CYPHER

VFX at it's peak.

Dean was in a state were he was awake enough to feel his body and the cool air on his face but he wanted to enjoy the bliss of sleep for a bit longer , so he still kept his eyes closed and his body lax.

It had actually been a nice rest for Dean .

Usually , his dreams were plagued with his parents and how their faces had looked when Dean had been called to identify their bodies or on worse days , he was plagued with Jaymie's face joining his parents in that cold room .

But today had been different , maybe because his sleep had been drug induced , he had dreamt of absolutely nothing .

He had to remember to thank his cousin for that .

A loud siren went off , jarring Dean from his lax state .

He opened his eyes and sat up , he shook his head to clear the remainder of the sleep from his eyes .

He was on a makeshift bed in a small room that looked like a cabin .

Where the f**k was he ?

He wanted to pay more attention to what lay around him but the siren was buzzing in his head , louder than anything he had ever heard.

Dean groaned loudly and put his head in his hands .

The siren abruptly stopped as soon as Dean had done this .

Dean lifted his head slowly to ascertain that his head and hands were not some secret code .

The siren did not go off again , he sighed .

Dean looked around him , it was a really old cabin .

The wood had began to rot , the fireplace had masses of spiderwebs and the room was just so dusty .

Even the bed he had been laying on was not only dusty but filled with dead insects , Dean scampered off it and fell in a heap on the ground .

Dean had scrunched his face as he fell , waiting for the pain to set in .

When he surprisingly did not feel any pain , he looked down at his body with ill directed excitement and enthusiasm .

He was wearing complete combat fatigues , boots , knee and elbow braces and even a tactical kevlar vest .

What in the world was going on ?

Was he still asleep ?

No , that siren had been too real .

Dean closed his eyes , something was eating at him.

He felt as if he was forgetting something very important, something as important as his name .

ALL REMAINING PLAYERS WILL NOW BE INTEGRATED FOR PROCESSING.

PLAYERS ARE WELCOME TO CHECK OUT OTHER PLAYERS JUST ABOVE .

Dean had fallen into a mess of tangled up dusty bed clothes and himself when the mechanical voice had come up just as loud as the siren .

He rushed to untangle himself as he hopped to the door of the cabin .

When he reached the wooden door , he realized that there was no handle .

Dean was already panicking , so he just threw his body into the door .

" f*****g hell !!! ".

The door burst open , splinters flying about while Dean stood at the edge of his life trying to maintain balance , lest he fell to his death .

It was no ordinary cabin , it was a cabin that had somehow ended up on the roof of a derelict high-rise .

Dean did not want to think of how a cabin had ended up on the roof of an eerie looking building but when he had thrown himself at the door , the force had propelled him to the edge of the porch .

Yes , the cabin had a porch , a porch that had eventually saved his life .

And If he had taken just a step off the porch , someone would be clearing and cleaning his innards off the street very soon.

Dean took a deep breath and pushed himself back into the room , it took a brief moment but when he fell , he fell towards the room and with his eyes facing the sky where he saw a picture of himself .

There was a picture of him in the sky.

It took Dean another moment to figure out that the picture wasn't a record for people that should have died today but an actual picture of himself alongside some other people he did not know .

It must have been from the impact of hitting his head on the hard cabin floor but anyhow Dean had been struck with a not so distant memory .

It flashed before him .

His cousin , the car , signing the agreement , cooking , leaving home , meeting another version of his cousin and then drinking the spiked drink .

He was partaking in the game.

The loud siren had been for the game , the announcement that had rang in his head too.

The faces he was staring at where the other participants .

Dean did a quick scan of the faces , Alec was not on the list of players .

Had he lost already?

It made sense now , the porch and the fall were virtual and a part of the game .

Falling would have taken him out of the game , there had been no real danger except disappointing Alec and his sister.

Dean heaved a sigh slowly and then chuckled .

This was probably one of those Virtual Reality game universes that were accessed with 3D glasses .

He really should have learnt to play videogames .

The imaging on the sky was changing now and Dean focused on it.

All of the previous pictures had been in an horizontal arrangement but after sometime some pictures had dissapeared while some pictures had moved on to another horizontal line above the previous one , Dean's picture was one of those that had moved on to the next line .

If the new lines kept forming above the older ones , it would end up being a pyramid .

And on top of the pyramid would be the winner .

