Chapter 4: Free Cell

Six months.

The words continued to echo in Ash’s head. Without completing his first day in afterlife, he would already lose the next six months to a prison sentence. He kicked himself for not picking a more stable avatar choice.

While the Sheriff Ogden processed police paperwork, Ash looked at his hands. He turned over his hands, looking at his palms. The experience of being in a new body challenged him. Ash could control these hands as easily as his own in the real world, but something remained uncanny about them. His fingers traced the foreign lines on his palms.

He heard the sheriff’s pen click.

“Alright, Casper. Everything seems to be in order. In the old world, I would take your fingerprints and put them in our database, but since we’ve brought ourselves to the brink of destruction, these dinky little notes will have to serve just as well.” The sheriff rose from his spot, pushing his chair backward with a high-pitched squeal.

He opened a filing cabinet behind his desk and slipped the paperwork into place. Then, with bureaucratic efficiency, he tied the small canvas bag that rested on his desk with a small strand of room and a numbered tag.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Once you’ve served your time, you’ll get your things back.”

He stored the canvas bag into one of the gym lockers that lined the wall. Some of the lockers had their doors ripped or rusted from its hinges. In those lockers, a few items of police equipment hung neatly: a riot helmet, a bullet-proof vest, a few boxes of ammunition, and a rifle with a shoulder strap.

That canvas bag held most of Casper’s belongings, or, at least, almost all of the things on his person. When they entered the station, the sheriff patted him down and took everything from his pockets. The only thing he missed were the five-playing cards in the chest pocket of his sleeveless leather jacket and a pair of roughly knit gloves, which he didn’t so much miss as much as allowed Casper to keep them.

“Let’s go,” the sheriff said, grabbing Casper’s arm.

As they walked to the back room, the sound of keys jingling filled the silence. Ash could not stop himself from worrying about the next few months. The sheriff would toss him into a cell, and no one would come to save him. Even if someone did come to him, he wasn’t sure if he would recognize them. Only brief flashes of memory made sense of this new world.

Ash still felt the intense emotions that struck him when he first laid eyes upon the sheriff. Ash knew that Casper had a deep connection to the man. When the sheriff entered the bar, Ash was hit with a memory fragment: the blurry faces of his mother and father around a wooden table and the sheriff entering the room for dinner. At that time, the sheriff had the lean body of his youth, his face radiated with a softness now lost to the stresses of work and weather. Ash heard the sound of Casper’s father laughing with the sheriff, laughing so hard his father almost fell from his chair. Ash knew that Casper held this memory in high regard. He felt its happy innocence. Since that day, however, the difficulties of the last six months -- the death of his parents, the break-up with Janet, the night of the propane tank -- embittered that cocktail of happiness.

The sheriff unlocked the door to the backroom. Ash entered, assessing the floor-to-ceiling jail cells that lined the room. They remained in relatively good shape despite these post-apocalyptic years.

Sheriff unlocked one of the cells and pushed Casper into it.

“Welcome to your new home,” the sheriff said, slamming the door shut. “I’m going to continue my rounds, but I’ll be back to ladle out dinner. Be sure to say ‘hello’ to your cellmate.” The sheriff spoke with a seriousness that betrayed the difficulty of his predicament. The sheriff exited the cellblock.

The jail cell only contained a bedroll for sleep and a bucket for waste. Worse still, the cell made Ash feel incredibly exposed. Of the four walls that surrounded him, only one had the solidity of bricks. The other three walls were merely metal bars.

As his eyes scanned the room, he noticed an older man in the dark corner of the neighbouring cell. The man appeared to be in his mid-40s and in rough shape.

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“What’s your SPECIAL?” the man muttered.

“What?”

“Your SPECIAL. You know? Strength, Perception…?”

“Oh,” Ash said. He turned his mind inward, trying to pull up his stats from memories. He could conjure the entirety of his avatar’s profile. While a regular video game required some sort of graphical interface or menu to see his stats, Ash had an intimate and immediate knowledge of them with the slightest tilt of his consciousness.

“Strength: 5, Perception: 5, Endurance: 7…”

“Thank goodness!” the man beside him shouted. He shot up from his bedroll and approached the bars between their cells. “You don’t know how happy it is to meet another human.”

“What do you mean?” stuttered Ash.

“You’re dead, right?”

“Yeah, I got hit by a transport truck. Two weeks before my twenty-first birthday.”

“Ah, that’s rough. Better than me though. I worked as Machine Overseer, fixing glitches with the machinery. One day, one of them turned on me. Splat!” the man shouted as he clapped his hands together.

