He felt pain.
Why did he feel pain?
He opened his eyes, blinking away tears and trying to see through smothering darkness. Everything hurt. Muscles he hadn’t exercised properly in years were screaming, throbbing as though from overuse and extreme exertion.
He blinked, vision coming into focus just in time to see the fist before it thundered into his face with bone-shattering force.
The hit drove him backwards on unsteady feet, blood pouring from his mouth and nose. He fell to his knees, teeth gritted against the blinding pain as he reached up and patted lightly at the ruined memory of his nose.
He didn’t see the boot as it connected with his head, but he did feel the world lurch sharply to one side as he was thrown back against the ground like a rag doll. Cold earth slapped him hard in the side of the head, overloading his ability to translate pain into meaningful sensation.
Lying on his side, blood pouring from his mouth and nose, he coughed and spluttered, spitting out blood as he pushed himself into a hunched sitting position. He sucked in warm, fetid air.
This doesn’t make any—
“The pits!” a gruff voice growled from nearby, followed closely by grunts of agreement.
The young man wiped blood and sweat from his face. He grimaced as he brushed his hand against the battered remnants of his nose again, sending a shock of vivid pain through his head that brought with it a fresh wave of nausea that threatened to empty his stomach.
He spat out blood and cursed, the words losing their venom as they spilled from his mouth in a weak gurgle. His ears felt like they were stuffed with sawdust. His vision swirled maddeningly.
None of this made any sense. It was all wrong.
He shouldn’t be feeling pain like this. All the pain had gone, taken away by…
He looked around groggily and found that he was sitting on the floor of a tunnel, lit by amber bulbs embedded into dark stone walls. Half a dozen brutes in thick leather armor stood at the tunnel exit, armed with heavy-looking clubs, whips, and hateful expressions.
At the head of the group stood a thickset man with a mop of unruly hair atop a swollen head and a thick beard that forked left and right at the ends. He sported heavy arms and a barrel chest, with dark, dangerous eyes that glinted with malice. A long, sheathed machete hung from the side of his belt, and a club dangled on the opposite side. Both the club and sheath bore signs of extensive use and what looked suspiciously like old blood stains.
The barrel-chested thug was wiping the young man’s blood from his fist, smearing it against his trousers as he turned to his companions.
“Nothing but gutter swill. Take ‘em all to the Blood Pits.”
Once more, this drew mutters of agreement from the gathered thugs. They stepped forward, holding metal devices that looked like high-tech collars in their hands.
It was at this point that he realized he wasn’t alone in the tunnel. He twisted around to see a dozen disheveled souls all cowering together, scantily clad and dirty, their eyes wide with fear, some bloodied like him, others untouched but looking like they’d just survived some profound trauma. They all looked underfed and tired, the dregs of humanity just as bewildered and out of place as he felt.
Behind them stood a large metal frame with peculiar markings cut into its surface. It looked like the frame of a doorway, a portal of some kind. At the apex of the gateway sat a symbol he recognized from the documents the Company had sent him and his parents. It was pitted with age and badly rusted, but he could still make out the tower symbol with the word Havenspire written in block letters across its lower half.
So, I’m in the simulation then? It worked. Whatever else is wrong here, the upload did at least work.
He caught sight of something on his arm. A simple tattoo of a mop and bucket running down his left forearm. When he touched the tattoo, a digital display opened above it, showing a set of basic stats.
Rank: 0
Class: Custodian
Meticulousness: 0
Efficiency: 0
Persistence: 0
Courtesy: 0
Special Skills: NA
He immediately recognized it for what it was, basic stats relating to his character here in the afterlife simulator. He was a rank zero custodian with no special skill and no experience. That made sense given that he’d just arrived in Havenspire. What made less sense was the gang of bloody-minded thugs in front of him.
The display vanished as rough hands picked the young man up off the ground. Something heavy and metallic was clamped around his neck, clicking into place with a deep, resonant hum as though an energy field of some kind had just been activated.
He reached up, fumbling at the metal device. A sharp shock snapped at his fingers. He let out a muffled yelp, pulling his hand away while a burly thug dragged him by the arm toward a large metal cart in the distance.
