Tim found the second part of the maze to feel a lot like the first part. Without the throbbing in his arm and the time pressure of finding a cure pounding in his temples, he’d lost the urgency that had pushed him through the early part. He found himself pondering the nature of the Beta Test, and all the possible implications of these text boxes. How many people were involved? How long would it last? Tim had to forcibly yank himself back from the mental rabbit hole of what-ifs he’d gone down when he made a left turn and saw a large red silk pavilion.
It was more than just a fabric gazebo like he’d expected from the brief glimpse he’d had at a distance. It was much more opulent than that, with several yards of crimson silk draped and bunched in complicated looking swirls hanging from what looked a lot like maroon bamboo. Stranger than the gaudy structure however, was its lone occupant. Tim wheeled his cart to the side of the path and walked forward silently, staring at the figure seated in what appeared to be a rattan lawn chair. The man was dressed simply, with black trousers and a simple white shirt with the cuffs turned back to the elbows. What fascinated Tim however was the stranger’s face was a mirror image to his own. He stared a moment in silence trying to process but eventually couldn’t help but ask for clarification.
“What the fuck?”
“Ahhh, you have made excellent time navigating the maze. No doubt you would have a truly prodigious intelligence score were you to survive the entirety of the beta trial.”
It was too much for Tim. His tolerance for the unusual had been stretched beyond its limit since the first textbox had appeared, and his response was less than politic.
“You’re a good looking sonofabitch to be that condescending, buddy. Who the hell are you and why are you wearing my face?”
Not-Tim gave a long-suffering sigh and made a languid wave with his hand. “It will move faster if I just explain won’t it? I never was one to let things go. You have to understand, your reality is merging with the multiverse.”
“Well, that explains everything.”
Apparently even Not-Tim didn’t appreciate Tim’s sarcasm, because his face screwed up in a moue of distaste before he responded. “The purpose of the Beta Trial is to find the ways in which the limited sapient species of your universe can interact with the true nature of reality. I’m a representation of how the truth of objects in themselves can be translated into the booming buzzing confusion of the sensible manifold.”
“What the fuck? You sound like a bad translation of Kant. What the hell did that even mean?”
“Your limited conception of reality is being expanded in a way that shouldn’t shatter the minds of humans. The members of the beta trial serve as a source of, for lack of a better term what we’ll call Jungian archetypes, that can represent aspects of the multiverse as well as provide a baseline for individual stats.” Tim saw a condescending smile on his own face that was a lot more irritating than he’d thought he was capable of as his doppelganger continued. “You personally have given a lot of thought to metaphysics, which makes this conversation possible, if slightly boring. I am the representation of your mind’s conception of the purely physical.”
“Wait, you’re saying you’re actually some kind of Platonic ideal?”
“I like to think of myself as more of a universal refererrent of the sense of a person a la Frege.”
“That’s it, time out.” Tim held his hands up in the classic T like a referee, shaking his head in negation. “This is too fucking abstract to be worthwhile at all. Apparently you’re some kind of figment drawn from my mind, which explains the stunning good looks. I’ve followed that far. It doesn’t explain what’s going on though. Why are you here?”
The not-Tim stood up then and picked up something that looked like a cross between a sledgehammer and a croquet mallet. The handle was fairly normal looking but the business end was exaggerated, almost twice the size of a cinder block. It should have been somehow ridiculous but managed to convey a vague feeling of threat to Tim. His double smiled and advanced a single step towards him before speaking.
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“As a representative of the physical, it’s my pleasure to beat you to death.”
“Holy shit!”
Tim had time for the exclamation, but only because he was already backing up when he shouted. Not-Tim swung overhead, the mallet narrowly missing his retreating opponent. Tim didn’t stop moving after the dodge. He backpedaled and sidestepped to put the upright on the corner in between NotTim and himself.
“Let’s talk about this.”
His doppelganger responded with maniacal laughter and a lunge to the outside of the post. Tim went to the inside and they switched positions. He was in a desperate fight for his life and to Tim it was surreal. His life had definitely not prepared him for this. He had had a knock down drag out with a fellow fourth-grader over a game of dodgeball gone bad. Later there was a drunken brawl with some frat rat during orange peel his freshman year at Oklahoma state he didn’t clearly remember. Now some maniac with his face was trying to kill him with a giant hammer. Tim had always been able to think on his feet though, and while wildly dodging the hammer he came up with a plan.
He scrambled deeper into the tent and snatched up the folding chair his double had started out in at the beginning. It wasn’t tailor made as a weapon, but he’d seen enough professional wrestling as a kid to know how it should work.
