The waitress returned less than a minute later carrying the most amazing looking turkey club sandwich William could remember, but given his lack of memory, shouldn’t have impressed him as much as it did. He grabbed one of the sections, cut diagonally in the traditional manner of club sandwiches, and sank his teeth into it. Flavor exploded into his mouth. First to reach his taste buds was the bread. Earthy, soft with a layer of toasting so ephemeral it shouldn’t have been possible. Then, the mayo. Sweet, tangy, melding with the thinly sliced tomato as though they had grown up together. The lettuce was crisp and refreshing, gently caressing the roast turkey, which tasted as though each slice had been lightly braised and dusted with the perfect amount of seasoning. And finally, just before his teeth made it to the crust of the opposing slice of bread, the bacon entered into the kaleidoscope of flavor-crunchy, salty, it’s texture easily discernible against the softer ingredients.
The entire section disappeared a moment later, so quickly he wasn’t quite sure he had even eaten it all. Somewhere around the time he took his first bite of the second section, he thought to question how this sandwich was so good. Was it just because he couldn’t remember the taste of anything else, making this sandwich, by default, the tastiest thing he had ever eaten? Or was it really that good? As if to confirm, he took another bite, savoring it’s layered perfection as he remembered where he was.
He was inside a simulation. The sandwich, delicious as it was, wasn’t real. It was just an expertly crafted sequence of ones and zeroes. His mouth faltered, pausing mid chew as he came to the realization. Had the flavors not been in his mouth as his mind made the connection, the sublime combination of disparate ingredients, somehow forming a sum greater than its parts, he might have put the section in his hand down.
Compelled to swallow the contents of his mouth rather than make a scene, he took another moment to really think it over. The food was delicious, and did it really matter if it was real? Is food consisting of ones and zeroes not still food, when it exists in a world of ones and zeroes? Did knowing “how the soup was made” have any tangible bearing on his enjoyment, other than the handicapping that went on inside his own mind? Did knowing that a turkey club sandwich in the real world, itself composed of atoms, ever stop him from enjoying it?
“Eh, when in rome…” He went to take another bite, only to realize that the section he had been holding in his hand was also now gone. He was either ravenous beyond comprehension, or the eating mechanics of this simulation needed to be tweaked.
“I’m sorry?” Kristie was looking at him.
He shook his head, indicating to her that he hadn’t said anything worth explaining.
“Nothing. Just talking to myself.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“You shouldn’t do that in public, people will think you’re crazy.”
William paused his chewing to look at her, and something in his face caused her to burst out laughing.
“Oh my god...I’m joking. Relax.”
William tried to play it off as if he was in on the joke, but her comment hit a little too close to home, when he thought about how little he knew about his mental state.
‘I know.” It came out slightly muffled, spoken as it was through the half chewed wad of turkey club in his mouth, but she seemed to understand as she chuckled at his expense. He took another bite immediately after swallowing, using the affectation to put distance between the present and his awkward gaffe. Perhaps trying to bail him out, Kristie continued.
“You said you were new to the area, and didn’t have a place to stay, right?”
William swallowed, pausing a moment to note that the entire sandwich had now disappeared from his plate. Had he not already decided that it was some form of in game mechanic, the way the system handled eating, it would have been unnerving. He certainly felt as though he had eaten the entire sandwich, his stomach having abandoned the strangled gurgling sounds from earlier, but it bothered him on some level that the simulation wanted to cut corners on the more enjoyable aspects of life in the digital world.
He wondered if other enjoyable endeavors inside the simulation came with the same shorthanded existence. Was sex that way in the sim as well? Would he just climb on top of someone, get a thrust or two into a marathon lovemaking session, and then wake up exhausted in bed lying next to them? He hoped not.
“Earth to William?”
Kristie’s hand waved in front of his face, breaking him out of his internal contemplation of abridged sexytime.
“Y..yeah, sorry. Yes. I haven’t found a place yet.”
Kristie looked at him, as though thinking something over.
“You know, I actually have a freshly emptied apartment you could stay in for a night or two, until you get your feet under you. It’s just an efficiency, so it won’t impress any guys or girls you might bring over, but it’s furnished.”
Her comment about bringing people over had strayed uncomfortably close to mind reading, given his interrupted train of thought. Coupled with her timely offer to meet his needs so far, he decided that she must be a helper NPC, and decided it was safe to take her up on her offer. He decided to press a little to be sure though. Apparently looking a gift horse in the mouth was part of his DNA.
“That would be awesome. I can actually pay you for the room for a few nights, whatever you feel is fair.”
“Oh, I can’t leave a new friend out in the cold when they just arrived in my city. What kind of hostess would I be if I did that?” Her tone was chiding him, indicating tat she could tease as good as she got.
“Well then, here's to new friends, and not sleeping out in the cold.”
