A Splinter in Your Mind - Matrix Quest

[open_sketch]

The date is March 29th, 1999.

Monday.

It is March 29st, 1999, because the calendar hanging in the break room, the ticking clock on the task bar of your computer, the word-a-day on Mabel's desk in Accounting all insist on it. It was in the tickers on the news in the morning, on the announcements while you rode in, scrolling by in lights as you waited for the subway.

Every piece of concrete evidence pointed to today being March 29th, 1999. There was no argument you could construct that it was any other day, no story you could tell. It didn't even particularly feel like it wasn't March 29th, 1999.

It just didn't feel like it was, either. It could have been the 30th, the 28th, the 1st of April. It could be 1998 or '97 or 2003 or 2021 or 2199 or 1867. All of it seemed the same. All of it just blended together into one endless, beginningless, meaningless forever.

It might not even be Monday.

You sipped your coffee, held onto the bitter taste as something real, just for a moment, then got back to work. It was the same task as always, some company you'd never heard of needing a unique payroll solution or scheduling software or accounting program. You felt sometimes like you'd written the same thing every day of your life.

You hit compile and went to get more coffee. When you sat back at your desk, the compiler had predictably crashed and spewed out a cascade of errors. You groaned: you were sure it'd work, you double-checked everything, but you always seemed to make the same mistakes.

Once or twice, you'd thought to yourself that it was, somehow, the compiler's fault. When you first started, you'd gone as far as to copy your code over to a fresh file to compare it, and there were times you swore you'd watched a typo or incorrect operator or misused variable appear in both files that hadn't been there. It had kept you up at night.

But you knew better now. The reality is that writing thousands of lines of code meant that there were always problems somewhere. No complex system was without errors.

---

The date is March 30th, 1999.

Tuesday.

Your work was never difficult, but neither did anything ever seem to come easy. Just once, just once, you wanted a program to compile right the first time. Just once, you wanted the debug window to be blank.

You sipped your coffee.

You couldn't complain. The money was good, better than you could have hoped really. The only catch was the overtime. The company said you were done at 5, but there was a clear implication that you were to stay longer, that anyone who didn't was letting down the team. People who went home at 5 didn't care about the company, didn't have passion for the work, and more often than not that meant they'd be clearing out their desk in short order.

The rumour you heard was they added up everyone's hours in the office and just cut the bottom five percent of every department quarterly. You didn't know if that was true, but you'd certainly resolved never to be in the bottom five percent.

You had grown to hate your cubical so much. When you first got here it had felt cool, your own little office almost. You'd put up posters and a little corkboard, tried to personalize the space, make it feel like yours. Now, though, you felt trapped. That was the nature of a cubical, that you were boxed in like a horse wearing blinders, no awareness of anyone else but no privacy from people walking past. The purpose of the cubicle was to narrow your world down to 36 square feet, to hide everything other than your desk and your screen while not letting you hide in turn.

You hit compile and went to get some coffee. You passed Chris, the new guy, walking zombie-like past you, going back to his cubical after doing the same. He'd pulled a fourteen-hour day yesterday, his first, and he seemed barely sentient now. Something had drained the life from him, the same vampire that had long since turned you.

You returned to a full debug log and a crashed compiler.

----

The date is March 31th, 1999.

Wednesday.

You'd stayed late yesterday, trying to get it to run, but every time there were new errors, new bugs, new problems. It was never this bad when you wrote software at home, when you used to write it in college back when you had dreams and ambitions and programming was fun. You swore you had to fix the exact same mistake more than once; it was like somebody had gone back and undone what you did.

It was nearing midnight when you finally gave up and went home. You were exhausted now. Your computer booted up and you opened everything back up, reading over it with fresh eyes. You double-checked everything. Explained it to Bentham, the rubber duck which sat atop your monitor facing the door to your cubical, watching the watchers.

It was perfect. Flawless. It would do what it was meant to do. You were good at your job. You pressed compile and went to get more coffee.

Sandra was there, in the break room. She smiled at you on the way back to her desk. She was so stunning, you always felt strange about it. The way a crush would always make you feel ugly and misshapen and wrong. How you always felt insufficient.

You returned to your desk to see the longest error log yet, line after line of red exceptions and loops and broken code spilling out. You trembled.

