"All locks are decoupled, you're free to go. Safe voyage." Came the common response from traffic control. I flipped the switch for the EMF Drive and held down the button for straight Reverse. The screen showing what was directly behind me showed nothing but cold black nothingness dotted with stars, while the brightly lit, scarred, and pitted orbital skin started to fall away through the armor glass.

These slow departures and arrivals always made it seem like the orbitals or stations were moving, not me, though logically I knew the Flying Brick that was my work and home was a thing that was actually moving. Well, relatively. In space, everything is relative and everything is technically moving. Once far enough away from the orbital, I locked in the Full Reverse on the EMF Drive, so I didn't have to hold the button. The EMF Drive or Electromagnetic Field Drive was one of those very old technologies that no one fully understands. Originally designed as radiation shielding, someone way back figured out that if it was pulsed in certain patterns, it would actually move a vessel. It wasn't a strong amount of "thrust," but it served well as a Reaction Control System. Actual forms of movement have advanced considerably, and so the reasons why the EMF Drive worked were never actually found, just relegated to the general acceptance of “it works. Therefore, we use it.”

At 500 meters out, I killed the reverse momentum gain and swung the ship around. The orbital slowly slid off to the left of the armor glass as the bow came about. Once fully turned 180 degrees, I locked in the forward “thrust” and waited the ten or so minutes to make it the extra 500 meters to the safety limit. At the limit, I flipped over to the Grav Drive. There was a brief sensation of gravity shifting around me before the inertial dampeners caught in, and my ship started falling at 2.6 Gravs per second per second. At this rate, it would take about four and a half days to reach the gate. I could go faster, but my scheduled departure date was then, and until just before I arrived, the gate would be pointing at some other star on the trade routes. Those ships with their own Rift Drives could pretty much go anywhere they wanted, but for ships like the Flying Brick I was subjugated to the trade routes, shipping lines, and interstellar roads dictated by the system that managed the gate. Four days heading to the gate, about a week in transit in the Rift, and probably another three to four days approaching the next orbital to drop off the load of lead. Very exciting. I set the autopilot and watched for a full nine or ten minutes to see if the ship would correctly adjust to its course. Once we hit the next waypoint, the ship turned two degrees to the port, and dropped down to 2.5 Gravs per second per second. Satisfied that everything was working correctly, I set my tablet to alert me if anything was not going according to the program and got up to do the needful.

My life consisted of a box. A box that moved boxes from one large box to another large box around different stars. I had a cockpit, a small galley, a head or bathroom, sani-box or shower, a bunk, and a small rec room which included a set of weights and my gaming system. A small box that hauls boxes. All so very exciting.

My neuro gaming system was the only thing that truly kept me sane on these long voyages. While I had to sink a considerable amount of money into the system, it literally paid for itself every day. The AI was capable of spinning up pretty much any requested scenario or game-like environment, everything from top-down RTS to flight simulators, from first-person shooters to fantasy role-playing games. It was a completely immersive system, and its only downside was that sometimes it got a little confusing as to what was real and what was make-believe. Unfortunately, I've been on this Flying Brick for far too long.

I was on my second day in the rift, green energy mixing with other random radiant colors rippled around the space or bubble of space or whatever the hell as my ship flew through an alternative reality or something like that. I didn't really know the science behind it, and honestly, I'm not sure that the people who are way smarter than I am know the science behind it. Point being, the rift was a strange place with slightly strange physics that made going from one star system to the next take six days instead of forty plus years.

Like every other day, I woke up, used the head, cooked myself a meal, checked my heading, and ran a visual site inspection of all the sensor heads in my little box part of the ship that would alert me if something was wrong. The only break in routine from any other day was a scrubber change, which itself was simple scheduled maintenance. After which I spent an hour exercising and got cleaned up in the sani-box.

