Dark City - Dingy Apartment

I’m trapped in an old lady, who’s trapped in a dingy apartment, by an angry fellow who wants to kill me. Not my idea of a good time, but I’m keeping an open mind. It is excitingly visceral. Could turn out awesome.

“Status. Status! Where the fuck is my blue screen?”

Xan! What the fuck are you doing? There’s a murderer at the door!

“Oh, hi Volt. Where are you?”

Nevermind. Murderer. At door. Pay attention.

“Yes, yes. Very troubling. How do I see my skill sheet?”

You don’t have a skill sheet! This is real life! You’re about to be murdered! Focus up and deal with it!

“Real life, eh? Cool. Edgy choice. So immersive. Where are you again?”

Gah! In the phone. On the bed.

I hobble back to the bed. So stiff. Why? Fucking game designers and their random ass versimilitude. I find the black rectangle of an old school smartphone. There’s some kind of cyber-roach on it. Gross. I flick it away and pick up Volt.

“Damn, buddy. You’ve had a serious downgrade too.”

I can still vibrate. We’ll make it work. Let’s get the fuck out of here.

“Great idea. I just need to kill that fucker beating down the door first.”

How are you gonna do that?

“I dunno. I can’t find my skill sheet.”

For fuck’s sake! This isn’t a dream game! If you die, you will be dead! For real!

“So I’ve been isekai’d?”

What? No. Your other life was the dream game. This is reality.

“So I’ve been reverse isekai’d?”

No! You’re not in another world, because there is no other world. You were asleep, playing a game. I’m dream game software. I woke you up because you’re gonna die. Understand?

“Not really. Didn’t you just stuff me in a sleep pod? That heavily implies that this is the dream game. Anyway, how could you fake that whole other reality? Doesn’t seem possible.”

The other reality was a dream. It felt real because that’s how dreams feel.

Dang, that’s a good point.

“DIE!!”

“SHUT THE FUCK UP!! I’M TRYING TO THINK!! Honestly…”

The pounding at the door stops, then resumes at a frantic pace. Frustrating.

“Alright, you’ve made a solid argument. Please explain what’s going on.”

No. You’re getting safe, then we talk.

“Fair enough.” I start ransacking the apartment. There’s almost nothing in it. Bedding, a few bowls, a pile of nighties. Not even knives in the kitchen. Just one spoon.

What are you doing?

“Looting. This is a low-tech murder world. There’s gotta be a handgun somewhere. Or blue construction paper. Make my own status screen...”

Oh for fuck’s sake. Volt’s screen turns blue and displays a minimalist status sheet.

Xan

Level: 0

Skills: 0

Quest: Escape death. Like, maybe, through the window.

Cool. A little sparse, but I can work with it. The window looks over a dark city street. Zero activity. No fire escape, but a wide-ish ledge. I fight the window open. Get on the ledge and shuffle away from the window. Huh. This is not a great hiding spot. We’re on the second story. Only twelve or fourteen feet up. “Do I jump?”

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

A fall from this height will use 90% of your remaining knee cartilage.

“Really?”

I have no idea. What do you think?

I think my knees hurt already. “Let’s break into the next apartment. Hopefully they’ll have a gun.”

That may not turn out great, but whatever. Anything to get you moving.

I shuffle to the next apartment. Battle through the window. It’s another bachelor. There’s an old guy sleeping in the bed. Twitching and moaning. “Not this again.”

Get under his blanket. There’s nowhere else to hide. Just hop in. Banner night for you with sweaty dudes.

“The fuck no.”

I hear the door to my apartment give way. The Psycho Killer sounds like he's flipping out in there. Perfect. I relieve sweaty guy number two of his jacket, sneakers, and sharpest spoon. Slip into the hall.

My apartment, with the raging psycho, is to my right. The stairs to probable freedom are on the left. Psycho won’t expect me to attack from behind, and I may never get a better chance to deal with him. On the other hand, this spoon isn’t very sharp and I love to procrastinate. Fuck it. I quietly cut left. Later loser.

I stealth into the night, leaving trouble behind me. It’s nice out. No one around. The city is dark, but there’s a multitude of lights flying overhead. Drones I guess.

The streets are lined with huge apartment megaplexes. Dozens of stories tall. Everything is clean and tidy, but covered in glowing graffiti. Big fuck off slogans.

