How High Can You Get?

Start Screen: Insert Coin

Harlow Flats - Detroit, Michigan.
0 Meters.

He was spending another one of the three twilights burning a pound of Godfather OG in a patio chair on the back slab of a strange dude's apartment. Speaking in echoes. Feeling the transformation from metallic decay into synthetic immortality. Sitting next to him and splitting the party favors was a beautiful woman who went only by the name of "Lady". She was telling him about a game. A game only for serious users. People who are endlessly dissatisfied in their bodies. Longing to finish whatever this is. Escape it. Achieve something. People like him.

These people circled the globe. Like he circles the city. Absorbing the most potent, purist forms of the world's greatest drugs in the most perfect of places. In shrines for the experienced. It's an annual challenge. Complete the course or maybe even die trying.

How High Can You Get?

"That's its name."

"Bullshit!" he said to her, laughing his ass off.

"I speak only the truth," was all she replied, leaning forward. Face as serious as a stoic stone statue.

"There's a game that sends you all over the world," he reiterated. "Just to capture the perfect high."

"Yes."

"And you've played it before?"

"I tried to. But I was unable to finish it, though. No one has yet."

"How far did you get?"

"I was in a hookah bar in Cairo when I slipped on the floor and suffered a major concussion. I spent four months in the ICU. And after I recovered, I gave up on the contest and went back home to Beijing. Just another nameless face."

"Then what are you doing here? In Detroit? At a house party?"

"I played so well that the creators offered me another opportunity. This time as a recruiter."

That purple haze in the night sky was retreating away and the golden warmth of morrow bled into the time around them. The strange dude's apartment had been slowly growing more and more quiet during the time lapse of their smoke as party-goers left to do other things. Its only sounds were the rustling of restless bodies in pursuit of comfort anyway it could be found. On a chair, between two steps in a hallway, wrapped around a toilet. The human experience as we all know it. Sad. Empty. Without meaning.

But, according to Lady, this wasn't his experience.

Not anymore.

There's that coolness outside. That dark cold that gathers in the silence of night. The feeling of absence on the flesh. That time when humankind turns the earth over to anything that isn't it. It's during these hours that we feel our truest selves. Like the dew weighing down a blade of grass. That is his experience tonight.

This is his experience now.

"Fuck it," he says. "I'm in, Lady."

She smiles.

"What do I have to do?"

"Got a quarter?"