To The World Still Asleep

Abysstellar would release later tonight.

Lila hurries home with a bag of snacks she’d decided to treat herself with now that she would have an income. It’d been several years since she’d graduated school and to say she was now the family disappointment would be an understatement, being that she had no career prospects. She yearned for the life of a video-game streamer - to be able to play games all day and to make money from it, to justify purchases of expensive computer equipment as a ‘business expense’. If she looked in the mirror all she saw was someone who no-one would want to watch, anime avatar or no.

The aspect of Abysstellar’s beta being play-to-earn had been kept hush and only revealed to those chosen who resided in Lastelle city. This, perhaps, is a better choice than being a streamer being that she got to keep her privacy, not humiliate herself online, and have guaranteed money. Along with the beta she’d participated in had been the very normal gameplay test for everyone else. Nothing about their secret beta had been shared online or, if it had, it’d quickly been scrubbed before anyone noticed.

She closes the door to the room and gets ready for the night.

The smart-band she’d been given tells her tonight is her first night of work.

During the induction someone had created a group-chat for them all. She checks it. Of the fifteen of them, several are claiming to not be sleeping tonight to play the game at launch. Theoretically one could avoid a day of work by pulling an all-nighter but then that meant not getting paid for that night. Lila knew herself, she’d never foregone sleep to play games and she wasn’t about to start now. The job she’d do during sleep was less game than they’d made it out to be.

She turns off the computer and the room is engulfed in darkness.

She slips beneath the covers of her bed and, for some reason, as if it’d be the last time she’d ever see it, tries to commit her room to memory.

The First Dream

In a grey city that’s seen better days there’s a hotel where the hallways shift as they please if you stop looking and management had long since fell to the wayside. The cold concrete walls are a painted white and the floors are furnished with a cheap grey carpet. She has a feeling that she’s lost something, or more so that it’s been stolen by one of the guests who appear out of thin air but disappear if you go looking for them. The subconscious sleeping goal of this dream is to find it. Though when she looks at herself, from what feels like a third-person perspective, she notices the uniform and wakes into true lucid dreaming. A door that should have been several floors up exits out onto the ground-level city street. Everything looks as if all colour were drained leaving only hints of it left. It’s eerily quiet, and any noise made seems to echo.

She checks her smart-band and sees several blue dots on a map blank of any lines. This, she’d been told, was normal until their data could be used to map the dream, if it could be mapped at all. The dots then were simply a proximity sensor for their group-mates. She follows the dots until she comes across the group meeting in a street lined with dilapidated homes.

“Seems we’ve got one more now.” Calen says.

Of the six of them present, Lila can just about remember everyone’s names from induction.

“So everyone else is up playing the game, I guess.” Estelle supposes.

Aver shrugs. “Well they’re the ones not getting paid tonight.”

“So what now?”

Just meeting, the group hadn’t yet encountered their target. Lila checks over their surroundings and can’t see anything odd either. As they’d been told there would be there are other people, other dreamers, going about their dreams in ways that looks strange from their perspective - a car door does not need to be opened for one to leave the car, and other such glitches. They were not to be disturbed, as much as what was possible.

“We could just walk around and get our bands to map the place.” Lila suggests.

“Sure.”

They walk for some time and though the map flickers no progress is truly made. It could just very well be impossible. The map also doesn’t help with finding Viruses as of yet. Every so often Lila checks behind her, feeling a chill that has her shiver. It’s a strange feeling, being able to walk for so long without feeling tired.

Eventually they stop.

“It’s not working.”

Lila checks behind her. And again. The others notice.

In the middle of the street is a flickering that could be written off as their eyes merely playing tricks on them but then, for a split second, a dark humanoid figure appears. Lila holds her breath and waits. A few reach for their guns. It reappears and disappears once more.

“This is one of them right?” Aver’s voice is shaky.

“Did it follow us? Can it do that?” Someone whispers.

Calen holds his handgun up, taking a breath to steady himself. The moment it blinks back into view he shoots. The noise makes a few of them flinch. That not being enough he fires a few more shots until the view looks clear. He checks his own band and finds that a counter went up by one.

“That’s it?”

For all of Lila’s shivering the end is rather anticlimactic.

After that they don’t encounter another that night.

Lila wakes up tired, later than usual. She drags herself through her morning routine. The Dream is vivid in her mind and, embarrassingly, she realizes that as some point she, as well as the others, had given into dream logic themselves, becoming incoherent before waking. The last thing she remembers is being back in the hotel, as if the dream had rubber-banded her back to her starting location, and searching down hallways for her lost item.

Blearly-eyed, she sits herself in front of her computer. The group chat consists of asking what happened last night and talking about the game.

The game takes hours to download and install. When it finally starts up it’s not much different from NOCTAL’s other offerings. Simply their other games with a sci-fi reskin, it seems.

