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This had to be a dream. No way this could be real.
Any second now, he’d be pitching awake, snapping his eyes open to the familiar gray walls of his room. It would be cool, with the smell of dew burning off under the heat of a Nashville spring. The chirp of birds outside his cracked-open window, along with the low drone of his neighbor’s heat pump would tell him he was in his world again, in his reality. He’d lay there for a few minutes, listening to the pump and the birds, smelling the moisture in the heat, and reflect on the dream he’d just had. Then, he’d get up, have breakfast, wave hello at Jacques across the street, and go to the gym. Later, he’d come back, bring out the lawnmower, and wave again as he mowed the daisies off his lawn.
Except… he had a sneaking suspicion that wasn’t going to happen.
However wildly fantastical his experiences over the past thirty-some-odd hours had been—however impossible it all was—this was not a dream.
He was not going to wake up. He was already awake.
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He’d considered a few possibilities. Apart from this being his actual living reality, with him somehow plunked down into some Eastern European medieval setting like a modern Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, he’d come up with two-and-a-half other equally absurd theories.
1. This was some sort of VR gaming experience, and he’d been doped before being dropped in.
It could be possible, especially with the drugs. VR had gotten remarkably good over the past century. Not perfect, and you could usually tell at some point that it was all generated—hence the addition of him being doped before going in. A sedative could blur the line just enough to make a virtual simulation lean towards feeling like reality. He wasn’t sure how they were pumping in the tastes and smells so acutely, and didn’t care to ponder it too closely, but sure. It might be possible.
Just a couple things wrong with that theory:
A game wouldn’t have kept him in that much pain for that long.
A game, without actually breaking his leg, could not have replicated the experience so exactly.
A game also wouldn’t have made him sit in a farmhouse for more than a day in real time, in that pain, watching the hours pass.
And, if he were in a game…
If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.
…his Heads-Up Display would have found something to connect to.
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Yeah. That whole thing was wigging him out a little.
This HUD was new, an upgrade from his last one. They’d been rolling them out through the whole Guardian system, one team at a time. It’s why he hadn’t been on active duty. It needed time to integrate. He was on paid leave until then. Nothing but workouts, lawn mowing, and cybernetic checkups.
He’d just had one of those checkups before this had all happened. That’s probably what had put the potential of this being a VR experience so prominent in his head. With the kinds of things they dealt with at Guardian Central, some weird sort of VR training wouldn’t be completely out of the picture.
But he remembered the appointment—a test of the targeting system—and he remembered coming out of it, too. Then, he’d gone for a bite to eat at his favorite barbecue joint—he still had some of the meat stuck between his molars. After that, he’d headed to the range to check the targeting system for himself.
Then, it was like he’d been hit by a truck.
A bright light had flashed, blinding him, he’d felt everything around him jerk—and then he’d gone flying.
When he’d landed, the concrete beneath his feet had been replaced by the jut of a rough-hewn log fence that he’d smacked his head on, along with a fern that definitely hadn’t been in the middle of the parking lane. He’d looked up, dazed and blinking, one hand already on his blaster, gaze catching the last of the light flare as it had left, along with the imprint of another flare somewhere off to his right. The edge of the forest had been quiet around him, as had the field in front of him. Dead quiet. As if everything had been holding its breath.
Instinctually, he’d sunk down into a squat behind the sparse cover of the fern and the fence, looking and listening hard, thoughts spinning as the HUD kept squawking its lost connection warning at him.
Then, he’d heard Eleza’s screams.
He brought his hand up and touched his head. The elf had healed the bruise from the fence, too. He hadn’t even noticed.
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2. God. Maybe he was dreaming. Maye he had been hit by a truck. Maybe he was comatose in some hospital, hopped up on good drugs, and vividly hallucinating all of this.
It was plausible. It would explain the leg pain, probably. He could have actually broken it, and the elf ‘healing’ it was just the weirdly-delayed administration of painkillers. Or maybe time was dilated in his mind and only a few minutes had passed in the real, not-hallucinated world.
He’d thought about that possibility a lot, too.
He could also be dying. The brain pumps itself full of hallucinogenic shit when it knows it’s dying. He’d heard that somewhere. It would explain the fantastical world, the pain, the disappearance of said pain, the extreme jubilation he’d felt earlier when he was running around without a trace of pain in a fantasy world—in the company of freaking elves—seeing other magical people come out of the goddamned air.
But, if it were true… he was remarkably sober for being in a drug- or death-fueled hallucination.
Plus, time was being too linear for a hallucination.
No. This was all very real.
Which brought him to the next questions: Where in God’s name was he? How had he gotten here? And how could he get back?
So far, he had no good answers. But one thing was for sure—he wasn’t in Kansas, anymore.