the next, and offered me one, but I still had three quarters of mine left.
The exact moment I realized there weren’t any taxi services in our tiny town that was within walking distance of everything, from down the snow-covered roads glided the strangest taxi I'd ever seen.
For starters, it didn’t even look like it should have been driving, like there was something fundamentally wrong with it. The body was too long, to boxy, the tires too big, the windshield at a perfectly vertical angle. “That’s our cab?” I asked, incredulous.
On top, seemingly built into the frame during production, read Taxi-Cab, with shining orange lights around it and a lurid yellow paint job with black checkers running down the side.
“What? You’ve never seen a cab before? Bro, this is what happens when you play videogames all day and live on a college campus. This is the real world. Welcome to it.”
It was hard to place the non-localized dread I felt, the same you experience when everyday life isn’t quite exactly how it should be.
The 'cab' stopped in front of us and a strange, gnomish man stuck his head out the window. I could smell him from the sidewalk. He looked like he only sat three or four feet tall, most of the space he took up residing in his long, goblin-like nose and tall pointy hat. “Mr. Stanley?” His voice was thick and syrupy, like a thorny toad lived in his throat and spoke for him.
Paul raised his hand and we hopped in.
It smelled weird like a mix of curry and battery acid and pine trees. And the inside was much too large, like it could have been a limo. “Where to, fellas?” the cabby looked at us in the mirror.
“The Twilight Exit,” Paul said, helping himself to the little bar in back, pouring the both of us a drink. “My good sir!”
“The Twilight Exit, eh? You boys are in for a treat! Buckle up!”
The car took off like the roads weren't covered in several feet of snow and I almost spilled my drink. The little gnomish goblin-looking man kept looking away from the road as he rifled through his collection of tapes, finally opting for the radio after running his third stop sign in a row. I wasn’t exactly thrilled about crashing, most games have full pain simulation. People are so desensitized to games that the very persistent and painful possibility of death is what people needed, just to feel something.
The strange little man flipped through station after station, before finally landing on something. It was the strangest music I ever heard, it sounded like hundreds of different horns playing in a subway, each one going on a tangent of their own, but to the tune of old Beetles songs. The little gnomish man whistled along, only getting one in every ten notes even remotely right. Paul was nodding his head along as I watched our old farmer occupied town zoom by.
Where could we be going in this old bumfuck two-lane highway town?
Then I saw searchlights in the distance and we came upon a club right next to the only Mexican restaurant in town that you could only get to going east on a two-lane highway. It looked so out of place, out of memory, out of time, like an exclusive club that wouldn’t have been out of place in Manhatten or some place like that. There were bouncers and fancy cars pulling up and a line of posh-dressed socialites.
I had to keep reminding myself to look out for bugs. Sometimes an AI goes on a tangent and creates totally bonkers worlds and systems. You had to look for signs, anything at all too far out of the ordinary. A good tester, like saturation divers, are always on the lookout for anything at all, the little things are what killed you, spiraling out of control faster than you realize.
But the way I see it: my life before testing was no life at all. Every explorer worth their salt is willing to sacrifice their lives in the sake of discovery.
And that was what I was.
I was an explorer of worlds.
And it was go time.
Paul could barely hold his excitement, to him, it just made sense. He saw what he wanted to see, evidence that our little bumfuck town somehow meant something. He didn’t question how there was suddenly a new club in town, our little town of less than five hundred. It was simply there and open and ready to receive us. The car slid to a stop, the icy mush causing us to skid.
“Pay the man, will ya!” Paul barely gave me a glance back as he ran and slid into the end of the line.
“Thirty-six dollars,” the strange, goblin man croaked. I could ha
ve sworn if I stared at him long enough his true toad form would reveal itself to me.
I fished around in my pockets and came up with exactly $36. Before I even finished counting, he growled. “No tip?”
“Sorry! Man! That’s all I have!”
“Perhaps, your soul?” a graveyard smile seethed out the corner of his lips and I half expected him to grab the money from across the tag with his long, sticky tongue.
