Caitlyn is digging shallow holes in the sand while I blast the ruin beetles that scurry out in a panic. I’ve seen other contestants try different techniques of farming. Most were driven mad, trying to steal whatever they could around town and sell it off for a profit, but had no luck because the townspeople are used to the ritual at this point.
I’m grateful to have had Caitlyn’s help ever since I figured out how to get the six-shooter to fire, but I’m especially grateful today. The Game Start rules do not allow the contestant to know what score will keep them from having to enter the open-world. So my best shot is to rack up as many points as I can, and because of this, Caitlyn has never left my side. Even just hours from the ceremony.
By afternoon, even with constant breaks, we are exhausted. Caitlyn takes a squat on a nearby patch of ground that’s shaded by a tree so dead it has no bark, sticking out of the ground as though an upside-down chicken foot, complete with three skyward toes, the fourth pointing west, and the rest of the large bird somehow buried underneath. I follow suit and sit cross-legged, leaning my back up against its trunk and stare out into the open.
There’s a slight breeze. It’s sunny, with few clouds. With time closing in on my turn, I can’t help but take everything in. In the distance, a green wall can be seen, barely visible as a slight hue over the rest of everything else, reaching up until it blends in with the blues and whites around the sun. The burnt purple horizon changes colors, from a far-off crimson, to a golden orange, until finally a flat sand, grocery sack brown beneath our legs. The crimson area in the distance is curious. Though I’ve never walked out that close to it, even from here, you can see the small specks of lime green, probably oozing out of the earth if you got that close to see it. Radioactive maybe. Or some kind of deterrent, meant to keep us from walking out there since it’s the closest to the tall green wall. The golden orange—half-dessert half-wasteland—which stretches towards us from there, steams like a cooking pot of soup, only its dry, miles wide, and the steam is big enough to blur the entire horizon.
“You think they’re telling the truth about out there,” Caitlyn asks. I turn to her. She looks somewhat relaxed, her hair gently catching the breeze. But her face is serious, eyebrows low, eyes fixated somewhere far out into the open.
I take in a breath. “I don’t know,” I say, letting it out. And I really don’t. The books we were brought up on—the ones in the library, school, or the few manuals we have access to in our kits, all of them—don’t tell us much. Really, they don’t tell us anything. The only worth-while detail is a quote from the CEO of Gen Realm Systems Incorporated, taken just before that operating system was implemented across the world in the year 2101. “Virtual Reality couldn’t answer the problem. And the problem was simple. Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die. Gen Realm Systems fixed that. Virtual Reality puts heaven in front of your eyes. Genuine Reality puts heaven in your neighborhood.” Even this quote can be misleading, because, really, all it tells us is when the operating system we still currently use went live worldwide. All of these resources make it seem as though we are part of a larger community that’s somehow survived something disastrous in the past, but give no details of the disaster. The only reason the townsfolk know about the player-characters and non-player characters, essentially who we are, is because the information somehow spreads around each generation. Who knows where it comes from. Some suspect the mayor, but we’ve had others. He’s just the latest in a string of them that take on the role.
“Never seen one come back is all,” Caitlyn says, her eyes dropping. She means the kids in the Game Start Screen. We aren’t even sure where the kid goes. Once the ceremony is over, our police walk the person out to the gate, but then return to the assembly themselves. Nobody even watches the kid. By the time we’re allowed to leave the assembly, even if you go out there and look, there are just shoe tracks left in the sand. I’ve looked each year for the past five years now. The tracks were all different. Different directions, that is. But each went out, far out, up until the place where I Long Hog Rampage at least. And even then, you can see the tracks heading out towards that toxic crimson wasteland near the green wall.
“Actually, there was one that came back,” I say, remembering. “But only one. And I only ever heard about it.” That part about me only ever hearing about it is true. So I’m hesitant to tell Caitlyn the story, being that it is merely hear say. Also, it apparently happened a very long time ago, when the whole ritual originally began. I turn to Caitlyn, who is surprised herself, and can tell she wants to hear it. So I speak.
