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From your apartment cell, you gaze through your VRES and watch as the first person immersion shifts.
There’s a smooth transition as the Truman Camera takes you to an over-shoulder view of your chosen protagonist; he is screaming in agony. The camera pans further back and reveals his ally, Jake, undergoing a similar seizure. It is painful to watch, but before long it stops and Logan is passed out on the living room couch.
The camera pans out further still, and as you are taken upward through the house’s ceiling, you are briefly able to see through its translucent roof. You see Jake coming to consciousness, but not Logan.
The camera now provides an aerial view of the entire Salt Lake Valley, and the graphics render the scene into an oversaturated, almost comical display. It resembles a live-streamed map. You can see fire icons raging across 42.0% of the city.
The Truman Camera jerks far north to downtown. You are a god looking down on a five square block radius, which comprises the city’s bar scene.
Zooming in, you are able to see civilians littering the streets. They are either unconscious or dead. Many of them have individuals beside them who appear to be in states of duress.
Camera fixes on an intersection.
On the northeast side of the intersection, there is a car, its hood wrapped around a stoplight. Through its shattered windshield there is a man visible. His face is planted into their steering wheel. There is a great deal of blood.
Camera shifts.
Inside what appears to be a very trendy club, there are no lights strobing, and no music bumping. Most individuals inside are unconscious or dead, blanketing the club floor and bar tops. This is, save for the anomalies left screaming, hiding, or trying to figure out why their 9mm won’t work.
Camera shifts, again.
You are seeing an arcade bar. Here, the power is also off. There are many upset customers, but only two males in the area are unconscious, and they merely came in to use the restroom before they’d been supposed to attend a social gathering with their fraternity brothers.
The Camera makes shifts, yet again.
This time to a local tabletop game store. There are several parties of heroes playing D&D. Lights are on. Music is playing. Everyone appears to be enjoying themselves, you get the impression not a soul here has any idea regarding the turmoil. Suddenly, every person in the game store rolls the most painful Nat20 of their lives.
Truman zooms out from downtown. Further zooming out.
The perspective has scope on the entire city. It is, once again, rendered into the aesthetic of a map on parchment. The illustrated fire icons have blossomed and expanded, consuming 69% of the city.
Because you watched season one of Simulations & Shutdowns, you easily deduce that this is but a small sample size of what is going on across the whole of this season’s simulacrum. Your incredible knowledge is rewarded by the show’s producers. Suddenly, something populates, superimposed, over the parchment style map—you receive a prompt, which reads:
Congratulations! You have been granted access to Ghost Mode!
Ghost Mode: as defined by the Simulacrum Terms & Makeshift-Mastery Manual (STMMM), means: to become a walking unbreathing ghost inside the simulacrum
(Disclaimer: Abilities of your specific ghost are subject to change based on-level, heart rate, but most of all, the algorithm’s opinion of you.)
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
Would you like to go Ghost Mode now?
Yes No
You select Yes; who wouldn’t?! Another prompt appears:
To go Ghost Mode, a ghost is required for your protection and ego. If you have not created your personal ghost to wear inside the simulacrum, please do so now.
Helpful Hints: Don’t have any creativity? Pick from any one of the infinite possibilities available to phantasm to your heart’s content. Creative so have your own customized ghost? Feel free to upload that, smarty pants!
Please pick which option most fits you:
1. I have my own dream ghost, and I’m quite proud of it
2. Bruh! I got that siiiiccckkkk skin preset! (What’s creativity?)
3. Ummm…can I customize my own ghost now?
4. Randomize my ghost-I wanna gamble
You look at your preset chimera Beholder-Dragorangutang, and curse. In your defense, you were zazzed out when setting up your current uncreative preset choice, and not once did you think, “this skin is sick, bruh’.
You choose option 3, blushingly.
There is a brief lag, before the VRES places your awareness center of an impressively vast array of customization options. You create your ghost, exactly to your liking. It takes you a while. And just as you get excited about your masterpiece, you receive an encouraging notification:
Now That’s One Helluva Horrifically Handsome Ghost!
But you knew that, already.
The character creation screen fades. In its place is the same map as before, except now that map displays this season’s planetary simulacrum-Earth. Your ghost is visible, flying over the map.
The VRES thrusts your consciousness into the driver’s seat. You are amazed by the immersiveness, but very few seconds later, second guess the joys of immersion, because the VRES starts rapid-fire throwing your perspective, in a way reminiscent of this simulacrum’s ADHD jetsetters throwing darts at a map.
You’re a ghost wandering the streets of Paris. Take a turn. You watch a plane crash into the Eiffel Tower. Smoke everywhere. Fires. People die.
You’re a ghost in the White House. Secretary of Defense devours the United States president.
You’re in Las Vegas, Nevada. On the strip, being affronted by all the sorts of shit you’d expect from this particular type of hell. Then a cheetah-chimera hermaphrodite rocking 19” stilettos, and a crop top skirt screams, felinely, about something in the sky. You look up to see seven helicopters; they had been flying tourists over the city (because Vegas is best if you can see it from afar, only at night, and best, never touch the ground).
These helicopters are no longer flying in as much as they are: falling, tailspinning, corkscrewing balls of brilliant flame, storms of comets plummeting through the sky, and crashing all around you; destroying every building except Excalibur, but definitely the Wyn, and killing nearly everyone, even those who’d just won big at the penny slots.
Mushroom clouds, rubble, glass, mammothine tv screens, blood, bone shrapnel and marrow, as well the pain felt by thousands of loved ones who just lost their brother/sister/lover/etc, all phase right through you.
You clap. What a show!
You see Iceland. Some residents are moderately inconvenience by the power outage.
You’re perched on Lady Liberty’s torch, right before a fallen satellite hits her crown, shattering her skull. It seems fitting. Now the Lady finally matches her people’s civil liberties.
The pentagon. You laugh. They deserved that.
In a candlelit monastery, you meander through rows of monks. All of them are busy pleasantly creating their characters, as if they had prepared for this. They all see you, and politely ask you to fuck off.
Ghost mode ends.
The fires come to life on your VRES and light the parchment ablaze.
The camera swiftly navigates away and returns to live action view, zooming in on a familiar house, through its ceiling, where it locates Logan avatar.
You quickly understand that time has passed.
At some point Logan regained consciousness. You can tell from your past viewership experiences that he has spent the previous thirteen minutes making progress on his Character Profile Initiation. You feel grateful that the streamed series didn’t make you watch all of that process, because you found it quite tedious during season one.
Logan appears to be in a deep trance, pouring over the Character Profile with an academic prowess you find shocking, as if perhaps there is some semblance of intelligence inside the seemingly moronic avatar. Your intrigue increases.
From the current over-shoulder view you can see that he is reading from a list of available quests. Slowly, the visual phases forward, toward his head. Camera travels neural synapses, through cortexes of his brain, and text populates on your VRES.
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