There was a moment where you almost dumped your coffee on your computer and walked away.

A moment where you kicked through the tower in a rage and screamed to the heavens until God himself came down to sort it out.

A moment where you pulled a gun from your briefcase, a gun you'd never seen or held but often dreamt of, a gun with one bullet for your boss and one for you so you can finally, finally be free of this fucking prison, of the screaming lights and grinding computers and insipid conversation, of the bitter coffee and endless papers and stress and overtime and errors, errors, errors in your perfect code, in your body in your brain in your fingers and hands and eyes the mirror lying to your every time your look, your tie a noose around the neck of a body that didn't feel like yours-

You sighed, sat down, took a sip of your coffee, and started fixing errors.

Life of a programmer. What could you do?

----

You left just before eight. Punching out early. You deserved it. Nobody accosted you on the subway, nothing went wrong. You got Chinese on the way back and were so hungry you'd eaten most of it by the time you reached your apartment.

Normally, you'd now open Mozilla Suite and IRC and uselessly browse the internet for a few hours before collapsing into sleep. You'd spend that time pretending to be somebody else; used to be literal, playing Ultima Online, but when you'd started at Cisco and the hours had made keeping up with the game impossible you'd ended up keeping the username, one you'd been using for one thing or another for years. It was a comfort, to escape yourself for a while.

For the first time you could remember, though, you had energy, just a tiny bit. Enough to work on the projects you wanted to work on, to pick something back up. You sat down at your long-unused desk, letting the wheels of your reclaimed office chair slide you in front of your keyboard, booted up as you started hunting through the CD-Rs and floppy discs in the bookshelf. A half-written IRC client, a handful of Quake mods, those fractals you'd made in Excel using conditional formatting as a laugh.

You know what? Fuck it, let's be ambitious.

You'd dreamt for years about writing an adventure game, like the kind you used to play as a kid on your dad's Amiga. You only had sketches of a story, but you had ideas for mechanics, about writing a text parser that could understand naturalistic sentences using some stuff you worked on in college, and you'd filled sketchbooks with drawings of the protagonist, this badass chick in a long coat and sunglasses who fought megacorperations in the cyberpunk dystopian future. A little Aeon Flux, a little Major Kusanagi.

You'd been thinking about her since middle school.

As sirens blared outside your window, you grabbed your old notebook and opened files you hadn't touched in the better part of a year. You were going to make progress today. You spread your notebooks out over the coffee table and-

There was a knock on your door.

Of course. Of fucking course. Was probably your bitch of a landlady after rent early, or some drunk fucking neighbour who'd locked himself out again. Or the cops outside had decided that they had probable cause to randomly search your apartment for the weed that they would, in fact, find under the cutlery in your barely-used kitchen. Fuck.

More knocking.

"Come on, Eugene, open up!" a voice came from the other side. You couldn't place it, but it sounded like somebody you knew. They sounded distressed. Maybe even in pain.

You opened the door, and there stood a familiar stranger.

He was a shorter man with short brown hair, wearing an all-black suit and tie with a white leather jacket over it, and he was clutching his side with a pained expression. There was blood on his hand, and the other held a gleaming silver pistol with a pearl grip.

"Eugene, man, thank God," he said, stepping forward. You stepped aside. He had a gun. "Close the door, man. Fuck…"

"Sorry, I…" You almost asked who he was, but there was something more pressing. "I'm going to call an ambulance."

"Fuck, dude, no. Hold on," he said, collapsing against your ratty couch and exhaling. "Fuck, clipped me good though. Um… off chance, do you reconize me? Know who I am?"

"... no," you said honestly. His face fell.

"Yeah, figured. God, the shit they do to you… is this how you live?" he said. You looked around your apartment and shrugged. It wasn't much, but it was home, as long as they didn't hike the rent again. "Shit. Where you working these days?"

"Cisco Systems. I… I write payroll programs mostly. Sorry, how do you know me?"

"I… I'd explain but you wouldn't believe me. I just need a minute to catch my breath and I'll-" There was a buzz under his coat, and he dropped the gun on your coffee table and, with pained movements, drew a phone from his jacket. "You got my exit? I… yeah, I know, I didn't exactly have a lot of options. No, I knew him, he's… he's harmless."