It was one of the elderly, old Mr. Hambrick, who told me one day. He said that it had happened so long ago, that somebody else originally told him when he was about our age. Makes sense, given that the ritual itself began at least decades ago, and the story had to have passed down through at least two generations. He told me about how it all started, how it was all different back then, when it started. There wasn’t an official assembly like we have now, and instead of just one person chosen, back then, almost all the kids in the town had to go.
Remembering back that long, when Mr. Hambrick was just a kid, he said that he thought it was one of those random guests on a daytime television show that introduced him, and simultaneously, the whole town to the ritual. Before then, nobody had even heard of the idea. But the day the commercial first aired in the neighborhood, he said he could tell that people were already taking sides about it. One day, on his way back from school, old woman Mrs. Granite—dead now—let it slip that she wouldn’t let her grand kids participate if it was the last thing she’d do.
“Think they can just fly a few commercials into this town—from out yonder,” he said she pointed somewhere off in the distance, “and expect this old lady to just agree.” She was checking her mail, and after having reached into the metal bucket and found nothing in it, pulled her arm back out. Mr. Hambrick wasn’t even sure if she was talking to him, per say. He said it was one of those vague encounters where the person talking could have easily been mistaken for talking into an earpiece you didn’t see, or to someone crouched behind the fence or something. He noticed neither, but still decided that the words were unintended for his ears, and casually began making a half-circle around her and the place where her mailbox met the road, out onto the street.
But before he’d made it back to the sidewalk, completing the pattern, her shadow—stretched out onto the pavement—moved abruptly in the bright afternoon daylight.
“Yeah, I said it,” he said she blurted out. He turned, and as he placed another foot in front of the other, he saw that her presence, the part he’d just ignored and walked around, and this new one—direct and now staring at him—had collided and reshaped into somebody who wanted to say one last thing. He said her eyes and eyebrows were, at that moment, sun-strained, glistening mad under seventy-year-old eyelashes, and her salt and pepper features and creaky posture suggested the wisdom she then possessed came from a place that had more to do with time, and the many things that uniquely fit into it during one’s lifetime. “Don’t you go following the rest of these kids, ya hear,” he said she said to him, “and get yourself mixed up in something you know nothing about.”
He said that was the first opinion he’d heard about the Game Start Screen, though it was called something different back then, and though he hadn’t seen the commercial himself yet. The normal thing to do, then, he said, was to ignore this comment. At that time, he could count—on more than one hand—how many rumors around town had lead to even bigger rumors, like some community-wide game of phone, where the thing that happened itself was somehow transformed into some other thing, and had, like a small controlled backyard fire, briefly blazed around town until there was nothing left but a tiny pile of burnt leaves. And he gave examples. For instance, that time he said Mrs. Baker—a middle aged woman back then—slipped and broke her nose in her kitchen, but everybody was circulating a story about how her husband had given her that purple mark under her eye, and her children had to be taken out of school for a week before the police department’s investigation finally concluded that her friend, Mrs. Calloway, simply misheard her on the phone when she’d said ‘life was beating me up’. Mrs. Calloway thought she’d said, ‘Ike was beating me up’. Ike was short for Mrs. Baker’s husband, Isaac. Or that time everyone thought the mayor—a different mayor at that time—had severely over budgeted the town’s account for expensive gifts and lavish travel expenses for his own family, and it turned out that one of his staff members—hand raised to the sky and all that jazz—had merely added an extra zero where there ought not have been.
Mr. Hambrick said that in his time as a kid, that our town was nosy. Is still nosy. He’d long before brought it up to himself, and kept it there, that this observation was not due, in any large capacity, to people’s natural affinity towards that proverbial phrase, ‘leave no stone unturned’, as they say. But that anyone actually watching their local news channel need only to do so for a week before suspecting, with natural effortlessness, that most stones have been checked meticulously, thoroughly, and completely, before.
