THWACK!
Knuckles struck my cheek and sent my head whirling to the right. I gasped and blinked, struggling to focus. I sat in a brightly lit room wearing a bulky plastic suit—like a cross between a diver’s suit and a straitjacket. A thin woman with glasses stood before me.
What was her name? Joanna? No, Jocasta.
Jocasta took my chin with her left hand and drew me forward. Her smile had transformed into a cold scowl, and she studied my face with the intensity of a detective examining a cadaver.
“Reflexes normal. Pupils are fine.” She raised three fingers. “How many fingers am I holding up?”
“Seventeen.”
Jocasta pivoted back, and then spun in a blur, moving so quickly that I couldn’t see her hand as it struck me. THWACK! If it hadn’t been for the suit, I would have fallen out of the chair.
I glanced at the wall and saw hungry-looking children laughing at me. No, they were portraits of children, and their teeth were emphasized because I was in a… dentist’s office. The linoleum was cracked and the blue paint was peeling, revealing gray cement. The wall calendar read March 2016. Seven years ago.
Jocasta took hold of my chin again and held up three fingers.
“How many fingers?”
“Three,” I whispered.
“Not so hard, was it?”
“You drugged me. Kidnapped me. Where the hell am I?”
Jocasta clucked her tongue. “American men are so inconstant. Three hours ago, you pledged your undying love to me, and now all you do is complain. Drugs. Kidnapping. Next, you’ll whine about not feeling your legs.”
My stomach clenched. She was right—I couldn’t feel my legs, knees, or feet. Everything below my waist was dead weight.
“What are you doing?” I struggled to breathe. “Are you… stealing my organs?”
“Relax. You wanted to play a roguelike in a Striba suit. Now you have your chance.”
I took a closer look, and my outfit was made of the same black Neoprene I’d seen in online pictures. Amazement overcame my fear. This was really happening. I was wearing a Striba suit.
“Isn’t there supposed to be a visor?” I asked.
“Of course not. Your optic nerves will be directly connected to the suit along with the rest of your nervous system. You’ll see what the suit tells you to see and hear what the suit tells you to hear. I figured you'd be some kind of expert.”
Like most gamers, I’d read countless articles about Striba suits, and I did consider myself an expert. However, reliable information was hard to come by. Sources clashed in many respects, but certain facts were agreed upon: the first suit had been designed by a neurosurgeon named Vyacheslav Striba during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and its original purpose was to assist with interrogating prisoners. It had an electrode for every nerve in the human body, and when the suit was connected, an interrogator could control the prisoner’s stimuli—every sight, sound, smell, and sensation—through the suit’s computer. Obedience was rewarded with pleasure; defiance was punished with agony.
Striba had produced 180 suits for the Russian army, and like so many of the army’s assets, they ended up on the black market. Moneyed individuals fought furiously for them, with auctions reaching tens of millions of American dollars. With a Striba suit, game developers could produce fully immersive experiences for their players. Sex workers could provide their clientele with heavenly heights or the deepest, darkest layers of Hell.
When lawmakers learned of the suits’ potential for torture, private ownership became illegal. The only Striba suits I knew of were owned by research institutions, and they were kept securely away from the public.
I looked over my shoulder and saw a semi-circle of machines connected to the suit. Having cared for my mother before her death, I recognized the electrocardiogram, the electroencephalogram, and the intravenous drip that injected fluid and nutrients into my arm. In the center of the machines sat a grim, bespectacled man in a white jacket. He looked intently at my lower back, and smoke wafted upward from his soldering iron. I turned to Jocasta.
“Does that guy know what he's doing?”
She nodded. “Before his experiments became public, Dr. Volkov was the most sought-after neurosurgeon in the world. Now he works for us. He’s established the interface for your sacral nervous system, which is why you can’t feel anything below your waist. Now he’s patching in your lumbar and thoracic nerves.”
I took slow, deep breaths. My grogginess was clearing.
“Why go to all this trouble? Plenty of gamers would give their thumbs to play a game in a Striba suit.”