I stared at my game console, unsure of what I actually wanted to do today. I had played so many fantasy games, tactical games, first-person shooters, and real-time strategy games. I was just pretty much out of ideas. Still, the only option I actually had was to read a book, stare out the port into the unnerving rift, or play a game. I've lived 1000 lives in games. It would not be incorrect to say I spent possibly too much time in there, but the other option was waiting. Waiting for the next port, waiting for the next port after that, and waiting for the next port after that.

It has been several years on the Flying Brick, and as much as I wanted to see people, as soon as I got onto the actual orbitals, I just kind of shut down. I'm too introverted to be around a crowded station or planet, and possibly not introverted enough to stay all alone on this damn ship. I sat my ass down in my comfy chair, the Neuro headset in my hands, still debating on whether or not I wanted to actually do anything. I could watch a movie. With a sigh I placed the headset on, got comfy, and waited for it to boot up. Once into the systems, it would hijack my neural functions and cause me to go into a state of paralysis, so it didn't flail around my little ship while thinking I was in some fantasy world. With a deep breath, I found myself in my home setting.

There were no actual lights in here. The overhead was a white color and kind of glowed, which made me think of the ceiling as being a light, but they didn't cast any shadows, and everything was kind of lit up from everywhere. So technically no actual lights. The walls were covered in various different games, snapshots of things I enjoyed playing multiple times. The floor was a dull metal gray reminiscent of my ship because I'm not very creative. Apart from a sofa and coffee table in front of a large screen where I could sit and watch movies, there really wasn't much to the room. I've seen videos of people's home rooms that were basically large mansions or expansive space stations. Honestly speaking, my little corner of the galaxy was just a brighter version of my corner of the galaxy in the real universe.

I sat down in the chair, put my feet up on a white coffee table, and stared at the blank large screen.

"Good morning, Grant," My Neuro’s A.I. said in a cool female voice.

"Morning,Neuro." I replied, noting the lack of excitement in my own voice.

"What would you like to do today?"

"I'm not sure, Neuro."

"Perhaps I could assist in the creation of something new based on your current mood. What troubles you today, Grant?"

I had to think about that for a moment. "My real life is the same old, same old thing, every day, every week, every month, every year. I kind of just wish I had something slightly more exciting, you know? I wanna do things like make more money, upgrade my ship, you know, want a world with more action and hot girls." Maybe that was kind of childish, but seriously, I was kind of getting bored.

"I think I can make a game based on that suggestion. Would you like to give it a try?"

I considered for a few moments, shrugged, and said, “Sure, why not?'"

"Sit back, close your eyes, and take a deep breath." Nero said.

I did as instructed, laying my head back on the couch and closing my eyes. My eyes were not actually closed as this whole place was virtual and I pretty much saw a loading screen the moment I shut them.

Loading, new world. Please wait…

Calibrating…

Starting opening sequence…

As the loading screen disappeared and the light started to brighten, I was thrown from my seat and into the wall.

Pain shot through my shoulder, the Neuro helmet tumbled off, freeing me from its paralyzing embrace, the world around me went dark and silent. For a moment or two, I thought maybe I had been knocked unconscious as everything was completely silent and all sense of direction was completely gone. As the dull red emergency lights and the few blowers that worked on auxiliary power kicked in, I realized it wasn't me that was out, it was the ship. Maybe we hit something, but that didn't really make any sense because I never heard of anybody actually hitting anything in the rift and if we had impacted something, it should have caused a shuddering rumble, if not a loud bang resounding through the ship’s superstructure. It was like the whole thing just suddenly decelerated.

I tried to clear my head and catch my breath, looking around my little room frantically in the dull red light. What the hell was I supposed to be doing? Why was this happening? What could I have possibly hit out in the middle of nothing?

My eyes landed on the floating Neuro helmet slowly tumbling across the room, and I had a sudden and rather relieving thought.

"Is the game still active?" I asked.

"Yes, Grant. The game is still active." Came the cool feminine voice of Neuro.