He said the fact is that our town was lonely, and had been long before he’d ever arrived on the scene weighing seven pounds five ounces.
He said he smiled at old woman Mrs. Granite in response, a common courtesy you gave if, in fact, you have no idea what one is talking about, and more importantly, if one has no desire to play telephone with people’s living rooms, or people’s offices, which is what he automatically assumed her comment was about. For he was the tender age of a high school freshman, then, and among the many accomplishments of an adolescent at that age, in his mind he said, was the great achievement of minding one’s own business.
He walked on a few more blocks, and a few more years, and by the time he’d made it home, found that what he thought would only amount to a small brief backyard fire had burst into a full-scale inferno, the likes of which our town had never seen before. The ritual, as it turned out, was not only the talk of the town, but had been taken up by the mayor in an official capacity, as a viable option upon graduating high school. Hired representatives from some faraway place that nobody had ever heard of were suddenly coming over the horizon, and like one of those traveling quick-assembled carnivals, moved into our town, and had set up for operation.
The first booth, he said, was assembled, so to speak, in the high school. Some day within his senior year, during a planned lull in his fifth period studies, a special kind of career counselor cheerfully filed into his classroom, and conducted, after setting up a desk with papers, a survey in anticipation of his post-graduation plans. He said you’d stand for ten minutes or so, until the line shrank enough such that you were at the front. A pen is handed to you, and you must make the decision to either mark the box labeled yes, or mark the box labeled no. For the people who marked yes, this became known as the beginning of ‘the track’, a term which is still used to this day for the walk that each contestant makes after the Game Start Screen. The place where I saw those footsteps.
Anyways, he said back then, after checking a box, you waited. The papers were shuffled around town to different organizations, which separated out the kids who marked yes versus the kids who marked no, until there was a single list to work from. The school and the city then provided this network of organizations all of your information, so as to create a profile of you, complete with your birth certificate, grades in school, and the many extracurriculars you had been involved in up to the point when you elected to join the program. When the creation of your profile was done, they’d send this packet of information back over the horizon, to some database, or some building with over twenty floors where people with lab coats walk around all day with clipboards. He said he was saying this detail because no one really knew for sure where all that information was sent to, exactly. There were rumors, of course, but none that were proven true. All he knew was that when you asked one of the administrators of the program questions like, ‘where did you all come from’, or ‘where do our profiles go’, the response that was always given was the same. Headquarters.
Stolen story; please report.
Once your profile was registered, and ‘headquarters’ had sent word back that the next steps could be taken, the real fun began. He was being sarcastic here. Kids were broken up into groups and shipped out at different intervals throughout the summer. He said he watched, in his remaining high school years, as droves of kids were collected and transported each summer, over the horizon, most never to be seen again. In a town where, historically, no kids had ever grown up and gone on to leave, he said he was first skeptical of this newly arrived program, and that was why he chose to mark his box no and never went. Where did all those kids go? What happened to them?
One year he got an answer. A cohort of high school graduates had just been relocated out of the town, and as always, the parents of those kids wept as they waved goodbye to the tinted windows of one of those fancy corporate super buses, of which the volunteering kids had just boarded some fifteen minutes prior. This had become a standard tradition by the parents ever since they’d found out about the non-disclosure agreement their children had been required to sign before being allowed to board the bus.
He said Mrs. Johnson, a mother who lived two streets over from his house, had cornered her daughter on the afternoon before she was to leave, and forced her to hand the non-disclosure agreement over. She, Mrs. Johnson that is, couldn’t prevent her daughter from leaving, but that didn’t stop her from almost memorizing the agreement word for word and sharing the details with her neighbors.
The agreement, in sum, was that the kids were, from that moment on, prohibited from contacting anyone back in town, including their own family members, for any reason whatsoever. This, the small print at the bottom of the page had read, was a lifetime contract. Please sign here.
