A Past Performance (4)

So… what do I do now?

Thirty minutes had passed since my parents left, or at least I thought so. The clock on the wall was stuck at a minute past noon, a time I wished it stayed at, so it was hard to keep an accurate sense. Ana hadn’t come out of the bathroom either, not responding to my calls to unlock the door. It was almost as if this place was waiting for me to do something – something I was trying to avoid.

“I guess I have no choice, huh,” I muttered to myself. There were three rooms I still hadn’t entered, so I started with the… closest one.

The first opened with mute click, revealing the laundry room. Two machines sat next to each other on the right while shelving cubes covered the left. I could hear the dryer tumbling something, but with the dead lightbulb, it was too dark to see what.

Next, I went over to Ana’s room. It was originally my parent’s, but after they moved out, Ana started to use it as her office space. What she did there, I had no clue.

Which probably explains this. The wall continued behind the door as if it were a decorative object, blocking any entry. From my subconscious point of view, it made sense. Even when my parents lived there, I rarely entered. I never had the need to. The only rooms that mattered back then were the kitchen, the bathroom, and…

That just leaves my room. Compared to the other three, this door had some wear, not noticeable at a glance, but obvious if you stared for a few seconds. The doorknob felt almost welcoming as my hand slipped into the slight indents made from my almost thirty years of use. The saying ‘two steps forward, one step back’ briefly popped into my head as I twisted, pushing inward a bit too fast.

“Let’s get this over–” I froze in my tracks, my eyes barely processing what I saw. A floor mattress with a divot on its left side. The half-shattered mirror I checked every so often. A bit of green mold steadily creeped its way out of the corner. Everything was exactly the same as I remembered it, uncannily so.

My body instinctively reacted, like a weight had fallen off my shoulders, while at the same being replaced with heavy chains. A strong urge washed over me to pass out on the bed, telling myself it was all just a bad dream. That I hadn’t been kidnapped to another world. That reality was just an illusion. It was almost euphoric, in a way.

“Seems like you’re the same as always.” My snapped to the sound of a voice, one so familiar that I heard every day of my life. The opposite side of the room came into view as though it had been imperceptibly far away until that moment. My steaming setup, a decade old machine with the cheapest peripherals money could buy, whirred away. A red dot blinked next to the live indicator. And sitting there, lying back in my reclinable chair, was a man with a handsome face, grinning wildly.

“Look here folks!” he began, controlling the attention perfectly. “Our Jester has returned. The original, you could say.”

The blue sidebar of the stream chat scrolled by at blistering speeds, making it impossible to read all the messages. The few I could catch were just the same character repeated multiple times in a row. Him, however…

“Ah yes NovaBlitz, that’s exactly how he looks like.”

“Am I sure PixelPanic? Well, of course. I’d know that coldhearted look anywhere.”

“Aw, you can’t say that VoidRifiter. He’s only extremely pathetic!”

Each one of his quips were expertly said, sparking even more messages to flood in.

“Who are you? And what do you mean, ‘the same’?”

“Huh? Isn’t it obvious?” he asked, closing the distance in an instant.

“Urk!” His hands curled around my neck, squeezing just hard enough so I wouldn’t pass out.

“I’m you, well the you on stream. Or maybe…”

Crap! Why does his hands feel so–

“...I’m the real one? After all, why would I come back to this horrible place? This cage of contentment.”

“I was… just… checking–”

“You can shove it with the excuses. You felt relieved, didn’t you? ‘Two steps forward’? It was barely even one.”

“So… what?” I tried to deny it. “I’m… only… human! It takes… time–”

“Time you no longer have.” He threw me onto the bed, well through the bed, as though it was another doorway. All my body could do was flap around, unsure whether I was moving or hovering in place. Suddenly, a spot of light shined brightly into my eyes. I quickly turned away, only to see a memory projected onto some kind of wall, one where my shadow replaced me.

“What is–”

“How long has it been now? Four years? Five? And what have you done since then? Sleep, stream, and eat in the same cycle over and over, day after day.” With each phrase, the image changed, reflecting the monotonous life I lived. “Even in this new world, you barely change, doing the same things again, only straying when you absolutely have to.”

“I have changed–”

“Then why haven’t you done anything? You keep saying how powerless you are, how you can’t do anything, when you know that isn’t true! You could’ve rescued the queen back when you first arrived. You could’ve prevented the guards from kidnapping anyone else. You could’ve stopped your sister or stayed in contact with your parents. But what did you do? You just closed your eyes and looked away – a bystander in your own life.”

“That’s because I–”

“Then open your status screen.”

“...”

“You can’t, or rather, you won’t, will you? Because if you do, you’ll be confirming the truth you’ve been so desperately trying to avoid. All these masks you wear just try to turn illusions into reality. The only reason you can is because of the people around you, forcing you to take one step forward. You haven’t done anything yourself.”

…he’s right. After all, he is me. There’s nothing I can say, no matter how much I want–

“So, answer me this, my dear Jester.” My body flew towards the projected image, just stopping a moment before I crashed. There, I saw a mirror of myself in my same old white t-shirt and brown shorts, though it had a much more unkempt appearance.

“Why are you such a hypocrite?”