Gaming the System

by P A Wikoff

  Clearing my mind got rid of all the thoughts and emotional barriers that surrounded me. All that was left was “Loading…” It was the only thing I saw anymore. It was presented as a bright installation art piece, inside a dark void of a room. Everything suddenly started to make sense. Calling this “the between place” was actually quite accurate.

  It was surreal and dreamy, and nothing like any normal, pixelated game I’d been a part of in the past. Even the word “Loading” seemed more like a living entity than anything else. It slowly grew and shrank, as if it were breathing.

  The only thing I knew for certain was that I was here. I wasn’t completely sure where “here” was, but I was starting to get a good idea. This was the game Dreamscape Online. Either that, or it was the most realistic dream about the game. In any case, I was outside my element if this was the next-level experience Mario had promised me. It had definitely delivered, with a bright, mysterious bow.

  Was I breathing? Or even alive? I must have been, if I was making decisions. You could also argue that A.I. programs made decisions, and I didn’t consider them to be living any more than the gear they controlled.

  Mario never really explained the ins and outs of the chamber pods. He was going to. I saw it sincerely in his eyes, but we were cut off. Was I still frozen, like cryogenically? Did that mean I could live forever inside the gaming experience?

  Technology was so weird. Just when I thought I was starting to understand things, I was somewhere entirely different. And it was magnificent.

  Chapter Nine

  Love and Berry Dress up and Dance

  N ow, with the loading screen gone, I was transported inside a mirrored room. The walls, ceiling, and floor were exactly the same size, shape, and distance apart—a perfect cube. The corners and edges of the glass were seamless.

  The only non-reflective object in the room was a neon clock, which read “1095.” Except it wasn’t telling the time. It was just a number. I didn’t know what it meant. A riddle perhaps?

  One, plus zero nines, plus five. I prepared myself for a long math equation when my enhanced memory intervened. 1095 was how many days the judge sentenced me to serve.

  Looking around the reflective room, the image displayed in the shiny surfaces was different than what I had expected to find staring back at me. It was me…I mean, I looked like myself. I had a form again—not digitally, artificially, or an artist’s rendition. It just wasn’t...right. In fact, it was better. Kind of like how you imagine your voice sounds inside your head, but when you listen to yourself on some guy’s live stream, you actually mumble and sound more like a psychopath than anything else.

  This was the version of myself I had envisioned inside my head but never lived up to, and it was impeccable. I waved my hand back and forth in my reflection, trying to locate a flaw in the programing or some clue to give away the illusion.

  “Astounding.” It passed the test...easily, I might add. This spurred on another idea on how to beat the system. “Hello, Seph, you are looking exceptionally well today,” I said, intensely studying my lip movements as I spoke. There was no doubt about it, it was flawless—no latency or imperfections. It was just as good as the real thing, if not better.

  What made it so remarkable was that I would have been fooled if it weren’t for the fact that I looked so great. A month of being incarcerated had worn on me pretty badly. I didn’t eat or sleep most days, and it showed under my eyes, in my washed-out skin, and in my pushed-down shoulders. So how I could have gone from that to this was beyond me.

  Observing my image as it bounced off the glass, I couldn’t help but notice there was something else peculiar about this room—something was off. The mirrors showed me from all angles without the multiplying effect that normally happens when you’re in a mirrored room. Not only that, each wall reflected a different side of me. It seemed that the walls showed me from a projected image, rather than a reflection. Perhaps they weren’t mirrors at all.

  Screens. They have to be.

  The only problem with this logic was that screens weren’t that good. Whoever designed this room wanted me to see myself from all angles without limitations. No hand mirrors required. It was bizarre and disorienting. I couldn’t wrap my head around it.

  How can any of this be possible?

  I turned to the right, trying to catch myself looking back—then again, and again, and again—like a dog chasing his tale from ancient feeds. It was no use, the me in the reflection was too quick to catch.

  Before I had to watch myself throw up from all angles, I decided to stop and collapsed to the floor.

  Catching my breath, I caught something else—a genuine smile on my face. Like it or not, I was having fun. Although I would never admit it. Maybe this whole thing wasn’t going to be so bad. At the very least, I could try and make the best of it.

  I looked up to see the top of my head, but there was something else there. Suspended above me was a sphere with the word “Start” plastered on it. I wondered if it had always been there or if it had just appeared when I was ready to see it.

  Launching to my feet, I slammed the button with the eagerness of a child. It jiggled and wiggled like a gelatinous blob.

  The room began to rumble and shake, growing louder and louder until it reached a crescendo. Something was coming with the intensity of a hover train. Before I could cover my ears and brace for impact, a translucent clothes rack rolled in, from god knows where. Instead of clothing, though, it was full of dangling…people—three of them, to be exact. They gyrated and flopped around on the invisible hangers like a bunch of corpses, still reeling from rolling in the way they did. Their dead eyes stared back at me. They were much too lifelike, much too real. Above the rack was a sign that read “Make your selection.”

