Reality Within a Reality

He smelled the fallen pine needles and felt the moist earth under his shins slowly soaking into his jeans. But the only thing he was able to focus on were the yellow orbs darting and bobbing in the forest shadows cast by the waning dusk light. The orbs were not a mystery to him. They were the shining eyes of predators. Grey wolf eyes. The light crunching of leaves under their paws sounded in every direction, each throaty growl strumming the tension in the air. His hair stood on end, pleading for him to run away. But fear had already seeped into his bones, leaving him frozen in place.

The leader of the wolf pack materialized out of the shadows in front of him, haunches raised, eyes zeroed in on his own. There was only one word to describe how he felt. Prey. I’m just prey. The wolf’s gaze sucked out every ounce of fear his soul was capable of feeling. He blinked. In an instant the wolf had pounced and was soaring toward him with a lethal finesse. The white of bared teeth searing into his retinas as the wolf closed the space between them. A scream boiled in his throat but there was no time for it to escape.

He bolted up, his arms held up in front of him in expectation of the pain of sharp teeth sinking into his flesh. But there was no pain, no smell of the forest and no sound of wolves. He opened his eyes to a messy bedroom. It was just a dream, an all-too-familiar recurring nightmare. No matter how many times he experienced it, it always felt real. The scars on his arm where wolf teeth had bit into him over ten years ago started to throb on cue. It was a reminder that he was a slave to his inescapable mortality. Maybe that was the reason he was so good at what he did. He knew he was going to be dead one day and had resolved to make the best of what was happening in the present.

He reached out into the darkness until he felt the cold of his smartglass. The phone slipped out of his sweaty hand, and he dove half off the bed to catch it before it hit the floor. He mouthed a silent “thank you” to his virtual reality-trained reactions for saving him from a costly repair bill. Who said games were useless?

Click. 5:24AM. Late enough, he might as well get his day started. The addiction to the rush of adrenaline coursing through his veins was already calling out to him.

He booted up his pc and stretched his muscles as he waited for the operating system to load. It was an old rig, but all he could afford. The screen finally loaded up with his desktop background, big letters encompassed by the muscled jaw and razor-sharp teeth of a grey wolf, casting the room in a soft, blue glow. The word read “Wolfrahh”, his gamer tag and chosen name. He had abandoned his birth name, Leif, and the boy that it was given to long ago, leaving his past and fears behind. He decided to become the feared lone wolf–fierce, confident and unrelenting. He became Wolfrahh.

He opened his livestreaming service and clicked “Seek and Slay,” the first-person shooter game that had made him a minor celebrity in minor circles after winning an e-sport international final. Within an hour of claiming victory, Wolfrahh had shot up the livestreaming charts into the middle of the pack. He was no longer an underdog, but he knew he wouldn’t be satisfied with himself until he was an alpha.

On his secondary holopanel, his fans flooded the livestream chat with messages of adoration and veneration as soon as they realized he had come online. Wolfrahh shook his head. He didn’t think he would ever get used to the amount of people who subscribed to his channel. But he wasn’t complaining, it was only because of his dedicated fanbase that he was able to follow his passion and make video game livestreaming a full-time job. He depended entirely on donations from his subscribers, fans and his one tiny coffee shop sponsor for survival. It was a meager existence, but it had been enough for him to put together his current gaming rig and pay rent.

A sleek VR apparatus, the most expensive thing he owned, beckoned to Wolfrahh, sitting in stark contrast next to his old desktop pc. He did a few quick jumping jacks to get his blood flowing, slipped the headset snugly onto his head and flipped on his mic. “You have now entered Wolfrahh’s Den! For all you new subscribers out there, welcome to the wolfpack. You’ve been requesting virtual cyborg destruction and that’s what you’ll get!” The chatroom erupted in excitement. They all wanted to see the champion in action. He selected “solo” for his squad size and entered the largest available game lobby available. If they wanted to see carnage, he was going to give them carnage.

A winter forest map spawned into his vision, pixels quickly loading in around him. Apart from his natural affinities for fast-twitch muscle movements and pinpoint accuracy, he had a knack for being able to predict other player’s movements. It was time to put those skills to use.

*

Wolfrahh ran his cyborg avatar through the snow, searching for the last squad on the server. Spotting a cabin up ahead through the forest trees, he sensed this would be the site of the final battle. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” Wolfrahh taunted the last squad. He was met by silence, but he could see traces of activity around the area. A few lootboxes, containing the items of defeated players, lined the pathway to the cabin–remnants of a recent battle. The winners of the altercation were still there, he could feel it in the tingling of his fingers wrapped around the VR controllers. “Have it your way! I’ll come blow your house down.”