"Oh, thank the stars." I began to laugh in absolute relief. I had told Neuro I wanted a game that was basically my actual life, but far more exciting. The only problem is it seemed so perfectly reasonable that something would happen to the ship that I hadn't made the connection that I just entered out of the loading screen. I got my breath under control and started to wonder what I should be doing. The Neuro helmet bounced off the ceiling and started its slow fall towards the far wall, and I hoped that the sudden disconnection, which was not supposed to be healthy for you in the real world, didn't actually affect me in this game universe.

I pulled my tablet out of my pocket, which was making frantic bipping noises and telling me that pretty much everything in the ship was powered down except the auxiliary units. In the real universe, that would have been absolutely terrifying, in here, it was kind of exciting.

"Nero, can you lower the pain feedback by 25%?"

"Pain feedback lowered by 25%."

"Thank you."

"You are welcome, Grant."

I ran the mandatory gravity-out emergency drills once a month, so being alone in a dark ship with no down wasn't a particularly novel experience, but I wasn't exactly trained in zero-G. That said, I had played plenty of games, so while everything felt a little bit off from what I was used to, all I had to do was recalibrate my own mental process for moving around. I reached out and tapped the wall with one toe, sending me forward into my comfy chair. That gave me leverage to get myself worked around and aimed at the hatch to the cockpit. I slowly drifted through the hatchway and looked out into the deep dark.

My breath caught in my throat as I saw the one thing I would have never expected; a ship, a very, very close ship. In space, everything is relative, and close was one of those things that was very relative. Unless entering or leaving some port, ships passing each other in the deep dark at about a kilometer apart was very close. With that sense of the word, the ship in front of me wasn't close. It was practically docked. I could literally see the pilot on the other ship's bridge. The other ship had an actual bridge. It was much bigger. Oddly enough, the other ship seemed to be sinking downward, which made me think my own ship gained a bit of a roll once it had apparently dropped out of the rift. The auxiliary power was enough to run the EMF drive, which likely was auto-correcting the ship's tumble. The important part here is it meant that the inertial dampener buffers had been working. There was supposed to be enough charge to run the inertial dampeners between any type of power loss and the auxiliary power coming on. It was next to impossible to actually test if it was working, but the inertial dampeners functioning appropriately in a time like that was the difference between a bump on the head and turning into a human-shaped splatter on the bulkhead.

The instruments on the cockpit’s console told a slightly different story, though. The Flying Brick wasn't rotating, it was stationary, which meant the other ship itself was sinking. They weren't trying to dock. Why the hell would they not try to dock? It made no damn sense.

Well, this was just a game. So, what do I want to do about it? I suppose I had a couple of options. They weren't attempting to board the ship, so they might not actually be bad guys. That said, why the hell were they here? These people were literally right on top of me as I dropped out of the rift. They had to know I was going to be here. I could sit down and try to hail them on the coms channel, but then again, if they were bad, that might be a bad idea. I could suit up in the hard suit and go for a bit of a spacewalk and board their ship. That was absolutely insane. For the real world. Not a terrible idea for a game. Huh?

I tried to come up with a couple of other ideas that were less, well, I guess stupid, but my mind had already been made up. This was just a game. If this was a game based on the real world, then I was going to go do the exciting thing. Suit up in a hard suit and spacewalk my way over and knock on the door. My little box was, in fact, not very big. So it took literally no time to drift my way over to the back wall, open up the cabinet, and pull out the hard suit. Getting into the thing in zero-G however, was a pain in the ass. It took entirely too long to get my legs into the correct holes, and getting the arms in was worse. Eventually, I was suited up with all the seals checked and all the suit's functions reading green in the HUD. I made my way into the bow of the ship and cycled the lock.

