Scrambled Lives Read online

  SCRAMBLED LIVES

  by Rue Vespers

  Copyright 2019 by Rue Vespers

  Cover photo courtesy of DepositPhotos and piolka

  Cover by Warren Dare

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Epilogue

  Chapter One

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Doctor, no!”

  “There’s nothing more we can do for him.”

  “But . . .”

  The voices faded out as abruptly as they had burst into life. Jenner tried to open his eyes. Tried to move. Tried to speak. His attempts were nothing more than the thoughts that preceded the attempts. Instead of matches catching spark within his body, the thoughts remained thoughts in his mind rather than traveling outwards. That was strange.

  Weeping. It sounded like his mother.

  Squeaking. Shoes on linoleum.

  Silence.

  “Is he in pain?”

  “Oh, no, ma’am. He isn’t aware of anything.”

  A scream swelled up within Jenner -I’m here! I’m right here!- and extinguished without ever making it anywhere close to his lips. He wanted to open his eyes so badly, but he couldn’t find them. His thoughts bobbed alone in a dark sea.

  Fade out.

  Fade in.

  He remembered rolling out of bed in the morning, and being so tired that he could fallen right back into it and slept for another eight hours straight. He remembered getting dressed. Eating a few bites of dry cereal, his appetite still snoozing back in the bed, and driving to his crappy, overpriced junior college with his eyelids drooping at every red light. He remembered being in a stupor in the back row through his lecture, nodding off and waking up not to giggles but the concerned face of the adjunct. Are you sick?

  It didn’t matter if he was sick. He had to get to work. When your earning potential didn’t breach the thirteen-dollar mark per hour, whatever virus temporarily claiming you as host could not be indulged with a day or two spent under a blanket on the couch. Sickness was for people with sick time. Jenner had to get on with it.

  His memories grew fuzzy and fragmented beyond that point. Punching his timecard in the staff lounge . . . shelving bags of dog food in Aisle 6 . . . hitting the floor, and now . . .

  “-Constance Derridge. I’m the Fallacore CT representative here at Memorial Hospital. Your son ticked the box for upload on his driver’s license-”

  He had?

  Oh God, he had.

  He had a distinct memory of that day, which happened to be his sixteenth birthday, ticking the upload box on the form because it was cool and because it was funny and because all of his friends were doing it. None of them were going to die. Death was for the old and the sick and the unlucky. Not a giggling group of healthy teenage boys and girls in study hall, arguing about what game they wanted to get uploaded to while grumpy Mr. Eggers graded papers at the teacher’s desk and told them occasionally to shut the hell up.

  Oh God, if anyone from Fallacore CT was in Jenner’s range of hearing, it meant one thing and one thing only.

  He was dying.

  “-what his estate would be able to handle-”

  “His estate?” That was Mom’s voice. She was somewhere out there in the darkness. Upset. Angry. “He’s twenty-one years old and works as a stocker at Zoomies! Before that, he twirled around an auto insurance sign on a street corner. What sort of estate do you think he has?”

  “Of course you would be able to contribute, and his father-”

  Jenner’s father had begged his mother for a baby, only to promptly cheat on her while she was pregnant before walking out the door. Child support arrived sporadically over the ensuing years, if it arrived at all; he couldn’t hold down a job for more than a few months and lived in his car when he wasn’t crashing on the couches of his barfly buddies. Jenner hadn’t seen his father in a decade. Longer than that now. The last time was when the two of them went out for fast food, and Dad expected his ten-year-old son to pay for it. That was the kind of man he was. Neither Jenner nor his mother had any way to contact him these days.

  As for Mom, she didn’t have anything extra to contribute. She worked in a chicken processing plant where she chopped up birds into parts. Her credit cards were maxed out from car repairs. The rent was overdue. Their bills were on second and third notice. They watched movies from the balcony, staring through their neighbors’ windows to the giant TV that took up the whole living room wall. That was their theater, free of charge.

  Fade out.

  Fade in.

  “-really, at this level, we’re talking about the experimental games-”

  Mom’s voice was as sharp as the knives she wielded all day long. “You want me to sign over my son to one of those pieces of trash that will most likely never make it to the market?”

  “Ms. Roggio-”

  “I read the news! I know what goes on! I hear the audio-tracks of those poor souls begging to be let out of games that never get finished! Packed in there like sardines in finite-growth worlds, unable to self-delete, playing the same old side quests over and over until it drives them mad! Help the poor villagers find their lost cows! Collect six dragon teeth from the desert to buy a blaster upgrade! Now collect them again! And again! And again! Better that my son meet his maker in heaven than consign him to the eternal hell of an experimental game.”

  Mom laughed, harshly and terribly. It was a hopeless, despairing laugh that would give a person chills to hear. “You put him in a game, a real game, or you walk out of this room so I can let him go!”