Movement on the top of a nearby truck betrayed the hiding spot of a member of the one remaining trio squad. A camper—one of Wolfrahh’s most hated types of gamers, in a close second right behind the cheaters. He ran into the compound and threw a static grenade on top of the truck. A shock of electric discharge lit up the clearing, stunning the player. Wolfrahh vaulted on top of the truck to bait the others, “I’ll let him live if the other two of you come out now!”

Bullets flew at him from the windows of the house in perfectly predictable fashion, playing right into his hands. Wolfrahh neutralized the stunned player to make sure he didn’t get shot in the back. As the enemy digitally transformed into a lootbox, he jumped off the truck and ran toward the house. “I’m coming in!” Wolfrahh shouted as he shot another cyborg dead through an open window. Sliding through the closed door, he smashed it open, readying himself for a pointblank confrontation with the last player. As his avatar readied its weapon, everything seemed to move in slow-motion. Wolfrahh and his enemy circled each other and unloaded their bullets, both moving just fast enough to stay ahead of each other’s gunsights. The moment ended as quickly as it started, when both of their magazines simultaneously clicked empty. Wolfrahh didn’t hesitate, tapped a button on his controller, and a crackling, electrified baseball bat magically appeared in his hands. He charged the other player, who was clearly still flipping through their weapon wheel. If video game cyborgs could show emotion, Wolfrahh was sure it would have looked surprised when his baseball bat connected with its head, sending the player to the end-of-battle screen.

Wolfrahh flopped down into his second-hand gaming chair, satisfied with his early morning performance. A replay of his victory dance cast in moonlight on the top of the cabin was already rolling on his channel. One of his subscribers had already cut part of the replay and made it into a clip. Little hearts started to pop up as his avatar ended the dance in a power pose. He felt his cheeks blushing with a slight warmth. It was always a sobering moment when one of his fans took that extra step. How could it be that these people blindly loved him, let alone a virtual version of him, despite having no idea of who he was?

The amount in his e-wallet was still slowly climbing on his smartglass. It had been a successful day. He was extremely grateful knowing he would be set for the next few weeks just from this session’s handful of donations from his generous followers. He might even be able to get that newly hyped game slated to launch next week. Unfortunately, not every stream ended up this lucrative. Wolfrahh wished he had more control over it, but all he could do was give them a good show. Thankfully, he was good at it.

A blinking icon in the corner of his screen caught his eye. He clicked open the incoming message and an encrypted window popped open.

“Leif ‘Wolfrahh’ Shotström, you are cordially invited to the InV Invitational later this week. We are impressed with the skills you’ve displayed in a variety of other virtual reality programs. If you choose to accept, we will contact you within the next 48 hours. We expect the utmost secrecy from you. We are watching. You have two minutes to make your choice before this message self-destructs.”

Wolfrahh almost fell out of his seat in excitement. He re-read the message to make sure he wasn’t imagining things. InV was the greatest underground virtual reality game competition in known existence and was a well-kept secret from the public. The Invitational was their shadowy, once-a-year competition that pitted the best against the best. It was rumored that the winner would be set up for life and hired by InV full-time.

His arm was still buzzing with the thrill and suddenness of the opportunity when he clicked “Accept”. The desktop window disappeared anticlimactically. Wolfrahh scanned his entire hard drive for a trace of the message–there was nothing. Unsurprisingly, whoever was behind InV had much better hacking skills than his own mediocre ones.

Virtual reality was not only his job, it was his life. Apart from an initial episode of nausea from his first gaming session, he was a natural at it. If he was being honest with himself, the confidence from kicking someone’s ass in virtual reality was the only reason he was able to function in and enter real society. Not to mention the fact that VR had helped his fitness and reaction skills in the real world beyond anything he had thought himself capable of as a kid. He lived and breathed to jack into virtual worlds.

InV was what people called an upgrade. Ultra-lifelike gravity, physics and destruction were their pride and joy. War mech skins and environmental textures felt, looked and were constructed exactly as they would be in the real world. The program even mimicked the weather in the local time zone of each competition. There was no healing or repairing in battle, no UI overlay or even a health bar–your war mech either functioned or it didn’t. Each mech was unique and came with its own built-in weaponry, as there were no digital backpacks or inventories in-game. Players need to pick up weapons manually in the arenas and can carry only what was physically realistic. Wolfrahh had seen the few videos of InV that existed on the darknet. Nothing he ever experienced could compare to its realism.

