You Are Not In Control

Sophie Edens

 

By signing this contract, you relinquish control of your body for one hour (60 minutes) to the usage of another person for the duration of a quest in “Lancelot.” Should you accomplish your mission before the allotted time, you will move on to the next quest. If you die within the game, your life is terminated in real life. If your controller causes your death, your family may not press charges. By signing this contract, you hereby acknowledge your acceptance of these conditions.
“Lancelot” is a prototype action-adventure-fantasy game that brings the thrill of gore and questing to a whole new level. To fulfill your contract, you must complete a total of thirteen (13) quests for the remainder of your imprisonment to be nullified and all charges to be purged from your record.

In addition, we have analyzed your case and agree that, should you survive all 13 quests of “Lancelot,” we will provide you with a lawyer who will aid in regaining custody of your daughter, Alice Pibb, from your ex-husband, Carter Pibb.

Digital signatures are accepted.

X                     Jasmine Pibb                     

WORLD 4: LOST CITY QUEST INITIATED

MISSION: RETRIEVE THE GOLD SWORD IN THE TEMPLE

Black hair in tight ringlet curls tied in purple ribbons, round cherub-pink cheeks, and the laughter of a pixie, all you can see as you fall is Alice’s face.

You land in a crouch, a painful tingling in your calves and the balls of your feet. It’s a desert for this quest—World 4 as you labeled it seven quests ago when you were successful in accomplishing your first mission in “Lancelot”—and it is thick with mounds of rolling sands and horrors. Mechanical VIPERS with acidic venom wait for you to trip its system into hyperdrive. Desert HOUNDS are nasty buggers too; they can run at nearly the speed of a cheetah but with the biting force of a black bear. You were made to stand and watch a pack of them tear a scantily clad woman to chunks that were greedily swallowed. She laughed and giggled the entire time till a HOUND crushed her windpipe and another dug its jaws into her skull, cracking it open like a coconut. That’s back when you were played by GAMER dark_knight@1; it is a wonder you survived with the recklessness that dumbass played with.

And your personal favorite, the MIST, a crimson cloud that sweeps over the desert and wipes out everything in its path. Similar to the acidic venom of a VIPER, the MIST is chemically designed to melt the skin at the slowest rate possible till it feels like bubbling liquid gold being melted over your skin.

You check your stats and character profile; your GAMER has chosen long black pants and a revealing tank top that squishes your boobs together and shows too much cleavage. If Carter saw you, his hands would be glued to your breasts till you had to shove him out of the bed and leave to take Alice to your mother’s house. Staring down at this skimpy body makes you feel sick to your stomach, especially as your GAMER continues to scroll through the clothing options before returning to the revealing top.

Your weapons are a fully loaded pistol, a hatchet, and a crossbow on your back. Your GAMER loads your backpack with a map, a compass, and food rations that will likely heal you twice if you take significant damage. Your GAMER’s username is black_phoenix975 with a purple smirking devil emoji. You’d roll your eyes if you could; it sounds like a child’s name trying to be all cool and shit in front of their friends.

Holding the pistol hazardously, you sprint towards the Lost City. Resembling a Greco-Roman city of sunbaked crackling stone, like in a movie with poor set designers, it is pitiful to look at. But one steeple rises above the elegant broken arches, a glistening gold needle reflecting in the sun. Your compass points you north in the direction of the Lost City. You wonder why your GAMER needs the map to see which direction they’re going, but there’s little point in questioning anything. Not like you matter anymore.

You put away your map and begin running again. Your movements feel sluggish, like you’re toting cement in your bag instead of three light items.

A message rolls across your vision: WATCH OUT FOR DESERT VIPERS! THEY’RE POISONOUS!

“No shit,” you wish you could say, but your voice is not your own. You don’t control that anymore. It was stolen from you long before “Lancelot” rewired your body to its needs. Back when you were struck across the jaw with brass knuckles over and over because of your “smart bitch mouth.” You chewed the words, grinding them between your teeth, and lifted your eyes to glare at the pimps all-too-pleased to steal your voice away, your mouth filling with blood. Too bad that even now you can’t use your words.

You stop again to check the map, and surprise surprise, you’re still on the right track. The damn thing is right in front of you! You put the map away and run again, but make it no more than 5 feet before you’re thrown back into a wave of steaming hot sand.

