Chapter 3: Elsewhere

I awoke in darkness, but it was not absolute. Soft light drizzled through barren branches. Behind the trees, I saw a starry sky, but not like any I had ever witnessed. The dots of light were too crisp, too numerous, too…much.

“You’re back.”

Miguel’s measured voice came from a few feet away. He was leaning against a tree trunk, a dim figure dwarfed by the wood surrounding him.

“You okay?” I asked, only recalling that we were in danger, but not how, or why, or where.

“I wouldn’t use that word. I’m...”

He trailed off, seemingly surprised by his uncertainty. But not scared. He had clearly had more time to consider our surroundings than I had.

“Sure. I’m…okay.”

I sighed with relief, but not fully understanding why. Then a new question emerged.

“What…”

That was all I could manage. I had no specificity for my inquiry. Just, “what.”

“I’m working on that,” he replied.

I sat up, instantly generating a sharp pain in my skull.

“Yeah, your head’s going to hurt,” he said. “More than a little. And for more than a while.”

I scooted back, finding solidity behind me, presumably a tree. I could feel rough bark on my skin, but through an even rougher fabric. It felt like I was wearing a burlap bag.

I glanced down.

I was wearing a burlap bag. My bare arms emerged from simple slits in the side, and I assumed my head was sticking out of an equally basic hole in the top. This was not a shirt I owned. Neither were the pants. And by "pants" I mean a burlap bag tied around my waist. With a burlap rope.

Okay. I was wearing burlap everything, leaning against a tree, hurting but not injured. Got it. This was good starter information, and probably as much as my pounding brain could process. I sort of understood my present. But the past wasn’t there.

“How…”

Again I stopped. I had questions, but nothing to connect them to. No foundation to begin upon. I knew I was Nathan. Miguel was Miguel. A tree was a tree. But at the moment, that was the extent of my knowledge.

“Give it a minute,” Miguel instructed. “Nothing will make sense. Not for a while at least. I’ve been trying to process it for hours, and I’m still mostly at a loss. I’m also guessing you don’t remember the transition.”

The transition? That sounded ominous. Were we dead? That would make sense actually. I had experienced alive, and this wasn’t it. So ‘dead’ seemed like a pretty solid guess.

“We’re not dead,” Miguel assured me, apparently reading my mind. In fairness, that had probably been his first guess too.

“Awesome. Then what are we?” I asked.

“Still working on that, too” he responded. “But I do know how we got here.”

I felt a rush of relief, allowing me to glance around at “here” a little more closely. We were surrounded by trees, which were all larger than they should be and with fewer leaves than made sense. I wasn’t cold, but the trees looked like they were 10 minutes away from their winter slumber. And they were massive. Ten-foot trunks were a width rare even in California. Plus, that made the canopy way too low. The forest didn’t tower above us as much as it enveloped the barren earth. The soil was lifeless, with neither a carpet of leaves nor a mat of grass. The ground was just undulating nothingness in every direction.

But the sky. I had never seen so many stars, even during escapes to national parks. There were dots of light everywhere, along with the streaks of gas that marked the Milky Way, but there were several, stretching from horizon to horizon. Milky Ways?

“I noticed that too,” Miguel said, seeing my eyes tracing the heavens. “It’s beautiful if you can avoid being terrified.”

He didn’t sound scared. But he was right. This was wrong. Something, everything, was off.

“Maybe I should start at the beginning,” he offered.

“Please.”

“What’s the last thing you remember?” he asked.

“Five minutes ago.”

“That’s the reset,” he responded. “It’ll pass. Just reach past the headache. Force yourself beyond the present, even if it hurts. Which it will.”

I did as instructed. I leaned into the pain, like pushing against a barrier instead of turning back. My mind began to give way, opening beyond the immediate for the first time.

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“Holy shit.”

“There you go,” Miguel acknowledged. “It doesn’t want you outside of the now, but you can get there. I assume you remember the earthquake, the sprint, the capsules?”

I did. It all emerged from the fog in absolute clarity, causing my pulse to skyrocket and eyes to flash. A red bar superimposed itself in my line of sight. Vaguely familiar images flashed in my periphery.

“What the???” I blurted.

“Yeah, we’ll get to that in a second,” he assured me, again showing a clairvoyance that was somehow comforting instead of frightening.

But first, the capsule.

The image of the pod became clear again: its gleaming exterior, its watery bottom, but most of all, its ring of internal protrusions.

“Were you awake at all inside?”

“No,” I answered.

“That makes sense. It explains why I’ve been grappling with this alone for hours, comforted only by the fact that I could see you breathing.”

His past fear briefly came into the present, and I felt guilty for being the cause.

“Well, then this will help make some sense of something impossible.”

Interesting sentence. I nodded to go on.

“The capsule wasn’t empty. It had…has? Had.”

Now time and tense were confusing? Fantastic.

“Let’s try to simplify. There was a past that is past. There is a past that is most likely the present, but we’ll treat it as the past. And then there is the present that is definitely in our presence.”

Simplify? I don’t think that word means what you think it means.