Never in my wildest dreams would I have considered strapping on a spacesuit and poking my head out the front door while not connected to an orbital. Floating in the vast nothingness, attached to the only ‘something’ in existence by a single handhold was so ridiculously surreal that it made my heart race. The other ship, dark from lack of any reasonable amount of light reflecting off of it, sat below mine, its bow pointed at the bottom of my cargo container full of lead. The running lights on the other ship were really the only illumination beyond the spotlight out front, a very odd sight. I gathered up my courage and searched for a couple of good handholds as I pushed myself outside the ship and tried to hand walk myself across the skin. It was considerably more pockmarked on this side than I would have thought. I suppose in a way, that made sense. The orbital skin always seemed a bit scratched and pockmarked, likely from the bajillion tiny specks of dust, some traveling far too fast.

When I came to a spot where I could find no more handholds until I made it to the cargo container attached to my ship, I had to hesitate. The only idea going through my head at the moment was to push myself off the ship toward the cargo container and hope I found something I could grab ahold of, lest I drift away into the empty void. So that's what I did. If this was the real universe, real life, it would be so incredibly stupid. If I, for any reason, missed my handhold or had miscalculated and pushed myself off a little too far, I would essentially just drift off into the empty, deep dark and wait until I ran out of air. The notion was ridiculous for real life, but this was the game. So if that did happen, I guess it would be a short game. I was still enjoying the scenario and was going to play it out as well as I could.

I caught my handhold and scrambled down the side of the cargo container. When I peeked over the edge, I found two men, both attached to the ship, which hovered only a few meters away. They were carving away the metal hull of the cargo container. It was weird. I watched for a few minutes as one of the guys cut his way through into the container full of lead. Not exactly a profitable haul for pirates. Regardless of why they wanted the lead, they were still basically attacking my ship and cargo. So, bad guys, definitely.

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I watched for a while before realizing they must be using some type of coms channel to talk on and thought I'd start sifting through the frequencies, maybe I'd get lucky. Chances are they were on some type of encrypted channel and I wouldn't be able to hear it, but pretty much just as I was thinking that, the crackle of a voice came through.

"I think I got it."

Wow. I can't believe they're not on an encrypted channel even. I know that's stupid.

"Wait, hold on. Ok. Got it now."

Presumably, the guy who was speaking was the guy cutting away the hull plates because shortly after that came over the radio, he pulled loose the large slab of metal and handed it off to his partner, who pushed it down and away from the ships. The guy with the cutter then stuck his head in the cargo container and started cutting away at something else. I'm not exactly sure what was in the cargo container. Theoretically, it's just stuffed really full of cubes; basically polymer crates one meter by one meter cube, and locked together so they don't move.

I looked at the other ship. The only way to get over there was essentially to launch myself through the empty vast darkness and try to latch on. Another one of those dumb ideas that in real life was so incredibly stupid as to be mind-numbing, but this was a game. I calculated where I wanted to land and pushed myself off gently. As I slowly drifted through nothingness towards the other ship, I watched as the man with a torch pulled out, like I thought, a cube. He handed it off to the other guy who shoved it down away from the ships to follow the chunk of hull plate he had thrown earlier. That meant they didn't want the lead. Lead was good at blocking scans. I wonder if there's something else in there? As far as I knew, I was hauling a crate full of lead, but that would make it very easy for the AI to just throw in something vaguely radioactive. A good excuse as to why it wouldn't show up on a scan on the other end of the system. Neuro is so clever.

Watching the two men work, I wasn't watching the incoming side of the ship. I impacted and bounced, which is a problem. Flailing around trying to get turned a bit so I can actually get a handhold of the ship. I only just managed to hook an antenna of some sort before drifting off into the nothingness. That would have been a good way to get a game over. Absolutely stupid. Still, I was now on the enemy ship. There'd be two ways in: the engineering hatch in the back of the ship, which was probably locked, and the docking port on the front of the ship, which had two guys right next to it, but most certainly open. I wonder if I should shoot them before I get into the lock or after. I made sure any lights in my helmet visor were off, which is something I should have done in the very beginning, but oops, and then started sneaking across the skin of the ship, gently drifting closer towards the open docking port. I inched my way closer as the two men dug their way deeper into the cargo container. One guy on the inside, cutting things loose and pulling them out. The other guy on the outside, shoving them downward, relatively speaking.

