Alex sprung out of bed, threw the casque off his head, and rushed to the toilet. After who-knows-how-many hours of lying still, his limbs were barely responsive.

What time was it?

When had he last had a bite, or a glass of water, or a trip to the bathroom?

He had no idea.

He made it just in time to the can to throw up what little there was in his stomach, then he crumbled down on the cold tiles of the bathroom floor and tried to regain some manner of composure.

That was quite the emotional rollercoaster, he thought despite himself. One moment he was feeling like the king of the world, flipping the proverbial bird at some eldritch abomination, and the next he was resting his head on a toilet seat, trying not to get a stroke or something.

As far as deaths went, his second one was slightly less traumatic–not that that said much. He still wanted to run away and not stop until his legs gave away, then crawl until his arms did. His heart pounded at his chest like a jackhammer, his mind was a hot jumble of neurons going haywire, and he had the nagging suspicion he’d peed his pants a little.

As if that wasn’t enough, there was someone banging at the door–someone loud and impatient.

“Rulin?” shouted Officer Carpenter. “Open up, I know you’re awake!”

“Go away” said Alex, or at least he tried to. He was still panting too hard to shout anything halfway intelligible.

“I’m coming in” she shouted again, and Alex heard the door open. “For both our sakes, I hope you’re decent.”

Alex tried to come up with some witty response, but all he could manage was another wave of gagging and spitting.

“Where–oh, for fuck’s sake, Rulin. You okay?”

He gave her the thumbs up and wiped his mouth with toilet paper.

“You kicked the bucket again?”

He nodded.

“Dumbass.”

She helped him up with one hand–the other was too busy holding a taser uncomfortably close to his soft parts. He washed up, rinsed his mouth, and dried his face with a towel, slowly and deliberately going through the motions in an attempt to ground himself back to reality. Carpenter stood by the door and watched him, her expression a mix of concern and mild annoyance.

“Feeling better?”

“I’m fine” he said, not fooling anyone. “Just a bit shaken.”

“Good, good. Hey, listen, regarding those complaints you had. Mr. Grimm got back to me and said he’s available for a chat, so this is your chance to talk to him.”

About time, Alex thought. In fact, the timing couldn’t be better. He’d hoped for a face-to-face, but a phonecall would have to do.

“Do I wait for the phone to ring or what?”

“No, no, just put the casque on and log in. He’ll contact you there.” She gave him one last concerned look. “Don’t keep him waiting, okay?”

***

Just like the other time he’d bitten the virtual dust, Hunter found himself back to the Prohibition era speakeasy that was his private Shard. Mortimer the bartender was there, wiping glasses behind the bar and looking as immaculate as ever, and so was Grimm. Or was it Faux-Grimm? His iron-gray hair, thousand-dollar suit, and self-satisfied smugness looked authentic enough, but beyond that, there was no way for Hunter to tell.

“There he is. Long time no see, son.”

“Grimm” Hunter nodded and climbed on a barstool next to the man. “I trust you are the genuine article this time?”

That made Grimm crack up.

“If you can’t tell, does it even matter?” he said, and flashed his trademark smug half-smile.

Hunter didn’t find it as funny.

“Whatever. As long as the real you gets the message.”

“Fair enough. Pint of lager, like last time?”

“I’ll have what he’s having, Mort.” Hunter told the barman, eyeing the brownish liquid that was Grimm’s drink of choice. “Good to see you, too.”

Mortimer grabbed an old-fashioned whiskey glass and a crystal carafe and poured him a drink, and Hunter took a sip. It was smokey and rich and smooth, by far the finest drink Hunter had ever had–not that he was about to admit it to the other man.

He’d more or less put Grimm on the backburner for the last few days, but now that the man was here and Hunter was still reeling from another virtual death experience, his anger was back with a vengeance. He slammed the rest down in one gulp for emphasis and asked Mortimer for another.

“Woah, slow down there champ," Grimm chuckled. “This isn’t your average Red Label. It’s a sipping liquor. It’s to be enjoyed, cherished.”

“What do you want, Grimm?”

“What do I want? It was you who put in for some face time, as I recall.”

“I want you to be honest with me. This Elderpyre thing? It ain’t just a game, is it?”

“Just a game?” Grimm said. “I should hope not. You’ve seen how realistic it is.”

“Yeah I’ve seen it. I’ve felt it too” said Hunter with a hint of the accent he’d tried so hard to get rid of. The more his temper flared, the more he sounded like the angry poor suburb teen he’d once been. “It ain’t just a game. Some kind of psychological experiment is what it is.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t fuck with me.”

