Initiating plunge...
Remember where your feet are.
Do not attach
For your safety, maintain simulation-disconnect levels
Godspeed, cthonaut
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We're somewhere off the atlantic coast on an island, underground in a grimy yellow room. Across the folding table from me and Rose, there's a man in a white labcoat and glasses. He has a beard. He has bags under his eyes. Rose is furious, shocked I think. We hear a boom. The light swings on its cord. The coffee mugs rattle.
The man folds his glasses very carefully.
"There's nothing we can do. For this reality anyways," he says with a sigh.
And then the ceiling crashes down on us.
***
"Did you know there are infinite amounts of time folded within a second? It's really a matter of perception. From this view, what is the point of a second? Or a life? It's all the same really." The white rabbit has very wet eyes. They are dark. It's holding a pocketwatch.
I must be dreaming.
There is nothing else but this rabbit and me.
"Well?" says the rabbit.
"I knew that. I also know there's a door somewhere in here."
"Fuddlecups, always racing to the next, even when there's no point in the now. But at this point there is no now."
"I need to go."
"Be a sport. Have a seat."
"Oh. I see." We sit at the materializing tea table. It's intricate but blurry, still figuring out what shape it is.
It sips the tea eagerly, gesturing for me to do the same. The tea is strange.
"What's with the face, chap?"
"I think my tooth fell out."
"Well, see your fortune!"
There's no tooth in the cup, but the grains form the shape of a watch.
"Can I see the time? There's someone I need to meet."
"Gladly!" He pulls out his watch and I take it. He sighs. "Ah, such a short time. I'll be seeing you soon, my boy." I don't like his grin.
***
The soldier was trappped in the gunmetal ship corridor, slick and shining with blood. At the end of the hallway, the bugs were slamming the locked bulwark repeatedly, over and over, at calculated one-second intervals. Like a machine. He knew that the door wouldn't hold forever. They usually didn't. He'd seen what happened when bugs attacked.
Winston sat at his desk, wondering. He was writing a very intense chapter for his story, and he didn't quite know where next to take the story. He also had an important test coming up soon. He had to get at least a B if he wanted to survive the year with his parents. Also if he wanted that scholarship, which he did. Three grand is a lot.
The girl, Raphael was her name, seated two desks to the right of him caught him dozing off into the fuzzy distance. She looked at him and smiled.
This wasn't how it was supposed to happen. Shellie and the crew and him were supposed to clear out the wreckage. It was going to be fast. Clean. Efficient. Then they were all going to go home. Oh, God. He remembered the faces of Rourke's family at the dock. His kids. Shellie's husband. How were they going to find out? Get shipped a half-eaten bag of bones by some other clean-up crew?
Shellie got ripped in half. Rourke got melted by bio-acid. Desmond and Dell made a last stand back at the hanger. Anyone else left would be fighting for their lives like him.
Winston smiled to himself on the street. Raphael was cute. He should have worked up the nerve to ask for her number, but he psyched himself out, like always. It probably was nothing. He had done nothing noteworthy in his junior year besides continuing band. The saxophone thing started as a joke, but he found he actually enjoyed playing it, to his friends' eternal amusement. Maybe Raphael liked smooth jazz, he laughed to himself. It was probably nothing anyways.
He counted the number of bullets in his magazine. Again. 13. He'd somehow dropped the others with the flak jacket, probably when he also got the gash on his neck where the strap should have been. Between 13 rounds and a single explosive, he was going to have to hope there weren't more than a few on the other side of that door. The bugs had gnashed at it for half an hour now, and it looked like a piece of tinfoil. For the last time, David punched the blasted door button, praying for it to unlock the door behind him. In vain.
Winston went back upstairs, where his notebook was waiting for him to finish the chapter. He didn't think he'd have kept writing this long, about what was really a tropey sci-fi action fic. Some of the wearlier writing he dreaded witnessing, or, god forbid, someone ELSE witness his atrocious plottery. For the tenth time, he considered retiring his shameful hobby of writing about big-miscled men fighting space bugs. It was immature, and took a lot of time. Time he felt a lack of. And he really had to "consider his future." What a horrible thing, to be agreeing with the elders.
This was the adult decision, though.
He packed his notebooks into a box. Labeled it "Winston's Notebooks." And put it in the garage.
"NO!" David snarled. "This isn't it!" He fired another two rounds into the bugs' cranium, splashing black gore on the wall. Another three came rushing through the gap, and he shut his eyes as the explosive reduced them to shreds. Already he could feel the strength leaving him.
He gritted his teeth, raising his rifle, dropping aliens as they entered. But there were too many.
He let out a primal roar, as his world dissolved into white.
"Pick up the pen, goddammit!"
Winston thought he heard something and turned to look back at the garage, but saw nothing. As he left his daydreams behind him, he thought he felt a little piece of him die, but he couldn't quite remember what.
***
WHERE ARE YOUR FEET, CTHONAUT.
Right where they usually are.
...
SUFFICIENT ANSWER
***
I am sitting with Rose on a picnic blanket on a mountain. I do not see the mountaing. But I know I am sitting on one. There is a tree in the background. I know it by the outline, traced in yellow sunrise haze. She is laughing, frozen. Is she dressed like the '60s? My immersion is roken, but the dream continues, I am bemused. The dream is in my control now but I let it go on. Her laugh splits across her face as her head blossoms into a swirly figure of oranges and reds like a time-lapsed fruit rotting. Soon the non-descript mountains and backgrop are all turning into fractals and dots and abstract art, and I see myself sitting cross-legged on a rug talking to a shape about the importance of lemons and life, but she doesn't understand and neither do I
and it is magnificent.
***
CAREFUL, CTHONAUT.
WHERE ARE YOUR FEET?
... I don't know.
WRONG ANSWER
The light behind my eyes cuts out.
I see out of a pod, a tube. The room is black. There are pods beside me. It unseals. I walk outside. There is a window. Outside, something massive and red pulses, covering the world, washing the room with crimson, even this high up. I can't see if there are more rooms, if the other pods are filled. The door is locked. The world is black and crimson.
I stay until I get hungry. There is nowhere to pee. I get back in the pod, and blue light washes me as it seals.
***