The Second Dream

There’s a campground at night that consists of a small building in a parking lot, a darkly dense forest behind it, and the sense that nothing else exists down the steep hill they’re on. The expectation is either to pitch your tent on the lined concrete or in the forest. And a medium, two-person tent is already pitched over several parking spaces. She’s aware she’s being watched from the treeline.

Bathed in shadow, the Viruses are easier to see. Alone in the area, Lila has to accept that now it’s her turn to get to doing some elimination work. With shaky hands she grabs her gun and holds it up. The Virus has eyes - two bright, white ovals that peer at her and blink. She closes her eyes and hopes the best as she pulls the trigger, once and again. When she thinks that’s enough she cautiously looks back to the trees and finds the Virus gone. Her counter increases. Easy enough.

She doesn’t dare to head into the forest and so she waits around the area observing the dreamers try, and fail, to camp. There’s an odd feeling she gets, a sad kind of second-hand embarrassment. Dreams usually don’t make sense but if they knew someone was watching all of this and would remember they’d hate it, she’s sure. Even when asleep people have no privacy.

Lila checks the group-chat.

Calen: Got chased around the woods all night.

Calen: Gonna get a good bonus though.

In strange mimicry of a multi-level-marketing scheme, some amongst them had taken to spending all of their wages on the Abysstellar game itself. Calen was not one of them. Neither was Lila.

Not being able to divulge the full details of the job, all Lila could say to her family was that she was a work-from-home tester for NOCTAL. She could tell her parents weren’t too pleased by it but having a job rather than none was enough to get them off her back for a while. She herself was becoming increasingly more distasteful of the work. The Department of Dreams were more forthcoming with feedback on how they were using collected data but they’d heard not a word from NOCTAL.

Her non-working nights were filled with nightmares now.

The Third Dream

They meet at the extravagant fountain of a luxury mall all tiled in marble. All writing on the signs that surround them looks like gibberish. A little dazed, Lila merely stares, transfixed at the flowing water. This time the place is filled with dreamers who pay no attention to the Viruses that surround them nor the gunshots to eliminate them. If they all go at once the sound is almost deafening and so some of them bicker over taking turns. Adding a bonus for the number eliminated adds an unnecessary competition that Lila had already decided to sit back on.

Aver yawns. “This is so stupid.” He complains. “We can literally do nothing and get paid.”

“Can we though? Really do nothing?” Lila questions, her gaze fixed on the white ovals on the other side of clear water. It blinks.

Aver notices and watches too.

The more the two of them stare the more it becomes their single point of focus until they feel frozen to the spot with fear, that this creature is doing something to them and they’re not even sure what it is.

“That’s why.” Lila tells him.

“Ah…”

Abysstellar receives an update. A new trailer teases new characters, heroes of the old world.

The more Lila plays the more and more disturbed she feels until she’s sure they’re using the group’s experiences as a sort of inspiration for the game. Lila checks through the contract, nothing mentions permission to do this. She can recognize her group-mates in the new supposedly fictional characters. Almost word-for-word were some of their conversations recreated.

The group-chat is divided.

The depictions are clearly thoughtful, sympathetic, but in that way they clearly know too much. Lila can almost immediately spot which one must be about her because it’s how she wished she looked. That’s perhaps the worst part of it all, that now she has something else she can never live up to, as unknowing players fawn over a character based on her that she’ll never be. It’s like being killed with false kindness.

Lila: So we can’t get a working map but they can turn us into characters?

Estelle: Already asked and we don’t get anything for free.

Lila: That’s not the point.

Calen: How do they know all this?

Calen: The psychic thing?

Lila: I guess so?

Until this point Lila would have considered herself a fan of these games. But now she uninstalls all of them from her computer.

The Fourth Dream

In a night lit only by starlight, in an otherwise abandoned plain, they encounter the so-called ‘final boss’ NOCTAL had practically announced through the game first, showing that they knew this would occur. Though she’d stopped playing, Lila still received algorithmically suggested videos about the game online and couldn’t keep herself away. Several dark Virus figures circle a huge beast that’s almost spider-like if a spider were a rotund circle with only four spindly legs and a huge gaping white mouth. It has the same bright, white eyes as all the others, several of them, all over it’s body. It looked almost like a ritual of sorts. The Virus figures don’t move but the beast thrashes around wildly.

They’d gotten the map to work now and this point was displayed as a bright blue star. This time they’d managed ten of them present at the same time.

Calen had become something of a leader in the preceding days and when he starts shooting for the eyes, a presumed weak spot, the others follow. Lila hangs at the back, holding her gun, a growing dread pooling in her self. A few of it’s eyes, once shot, shut.

In one swift movement the beast skewers Calen with one of it’s legs. Everyone freezes.

Even if painless, bloodless, even if a dream, even if Lila barely cared for the person involved it’s still a horrific sight to have to watch them killed.

It sends the already haphazardly disorganized group into a panic that easily gets them picked off one-by-one until Lila too is gasping awake in her room, her hands gripping blankets, her heart racing.