* * *

It had been almost a day to the hour since he received the message, and there was no hint of contact from InV. Wolfrahh shuffled out into the brisk autumn air and the hustle and bustle of City Minor, where he had made his home for the past year. He couldn’t wait inside any longer. The sunlight reflected off the seemingly infinite number of windows above him, illuminating crowds of people on their morning commutes. They seemed like mice in lab experiments, all scurrying about to find a block of cheese somewhere in the maze of life. Very different from the quiet existence of living in his hometown. Would he ever get used to so many people in one space? It was suffocating in the city. Maybe it was part of the reason he had gravitated toward the virtual world, an escape away from the rest of humanity.

A glint of light pierced through the crowd, blinding his eye for half a second. A man in sunglasses and a suit was staring at him from an alleyway. The next thing he knew, he was being grabbed from behind and escorted toward a new-generation limo idling in the alley behind the waiting man. A few seconds later, he was seated in the backseat, facing two suited men with identical no-nonsense expressions on their faces.

“We are your escorts to the InV Invitational.” Wolfrahh flinched unconsciously as one of the men reached into his pocket–but it was just a digital device, not a weapon. “Please read the contract and sign below.”

Wolfrahh breathed a quiet sigh of relief with the knowledge that this wasn’t his time to die. He signed the wordy, digital document and handed it back to them, ignoring the faint inkling that he might have just signed over his life to an unknown entity.

“Good. You can’t imagine how many people decide not to go through with this,” one of the men said as he pocketed the device. The automated, driverless car silently lurched into motion. “You will have the rest of day to prepare when we get there. Sit back and enjoy the ride.”

The car passed under the shadow of the sky-high Horizon tower, through the neighborhoods in the outer tiers of New Dawn and then past what the natives of the city called “the boonies.” Wolfrahh just called them “disaster zones,” which was exactly what they were–bombed out, destroyed, or abandoned sections of towns, remnants of the war that had reshaped the city. The irony that he was probably on his way to creating virtual destruction not dissimilar to the view streaming past his eyes was not lost on him.

The journey ended abruptly an hour later when the trees that had been a constant for most of the journey disappeared and a vast, clear-cut area emerged. A square building of concrete walls and dark one-way mirrored glass windows stretched deep back through the surrounding woods far beyond his vision. Wolfrahh had never seen a military complex before, but he imagined them looking just like this. Tall, black, steel walls complete with patrolling guards wielding sniper and assault rifles on the roof. Cold and hard. For a virtual reality game competition, they were taking security extremely seriously. He hoped he knew what he had signed up for.

A car pulled up as Wolfrahh was exiting his limo at the base of the massive complex. An AI voice spoke as a passenger door of the other luxury sedan unlocked and smoothly rotated upwards towards the sky, “…You have arrived at your destination. Horizon thanks you for your service.” Horizon? They had always been silent objectors to InV technology–or so the internet believed.

“You an initiate?” a deep voice asked from the open car door. Wolfrahh felt his shoulders stiffen, it sounded like the voice of a man who could lift him up with one arm and toss him out of the way like he was nothing but a twig.

“I…” The body that stepped out of the car fit the voice like a glove on a hand. He was a large, muscular man whose veins seemed to have a life of their own. He had a scar on one side of his face, and a fresh cut on the other. In virtual reality, Wolfrahh was an alpha wolf, but right now he felt like a puppy with its tail tucked between its legs. “I, I am. It’s my first time at a competition… I didn’t know Horizon had an InV division,” he managed to squeak out. The brutish man’s eyes gave him a friendly look that was completely at odds with his appearance, then he broke into a grin and gave him an exaggerated wink, “Officially, we don’t.”

The escorts from his limo rushed over in clear panic, “These damn AI cars. They can’t do anything right. Horizon is supposed to go through the other freaking entrance!” One of the men pushed the big man forward towards the building. Wolfrahh took a step to follow. “No. You come this way,” the other escort muttered as he felt his arm tugged in the opposite direction. He heard the brutish, Horizon man shout “Good luck, kid!” as they quickly moved out of earshot. Wolfrahh looked over his shoulder to see if he could find any obvious reason for what caused the guards to panic, but saw nothing but two empty cars.

*

The first thing they let him do after dropping off his bag was to choose his war mech. Wolfrahh felt like a kid in a candy shop. He put on the headset and virtual models of war mechs he could test and manipulate with motion controls loaded into view. They weren’t too many options left, the other competitors had already chosen much of the selection earlier in the day. But that didn’t bother him, the three options left were more than enough.

The first war mech had a rounded, hunched posture and razor-sharp edges on its shoulders, back, and knees. It was clearly constructed so it could roll into a dangerous razor ball that could move quickly across terrain. Interesting, but it didn’t suit Wolfrahh’s preferred hand-to-hand style of combat.

