Prompt Lost
Ghosts Of Dacatoma County
Max stood on the edge of Rockjaw Cliff and howled at the moon, his arms outstretched above him.
Sam sat a few meters away, laughing, and raised his beer in a mock salute. He gave his own supportive mini howl, not even standing up, and Harry, sitting beside him did the same with a smile.
Max, always the most adventurous of the group, stepped back from the cliff edge and looked out at the far horizon. Dacatoma county stretched out in front of him as splotches of well lit houses connected by dim stretches of road, all surrounded by utter darkness. With a deep breath, Max turned back toward Sam and Harry and held out a hand.
“Beer me.” He said. Sam obliged him, tossing a can in an underhand arc which Max caught mid-flight and cracked open, catching the escaping foam eagerly in his mouth. The front of his t-shirt spritzed with beer, Max sat down to Sam’s left and the three old friends relaxed in silence for awhile, just taking in the darkened world.
It was Max who broke the silence. “Boys, whadya want for yourselves?”
The question caught Sam off guard and he hesitated before answering. Harry jumped in immediately, “I for one don’t want a damn thing more than I’ve already got. Hell if I ain’t the luckiest man alive.”
Sam rolled his eyes. Harry’s response was one of Harry’s “canned” answers – comments that just sounded too perfect, too fast, as if they’d been written by someone else and Harry just recited them or something. Sam always made fun of Harry for it, told him he watched too many romantic movies.
Max felt the same way. “That’s good for you Harry, a real fairy tale ending.” Max jabbed Sam in the shoulder with a fist, his face kind, filled with the genuine interest of a good friend. “How ’bout you Sam? What do you want for yourself, out there in the world? You can’t mean to stay in Dacatoma forever.”
Truth was, Sam had been thinking about this exact topic. It felt like he’d done everything there was to do in Dacatoma county. The world out there, beyond the green hills, called out to him, and he was beginning to listen.
Sam sighed and took a gulp of his beer.
“Actually man, I was thinking I might go on a trip.”
Max feigned amazement. “A trip? Sam is gonna go on a trip?! Now this is big news. How long we’ve known each other?”
Sam did the mental calculation. “24 years this August.”
“And how many trips you gone on in those 24 years?” Max cocked his head expectantly.
Sam laughed. “None.”
“Not. A. One!” Max clapped Sam on the back and bent over to look at Harry. “See, this is what I’m talking about Harry. You live in your little bubble, but this guy, he’s really liv…”
Max stopped mid sentence, mid word. Sam turned toward him and saw that his head was frozen in space, his mouth stuck in the middle of pronouncing a sound. There was something wrong with the color around the edges of his form, almost as if it three colored outlines appeared there, blue, red and green. Sam turned to Harry and found him in the same state, his beer upturned to pour into his mouth, the liquid frozen mid stream, itself glimmering around the edges in that same triplicate haze of color.
Sam stood up, terror beginning to eat at his insides. He went to shake Max, to place his palms on his frozen shoulders, but, to his horror, Sam’s hands did not make contact with anything at all. Instead, they passed right through Max, as if he were a projected image in space, insubstantial, just a poor copy of Sam’s lifelong friend. Sam slowly backed away from the Max shaped image as his mind reeled from the unfolding experience. He screamed, but there was no sound. No matter how hard he tried to yell, he couldn’t make a sound. He spun around, searching for something, anything to explain what was going on.
Out in midair, maybe three meters off of the Rockjaw Cliff, a rectangle floated in space. It was brightly lit and blue, maybe four meters by two meters, and what it said made Sam’s gut’s churn.
USER ERROR. CALIBRATE HEADSET TO CONTINUE.
Unbidden, a burst of memories flew into Sam’s mind. Bizarre half dreams of a life lived elsewhere, in another place. The world around him began to flicker, like an old computer screen refreshing in camcorder footage, lines of visual interference scanning downward at set intervals through reality itself. Sam watched the lines as his mind deteriorated into a state bordering on abject madness. The lines increased in speed and number, racing across the sky and the hills and the night lights of the Dacatoma township – Sam’s home town.
Sam’s home.
Home.
“Welcome Home Sam.”
The masculine voice of Sam’s auto-assistant chimed in helpfully as Sam opened his real eyes to almost complete blackness slashed by the tiniest sliver of light. Somehow his goggles had gotten loose and the visual seal had broken. Reaching up with his real hands, he pulled the mask off his face.
He was back in bed, laying in his sunlit bedroom, the whitewashed walls and sleek modern furniture surrounding him, the same as when he’d left. As long as he was taking this unwanted break, Sam took the opportunity to stretch out his legs a bit and roll his shoulders in their sockets, just to get the blood flowing.
“Max, order a new VR headset. The TE-3.0 please.”
The auto-assistant responded with its ever-helpful deadpan.
“Of course Sam. I have ordered the TE-3.0. It should arrive by 12PM tomorrow.”
Sam muttered a little curse at the delay, he was hoping to have it droned over within the hour so he could get right back to it. The simulation he was running was extensive, with full memory dampening. It was Qixbit’s newest release, an entire lifetime in a sandbox world with almost limitless possibility. Sam had only just scratched the surface of the sim, laying low on his first run through, going nearly 24 years as a homebody in the starter town. He was just about to head out into the larger world when the glitch interrupted him.
The game had only just arrived this morning, and Sam booted it up the moment he was done at work. Calling up the time in his ocular implant he saw that it was a quarter past 7, which meant he’d been playing for nearly an hour before he was interrupted. An hour that felt like 24 years, except not literally 24 years. More like the way a dream can seem to last forever.
“The hell with it.” Sam picked up the headset and carefully placed it back on his head, pressing down around the outer sealant so that it was flush with the skin of his cheeks. With a thought Sam allowed the system to divert his neural pathways, sending motor signals as input, and then the headset ran through a series of calibration tests. Sam flew through them and prepared himself to jump back in.
“Max, load up a few minutes before the crash.”
“Yes Sam. Initiating memory dampening. Loading.”
For a brief moment Sam existed in a void, the gap of a millisecond between the real world and the fake one, when Sam’s memory’s were blocked from his recall and the simulation had not yet loaded. It felt like an eternity.
But then the world coalesced around him, the brisk night air, fresh up high on the hills surrounding quiet Dacatoma county.
Max stood on the edge of Rockjaw Cliff and howled at the moon, his arms outstretched above him.
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