Grimm’s face was slowly drained by all signs of good humor, and his half-smile turned into a scowl. Hunter saw a hardness that wasn’t there before, a warning, threat, and promise of unspoken but dire consequences. He didn’t care. He was too angry to slow down now.

“What is it, then?” he went on. “Is it a psychology thing like those you read about online? The Milgram experiments? The Stanford prison experiments? The fucking Russian sleep experiments? Is it some fucked up PTSD thing? I fucking died, man. Twice! This shit’s fucking traumatic!”

“Hunter–”

“No, wait. What was the name of that other thing? That cold war shit. Is this like Project MKUltra? Are you some kind of fed?”

“Yes, fed up with this line of questioning!” Grimm snapped, finally dropping the pretense of urbane politeness. It was for only a moment, but it was enough to give Hunter pause. He closed his eyes and massaged his gray-haired temples as if trying to calm himself, then continued in a tired, level voice.

“Look, son. If you don’t want to do this, be my guest. I can get you moved back to county jail, and you can spend the rest of your sentence playing checkers and watching daytime television with the rest of the deadbeats in there. Is that what you want?”

Hunter said nothing. He was full of hot air just a moment before, but now he felt as if he was deflating.

“Hunter. Is that what you want?”

“No," he admitted. “It isn’t. But you owe me an explanation.”

“I owe you nothing more or less than what we agreed on.”

“How about you give me one anyway?”

“God, I hate this part,” said Grimm. He finished his drink and rubbed his temples again. He sounded tired when he spoke, all signs of his short outburst faded. “Officer Carpenter relayed your concerns to me, Hunter. I went through a log of your experience in Elderpyre, too–well the abridged version of it, anyway. You went in over your head a couple of times and paid for it, yes, but you must understand that those were the consequences of your choices. Be honest with yourself; nobody forced you to do any of the things that got you into trouble. Am I wrong?”

“You threw me in a wild place full of monsters," Hunter tried to argue, but he knew Grimm was more or less right. “What was I supposed to do?”

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“Whatever you want! That’s the whole point! You can’t expect your choices not to have any consequences, though, can you?”

Hunter said nothing.

“If you want to stay out of trouble, then you can stay out of trouble. If you want to simply kick back and have a good old vacation, you can do just that. Nobody’s stopping you.”

“I tried to do just that," Hunter complained. “Fawkes showed up and dragged me away from the scruff of my neck.”

“I suppose you are right. Still, she didn’t really make you follow her, did she?”

“Well…”

“Did she?”

“No.”

“There you go. And let me take this a step further. Do you want to stay away from Elderpyre altogether? You’re free to do that too. You can spend your days sleeping or exercising or playing cards with Bob at the cafeteria, though I’d advise you not to get too close with Humbug Hank–yes, I was briefed about that, too–and kill time until you’ve served your sentence.” He took a sip from his glass, squinted, and stared at it. “The way I see it, son, you choosing not to engage with Elderpyre at all would still give the eggheads back in R&D a ton of valuable data to sort through, and that’s what this whole program is supposed to be about. In short; do what you fucking want, Hunter. Alex. Nobody’s stopping you. Not one person in the whole wide world.”

“I got some feedback for your eggheads, alright,” Hunter said. “Nobody would play this game. Don’t get me wrong, the tech is unreal. I have no idea how you people pulled this off. The verisimilitude is unreal. You could use for, I don’t know, military exercises. Education. Porn, even. You could make billions off it just from the porn industry. But a game? This kind of game? No. Nobody in their right minds would keep playing after taking even a fraction of the punishment I have, and I’ve not even played that long.”

“Pour me another, if you may,” Grimm told the bartender. Then he drained his glass and stared at Hunter, as if studying him.

“Do you know what was the worst thing that’s ever happened to you, Hunter?” he finally said. “The thing that single-handedly stunted all your potential as a person, as a human being? You were born in a majority-minority lower-income residential district. You were born poor, son.”

Hunter’s eyes went wide with anger and surprise. He opened his mouth to give the condescending bastard a piece of his mind, but Grimm cut him short.

“I don’t mean it as an insult. Give me the chance to explain, and then you can shout at me all you want, if you so please.”

Hunter stared daggers at him, but to his credit, he held back.