He continued.

“The pod had probably six inches of liquid in it, but it wasn’t water. More like jello. It gave into my weight when I jumped in, but then it immediately pushed back as I settled. So not completely like jello. Anyway, a few seconds after settling in, I felt needles in both of my arms and legs. That obviously hurt a little, but then it immediately felt amazing, because they definitely had sedatives in them. Like if Jameson had Xanex and MDMA in it.”

He said it like that was a normal concoction. In his defense, it sounded pretty wonderful.

“As my muscles relaxed, so did my mind. The fear of the outside world dematerialized. That was partly the drugs and probably partly the electrodes that pressed gently against my head. There was also a soothing pulsating red light I could see through my eyelids.”

“You say all that like it’s normal,” I responded.

“Well, to some degree it is. Remember the PTSD treatments I told you about? A sensory deprivation tank is filled with salt water that’s so heavy you float, so that’s not unusual. Soothing lights and music are common as well. And during my tour of the facility, I was told they used direct brain interaction, for both measuring and stimulating cognitive experiences. So if you subtract the infusion, which I totally did because I felt too awesome to care, the experience wasn’t particularly confusing.”

“Fair enough,” I agreed.

I heard him settle into his living backrest like he was preparing for story time. So I rubbed my own temples as I tried to imagine the experience. It felt good, but it also informed me that I was no longer bleeding. In fact, I couldn’t even feel where the wound had been.

Before I could ponder this further, Miguel continued.

“In the darkness, with my eyes closed, text appeared in front of me. It looked like an RPG menu. Start, Continue, Options. But it quickly chose for me. Start. And that’s when the darkness got deeper. Not darker. Deeper, like inside my consciousness. It was like blacking out while awake.”

That made no sense. But neither did most of this, so I waited.

“From the darkness, a cut scene emerged. And when I say cut scene, I mean Triple A, 10-year production timeline, perfect motion-capture animation cut scene. Like James Cameron decided to make Skyrim.”

My pulse quickened again, super excited at the mere idea of James Cameron spending a billion dollars to make an epic RPG. Then the red bar flashed again. What the hell?

“The cut scene wasn’t on a screen or projected onto the capsule. It was in my mind. There was nothing between me and the images playing out. It was as immersive as VR, no borders, no peripheral distractions, nothing but a world that was not our own.”

It was one of his favorite phrases: “a world that was not our own.” But I had never heard him say it with this much awe before. He was describing a near-religious experience.

“It was a top-down view of a planet, dotted with settlements but dominated by a circular metropolis. As it zoomed in, I could see dense wilds running hundreds of miles around the entire city. Gnarled trees, murky swamps, bubbling bogs. Then there were first-person flashes of chaos I couldn’t process. Wolves. Giants. Demons. Not beneath me, but all around me. It was terrifying. But they were gone as quickly as they appeared.”

Miguel took a deep breath and seemed to take a drink of something. There were beverages? I checked my pockets for a bottle or flask. My sack didn’t have pockets. Or beverages.

“Then I was above again,” he said, exhaling.

Fine. We’ll circle back to the drinks. I was pretty enthralled with the world he was describing anyway.

“As I moved toward the city from above, an outer wall came into focus. Well, ‘wall’ is a strong word. It was sharpened poles at awkward angles, but running hundreds of miles around the entire city, which I could now see was actually cities. Plural. It was an archipelago of civilization in a sea of madness. It looked like these individual strongholds could house millions of people, but they were primarily protected from the wilds by a wall that looked like it should offer almost no protection.”

I could see it. By combining his words with images from hundreds of games and movies, what emerged was something eerily familiar but utterly unique. My mind’s eye saw something unprecedented in gaming or cinema.

Yet, at its core, I intuitively understood. Civilization vs. chaos was a common theme, particularly in RPGs and blockbuster films, and this was its perfect physical manifestation.

“But as the world came closer, I veered off course, pushed toward the wilds. I caught glimpses of shimmering gold, then hewn stone, then thatched roofs, then mud huts, then battered mud, and eventually this:

“The Wilds.”

Okay. I now had a macro understanding of the world I was in, a confusing idea as to how we had appeared in it, and a vague acceptance of my circumstances. That left approximately 42,000 remaining questions, but it was a start. Simply put, we were in a scary place, but there was hope nearby.

I was surprisingly comforted despite the insanity of what had transpired, assumingly to both of us factoring in my unconsciousness. While it was on an infinitely lesser scale, I had seen this sort of thing before. In fact, I had done it before.

But that dichotomy suddenly hit me. Which is it? Am I in a movie, watching from the inside? Or am I in a game, playing with an unprecedented level of realism?

I should have probably already known the answer. It was obvious really. The primary difference between a movie and a game is agency. Was I watching or doing?

That was when Miguel punched me in the arm.

My adrenaline surged as my pain set in, which brought the red bar into full view, all while I instantly leapt to my feet and punched him in the chest, hard and without thinking.

A smaller red bar appeared above his head, now slightly diminished. It was his health, and I had taken a chunk from it.

We were definitely in a game.