And they in fact didn’t see or hear from any of them, ever. That is, until the winter of his junior year.
He said one day it was snowing, and the flurry was coming down so hard that it made it nearly impossible to see anything past five feet. Most businesses had shut down for the day, and by nightfall, the town had closed its doors for good, intending to wait out the storm. The roads were bare, except for the string of light poles that dotted about, illuminating the packed snow sheets that rendered everything white. Rooftops were white, trees were white, front lawns were white, and the roads, which were normally cement colored with yellow dash lines during the warmer parts of the year, were now completely covered with a thick layer of white powder, which rolled and shifted in the wind like an ocean of white sand. When trying to look about, the blackness of the night sky appeared as an obscure background, replaced in front with a constant drizzle of white dust, which acted as a white curtain, covering your view of the road with so much opacity that only your next-door neighbor’s house was distinguishable as some vague caricature of a square gingerbread house, and in the distance, all the dark white beyond.
He said Judy, the hardware store owner’s daughter, said she saw the kid first while randomly looking out of her family room window. She said it didn’t seem odd, in the beginning. Could have been a small snowy riptide, you know the way wind currents collide and all that, and become a temporary miniature snow tornado, dancing on the road until its strength wears out, dissipating and settling into the whiteness like everything else. Only it didn’t dissipate. The thing stumbled a few steps, then fell to the ground in a lump that looked awfully like something alive. He said she gasped, thinking it was a large animal, and ran to the fireplace to tell her family members. When they returned to the window together, it was up and moving again, lunging, step by step, down the road, as some heap of white human-ish motion.
The hardware store owner, Mr. Jim—as Mr. Hambrick and all called him—rushed out into the storm and brought the person inside, and after he’d managed to ruffle all of the loose snow off the person, found that the person was actually Mrs. Johnson’s daughter, come back into town from over the horizon, by some means that only she and God knew at that moment.
“My God kid,” he had said. “How did you get back here?” But Mrs. Johnson’s daughter didn’t answer then. She couldn’t. The journey had clearly taken everything out of her, and at the first sense of warmth from the fireplace, had passed out from shear exhaustion.
He said over the next few days, despite the storm, the information trickled out around town like the slow drip of a cracked water faucet, leaking constantly and gradually, until the sink was full, and they all knew the whole story.
Essentially, Mrs. Johnson’s daughter had thought that coming back was going to be easy. But then she ran into the Dead Zone and saw the mutants. People who used to be people a long time ago. People, or things now, that the town had only ever heard rumors about but never actually had ever seen firsthand. And then there were the wild animals. Some that were taught about in our biology classes locally, which survived from the Old World. Dogs, cats, boars, lions, bears, to name a few. But then there were others nobody had ever even dreamed of describing. Others that only came into existence after what our town calls the Second Big Bang. Others that, even if our local scientists had access to, nobody would dare risking life or injury to study, in environments that nobody could survive. Environments that nobody, in fact, had survived, until her.
She’d ran and ran, over a number of days she still couldn’t remember, until her legs had just about given up on her, and that’s when she said she’d made it to the edge of town, and saw the first light pole down the street, and a snow-covered Mr. Jim’s house.
As she lay there, back in her bed at Mrs. Johnson’s house, her family members gazed at all of her injuries. Both her eyes were purpled, lips cracked and bloodied, and one of her arms was readjusted back into its socket and wrapped in a cast by Dr. Hawthorne, who’d rushed over through the snow the moment he’d received the frantic phone call. He thought he’d brought enough bandages the first time, but soon realized he would need many more, and made a couple more back-and-forth trips to transport the necessary amount of wrap to cover the large gash she had on her stomach, which curled around her torso and around to her back so gruesomely that it looked as though she’d been filleted like a fish.
