Player One
1443 Words
I taste copper and grass. That is the first thing that registers, like I have been face-first in a field after getting my a*s kicked by a linebacker. My eyelids feel like they are made of lead, but I force them open anyway.
Blue sky. Puffy white clouds. The scent of wildflowers carried on a gentle breeze.
What the hell?
The sky is too blue. That is my first coherent thought, not where am I or what happened, but that specific, nagging wrongness: the sky is too blue, the clouds too perfectly spaced, the breeze timed like something out of an opening cinematic. My visual cortex lights up with alarm before the rest of my brain has even caught up.
Then the rest of my brain catches up.
The crash.
It hits me like a second impact, the memory of it: headlights filling my windshield, bright as twin suns. The screech of brakes that came a half-second too late. The passenger door folding inward like paper. The feeling of being lifted, weightless, by something that had absolutely no interest in keeping me alive.
I suck in a breath so hard I nearly choke on it.
Am I dead?
The question sits there, flat and enormous. I run a fast, desperate inventory. I can feel my fingers. I can feel the dirt pressing into my palms, gritty and specific, each individual pebble distinct. Dead people do not feel pebbles. At least I was fairly sure they did not. I had not exactly done a lot of research on the topic.
My arms buckle when I try to push up. The world tilts, and I catch myself on one knee, head hanging, breathing through the nausea. Everything is too loud suddenly: the birdsong sharp and close, the rustle of grass like static, the wind a physical pressure against my ears. I squeeze my eyes shut and press a fist to the ground until the spinning slows.
Mom, I think, randomly and helplessly. She was going to find out about the crash. Someone was going to have to call her, and she was going to sit in the kitchen of the house in Daly City with her hands wrapped around a mug of tea that went cold while she cried quietly so nobody could hear her. That was how she grieved. I knew because I had seen her do it when my grandfather died.
Sarah would probably find out from LinkedIn. The thought is so bleak it almost makes me laugh.
I force my eyes open. I force myself upright. The world steadies by degrees, resolving itself into something I can process.
Rolling green hills. Clusters of oak trees. Patches of wildflowers nodding in the wind. And in the distance, the unmistakable spires of a small town, smoke curling from chimneys in lazy, picturesque spirals.
Everything is too perfect, too clean, like someone took a Bob Ross painting and made it three-dimensional.
It looks exactly like the starting zone of Respawn.
My game. My creation. The virtual world I had spent the last three years building, coding, debugging, and perfecting.
"No way," I say. The words come out hoarse, scraped raw. "No. Absolutely not."
A translucent blue window materializes in front of my face, floating in mid-air like a holographic display. Text scrolls across it in a font I recognize because I had spent forty minutes choosing it at two in the morning eight months ago:
WELCOME, PLAYER ONE INITIALIZING NEURAL INTERFACE... CALIBRATING BIOMETRIC SYSTEMS... LOADING COMPLETE
"What the actual--" I reach out and my fingers pass straight through it. The window holds perfectly, solid-looking and completely incorporeal. I wave my hand through it twice more just to be sure, then feel immediately stupid for doing it.
This has to be a dream. Or a coma. People in comas dream about familiar things, right? Their brains reach for something known, something safe. That would explain why my subconscious had conjured Respawn. Though it was hard to explain the scratch of unfamiliar wool against my skin, or the earthy smell of dirt, or the way the breeze carried the specific dampness of incoming rain. Dreams had never had weather forecasts before.
A second window appears, larger:
PLAYER: LEE ZHANG (PLAYER-1) LIVES REMAINING: 7/7 HP: 100/100 | MP: 50/50 LEVEL: 1 | XP: 0/100 STR: 10 | AGI: 12 | INT: 15 | LCK: 8 | END: 10 | DEX: 11 STATUS: [CONFUSED] [DISORIENTED] LOCATION: MEADOWBROOK STARTING ZONE
I stare at it. Those stats are exactly what I had programmed for new players. Balanced but not overpowered, slight emphasis on intelligence and agility. Even the status effects are updating in real time. As I watch, [CONFUSED] flickers and intensifies. Accurate.
"This is not possible," I mutter, and get my feet under me properly this time.
Standing up turns out to be its own adventure. My legs work fine. More than fine, actually. That is the problem. I push off the ground expecting the familiar protest of joints that have spent too many hours in an office chair, and instead I come up smoothly, almost springy, like my body has been upgraded while I was not paying attention. I take one step and overcorrect, two steps and nearly walk into my own momentum.
"Okay," I say, planting my feet. "Okay. We have different physics. Great. This is fine."
I look down at myself and stop.
Brown leather boots. Dark pants. A cream-colored tunic that looks like it came straight out of a medieval cosplay convention. A small leather pouch on my belt that jingles when I move.
Gone are the khakis and cracked-elbow jacket I had been wearing when I left the office. The jacket Sarah gave me. The thought snags briefly, painfully, and then I push it somewhere smaller.
Focus.
I look at my hands. They look like my hands, same slightly stubby fingers, same scar on my right knuckle from the whittling incident at age twelve when I had been absolutely convinced I had my grandfather's talent and absolutely did not. But the skin is smoother. Less weathered. Like someone had run a light touch-up pass over the whole model.
I close my eyes. Count to ten. Open them.
HUD still there. Medieval outfit still there. Impossibly gorgeous meadow still there.
"Status report," I say, using one of the voice commands I had programmed in.
Nothing.
"Character sheet."
Nothing.
"Menu. Options. Inventory. Help. Debug mode." I pause. "Admin console."
Every command disappears into cheerful birdsong and rustling grass without so much as an error message. Wherever I was, I was not running with elevated permissions. I had built this entire world from scratch and apparently I was going to experience it as a regular user with no backend access.
The irony was genuinely impressive.
I pull out the leather pouch and look inside. A few copper coins catch the light, along with a piece of bread and a small vial of red liquid. Standard newbie kit. If this was really Respawn, the pouch should contain exactly ten copper pieces, one loaf of day-old bread, and a minor health potion.
I count the coins. Ten copper pieces.
I examine the bread. Stale, with a slight green tinge around the crust.
I pop the cork on the vial and sniff. Cherry cough syrup with an underlying medicinal bite.
Every detail matches perfectly. Down to the stale bread.
"This is insane," I whisper.
But even as I say it, the programmer part of my brain, which had apparently survived the crash and the coma and the Bob Ross landscape with its problem-solving instincts fully intact, is already running the implications. If this is real, if I am somehow actually inside the game I built, then I need to understand the rules.
And the first rule of Respawn is simple.
Death has consequences.
Real consequences. I had designed this game to be the ultimate test for hardcore players. No save scumming, no infinite do-overs, no respawning until muscle memory kicked in. Players got seven lives, seven chances against a game I had specifically engineered to be unbeatable. Lose all seven, and your character was permanently deleted. Account banned. Game over, no appeals, no exceptions.
It was supposed to be the selling point. The thing that made Respawn matter in a market full of games that held your hand from the tutorial to the credits. I had been proud of it. I had pitched it to investors with a straight face and called it innovation.
But if I was really here, if this was really happening, then those were not just game mechanics anymore.
They were the difference between life and death.
- Writer