The second mech was a massive tank of a mech with legs supplemented by reinforced hydraulics. It was built for massive jumps and kicks, but looked too slow for his liking.

The third was a handsome looking hunk of metal designed for bipedal running and quick movements. Its feet were clawed, not only to be used as weapons but for climbing terrain. It didn’t have any heavy weaponry, but its fists could transform into a short-sized battleblade and heavy hammerfist. What sealed the deal was the facemask. Elongated, it ended in a sharp jaw with purely aesthetic metal teeth. He imagined it was designed for aerodynamics, but it sure looked like a wolf to him. He had made his choice.

* * *

The next morning, he finally settled into his assigned competitor’s quarters. Wolfrahh looked in the bathroom mirror and ran his fingers through his dyed blue, purple, and silver locks. “Looking good,” he said to the reflection. The image looking back at him burst into a fit of laughter. Two years ago, he was the shyest guy he knew–he couldn’t even hold a conversation with a girl of his own age. Focus, Wolfrahh. You’re at the Invitational. No one gets invited. But you did. He wasn’t used to feeling these positive emotions toward himself.

Minutes later, he made his way to the control room filled with other competitors. Wolfrahh slid into the InV suit and started up the battle program, already having familiarized himself with the controls the night before. He tested his leg and arm movement–no restrictions, yet the apparatus held him suspended in place. It was a marvel of modern technology that tricked your brain into thinking your body was moving in three-dimensional space when it was actually just stuck in a harness.

The tingling in his extremities was comforting. At the start of every battle, he felt some form of nervousness in anticipation of an upcoming fight. The sensations prepared his mind and body for battle. The familiar feelings triggered a wave of confidence that crested and splashed through him. He was ready.

The terminal start button pulled his finger toward it like a magnet. As it made contact, his headset went black, and he felt the unshakable feeling that his consciousness was being transported across time and space. He didn’t remember closing his eyes, but when he opened them, the program had fully loaded. He had been transported to an armory and was now in full control of his war mech. Looking down at his metallic body, he clenched his hand and the mech-hand clenched itself in perfect synchronicity. He was successfully jacked-in. A loud ticking started to reverberate–the countdown clock had started, signaling that all competitors had entered the arena.

Fifteen. Wolfrahh scanned the terrain around him. Boulders and trees lined the inside of a circular, twenty-foot high wall, marking the boundaries of the massive arena. The trees overlooked a mini-city laid out slightly below him. The arena looked to be based on one of the older suburbs that dotted the area. Residential housing on the fringes transformed into taller, two-to-three story apartment and commercial buildings framing what looked to be the town’s main street. At the center, three futuristic buildings clawed upwards like aliens bursting through the earth, reaching slightly above the tree line where he stood. They were slanted over the center of the main street for easy traversing and were interlinked with bridges that met three stories up, creating a large platform in the middle. A weapon of high value probably spawned there to encourage the competitors to engage one another in battle. Good game design, he thought.

Nine. Wolfrahh looked down and transformed his mechanical fists into a hammerfist and battleblade. All was in order.

Seven. He let off a few backflips and jumped off a tree to test the constraints of the war mech’s abilities. Its body felt like his own, except for the fact there were no muscles, just coded hydraulics and raw digital power. Wolfrahh and his mech were in sync.

Five. Blips of movement along the tree line around the little city let him know others were preparing for battle just as he was.

Four. Inhale.

Three. Exhale.

Two. Wait, mechs don’t breathe.

One. He jumped down the slope, grabbed a whipline and swung onto the roof of a house, “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”

*

Wolfrahh felt droplets of sweat dripping down the sides of his face as he walked out of the control room, where all of the InV terminals were powering down. It still surprised him on how much energy and physical movement he exerted in virtual reality. There was a spring in his step despite his tiredness.

Wolfrahh looked up at the scoreboard for Round 1 alongside the other competitors. A bunch of figures and statistics from the battle littered the board. He wanted to brag to the others murmuring around him wondering who the guy at the top of the table was. Obviously, it was him, but he didn’t have the guts to say anything in public. His eyes rose towards the top of the table until he found his gamer tag–“Wolfrahh (Initiate)”. But something was wrong—he was in second. There was one other name ahead of his. “Butch (Horizon)”. Who the heck is that? His pride evaporated into thin air as a dagger of fear stabbed through his chest. Wolfrahh now realized he stupidly had expected to win the competition with ease, as he always had done in the past. But none of those competitions were professional matches. None were an InV Invitational. This is where the big boys play. The next eight names after his were all Horizon as well. He felt a chill run through his bones. He looked around. There wasn’t a single Horizon competitor. Why weren’t they checking the scoreboard along with everyone else?