You paced nervously for a minute before the man indicated for you to take a seat. At his behest, in your own home, you sank back into your office chair and tried not to look too anxious. There were sirens outside, closer now than they'd been.

You realized this man was almost certainly a criminal and that meant you were harbouring a criminal and that meant your life was over, one way or another. Strangely, it didn't seem too distressing. It was just Wednesday.

"Yeah, I can make that," the man concluded, hanging up and stuffing the phone back in his jacket. In its place he withdrew a pair of green-tinted sunglasses, so dark his eyes disappeared behind them. He didn't look in nearly so much pain anymore. He plucked the gun back up off the coffee table, then paused. Shuffled the notebook around with the barrel.

"You still writing about her, huh?" he asked.

"Sorry?"

"The, uh, cyber-chick you used to draw. Shit, what was her name? You'd go on and on about her. You still going to write that game?" he asked, holstering his gun under his jacket.

"I was. I was just sitting down to, uh-" You paused. "How do you know about that? I've never told anyone about her."

"You told me. Just me," he said. "... did you have any friends in school. A best friend?"

"Yeah," you answered reflexively.

"What was his name?" he asked, and you opened your mouth and there was just a void where it should be. Helpless, you just shrugged.

"Yeah. That's what they do," he said, sighing and staggering to his feet. "Thanks, I'll get out of here. No trace of me. It was good seeing you again, take care of yourself," he said, moving to the door. Dumbstruck, you just watched him go, walking with a bold confidence now, right until his hand touched the doorknob.

He turned back to you.

"... actually. Hold on."

"Who are you?" you asked again, not sure what else to say.

"I think you might be asking the wrong person that question," he said. "Tell me something real quick. If you could be her, instead of you, would you want that?"

"I… I don't understand," you said honestly.

"Like… if there was a button you could press, or… heh." He paused to laugh to himself. "A pill you could take that would make it so that you never existed, and instead, you were her. The cyber-chick in your drawings. Would you take it?"

It was such a stupid, bizarre question.

"Yes," you said, without hesitation. "Yeah. Yeah, I would. I would."

The man nodded, reaching into his coat. You were expecting him to pull out his gun, to shoot you dead on the spot for your transgression, for admitting something so embarrassing, something so… wrong.

Instead, he was holding a small red pill.

"What's your name, girl?"

----

[ ] Write In​

 

[open_sketch]

"Alice," you said, a name you'd turned over in your head for years without knowing why. "But, she… she's named Coda, it's a music theory, um-"

"Coda," he said, like he was turning the syllable over on his tongue to inspect it. "I like it."

Then, to your utter horror, he retracted his hand, and with it the promised red pill. Horrified, you reached out impotently, opening your mouth to protest and making little more than despairing whine.

"I'm sorry girl. It's not safe now. Here," he withdrew and threw to you something you caught clumsily; a pager. "I'll be back for you in three days, okay? Keep your head down, stay out of trouble, and I'll be back. Can you do that?"

You shook your head, feeling on the edge of tears, and he nodded sadly.

"I know. Three more days. You can do it."

The door opened and he disappeared through it.

It was as though it had never happened. There was no trace. No blood on the couch. No cops accosted you. Gone.

You forgot about your project, and late into the night, you turned everything that had happened over in your mind, again and again. None of it made sense, nothing he said followed. He'd just been some… drug dealer. Trying to push a product on you. A childhood of cartoon memories flooded into your brain, just say no! Winners don't use drugs!

But, God, if his drugs could do what he said you'd take as many as you could get. If it could make you feel like her, feel like you were Coda instead of Eugene Lovelace, software engineer at Cisco Systems and nothing else, even for an instant, you…

You scoured the internet to find out what drugs came in little red pills. MDMA, maybe. Yeah, that was it. Little pills. They came in lots of colours, but sometimes they were red. They caused hallucinations. They made you happy. You couldn't remember what that felt like.

That night, you hit your weed guy up and asked him if he had any. He said to meet him tomorrow evening.

---

The date is April 1st, 1999.

Thursday.

You feel as though you have been subject to the world's cruellest prank. In the time since you'd convinced yourself that perhaps it simply hadn't happened at all. You'd been working yourself to the bone, your family had a history of mental illness. You had an uncle who had spent time in a psyche ward for schizophrenia. That's all that was happening. You were losing your mind.

