Dark Knights Online

The Monster Squad

By

Raymond Johnson

 Prelude

Whenever people talked about the apocalypse, they always spoke of things like nuclear war, pole shifts, climate change, asteroids, and plagues.  No one ever thought it would have been madness that destroyed humanity.  Technically, the insanity was merely a by-product of the old one’s influence on humanity. 

Elder gods, eldritch things, and old ones were all names that had been bandied about, but in the end, the cosmic horror of ancient and ageless god-like entities had corrupted the world.  Some oddball cult had found and deciphered some antediluvian text scribed in blood with pages made of cured human flesh.  At least, that was what the news had conjectured right before the anchorwoman ripped out her tongue and started chanting.

A tubby man with a shirt slightly too small for him checked his door and windows for the eighth time.  He’d boarded them up quite securely, but he knew they would never stand up to the things people were transforming into outside his shop.  He pulled down the front of his shirt to cover his exposed belly and sighed.  Curly hair fell into his eyes, and he brushed it out of the way, but it refused to stay in place.  He sucked on his teeth pensively.  The whole thing reminded him of the movie Pontypool, in which just hearing an infected person speak was enough to infect you.

It was so Lovecraftian.  Comic Horrors conquering the Earth and insanity from just a glance at the wrong thing or hearing whispers in the dark.  Once upon a time, something like this would have made his teenage self so happy.  After all, it confirmed the existence of monsters, and H.P. has some crazy ideas.  However, seeing it put into practice was the slap in the face that he needed.  So, he’d barricaded himself inside his place of business and waited.

He’d been careful not to look at the people, but he’d heard reports that some looked like fish-hybrids and others appeared to be transforming into tentacled squidish humanoids.  He also heard that just looking at them could transmit the madness, as could hearing the horrible sounds they made.  So he’d been careful to stay away from windows until they were boarded up and had done his best to soundproof his workspace.  Thus far, he’d managed to remain sane, but it only took a nearly inaudible whisper or a glance to lose your mind.

There was nowhere he could run or hide, and even if there was a hiding place, he knew he was too slow.  They would catch him, and that would be that.  There was no escape.  There was no hope.  All he could do was pray to survive long enough for loneliness and everyday human insanity to take hold so he could kill himself with his soul intact.  There was no way a benevolent supreme being would hold suicide under these circumstances as a sin.  He hadn’t hit that point where things looked so bleak that he could do the dirty business.

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A week later, he'd changed his mind.  He could hear scratching in his walls and ceiling and knew they were coming for him.  When they broke through, they would not infect his mind.  They would rend his flesh and mutilate his still-living body.  Not a way he wanted to go, and so he’d concluded that suicide was his best option.

He’d almost done the deed until he stumbled upon an unlikely method of survival.  He was the owner of a virtual reality sleeper store.  Sleepers were what people used to enter various gaming worlds.  They looked like white booths with a singular window on the door.  People walked in, closed the door, and the booth was flooded with a nanite gel connecting their brain to the program they wanted to interact with.

The nanites feed the body, kept it stable, and with an ample enough supply refreshing the older gel, a gamer could live in a hibernetic state for as long as they had replacement fluid.  He had fifty booths and enough bionanetic gel that he could live in a booth for a hundred years and never notice the passage of time.  He had the best booths, too.  Produced by Miskatonicsoft, the booths were resilient, leak proof, strong as a tank, and had contingencies in case of power outages.

The round man had figured that he could speed up the game play so that a year in the game would be little more than a second in the real world.  As they were known, most gaming taverns kept the setting to one year per hour in the tank.  The general population had no idea that the booths could be adjusted for more extended play.  After all, if a player could complete an entire game in a few hours, why would they keep playing repeatedly?

That was his way out.  The monsters might make it inside in an hour or a day, but he would live a long and fruitful life in that time frame.  They might not even notice him if he was in a tank. He just might be left alone for years.

That settled it.  After a few hours and weighing his options, he found a game he could live in and prepped his Virtual Reality booth.  It was a fantasy game set in a world of men and monsters called Darkest Knight.  The game molded itself to accommodate the player and had no hard and fast storylines.  Those were formed based on how the gamer wanted to play. It wasn’t a single-player game, but what were the odds that someone else would have the same idea as him?  Would infrastructure last long enough for him to even interact with anyone?  He doubted it.

With the game loaded and the booth open and waiting, he stepped inside, saying a final farewell to the world he’d known and anticipated, entering the world where  The door sealed itself shut with a pneumatic hiss and a gooey green fluid bubbled up from the floor.

This was the most challenging part for him: inhaling the nanite liquid.  It felt like drowning as his lungs filled up with the gel.  No matter how often he’d done it, he had never grown accustomed to the process.  It always felt like dying.  The opposite was confirmed when the gel exited his lungs.  The nanites moved swiftly to expel themselves; all it took was one exhalation, and it was done.  There wouldn’t be any coughing, sputtering, or gasping for air.  It was the entry that always shook him mentally.

He steeled himself as the fluid reached his neck.  Reflexively, he held his breath despite knowing that it would go smoother if you just breathed usually.  The ocean of nanites rose over his head, and he found himself floating in the medium.  Ten seconds later, he gave up the ghost and gulped for air.  His body thrashed and shuddered as it “drowned,” but once the fluid had filled his lungs, there was an electric jolt, and he slipped into the world of the Darkest Knight.  Thoughts of character creation blocked out the recent trauma he’d suffered, and just like that, he was safe from the monsters and insanity.  He would no longer be the man he was; he would become the man he wanted to be.