*

Wolfrahh was in the last match of the day. He glanced up at the in-game scoreboard, reminding himself only three other names apart from his were still active. He had already qualified for the final tomorrow, as had the entirety of the Horizon crew whom had already finished for the day. This match was just the tip of the iceberg.

A trio of enemies in a temporary alliance appeared from the shadows, cornering him in an alley. But the joke was on them. It’s you three who are stuck in the alley with me. He sprinted toward the group, his hand clamping firmly around a whipline that had been hanging between them. He felt his metallic body lift into the air with the momentum of his forward movement. Wolfrahh soared above the other mechs, who were foolish enough to stand shoulder-to-shoulder, and let go of the whipline at the height of his swing. Metal sprang out from his forearm to cover his fist in titanium as the other arm transformed into a short blade. Wolfrahh twisted in the air, dodging their bullets, “It’s a good day to die!” He let gravity do much of the work as his heavy mech propelled his hammerfist and battleblade to pummel and shred through the enemy’s metal bodies. Zzzap. Zzzap. Zzzap.

InV’s chosen audio for a kill was very satisfying.

He turned to look up to the sky to see two lines of familiar text. “GAME OVER. Wolfrahh wins.” He did a victory dance–a quick leg movement, a spin, finishing in a one-handed handstand. His fans may not have been watching, but Horizon was. He wanted to show them whom they needed to be afraid of tomorrow.

*

He stared at the water stain on the ceiling in the corner of his room. The satisfaction from his last win had been cut short. Some new information had traveled through the competitor grapevine–somewhat disturbing information. It was unheard of. Instead of using war mechs in the competition, Horizon were using human battle skins. There were enough competitors in the Invitational that he hadn’t been matched with any of them in the preliminary battles and hadn’t got to see them in action.

Where did Horizon even get human battle skins? Did they develop the code themselves? How did they integrate them into InV? Why was it bothering him so much? He sat up in a flash as the underlying question that had been bugging him suddenly formed in his head. All the video games he had played in the past involved mechs, cyborgs and aliens–but never realistic humans.

InV was the most realistic experience he had ever had in a game. It truly deserved its title of the world’s best VR technology. The in-game war mech truly felt like his own body. He felt like he could feel the sun shining down on his metallic body, the gun recoiling against the hydraulics of his arm and the metal of his battleblade shredding other metal, sparking with friction exactly like it did in real life. Which begged the question, what would it feel like to battle against a human skin? Would he be able to kill one?

The rational part of his mind told him there was nothing to worry about. Theoretically, it was all just programming. Within InV, a human could be just as strong as a mech, comprised of the same coding as everything else. Horizon must be using psychological warfare to throw us, competitors off. It surely had him thinking.

But the irrational part of his mind couldn’t divorce real life from the realness of the battles he was participating in while jacked-in to InV. It believed he would actually be killing another humans just like it felt like he was legitimately destroying other war mechs.

He could feel the creeping dark thoughts of his youth trying to surface in the back of his mind. Doubt, humility and shame swirled in the depths threatening to invade his skull once more. Wolfrahh pushed his thoughts back down as his consciousness started to blend into the wisps of sleep.

* * *

Wolfrahh stood still and silent along the tree line, waiting for the final round of the competition to start. The countdown timer had already started ticking down. He kept his eyes shut and his doubts from the night before started to dissipate as he let his consciousness sink deeper into the war mech coding. There was no where he felt more at home than in virtual reality. Energy coursed through him–the excitement of a caged wolf raring to be let out. “Awooooooo!” He felt the guttural wolf howl escape his lungs, echoing between his real ears and the war mech audio. The intensity of the call of the predator caused goosebumps to rise on his arms back in the real world in a spooky chill. He smiled knowing others in the arena would feel the same.

*

Wolfrahh crouched in one of the apartment buildings on the east side of the city, his mechanical eyes darting toward every corner and every rooftop with tiny mechanical whirrs, looking for signs of the enemy. Movement—northeast rooftop. He took a shot. Southwest corner. Shot. South-southwest corner. Shot. They were all war mechs. All headshots. He checked his gun magazine–empty–and dropped it to the ground with a thump.

An odd feeling settled in his stomach as he moved further toward the center of the arena. And it didn’t go away. With each deactivated competitor, he was closer to meeting a Horizon competitor in a human skin. He glanced at the scoreboard projected on the generated storm clouds above reflecting the weather back in the real world. Only five minutes in and there were only five names left active on the board.

Wolfrahh turned a corner onto the next city street to find himself confronted with two armed Horizon competitors. For better or for worse, he had finally found what he was looking for.