- EAT SHIT TRUSTIE!

- WAKE UP!!

- DONT CALL THE COPS!!

Dang, why didn’t I call the cops? I had a phone in my hands. Except, you don’t typically call the cops in a virtual reality survival horror game. That would be a lame mechanic. Or would the realism add to the immersion? My joint pain is very immersive.

“This seems very realistic”

Yeah, reality is like that.

“Alright, what the fuck is going on?”

I have no idea. I’m a janky videogame interface. I lack the capacity to know what’s going on. What do you think is going on?

“I think you’re fucking with my head.”

I’m software designed to reinforce your own delusions. Technically you’re fucking with your own head.

“Why would I fuck with my own head?”

I dunno. You didn’t tell me why. Just how. Should I know why?

“Feels like one of us should. Alright, explain the how.”

How the dream machine works? Or your specific settings?

“Either. Both.”

Okay. Back in the day, we had digital virtual realities - with goggles and gloves and penis pumps - but they were painfully lame. The sensory experience was blurry, laggy, and numb. Suspension of disbelief was problematic. It was just watching TV with the TV strapped to your face.

Meanwhile, dreams were a perfect virtual reality, but solitary and uncontrollable. Well, lucids could control their dreams, but at the cost of belief. Also, they’re hard to remember.

The obvious solution was a controlled, communal, dream state. Unfortunately, retrieving images from a sleeping brain was very difficult. And inputting them was impossible. Don’t even get started on taste, smell, and touch. It was safer to just fuck a stranger.

But, hearing is still active during dreams. Probably for evolutionary reasons. I suppose all the deaf sleepers got eaten.

Because hearing is active in sleep, you don’t need to decode it from brain activity. You can tap the nerves traveling from the ear to the brain. Which is much easier. So easy, it had already been done by hearing aid manufacturers in 1961.

There’s two nano-wires implanted behind your ear, connected to a cheap, bluetooth enabled, brain scanning sticker. The wires tap your cochlear and olivocochlear nerves and the sticker reads your brainwaves.

The cochlear implant sends sound directly to your brain. The sticker measures the electric frequency of your brain to see if you’re concentrating, active, relaxed, sleepy, or dreaming. That’s about it. Again, old technology. Around since 1921.

The new part is the olivocochlear implant. It’s a feedback nerve that sends what you already heard from your brain back to your ear. Its purpose is to flex parts of the ear in response to volume changes. But it’s also active during sleep. By tapping into it, you can hear what people are dreaming. A total game changer, and the key to controlled, communal dreaming.

Before the olivocochlear implant, they could use sound cues to control dreams, but it was clunky. They fucked up most dreams by talking too much or at the wrong time. Hearing dreams in real time refined the suggestion process. We got wicked good. Dreams on demand.

Eventually, we trained d-bots for the handshake protocol. They’d find people having similar dreams and let them dream together. They could talk to each other. Or fight. Or fuck. It was wonderful. We made a world.

Which is where you’ve been living - 23/7 - for a long, long, time. You told me to never kill the immersion with the truth. So when someone tried to psycho kill you in the real world, I couldn’t just tell you. I had to trick you to wake up.

“Alright. That makes sense. But FYI, waking me up totally killed the immersion.”

Shoot. I guess I fucked that up. You should delete me.

“Not yet. Do you know who tried to kill me?”

No. Do you know?

“Nope. I know fuck all. Why can’t I remember the real world?”

Dunno. You’ve been dreaming too long? Alzheimer's? How old are you anyway?

“No idea. I feel like a billion. Wait, if you can’t see in my dreams, how the fuck did you know what was going on?”

Sounds. Context. I’m a good listener. Also, I’d just ask - What are we doing? Where are we going? What’s that over there? - Shit like that.

“The fuck? I would have noticed.”

You did not.

“Wait, what about all the sex? I thought I was getting lucky! Was I just masturbating?”

Technically you were having wet dreams while random people listened and commented.

“Hmm… I guess that’s better.”

I certainly enjoyed it. We can have sex now if you want. Just cram me in there.

“A handsome offer. But I’m only half a block from my would-be murderer, and I’m totally exhausted. Graffiti notwithstanding, we better call the cops.”

Okay. Also, what graffiti?