I made sure to keep on the other side of the lock from the cockpit so I couldn't be seen by the pilot and waited for my chance to throw myself into the open hatch. The guy on the outside sent a cube sailing downward towards all the others and when he turned back to the hole, I made my move, flipping around the open dock and into the actual lock. I was so close to the guy that it seemed unreasonable that he wouldn't notice me. However, he would be staring through the visor of his helmet, which would narrow his vision, and the big part is there was no sound. There's no way this move could have been done in atmosphere, but with nothing to transfer the sound from me touching and hitting the ship to the guy only a few meters away, he didn't notice.

“Uh? Who's using the lock?"

Fuck! Of course, the guy in the cockpit would know that the lock was being cycled. I could see the guy on the outside of the ship look back through the little port window in the hatch, which had closed behind him. On the other side, some other guy looked through another window in the opposite hatch, he stuck his face right up to the glass and squinted. I pulled my Arc pistol, a small handheld weapon that shot a burst of energy and had a good chance of not killing anybody it hit because in the real world, I wasn't particularly sure I could actually kill someone. However, in the game, I kind of wish I had stocked an actual pistol. I was gonna have to fist fight this guy to death. Well, that wasn't particularly true. The arc pistol was lethal if you hit a person enough times with it.

As the hatch cycled open, I leveled my pistol at the guy, a very confused-looking guy who had half a hard suit on, and blasted him in the chest. He went down with a scream.

"All hands repel boarders, uh, repel boarders." Shouted somebody over the comms, both in my helmet and on the ship-wide.

"What do you mean, Borders? Boarded by who?" Came another voice over the comms.

I put two shots into the face of the guy on the deck, hopefully frying his brains or stopping his heart. Once I got past the lock, I realized my mistake in letting the lock shut. Now, the guys who were on the outside were starting to cycle the way on the inside, and I had to worry about the people who were still on the ship who knew I just entered. Shit.

I walked forward out of the lock and into a large cargo area and heard rather than saw somebody above me on the metal grating. Pretty sure he leaned over the rails with a gun point down, but I was still technically underneath him and out of his sight, I could, however, see the bottom of his boots, through the little holes in the metal grating, and launched a couple of energy shots up at him. The ‘blats’ of my arch pistol dumped themselves into the floor, or my ceiling, or something, and he screamed and apparently fell on his ass. So I shot it again. In a way, the nice thing about energy shots is that it kind of went through certain things, though, to be fair, an actual lead thrower might have worked better. Not gonna complain as the idiot had dropped his gun, which clattered to the floor in front of me.

I picked up my loot and launched another energy ‘blat’ up into the floor. As the guy was trying to get up, he screamed again, and I made my way far enough into the cargo bay to pull up his own pistol, a hefty little lead thrower, and fired at him when he actually got up, and then dropped the pistol back down to the lock which was cycling open, revealing the two guys who were outside and completely unarmed. I fired two shots into the first guy before realizing I had no idea what this lead thrower was shooting and I didn't want to poke a hole in the damn ship.

I brought the other gun up, letting a ‘blat’ off with the arc pistol and nailing the one I hadn't just murdered. Once he went down, I walked up to him, put two more rounds in his head to fry his brains. Only then did I think about what I just did. Game or not. That was fucking cold. These guys were completely unarmed and I probably could have taken them prisoner or asked them questions or something other than just straight up murder hobo their asses. What does that say about me as a person? I looked down at the guys and felt kind of sick. This particular version of this game was so damn realistic. The scent was fucking horrible, but I guess that's what I asked for.