“Possessing this suit is a felony, and with so much money at stake, I can’t take no for an answer. I need someone to beat this damned game, and you’re number one on the list.”
“But I’m not really the best. Mordrake the Magnificent and Lady Valor were at the top of the board for years. Both of them were—”
Then it dawned on me. I'd been delighted when the top two gamecasts had disappeared, raising me to the Number One position. I gasped.
“What happened to Mordrake and Lady Valor?”
“I gave them the opportunity to beat Realm of Shadows. Despite their reputations, neither succeeded. Dr. Thaddeus Wilson, better known as Mordrake, flatlined wearing that suit, as did Himari Tanaka, known to her fans as Lady Valor.”
“What do you mean, flatlined?”
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“The suit delivered enough electrical stimuli to overload their nervous systems and trigger heart fibrillation. Thirty-two people have played Realm of Shadows, and that suit killed them all. Convulsions, screaming, then silence.”
“Can’t you reverse engineer it? Or hack into the suit’s computer?”
“We tried shutting off the suit’s power so we could talk to the player. Flatline. Another time, we disconnected the player’s facial nerves so he could describe what was happening. Flatline. We hired the best engineers in the world, and they all said the same thing—the game is unhackable. Once it takes control of your nervous system, it won’t let go.”
I pressed my eyes shut as a chill of despair passed over me. “If Mordrake and Lady Valor couldn’t win, I don’t stand a chance. They weren’t just higher than me on the board. They were better.”
“But you play different types of characters. Mordrake played wizards, Lady Valor played paladins, and you play rogues. That could give you an advantage.”
"Rogues can't use good weapons or cast good spells. We're usually the first to die.”
“If you need motivation, have a care for the next player on the board.”
I struggled to think of the name of the second-ranked player on the Roguelikes board. “You mean Eric the Cleric? Isn’t he just a kid?”
“Eric Mortzheim is a fifteen-year-old living in Wisconsin, adored by his parents and worshipped by his twelve-year-old sister. Every hour you spend playing the game is another hour he gets to spend with his family.”
I studied Jocasta’s face, searching for some trace of remorse. But she looked bored, as though this was just another day on the job.
“You’re a monster,” I said.
Jocasta’s eyes brightened, and she leaned toward me, smiling in a way that drew her lips into a V.
“Listen to you. You have no friends and no family, and when you’re not wasting your life playing games, you inspire other people to waste theirs. This might seem monstrous, but the way I see it, I’m just taking out the trash.”
I struggled to force my lips open and tell Jocasta what she could do with her trash. But my mouth wouldn’t respond. I couldn’t feel my face or any part of my body from the neck down.
Dr. Volkov spoke in a low-pitched growl. “The spinal interface is nearly complete, and his nervous system is almost patched in. Before I can start the game, the computer needs a name for the player.”
“Dylan,” Jocasta said. “D-Y-L-A-N.”
The room fell silent as the boundaries of my vision darkened. Jocasta waved and mouthed the words, “Good luck.”
Then everything went black.
⚔
For an unmeasurable amount of time, I floated in space as a disembodied soul. It was like the Catholic idea of purgatory—no pleasure, no pain, no feeling. Just time. All the time in the world to reflect on one’s life and the choices that one should or shouldn’t have made.
Looking back, my most vivid memory was of the police officer who had called me out of my high school Economics class. In a quiet, solemn voice, he’d told me that my parents had been in a car accident. Both had been drinking, and their car had T-boned a cement truck on Erie Blvd. My father had died instantly and my mother had fallen into a coma.
I dropped out of school and did my best to manage affairs, but after the legal and medical bills, there had been nothing left. I’d turned 18 the month before, so I was too old to be a ward of the state. I ended up living out of my Dodge Shadow during one of the worst winters in Syracuse’s history, and I’d expected to freeze or starve. But I hadn’t. I got a job at the Westside diner and a lease for the cheapest apartment in the city.
I’d fallen into a hole, but with the money I’d earned from the gamecast, I could have pulled myself out. I wanted to seize Jocasta by her silk collar and tell her how very close I’d come to getting my life back. But now I was stuck in an entirely different hole.
