“Congrats, you’re not dead!”
The voice coming from the device was annoyingly chipper. Frustrated and aching, Russell responded.
“Hello? Yeah, look, I need some help. I don’t know what’s going—“
The voice kept rolling.
“Feels awesome, right? A second chance at life. The opportunity to become the best YOU you can be.”
“Listen, things are pretty fuzzy right now. And I was just in a precarious situation, penis-wise, so I’d like some—"
“On the island, the game of life is made real. It’s the perfect stage for you to leave the Ls of your past behind and start stacking up the Ws.”
Russell rubbed at his eyebrows. The device was testing his already limited patience. “Maybe you’re not hearing me: My head is bleeding. A crab tried to pinch my dick. HELP ME.”
“But to become the best you you can be, you’ll need to lose the you of yesterday. You’ll need to take on a new role, play a new part in your own story. And you’ll need to learn to survive.”
“This is a recording, isn’t it? I’m talking to a goddamn reco—”
"Listen to the words I am saying. New role… play a new part… the game of life made real. Welcome to the greatest role-playing game ever made! And with every good RPG, you’ll need stats.”
Russell knew it was a recording, but he really didn’t care. “Dude, what are you talking about?”
At the top of the screen, the word “SPUNK” appeared on a tab, along with other menu options that were greyed out. The word SPUNK blinked at him, practically begging to be pressed. So Russell did just that.
When the tab opened, he was greeted by an image that made him physically cringe. It took up the right half of the screen — a picture of himself, and definitely not the kind of photo your mother would frame to put on the wall. There he was, slouched against his beat-up car in the parking lot of some dingy convention center, still wearing half of a mascot costume from a job that had gone terribly. It was a catfish costume, the big fish-head was pushed up above Russell’s own head so he could smoke a cigarette, felt fins awkwardly dangling over his exposed arms. He looked every bit as miserable as he remembered feeling that day.
“How the hell did you get that picture?” Russell asked, knowing full well there’d be no answer.
To the left of the image, text started to fill the screen. Russell leaned in with growing curiosity.
“For several months we’ve been assessing your skills and quirks to define your base attributes, what we call SPUNK. Your SPUNK is as follows:
SWAGGER: 6
POWER: 3
UTILITY: 5
NERVE: 7
KNOW-HOW: 3
Your SPUNK score is fundamental to your success and more immediately, your survival. Play to your strengths. From these humble beginnings, learn to not only survive the island, but thrive. Your current Level is 1. A perfect runway of opportunity. Levels are gained through acts of BADASSERY. Gain your first level and we’ll speak again. Remember: Your arrival is my gift, but success is up to you. However, I have many more gifts to offer — for those who can _HACK IT.”
Just as abruptly as it had started to play, the message ended. Along the top menu, a new “LOG” tab appeared with a little plus-sign next to it, but Russell was too focused on all this SPUNK nonsense to look away.
‘For several months, we’ve been assessing your skill…’ The thought of it frustrated Russell to no end. They’ve been watching me? Yeah fuckin’ right.
Russell tried to take in all the info on the screen — stats about him, laid out like he was some kind of pro athlete with percentages, or a criminal with a record of attempted murders. No, it wasn’t even that straightforward. These stats were vague as hell, as far as he could tell.
Russell wasn’t much of a gamer, but his roommate Wayne? The guy never did anything else. On the days when Russell had nothing going on (which was embarrassingly often for a 32-year-old), he’d plop down on the couch next to Wayne and watch him dive into the digital realms of his favorite fantasy game, Big-tittied Warrior Woman Saves the Day. Alright, that wasn’t what the game was called — Russell could never remember it. All he knew was Wayne had a serious thing for games where the main character was a big-tittied badass.
One night, after a few beers, Russell finally asked the question that had been nagging at him. “Why are all your characters always these half-naked chicks with giant swords?”
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Wayne, with the casual indifference of a guy who’s answered this question before, explained that these games — what he called “role-playing games” — let you create any character that you wanted. You could be some old wizard, frying the end of his long, white beard with fireballs, or a sneaky little rat-man, lifting people’s coin-purses right off their belts. The looks didn’t matter, you could be whoever you wanted to be — Wayne just liked his characters big, beautiful, and barely dressed. What really mattered was the stats.
Wayne spent the rest of the night indulging Russell’s curiosity. He cranked out half a dozen characters, all with the same basic look: hot women in barely-there outfits. But Inside those scantily-clad frames, the classes were what defined them. Warrior women, tough enough to take a war-hammer to the gut. Spear-maidens who fought like dancers, slicing through enemies with moves that came with a side of poorly-written innuendo. Then there were the spell-slinging, blonde-haired bombshells, using fire and ice to turn their foes into toast or popsicles, depending on their mood. Yes, Wayne most definitely had a type.
Russell wasn’t even mad about it. If anything, he was hooked, more fascinated by the mechanics beneath the beauty. He had no idea video games could run this deep, could feel this immersive.
But then, feeling more bonded to his roommate than ever before, Wayne began to tell Russell about some modifications he downloaded from the internet that took the game’s “immersion” to the next level — essentially turning the fantasy world into his own goddamn harem. It was around that time that Russell excused himself and went to the bar.
Looking down at the stats on the screen, Russell felt a flicker of that same curiosity he'd felt watching Wayne build his buxom characters. But this time, instead of clear-cut attributes like strength or intelligence, he was staring at something more open to interpretation. And these stats, while abstract, felt like a strange version of what made Russell, well, Russell.
