R34L L1F3

PART 1: R34L W0RLD

My name is Aryn Jester. But no one knows that name. The name they know is Aryw (pronounced arrow). In my world, you aren’t limited to the name - or the body - you’ve been given at birth. In this world, you can be anyone. Or anything. My current avatar has dark blue hair, same color eyes, a retro hoodie design from way back in the 2000′s, and whiter than bone skin. The best part about it is the skin. Before they invented X-World the R34L W0RLD, as it was advertised, I was bullied. A lot. Now? I am Class C, class 100, the top ranking for gamers. On the rare occasions that I take off my headset, I get to look around the Dome. The Dome is the housing for all that’s left of humanity. A few million. Not many. The War, which doesn’t have an official name aside from that, lasted eighty years, so long that eventually no one could remember what they were fighting for. The Earth was scarred beyond recognition, and the human population dwindled to approximately what it is today. 609,802,001. The Dome is boring. On one side, you have the cafeteria, where you eat slop. There’s bathrooms and water fountains next to that. On the other side, you have the dorms, where you exist when you aren’t Worlding. Beds and a private bathroom, shower, clothes. Then you come to the largest area, the Zone. It’s full of VR platforms that give you complete immersion into X-World.

The X-World is what makes life not boring. They have something for everyone. They have a kids zone, where you send children under eight. Then there’s a zone for 9 to 12 year olds, then there’s the teen area, and then the adult area. No one ever has to pay anything for any of this. It’s all provided. I’m in the teen zone, arguably the most fun. You never know what stupid crap you might come across in here.

There’s only one rule: Don’t go Outside. Outside the Dome is strictly forbidden, where only Units can go. Units are basically our military force. They guard us from the wild animals and strays that lurk outside. It’s not a hard job. My older brother Traevur, before he had to come back for our parent’s funeral, worked there. He said it was so boring that he sometimes fell asleep on shift. That wasn’t true, of course. I know my brother. He doesn’t do that kind of stuff. He went back out there, after Mom and Dad died, and I haven’t heard from him since. People manage their grief in strange ways, I guess.

Me, I managed by gaming. I rose to the top fast, mostly because I never do anything else. I just kept Worlding.

Until now.

I am staring, a half-consumed ration in one hand, an empty water bottle in the other, at a hole. A hole in my dorm. A hole in the Dome, leading to the forbidden outside. Scorching air hissed into my face. Ever so often, my nose is filled with the scent of smoke from some unseen source.

The real world is wrecked. We’ve been living in a lie. The Units, they aren’t just protecting us from wild animals. They’re protecting us from our own. Our stupid past mistakes.

I start to notice small things. The air tastes stale, like old soup. The smoke smell emenating from returning rangers. It is faint, of course, but now that I’ve caught it’s scent, it won’t go away.

I can’t keep living like this. In ignorance of our planet, of all the other species besides us. But I can’t go outside, either. And even if I did, I couldn’t live out there either.

So what do I do? Die? Join Mom and Dad on the other side? I don’t want to do that either.

The hole in the Dome is bigger, like it’s taunting me, begging me to give in to impulse and teenage rebellion and escape. No. Not escape. I’m not trapped. Right.

Right?

The hole is slowly getting bigger, as if the very air of the ruined earth is dissolving it like acid. As the hole grows, so does my desire to leave. As I see more of the ruined world, I am less and less happy with X-World. One of these days, one of the Units is going to come in here and seal up the hole. I have to make my decision soon.

Then my decision gets made for me.

“ATTENTION! DOMERS! WE HAVE A TRIAL SCHEDULED FOR THREE THIRTY THIS AFTERNOON. PLEASE REPORT TO THE GALLOWS THIRTY MINUTES BEFORE THE TIME.” A trial? We haven’t had a trial in years. I wonder what it could be for. Who it could be for.

The Gallows haven’t ever been used, except for once when a guy was caught going outside. It’s used for public executions. Rather brutal, I always figured. I thought it was medieval and cruel. Did someone go outside? What is happening?

Three o’clock takes forever to arrive, and I get to the Gallows thirty minutes early. I watch the “stage” intently, hoping to get some prelude to the events about to take place. Nothing. The stand is sterile, like a hospital room. I’m counting the seconds. Somehow, it makes the time go faster. I am so absorbed in counting the seconds that, ironically, I don’t notice when they lead someone in. The person looks male, with a white hood over his face. He is led up to the stage. All at once, he breaks free of the guards.

“YOU ARE ALL TRAPPED HERE!” he screams. “ESCAPE.” Several people snicker at him. Not me. I stare in shock.

His hood has come off.

It is my brother.

PART 2: CH4S1NG R34L1TY

The scorching wind pressed lava-hot tongs into my skin. Rocks are picked up and flung at me like bullets. People died from shrapnel a lot in the war. I hope this doesn’t kill me. My combat boot clad feet dig into soft sand. These things are military grade and my feet still feel like they are being slow roasted at a barbecue. The sky is white. The ground is a sickening shade of tan. Everything reminds me of the model of the Sahara in X-World. There is no way anything could grow here. There’s no way I can survive here. But I can’t go back. My brother is the patriot to rule all patriots. He’s always been a mega rule follower and a big fat snitch. If you were doing something wrong and he caught you, bam. You’re done for. It annoyed me a ton when I was younger. Now I don’t have too much that he finds out about, since he’s on guard duty all the time. But that’s not the point. The point is that if he thinks something is wrong with the place he used to call Utopia, then you know something is horribly wrong. This place is evil. I don’t know how, or why, or what. But I do know that I trust my brother. And so I’m going to chase down the truth. Whatever that means. I saw the phrase in a TV show.