“Being born, being raised with limited resources means that your main focus is surviving. Not growing, not thriving, but simply surviving. You have no support system in place, no safety net. You learn to be risk-averse. You can’t afford to try new things, new ideas, because you can’t afford to fail. How’s that worked out for you so far?”

“I sure didn’t end up here by playing it safe, I can tell you that.”

“Exactly!” Grimm snapped his fingers and smiled. There was a glimmer of excitement in his eyes Hunter found confusing to say in the least. “You took the wrong risks, handled them poorly, and ended up paying too high a price!”

“...are you done with the insulting? Can I skip to the part where I get angry and tell you to go to hell now?”

“Oh, but you don’t see! I’m not insulting you, Hunter! Picking what risks to take, handling them well… These are skills you can learn. Be taught, even. It’s not your fault you never had the chance–the luxury!–to do so!”

Hunter did see. He saw alright, he’d seen and felt all that in the pit of his stomach almost every day and every night, so much so that he’d learned to stop paying attention to it. That’s how it went, where he came from. That’s how his mom had lived, that’s how his old man had lived. Like them, Hunter–Alex–had been running from stuff his whole life.

Growing up in as shitty a place as he had, he had to be extra cautious if we wanted to keep what little he had. Even as a grown man, taking as few and as little risks as possible had become second nature to him. What he had to gain if he succeeded had always been a secondary priority. With so little going on for him, the risk of losing had always seemed the more important deciding factor.

And where had that gotten him? He’d spent some of the best years of his life toeing the poverty threshold, and he’d still somehow managed to land in jail for being brazen enough to want to eat a goddamn pizza for dinner after a fucked-up day.

“I still don’t get what any of this has to do with Elderpyre,” he told Grimm coolly.

“It’s a chance for you to finally be able to try things! To learn how to take risks, to learn how to rise up to the challenge. To dare to want more, to dare to reach for it and take it. And then, once your time with us is over, you can carry that skill with you in real life and apply it there, too!” Grimm’s eyes all but shone with wonder that seemed almost childlike. “Don’t you see it? You have nothing to lose and everything to gain!”

“I have my sanity to lose and tons of trauma to gain,” Hunter snapped. “If you’ve spent any time in Elderpyre, then you know what I’m talking about.”

“I have, and I do,” Grimm said, his excitement grounded, his smile slowly fading. “More than you know. Even so, this is still a great opportunity for you.”

“Is that all?”

“Isn’t it enough?”

Hunter said nothing.

“Alright then,” said Grimm. “There’s more. If that’s what you care about, there might be money to be made after your stint in the Happy Motel. A job. A decent one. How does that sound?”

Grimm was playing him like a fiddle again, and it made Hunter furious. As much as he wanted to think he was above material gain, however, he wasn’t. A job was a job, especially if it was a decent one.

“I’ll think about it,” he said as sullenly as possible.

“You won’t get another deal like this, Hunter.”

“I said I’ll think about it.”

“Alright, alright.”

Grimm suddenly looked old, taxed. Tired. He finished the drink that had been sitting in front of him in three big gulps and stood up.

“I thought it was a sipping liquor,” Hunter said, still itching for a spat.

“...I guess what they say is true,” said Grimm with a sigh and turned for the door. “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.”

“I said I’ll think about it.”

“Drink the water, son. You may even find out you like it.”

***

Hunter sat there for a long time after Grimm left, thinking. He finished his drink and Mortimer made him another, and then another when he drained that, too.

He was really good at blending in with the background, the bartender. During his talk with Grimm, Hunter had barely registered him being there. Even now that Grimm was gone, Mortimer’s presence was somehow so subtle and non-intrusive Hunter could feel as if he was in the bar alone, should he allow himself to.

“Hey, Mortimer," he said. “There’s an old saying on my side of things about bartenders being the best therapists.”

“I can neither confirm nor deny that, sir," said the bartender. “Though I can say that the bartender’s role as an accidental, informal counselor and first line of advice and support for troubled late-night drinkers has long been recognized by actual mental health professionals.”

“Yeah, well, got any sage advice for me?”

“Concerning what, sir?”

That was a good question. What did Hunter need sage advice about?

Grimm had given him the all-clear to do whatever the fuck he wanted–but what did he want, in this case? Following Fawkes around meant diving headfirst into mortal danger, that much had been established. In the beginning, she’d dragged him along more or less by force. Then he’d chosen to follow her out of perceived necessity. And then he’d chosen to put his ass on the line to get her out of trouble, not once, but twice. Why had he done that?