I crept up the ladder, which if you're not aware is actually just a staircase. It's not literally a ladder. It's just called a ladder because it's on a ship. I have no Star’s damned idea why. Regardless, I climbed up the ladder and made sure that the previous guy whose gun I was now wielding was down. Now that I had a moment, I looked the pistol over and was both pleased and dismayed to know I only had four rounds. Pleased because there was this nice little indicator that told me and dismayed because I only had four. The guy on the ground didn't seem to have a spare magazine beyond that. Beyond the guy was a small galley, a head, which was a bathroom on a ship by the way, and then an empty bridge. I turned back to the walkway that went around the cargo bay, which contained some large two part mechanism, and ducked around the hatch as a crack and a pop from down below, sent some type of frangible round skidding across my hard suit and spraying shrapnel down the passage. That was the benefit of wearing armor in a ship, though specifically, this hard suit was meant more for spacewalks, not necessarily gun fights. I tried to use the Arc pistol to keep them down while leveling the lead thrower at my now assailant. Sadly, it took two shots to get the guy, and I had to hit him with another two ‘blats’ from the Arc pistol to hopefully put him down. Not 100% sure that one's dead, but I decided to keep on the upper level.

I came across the first closed door, and by door, I mean an actual door, not a hatch that had any type of atmospheric sealing ability. This was literally just a door. I re-holstered my arc pistol and tried the knob. Of course, it was locked. So I pulled the Arc pistol back out and kicked the door in because, again, it was just a door, wasn't even a particularly well-installed door. The thing banged open, and some girl screamed. I lifted both weapons and almost started pulling the trigger at the alien inside. Well, not really an alien, more like a demon. I'm assuming she had been in possession of a pistol because one clattered to the ground off to the side of a table, and she threw herself back against the cabinets. Apparently, I scared the shit out of her, and to be fair, she kind of scares the shit out of me.

Her short black hair was the same color as the small horns protruding from her forehead. Her skin was crimson, and her eyes were a reddish-orange glowing color like embers. She wore a black leather collar, and a lab coat. I couldn't see the rest of her because of the table.

"What the fuck are you?" I yelled.

"I'm just the medic!" She practically squealed, her arms up in the air, back pressed against the counters, and her head turned sideways as if that was gonna help her get further away.

I had to pause for a moment and try to figure out what the fuck that meant. It took entirely far too long for me to realize she was talking about her job on the ship. Not exactly what she was. "I mean, what the fuck are you? Not your job."

I'm from Zarin. It was settled by splicers.” She said, like that explained everything. Actually, it kind of did. I don't know where the hell Zarin was, but if the place was settled by splicers, her looks made entirely more sense. Spicer was a generally derogatory term for somebody who went a little too far on gene therapy. For her to look the way she did, she either spent a small fortune on genetic therapies or her parents designed her before she came out of the womb. That's just fucked up.

"And you're the medic on this ship?" I kept my tone a bit threatening as I moved off to the side to kick away her pistol.

"Yeah."

Once her Arc pistol was kicked back out towards the door, I moved backward while keeping my guns pointed in her direction, and just before leaving, made my first non-murder-hobo decision. "Fine, if you stay in here, you'll be okay. Come out into the passage, and I'll consider you a threat." With that, I shut the door, which did not latch into place appropriately. It took a bit of jiggling with it in order to get it back into its correct position. This room clearly did not exist previously, and whoever assembled it didn't do a particularly great job.

I snatched up the weird girl's arc pistol and made my way down the passage. I pushed open the next hatch to find a bedroom. I'm assuming it was the captain's quarters because the next room was essentially just a berthing area which was empty. I wonder how many more people were left on board this ship? I probably should have asked the girl, but I kinda didn't feel like going back. Yeah, I didn't shoot the girl, which technically made me sexist. On the other hand, I still kind of felt bad for shooting the guys in the lock. They probably would have surrendered, but I was kind of hyped up on adrenaline, and I had somebody coming around from the other side. Really, I'm just making up excuses, but starting to think maybe this whole thing is just a little too real. I'll have to have Neuro back down on the graphics or something to make it a little more distant. Once I was done with this particular mission.

