Immersed

It’s the greatest game ever made.

And Benny should know. He’s played every game they ever sent him, even the earliest ones that were nothing more than ping pong or tic tac toe in chunky monochrome. He loves games, and by this point considers himself quite the expert. And this, this is the greatest game he’s ever played.

The controls are responsive, not the sluggish laggy crawl like so many of the others. They took a long time to get used to, but now that he’s used to them they’re more versatile than any regular controller. He can walk and run and turn on a dime, duck and dive, pick up a blackened coin from the ground and roll it across his fingers. There are long moments where he can even forget that it’s not his own body that moves. 

The graphics are incredible. For so long he could count the polygons on the chunky models, see how close he could get before the edges started to fray. But this game? He can stare at a discarded soda can lying in rubble and pick out the faintest pattern of whorls on the side, the fingerprints of the last person to hold it. He can stare at his own chrome-plated avatar in the reflection of a cracked mirror, in all its raytraced glory.

The sounds are impeccable. The sound of his armored foot crushing brick to powder underfoot. The faint hissing of his pneumatic muscles. The chugging thunder of his gun that sends echoes around the blasted battlefield, and the crisp clang as he slots in a fresh magazine. 

But best of all are the enemies.

It’s hard to get the enemies right in games. Sure, with a simple game you can get away with a handful of decision routines. You don’t have to be particularly smart to play Rock Paper Scissors, after all. But as they get more complex, you can start to see the way they think, and it’s always depressingly routine. Move forward. Shoot. If they’ve really put the work in, “find cover” or “throw grenade”. Benny loves teasing out the limits of their programming, but it’s always a little disappointing to find out how limited they really are.

But not these ones. They’re smart and organized. They can coordinate, lay traps, set ambushes or fall back to fortified positions. Most of them have small arms that do his character little harm, armored as he is, but they’ll try and distract him while bringing heavier weapons to bear. Benny’s guy is tough, but they can get him if he’s sloppy or careless. And if they get him, it can be hours before he gets to play again.

But Benny is never careless. He likes to lay traps too. Sometimes he’ll pretend like the bullets are getting to him, stumble backwards. Some of them will get eager and come out of cover, even when the others are shouting them back. That’s when he comes back up and cuts right through them with his machine gun. There’s nothing Benny loves more than outsmarting the enemies, especially when they try to outsmart him. That moment when he’s won, when his trick pays off, he pulls the trigger and they come apart, feels better than anything else in the world.

There are other players in the game. Sometimes Benny sees them on the edges of his missions, playing missions of their own. Their avatars are too hulking and shining to be anything else. Sometimes he even stumbles across the body of a careless player. Their blasted out torsos and twisted limbs are a reminder, and a warning. The enemies in those areas are always a lot harder than usual.

He doesn’t interact with the other players much. Sometimes he’ll wave, and sometimes they’ll wave back, but never anything more than that. There’s no options for messaging or voice chat, and his targets never intersect with theirs. The game is amazing, but it wasn’t built for teamwork. 

Benny doesn’t mind. The game is plenty exciting enough. And somehow he feels that working together, sharing the experience, would diminish it. He doesn’t like the idea of clumsily coordinating their attack or storming through by force of numbers. There’s something pure about putting himself into the minds of his targets. Working with someone else would just complicate it. He likes it fine with just him against the enemies. 

He’s chasing one now, the last survivor of the squad. They had tried to draw him into a cluster of buildings not yet leveled into rubble. They plinked away with their guns, luring him closer, falling back to the killbox where one of them waited with a rocket launcher. As soon as Benny rounded the corner, he would meet an armor-piercing explosive that would breach even his considerable armor. 

But he didn’t round the corner. They waited, nerves stretched to the breaking point, wondering if something had gone wrong, right up until his hand came bursting through the wall, seized the would-be rocketeer by the head, and squeezed. Then the rest of them were panicking, screaming, running for their lives, and Benny could pick them off at his leisure.

It was a nice touch.

The last one is around here somewhere. Benny knows he’s hiding in this building. He’ll be crouched behind a doorway, waiting for Benny to come through so he can unload a barrage of useless bullets. It’s a hopeless plan, but the enemies don’t act smart when they’re frightened. All the smart tactics they usually use get dropped and they revert to their basic programming. Benny isn’t sure whether he likes the fear mechanic or not. It almost makes the game too easy.

