Chapter 4: Which

“Holy…”

“Yeah,” Miguel interrupted, his shock apparently rising with mine.

“Is that a…”

“HUD,” he finished.

There was no other description or explanation. Apparently, my adrenaline surge had generated a full heads-up-display, sitting along the edges of my vision just as it would in a first-person RPG. My health was at the bottom, a sadly small red bar now that I understood what it was. Bottom left was a blue bar, and bottom right was a green one. Classic magicka and stamina indicators. Top right was an empty bar with a 1 next to it, presumably my level. That fact that this was literally in my brain and not on a screen should have scared the hell out of me, but it all felt so…normal.

Miguel’s red bar, floating just above his head, returned to full and disappeared, apparently because we were no longer in combat.

That felt normal too, thinking I could be in “combat” with my best friend in real life.

Wait. Was this IRL?

“So you see it all too?” he asked. “I wasn’t sure if I had imagined it. I only saw it the first few minutes after we arrived, I guess because I was panicking. But when I calmed down, it disappeared, and I didn’t know how to get it back.”

“That’s incredible,” I said. “It must be triggered by our pulse, or mental spikes, or maybe even adrenaline measurements? Do the syringes work both ways?”

“I don’t know. Maybe,” he responded, turning it all over in his head. “We are definitely ‘connected’ to the capsules, and by extension – PCs, servers, and those storage containers. We have to be if we are seeing this, and seeing it together.”

That was an entirely new level of incredible. Immersing a single person into a hyper-real VR/controlled-dream experience would be a technological feat beyond anything I had ever heard of. But connecting two people within a shared reality? That was the same achievement times ten. This kind of technology wasn’t even on anyone’s radar, much less in use.

Except that, of course, it clearly was – because we were in it.

This was making sense of the impossible. Miguel had put it perfectly.

“Okay,” I responded. “Let’s assume everything you’re describing is true, which I think it is despite how absurd it sounds. But if we are…in a game.” The words still sounded crazy to my ears. “What kind of game is it?”

“Well,” Miguel thoughtfully replied, “the HUD looks more RPG, but it could be linear action-adventure, God of War style?”

“Maybe,” I said. But...”

Every game I had played over the last twenty years flashed through my mind, settling into genres, categories, variations, deviations. It spanned from 2D platformers…to shooters…to story-driven action…to immense open-world RPGs. I quickly catalogued a lifetime of gaming, that included my forays into historical games all the way up until the teaser trailers I had seen for epics that wouldn’t be released for years. From that immense sample size, some rules emerged.

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“A linear game would have immediately started happening to us,” I began. “The inciting incident, the characters, the story line – it would have all just kicked in, and we would have had to instantly respond. Even a classic RPG would work that way, for the most part. Games don’t wait for you after the Start button is pressed.”

Miguel nodded in agreement, apparently remembering the opening menu before the cut scene he had described to me. If he had been waiting for hours, then this was something else.

“Survival RPG,” I stated, now quite sure of myself. “Nothing happens until you make it happen. Desert oasis, island in the Pacific, protected cave. It doesn’t matter. You start in a safe place and venture into danger. Then the game begins.”

“Right,” Miguel agreed, re-scanning our surroundings, recognizing them as safety and scene-setting for the first time. “The game hasn’t started because we haven’t moved.”

We both suddenly held our feet very, very still. Somewhere, there was an invisible line, and once we crossed it, things would start until they stopped, which usually meant saving, winning, or dying.

Saving seemed impossible in a world like this, especially since we were actually trapped on the 32nd floor of a building teetering on collapse, with no rescue in sight or lab technicians monitoring us. We were stuck here for the foreseeable future.

As for winning, most RPGs ran from forty hours to several hundred, depending on the sub-genre and the completionist mentality of the gamer. That was too far off to consider. That left me with death, which could happen shockingly quickly depending on the game. So. We had one more thing to figure out.

“Souls, respawn, or permadeath?” I asked, knowing Miguel would instantly recognize the gravity of the answer.

He took a very, very deep breath.

“What do I hope, or what do I think?” he asked back.

“Think.”

“Well,” he mulled. “Souls means we die all the time, so I definitely hope it’s not that. Fortunately, I don’t think it is either. It just doesn’t have that look or feel. Everything I saw in the opening indicated a world that wants to be explored, not one that punishes you for it.”

I let out a huge sigh of relief. Obviously, we couldn’t be sure, but he was right, what he described was not a “die all the time” game. I felt a lightness I had not since arriving here. Constant-death games were never my favorite, and that was magnified immensely now that I was living one instead of playing one.

“My guess,” he continued, “is that it’s a classic ‘save-all-the-time’ and ‘lose-loot-when-you-die’ game. It probably punishes death, but it shouldn’t be common if we’re good.”

“And we are,” I reminded him.

“And survival games usually have permadeath as an option, not as the default.”

That was true. Survival games had exploded in popularity in recent years, and none of them I could think of were set to permanent death automatically. That was just chosen by the very brave few. A game-maker would never force it upon you.

But these weren’t normal game-makers. These were neuroscientists and programmers and psychiatrists toying with technology with very specific goals in mind, and it was unlikely that “fun” was one of them. This “game,” if we could call it that, had a purpose. It was trying to teach something. Create something. Achieve something. And if that’s the goal, and they wanted it to have IRL implications, then the game had to have consequences. How far would those consequences go?

Miguel and I stared at each other quietly, apparently processing all the same information and playing out every conceivable scenario.

“It’s probably not permadeath,” I finally stated. “But I think it’s really, really, really important that we not find out.”

Miguel looked up in despair. I had rarely seen him this pained, and I knew instantly why. This possibility rocked him to his very core.

“That means I have to be careful!” he yelled. “That suuuuucks.”

I smirked, my first smile since our arrival. “I know, man. But you can do it. I know it’s rare, but you always play more cautiously in MMOs since the rest of us are depending on you.”

My HUD flashed as my breath stopped.

Miguel froze as well.

Until that moment, we assumed we were playing a co-op game – just the two of us. That was relatively simple, because NPCs were notoriously predictable. For non-enemies, their only function was to respond to the player, give quests, and help where needed. They were like movie extras who ceased to exist the moment you turned away from them.

And enemies were actually even easier to deal with. They just tried to kill you. That’s it. They had no other motivation, making them even more predictable.

But actual human beings, like those in massive-multiplayer-online games? They were unknowable, unreadable, unmanageable pieces of chaos waiting to unravel an otherwise certain world. Every single one of them was a potential disaster waiting to happen.

I hated MMOs.

Now it was Miguel’s turn to calm me down.

“Okay, you’re right,” he said slowly, reading my mind yet again. “That would definitely complicate things.”

I glared at his understatement from hell.

“BUT…” he went on, “we saw all the other capsules. It was the middle of the night. This game is in pre-pre-pre alpha. No one else is in here.”

My HUD faded as my pulse slackened. He was right. That made total sense.

“Come on, bro,” he said, finally turning toward the invisible line that would start the game. It’s just us.”

I exhaled.

“Probably,” he muttered.

My HUD was back.