A loud BANG shattered the nothingness and shook me out of my self-pity. My senses returned, and I found myself seated in the third row of an old-time movie theater—the kind they made during the Golden Age of Cinema. Velour pressed upward on my thighs and my arms rested on polished mahogany. Twinkling lights gave the theater a regal atmosphere.
I was amazed by how flawlessly the Striba suit had created the illusion. The tapestries on the walls appeared to be made of real brocade, and the air smelled like genuine lilacs. But it was all a computer-generated, electrically-stimulated hallucination. In reality, I was trapped in the dentist’s office from hell with an IV stuck in my arm.
I tried to get a better look at the theater, but the muscles in my neck wouldn’t respond. I couldn’t stand, lift my arms, or move my fingers. I couldn’t even avert my eyes from the green velvet curtains at the front. The left curtain was embroidered with a golden K, and the right curtain bore a golden A. Konrad Aften.
Trumpets sounded and the curtains opened, revealing a movie screen. Once the curtains were fully open, the theater fell silent and the screen glowed.
The movie focused on a well-dressed man in a wheelchair surrounded by racks of computers. He was pale and skeletally thin, and with his thick glasses, he reminded me of Stephen Hawking. But this man didn’t have ALS. As I’d learned from taking care of my grandmother, the purple blotches on his head and neck were the hallmarks of chemo rash. This man was in the late, drastic stages of cancer treatment.
Despite his infirmity, the man’s eyes twinkled with intelligence. He smiled as though the world was a joke to which he alone knew the punchline. He spoke in a raspy, high-pitched whisper.
“Hello, friend. My name is Konrad and I don’t believe I flatter myself when I say that I’m the greatest programmer alive.”
Konrad coughed twice, trembled, and then coughed again. He withdrew a handkerchief from his suit pocket, unfolded it, and spat something dark. Then he folded the handkerchief back up.
“When I look at the world around me, I see liars, cheaters, and cowards raised to lofty heights, while those with sincerity and courage are trod underfoot. I can’t fix the world by myself, but I have begun an effort to even the score.
“You see, I’ve stolen a great deal of money from the worst people in the world. I won’t live long enough to spend it, so I’m going to leave it to someone whose qualities I admire. I’ve spent years constructing a trial that will separate those with quick minds and stout hearts from the rest of the herd. I call it Realm of Shadows, and the only way to win is to retrieve the Medallion of Darnok. Succeed, and you’ll win your freedom and my vast wealth and resources. Fail, and you’ll join me in death.”
Konrad lowered his head and coughed once more. His body shook violently as the coughing grew deeper, and it looked like he might fall out of his wheelchair. But he raised his head and looked sternly into the camera.
“Realm of Shadows doesn’t have a tutorial, so pay attention. Like a regular fantasy game, there are experience points and levels. But there are no traditional classes like fighter or wizard. When you reach Level 2, you can choose a deity to worship. This determines your skills and abilities.”
This was a feature I hadn’t seen before. Choosing a god wasn’t a big deal in most games, but now it was a major decision.
“You’ll see three status bars in the lower left. The red one displays your health, the blue one displays your mana, and the brown one displays your stamina.”
As he spoke, horizontal bars appeared at the bottom left of my field of vision. All three were at their maximum, which meant I was in prime condition.
“For more information, you can bring up your character sheet by concentrating on the letter C. This shows your general well-being, including your experience level, skills, abilities, and quests.”
“To view the world map, concentrate on the letter W. This illustrates the continent and displays markers for locations you’re aware of. Thinking of the letter L brings up the local map, and if you’re in friendly territory, you’ll see every point of interest.”
Konrad closed his eyes and clenched his jaw. When he looked back at the camera, tears had formed in the corners of his eyes.
“Those are the rules of my trial. I’m sure you have questions, and I wish I could answer them. But by the time you hear this, I will have been dead for some time. I wish you well, adventurer, and I’ll leave you now to the Realm of Shadows.”