April Fools, Alice. Eugene. Whoever you are.

That morning, while you were showering, by some strange impulse you covered your forearm in shaving cream and, mechanically, ran your razor along it, through the mat of thick, dark hairs. You couldn't explain what you were trying to accomplish at the time, it was on autopilot like everything else in your life, a puppet whose strings you didn't control, because you weren't a person. Just a body, just meat, shuffling to the abattoir.

Finished, you put your arm under the spray, and as the water washed away the twisted hairs and white foam it was like watching dirt flow off your body. Like you'd spent years scrubbing yourself raw trying to get rid of it and finally, for the first time ever, you felt clean.

You destroyed two razor cartridges, gave yourself a dozen small cuts, and were thirty minutes late for work, but for the first time in your life when you looked at the mirror, some part of the meat felt like you.

Now, though, it was hidden, clandestine, the metamorphosis concealed under a shirt and tie. You felt shrink-wrapped by it, even as it was armour against the questions that would be prompted. A cage and bunker both.

Your manager, that piece of shit, had choice words for you. Your first day late in over a year and he treated it like a personal offence. You spent the entire time in his office imagining various ways he could die. Trying to picture what his face would look like after somebody swung a sledgehammer at it and splattered all his delusions of power and importance and superiority over the cheap fucking carpeting.

"Yes, sir. It won't happen again," you said evenly. You returned to your desk. Started typing. The day ground by, each minute an agonizing eternity. You ate a ham sandwich for lunch while staring at the wall. Back to your desk. More coffee.

You hit compile and, for the first time, sat and watched. Within thirty seconds, the first error, then the program hung as the fans spun up and the hard drive ground out like a millstone. A harsh tone of failure beeped from the speakers.

You checked the clock. Five. You got up, got your coat, and left. Smiled smugly at your manager as you passed. Who cares. Fuck this.

You met your weed guy at the door to his apartment as usual. You never bothered learning his name, he never bothered to ask yours, but he was the best friend you could remember. You slipped the cash into his hand and he handed you, alongside your usual order, a tiny baggy with three little pinkish-red pills. They had a design pressed into them, sort of looked like the Playboy bunny.

"You ever tried that?" he asked. You shook your head. "Well, you're in for a good time. Give it about an hour to kick in, just take the one. You get a girl with you…"

"Yeah. Thanks, man," you replied warmly. You headed back up to your apartment, sat on the couch where the bleeding strange had sat (or not), and started at the little bag, letting it twist at the end of your fingers.

People took these at raves. You'd never been to a rave, or a club, or anything. Always too scared. Could you go to a rave? You went to your closet and pulled it open and were greeted with the endless collared shirts and pressed pants and identical ties. You didn't have much else.

Who cares. Fuck this. You threw on a black t-shirt you mostly only slept in and an old pair of ratty jeans you'd worn since high school and ducked out in your work jacket. You weren't sure exactly where you were going, but you wandered until you found somewhere where people were lining up. Inside you could hear music, a deep, fast beat.

You slipped the pill onto your tongue, waiting a short while to be let in, and found yourself in a space at once too bright and too dark, lights flashing, music pounding, bodies packed wall to wall. Too close, closer than you'd let people be in years, but you were oddly okay with it. You danced half-heartedly to a few songs, feeling awkward, then found yourself feeling somewhat nauseous.

You fought your way through the crowd to the washroom, but you didn't throw up. You thought you needed to leave, to get out, to forget this. You had work tomorrow. What were you thinking?

You moved to the sink to wash yourself off and caught sight of Alice in the filthy mirror, partially hidden behind graffiti. She didn't look as scared as you felt. She looked confident. She looked badass. She looked like she was ready to keep going. She looked like Coda.

You pushed back out into the crowd and danced.

You felt like you were the star of a music video. You felt like everyone was looking at you and for the first time in your life, that was a good thing. You realized everyone here felt the same way, swept up in the sound and excitement and life, the noise and lights pounding through your brain in lightning pulses of energy that seized your limbs, seized the puppet and made her dance. Brushing up against somebody else was electrifying.