The words came out more self-assured than they had any right to be. Kristies expression then did a curious thing - it went from confused, a lopsided grimace with narrowed eyes to a lopsided smirk and a gaze that showed a kindness which wasn’t there a moment ago. There was no discernable transition, the shift happened with such an economy of motion that William almost would have forgotten all about her momentary confusion had he not been watching closely.
“Sure. Everybody needs friends, right?”
Her words were honest, with no hint of sarcasm or malice, and William returned her smile. She was clearly placed there to give him a hand. Nobody warmed that quickly to a perfect stranger if they aren’t being told to.
He wasn’t sure how he was supposed to act towards her. Part of him wanted to see how far he could push the programming, to see how long she would continue to be helpful. The other part of him was still worried that she was a real person, that he’d offend her or drive her away by acting erratically.
In the end, his need for shelter won out.
"Let me pay my tab, and we can go."
********
William stepped from the bathroom, a carpet of billowing steam chasing the door and spilling into the livingroom of Kristie’s small apartment. She kept the air conditioning on 24/7, which not only frigid 60 degree microclimate in the space, but also caused strange phenomena like any warm moist air, such as from a shower of faucet creating steam comparable to an antique locomotive.
He had vague memories of a figure dressed in black with a long cape entering rooms amidst a similar amount of smoke, but couldn’t for the life of him remember the figures name. Garth? Mater? Something like that.
Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
One of the things William had discovered as his memory began to come back to him was that sometimes the process of retrieving disjointed, useless bits of information, and the resulting frustration of knowing part of something, was often more irritating than not knowing anything at all.
He glanced at the answering machine for the fifth time that day, hoping to spot the tell tale red blinking light that meant he had missed a call from one of the dozen or so job postings he had applied to over the past week, but the beige and black hunk of plastic remained inert on the counter as he passed it. In truth, he was beginning to wonder how long Kristie’s hospitality would remain in effect, ingrained artificial intelligence or not.
Stepping into his bedroom, he made his way over to the clothes he’d laid out onto the bedside chair and began getting dressed. Underwear, socks, pants, shirt, the motions robotic. In truth, he no longer worried about recovering his memories. He knew they would come back in time, which left him headspace to worry about more pressing matters, like how to navigate this new world, with it’s game mechanics that nobody seemed to know anything about. Perhaps, if the hooded man with the shadow daggers had survived the attack, he could have gotten some answers.
Clothed, he turned on the small FM radio atop the table to the right of the bed. One of the quirks of the digital construct, it always seemed to know exactly what music he was in the mood for. An electric guitar, strummed to an upbeat tempo with synthesizer backing filtered through the room.
The music made him feel more grounded than anything else, surprising because according to the doctor, this world had literally been created from his memories. His expectations upon arriving were that he would be awash in familiarity, but that hadn’t been the case. Sure, there were occasional bits that drew him in, half truths from the past that did little more than frustrate him at his inability to locate where he had seen them before, but so far the experience had felt more like a crate of puzzles bought from a discount store, marked down because they were incomplete.
William flopped back onto the bed, somewhere in the back of his mind understanding that the resulting sound of simulated straining springs were a problem that had already been solved in the future of the present. He tried to put his problems in order of which needed to be solved first. His obvious first issue was that he needed to find employment, but he tempered that with the understanding that the world around him was literally designed to prevent him from failing, which made him feel both a little better and irritated that it hadn’t already stepped in.
“Maybe the point is to struggle.”
He murmured it towards the ceiling, deciding to try out vocalizing his frustrations for a change. Grasping for understanding, his mind instantly grabbed onto the idea of suffering as a means of progress, wondering if the system indeed required him to overcome a minimum amount of adversity for the memories to stick or make sense. It made sense. The Doctor had straight up told him that it wouldn’t help to just give him the information, and that he would have to allow it to all piece itself together over time.
Which, frankly...sucked.
Lost in his thoughts and self-pity, he missed the sound of the phone ringing for the first few cycles. Coming back to reality, he pushed off the bed, coaxing out another squawk from the antiquated springs, and dashed out to the livingroom where the phone sat.
“Hello?”
The voice on the other end was jovial, as though most of their days in life had been pretty decent.
“Yes, is this William Kenney?”
William’s pulse quickened, which he knew on some level was a little overdramatic for a potential job interview from any of the low level service industry jobs he’d applied for.
“Yes, this is William.”
“Ah, good. My name is Carl, I’m the store manager at the Dollar World on 4th and Vanguard, and I’m setting up interviews over the next couple of days for a stockperson position. It says here on your application that you’re open to, and I’m quoting here-any position you have. Is that still accurate?”
William pulled the receiver away from his mouth and exhaled, not wanting to sound too relieved.