The three of them stood in a gun-less, three-way standoff. The Horizon competitors were managing to display human mannerisms even while standing still. It was highly disturbing to see in virtual reality. I don’t like this one bit. He was forced to ignore his discomfort as the other two set off into action. Wolfrahh felt the familiar movements of the dance of death, attacking in one direction, only to have to spin 180 degrees to deflect a sword coming at his back. Sparks of metal weapons hitting each other filled the air as the three of them traded blows. He imagined it smelled like iron–like blood–glad his war mech wasn’t capable of the sense of smell. One competitor moved with inhuman speed, even faster than his war mech. The other was nimble as a fox, jumping with uncanny dexterity.

Doubts started to fill his mind. Was he going easy on the duo because he didn’t want to kill them? Was he even good enough to take on the two Horizon competitors? He refused to name them as humans in his internal commentary.

His battleblade had just entered a deadlock with the other two’s weapons when he heard a concussive crunch of metal followed by an explosion from a block away. Zzzap. Only three were now left in the way of his victory. A shockwave blew dust around them. He felt his body get tugged downward. He looked down to see a sword sliding out through his other pierced metal arm. The two Horizon competitors, gave each other a look and both turned toward him in a temporary alliance; they thought they had him. Wrong. He dropped and rushed forward, cutting the both of them in a smooth and quick sweeping motion. They both screamed in pain before falling silent. THAT was way too human. Zzzap. Zzzap.

A silhouette materialized on the other side of the street from the cloud of dust that was still billowing from the nearby explosion. As the figure emerged, Wolfrahh could almost feel a smile from behind the battle helmet. The man walked with the grace of a tiger strolling into a pen of sheep. Wolfrahh hadn’t seen him before, but he had no doubt who it was. Butch. Another predator. It was the final showdown.

The next thing he knew, Wolfrahh was hit with the force of a truck. The image of the wolf pouncing on him as a kid flashed before his eyes. It took everything he had to land nimbly and prepare himself for the inevitable follow-up attack. Wolfrahh shook the flashback from his mind. He might have been prey back then, but now he was a predator.

Butch crashed down on him expectedly and Wolfrahh kicked him off, sending the bulky man through a brick wall. But Butch was strong and fast—stronger than him. Unfazed, Butch got up and kept coming. The battle led them up a building ramp to the platform suspended in the center of the city overlooking the rest of arena. The pinnacle battle of the competition, now at the pinnacle of the city. Wolfrahh imagined it looked like the final battle out of a movie–the threat of falling from a great height now added to the multitude of dangers one already had to worry about in battle.

The battle kept grinding on, neither of them gaining a clear advantage. But Wolfrahh inevitably felt the energy in his human body slowly ebbing away with the high pace of the battle. He was going to have to do something drastic to win before he ran out of stamina to fight with.

Butch had just grabbed his injured arm in an iron grip. This is the moment. As he allowed his arm get ripped off the shoulder, leaving wiring and exposed metal behind, Wolfrahh braced himself for an expected pain that never came. Once his arm was completely disconnected and left useless in Butch’s hand, he jumped up with all his might and threw an uppercut with his remaining arm. Connecting with the bottom of Butch’s chin, his foe yelled in a croak of pain. Wolfrahh saw Butch’s helmet sail over the edge of the platform and took the moment to charge. Kicking Butch’s body mid-air, he sent it to the ground, then pounced, ready to administer the killing blow. His war mech’s remaining fist activated into his battleblade as he cocked his shoulder back, ready to end the battle once and for all. But his arm was frozen in midair. The helmetless face he was staring down at was an exact replica of the Horizon competitor he had met yesterday outside the complex.

It can’t be.

It must be a simulated model of the man’s real body, his rational mind told him. But Wolfrahh’s mech eyes were telling him otherwise. Butch was already bleeding from a fresh cut on his chin from the punch, right next to the now almost-healed cut he had seen the day before. The trickle of blood looked so real, flowing over the man’s stubble. Liquids were notoriously difficult to code…how did they do it? There’s no way…

Butch looked up at him, a little disoriented from the hit to his head, “Hey kid. It’s you, isn’t it? Good move.” He said with the same unexpectedly friendly smile as the day before, before wincing in pain. Butch tapped Wolfrahh’s helmet, producing hollow clunking sounds. “You look good in metal.” Wolfrahh knew what he should do, but couldn’t bring himself to do it. What if it really was him? Real in the flesh? I can’t kill him. His battleblade retracted back into his arm and he clenched his fist. He punched Butch hard on the jaw knocking him out cold. Would a knockout count? Zzzap.

Guess so.

