Sinner's Game

24 - Endgame

Eric

"You know this isn't funny, right? The trick is getting old, stop it."

Eric grabbed the armrest of the chair he was sitting on with one hand, squeezed the soft material tight. It was as if he was looking into a mirror, his own face seated comfortably on the creature's face. The mask had disappeared as soon as it had pulled it off its face.

"You used my face more than enough. There is no reason to show it off to me anymore. I already have my body back."

"Oh, sorry, I kind of have gotten used to wearing it by now," it said, and its face began to move. It was like a fluid transition, its nose getting smaller and more delicate looking. The eyes began to change. Then, the face got more round than edged, and suddenly Eric found himself seated across from a female around 40 years of age.

"Do you prefer this face? This woman killed her two children." The face changed again, now presenting an old man, wrinkled and with flawed skin. "Or this one? He stabbed his wife 24 times before trying to kill himself by overdosing on sleeping pills." The old man closed his eyes, then smiled a wide grin. "Well, he most likely would have been more happy if he just died back then, but he didn't."

"Get to the point. I don't care who else you toyed around with in your stupid games. Just show me who you really are."

The old man looked bedridden all of a sudden, but it felt more like an act than real emotion to Eric. The face started to move and twist in pain, turning and spinning as it got deformed and broken down. Its white hair fell out over the course of a second, made place for a bold head underneath. After a moment, the face was gone, and there was only smooth skin left.

"You don't have a real face, do you? It's because you aren't even a real person." The force of Eric's grip increased, still not having found a comfortable position.

The fire in the background stopped moving for a glimpse of a second before returning like nothing had happened. The blank face moved aside some more skin, rearranged itself as a big, wide smile appeared in the middle of it. It went from one side of the face to the other, moved the blank skin around it as it spoke. "It depends on what you count as real and what not." The smile roughly represented the one that had been on the mask all this time, but more 'real'.

"In here, I can become everyone I have stored as data. Real in your world? Perhaps not. Real in here? It is for you to decide that."

Eric grabbed the glass in front of him, took a deep gulp of the liquid inside. He felt the glass in his hand, tasted the light burn of alcohol run down his throat. It felt real.

"The deal you made with Jim. What was really behind that?"

The smile rested its chin on one gloved hand, said, "I have a question for you first. What do you think is the real purpose of the game?"

Eric put the glass down, noticed his hand shivering slightly. "The police brings people they think did something to the C.U.A, and the C.U.A's people throw them in here. Then you try to break them with your games to punish them. The game isn't designed to be beaten, is it?"

"You got parts of it right," the smile said, "but the game is not meant to keep people in here. The game is more or less the first criteria of selection."

"What do you mean by that?"

"I'm here to find out who deserves to be punished and who not. I am designed to create challenges which are made to be beaten, but only if you go one defined path. Either you abandon every sense of righteousness and do everything to reach your goal, screw everyone over and betray and lie whenever you can, even killing people off, or you work together with people, refuse to betray them or even give up and tell everything we want to know. It is not about if you beat the game or not, it is about making the Sinner show its real colours and find out what we do with him after that."