There was a girl there who seemed to brush up against you particularly often, and soon you'd locked eyes with her, soon you were dancing with her and not just near her. She was the most beautiful person you'd ever seen, you thought. You couldn't place her ethnicity, quite, save that she had darker skin in contrast with a canary-yellow crop top and long waves of dark hair and a piercing in her nose, fishnet gloves up past her elbows, a bright plastic necklace that clattered with her every movement. You were mesmerized by her.

"What's your name?" she asked, after you'd danced for some impossible length of time and she'd pulled you aside to pay six fucking dollars for two bottles of water. You shrugged, honestly unsure.

Eugene, you should say.

Alice, you wanted to say.

"Coda," you replied. She smiled.

"Cool!"

"I… I just picked it. You like it?" you asked. Telling her that seemed like the most natural thing in the world.

"Yeah! You live around here?"

The moment, sometime later, of pushing through the crowd and out of the club, back to your apartment, all of it felt etched into your mind forever and yet completely fleeting. You couldn't recall what you talked about, if you talked, what her name was, if she gave it, what she was wearing, while she was wearing it. But you remember faces in the crowd in exacting detail, could recall how each shuffled step toward the door felt, what her fingers felt like along your bare wrist as you walked.

You were no virgin, but it had been a while. Not since college. It had never gone well. Eugene was a profoundly uncomfortable and sad person who had always felt like sex was something that happened to the body he was loosely associated with, something he watched from the outside with an alien fascination and disgust, even while he felt compelled by biology to pursue it. Alice wasn't sure how she felt yet.

Coda wanted her so, so badly, needed her touch like a drowning woman needed water. For the first time, the mechanics of it didn't matter, the exultation taking over and smoothing out the discomfort. You still felt like you were watching it from the outside, but right now that just added a pornographic thrill, voyeurism into your own life. It stil felt wrong, but in a perversely exciting way.

By contrast, coming down off the high in somebody's arms was pure bliss. The fact it was nearly three in the morning seemed nonsensical. Your body felt as though you'd run a marathon wearing weights, every muscle burning and worn, equal parts the triumphant soreness of a good workout and the genuine discomfort of pushing too hard. Exhaustion crept up on you.

You set your alarm, jacked the volume all the way up, and-

-you felt like you were underwater. Not a pool, maybe a hot tube. Warm, body temperature, thick like honey. There was a distant discomfort, a weight in the back of your skull, but it was very far away. You felt at peace. You could sleep here.

There was a disturbance, and you opened your eyes. For a moment you felt like you were in a metal room, like an old and rusting warehouse. There was a woman watching you, leaning forward with a look of disbelief on her face, and as she closed a green glow reached her face, like she was close to a screen.

She reached a finger out and poked at you, and she was gone. You'd closed your eyes. You struggled to open them again. Should get awake anyway. Work soon.

This time, you saw only red. Felt yourself suspended in something, thick and viscous. The discomfort was like a knife through your brain. Everything was blurry.

You saw thousands of red lights, stretching up above you and around you, forever. In every one, a person. You tried to reach out a hand, but even that motion was so tiring that instead, you just faded back into sleep.

---

The date is April 2nd, 1999.

Friday.

The alarm was a cruel screech that shook you awake, one the woman sharing your bed wasn't pleased with, and she stormed out while you showered. The water, cold or hot, did nothing to wake you up. The first cup of coffee in your cubical was powerless against the exhaustion. Where yesterday you felt invincible, like Coda, today was the most Eugene you'd had to experience in a very, very long time.

You started working your way through the error log, correcting the same fucking mistakes you always made, unable not to feel bitter about it. How the hell do you mix up < and [, after all this time? You'd been coding since 1992. You'd fixed it enough times that you were always very deliberate about it, but it felt like you always found one instance of misuse somewhere, as you hunted through line after line looking for what went wrong. Didn't help the debugging software was shit. You'd written your own, but weren't allowed to use it, or anything else. In-house only.

It sometimes felt like they didn't care about how efficiently you worked, only that you worked.

Your manager glared at you every time you made eye contact, and loitered outside your cubical constantly. You were one of the most productive people on the floor but you'd slipped and that was it. Perfection or nothing. The message was clear.

Just one more day. Tomorrow was the weekend. You didn't have to come in, though you usually did. Maybe you'd leave early tomorrow. Take another of those red pills. Feel like Coda again.