You land on your back and stand quickly, taking aim with your pistol. A VIPER rises out of the sand, its wings spread wide like a cobra. You hear its gears whirring and clicking inside its hulking body. A flabby tongue wags at you and acid drips from its fangs. Its eyes are just two clear sheets of blue metal that glow.

It strikes quickly, faster than they normally do. But god bless that black_phoenix975 is better than you initially feared. They’re good at defense and dodging, making you leap and do acrobatic moves—somersaults, backflips, flip flops—one right after the other. You do them so many times your muscles scream and tighten and you become dizzy. But you have no time to recover, landing in a crouch and running forward, firing off bullet rounds like a maniac. Perhaps you spoke too soon.

But your GAMER is clever and not a newbie after all; they know the weak spot is on the forehead in the form of a blue gemstone. You just have to leap high enough to hit it or get far enough not to get bit but close enough that you can shoot. You take another hit but tuck and do a somersault, landing perfectly on your feet. With dramatic music playing—it always bothered you that you could hear it but not your GAMER’s voice—you take a knee, take aim, and fire. You see the round spiral through the air, the fire from the barrel for dramatic effect, and the zoom on the death hit. The VIPER shrieks and spurts acid like spickets. Then it collapses in a heap, twitching as the metal liquifies from the acidic compound and settles into a steaming sandy bog.

You jump and pump your fist in the air as fireworks explode around you, laughing when you want to scream. LEVEL UP flashes across the screen as black smoke puffs out of the VIPER and coils into the air. You rest your pistol against your side and snap off a fang, wiping the excess venom off in the sand before tucking it into your backpack. Why? Only your GAMER knows.

You hear the rumbling in the distance, the dread settling heavier in your bones. You remain stoic but your heart is pounding, the fear settling in the pit of your belly like rotten meat. You pray to whatever merciless god that is allowing this to happen to spare you and bless you for once in your damned life that your GAMER knows what the fuck they’re doing for once.

Otherwise, there’ll be no getting out of prison, no taking back Alice from her drug-addicted, abusive father, and no more purpose. You’ll just be a corpse left on a gaming battleground. At most your body will be picked up and thrown in a furnace and your death written off. Alice will be kept by her worthless-worm father. If you’re lucky, your spiteful mother will recognize the signs and take Alice under her wing. With that in mind, you pray harder and keep running.

Finally, you make it to the Lost City perimeter. The entrance is a wreckage of carts and skeletons in robes, clutching their belongings and mouths agape in mute screams. You walk slowly through the scene, looking at all the dead. They are nothing but made up projections, game filler characters recycled and reused in every other World in “Lancelot.” But your heart still sputters with the fear that your own body might join them and the creators will do nothing about it.

You kick the creaking metal gates, the top breaking off its hinge and halfway collapsing. You stare at it blankly for a moment, and then fall against the wall when the earth convulses beneath your feet. The gate falls off its hinges completely, clattering to the ground. A soft hiss fills the air and your skin crawls. You look behind you, and there, the MIST approaches. It looks like any other innocent cloud-shape, but its bloody, sunbaked color and black, hazy shadows give it a menacing aura that will scare the piss out of any GAMER who see it in real life. Gleaming golden droplets, mistaken by many dumbass GAMERs as healing ambrosia (offered in “World 9: Arabian Knights”), begin to fall. And like charred food, the dessert turns eerie black and dissolves into nothingness.

You turn tail and run, but your GAMER isn’t pushing you fast enough (Hit the A and B Buttons simultaneously for Speed Boosters). You thank your merciless god that the Lost City is abandoned. Dealing with the panicking citizens of “World 1: Metropolis” would be too annoying a feat for the fear bubbling inside you, bile rising in your throat. But you keep going, eyes trained on the glistening golden steeple of the Temple. There, your mission will end and another quest will be won.

But naturally, it won’t be that easy for you.

MULTIPLAYER MODE ACTIVATED.

You hear the rush of voices of all the players in the chat group, laughing about how awesome the game is, the animation, the realness, and “look at the sizes of that girl’s tits!” But you have more important things to worry about, like the glowing red dot where an opponent is lying in wait for you to step out into the open and get sniped. You remove your hatchet and angle it low, inching forward cautiously. Gunshots can be heard in the distance and screams of agony as players are devoured by the MIST. The boom of a cannon accompanies the MIST’s gentle hushing.