Because it was the right thing to do. The logical, the rational thing to do.

Was it, though?

Was it rational, after all?

“Are you real, Mortimer?”

“I’m not really sure how to answer that, sir. Master Grimm’s take on the topic earlier was the implication that if the observer can’t tell the difference, it doesn't really matter.”

“No, I’m not asking if you’re real to me. I mean… Are you real to you? Do you feel real?”

“A most curious question, sir. No more or less real than you feel real yourself, I would think. I am aware of my nature and how it differs from yours and Master Grimm’s, yes, and I do not know how being real feels to you. I am conscious. In fact, I am self-aware.”

Hunter’s brow furrowed as he tried to make heads or tails of what the bartender was saying.

“I’m not sure I understand the difference between the two, Mortimer. I’m just a college dropout, remember?”

“Very well, sir, I shall elaborate. Be aware that I will be quoting and paraphrasing external sources. Is that acceptable?”

“Yeah, sure, as long as it helps.”

“The qualities of consciousness and self-awareness as well as the distinction between the two have been a long-standing matter of debate for scientists on, as you say, your side of things” explained Mortimer. “Consciousness is often defined as one’s awareness of one’s body and one’s surroundings. Self-awareness is often defined as the recognition of that consciousness. To put it in another way; to be conscious is to think. To be self-aware is to recognize and realize that you are a being able of thought, and to think about your own thoughts.”

“I see” said Hunter, though an explanation that esoteric was something that would take a while for him to wrap his head around.

“May I speak freely, sir?”

“You’re the accidental, informal counselor and first line of advice and support for troubled late-night drinkers, Mortimer. You do what you have to do.”

“I will go on and hypothesize that what troubles you is of a practical rather than of an academic nature. Sharing the nature and details of your predicament is likely to allow me to be of more substantial assistance.”

The nature and details of his predicament…

“To put it simply," Hunter said, “I’ve made friends with some people in… on this side of things. These friends are in trouble. I can help them, or at least try to. Point is, if they die, that’s it for them. If I die, I will simply pop up right back here.”

“I suspect it is not that simple," Mortimer said. “But please, do go on.”

“Right. Getting killed in Elderpyre, you see, won’t actually kill me, but it still is a very shitty experience. Traumatic, as in ‘mental trauma I will have to carry and live with on my side of things, too’ traumatic.”

“I see. So you are faced with a moral dilemma; whether you should take real risks for non-real people, or ignore them and abstain from danger.”

“Exactly," said Hunter, happy to hear his own troubled thoughts being spoken aloud by another person.

“I’m afraid I cannot provide you with insight into such a question; morality is, by its nature, personal and subjective. Arbitrary, even. I will point out, though, that you yourself refer to these simulated entities as ‘people’. This suggests that they feel real to you, even if you are aware of their simulated nature and you are anthropomorphizing them.”

For an NPC that couldn’t provide insight into moral dilemmas, Mortimer had made things very cut-and-dried for him. If Fawkes and the Brethren felt real, and they felt real to himself, then, for all intents and purposes, they were real. That took the parameter of being real or not out of the equation, and made the dilemma more manageable: should he take risks for other people, or play it safe and let them handle their problems on their own?

“As master Grimm put it, sir, you are free to do what you want,” Mortimer went on, probably guessing what was going through his mind. “Although you cannot expect your choices not to have any consequences. What you have to do now is figure out what those consequences are, and whether you are able and willing to deal with and live with them.”

Consequences, huh.

Realistically speaking, leaving Fawkes and the Brethren fend for themselves wasn’t going to have any severe ones. They wouldn’t take action against him. They wouldn’t even blame him.

He, however, would blame himself. The risks those people had taken for him were real enough for them. Would he be the kind of man he wanted himself to be if he couldn’t respond in kind? Would he be up to the standards he wanted to set for himself if he chickened out for fear of the possibility of trauma?

No, he wouldn’t–and that was that.

More than that, he had to admit Grimm had been right. Hunter had access to a simulated world so realistic he couldn’t tell it apart from the real one, a place where the consequences of his actions were serious enough to be worth pondering over, but not as serious as to get him really, honest-to-God killed. If that wasn’t the perfect training ground for practicing how to be a risk-taker, he didn’t know what was.

So yeah, that was that.

He drained the last drops of liquor from his glass, got up, and headed for the door.

“I take it sir has reached some kind of decision, then?” asked the bartender.

“He did, Mort," said Hunter. “It took a while, but he finally did.”