  Silence.

  Jenner listened, desperate not to fade out.

  Silence.

  Had he faded out?

  “I will give you this.”

  Clink.

  He knew that sound.

  It was Mom’s diamond ring striking the surface of a table. They almost sold it dozens of times in the past to make the rent or buy more food. But Mom wanted to save it for the future. For Jenner’s life, the only boost that she could give him.

  Now it was for his death.

  “There is one game,” said the woman from Fallacore quietly. “A real game, infinite-growth, released to the market ten years ago. It’s called Scrambled Lives.”

  Oh, fuck me, Jenner thought. It might be better to be dead.

  People hated Scrambled Lives with a passion. He had never played it, or felt tempted to play it. Not that it was really a choice when he couldn’t afford to buy his own VR pod, which was necessary for the immersive games. He couldn’t even afford a pod rental at the game port down the block very often. It w
as a birthday or Christmas splurge, a three-hour vacation in another world, and he definitely didn’t waste those precious, expensive hours playing Scrambled Lives of all things.

  The game was a joke on late-night TV, or it used to be when it was new. Not for the graphics. The graphics were good. Not for the world itself, which was no better or worse than most games out there. But when you died in Scrambled Lives, you didn’t pop back into being at an earlier spawn point in the game and continue onwards upon your journey.

  Oh, no.

  You could spend five years, eight years, ten years carefully crafting your character, be it elf or werewolf or wizard or whatever, grinding away to unlock game features, forging alliances and joining guilds, spending your money on upgraded weapons or skills, only to die and come back as someone else entirely. Your tough-as-nails Level 50 dragon shifter? Goodbye. Say hello to your Level 1 dwarf! Your Level 189 wizard with a vast personal library of spells, a player to whom everyone practically fell down to their knees in worship? Sorry about that, dude. Now you’re a Level 1 vampire catching rats in an alley, scorned and avoided and with an empty inventory. Worst of all, your Level Infinity Warrior Man could come back with a set of tits and a succubus’s insatiable thirst for cock, because this game didn’t respect any boundaries whatsoever.

  All of that work was for nothing. Absolutely nothing!

  Several lawsuits had popped up over Scrambled Lives by enraged players who dropped fifty grand or more on designing their characters only to lose them irrevocably. That was why people hated the game so much. Jenner didn’t know anybody who played it. Some probably did, but had the sense to keep it their dirty little secret. Like watching pimple-popping videos or listening to that oldies rock band Nickelback. Jenner knew better than to cop to either count, though he was guilty of both.

  Scrambled Lives or death.

  Living forever in the best games came with a high price tag. It took a cool half a million bucks to get a spot in Man of War, and having the money wasn’t enough to get you in. They had a selection process. If you couldn’t tell the difference between a clip and a magazine, your chances of getting accepted were slim to nil. That game was so incredibly realistic that it was said the military played it to develop weapons and refine battle strategies for real-world applications.

  The price was nearly as high for Unlimited Universes, a space adventure game that insisted on extensive psychological testing for its candidates. The point of the game was to explore, to solve problems by expanding your scientific and diplomatic knowledge, not to spur war by seizing galaxies in a mad bid for power. Actual real-world advancements had been borne of Unlimited Universes in various arenas. Jenner had never played Unlimited Universes or Man of War, but he’d heard nothing but praise for each of them.

  Those were examples of first-tier games. The second-tier was a little cheaper and a little less rigorous in its admittance standards. Still good games, but not great, you could spend eternity fighting zombies, racing cars, riding eagles, or tilling your fields until you built your own castle with the proceeds of your virtual turnips. Game selection was very individual.

  Had Jenner possessed a voice at the moment, not to mention one hundred thousand dollars, he would have asked to buy a place in the second-tier game called Corazon’s Journey. It was a gorgeous world, and tons of fun. He didn’t know what he would do once he was uploaded there, but there wasn’t much you couldn’t do in that world. Sail the high seas. Raise horses. Search for treasure. Join an army. Learn the trapeze. Keep a harem of men or women or both, whatever pleased you. Or everything in turn. When you were uploaded permanently to a game, you had eternity to play it.

  And then there were the third-tier games.

  Those were the ones that took anybody who could pay. They were the games that nobody dreamed of being uploaded to, like Cloud Castle. It was a kids’ game. If a person really wanted to spend eternity as a unicorn farting gold coins for others to collect, and Jenner supposed there was always someone, well, cough up ten grand and fart away. Or Rock Out, an utterly inexplicable game where one bashed rocks to find instruments and sheet music to start a rock band. There was Library Time, for the dedicated academics who refused to let the Grim Reaper part them from books; Let’s Build a Monster, which was exactly that; and Smash and Grab, for the criminally inclined who never got tired of breaking windows and stealing TVs.