“My soul? I think I might need to hang on to that,” I said, eager to get away from him. I could smell his breath from across the cab and out the other side through the window.
“Off with you then,” He took off, his improbable car trucking along despite gravity and physics and reality working against it. He honked his horn, a La Cucaracha-like tune playing. I smirked and made my way over to the line. I thought about how much I loved this aspect of my job. Interacting with all these characters, they always found ways to surprise me.
Paul was already making nice with the patrons who were miles beyond his league and while we were in the dead of winter, nobody was dressed like it, everyone seemed warm and cozy and content waiting in the single digit weather, despite only wearing little slip dresses and trendy sports jackets. I was bundled up in a fur-lined parka and it was still a bit chilly. Paul had on his old winter parka with patches sewn into it, chatting and shooting the shit with people who looked like actual movie stars. Better than movie stars, actually. They were so perfect and beautiful, they could have only been created by AI. And yet they were so life-like. Each of them having a story of their own.
A life of their own.
In a way, I was kind of an outsider, an alien presence sent to decide their fate: If I found the build to be broken or dangerous their existence is over in the blink of an eye.
Just like that.
It kind of made you wonder about the nature of reality.
I was, in a way, an angel of death sent from another dimension to decide their fate. If I determined the game to be unsafe, their entire world is erased, never to be heard from again. No chance of afterlife, no second chances, no appeals.
Just nothing.
Regardless of how they were created and if they truly believed they were alive: they were very interested in us.
And I had no idea why.
We did not at all look like we belonged. Paul smelled like diesel fuel and had a smudge of oil under his eye, his greasy hat sitting haphazardly on his head, bits of frost hanging off the ear flaps. But they talked to him like he was one of their own. Something was up, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. The whole scene was surreal, like a heavy dose of magical realism, something you don’t experience much in testing. Most games are based off the tried and true Sword & Sorcery formula. So why fix what isn’t broken?
I personally welcomed the change of pace. I was a gamer who loved all kinds of genres and have played so many, experienced so much living art, that I loved the weird and outlandish experiences, as sparse as they are. When you’ve seen it all, you get really jazzed up on the strange and esoteric. I supposed it was how people get into things like freeform jazz or weird fetishes or develop tastes for delicacies like fermented shark.
I was thrilled to see what the Twilight Exit had in store for us as we received the royal treatment and they were all but rolling out the red carpet for us. It was like we were the celebrities, everyone waving and clapping and giving us pats on the back. The bouncer took notice of us and motioned us forward. Paul was right at home, this was the treatment he rightfully deserved. Despite his many, many, shortcomings, he always viewed himself as royalty, a King who had been temporally deprived of his birthright.
Yet there was something else that was bothering me. It felt like we were in a movie. And looking around I realized what it was. It was like everyone was from the '20s: long jackets, art deco, flappers. Everyone looked so elegant and handsome.
Looking around I noticed all the cars in the lot looked like the classic model-T design. Long carriage like vehicles, the kind that could rip your arm off with the crank start, the charm,ing little crank attached directly to the motor.
We sauntered and half-jogged to the front of the line like we just hit a grand slammer. Everything was too beautiful, supernaturally beautiful and in my mind, I made mental notes to beware of the Fae. The nasty, dangerous and vein little creatures. You never really knew with the Fae, until it was too late.
And yet, that thought seemed so unimportant.
It’s just a game . . .
Right?
At the front of the line, the most beautiful woman I had ever seen fixed her cat-like eyes on me. “Nice tits, love,” was the doozie Paul came up with. I wanted to smack him.
And yet she smiled back at him with a big Cheshire cat grin, and slinked in the door behind us.
There was something odd about her, perhaps the way she moved, or was it her eyes? She reminded me very much of a feline, despite being completely human. Two legs, big green eyes flecked with gold, purplish hair. She was short, probably only five-three in a line full of six-foot supermodels. Her chest was more than a handful and she looked to be about our age, possibly slightly older, wearing a slick, form fitting dress that squeezed her big tits together.
