by Deck Davis
“That’s an option?”
“You don’t have to walk through the door. Some don’t. More than you’d think.”
There was no way he’d pass this up. He’d done what he could with his old life, but he’d never really made the most of it. Now, at least, he could try damn hard with his second. If he turned this down, what waited for him? The oblivion of brain death, most likely. His body was gone, and if he didn’t walk through that door, they would shut down his mind as well. Delete it from the recycling bin like a teenager erasing naughty videos from his laptop.
He took a few steps forward until he was in front of the shimmering light. It felt warm on his skin. He heard a distant rumbling, like the sound of a thunderstorm gathering. It was like staring into a cosmic chasm, and he wondered if he would just be sucked into it.
“So, I just step through?”
She nodded. “And your second life begins.”
“One last thing,” he said. “What was the deal with the burger?”
“Another psyche test to see what kind of person you are,” she answered. Then she was silent, as if that had explained everything.
“And?”
“You’re a decent guy. And you need to hold on to that in Adonis. Don’t become a monster.”
He shrugged. He wasn’t going to get anything else out of her.
With that, he walked forward and stepped through the door.
The light seemed to latch onto him as he walked into it. It was thick, like stepping through cobwebs that resisted him with each step. The light spread across his arms, his legs, his chest. It gathered all the way up to his face and over his mouth, and he felt like he couldn’t breathe. Then he felt it crawl inside him, bonding with every cell in his body.
There was a booming crack of thunder.
He felt cold. Like he was plummeting through ice. There was a metallic screaming in his ears.
“Dina, how about some of that sugar?” he said, knowing she wouldn’t be able to hear him.
Something wasn’t right. He reached out, trying to grab hold of something. The screaming grew louder, until it was all he could hear.
He felt himself tumble down.
And down.
And down.
Until he suddenly stopped. The screaming faded, the light began to disperse. It left suddenly, as if it were smoke being sucked away through an extractor fan.
And then he was in Adonis.
He didn’t land with a thud or a bang. Instead, it was if the world of Adonis rushed to meet him, and he suddenly found himself within it.
The first thing he noticed was the darkness. Like his eyes were shut, except he knew he had them open. He turned his head. The next thing he noticed was the smell. Foul, like food that had been left to rot.
As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he began to make out his surrounding area. He saw muddy walls. A stone ceiling. He heard water dripping from it and landing on the dirt floor. As his eyes adjusted more and more, he realized he was stood in a cave or dungeon of some kind.
This sure as hell wasn’t the starter village. It looked like the kind of place a dwarf clan might build a fortress in, except that there was something lonely about it.
“Hello?” he said.
His words echoed back to him, and after that, there was only silence. He shrugged. Time to explore.
Chapter Two
Something had gone wrong, that was for sure. The problem was, he’d hardly seen any actual screenshots or videos of the game. He didn’t know whether this was normal or not. Maybe it was a training area.
Hard to say. The Adonis Rebirth devs didn’t share many images of their game world. It was a secret more tightly guarded than the Whitehouse UFO files. The reason they gave was to prevent hackers from penetrating it and raising hell with people’s afterlives.
Some people, in the darkest reaches of the internet where the normal headwear was a tinfoil hat, believed the devs were covering up issues with Adonis that they didn’t want to get out. If they kept the game’s problems hidden from their customers in real life, they were golden. Since people could only access the product after their death, they could hardly complain, could they?
So why didn’t they demand to see more of the product before investing the massive chunk of change it took to get a pass? Here was the thing - it didn’t seem to matter. As long as Adonis Corp promised life after death, people emptied their wallets. It was an act of faith for most folks. A promise of an afterlife that didn’t require a lifetime of devout worship to get there.
That meant that Nathan had never actually seen the starter village Janess, so he didn’t know what it looked like. This sure as hell wasn’t it, though. He was in an oval-shaped cavern. The air was cold but stuffy at the same time, as though the oxygen struggled to circulate. There were two smells; one was of damp mud. The other, the more pungent of the two, was of rot.
He needed to contact the game devs and tell them something had gone wrong with his transition. He knew that the outside world couldn’t communicate with those in Adonis, but there were supposed to be AI controllers here. The question was, how was he going to contact them?
Think. Remember. They explained some of this when an Adonis rep visited the barracks. It was during basic training. He remembered her pulling up in a 4x4 and getting out. The other guys whistled when they saw her tanned legs. They’d set up seats in the canteen and she’d given them all a demonstration on how the Adonis UI worked.
He pictured her as she ignored the canteen banter and told the recruits how Adonis operated. He tried to imagine her voice. He pictured the way she manipulated the projector to move through the different screens.