“Lost a lot of blood,” Dr. Hawthorne had said, holding his winter hat with both hands as though he were at a funeral. “But she should recover, in due time.” He was amazed, as everyone was, that she didn’t lose any of her organs along the way. He would later detail that she likely held some of them inside of her during the trek. He paused here, looking at his work, and everybody who was in the room said he kept muttering to himself, “you brave, brave little girl.” Once he’d packed his medical bag, he turned back towards the bed. “One more thing,” he had said, insisting with a somber tone that he had one more question to ask. He was the one who asked most of the questions, mainly because the context would go on to help him understand the type of medical treatment necessary to keep her alive. “If all that was in the Dead Zone, what was in the place where they took you?”
At this, I looked back at Caitlyn, and a shiver ran down my spine, because this was now the place I was likely to go, after my own ceremony.
“What did he say he heard?” Caitlyn asked, eager to know.
I shook my head. Then told her the bad news.
Mr. Hambrick had finished his story without giving any of these details. Not because he didn’t know, but because no one ever knew. No one ever found out. He said, in that same moment she was asked, Mrs. Johnson’s daughter took a deep breath, and all she could muster was, “they can edit.”
“What?” the doctor asked. But when he looked at her again, her eyes grew wide as they shifted towards the ceiling and the picture of the place she had originally ran from slowly crept back into her mind before she fell asleep.
“Where did they take you kids?!” the doctor had asked again, frantic and sounding more eager this time for an answer. “What is going on over there?!” But it was too late. She had already fallen asleep. The next morning she was dead.
The last thing anyone remembers is how the family was treated afterwards. At the funeral, Mrs. Johnson could be heard wailing, “I just want her to be my baby again!” and “my sweet, sweet, baby girl!”
In the weeks and months after the funeral, people began treating the Johnson house like the town’s local tourist destination. Families walked by the front yard as though it were a museum, and pointed and whispered until the rumor mill was ablaze with a hundred different theories about the place where she had come from. Some parents, of course, used the whole ordeal as a deterrent for their own kids to join, essentially saying “see what can happen to you if you sign up.” Other parents scoffed at the fear mongering, insisting that the program was still the best opportunity any kid had at a life that was better than their own. Naturally, the mayor took after the parents in this latter category, doubling down on his initial efforts, and insisting, in the way only a politician can insist, that this one example was an anomaly. An out-liar. A mistake, which had nothing to do with the overwhelming majority of the rest of the cases, which is why, this many years later, it is what it has become to this day: an entire assembled ceremony where one person is chosen.
When I’m finished telling her the story, Caitlyn takes a deep breath, and lets it out with a sigh.
In the next moment, her eyes flicker, like there is a flash of light in them. “You remember when we first saw the footsteps?” she says. My mind reaches back to when I was a little girl. I wasn’t actually with Caitlyn. Or at least I don’t remember her there. I think she just means when we all first saw it. We, as in, those of us who grow up in this town, where everyone eventually has this experience, alone or not. “Lord,” she says. “I was nine. My brother told me, but I didn’t believe it. And then the first sight, and the way it first made you feel. Like really feel.”
She squints at the ground, and I can’t quite discern what she’s looking at, but it must turn out to be funny, because she suddenly burst out into laughter.
“And there was this boy, Jerry, who spat out all of the milk his mom gave him after the ceremony.” She places both her hands over her nose and mouth, and I can see her cheeks turn pink. “I couldn’t tell if it was just milk or not.”
When she looks over at me, I widen my lips a bit to make a closed smile. The story, the sudden fondness of it, possibly her first crush, makes me feel warm.
She sighs, smiling, looking, but not looking. “He got so tall,” she says blankly.
The comment rushes back a memory for me. Of when I was growing up. A sort of tradition in my house. My father would always take our measurements each year, Petey and I, and see how much we’d grown. They were great times, being with my family, celebrating life.