I headed back down the passage towards the cockpit and double-checked that nobody had snuck up behind me before going down to the lower floor. There was a passage in the back of the cargo hold which headed aft, likely to engineering. There couldn't be too many more places to hide. Theoretically, the only thing back there should be engineering. The passage very quickly dead-ended at a hatch. I threw the lever, which pulled back the dogs, and carefully opened the door, sticking my head and just one gun into the crack before entering the room. This was indeed engineering. It had literally everything mechanical. Several consoles, the Grav engine, a Rift drive, which is something I'd actually never seen in person, and of course, the power core along with all the environmentals. I took another few steps in before a sharp crack spun me around. Pain blasting through my left side. I turned towards the sound, pistols leveled, and fired both guns directly at the guy's head, which was the only thing I could see around the Grav engine. Another sharp pop caught me in the arm as the click, click, click of the empty lead thrower in my hand came. I fired entirely too long. I was pretty sure I hit a moment or two ago, but I just kept blasting with the damn Arc pistol before eventually letting my arms fall, my breath coming heavy and pain radiating through my limbs. What the hell?

I stumbled back into the passage outside of engineering, put my back to the wall, and slumped down. My arm hurt so fucking bad. I tried to reach up and pull off my helmet. The arm didn't seem to function right. Eventually, I managed to get the latch loose and the helmet off and took a deep breath of the ship's air not filtered through the hardsuit. God damn, this hurts.

“Neuro, lower the pain settings to 10%.” I waited far too long with no damn reply. “Neuro. Hello?” That can't be good. That really cannot be good. “Neuro, end the game and let me out. I wanna go out.” I practically begged the AI with a horrible sinking feeling pressing deep into my gut. I remember very vividly asking her if the game was still active, and she said it was, but where was she now? Why was she not responding? Why am I still stuck in the game? Oh shit. Oh shit.

I sat on the floor, my back against the bulkhead as I bled out into the hard suit. The sudden realization I had really fucked up. I had asked Neuro if the game was still active. I didn't ask her if I was still in it, which likely meant all the fucking stupid shit I just did. All the people I just blatantly murdered…

“Neuro? Neuro” I begged for her, but she never responded.

***

“What is your name?” Neuro asked.

“Grant Takata.” I replied while trying very hard not to giggle. The world in front of me was so bright and white that I felt like it should hurt my eyes, but I couldn't actually focus on why it didn't. I think it was in character creation because I couldn't really feel anything, and Neuro is talking to me again, which was a considerable relief.

“Why are you here?” Neuro asked again, though there was considerably more inflection in her voice than usual. I couldn't quite place why.

“Because I'm bored. Duh.” What kind of weird-ass question was that? “I need to know what the game we are playing before I can make up some kind of character backstory. Everything's so fuzzy right now.”

“Game? What game?” That was weird. She sounded rather angry.

I tried to shrug but I don't actually know if my arms moved or if I have arms or if arms are useful. “I don't know. You tell me.”

“This isn't a fucking game!”

That didn't sound at all like Nero. What the hell?

“I don't get it. Is this not character creation?” I asked because honestly I'm a little confused now.

“Character? What the fuck are you talking about?” The feminine voice seemed considerably more stressed and definitely not the same pitch as Neuro. That said, I was kind of having a hard time caring for some reason.

“Ok, let's start over. You said your name was Grant, right?”

“Yeah, that's me.” I sing-songed.

“Ok, Grant. What do you remember?”

“You're gonna have to be a little more specific. Are we starting with my childhood or what? Where the hell is this going?”

“When your ship fell out of the Rift?”

“Oh, so like, you wanna recap of the game so far?” I asked, trying to get clarification on what the hell she wanted. I'm assuming this was some type of character Neuro created for some reason.