SWAGGER: 6
POWER: 3
UTILITY: 5
NERVE: 7
KNOW-HOW: 3
But if he was reading the stats correctly, he was neither a powerful warrior nor a wise wizard. In fact, it would appear he was kind of an idiot. A weak idiot at that.
Both his POWER and KNOW-HOW, what he figured represented strength and intelligence, were his lowest attributes. As if his ego hadn’t taken enough of a beating already, now he had hard numbers to back it up.
His UTILITY was smack in the middle, which he figured wasn’t bad — assuming the scale was zero to ten (if it was out of 100, well, then he was screwed). Utility seemed like the vaguest stat of the bunch, but he guessed it had to do with resourcefulness, problem-solving, maybe how well he could handle the world around him. If it had anything to do with the number of times he’d locked himself out of his own car and had to crawl through the trunk just to get back in, a five felt about right. After all, he was the idiot who locked himself out in the first place.
Russell clicked his tongue, furrowing his brow as he tried to dig for a silver lining. His SWAGGER was high, at least. that had to count for something, right? On instinct, he figured Swagger meant charisma. Whether that was based around his ability to connect with people or con them, who knew. He felt his number should be higher, on both counts — not that so-called “Swagger” seemed like it was going to do him a lick of good around here.
Russell stared out at the ocean, past the alien-looking cliff-islands to an endless horizon that stretched into nothing. He might as well be on the moon.
“Lotta good my gift of gab does me on a desert-fucking-island. Otherwise I’m just a smooth-talking, dumb-fuck weakling.”
His highest stat was NERVE, and Russell felt that deep down. He’d made his living inside big, ridiculous costumes, sweating bullets and breathing in his own recycled air. Out of shape? No doubt. But stamina? His tank rarely ran out of gas. And for the last fifteen years, he’d dragged himself out of bed every day, chasing down gigs, sure-things, and dreams that led to nothing but dead-ends and "better luck next times." Sure, half of those failures were his own damn fault, but he still showed up, kept pushing forward.
Russell glanced at the many red pinch-marks across his sunburned skin, then at the mysterious device strapped to his wrist, and let out a dry chuckle. Yeah, if Nerve measured how much bullshit a guy could take and still keep chuggin’, it made sense that it was his strongest trait.
There on the beach, Russell had a rare moment of introspection. A pause to actually look inward at the bizarre series of events that led him here — or at least, the parts he could remember. He thought back on the decades of bad decisions, the unfulfilled promises that had dragged him from one mascot suit to the next, each more stained and unrecognizable than the last, along with his own prominence in the industry. He thought about the people who’d tried to help him along the way, the ones he’d probably let down, and wondered how many of them, if he’d just chosen the right path, might have saved him from ending up wherever here was.
All of it swirled in his mind, the weight of his past sinking in. And if that line of thought had kept going, maybe, just maybe, Russell could have seen the error of his ways. But that moment of introspection was cut short by that goddamn chipper voice blaring from the device on his wrist, snapping him back to the absurd reality he was stuck in.
“Have you had the time to take it all in? Let’s see the brand new YOU. Pose for your new character avatar.”
The screen displayed a 5-second countdown, counting down as Russell’s anger grew with each second that passed.
5...
Who the hell is doing this? Was this a prank? A game show?
4...
Who the hell thinks they can game my life — like they have any clue about anything!
3...
This whole thing is a joke — and it’s probably fucking illegal.
2...
I’m gonna get out of here, and when I do, oh man. Oh-ho-ho man! They’re screwed.
1...
Whoever’s running this, they’ve got no clue who they’re fucking with. I’m Russell fucking Murphy.
CLICK!
The screen blinked like a camera shutter, and a new image expanded across it. There was Russell, sunburned, battered, bruised, biting down on his bottom lip, mid-syllable of his favorite expletive, and flipping off the camera with his crab-cracked middle finger. They say a picture tells a thousand words, but this one only had two. Fuck. You.
The new picture of Russell replaced the old stalker shot in the corner of his stats, literally giving the bird to the whole SPUNK system.
Russell huffed, shaking his head. He stared down at the sand and pondered next steps. His dad always said he should’ve been a lawyer, but that ship had sailed a long time ago. Still, Russell knew enough to recognize when something was legally borked, thanks in part to an incident at a minor-league baseball game. Back then, he was still working as the team’s mascot, Dinger the Bear. A pack of frat boys grabbed him, bagged him, and whisked him away to be a celebrity contestant in their fraternity’s “Drunk Olympics.” And while Russell eventually got into the spirit of the games, the cops later explained the finer points of what legally counted as kidnapping.
And this island nonsense? This was definitely it — except now, instead of being tied to a pledge too plastered to run a three-legged race, he was stranded on some bum-fuck beach in the middle of nowhere, forced to play suvival-man for some unseen asshole who was probably watching him right now, laughing their ass off.
Every game had a game master. Someone behind it all, pulling the strings. Someone with a name and a face and an ass to sue — courtroom style. Russell was about to get all litigious up in this bitch. But first, he’d have to get the hell out of here. That meant figuring out if civilization was hiding in the jungle behind him, or out ahead of him, across the big blue. As a true champion of NERVE, Russell wasn’t swayed by the challenge. He’d build himself a boat if he had to. Like Tom Hanks in that one mov—
Russell’s head jerked up in a moment of realization, eyes dead-set on the horizon. Something flickered in his banged-up brain, a spark of memory trying to build itself back together. His jaw tightened as the pieces took shape.
“Wait,” he said.
He didn’t need to build a boat, because he’d been on one the night before.
And he hadn’t been alone.