Ash thought about the times he visited the factories in the Labour District, the factories his brother now worked in.

“Luckily for me, after ten years of service, the company added a data back-up as part of my medical benefits.”

“How long have you been in-game?” Ash asked.

“Oh, that’s a good question. Maybe, uh, five years.”

“Five years!”

“It was fun for the first year or so, but then it got boring.”

“When will you exit the game?” Ash asked his fellow prisoner.

“No end insight for me, I’m afraid. I don’t have money to buy a new body, or any friends or family that would try to.”

“Oh,” Ash said despondently, “I don’t think my family can afford to buy a new body either, but I think they will try. It might take several years, but, maybe one day, I will return to the real world.”

“That’s nice,” the man said with a tinge of envy. “Try not to die in the meantime then.”

“What do you mean? It’s just a game. Why would it matter?”

“Just a game!” the man shouted, “Oh, man, there is so much you need to learn.” He began to pace in his cell. “It might seem as it’s just a game, it might feel like it’s just a game, but the stakes are higher than you know. I have never re-encountered a human who has died in-game. There might not be respawns. We must believe there are no respawns.” The man stopped his pacing and brought himself face-to-face with Ash. His face lit up with a genuine smile. “Well, at least, we have each other. I meet less and less humans these days. You wouldn’t believe how lonely it is once you realize everything is mere simulation.”

Ash kept quiet. He still struggled with the reality of this virtual world. He knew, deep down, everything around him was a digital construction, but it felt so real. If, by some twist of fate, he spent his life in this Post-Apocalyptic RPG and ‘woke up’ in the real world, his experience of the world would have been the same. How did he know that the real world wasn’t a simulation and he had moved into a deeper level of deception -- a simulation in a simulation.

“By the way, I’m Sander. Sander MacShannon. That’s what they used to call me. I mean, I guess, I could get people to call me that here, but I decided to roleplay these long years. In this world, they call me Lewis Hopkins.” He shrugged his shoulders.

“I’m Ash Clearly,” Ash said confidently. It felt nice to introduce himself as a human and not as the character he appeared to be. “And this character is Casper Brakes, but most people call me ‘Caz’.”

“Well, it’s nice to meet you, Caz,” Sander said with a knowing grin. They shook hands through the iron bars that kept their cells separate.

“You know,” Ash said, as he went to recline against the wall of his tiny prison, “it hasn’t even been a day for me yet. Now, I have six months to rot.”

“You’re kidding me,” Sander said. “Not even twenty-four hours, eh?” His voice contained a high degree of amusement. “We really got to bust you out of here.” He turned his back to Ash and went to the corner of his cell. He wiggled a brick out of the wall and retrieved his treasure. When Sander returned to Ash, he lifted a shiny metal spoon.

“A spoon?” Ash asked incredulously.

“Not just any spoon,” Sander said with a laugh. He spun the spoon in his hand. The handle had been sharpened to a point on the other end.

“I don’t get it,” Ash said.

“What’s your picklocking skill?”

“16.”

“Bah! You’re useless then!” Sander turned away. “I was hoping you had something a little better. Even with my near perfect Luck, I’m worried that my 25 in picklocking won’t do much. It doesn’t matter though. I need something else to help turn these locks.”

Almost by instinct, Ash begins to pat his body for something useful, forgetting that the sheriff had confiscated nearly everything. The sheriff even found the combat knife he had holstered on the interior of his boot. The only things Ash managed to find in his pockets were the rough knit gloves and the bundle of playing cards.

“The sheriff took everything else away,” Ash said sadly. “So unless you can break out of here with five playing cards, we’re out of luck.”

“Yes!” Sander reached into Ash’s cell and plucked the bundle of cards from Ash’s hands.

“I was joking,” Ash said.

“Not the cards, dummy. They’re held together by a bobby pin.” Sander gave the cards back to Ash and went to his cell door. He bent the bobby pin into an L-shape and inserted the narrow end of the spoon into the lock. He jimmied the lock until he heard a final satisfying click. “I got me a 21-leaf clover!”

Sander pushed the door his cell. He stepped into the open with his arms outstretched. “Ah! Freedom!” Despite his small frame, he exuded a cleverness and a craftiness essential for survival.

“Give me a few seconds and you’ll be out as well.”

Sander knelt in front of the keyhole of Ash’s prison lock. With the same deft skill, the lock clicked open.

“Well, Casper, it's official. You and I are fugitives.”