He was the last man standing. Victor of the InV Invitational.

The monotony of the concrete wall of his room offered him no solace to the storm of questions circling his short time at the complex. Wolfrahh stood up abruptly in frustration. He snuck out into the darkness of the hallways and ventured past checkpoints into parts of the massive building he hadn’t seen before, hoping the walk would finally clear his mind. The lights of a pair of guards on patrol turned the corner up ahead, forcing him down a dark corridor further into the unknown corners of the complex. InV would not take too kindly to their about-to-be new employee snooping around.

Wolfrahh had left the Invitational victory party early–although not for his usual reason of social anxiety. Between the excitement of winning the competition as an initiate and the disturbing experience of having had to face Butch and human skins in battle, he felt like he was being torn in two.

The grand prize was more money than he had ever imagined, and a contract with InV was more prestigious of a job than he could have ever dreamed. InV had already told him their administration department would come find him back in New Dawn to initiate the contract process. Game operators had also talked to him at the party, telling him how excited they were to have such a promising first-timer being added to their crew. It all sounded like a dream, until he thought about what he had to do to get there and what he would have to continue to do. Could he survive a job where he felt like he was fighting real humans?

The image of Butch smiling up at him, helmetless on the ground, was replaying on an infinite film wheel in his cranium. Had he actually fought the real man? It felt too real not to be true. But how? What would that mean? If Butch hadn’t been in virtual reality, that meant he, Wolfrahh, also hadn’t been fighting in VR. They had fought in the real world. But he was positive his body had been strapped in an InV terminal for the duration of the battle. However, he couldn’t confirm the same for his war mech… Was that even possible? Controlling a physical object with just your mind?

It was science fiction. That kind of technology that only existed in tales you read about, movies you watched on holopanels, or experienced as a storyline in video games. The world wasn’t yet futuristic enough for those sorts of things to exist, and yet all his senses were telling him otherwise.

Even if it was all true, why would Horizon send real humans to fight super-powerful war mechs? How were humans even capable of fighting against them, let alone beat them? Had any died? Had he killed the other two competitors?

Or he could be one-hundred-percent wrong, and everything he had just experienced was InV virtual reality coding. Coding beyond anything he had ever seen before. He hoped that was the truth.

He continued to rack his brain for answers, but he had none. As he turned the next corner, voices echoing down from a side hallway interrupted his internal dilemmas.

Wolfrahh’s curiosity outweighed his fear of getting caught, and he snuck over to the door to eavesdrop. The voice of an older woman spoke with soft venom, “It is acceptable to kill each other to determine survival of the fittest.” Wolfrahh peeked through the crack in the door and saw six Horizon competitors facing toward the speaker hidden in the other corner of the room. One was Butch with a heavily bruised face right where Wolfrahh had punched him. “But what is unacceptable is that you allowed a boy using a hunk of metal to defeat you. I am disappointed. We are here to prove our superiority. You two are lucky to be alive…”

She was talking about him. Two? He had fought three. What happened to the third?

Wolfrahh heard the sound of an almost silent motor of something being revved up, “Your healing serums are ready. Once…” Down the hallway, the footsteps of more patrolling guards echoed, interrupting his impromptu detective mission. He wished he could have gotten more answers, but instead reluctantly sulked away back to the safety of his room.

*

Wolfrahh lay staring at his ceiling once again, as it started to glow with morning sunlight. Had Horizon purposely sent people knowing they could die? To what end? According to the woman, he had really controlled a physical war mech. Butch’s face was bruised right where Wolfrahh had punched him. “No, that’s not possible.” But she said. “She said ‘using a hunk of metal’, that could mean a bunch of different things.” One of which could be the fact that you were using your mind to control a freaking war mech in real freaking life. His morning alarm went off, the debate left unresolved.

* * *

The monotony of the blur of green trees along the side of the highway were slowly lulling him into a more than welcome trance. Anything to distract himself from the chaos of his thoughts. The trees up ahead opened up into a rest stop, where a huge, unmarked tractor trailer was parked. He saw two men with InV-marked jackets entering the station–even automated vehicles needed to recharge their batteries. Especially the big ones.

What were they doing here? What did InV need a tractor trailer for? A neon lightbulb switched on in his head.

AI driver systems were not flawless. He convinced the system to pull into the station to allow him use the restroom. He, of course, was going to do no such thing. The InV guards would be in the station for about fifteen minutes while the truck recharged, giving him plenty of time to have a quick look at the content of their cargo.

Wolfrahh approached the truck and pulled out his trusty hacktachine, a little digital device used to get past security systems and door codes. In his free time, he liked to work on his hacking skills, but was only an amateur and often relied on little trinkets from the grey market. The device worked like a charm and the backdoor’s digital lock unlocked with a quiet beep.