In like fashion, all the newcomers were each given metal collars and hauled forward by their captors. One of the smaller specimens—a thin, sickly man—tried to make a run for it and earned a savage swipe across the face with one of the heavy clubs held by the brutes. The blow knocked him hard to the ground, where he lay motionless, blood pooling about his head.
Two of the thugs dragged the unconscious man ahead of the group and tossed him into the back of an archaic-looking prison cart. It rocked slightly as the man’s body landed in a heap inside.
Heavy hands shoved the young man forward and forced him to climb up into the back of the cart along with the others. Every part of his body screamed in pain, and not just from the attentions of the brutish slavers. There was something deeply wrong with his body, a fever burning his blood and causing his muscles and bones to ache.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
He searched his memory but came up blank. There was no mention in the Company documents of crippling pain that would accompany the upload, so why did he feel like this?
He grimaced as a nearby prisoner was shoved against him. An errant elbow jabbed into his side and pushed him back against the rusted bars of the cage.
“Hey!” he blurted. Though the garbled, wet sound that actually escaped his lips was far less articulate and went entirely unheard by either slaver or slave.
He gritted his teeth, shuffling around to try to find a more comfortable position. However, when he stood, or bent, or twisted his limbs, the hot, angry pain still burned through his body like a rabid fever.
Pain was nothing new to the young man. He’d spent most of his life in discomfort of one kind or another, shuttled from hospital to hospital and ward to ward as his illness inexorably progressed toward its final end. The drugs and constant blackouts made it a little easier to bear, but life for the young man had been murky and unreal, a numb reflection of reality filtered through a haze of skipped time and drug-induced delirium. At least that’s how it had been toward the end.
There had been moments, in his earliest years and teens, when he had experienced the highs and lows of a normal life. He had played with other children, learned to read, kick a ball, and had endured all but his final year of high school. There had been a time when he’d even experienced the first blossoming of love and infatuation.
REDACTED had been her name, the mousy-haired girl with big brown eyes who had a habit of wearing brightly colored t-shirts that featured an impressive array of cartoon unicorns. He’d known her since middle school, the short girl in pigtails who skipped to school and lived in the two-story house with the tall white fence three blocks from his home.
He hadn’t thought much of her until puberty hit like a hurricane, reshaping her body in ways that suddenly enthralled him and recast the simple features of her face into the pristine visage of a goddess. He was at once both besotted and embarrassed. With no preparation and no clue how to approach REDACTED other than the warped perspective of modern media and the unhelpful jeering of his friends, he had watched in anguish as his heart’s desire struck up a relationship with a long-limbed track and field athlete named REDACTED.
As the cart rattled forward, the prisoners all stumbled in unison, holding to rusted bars for support, each shackled around the neck and staring wide-eyed in disbelief at their dismal fate. The young man watched the passing underground city through swollen eyes, his wheezing breaths causing fresh pain with each draw and exhalation.
The surrounding city was a portrait of poverty and misery. Buildings were cut into solid stone, their doors and windows curved as though their builders didn’t have the strength or desire to bother with corners. Here and there shacks and market stalls stood cobbled together from mismatched pieces of wood and sheet metal.
The roof of the cavernous city was so distant that it seemed more like the night sky, twinkling with far-off lanterns and dimly flickering lights. Buildings rose up all around, stacked tightly against one another like wooden blocks. Dim amber and yellow lamps glowed like fireflies throughout the vast city, illuminating crooked back streets and lofted alleyways along with countless hanging bridges that stretched across the roadway far above.
The people of this strange city smiled and talked with one another, going about their business, seemingly unconcerned at the oppressive squalor they were forced to endure. Clothed in little better than rags, tattered shirts and rat-gnawed cloaks that looked like they’d fall away in a strong breeze, the people carried on about their business, utterly uninterested at the passing of the young man and his hapless companions.
The air was thick with acrid smoke, stale sweat, and other, more disturbing odors. Fetid water ran through a shallow channel in the middle of the street, where children washed clothes and utensils, eyeing the prison cart with a mix of curiosity and fear.
There was something particularly disturbing about the sight of children in this place. They looked positively destitute, and that fact was even more confronting than the young man’s own perplexing predicament. Children could, of course, be uploaded to afterlife simulators like Havenspire. Those taken by tragic circumstance or illness could be transitioned, provided they were mentally sound and there was sufficient time to complete the process.