  “Quit. Stop it. Just…no.” I didn’t want to go shopping through a rack of creepy, bloated people.

  “Go away.” I tried to send the thing far, far away and get back to the empty mirror room. Flipping my hand in a shooing manner didn’t work, so I moved on to using physical force. The rack wouldn’t budge an inch, no matter how hard I pushed and pulled. It was too late. I had already hit that tricky start button.

  I should have asked more questions as to what kind of game this was. What if it were a corpse-collecting game or something? This could be my life now, sifting through the dead and rotting, in order to get a complete set. I didn’t know if I could handle that. Then I remembered that Mario and my mom had both said this was an RPG. To be fair, it was supposed to be a massive multiplayer online roleplaying game, also known as an MMORPG.

  Wait…what’s the first thing you always do in a role-playing game?

  My mom, more so than my dad, always spent way too much time in the first couple hours of a new RPG making sure everything was right because she loved…

  “Character creation. That has to be what this morbid rack is.” Saying it out loud made me feel silly for not catching on sooner, but I wasn’t a gamer. My parents, on the other hand, were huge gamers. I was more…gamer adjacent. Which was to say that I knew some random facts about the games my parents rambled on about, when I didn’t just tune them out completely.

  Reluctantly, and against my better judgment, I thumbed through the three corpse options on the cold, invisible rack. I averted my gaze, only using the occasional peripheral glance to sort through them.

  Touching each one caused a large prompt to appear, explaining it. There was a male one, a female one, and the third was custom. Everyone has, at one point in their lives, wondered what they would look like as the opposite gender, but custom? What did that even mean? I was too afraid to look. The hanging bodies were so life-like to the touch, plus they were completely naked.

  Remembering the very real and very scarring breastfeeding experience I recently had, I decided to curb my curiosity for the time being and randomly pulled one off the rack. The mass of the body entered into me, as if it were a ghost trying to perform a possession. I felt a chill come over me.<
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  “You have selected the gender: Male,” a voice said, with a sophisticated accent that I couldn’t place. It must be native to the game.

  “Who said that? Is someone there?” I asked. Based on the lack of response, I knew it was most likely an A.I. Why couldn’t we go back to the days where protocols just did their jobs sans the intelligence, artificial or otherwise?

  After the chill in my body resolved, I felt quite comfortable in my new skin.

  Before I could give myself a once-over, a new set of hollowed-out body suits appeared in the same fashion as the last ones had, except they rolled in from the right instead of somewhere to the left. This rack was filled with the hides and skins of many species of humanoids. Each one had entirely different colors and shapes within their skins. It was less creepy than the gender rack, because they lacked the solid mass and bloated effect.

  I just had to not think of them as people, but rather, costumes. To be fair, it was like sorting through the clothing racks of a vintage cosplay shop, more than anything else.

  This had to be the race rack. What else could it be? At first glance, there were nine different options to choose from. I counted twice, just to make sure I wasn’t mistaken. There were a lot of choices to go over. These games were notorious for not letting someone make a “bad” character. I just had to go through the motions and pick the first thing that stuck out to me.

  One race was a winged humanoid; another was plant-like; one even had a flame coming out of its head. Some looked more like monsters than something I’d want to play as. Others looked like something straight out of a holographic comic. I didn’t want to wear a ridiculous suit. I hated avatars, and this was basically the same thing.

  Suffice it to say, none of these were my preference. I kept thumbing through, ignoring the prompts until I found the most normal of the bunch.

  “This will have to do.”

  As I pulled the thing as if it were a coat off a rack, it instantly faded from my grasp—so did the whole rack setup.

  “You have selected the race: Human,” the voice said, as if it wasn’t obvious. This time, I noticed that the sound was everywhere and not just coming from a speaker or certain point in the room.

  “Is Human a good option?” I asked, cringing, not knowing if I wanted to know the answer.

  “Humans are a versatile race, who reside in the eastern regions of the Craglands,” the voice said, completely ignoring my question.

  “Yeah, but are they any good?” I spat.

  “All races have been tested and balanced to suit different objectives and play style preferences.”

  “What if I don’t have a play style or preference, though?”

  “Perhaps you should play something else, then.”

  “There is literally no way for me to do that.”

  “Excuse me, but I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  “Then just say nothing.”

  Instead of answering, a bunch of sliders and knobs appeared around me. They were similar to the start button but smaller and less jiggly.

  To my right, there were appearance options; to my left, stats and skills. It was overwhelming how many different things I could mess with. I didn’t know what was high or what was low on the scale of things. I was never good at this stuff.

  After messing around a bit, I looked forward in the reflecting wall and nearly stumbled backwards at the person staring back at me.

  “Who are you? Wait, is that me?” I said. Then I had my answer, as my words were said perfectly back to me by the mysterious figure. It was me, as a Human, not me as a Homo sapiens, because apparently there was a big difference.

  My back was hunched. My weak arms looked like chicken that had been overcooked, my hair was stringy and unkempt, and I didn’t have anywhere close to a full head of it.

