[Original Novel] Metal Fever 2: The Erasure of Asherah, Part 15

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The other type of park I saw frequently employed the same gravity manipulation fuckery as the upside down apartments. Only sideways this time, the lush green grass and bushes carpeting the sides of certain skyscrapers, sideways families walking along neatly trimmed paths with their children like flies on the wall.

While gawking at the spectacle, I spotted what I at first took for malfunctioning drones repeatedly entering the sideways gravity of the parks, retreating, then attempting to pass through it again. When magnified, I discovered they were in fact just some very confused birds.

The strange dream returned night after night. I’d initially been content to put it down to body hopping adjustment issues, but the persistence and suspicious self-consistency of the dreams soon led me to suspect there might be more to it.

With little else to fill my time with until I moved out of this shithole and into a slightly different shithole, I paired my interface with an app on my phoneputer. A cracked dream monitoring suite with some choice plugins for discreetly recording background traffic.

I leaned as far back as I could in the computer chair without falling over. I’d raised enough SeaCoin that I felt comfortable buying a jacket the other day, which I draped over myself as a blanket. My retrograde transformation from full metal to flesh blob naturally increased my appetite for creature comforts, though I couldn’t yet afford many of those.

The first night was rough, but since then I’ve grown more and more accustomed to falling asleep like this. Comfort is another thing I never had to worry about when I was full metal. I could just tuck my limbs close to my body and go dormant. I felt only as much or as little of my surroundings as I wanted to.

Flesh bodies, on the other hand, are seemingly never fully comfortable. When I finally did get myself situated just right, with my arms tucked under the makeshift blanket and my head propped up by the headrest so I was looking straight up...I had to pee.

For fuck’s sake. I reached under the desk and pulled out the bladder evacuation tube. I screwed the threaded plastic end into the appropriate port, then began the laborious process of getting comfy again as it emptied me out.

I left it attached so I wouldn’t have to bother with it again in the night. Though from what I’ve seen around here, most of the die hard types just have it hooked up all the time while they’re at the computer. I’m not quite that far gone yet, but it’s foreseeable.

I dozed off like that, my last conscious brain activity for the day consisting of the Speed Foam jingle on irritating repeat and pleasant memories of the airline pizza. The next thing I knew, I was standing in a room with differently colored walls, but no detail on any of them.

Memories of this world rushed back to me, even as memories of the waking world faded. The same process which happens after I wake from a dream, but reversed. That gave me pause as I mulled the implications.

A moment later I could no longer recall what my strange dream was about, save for brief flashes of inexplicable imagery. A sleek, glistening creature of some sort on a wheeled carrier. Immense, blocky structures covered in twinkling lights, their reflection distorted in some sort of fluid which I floated on.

What does it mean? Is that where the epiphanies come from? The meaning of “tree”, and “cloud”? The names of colors...? I felt tantalizingly close to solving the puzzle, but try as I might, I couldn’t make the final connection.

Having exhausted the storage cubes in this building, I continued on in hopes of finding more clues. The landscape continued changing along the way. First from points to lines, then to filled triangles, now they had imagery on them as well.

It’s supposed to resemble something, I think. Blotches in different shades of green, crudely pixelated. The trees look different here as well. No longer vector constructs, now filled out considerably more and adorned with their own flat imagery.

The long thin part appears #D2B48C, which corresponds to “tan”. It’s striped with darker brown lines as if to imply it’s comprised of many cylindrical tan segments, growing smaller near the top. From that top sprouted several ragged green appendages, roughly #10b223.

The progression from vector tree, to filled triangle tree, to this one suggested an overall direction. More complexity, more color, more detail. I wondered once more if the ultimate reality I’m moving towards might possess a maximum of these qualities.

It seems like a safe assumption. But it actually helps me very little, as whatever I imagine it might look like, it will undoubtedly differ. I’ll know it when I see it though, I feel certain of that much. It will be impossible to miss.

The further I walked, the crisper everything became. The obnoxiously large pixels grew smaller and smaller. The flat imagery painted onto triangles grew sharper and more detailed. The triangles themselves, for that matter, grew vastly more numerous.

The ground beneath me now had fuzzy stuff on it. Thin green strands, densely packed. When I knelt to look closely, they were just flat images which turned to face me regardless of which direction I examined them from. “Grass”, it would seem. Same first two letters as green, surely not by coincidence.

The imagery painted onto surfaces also appeared to have depth to it now. Rugged, smooth, shiny, and various other material properties I’d never seen before. Then, something even stranger rose into view over the horizon.

An enormous building in a state of partial disrepair, as if left to fall apart over time. It looked to be made from rough grey blocks and cylindrical columns, placed as if to support overhanging decorative arches. Frilly green growths of some sort crept partway up these columns, and thin flat pieces of it drifted lazily in the wind. Whatever “wind” is. The sensation of movement?

Just then, a painfully bright, loud burst of some sort shattered the pillar nearest me. I fell backwards, shielding my face with both arms. When I looked up, there was somebody else. The first creature other than myself I’ve so far encountered in this place.

It ran past on two legs very much like mine. It also had two arms, clutching some sort of cylindrical item. The figure stopped, aimed the cylinder and launched a projectile from it. Another figure wearing differently colored body coverings, which I’d not seen hiding behind the green growths, was struck.

They came apart in an abrupt, shocking fountain of red particles and chunky pieces. There was a shiny, wet looking red pool decal on the ground beneath where they once stood, the jiggling red pieces still raining down and bouncing all over the place.