He had known there would be children here. The Company had countless images and ads showing kids frolicking in meadows and playing in bubbling brooks. By contrast, these children looked like they’d been plucked out of a Dickens novel and dragged through the mud for half a mile before being deposited on the streets of the sprawling, underground city.
What kind of place would treat children like this?
The young man snorted, a shock of pain shooting through his head as his broken nose made its complaint known once again. He winced, closing his eyes against the persistent pain of a throbbing headache in addition to the fever that was still burning its way through his body.
“This isn’t right,” he said, the words slipping between swollen lips.
“Really?”
He turned, looking back to find a figure walking alongside the cart. Her face was hidden by a dark red cloak and hood. She walked with confidence, a predator prowling through the shadows, her gaze straight ahead.
“I’m not supposed to be here,” he offered in the desperate hope that this woman might somehow help. “I was supposed to be sent to a starting Havenspire district where I could start to work off my debt as a custodian. Something’s gone wrong.”
Bright teeth glinted momentarily from beneath the hood. “This is a starting district, champ. You’re in Fallow, lower east side, to be exact. This is one of the places they send newbies, the lowest level in Havenspire. We don’t really do custodians down here, though, as you can probably tell. The garbage just kind of piles up, or it gets carted off to the Blood Pits.”
She motioned to the dirty street surrounding her.
“A thousand custodians working around the clock wouldn’t do much to fix this place anyway. Besides, people down here like it dirty.”
He shook his head, regretting the movement immediately as another wave of pain and nausea overcame him. It was hard enough to stay standing with the constant rocking and bumping of the cart on uneven ground, but the thudding in his head and the aching of his muscles made it all the more difficult.
“This doesn’t make sense,” he said, trying to reach her with words that would accurately convey his predicament. “I read the upload contract. Three times! The agreement was completely clear. I get sent to one of the mid-tier levels of Havenspire where I work off the debt scrubbing floors and cleaning toilets, or whatever. Nothing in there about being punched in the face a second after I upload or getting shoved into a prison cart and sent to… What was it? The Blood Pits?”
He shook his head, remembering every piece of fine print he’d forced himself to read meticulously from his hospital bed in the weeks before the transition.
“There’s a legacy arrangement. Because my brother came here first, it means I get priority. Mid-tier at least. A nice cushy starter area where I can get used to everything slowly. That’s the deal. I only needed to pay the upload fee and then I can work off the rest of the debt through custodial duties on the mid to upper levels.”
She turned to him, emerald eyes piercing in the dark shadows of her cowl. Raven hair framed a starkly beautiful face, made all the more alluring by the slight upward tilt of her smirking lips.
“I can’t believe they’re still peddling that nonsense.”
“I don’t…”
She nodded, turning back to face the path ahead. “Yeah, you don’t understand, I get it. Look, that whole blissful afterlife schtick they sold you was a lie. Havenspire doesn’t answer to the Company anymore. It hasn’t for years. It goes by its own rules, controlled by the Didact, the Assembly and, to a lesser extent, the high houses and guilds.”
The young man blinked in confusion, her words striking like a punch to the throat.
“If you’ve got enough money coming into this place, you might be lucky enough to end up in one of the higher tiers. If that’s the case, you might land yourself in the Blue Tier, or Indigo, and if that happens, you’ve got a shot at surviving. Maybe even make a decent life for yourself. You might end up polishing shoes for the rest of eternity, but at least you’ll have clean water and a roof over your head.”
“But the contract—”
“Doesn’t matter what the contract said, friend. You’re here now, so you’d better face facts. Forget everything the Company told you. It’s all lies. Havenspire is a hellhole, and it’s maxed out for people living the high life. No room for newcomers like you.”
The cart hit a hole in the road and jolted sharply, slamming the young man’s head against rusty bars. He cursed as fresh blood started to drip from his nose once more.
“This place was supposed to be better than the real world,” he mused, voice barely above a whisper.
The woman in the red cloak stopped walking, looking up as he passed by. “Sorry, champ. I’ve got places to be and there’s no point in me standing here wasting words with meat.”
He stood despondently as the cart moved on and the woman walked out of view.
“Meat?” he mused.