  And there was Scrambled Lives.

  Scrambled Lives should have ranked pretty high in the second-tier, but it was defeated by its makers’ refusal to budge on the scrambling of its players every time they died. Upon reflection, farting gold coins until the sun burned out didn’t seem so bad.

  They were talking again, the women’s voices overlapping and wiping one another out. He couldn’t say if they had ever stopped talking, or if he’d faded out once more.

  A silly thought crossed his mind - all he was at present was a mind - that he needed to call his boss at Zoomies and warn her that he wouldn’t be in for the rest of the week. No. He wouldn’t be in ever again.

  He turned his attention back to the voices.

  The Fallacore rep was currently getting down and dirty with science jargon: artificial intelligence and processing speeds, algorithms and pre-set codes and more. Jenner was unable to explain that Mom didn’t understand a twentieth of it. As for Jenner himself, he didn’t understand much more than she did. He had never been interested in precisely how games worked. He was no A student. He just wanted to play.

  “-but we have to get started right away,” the woman said. “Uploading will be a slower process in his condition, and Doctor Verne-”

  “The doctor doesn’t believe he has much time,” Mom said. “What if he dies before the upload is complete?”

  “Well, that’s the worst-case scenario. I’ll contact the Scrambled Lives consciousness transfer team immediately and we can have the upload process begin within the hour. He’ll be in good company: Scrambled Lives has several hundred thousand perma-added characters in addition to millions of live players and non-player characters. It truly is a world.”

  “And can I . . . I can visit him in the game, can’t I?” Mom asked.

  “Of course you can!” Constance or whatever her name was hadn’t answered the question of what happened if Jenner died too quickly. “You’ll have a monthly allotment of data that allows you to send text messages back and forth, and you are entitled to two free visits to the game a year. There will be a charge after that for additional visits. To see him, you just have to go to your local game port and show your Scrambled Lives family pass to get hooked up with a pod for three hours. He will meet you at Visitors’ Village in the game and you can have a good chat. Unless you’d like to purchase a pod and play the game yourself, in which case you can see him much more regularly!”

  “Do parents do that?”

  The representative’s voice changed from saleswoman chirpiness to sober. “I do.”

  Silence.

  It stretched on to infinity and throbbed with pain.

  “I’m sorry,” Mom said. The knives in her voice were gone.

  “It was a car accident. Two years ago. Her body lingered just long enough for us to upload her mind into the game.” Another silence. “But she is doing well, Ms. Roggio. Now and then I go on quests or raids with her, but most of the time, we just sit back at an inn with mugs of ale, listening to music and watching the tumblers. She tells me about her adventures, the friends she’s made; we talk about where to apply her skill points. I send her money when I have some to spare so she can have a richer game experience. This isn’t the life I wished for her, to be frank with you, but it’s still a life.”

  Fade out.

  Fade in.

  Oh God, had he died? Was this death? To dwell forever in darkness and silence?

  He strained for voices or footsteps, and came up short.

  He would take Scrambled Lives over this. Anything was better than this!

  A distant light began to shine.

>   It was too late for the upload process. He knew what that blinding white light was. The beams illuminated a tunnel that he was rushing through, weightless and borne along by a powerful wind.

  From far away was a voice, a male voice. “There he goes!”

  A member of the medical staff shouldn’t sound so happy that the patient was dying, Jenner thought resentfully, and then he hit the light and it was over.

  Welcome to Scrambled Lives, Jenner!

  Chapter Two

  He floated in the light, staring as the iridescent blocks came together to spell out his welcome message and then broke apart. They flew away towards the edges of his vision as if propelled by a blast of dynamite, and evanesced.

  Jenner?

  Who was Jenner?

  He was Jenner. How had he forgotten that most basic fact for even a moment?

  Jenner . . . Jenner . . . He searched the bare shelves of his mental stores for his last name, where he was born, if he had a family, how old he was . . . There was a void in his brain where these facts should be, a veil separating him from himself. Yet he could feel the information there, invisible and out of reach, but present.

  No sooner had the blocks gone than they were flying back, ricocheting off each other as well as the invisible boundaries of a surrounding rectangle. In seconds, new words coalesced within a radiant screen. He might not know his last name, but luckily he still knew how to read.

  Permanent Character Addition

  You are being uploaded to the game. Check in at any time for an update.

  Current Upload: 5%

  If that was five percent of Jenner out of one hundred percent total, it explained why he didn’t remember much. He did remember Scrambled Lives, however, what it was and what it wasn’t. He groaned.

  Then he remembered those hollow, terrifying seconds in which he thought he’d died, actually died. His groan instantly stifled. Even the worst games had something enjoyable about them.

  So that was what Jenner would do in this virtual world. He would find something to enjoy and make the best of it. There had to be some little corner of Scrambled Lives in which he could make a home.