“Asshole.”
He screamed his battle cry with all the passion and fear for his life the mad scramble away from the hammer wielding maniac had given him, and swung the chair in a sloppy haymaker. It was almost the mirror image to the strike that was coming at him, and the chair and warhammer collided with a crash. Tim almost dropped the chair from the vibration that traveled up his forearms. Not-Tim didn’t seem to have the same trouble. Still laughing, Not-Tim released one hand from the haft of his weapon and leaned to the side of where they were straining at one another and punched his double in the face.
Tim was skidding across the grass in an awkward reverse crab walk as he spit blood from his mouth, and he wasn’t really sure how he’d got there. The single punch had been enough to floor him. Even with his bell rung, his body had retained the instinctive knowledge to retreat even if Tim hadn’t exactly been in the driver’s seat. Not-Tim seemed to be enjoying himself, and was busily smashing the chair into tiny pieces in the middle of the grass rather than following up on his advantage. It gave Tim the time he needed to get back on his feet, and rack his brain desperately for a new plan. The maniacal laughter, the strength behind the single punch that had connected, Tim decided his best bet was a tactical advance to the rear, also known as running like a bitch. He turned his back on himself and lurched into a dead sprint towards the nearest gap in the hedge maze.
Tim was not a graceful runner. He’d played sports back in high school, and he’d spent some time on a treadmill as an adult trying to look good naked. His running form was terrible though. He’d had a coach tell him he was less poetry in motion and more of a dirty limerick about a drunken duck. This time Tim was motivated though, and he headed for the exit with 100% commitment to his ungainly stride. Looking back over his shoulder to gauge just how much distance he had proved to be his undoing though, because Tim tripped.
It was an ugly thing, where he took the fall on his hands and knees instead of rolling with it, or just sprawling out and dispersing the impact. It was just too fast, and suddenly he was in pain and he felt his face smash into the turf. He hadn’t even processed the need to get back up and run before there was a blow to his hip and shoulder. It was horizontal rather than vertical, and it shoved him into the grass, and much worse into the same orange hedges he knew to fear. Not-Tim had fallen over him. He had been chasing Tim with his hammer up poised for a blow, but Tim’s almost pratfall had been so abrupt there had been no time to dodge. The two men collided, and both pitched into the tangled mire of the hedge wall.
It felt like he’d fallen into live electrical wiring. His entire body was a mass of burning and tingling, nerve signals coming in so fast it overwhelmed what was hurting where. Tim fell back on the instinctual response of his simian ancestors when placed in similar situations. He screamed and started to flail around blindly. It felt like the branches were pulling him to the left so he tried desperately to force himself back to the right. Bare hands scrabbling at the turf to claw himself forward, legs churning for purchase to propel him away from the pain. He got lucky when a steel toed boot hit some part of Not-Tim with a satisfying crunch, and his double’s panicked thrashing and yelling scaled back significantly. Finally Tim’s flailing arms whipped back and forth in open air, and he lunged forward, clear of the hedge wall. Tim crawled clear, looking over his shoulder, watching to make sure Not-Tim didn’t follow him back out. The branches still writhed in seeming disappointment at his narrow escape and he saw a single bloody hand pulled back into the mass by the angry foliage.
The screaming had stopped and another of those annoying popup messages appeared telling him he’d been poisoned. Tim struggled to read it through his tears, then tried to ignore the swirling mass of pain his exposed skin had apparently become.. Instead he focused on the important things, and tried to stagger back to the cart full of samples he’d abandoned at the very beginning. He made it to the part basin on the left, the very first one he’d filled with the apparently magical water from the fountains. It had offered almost instant relief from the first time he’d pricked his finger on one of the orange plants, and Tim was desperately hoping the situation would repeat itself.
He stuck his head in the basin and drank like a dog. The tepid water had a slight plastic after taste, but he could feel the pain in his skin receding in real-time as he drank. Tim finally raised his head from the basin and took a shuddering breath. He felt like baked ass, but significantly better than when he’d first crashed into the hedge. He took a moment and just breathed, his body shuddering with excess adrenaline. That had been terrifying, but eventually, Tim was able to regain his composure and finally made it back up to his feet. Despite the chaos of the past few minutes, nothing marred the tranquil look of the park except for the debris of a rattan patio chair his double had destroyed. Tim sighed and started pushing his cart across the lawn. He’d only seen 2 of the first 3 spots he’d plotted on his arm map.