“Hey, he’s coming back!” Taylor said with an excited expression. Sharpe had an expectant look in his eyes as he waited for Ethan to say something.
“What — what’s going on?” Ethan asked. His voice was drowsy; it was clear he wasn’t fully awake yet.
Once he realized who he was speaking to, Ethan bolted upright and looked around. Brow furrowed, he gazed around the basement of Sharpe’s home base, trying to discern where Tera and the autocar went.
“Oh, man, he’s all disoriented,” Taylor said.
“Must have been some immersive shit,” Sharpe commented.
“Where am I?” Ethan inquired.
“The basement,” Sharpe replied. “Right where you left us.”
“No,” Ethan said in a trance-like tone. “No, no. That isn’t right. I left through the Last Stand map.”
Sharpe and Taylor looked at each other.
“I dunno what you’re talking about, but it sounds cool,” Sharpe said, smiling. “I wanna give it a try now, but I’m nervous!”
“Don’t be a pansy,” Taylor said to their host. “I’ll do it right now. Look at Ethan’s face; that’s gotta be some adventure to make a look like that.”
Ethan grew frustrated that his friends were ignoring him. “Dammit! What’s going on?” he asked. “Where the hell is Tera? Why am I back in the simulation?”
Sharpe and Taylor looked at each other again, confused. There was a hopeless expression on their faces, like they didn’t know how to answer Ethan’s questions. Or, rather, like he had asked them in another language.
“Who’s Tera?” Sharpe asked.
“Was she your girlfriend in the new adventure?” Taylor asked with a tone of teasing.
“New adventure?” Ethan asked. “Shut the fuck up and explain what’s going on!”
Sharpe started to laugh as Taylor shook her head.
“I don’t think we can do both,” she replied, chuckling.
“You know what I mean!”
“You really don’t remember?” Sharpe asked.
“I remember Tera, and leaving the kingdom of Opes, and talking in the autocar — ”
“Ah, yeah,” Sharpe started. “That must have all been part of the narrative. I gotta say, I’m impressed. I knew you’d be immersed, but not ‘where-the-hell-am-I’ immersed.”
“Narrative?” Ethan echoed. He was getting tired of asking them to elaborate; he wished they would just spit it out.
“Ethan, you’ve been inside a new simulation adventure the guys at Replication Systems cooked up,” Taylor explained. “It’s called The Rebels of Shell City — supposed to be an action-cyberpunk experience. You’ve been playing it for a couple hours now.”
“A couple hours?” Ethan repeated. “No. I was out there for over a month. Out in the real world.”
“No, Ethan,” Sharpe said. “It’s only been a couple hours. Jesus, is it really a month long in there? That’s incredible.”
“It wasn’t a simulation!” Ethan argued. “I was out there in the world. The real world. Not the one they’ve told us is waiting for us. Everything they’ve told us is a lie. There aren’t colonies on other planets or a utopia for all people. In fact — do you even know what they’re doing to us?”
“No! No spoilers!” Sharpe shouted, putting his hands over his ears like an unruly child. He turned away and squeezed his eyes shut. Ethan looked at him with bewildered eyes.
Taylor put a hand on Sharpe’s shoulder. “Don’t worry, Sharpe,” she said. “The storyline is different for everyone, at least a little bit. Ethan can’t spoil it for you. Sounds like he had a hell of a time, though.”
Ethan shook his head. “If I’ve just been playing an adventure, why can’t I remember that?” he asked.
Sharpe shrugged. Taylor, realizing she was the only one with any info, said, “It’s a new set of coding Replication Systems designed to really immerse you in the adventure. They make you forget you’re even playing an adventure or that you signed up to do so. It tries to transition the first adventure with your real life as seamlessly as possible. That’s why you can’t remember when you started playing; the transition was perfect.”
“I don’t believe it,” Ethan said, trying to push away from his friends. He put his fingers to his temples like his head was going to explode and he’d be able to hold it together. “None of this makes any sense to me. If I’ve been playing an adventure, then what happened on my nineteenth birthday? What happened on the Last Stand map?”
Taylor and Sharpe shared a confused glance for what seemed like the thousandth time that day. Ethan was growing so frustrated by the situation that he wanted to reach out and smack his friends each time they looked at each other like that. He wanted to shake them and demand they start making sense.
“What are you talking about?” Sharpe asked. His brow was still cocked in confusion.
“Ethan, our nineteenth birthday isn’t for another week,” Taylor said. “We’re still just making plans.”
Joker to the Thief
While Sharpe and Taylor were resting or playing some adventure to kill the time, Ethan was busy. He was looking for another way out of the simulation.
He started by looking for the Last Stand map, but to his surprise, couldn’t find it on any of the server directories. He even looked deep on the inner-sim web for any references to it, possibly in other languages or by a different title. Nothing turned up. He cycled through hundreds of random multiplayer maps, hoping to find one that resembled the map he had escaped through. Each program was thoroughly engaging, but none of them were the Last Stand game.
As far as he could tell, the map didn’t exist. It was as if he dreamed it up. Like someone had deleted it from not only every hard drive on the planet, but from everyone’s memories as well. It was possible that the Last Stand file was buried in the mass of unnamed, random maps and programs other people had designed, but Ethan didn’t know where to start looking. It could be disguised as an image file for all
