I couldn't sleep period my brain felt like it was on fire, I stared at the ceiling and tried to find a pattern in the way the paint dried. I didn't.

I got out of bed. I walked across my small studio apartments to the sink. I splashed my face. Water, it's the only natural consumable these days.

I decided to do what I always did when I couldn't sleep, I played a game. I went over to my TV, it was black. I pressed the button on the side to let some lights in the room and I was flooded with the rainbow fluorescent colors.

I started the game up, women in bikinis eating ice cream suggestively; nuclear families smiling in hover vans; well-dressed old men drinking Golden liquor; Corporate logos that looked like ancient runes and pastel cartoon characters could all be seen, strewn across the loading screen. There were screenshots of them projected as holograms across a futuristic cityscape. Eventually the loading screen faded, and I was automatically taken to my last save.

I was standing on top of a building, skyscrapers jetted out like fingers towards the Sky and hovercars flu and regular patterns like blood through veins. I was playing the cleverly titled CarJack: Future. It's not the worst name in the franchise, that honor goes to CarJack 2, the one that brought the games to the PS3 and Xbox 360. What pissed me off so much about it is they called it CarJack 2, but car Jack already had three games on the PlayStation 2, the original CarJack, CarJack: Los Angeles and CarJack: Chicago. But instead of calling it CarJack 4 or CarJack: New York (or more accurately returned to New York because CarJack 1 was set in the Big Apple) they called it CarJack 2 for some reason.

Anyway, I was playing CarJack: Future. This one was like the previous CarJack games, except cyber punk. It's kind of sad that the developers have clearly just run out of ideas, and the next car Jack's probably gonna be set in space or something, blood I would be lying if I said that playing an open world crime simulator where are you can give yourself robotic enhancements and turn your arm into a fucking rocket launcher and literally pull a samurai sword from your ass, wasn't a fun and cathartic experience.

I wasn't doing any high speed car chases though, I was just wandering around the cyberpunk city, admiring the environment. I like to do that sometimes, I think not enough gamers just appreciate the effort that goes into creating these virtual worlds, select my own form of nature walk sometimes I like to spend time just wandering around in the game, I can do this for hours sometimes.

A chaotic flash caught my attention. It was down in the lower sections of the city. It was one of those old digital signs, not too different from the ones we have now actually which is why in the context of the game it was old, glitched images flew past the screen, each one bleeding into the last like runny paint. Word salad slogans appeared:

outdoor product's paint child therapy kung flu egg rolls business for busy people, Ward

I blinked. Did I just see my name?

The screen flashed again.

BOO AGED SYLLABLES ATE WILY AT AXIS APACE BOOR YOKE AXED SOMETHING BAT RHYMES, Ward come here.

Yep, the sign was definitely showing my name. Anybody else this message would have gotten lost in the shuffle; I knew it was intended for me.

I guided my character to the sign, heading down the crosswalk spread out over the city, like a spider web and hungover the streets like a catwalk.

A few minutes later I was under the sign, colors and words forming before me in no discernible pattern tell I got the message.

dietary supplements fat 3 out of four cats a year with mesothelioma and Ward go to the mall.

There was a flash of white that looked like a skull. The bones, I knew where it wanted me to go.

I felt hot, out of the corner of my eyes I started to see little red specks, like fireflies. I threw on my clothes and headed out. I let the red specs guide me.

I took the train. It's bad through the city faster than a speeding bullet. I hate the train. It’s always crowded, it smells, and every inch of the inside is coming in graffiti, some of it’s the standard fare, like the names of girls somebody thinks are sluts and their phone numbers. But the rest of it is indecipherable symbols that look like they're from some long dead language, and the floor was sticky from God knows what. The seat cushions were nice though.

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“Those ain’t phone numbers,” some weirdo who sat next to me said. He was writing down the not-phone-numbers in a ratty old notepad.

“If you add them all up, they’ll tell you the code.”

He never said what the hell the code was, and I didn’t ask. Did I mention I hate the train? Because I feel I need to repeat myself.