‘A tap of your chest will bring up the main menu. A finger, a palm, it doesn’t matter. As long as it’s you tapping, and not anyone else. Wouldn’t make sense for an enemy to open your menu screen mid-battle, would it?”
He thought she’d made a mistake by mentioning the word ‘battle.’ Most of the recruits, once they finished their first 4-years, would leave the army. Attrition was at 28%. The ones who stayed in the forces long enough would see their fair share of combat. After that, the last thing they’d want in their second life was more fighting. Most of them would probably spend their time fishing or crafting.
Nathan was different. He craved adventure. He wanted to meet heroes, join a guild. It just felt right to surround himself with people. After all, that was one of the reasons he joined the army.
Picturing the Adonis rep in his head, he tapped his chest. Sure enough, a transparent overlay of text filled his vision. The writing was blue. It was clear enough to read, but it turned transparent if he needed to see beyond it. In front of him, he saw several options.
Character Screen
Map
Inventory
Quests
Chat
This was all well and good, but there was a problem. Every single option bar ‘Map’ was greyed out. He tried selecting them, but nothing happened. Usually in games, this meant there was a tutorial you had to finish before you could access everything. Here, though, there was no sign of one.
“This is Nathan Attis putting in a tech support request,” he said aloud. “I’d try turning it off and on again, but I can’t find the power switch. Anyone want to give me a support ticket?”
When no answer came, he decided he better try and figure out where he was. If he could make his way to the village, he could at least find someone to talk to. He clicked the map option, then watched as it filled his screen. The image was vague, and he found that he could see through it if he chose to.
He studied the map. This sure as hell didn’t look right. Rather than being the expansive game world he’d heard about, this seemed smaller than a school playground. Right now, it only showed the room he was in, although all around him were greyed out sections. He guessed he’d have to explore a little for the map to fill itself in. The borders of the map indicated that although there was some exploring to do, it wasn’t the hug
e world he’d been promised.
‘It’s twelve times the size of Texas,’ the rep had told them. ‘With new content added every year.’
‘How do you create new stuff if you can’t communicate with the game from the outside?’ asked Nathan.
The rep tapped her nose. ‘Trade secret,’ she said, and flashed a smile.
‘And what about if there’s a problem in the game? Who fixes that shit?’ shouted another recruit.
The woman smiled. Nothing seemed to faze her. ‘A sophisticated group of AI controllers are there to fix any possible eventuality,’ she answered.
The AI’s weren’t here now, though. With the ‘Chat’ button greyed out, Nathan had no way of contacting them. He reasoned that it could have been due to where he was. Maybe he needed to leave here so that he could get tech support and access his character screen.
He looked around. The room was shaped like a football. There were three openings marked on the map, two to his left and one to his right. The presence of the openings made him think that someone had been here before him and carved the passageways. Maybe the place was occupied, but he doubted it.
The two openings on the left looked like they could lead either further into the dungeon or out of it - it was hard to tell. The one on his right was just a single room.
“Better start there,” he said.
He closed the map and looked to his right. The door was just across from him, but it was less an actual door, and more of an opening cut into the stone walls. As he walked toward it, his footsteps echoed back to him. He heard something scuttling behind him, but couldn’t see anything.
As he got closer to the door, the smell of rot grew stronger. It reminded him of the time, when he was a kid, he and his friends had found a dead possum in a bush. They’d gone back to it day after day, daring each other to poke it. Eventually, the stench got so bad that it made them retch.
The smell here was worse. He didn’t know what the hell was in the room, but it smelled like one of Satan’s own hell pigs had crawled in there to die. It was how he imagined a slaughter house to smell if all the workers abandoned it. He made it to the doorway before the stench overpowered him. He took one quick peek, but it was too dark to see anything inside.
“No way am I going in there,” he said.
He needed to think. Get a plan together. He was no stranger to shit hitting the fan. Even the most well-planned mission could go to hell when Lady Chance got involved. The trick was to keep calm and take action. That was the thing that screwed most people over in stressful situations. They let their monkey brain take over and force them to make decisions based on panic. It was the reason why people lost at sea did the crazy thing of drinking sea water. They weren’t thinking clearly.
He realized that his hunger had come back. Memories of the burger drifted through his mind, but he let them pass. He doubted that there was a fast food joint around here. He guessed that if he felt hunger, then even though he couldn’t see his character screen, there must have been a hunger gauge on it. That made sense – this wasn’t just a game, it was a 2nd life. He was going to have to forage for something to eat.