“Sure. Let's do that. A recap of the game. Start from the beginning.”

I had to think about that for a second. Everything was so fuzzy, and I felt so great, but I still couldn't move. So that's a little weird. The beginning started with the game. I was bored. “Well, I put on the helmet and I walked around, I sat down, and I talked to you, and you said, ‘Yeah, could you help?’ And I said, ‘Well, let's give it a try.’ I wanted a game that was basically real life with more action and shit. So I guess that's the start. As far as a recap, I guess. I, um, as soon as the loading screen opened, I was thrown against the wall and the gravity cut out, which was freaky because I didn't know if it was real or a game. At that point, I asked you if the game was still running, you said ‘yes,’ I asked you to lower the pain threshold, you said, ‘Okay,’ and then I got to work trying to figure out what was going on. There was a ship.” I thought about that ship floating out there in the black. “It was so surreal and so freaking weird to have something like that happen in the middle of the deep dark. It was so great. I wasn't in the rift anymore. I assume they were the bad guys. So I went and got the hard suit and went outside. Never go outside like that in real life. Stupid, stupid, stupid idea.” I giggled. “Anyway, these pirate people were cutting into my cargo hold to get the lead out or something. I'm assuming you put something in there that wasn’t lead. That would make more sense. Where was I? Oh, right. Then I got inside of the thing. People were like, ‘hey, who's in the lock?’ The locked door opened. I shot a guy, walked in further, the lock door closed. And I shot another guy who was on the catwalk, his gun fell down. So I got that and then I shot another guy. Oh, yeah, they both came through the lock and that was, yeah, I don't know if I, hmm. Yeah.” I kind of petered out at that moment. I still feel kind of bad about shooting them.

“Yeah, I feel kind of bad about shooting the guys in the lock, but I'm not sure I would know what to do with them. Anyway, I went upstairs, didn't immediately find anybody. Then somebody started shooting at me from the lower deck on the other side of the cargo bay. Then I walked around, I kicked in the door with a demon chick of some sort. Yeah, I left her alive. I know that makes me sexist.” I paused for a while thinking about that. Should I have shot her? Just to be fair? No, I should have kept other people alive to be fair. I'm kind of horrible in games. “Then I searched the upper deck a little bit and I walked down into the engineering bay and somebody shot at me and I shot at him and I think he hit me and I… I, ah…”

Okay. What the fuck? I swear. I remember lying on the floor bleeding. Am I dead? And then there was Neuro or there wasn't Neuro.

“And then I was telling Neuro to turn off the game or reduce the pain and she didn't answer.”

I pulled myself out of my own holy shit moment and tried to figure out where the other person was. Somewhere in the deep distance was a small voice whimpering a mantra of "Holy shit, holy shit." Honestly, I kind of had to agree with her, and if she wasn't Neuro and if this whole thing happened to be real or I suppose even if we were in the game and it wasn't Neuro, that meant she was the demon lady or more accurately, the splicer, the doctor or medic. Which meant I was probably drugged. It is so weird to realize something so terrible and wanna giggle. I swear. I spent a long time just trying to get the giggles under control. This was not funny. I've decided right here and right now I don't like drugs. I don't know where the girl went, but the ceiling is starting to resolve itself into an actual light and I probably shouldn't be holding my eyes open while staring at it like this. That said, I literally just murdered several people and now was giggling about it. The light's not really a problem. At some point, the girl must have come back because she asked me a new question which brings on a whole new level of horror when you get deep down into the mechanics of it.

“Can you fly a ship?”

“Yes.” I answered because I did know how to fly a ship. “But…” And this was a very big but. “We’re in the middle of the deep dark and I don't know how the fuck a Rift-Drive works.” I heard the woman swear if she was asking me this question because she also didn't know how the Rift Drive worked or even how to fly the ship, and everybody but me and her were dead. Seriously. What the fuck did I do?