You hover at the end of the alley and angle your hatchet blade low for the best reflection. There: fourth building, second story, third window from the right. You put your hatchet away and remove your crossbow; this one is different from other GAMERs you’ve had, but you admire their strategic creativity. You have a split second to load the arrow and breathe before you leap into the daylight and fire, getting a close-up of your arrow hitting the target between the eyes. Blissfully, the bow and arrow close-ups are considerably less gory than the ones for guns.

Your GAMER makes the smart move of putting away the crossbow and taking out the pistol again. You turn to the main square, staring with wide eyes at the bloodbath spewing left and right. Dozens of players—prisoners—are dressed in tight-fitting dresses and tops that just barely cover the nipples bouncing around, only to have their heads blown off by machine-gun fire.

“Fuck! That was awesome!”

“Go for the one on the right! Yeah!”

“I’ll pay 100 coins to the person who shoots down the one in—”

Your heart sputters with the vague inkling that your GAMER will be intrigued by the chaos and throw your ass into the fire. It’d be easy to do. Three steps—you’ll make it three steps before you’ll have your head blown off. But thankfully, that doesn’t seem to be your GAMER’s priority. They make you sprint as fast as you can to the other alleyway.

“Get the big guns,” you wish you could tell your GAMER. “Don’t be stupid, these people have way more than just a hatchet and a gun! We won’t get far with this! Go back! This isn’t your life that’s on the line for this dumbass fucking game!”

But they will never hear you, never truly known your name or understand anything beyond controlling your body for the next 20 minutes remaining in the game segment.

Your vision is glitchy and blurry and your hands shake. You rip into a loaf of buttered bread that you don’t want to eat, but your energy skyrockets before you put the remainder back in its pouch.

You’re sprinting again down the alleyway, eyes trained on the Temple steeple and the enemies that surround it like flies around a corpse. You hear the MIST approaching behind you and the shrieks of other players dying ahead. You get to the Temple with few complications—a few characters you regretfully have to kill—but then comes the real problem: how to enter the Temple without being shot in the first 10 seconds.

You pause just outside the white circle surrounding the Temple, watching the massacre. Any who run into the circle become an immediate target. Similar to the main square, where you watched men and women charge into the circle and had holes the size of fists shot straight through their bodies. You wish you could go back to the day you signed that agreement to participate in “Lancelot” and promised that you could make it through the remaining years of your sentence, that this bloodshed and fear was worth it. But you have no time for hesitation; you’re running around the circle, thank god.

Your eyes count at least ten enemy dots and all are stable, which means they shouldn’t come down from their buildings. But the MIST is close, so who’s to say?

You’re suddenly going in the opposite direction, towards the MIST.

“What the fuck are you doing? Why are we going this way? I’m gonna die!”

You’re rushed into a broken building with no ceiling, exposed to the golden rain and a visible target for any sniper. You switch your pistol for the hatchet again and dash through hallways, your footsteps echoing too loudly. An elephant could run more quietly.

But then you do something you’ve never done before; you run straight through a door and into an empty room. There, in the center, is a black hole with a flimsy rope that disappears into the darkness below. You stare down into it, eyes widening. What’s this? You’ve never seen this before. You sway, a new wave of adrenaline flooding your veins. You pray that black_phoenix975 knows what the fuck they’re doing as you jump in …

Only to be spat out in a storage room of religious artifacts and cobwebs. You wheeze and slap away the stringy webs and shove your way through the clutter. You scan your surroundings, blinking for your eyes to adjust to the dark.

WARNING: MIST APPROACHING. TEN MINUTES TO COMPLETE QUEST.

“Fuck, I’m not going to make it,” you think, tears bubbling in your eyes. They streak down your cheeks as you heft your crossbow off your back and load an arrow. You think of your little girl. You think of her asking your ex-husband if she has a mommy like the other little girls. Then you think about how he will say, “yes, but she can’t be with us.” Then a deep rage settles into your bones, binding to them till that rage consumes you.

You bust through the door with an animalistic, feral shriek. But that glorious fire inside your bones can’t deflect the VIPER’s tail that slams you into the rock wall, cracking a gaping hole in the sandy stone. You gasp and taste blood, spit it out, and choke on more. You hear a beeping in your ear, your stats dropping rapidly. You roll onto your back, gawking at the largest VIPER you’ve ever seen—apparently “Lancelot” designers have updated the game. Black and plated in silver armor, its eyes a fluorescent zesty green. This freak-of-nature’s body looks cramped even in the high-domed room, glistening in the kaleidoscopic light that streams in from the glass windows. It hisses, spitting venom two feet from you, the sulfuric stench singeing your nose hairs.