"Mister Lovelace?" somebody said, a million miles away. You tore your eyes from the screen, the line after line of perfect, broken code, and saw one of the HR workers whose name you could never remember. The one who always wore those ridiculous silver broaches that looked like little woodland creatures and shit.

Today, a pig.

"Um. The, uh, they want you in meeting room six. Right now," she said. Heh. Of course. You'd been anticipating this. You sat up, stretched, adjusted your tie. If they were expecting you to grovel for your job, they were sorely mistaken. You didn't have the energy for anything right now except perhaps giving them the finger on the way to collect your shit. Maybe with both hands. Actually, you were strangely excited for that.

You stepped into meeting room six with both chambers loaded, but your manager wasn't there. Neither was your boss, or his boss. There were just two cops, and a man with brown hair, a dark green suit, and sunglasses.

"Mister Lovelace, thank you for joining us," the man drawled. His voice was entirely serious, non-nonsense, emotionless. "Please. Sit."

It wasn't an offer. Numbly, you pulled out a chair opposite and sat down.

"What's this about?" you asked.

"Don't worry, you aren't in any troub-" one of the officers started, but the man in the suit silenced him with a hand.

"Let me be brief, Mister Lovelace. We have reason to believe you might have information that would facilitate the capture of a dangerous criminal," the man said, staring at you with those blank lenses. "We also have on file here several potential offences that, while fairly minor, do qualify as felonies. Drug possession, for one."

You nodded stiffly.

"I want my lawyer," you said. He smirked.

"To be clear, we are not particularly interested in prosecuting you. Our resources would be better spent on the case we're working, though if we have no leads we do have spare time to do the… paperwork," the man replied. "Do you understand?"

"Crystal clear," you responded tersely. You were so terrified you thought you might piss yourself, but at the same time there was a rising anger at the bullshit here, coming after you for daring to feel alive for one fucking night, using it as leverage against you. Assholes.

"Good," the man said, slowly unwinding a thick file in front of him. It flopped open and you expected to see yourself, but of course not. The most crime you'd ever done was steal a handful of POGs from a convenience store when you were ten, and some casual drug use. Maybe a few programs you'd written might violate laws, maybe.

The man slid a photograph across the table. On it was a blurry, greyscale picture of the man who'd hidden in your apartment, wearing those same sunglasses, the same white leather jacket. He had a pistol in hand. Somebody had circled his face in a red marker, his dispassionate expression as he fired his weapon at something off-camera.

"This photograph was taken at a bank robbery three months ago, one that left four people dead," the man explained. "The… individual in the photograph is, we believe, personally responsible for the deaths of at least six people, theft and destruction totalling nearly sixteen million dollars, and a long history of human trafficking."

"Huh," you said, not knowing how else to respond. The suit nodded.

"Indeed." He paused, drawing out another picture. Same man, same clothes, same pistol, same greyscale, though you could not see his face in this one. There was a blue circle around him as he ran, and a gun was being pointed at his back by somebody just intruding at the edge of the picture. "This is no mere criminal, Mister Lovelace, this man is a member of an organized crime group responsible for a variety of heinous acts. They have connection with slavery, people smuggling, the drug trade, and international terrorism."

"They… uh, they sound like a bad bunch," you said, stumbling over your words.

"I have only one question for you, Mister Lovelace, and I just need you to confirm what we already know. Tell the truth, and this ends here. You go back to your cubical, and everything we have on you will be… forgotten. Lie, and you will find out how short our patience can be."

You could see the reflection of the two photos in his glasses, and your own terrified face staring apprehensively back. Truth or lie. Run or fight. Blue or red.

"Do you recognize the man in this photograph?"

---

[ ] Tell the truth.​

[ ] Lie.​

 

[open_sketch]

"I've never seen him before in my life," you said, willing your voice as even as you possibly could. The man in the suit sighed, closing his file, looking honestly disappointed.

"Very well. Officer, cuff him. Mister Lovelace, you're under arrest for felony drug position and harbouring a fugitive," he said, standing up from the table with a weariness clinging to him.

"I want my lawyer," you repeated uselessly as the cuffs came out.

