by Casey White
Also, the floor beneath his feet wasn’t carpeted. It was hard and cool. And...it was stone. He was standing on stone.
Hand shaking, Julian bent down to feel the stone, hoping his fingers would return a different sensory input than his feet. They didn’t. There was, in fact, stone beneath his fingers. In his bedroom.
In the distance, he could hear the gentle drip of water into a pool, and air rushing past something.
“Oh,” Julian said. “I get it. I’m having a nervous breakdown.” The words were supposed to be calm and reassuring, saying something patently absurd to mitigate the absolute insanity of his surroundings. Unfortunately, they came out as a kind of panicked squeak. They also didn’t do anything to alleviate the hallucination.
“Okay. I’m in my bedroom, right? So that means that I need to take three steps and I’ll be at my bed. Then I’ll bang my shins on it.” Julian nodded in the darkness and took a step. Then another. Then a third. Sweat beaded his brow as he took a fourth. Then a fifth. Still no bed. Still nothing barring his movement.
Julian’s hands were shaking now, and his heart was beating like a machine gun. Was he in his bedroom? For all he knew he’d snapped so badly he’d ran from his apartment and was now in the street.
For all he knew, he was blind now.
Barely able to keep his hands steady, Julian reached into his pocket for his phone. He tapped the screen. The sudden flash of light was blinding, and the shock merged with his trembling hands to cause his phone to tumble from his grip.
It landed at an angle, half resting on something on the floor. Julian had to blink a few times to clear his vision.
The phone was bright enough to illuminate his surroundings, which wasn’t hard given how minimal they were. He was in a cave that had been partially worked by human hands, given a smooth and level floor. If he’d taken another step, he would have banged into something - a stone slab about the height of his waist and nearly three times that long. More of a table, really. The phone’s light threw shadows from the carvings in the side of the slab, and while none of them were recognizable as anything Julian had seen before, they had a repetitive quality that tugged at his memory.
It looked like an altar.
“I’m...dead?” Julian asked nothing.
It was no surprise when the only response was the distant drip of water.
It made a kind of sense to him. He’d been so tense he’d had a stroke or heart attack. Died instantly. Ended up...here. Heaven or hell’s waiting room. It was hard to not regret a life of atheism now that he was faced with the final destination and the inarguable fact that it was not, in fact, oblivion. That after death, there was still a him to think.
And...carry a cell phone.
How’d the old saying go? “You can’t take it with you.” Julian wasn’t sure of much, but if there was an afterlife, he doubted they had changed that particular policy to make exceptions for cell phones. Or pants, for that matter, yet he was still wearing his jeans. He patted his pockets. Car keys were in there as well, and his wallet. The very definition of worldly goods. The AREVE system was in the other pocket, although Julian didn’t think that was definitive proof of being alive. Any version of heaven he could imagine featured his baby, and any version of hell would involve using it to torment him somehow. But the rest...that was easier to believe wasn’t something you could take to the afterlife.
“Okay, so not dead. I guess we’re back to - shit!”
The last swear came from the light of his cellphone dimming as it started to go into sleep mode. Julian half lunged for it, a terrified vision of being unable to find it in the inky darkness gripping his imagination. He tapped the screen before it could go dark, and the light returned to its normal levels.
Breathing a sigh of relief, he picked it up, and the stone that it had landed on came with the phone.
He turned the phone over. The stone wasn’t some ordinary rock. It looked like an uncut golden gemstone. What was the term for it again? A citrine, that was it. It was a citrine so large, it almost covered the entire back of his phone.
His heartbeat didn’t slow down, but panic was starting to change to excitement. He didn’t know the value of a citrine, but one this large had to be worth something. Enough to at least pay off his cellphone bill and put some gas in his tank, get back on the road, without selling the console.
“Except you’re insane, remember? You’re hallucinating this.”
It was harder and harder to convince himself of that, however. He was now certain he hadn’t died and gone somewhere else. He’d never heard of someone hallucinating this completely and coherently before. If it was a hallucination, it was a remarkably dull one. He expected to see a caterpillar smoking weed or bleeding eyes on the wall or spiders crawling out of his asshole or something. Not a rather boring cave with an ominous altar and a gem that was stuck to his phone.
Stuck firmly to his phone, he soon discovered. When he tried to pull it off, it didn’t move in the slightest. He started tugging as hard as he dared, but that just made his phone creak ominously. He stopped before he broke it.
“Okay, Julian. Time to start applying logic here. Use that brain of yours.”
The idea that he was hallucinating couldn’t be ignored. If that was the case, the smartest thing to do would be to sit still until someone noticed he was missing and came looking. Which would be in seven days, when he was evicted. Before the depressing reality of that thought could settle in, Julian focused himself on the more practical side effect of that - namely, that he’d have died by dehydration in that much time. So sitting still wasn’t an option. He’d have to risk walking.
