Thirty sunsets have turned the sky into a cold black littered with dark purple clouds and white holes, poking throughout the darkness. The area outside the corporation’s complex is flat and arid, an endless landscape littered with the aftermath of MLG battles. I’ve learned a lot since I left the complex a month ago. As my tattered brown scarf wraps around my face, flapping in the bitter wind which scrapes particles of earth along my cheeks, I can’t help but wonder if I’ve made the right choice. The night sky is disturbed by the distant glow of lit up cities atop large suspended discs floating over mountains of electronic waste and the remains of a millenium old civilization.
These cities masked in the elegant glow of their towers are but mere illusions, meant to taunt us from the lobbies we’re meant to consider rewards. As I wander deeper into this endless ruin I’ve seen the Logo of corporations appear over these “cities”. They’re all organized the same way, a large white tower hovering over an endless maze of interconnected cubes, each of which contains the body of a young soul, slowly being siphoned of it’s essence to fuel the towering giant above it. Even the surface of the very disc they are on is covered in a shallow layer of dirt which perhaps at one point contained plant growth but now only serves as a reminder of how far we have fallen as a civilization.
When I left my room I was greeted by three walls. I wandered for days trying to find a way out, marching along an endless display of chipping paint and messages of lost gamers. Each message increasingly disheartening and morbid than the last. Messages of melting in the sun rather than dying in the dark, stories of lost friends drained to death by the corporation, promises of revenge, all of these messages are usually greeted by the body of someone who couldn’t find their way out. As I wandered this endless maze picking up various leftovers from the gamers I felt no hunger, no thirst, only a sense of bewilderment and longing. Eventually I saw the reddish brown dirt, continuing endlessly into distant structures as I broke through the final layer of the maze and made my escape.
I stop a moment, my thoughts disrupted by a great cloud of dust approaching me. I lift my hands covered by the remains of my tattered gamer gloves to put down the goggles I had found on the dead body of a gamer. The great cloud envelops me, hiding the environment around me in a cloud of reddish brown, I feel the sharp stinging of grains of sand whipping across my face as I walk aimlessly forward. I lift my hand up once again, my finger pressing into a button on the side of the goggles. The goggles flicker a moment the sound of a silent buzzing emerging from the metal chasis surrounding the glass over my eyes, a dim red light ignites over the environment in front of me, a cheaply imprinted set of lines with a flashing colon lets me know it’s 3:30. I’d better hide soon, at 5:00 they come out.
At first I didn’t know what they were, rounded figures segmented by thin metallic limbs, covered in a glossy white paint that reflects the harsh sun into your eyes. The highest sphere on their humanoid body shoots a beaming red LED into my eyes, reminding me of the soul penetrating iris of the Zbox. They stare at me, confused at first, as if pondering why something so out of place is here. Then whether out of curiosity or hatred, they reveal darkened weapons and attempt to steal what life I have.
My first few times encountering these beings I was sure they were robotic guards controlled by the corporation or A.I. that had gone amiss and were in fighting due to programming errors. Sometimes as I hid I’d sit and watch as their feeble sleeping bodies would awaken, each greeting the field with their bright red lights as they awoke. It was astounding how these sphere bots would violently fire at another, dismember the heads of their fellow being all while crouching over the body of corpses filling the air with their shallow metalic laughs.
These battle would usually end around 3 A.M. and start up again no later than 5:30 A.M. There were rare occassions where I came across sphere bots prowling alone on the battlefield , I called them night stalkers. Their motions were slower almost as if they had somehow become tired from fighting. Surely I thought a mechanical machine cannot feel a sense of weariness. The sound of a snapping twig was what caused my first encounter with a night stalker. He glared at me, his gleaming red LED stinging my eyes in the darkness.