“Did you see that? She was STACKED. And into me!” It was like he didn’t even notice that we all but stepped into another world. It was how I imagined stepping into a pressure lock felt, my ears immediately popping. The inside was hundreds of time larger than the exterior let on. It was obvious we were dealing with space magic of some kind, and it kind of made sense: perhaps the inside of the cab wasn’t just a fluke.
It looked like we stepped into one of those old speakeasies, a regular bathtub gin company and I kind of had a nagging feeling we crossed through to the other side.
But the other side of what?
The deeper we delved, the more reality unraveled. We were so out of place, but still everyone was treating us like royalty, putting on a show for us.
And everyone was so hot and welcoming, it was easy to accept. I should have ran a diagnostic, but it was like every time I thought about it, I would be interrupted.
Someone tapped on my shoulder and I turned around, and I was stunned. I was looking into the eyes of the most perfect being I had ever encountered. I don’t really subscribe to shit like ‘love at first sight,’ but that’s the only way I could really describe the feeling.
She dazzled at me knowingly her high cheekbones and fair, lustrous skin giving her the appearance of royalty. She was two or three inches shorter than me, with short cropped hair, huge tits, and wore a perpetual smirk on her face--like she was always in on a joke or some secret. It may have been at your expense, but you really didn’t care. “Do you have any carrots?” she inquired.
“Any carrots?”
She leaned over and sniffed me, her cute nose scrunching up and into the crook of my neck, sending chills and goosebumps through my body, but in a good way. I felt the edge of her breast pressing into my arm and I laughed and she laughed. “Carrots? Or celery?” she started rifling through my pockets, her touch soft but deft, her eyes darting around. There was something odd about her, but like the Lady with the Cheshire Cat Smile, I couldn’t really finger it. She put her arms around me and we started swaying to the music.
“I don’t think so?”
She pulled a carrot out of my front pocket, which she examined, sniffed, then once satisfied, stuffed it in her purse, like she had something of great value.
It was like we were the only two people in the room, the rest of the party projections or hallucinations. But it didn’t really matter. “They say a good carrot helps your eyesight, but I eat so many carrots, it’s hard to say, I mean, by now I should have like eagle vision. Like you see that guy at the end of the hall?” she pointed, but the distance was breaking my brain. My brain and logic were telling me it was impossible for him to be a quarter mile away, and figured it was a trick with mirrors.
I nodded. There was noth
ing else to do but nod.
“Well, I see him perfectly, I think. He looks like a William: Mr. William Charles, I bet he works in a paper mill, or maybe in the big apple, a bigtime financial hotshot. But is that really any way to live? What do you think?”
She said so much in so little time I had a hard time processing it all. And she was so cute, her nose constantly crinkling, her eyes twinkling. Her breasts slowly heaving beneath her thin flapper girl dress. Before I could answer she reached into my pocket and found another carrot, to which she stashed away in her pocket, already sure of the general quality.
“I can’t really see him.”
“Well you should probably eat more carrots, see what I mean? My mother always said a carrot a day keeps the doctor away. But then again my mother is dead,” she looked down at her watch, and for a split second a flash of worry haunted her face.
We continued dancing to the strange swing-style music that seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere at all. “What are you doing here?” she asked, her dazzling eyes never straying far from mine.
“I don’t know, really.”
It was quiet for a moment as she studied me.
“You’re not a pervert are you?”
“Probably not,” I said. “Why?”
She kissed me on the lips, just a quick peck, but it made my knees weak. “Anyways, I don’t really care if you are a pervert or not. By the way, what’s your name? I don’t know what to call you.”
I had to think for a second and my name in this world popped up first: “Alex Hampton.”
“Not much of name if you ask me. Don't you have a nickname?”
I couldn’t recall having a nickname. “Not that I can recall.”
“I think I’ll call you Rock.” she squeezed my muscles, or lack of muscles, running her soft hands down my arm. I had the feeling she was making fun of me.
Void.Net: Wonderland Page 2