“You can move,” he said after a moment’s thought. If he was in his apartment, he’d closed the door. So, as long as he made no motion to open a door, he’d be unable to leave. If he wasn’t in his apartment...well, if he wasn’t in his apartment, he had no idea if he was somewhere safe or not, so moving was as safe as not moving.
But first, there was one thing to try. He put the phone and gemstone in his pocket and cupped his hands to his mouth. “Help!”
The sound echoed through the cave. He repeated the shout, over and over, until his throat was hoarse. Then he sat down on the floor and took deep breaths.
One hour. He’d give it one hour. If he was outside and somewhere dangerous, like a street, someone was already nearby and realized he was either blind or insane and trying to help him. If he was inside his apartment, the cheap walls meant one of his neighbors would have heard him and eventually called the cops to get him to shut up if for no other reason.
They’d come and take him away. He’d have to notice that, right?
All he had to do was sit for an hour. In pitch darkness.
He didn’t make it five seconds before pulling his phone back out of his pocket. It stuck when he did, the rough gem catching on the fabric, and he heard something tear when it pulled loose. He breathed a sigh of relief when the light came back on.
Darkness and silence with still air was a terrible combination. His brain had already begun to tell him he was floating in some kind of empty void, that the only real matter was the small square of rock beneath him. Seeing the walls around him, even if they were the product of a hallucination, was better than nothing.
For the first time, the idea in the back of his mind - that he was having a portal fantasy adventure, or that he’d wandered into an isekai story - pushed itself to the forefront of his mind. He pushed it right back to the back where it belonged. Real people didn’t have magical adventures in other worlds. Real people who believed that went crazy. Besides, it definitely couldn’t be an isekai, because no one had hit him with a truck.
Trying to distract himself, he looked at the phone. Even if he couldn’t get data, he had some offline games on here he could play to pass the time until the cops arrived.
No luck there. It was showing him a white screen, with only the word “Syncing” sprawled across it, and a progress bar that showed zero point thre
e percent.
“What the hell are you syncing to?” he asked his phone. It did not respond. He tried pressing the home button, to no response. He tried swiping in various directions, also to no effect. He pressed down the power button to initialize a hard reset...and the screen didn’t even flicker.
“Damnit,” he muttered, looking more closely. Unfortunately, that didn’t give him any useful information. Across the top was the time, which informed him it was 29:73 PAM, and the power bar, which told him he was at one thousand and twelve percent power. And the white background wasn’t completely blank. There were symbols on it, scrolling past like Matrix code, in a slightly darker shade of white, almost unnoticeable unless you were paying attention.
Symbols that almost perfectly matched the ones on the altar.
This was helpful, in that it let him know the phone wouldn’t be of any help.
He laid back on the cold floor and closed his eyes. The sensation of closed eyes and the warmth of the phone and the coolness of the gemstone in his hand helped make this feel less like he was going insane. If he’d had a shirt, he would have balled it up under his head for a pillow. As it was, he had to just rest his skull on the stone.
It was hardly comfortable. But the panic of earlier combined with the anxiety over his finances falling apart had been exhausting.
He didn’t know how long it took - his phone told him it was GA:62 APM last he checked it, and the syncing bar had progressed to a whopping one point three percent - but at some point, he lost track of the passage of time.
It wasn’t sleep. He was too frightened and uncomfortable for that to happen. But when he next looked at the phone, it took his eyes a moment to focus, and the syncing bar was up to double digits. On top of that, his everything ached enough to tell him he’d been laying on the stone for a long time. Long enough help should have arrived, and certainly long enough that if he was out on the streets he would have been noticed or run over by now.
Which meant he had to still be in his apartment, and no one had heard him.
Or...he hadn’t gone insane.
There was a certain banality to his surroundings that was helping to abate the fear. The stone walls weren’t shifting, the altar’s symbols hadn’t changed, there was nothing moving in here. The only sound was silence. Whatever had been dripping had stopped, and the wind outside had died down.
Julian stood up, his muscles protesting the motion, but it was time to stop wallowing and to start moving. Holding his phone screen outward, since he couldn’t turn the flashlight on, he turned around towards the source of the wind.
The path leading towards it was less worked than the area he was in. A natural cave. He started to walk in that direction. It had to be safe, he reasoned. There was no other way in and out of the room, and someone had come in here at some point to build that altar. He’d probably end up moonwalking or pacing in a circle or walking into a wall without moving.
He’d look like a moron, but at least he’d survive.
“And if that doesn’t sum up my life,” Julian muttered, “then I don’t know what does.”
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