The massive truck trailer walls were lined with square hunks of metal. They looked like the InV armories that housed the war mechs at the start of battles. Wolfrahh noticed each was labeled with a codename. He walked down the length of the trailer, fears and misgivings filling the cramped space. He stopped. “Wolfrahh” was etched in steel at the top of the door of the armory in front of him. The pressure in his chest was compounded by his heart threatening to burst through his ribcage like a volcanic eruption as he hooked up the hacktachine once more. After the sound of an unlocking hydraulic pin echoed loudly in the truck, he grabbed the handle of the heavy door and heaved.

The door swung open silently to reveal a war mech. He dropped to his knees in shock. The war mech was slashed and dented across its body. Silvery steel shone out in the dim light through the scratched paint. Where the left arm should have been, wires, pins and steel hung out grasping desperately outwards, seeking the appendage that had been ripped away from it. At the head of the body a face reminiscent of a wolf stared back at him.

Any lingering hope that everything he had experienced and heard at the complex had some other explanation was shot and buried. This was his war mech.

He reached out and touched the war mech’s leg. Cold steel. It was real, all real.

*

New Dawn appeared on the horizon, cast in light from the mid-morning sun. The city had always felt welcoming to him, the pinnacle of human advancement contained in a few square miles encouraging citizens to be a part of the future. But not today. The Horizon tower at the center of the skyline stuck out like a sore thumb, looming over him and everything else with an ominous air. He imagined a kraken sending its tentacles throughout the city, intertwining itself around anything it could touch. He’d heard rumors Horizon were expanding their scope of power, but he never thought it would ever concern him. Now, it felt like a personal assault.

* * *

Wolfrahh sat with his head in his hands, starting to see stars from the pressure on his eyes. He lifted his head out of his hand-made cradle to take in the afternoon street from the café balcony. He had an appointment with InV the next day to sign a contract and was still not sure what to do about the situation. Wolfrahh could live on in peace–no one knew he was aware of any of these secrets–neither Horizon nor InV. But he wasn’t sure he would be able to live with himself and carry on like nothing had happened leaving so many questions unanswered.

The past few days went by slowly. It felt like he had been walking through a fog. Everything that used to feel familiar now felt alien. Everything he thought he knew was now cast in a shadow of doubt. He looked out at the groups of people of all shapes, sizes, backgrounds, and origins commuting home one story below him in the city dusk. People had flocked to New Dawn after the war looking for a way to survive and get a slice of the success and prosperity that Horizon had rebuilt. Wolfrahh thought he had come here for better reasons than them. He had left his life to escape his old, flawed self and finally make something of his life, but now it all felt like a lie. InV was certainly a lie–what else in this life has been a lie? Was all virtual reality this weird, new mind transfer technology? Was the new, more confident version of himself just a façade, on the verge on reverting back to a scared shell of a human being?

But the scariest question of all still lingered in the back of his mind–was he a murderer?

These days, Wolfrahh felt like all he was doing was asking himself questions he had no answers to.

“Tough day?” A voice asked him from the next table over.

A young woman was leaning back in a chair, feet propped up on the balcony ledge with a dark hoodie pulled up, head just slightly turned, eyes shining bright in the shadow and looking at him with a questioning expression.

“You could say that,” he replied exasperatedly as he took a sip of coffee.

“Want to talk about it?” she said as she leaned over and punched him in the arm with what he guessed was a friendly gesture. “I’m bored, waiting for my friend. She’s late, as always. She can really suck sometimes.”

It took some effort to not rub the spot she hit on his tricep. She hit pretty hard for a small girl. He let silence answer the question as held his cup of coffee judging the stranger a few feet away from him. As Wolfrahh took another sip, he realized his normal feelings of social anxiety were on vacation. For some reason he didn’t feel the normal pang of shyness and nervousness he usually felt around an unknown female. Was this the one positive, unintended side of effect of having his life completely turned inside out?

She took a gulp of her own coffee, “Suit yourself,” and placed the cup down next to six other empty cups. As she leaned back to look up at the sky, an arctic-blue lock of hair fell out of her hood. She was pretty–in a rebellious sort of way. And he really did need someone to talk to, to get some of this off his chest. He knew locking it all inside would eventually tear him apart, like other things had in the past.

Who better to talk about it than with a stranger whom he’d never have to see again? He didn’t have to tell her any details. He could bring bits and pieces of it up in passing. Something abstract and non-committal. He leaned forward on his elbows, still peering out over the busy street and replied, “Do you believe in science fiction?”

THE END