I am officially breaking the law now. I just passed the telltale sign that says

| TURN BACK NOW |

| ANY WHO CONTINUE |

| WILL BE PERSECUTED |

| PUNISHMENT IS PUBLIC |

| HANGING AT THE GALLOWS |

| USE CAUTION. |

The sign mocks me as I pass, etching it’s all caps font into my forhead, tattooing itself on my brain. The tattoo burns even more when I come to the realization that it isn’t centered. In the digital world, everything is clean and in a state of perfection unnattainable in reality. Perfect circles. Here, straight line twist and circles have more in common with a rotting fruit than an actual circle. I feel as though I am suddenly going to be swarmed by guards, a gun pointed at my head.

This is a suicide mission. A Die-Run. That’s what we call it in X-World when someone purposely fails a mission. A Die-Run. This is a Die-Run except their is no regen button, there is no respawn. This the Die-Run to rule all Die-Runs.

Only once have I seen someone leave X-World for good. Technically, that wasn’t by choice. His name was King Pourshe (POOR-SHAY). He apparently was a hacker, hacked into the little kid zone, and put some unsavory footage on there. Honestly, this guy was smart enough to hack the game, but too stupid to realize that he shouldn’t feature himself in his vids. He was arrested within a few days, sentenced to solitary confinement and zero electronic access. Harsh, but necessary. The guy was a danger to everyone.

I felt like him now. I had just made a stupid decision and now I would never be able to play X-World again. I has plunged myself into this cold, unforgiving world for what? For a small sliver of possibly misplaced sentiment.

I see figures moving like ghosts. It’s guards.

Now the fun begins. I just take off running, as silently as I can, which is not at all. Plumes of sand like peacock feathers spin up behind me in a whirlwind. I run past the first figure and hear him (or her) choke on sand and yell “HEY!!!”

I felt like a spammer in a chat room. Constantly shoving unwanted things into people’s faces.

My feet were already on the verge of giving out. Naturally, that’s when the shots started. One whizzed past me and hit a dune with an explosion of dust. I now got to taste the pain I inflicted on the guards as sand shoved its gritty hand down my unsuspecting throat. I choked like someone trying to drink water on their back. As I kept screaming as if that would help, up came my breakfast. Also everything from yesterday. Feeling empty and trying to ignore the stench of vomit clinging to my clothes, I ran into a giant drift and burrowed myself inside. Everything became muffled, but I could hear voices as the guards caught up.

“Where did she go?” asks a deep, gruff female voice.

“Dunno,” says a pitchy teenage boy. “But it doesn’t matter. She’ll die within a day.”

“Yes, unless she finds those other runaways. They have evaded us for so long.”

“Exactly. If we can’t find them, what hope does she have? She doesn’t even know what she’s looking for.”

“You’re right.” The woman takes a step back- right into my ankle. I’m sure she can’t feel it, but the pressure of her own military grade boots digging into my sandy, tired ankles feels like an anvil being dropped from a forty foot building onto my leg. OW. It makes me bite my hand to keep from screaming in totalitarian agony. Her leg was the dictator. I was the measley peasant, being ground down into subserviency. OW.

Finally her leg leaves the spot. A rush of giddy relief shreds through the agony. I wait for several eternities (five-ish minutes, give or take) before lifting my head. Sand spills off my curly hair, giving the distorienting illusion of being trapped in an hourglass. I vomit again, this time nothing but a long stream of mucus, acid, and water. It dances along the sand, creating a trail that looks like the cursive letter F. Fitting. Because I just F’ed my entire life. My ankle throbs, threatening to collapse and shatter like a glass bowl. I walk anyway. Guards are sure to return and patrol looking for me. I have to move. I just don’t know where I’m moving to.

My crippled ankle decides for me, stepping right into a patch of dry quicksand. I don’t actually know if that’s a thing, but my leg sinks down into the sand until my leg is caked in grit all the way up to my thigh.Something too hard and flat to be sand lurks underneath my foot. I reach down before something hits the back of my head.

“I knew we’d find her if we stuck around,” says the gruff female. “Let’s deal with her the American way.”

PART 3: TH3 PR3D4T0RY PR3Y

I wake up in a cell. Not a movie cell. Not a prison cell like anything you would imagine from vividly animated movies. A cell disguised as a room. There are no bars. There are no cold, unforgiving white walls. Actually, it resembles the interior of a pediatrician’s office, one of those doctors for children that house horrifying art, cheesy mantras, and tasteless literature like magazines from the 2000s. There is a pink and yellow giraffe dancing on a TV screen. A stack of books thinner than supermodels occupy their corner of shame. I am sitting in a small plastic chair. But that’s not the real travesty. Oh no. The real travesty is the quote on one wall.

“BE-YOU-TIFUL!” in curly pink letters covers the inconspicuous doorway. The door opens, and in walks none other than Traevur. My brother.

“You died,” I say, my voice uncharictaristically calm. My body has settled into a state of complete numb.

“I can explain,” he says. I doubt it.

"You died," I say. "Start there."

"That was a setup to get them off my trail."

"So who was it that died?"

"A completely different criminal who committed murder and happened to look similar. We hired him to say those things. We also did face-alter so that the scan would show him as me."

"Why?"

"To recruit."

'Recruit who?"

"Dissenters. We need more numbers if we want to take on TSU."

"TSU?"

“No one really knows what it stands for. Something with the government. Big secret. All that.”

“Are they evil?”

“That depends on which side they are on.”

(TO BE CONTINUED)