If the game was pyramid style , there would be no fixed number of games , they would all keep playing till one person was left .

In that case , seven days was just a safe timeline , the game could end before seven days .

Forming teams was also futile since it was a pyramid , there was bound to be betrayal when you knew only one person was winning.

Dean had considered a team because it might benefit him but it could also cost him more so that was cancelled.

Dean's musings were interrupted by the mechanical voice once again .

ALL PLAYERS HAVE NOW BEEN INTEGRATED .

PLAYER PROGRESS CAN BE MONITORED ABOVE AS WELL AS PLAYER PATRONS.

Player Patrons , What was that now ?

Dean was beginning to think that Alec did not give him any Information at all about what was going on .

More pictures began to be added on the sides of the previous pictures .

A picture of Alec was added to Dean's and on the far side ,Dean noticed that a picture of his aunt had been added to some girls picture.

So Patrons were partners?

But ,why was this unnecessary ceremony needed when they were also players ?

ALL PLAYERS HAVE SIMILAR RESERVES TO CARRY OUT THE GAMING.

PLAYERS ARE WELCOME TO BUILD WEAPONS OF THEIR CHOICES WITH ANY OF THE AVAILABLE RESOURCES.

THE GAME RESERVES THE RIGHTS TO PLAYER LIVES AND WILL NOT BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR ANY LOSSES .

THE AIM AND ONLY RULE OF THE GAME IS TO SURVIVE THE DAY AND ALL OF THE COMING DAYS .

GOODLUCK .

The mechanical voice finally came to an end and Dean tried to make sense of all he had learnt .

He was coming up with a theory for the game but since he still did not know a lot about the game , his theory had a lot of loopholes .

He stood up from where he had been laying , he should look for what weapon his patron had given him and at least leave the cabin .

He looked around the room , thinking of where a valued weapon could have been hidden but there was nothing in sight .

Going through the room was not a given , it was so dusty that he would probably sneeze for the rest of the seven days .

Or had he woken up in the cabin not by chance ?

Did Alec want him to wait in the cabin till more people lost ?

It seemed logical and stupid at the same time .

If they had put so much energy into building the gameverse , it was probably impossible to hide out without participating in the game .

An out of place item caught his eye.

Dean walked towards the object , it was a book or actually a journal of sort .

Unlike the other items in the room , it was neat and void of dust .

It was quite glaring that this was the item that Alec had left him , Dean was slightly disappointed , he had expected some fancy weapon that only existed in games.

He opened the journal and flipped through the pages .

It had been used to keep records of a research on Autobots and the researcher had been quite detailed , he had signed every page of the journal .

It was signed JPW.

James Pierre Winchester ,it was his dad's research journal .

Had this gameverse been created by his dad ?

There was a backpack on the floor , Dean picked it up and unzipped it .

Water , protein bars , a flashlight and a small emergency regeneration kit .

Dean added his journal and zipped the bag up .

The window of the cabin was wide enough to climb through , so he did .

He looked from the rooftop around the gameverse .

The game was taking place in a deserted town with destroyed buildings everywhere and abandoned cars lining the roads .

It looked like something had hurriedly wiped out all the inhabitants of the town and it inadvertently gave off the perfect game vibe .

Dean found the stairs and began to descend , thanking Alec for the game suitable attire .

He reached the ground floor and ran towards the opened door ,he was about to run out when he heard screams followed by a mechanical whirring .

A woman ran out of one of the buildings and caught sight of Dean , she began to run towards him, screaming .

" Help ! Help !! ", She screamed , a face and voice the epitome of horror .

Dean was a second away from running out to her aid when the source of the mechanical whirring came into sight too , freezing Dean .

It was a large hunk of metal that was running after the woman .

Dean might have called it a robot , but it looked too sleek and it's eyes looked too human to be just a robot ,it was like humanoid technology.

A mutation was a better description .

Dean watched in perplexity as the mutation raised up one of its jacked up hands.

The arm turned into a large revolving gun and while Dean watched helplessly and the woman's screams intensified , the gun released a spray of bullets into the woman .

The mutation turned around and ran off .

Dean stared at the woman's mangled body laying almost at the entrance of the building , her blue eyes opened wide in terror .

The blood that had sprayed everywhere , including on Dean's face was too warm .

Too warm to be blood from a virtual reality .