The enemy is hiding in the room at the end of the hall. At least, Benny thinks he is, but his hunches are usually right, and they’ve made the difference between a “Game Over” and a “Mission Complete” before. He’s waiting for Benny to round the corner, just like before. And just like before, Benny isn’t rounding the corner.

You’d think he’d have learned his lesson from what happened to his friend, but again, they don’t fight smart when they’re frightened. Benny runs down the hall, step by thundering step, twists his shoulder forward and smashes right through a concrete wall already weakened by riddling bullet holes and airstrike shockwaves. He levels his gleaming machine gun.

And stops.

Because the enemy here isn’t coming at him, he’s on his knees. His gun isn’t pointed at Benny, it’s lying discarded in the corner, and his hands are raised and open. And he isn’t screaming threats or curses, he’s just saying the same thing, over and over.

Please.

Oh god, please, no. Please. 

Don’t.

Benny can see in high definition the sweat beading on the man’s brow, the tears rolling down his cheeks, mixing with the drying blood where shrapnel has already clipped his head. In the high definition feed he can see his individual pores. He watches the man swallow, lick his lips, still mumbling his endless prayer to his new cruel god of gleaming steel.

Please.

It could be a trick. They could have programmed in some kind of false surrender tactic. Even now there could be other enemies closing in. The entire room could be wired to explode. And then Benny will have to wait even a day or two to play, if he’s unlucky.

He still doesn’t pull the trigger. Benny trusts his instincts. And he is certain now, as sure as he knew where this man was hiding, that this is no trick. The man is sincere. And if it’s not a trick, what’s the point of an enemy who cowers and begs? It’s bad game design, and the game is perfect in every other regard. 

Unless it’s not- not what? Not perfect?

No.

Not a game.

The gun lowers, just a bit. If the man even notices, he’s far too terrified to escape, even to move, to do anything but plead. He’s seen the traps Benny and his kind could lay. Giving him the barest measure of false hope before snatching it away is well within their wheelhouse.

But Benny isn’t thinking about him anymore. He has more bigger thoughts to think. Benny does something he has not done, something he has not wanted to do, for a very long time. He draws back from his character, back from the controls, back across ten thousand miles by the highest speed connection money can buy. 

Back to his real body.

It is dark outside of the game interface. Not the warm darkness of fallen night undercut by starlight, but the utter black of something long-buried. Something that doesn’t need the light anymore. 

He stirs his atrophied flesh and moves what little he can, exploring the squirming limits of his space. The mere millimeters left to him between cold flat metal and wires. He would smell the stink of his clammy sweat, if he still had a nose. He would taste bitter chemicals and plastic, if he still had a tongue, or mouth to house it.

He can sense what is left of his body, his parts too vital to strip away, neatly packaged and mounted in its standard-issue frame. He feels the cool brine pickling his raw tissue, and thick tubes pumping him with nutrients and antibiotics. And right at the back of what might be called his head, the distinct pinch of a thick needle burrowed right into his skull. Benny knows that if he pulls the trigger, it will send an endorphin cocktail coursing through his brain, and it will feel better than anything else in the world.

This is the world Benny will live in if he does not play. 

He can’t even go back to the old games any more, not since he started this one. They quietly shut them down as soon as this one came out, and Benny barely even noticed. On some level he realizes that those games were just practice leading up to this game, the only game that matters. 

No, not practice. 

Calibration.

He doesn’t know how he got here. He can remember daylight, and freedom, and the feeling of his own limbs, just enough to miss them. There were people; real, other people, who talked and laughed and held him in their arms. But then there was pain, and his thoughts got all jumbled around, and when he could think straight again there was only the games, and the dark.

He tries to imagine what he looks like from the outside. Would they see the horror of what he has become? No, they don't need to see him. It would just be a box; a plain, black box, with a power cord and a nutrient valve. And on the left, another box, and another on the right. Racks and racks and racks of them, wall to wall. Each holding its own player, hooked to their controls, commanding iron titans halfway across the world. Each desperate for that trigger fix, desperate for a body that they could forget was not their own.

He’s wondered sometimes if they would hurt him if he refused to play; shock his brain, tweak his nerves, or heat his fluids up to boiling. But he knows they wouldn’t have to. They’d be perfectly happy to just leave him alone in this tight space in the dark.

Forever.

Benny isn’t sure how long he’s spent thinking. It’s hard to tell time in this place. But eventually, slowly, he presses his lidless eyes to the interface once more. He comes forward, sends his mind back ten thousand miles to where the enemy is still waiting, still kneeling, still praying.

Benny raises his gun.

And makes the only choice he can.