WARNING: LOW HEALTH. USE BREAD FROM YOUR BAG.

You struggle to stand, using your crossbow as support. But then you’re knocked over again and trapped under the weight of its tail, the VIPER’s dripping fangs drawing closer. You feel a droplet land on your cheek and scream in agony as the flesh burns and rots away. You writhe, dropping the crossbow and your bag, and futilely kick at its bulky plates.

WARNING: MIST.

You hear the soft shhhhh from outside, rattling the windows and tapping on the steeple. The muted crick crick crick of glass splintering and then shattering beneath the golden droplets and sprinkling in.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck NO!”

You writhe under the VIPER’s weight, eyes darting around wildly. And there you see it, the jeweled hilt of the Gold Sword nestled in the coils of the VIPER’s tail. It is beautiful; beautiful as you remember it the first time you played this world. The first time you were played by ChosenOne12_34 and snipered your enemies outside before busting into the Temple and slaughtering the zombie priests. The sword’s blade is like starlight and the emeralds green as the forests you grew up playing in, the ones you had hoped that Alice would get to grow up in as well.

You don’t know what comes over you, whether it’s a glitch and you move on your own or as black_phoenix975, but suddenly the VIPER fang you took from the DESERT VIPER is in your hand. And as the monster descends, you rear back your arm and jab it into its forehead with all your remaining strength.

There’s a noise you’ve never experienced before, so high-pitched and squalling it makes blood spurt from your ears and your right ear goes completely silent. Venom drips onto your arm, scorching the skin, but you see the fang protruding from the metal plates and know you’ve found the weak spot. It rears back, lifting its monstrous body from you, leaving you gasping for breath as you watch it flail and slam its body into the Temple.

The VIPER fizzles out, smoke rising from its forehead where the fang remains, and the body clutters in a metallic CRUNCH heap, rubble flying with the force of its body’s collapse. The only sounds hovering in the air are your heaving breaths, the dusty noises of rubble pebbles and dirt hitting the tiles, and the continued shhhhh of the MIST outside.

WARNING: ONE MINUTE REMAINING.

“Fuck, gotta get up, gotta get up … why the fuck am I EATING right now?”

You want to scream around the butter bread you’re shoveling in your mouth. You watch the seconds countdown in bold red font. 60, 59, 58, 57 …

“GET UP!”

Your body twitches as you rise to your feet, arms dangling at your side like they’re noodles. You trip and stumble, body trembling as the golden rain disintegrates the ceiling above. A few drops land on your skin and the searing pain eats away your flesh. But you keep going, latching onto the shivering-cold metal plates of the VIPER’s body and hoisting yourself over. Crawling over the plates scrapes your hands and knees, but it’s right THERE. 33, 32, 31, 30 …

“Hurry up!”

The MIST casts a dark shadow over you, the droplets growing larger and quickening into a downpour. You scream as you make the final reach, shoving your body forward and your fingertips glossing over the hilt. And just like that, the rain stops—the individual droplets frozen in mid-air like sparkling gems from an amber chandelier. A gust of wind blows into your face and rushes over your skin, healing over the holes the acid left behind. You sigh in relief as you rise onto one knee and draw the sword from the VIPER’s tail and hoist it high over your head. Knocking aside the golden rain, you leap in the air, fireworks erupting around you with gusto and glorious colors.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! GAMING SEQUENCE COMPLETE.

You feel the click of black_phoenix975 exiting the game, and for a split second, your body is your own. It comes with a stuttered breath and a cough, and you collapse to your knees and clutch the Gold Sword to your chest. Memories wash over you, thanking whatever merciful god granted you life for another game and a return home to Alice and her delinquent father. You think of going home, of Alice leaping into your arms, crying. Carter will try to be cute, but you’ll sock him in the jaw, gather your things, and take back your baby girl.

And then all goes black as “Lancelot” resets and your mind is clicked offline

 

Sophie Edens is a senior Ball State University student, pursuing a degree in Creative Writing. Her stories have appeared in The Broken Plate and Tributaries.