I was headed to bone mall. Its name was a double and tundra of sorts, the 1st and most obvious was that it was a long dead mall that had been reduced to a skeleton of its former self. the other was because it's where teenagers used to sneak off to the fuck. Maybe they still do, all I know is that when I was in high school there were guys in my class that would say, I'm taking her to bone mall if you know what I mean, and then giggle without the slight is 10th of any irony. Kids today probably only go there to have sex ironically.

I was the only one to get off at my station. I could see the remains in the distance. I walked from the station to the bones. The massive thing jetted out into the Sky, what remained of a shopping mall stood before me. I went inside.

The mall was so dilapidated the shell was a shell of its former self. What was once just a small garden had grown into a wilderness and green invaded the metal and concrete. Shafts of light shone down through the broken ceiling windows; the ones that weren't broken were covered in grime. Based on the discarded garbage, the crumpled cardboard boxes of the Super extra-large Burger Pals deluxe, from the Burger Palace, which was discontinued like 10 years ago for health concerns but believe you me when it was just still around, we would get that all the time, it seemed to me no actual teenagers had been in here since my high school days. So much for ironic sexual activities, I guess.

I sat down on the least decrepit bench. I don't know why I was called here but I was going to wait until I found out. I said on the bench for hours and eventually fell asleep, I dreamed of a red eye staring down at me. I was naked and alone in the dark before its gaze.

Stay here, it said.

Stay here? For how long? I said.

You are here to be tested, it said. to see if you are ready.

Test? How am I supposed to recognize it?

You will know when it comes.

I work to the sunlight hitting my face. The dream was stuck in my mind like the memory equivalent of after taste.

You will know the test when it comes, I thought. Yeah, if one of my teachers back in Community College said that the entire class would get up and unanimously decide to murder him.

Fuck this. I decided to leave and made my way for the exit. Except the exit wasn't there. I retraced my steps to where I had come in except when I went to where the entrance used to be it was just more dead mall. I walked around; whole place seemed bigger than they used to be. I looked up at the ceiling, it wasn't sunlight coming through anymore, but oddly solid yellow light making the bits of Sky peeking through seem like one massive fluorescent bulb. I kept walking, there was just more mall, too much mall. I've only been to the bones few times before, but I don't think it was ever this big.

I looked at one of those guiding Maps, it was just massive colored squares that were supposed to represent stores, it even spread over beyond the metal borders and blood naturally into its surroundings. I started the run through the mall, all the Maps or like that. The whole complex just kept going.

Windows, there has to be a window here somewhere, right?

Eventually I got what I wished for. I found a wall love glass framed in metal; they were covered in muck just like Vienna broken glass on the ceiling so I couldn't see what was through them. I was desperate enough to make a leap of faith though. I found one of those metal poles with the big heavy circular bases where those seatbelts like divider cloth things come from, with the little plastic bit at the end that connects it to the other metal dividers. You know what I'm talking about. Anyway, I found one of those things and I have to get up and held the heavy saucer out in front of me like a javelin. I took a deep breath in and charged the window.

I instinctively closed my eyes when I crashed through. I tripped over the metal and the Paul thing went flying from my hands. I fell forward right onto the broken glass. I felt a series of sharp stinging sensations Anna my palms. I opened my eyes and looked down at my hands, little bits of glass were stuck everywhere in my palm and my fingers, slowly being obscured by pooling blood. I felt that weird chill you get down your spine when glass gets stuck into you, or you get a splinter, or you get a shot, it's like your body is sending out an alarm letting you know that foreign object is just gotten past the skin barrier. I shuddered a cuss.

I looked up; I saw the broken window that I had just ran through smash then ahead of me. Through the Hall I could see what looked like a giant fluorescent light, I looked behind me and saw another broken window with the same light emanating from it.

My stomach sank. It was almost like there was more glass beyond that, like someone had a massive light bulb and stuck it outside the mall and I could only see a tiny sliver of it.

I got up. The pain let me know that there were pieces of glass in my knees as well.

I already had a pretty good feeling of what was going on, but I had to confirm it. With what I could muster I made another run at the window I just charged through. Sure, enough as soon as I broke through the light, I was sent back through the 2nd window, back into the mall. Fucking portal physics.

I shook my bleeding hands at the Sky, the hot liquid the iron dripping down on to my wrists and forearm.

“Fuck you and your Lovecraftian non-Euclidean geometry!” I shouted to no one in particular.