  “I’m hideous. Is this the default?” I asked, looking at myself from all angles. “This can’t be right.”

  I wanted to go back to being the better version of myself. I liked him. He was perfect; not too gross, not too pretty, just a normal guy trying his best.

  Perusing through the appearance options, I decided to try something.

  “Time for a nose job.” I chuckled at the notion and slightly turned the “nose length” knob, but it was more about me trying to get my old one back. It was amazing how different a person looked with just a couple of minor changes in things like eye size, shape, and position. People may look miles apart, but their unique features are hidden in only the slightest of details.

  “I wish I had a picture of myself to copy off of.”

  After messing with the appearance knobs and sliders for a good long while, I was only making things worse.

  I had done something with my forehead that I couldn’t for the life of me undo, and it made me look dumber than a suicidal robot.

  Over and over, I tried every option combination I could think of, but nothing made me look like anything other than a sickly Human knocking—no, pounding—on death’s door.

  Taking a quick break from my rough appearance, I went over to the statistics section. There were eight total statistics—strength, health, speed, psionics, intellect, willpower, charm, and luck.

  The mysterious voice filled the room again, “Due to their exceptionally high base stats, Humans only start off with four advancement points to freely distribute.”

  I guess it got bored of giving me the silent treatment.

  Not trusting the voice, I had to see for myself. Each stat already had two points assigned to it, totaling sixteen points. There was also a prompt above the stats titled “points left to assign,” which indicated that I had, in fact, four points at my disposal.

  I wondered what other characters’ base stats were. The voice had made it sound like this was a good starting option, and it definitely was well rounded. But it seemed low to me, if anything.

  Reluctantly, I reached through the overlaying knobs and buttons instead of using them. The rack rematerialized, in a less dramatic way this time. At least I figured out how to go back.

  I picked the race to the left of Human, just for a comparison. Pulling the new suit off the rack, my previous human suit rematerialized back to where I had retrieved it from.

  “You have selected the race: Hybrid,” the voice informed me. “Hybrids are…”

  “Enough. I don’t need all the flavor text,” I interrupted.

  Looking in the back wall, my reflection had changed to this default animal thing. I looked like a mangy, upright wolfman, or as they used to call them in ancient times, a furry.

  There was a whole new set of appearance options and stats different from what the human had. I could change the length and color of the fur. Not that it made any dramatic changes to the missing mangy patches or to the fact that I could see my ribs.

  Then I noticed a slider on the stats side called “genus.” There was a dozen or so different genus options, and each genus had three subcategories of species. Browsing through this section, it didn’t take long for me to get that there were way too many furries, or Hybrids as the game called them, that I could choose from. There were bear hybrids, crocodile hybrids, snake hybrids, panther hybrids, shark hybrids, rodent hybrids; the list went on and on. A lot of them didn’t actually have fur. That must be why they were named “Hybrids.”

  Each species came with a special featured attack called an “instinct.” Although it wasn’t my cup of energy tea, it was interesting, to say the least.

  What’s the harm in trying a couple on for size?

  One by one, my body was a new upright animal body. It was so unique and so enjoyable just to see how various ones moved at my command. When I selected a cheetah, my hands turned into huge paws with retractable, razor-sharp claws. I didn’t even know how I did it; they just came out. It was instinctive.

  I swiped at the air a couple of times in amazement. “Wow, these are neat. I only wish there was something for me to test these things out on. You know, like a practice dummy or some
thing similar to beat on for a while.” A part of me was hoping that the A.I. might comply with my statement, but I wasn’t so lucky.

  I continued to cycle through the animal hybrids. It was mind-boggling how the developers managed to put so much detail into each alteration. I’d never seen such beasts living, but somehow, someway, they felt right.

  In the middle of spitting venom from the snakeman option called a Slither Hybrid, I noticed that my stats had changed dramatically from the cheetah form.

  After playing around a bit, it appeared that each Hybrid was unique and started with a different set of base stats, with no extra points to distribute.

  The Cheetah Hybrid had six points in Speed but only two in Strength. The turtle one had five points in willpower but negative one in Speed. I added up their stats to see if there was any advantage one Hybrid had over the next. I didn’t go through the whole list, but fairly quickly, I saw the pattern. It appeared that no matter what Hybrid option I selected, they each had a total of eighteen statistics pre-assigned in different configurations, with zero bonus stats to distribute. That was two less than the Human, including their four bonus advancement points, making the human the winner in the statistics department. I had to admit it. I liked the idea of bonus points to customize with, although it was scary to think that I might place them in the wrong spot and regret it later.

  The Hybrid race was made for people to simply jump into the game without doing much research. That was me in a nutshell.

  Before settling on my choice, something else caught my eye. It was under racial traits. “Paws and Claws: Hybrids cannot use standard weapons.”

  “Ahh.” That explained why the Cheetah Hybrid had a claw attack, and the Lizard Hybrid had a tail whip, which could apparently knock down a target.