---

After a ride in the back of a cop car, you spent the next eternity in a small, windowless, overheating room somewhere in the depths of a police station, handcuffed to a steel table staring at puke-green walls. The halogen overhead sang its best rendition of tinnitus. There were no clocks, no way to see out, they'd taken your watch and pager and the two pills you had forgotten to take out of your jacket pocket. You were hungry and your mouth was dry and were so desperately exhausted it was hard to stay upright.

You'd asked for a phone call, to call a lawyer. The cop who'd shoved you in here had said you'd get your call in a minute. You couldn't tell how long ago that was. You didn't even have the energy to cry. You called out for help, but nobody came. You could hear no sound from outside the door, nothing but the light overhead and your own ragged breathing.

At some point, you think you fell asleep, not because you had any memory of it and not because you felt any better rested, but because there was a crick in your neck and your face felt sore from lying half-on your arm. You were fairly sure that this was in violation of your constitutional rights, but who was going to enforce that? The cops?

You were just starting to accept that you were going to die in this room when the door opened. A policeman stepped inside, holding the door open, and then in came a young Black woman in a purple suit who gave you a cheerful smile.

"Excuse me, officer. Attorney–client privilege," she said. She had a clear British accent and her voice was sunny and friendly. The officer rolled his eyes at the inconvenience of following the fucking law and closed the door behind him. Exhaling, she sat down and pulled up a briefcase.

"Do you have anything to drink?" you asked. She nodded and pulled out a water bottle, then paused halfway through handing it over, noticing how short the chain on your cuffs were. For some absurd reason, you felt a pang of guilt, like it was your fault you'd asked for something impossible. "Fuck… I'm sorry."

"Don't be. You did the right thing," she said. You looked at her strangely as she smiled and pulled something else out of her briefcase, a laptop in bluish steel. She clicked a few buttons, and you felt a static snap against your cuffs.

"What are you doing?"

"Right, that should do it. Hello Alice," she said cheerfully. "Or, would you prefer Coda?"

Unsure what to do, you just shrugged. You couldn't decide, and you didn't have the energy to argue.

"Miss Lovelace, then," she said. "I'll say, you really won us over back there, lying to an Agent. Not a lot of people we can count on to do something like that. Cache was onto something after all."

No part of that statement really parsed, even if all the words were familiar.

"What time is it?" you asked.

"The date is April 3rd, 1999," she said. "Saturday. It's seven AM." You'd been in here for almost fifteen hours.

"You're not my lawyer," you accused, and she nodded.

"No, I'm not, though I am here to get you out. You went and made that a lot more complicated for us, but you did us a good turn, and now we're going to do an awful one." She retrieved another thing from her briefcase. "I'm Page."

"Paige… what?" you asked.

"Just Page." She clicked open a small steel case in her hands and took something out. "I know you have a lot of questions, but we're on a short schedule here."

"Um… do you know the man who came to my apartment?" you asked.

"I do. That was Cache. He'd come here himself, but he's on their radar now. Don't worry, he can hear you."

You weren't sure how that would be reassuring. She transferred something to her other hand, then held both out in front of her.

"Miss Lovelace, I'm going to give you a choice now, and it is going to seem incredibly obvious what to pick. I still want you to think about it carefully, okay?"

"Okay," you agreed. You'd agree to anything at this point.

"Now, there's no physical mechanism we can understand in the human brain from which choice originates. It's all procedural, and there's evidence that we never make choices at all, that our brain makes decisions instantly and without conscious thought, and what we think of as reasoning occurs afterward, retroactively," she explained. "And yet…"

You blinked, and in place of the woman who was speaking to you, there was a man. They looked quite a bit alike, as though they could be siblings, but the distinction was clear. You couldn't tell the moment when the change had happened. You almost felt as though this man had been the one to walk through the door.

"And yet there is nothing we resent so much as not having a choice. We can justify anything to ourselves if we are given the illusion of choice," he said. "Even if the choice is no choice at all, even if the choice was never truly ours to make, if we can tell ourselves our circumstances are of our own making, we feel we have power."

"I thought you… she… you said we didn't have a lot of time," you said. He nodded.

"That was taking into account how longwinded I'd be. I want you to understand, when I give you this choice, it is not because the answer is in question. It is because you need the choice, Miss Lovelace. You need to feel control over what happens next."

He opened his left hand. Resting on his palm was a small blue pill, translucent, the light from above refracting onto his skin.