The aggressor spoke. “Suck my dick you camping faggot, play the game right!” I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. Or hearing, for that matter. Terrified he might destroy me as well, I crept around the edge of the structure, spectating what I soon discovered to be some sort of brutal ritual. “Ritual”...? Activity. Endeavor.

Others ran around the layout of the structure, each clutching their own implement of destruction tightly, firing different kinds of projectiles from them at one another. Why? For what possible reason? It seemed to correspond to the color of their body coverings.

Half of them wore blue, the other half wore red. As I watched through a crack in the gritty, grey blocks...one of them snatched a flag from a pedestal. That seemed the natural word for a long, thin cylinder with a flappy thin rectangle of flexible stuff attached to it, anyhow.

The flag snatcher then attempted to make his way to the half of the structure, which I now realized was symmetrical, that bore lights of the same color as his body covering. He acted as if it was incredibly important.

It must be. Otherwise, why would he risk his life for it? One of the opposing group fired a bright, glowing beam at him. It missed. He hopped around, startled. Perhaps believing unpredictable movement would prevent him from being struck.

It didn’t. The next beam hit him straight on. He collapsed, limbs flailing about briefly. I felt wounded watching it happen. Upset. But then, his remains...vanished. Just like that! Where did they go to?

That’s impossible, isn’t it? Who are these creatures? Then I glimpsed the same one I’d earlier seen shredded by the loud burst into all those little jiggling pieces. Intact, though. No worse for wear! How could that be?

This one had long, thin growths from their head which were bound together. “She”, then. Why? I couldn’t tell you. Nor was it obvious to me why any such distinction existed when it was seemingly irrelevant to the activity I’d so far spectated. “Blue Team Scores!” a painfully loud voice boomed from the sky.

Mortified, I looked this way and that for any sign of the source. “Who was that?” I asked. A moment later, I heard “The announcer, retard” in reply. When I asked how it was that anybody heard me, they informed me that my question appeared in something called “chat”.

“Who are any of you? What is this place? Why do you attack each other?” I begged, at my wit’s end after witnessing such extreme but seemingly pointless aggression. A projectile, trailing white puffs behind it, sailed over my head and exploded on contact with a tree.

“This isn’t an RP server, scrublet. If you don’t know what you’re doing, go play the tutorial. Or better yet, join red. Then you can derp around all you want.” A different voice now objected. “Don’t dump him on us fuckass, he’s probably a literal ten year old with a voice changer.”

While speaking, an image would briefly appear over them. A white blob in a black outline with a pointy little triangular tail hanging down from one end, and a sequence of three black dots in the center. Indicators that they were speaking, surely. But why?

“Why do you attack each other?” I again asked. “This place is so beautiful. Are you fighting over it? Is this a territorial dispute?” I heard a riotous sound I somehow knew was laughter. “That’s Domination mode, dipshit. You’re in CTF. Kid doesn’t even know what mode he’s playing. Stay the fuck off the voice channel at least.”

They just kept at it, and wouldn’t listen. Running around with no clear goal except to annihilate each other or return the flag to their own color’s territory, over and over. The fact that their remains quickly vanished, whereupon they were somehow restored to life explained to some degree why they endured it all without fear. But still, what could the point of this possibly be?

“Life doesn’t need to be like this” I implored, cowering between two pillars, hoping to escape notice. “There is no meaningful difference between the red body coverings and the blue ones! One’s just #FF0000 and the other is #0000FF! Why don’t you slow down and think about what I’m saying, at least? Let’s talk our way through this. Perhaps an understanding can be arrived at.”

The sky voice boomed “Red team has the flag!” followed by a series of loud bangs. “What the fuck is this retard talking about” one of them asked. “He’s talking about our armor colors” the other explained. “I think he might be autismal or something.”

I asked if ‘autismal’ is my name. They laughed. “No, your name is Fart Tornado McFagballs.” I felt briefly awed at the realization that these must be the ancients who built the structure I found earlier, with the differently colored cubes. They must’ve created all of this!

But then why do they occupy themselves with such a fruitless endeavor? How could they possess the knowledge to create such a beautiful place, for no higher purpose than ritual violence? Is there some method to their madness that’s beyond my understanding?

“Is this...the ultimate reality?” I asked aloud. One of them replied “I guess so, if you like arena shooters. Not many people still play these. You gonna join a team or what? Wait, how did you even spawn without picking a team?” The person speaking then rounded a corner and spotted me.

“I see him now, he’s over here! Weird, he isn’t in the player list. You a hacker, bro? Do I need to report you?” I cried out in pain as many tiny solid projectiles lodged in my side. In a fit of panic I ran blindly for the nearest dark opening, a cave of some sort. What is a cave? There wasn’t any time to ruminate.

My feet made splashing noises as I ran through a fluid I recognized from the dream. Is there some connection? How I wish I wasn’t being chased by a madman, so I could study it more closely.

The fluid in the dream rippled, though. This fluid doesn’t ripple. There’s just a small burst of refractive round particles around each foot as it comes down through the fluid surface. What is this place? It can’t be what I saw in the dream. It’s...simpler.

Everything at once made sense after I fell through the floor. I found myself a ways below the ground level, looking up at a sort of hollow, partly transparent view of the world. I could see all of the other players, even through walls. My side still ached, but I no longer cared.

It’s simpler...because it’s just a representation. At last, the puzzle pieces came together! The vague, intuitive sense that I was being made to see a world which was only ever an expression of something abstract and fundamental, hidden from view. Hidden from the others as well, I’d wager.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 16!}