But something else grew out of that experience. Something odd. Once I became old enough to attend high school, in those awkward, catty days, when I was beginning to learn to look at myself, I noticed something that, for the first time, frightened me. I don’t mean I was a little scared, like the times Petey spooks me with a costume mask when I come out of the bathroom. I mean really frightened. To my core.
I’d come home from school and randomly wanted to check the markings my father had made of our growth over the years. We’d taken a year off and hadn’t measured in a while. The notches were along the wall just outside the frame of the kitchen door. But when I walked up to the thing, and my eyes landed on the last few years of indentations from pencil, I noticed something I hadn’t noticed before. Perhaps, and it occurred to me this way, something maybe I hadn’t been able to notice before. And the thought, coupled with what I was seeing, brought me to my knees. The entire column of penciled grooves was somehow outlined in a sort of warped-ness. Like this paint, or this section of the wall or door, or this particular sliver of the house was—and this is what was so difficult to put my finger on—somehow, maybe some previous day, maybe even multiple times, edited somehow.
I couldn’t wrap my head around it. It didn’t make any sense. For the most part, our town is strictly applied as what’s called a Non-Destructible Environment. This means that even if player-characters roam here and create havoc, there wouldn’t be much damage they could do, infrastructure-wise. Buildings and items and such, in the main, aren’t allowed to be damaged or destroyed. And even if one of us, a resident NPC, wanted to make changes, we’d have to go through the economy like everybody else. Hire an architect, then a contractor, and wait for the construction company to complete its work. Light alterations, even on your own home, and even if you’re a carpenter yourself, is not allowed. This ensures that our town, in the closed-world, is functioning as it’s supposed to be functioning. A performative city, perpetually stunted in the background of the game.
The only exception to this that I’ve seen is the spot I’m now staring at. There, in the fence that forms a perimeter surrounding the entire town, is a gap as wide as a house. That’s where it happened. At least, where they’ve told me it happened. How my mother got injured. Player characters rushed the city and tore straight through the fence. Apparently, the Mayor was allowed to issue an emergency ordinance for the entire town, something that hadn’t happened before or since, changing the rules of engagement from a no PvP Zone to a city-wide Capture-The-Flag emergency. A few say he was just doing his job the best he could, but most agree that it was the wrong move. Should’ve changed it to an all out assault mode or something else. Because the player characters left with more loot than they could carry—our entire reserve of sun coins, every weapon and ammunition at our best weapons shop, Blue’s Nano-metal Store, and the list goes on. They didn’t come to capture our town. It was a raid. And all that was left was that hole in the fence and a whole lot of dirt in between. Charlotte used to joke that, from here, it looks like a giant tried to lick the town and took a chunk right out of the fence.
Anyways, other than that fence being damaged, every building was structurally sound. And that’s the only evidence I’ve seen of anyone changing anything about this town without hiring a construction worker. Which is why I found it so odd that one day in my house, that someone, or something, seemingly had edited the door frame where my father carved growth notches.
I slowly hear Caitlyn’s voice again. “And that’s when he finally asked me out.” she says.
I squint my eyes. “Wait, who?” I say. I wasn’t listening to her.
“Jerry.” She looks at me like, who else could I be talking about. Then continues.
“He waited so long. But when I came out of the cafeteria, and this was what I thought did it—I slowed down. Pretended to fiddle with my kit or something.”
She stops abruptly. Probably noticing me looking back out into the open. The breeze whistles softly somewhere, and I have to pull a piece of hair away from my face to keep from eating it.
“You ready to head there?” she says softly, noticing, finally, all my concern. She means the town hall, where all of the assemblies take place.
I don’t answer. I take a moment to breath. In the small silence, I can hear the tiny chimes from my kit, indicating how many people are still joining into my live feed, and it sounds massive. Constant, unending, repetitive bells, tell me what time it is. I want to run away, but instead, I just look back at Caitlyn. I don’t even have any tears left. I’ve cried all year leading up to this moment. I just get up, dust myself off, and we begin walking back into town.