He heard the scuttling sound again. It came from his right, over near the wall. He stayed still so as not to spook whatever it was. As he watched, he picked out a shape in the shadows. He saw a furry body. Claws. A thin, worm-like tail.
It was a rat. It had a long snout that it stuck into every crevice it could find. Its claws were lined with dirt.
At first, he was a little disgusted. Then the strangest thing happened. The more he looked at the rat, the more delicious it seemed. It was weird, but he began to salivate over the thought of eating it.
Effect gained: Hunger
-1 HP per 10 minutes
He looked away. He knew hunger could make even the worst food seem appetizing. He’d once eaten a cheese and coleslaw sandwich out of hunger. And man, did he hate coleslaw.
This was different though – it wasn’t just a sick mixture of cabbage and mayonnaise. It was a rat. Most people would argue that it was much, much worse than coleslaw (they’d be wrong.) Still, eating it suddenly became the best idea in the world. He knew that he had to catch the critter and chow down.
“Okay,” he said to himself. “Softly does it.”
The rat stayed near the wall. Nathan crouched down and began to walk across the ground, careful not to make much noise. He managed to get within a few feet of the creature. Now all he had to do was attack it.
But he couldn’t.
He tried to move his arms to hit it, but they wouldn’t cooperate. He tried to swing his legs to kick it, but they refused to budge. It didn’t make sense. He could move and crouch, but he couldn’t attack. It was as though the game wouldn’t let him.
As he contemplated his inability to strike it, the rat gave a squeak. It ran across the room and disappeared into one of the passageways on the left. So much for the snack.
Nathan sat down. With the rat gone, his head seemed to clear a little. The idea of eating it became disgusting again, as it should have been. What was wrong with him, though? Why did it look so tasty? Maybe in Adonis, the game tweaked your mind so that you could stomach different kinds of food. Still, that didn’t explain why he couldn’t attack the vermin.
He heard a scraping noise over to the left of the room.
“Back again?” he said. “I changed my mind. I don’t want to eat you anymore. Maybe we can be friends.”
The sounds grew closer, and he began to think that it wasn’t the rat. Instead of the tiny body of a rat scuttling into the room, he saw something bigger. A shape emerging from the darkness of the passageway. When it got closer, he saw what it was.
He leapt up to his feet.
Just ten feet away from him, was a goblin. As tall as his waist. Skin the color of grass. Teeth protruding over thin lips. It looked like it was two weeks overdue a bath.
This wasn’t good. If the game wouldn’t let him attack the rat, it wasn’t going to let him fight this creature either. And he knew that in most games, goblins were hostile. They were low-level critters there for you to level up on, but they could do damage if you let them.
He’d learned that the hard way when he was playing an old RPG. He’d once gone to make a sandwich, leaving his character in a forest surrounded by corpses of ogres. He thought he’d be safe since he’d killed most of them, and they were low-level creatures. He came back 5 minutes later to find the computer screen the color of blood, and the words ‘You have died’ plastered on it. While he’d been gone, four ogres had surrounded him and brought the smack down. His character had stood there and taken it.
Nathan wasn’t about to just stand there and get a beating from the goblin. The problem was, right now, he was defenseless. He might as well go make a sandwich.
The goblin took a step forward. Nathan backed away. He looked around for a weapon. He saw soil, stones, a few vines extending from the ground. Nothing he could use. He quickly brought up his menu screen. He saw with dismay that all the options apart from ‘map’ were still greyed out.
He needed to leave. If you were overpowered and didn’t have the strategic advantage, you left the area to regroup and re-plan. That was the sensible thing to do. So, which way did he go?
The goblin was in front of the two passageways. That just left the room of rot behind Nathan. He sure as hell wasn’t going to go in there. Besides, it had seemed like a dead end. According to the map, there were no tunnels extending from the rot room.
Escape was out, so he had to do something else. Maybe he could let the goblin get close, then just as it was about to attack, he could dart around it and go down the passageway. Then, when he was tooled up, he’d come back and finish it off. He’d even think up a witty catchphrase to say while he killed it.
He waited. The goblin took tentative steps toward him. Nathan watched it intently. He waited for the slightest indication it was ready to attack so that he could catch it off guard and escape. He just need
ed to hold his nerve.
The creature got closer.
And closer.
Just one more step…
He thought it was about to strike, so he readied himself. It jerked forward, arms raised. Nathan watched in shock as the goblin looked at him, grunted, then got down on one knee. It stayed there and stared at him.
Neither of them moved. It started to get awkward.
Finally, he had to break the silence. “Are you going to propose?” he said.
It looked up at him with wide, puppy-dog eyes. It gave a high-pitched grunt.
“Well, okay,” said Nathan, relaxing.