“I am. I’m available whenever you can fit me in.”
There was a pause, and William worried that he had made the mistake of sounding too overeager. He might not know his parents' names at the moment, but even he knew that was usually considered a red flag for some reason, even if on paper it should sound like exactly what a potential employer should be looking for.
“Oh? That’s great. How is this afternoon? Say, around 3:30?”
William glanced at the clock on the answering machine beside the phone. The clock read a little after 1:30pm. He knew he only needed around half an hour to get there, based on his previous trips downtown.
“Sure, I can be there before then.”
For some reason the saying “on time is late” sprang to mind. It always struck him as strange how the easiest memories to recover were the least useful.
“Great, I’ll see you then.”
William hung up the phone and clenched a fist in the air in silent celebration.
Around two hours later, William pushed open the door the Dollar World on the corner of 4th and Vanguard. The smell of early 90’s department store hit him in the face, the low grade chemicals used to polish the floor, the arid air and accompanying smell of cardboard. A woman, looking distinctly bored at her position behind the lone open cash register, gave him a polite smile. The emotion of waiting around, feeling trapped by a timeclock with little to do washed over him, and he assumed it came from some psychologically desolate job he had worked in the past.
He returned the smile, summoning the commiserating knot in the back of his mind to power the expression.
“I’m here to speak to Carl?”
“You here for an interview?”
Her voice sounded almost desperate for social interaction. William wondered for the first time if the store even had enough business to warrant three employees.
“Yeah.”
She gave him a brief once over, sizing him up before tilting her head towards the rear of the store.
“He’s in the back. Just use the door leading to the restrooms in the back left corner, and go through the double doors in the back and into the stockroom. His desk is just around the corner.”
“Thanks.”
William felt her eyes on his back as he walked away. She wasn’t unattractive, but had the exhausted patina of “recently separated single mom”. That didn’t feel like a deal breaker for him, but something in the back of his head urged him to stay away. There was also the fact that she was more than likely code strung out on a mainframe somewhere, and he had a hard time getting hard knowing that.
Nothing stuck out to him as especially memorable or interesting in the store as he made his way to the back corner. He pushed open the back door, a solid gray painted steel number that seemed excessively dense for an interior model. As it broke contact with the threshold, muffled screams and yelling rushed out like a compromised hatch on the Titanic.
William couldn’t make out anything specific, but the rage in the voice was apparent. He glanced around, reaffirming that he was in the right place, then continued on down the hallway. He wasn’t sure what his plan was if the shouting turned out to be anything physically violent, and his mind instantly began making possible explanations for what could be causing the tirade. Was it the manager, chewing out a distributor that was gouging him on prices? Another employee, quickly approaching the end of their illustrious career as a Dollar Store employee? William knew the answer would be apparent once he passed through the partially closed door at the end of the hall, so he slowed as he reached it. The voice that resolved into further focus was sarcastic, insulting in a way that sounded familiar to William for some reason. Not the voice, per se, but the tone.
“Jesus. You fucking cuck. You are useless. Why don’t you do us all a favor and go slit your wrists and jerk off in the blood until you pass out?”
William raised an eyebrow at the comment. Something gave him the impression that the person the mystery male voice was talking to wasn’t physically in the room, so the risk of physical violence became more remote. He slowly pressed the door open, making his way into the sparse industrial shelves in the warehouse section in the rear of the store.
He heard a bang, like someone slamming a fist to a countertop or desk, followed by another string of expletives. Tentatively, William peeked out around the corner or a shelf packed with discount toilet paper, and saw a middle aged man sitting in front of a computer monitor, frantically clicking a mouse as he screamed into a headset. Small characters chased each other down narrow pathways on the screen, clashing in battle.
“God, you suck. Your whole team sucks. You’re just a bunch of sweaty bitches all coming after me because I’m worth any two of you. Why don’t you uninstall this game and give your PC’s to a blind hobo on the street, someone who might give me a game.”
William relaxed. There was no fight here, just a middle aged man sneaking in a round or two of some online game William wasn’t familiar with before his interview arrived. He assumed the guy wanted the woman at the front desk to page him or otherwise give him a heads up when William arrived, but the cashier was probably the strongest personification of “that’s not my job” William could ever remember seeing, which, admittedly, wasn't saying much. He took a few steps back, moving back through the doorway, which he partially closed behind himself, leaving only a small gap for which to shout through.
“Hello? I’m supposed to meet Carl for an interview?”
He could hear the clatter of computer hardware as Carl, the manager of the Dollar Store, jerked his headset off and exited his game. A moment later, he spoke.
“Umm, back here.”
William did what felt like a commendable job of hiding his smile as he made his way back to the desk. Carl stood up, his eyes a little frantic, his cheeks flushed.
“Thanks for coming in.”
He extended a hand, which William shook.