"If you take the blue pill, then the next thing you will recall is waking up in your own bed. The case will be thrown out on procedural grounds: Nobody will care. You are and will remain a nobody. You will return to work on Monday as Eugene Lovelace."

You nodded. You were so scared and exhausted right now that that sounded like paradise.

"Okay. Give me the pill. Please," you said, and he stopped.

"Hold on there, Miss," he cautioned.

"I…" you stammered.

"Tell me, Miss Lovelace. What's wrong with the world?" he asked. You shook your head, the question too big for you. "Take your time."

"W-what isn't?" you asked, staring down at your manicled wrists, at the scratched steel table. "I know I'm lucky, I know it could be so much worse, but I feel like I'm being ground to pieces, like… like a poison in the air and on the screens and under my own skin, like it feels like I wasn't… I wasn't made for this. For offices and managers and hunting typos. For ties and suits, for…" You stopped, the shackles at your wrist clacking as you trembled with it. "It feels like I'm trapped. It feels like I've always been in this little room."

You looked back to his face, and once again the woman was there, smiling.

"I know exactly what you mean."

She opened her right hand. Resting on her palm was a small red pill, translucent, the light from above refracting onto her skin.

"If you take the red pill, I will show you what's beyond the walls of this… little room. With that truth may come understanding, freedom, and power over yourself that you've never had. But it will also come with pain, fear, and struggle. Truth reveals, but revelation is destructive."

The two pills sat before you.

"Is this it? Just these two choices?" you asked, and that's when her eyes lit up.

"Oh, of course not," she said. "But I do only have two pills."

---

[ ] Take the red pill.​

[ ] Take the blue pill.​

 

[open_sketch]

You indicated to the red pill, and she placed it carefully on your palm. As you closed your fist around it, she drew out a pair of bolt cutters from her suitcase, and casually cut your cuffs. She barely seemed to exert any effort at all.

You brought the pill up and placed it on your tongue, then grabbed and downed the entire bottle of water so quickly you choked on it a little. She laughed, then indicated for you to put your hand out. You did, and she placed an electrode against your wrist.

"Normally we do this in a secure location with a lot more equipment. This is somewhat more improvised, and it's going to be very uncomfortable," she said.

"What are you doing?"

"Breaking you out," she replied briskly, tapping something on the computer. "The pill is going to help us find you, but in doing so it's going to kill you."

"W-wait, what?"

"Yeah, I know. Don't worry, just a little," she said, pinching two fingers. "Just enough. Okay." She took out a cell phone and flipped it open, jamming a thumb on a button and bringing it to her ear. "I don't want to say hurry up, but do hurry up. I mean, look at her, she's half-dead already, this is a rush job."

"I don't want to die," you said, feeling cold washing over you. Feeling a sudden panic rising in you, you started clawing at the cuffs still around your wrists, pushing yourself away from the table. "I don't want to die!"

"Hold on, sweetie, you're going to be okay! I... just sit, please sit down, oh bugger-"

You stood unsteadily, the room swimming. There was something deeply wrong, you were too warm, overheating. You pulled at your tie.

"What's happening to me?"

"Ever woken up from a nightmare in a cold sweat?" she asked. You nodded. "Same thing, just bigger. Sit down."

You moved back toward the chair, but it slipped out from under you. You suddenly felt very weak, the world seeming to slide until it was sideways as you crashed down onto the floor, dragging the laptop half off the table by the cables. You were having trouble breathing, like you were underwater.

There was that woman in the rusting warehouse again, tapping on a keyboard and glancing up. She leaned close, staring through thick glasses, mouth agape, and she pulled another panel from somewhere and-

You saw red all around you, a cloying wet warmth, a weight on your chest. You were choking on something. You felt so weak-

You were lying on the floor of the interrogation room in a puddle of your own vomit, twitching and spasming involuntarily. The woman was lying down next to you with the laptop, tapping furiously, pausing to dab your forehead with a cloth.

"Chrysie, please tell me you have her. Please."

"We do, I'm sending the signal! Disengaging the macerators!" you heard somebody say. The woman in the warehouse, staring at you through the walls of this place, the walls beyond the walls, before the twisted and dissolved into nothing, the world falling away around you, receding to a single point of light.

The light took on a sickly red character, and you opened your eyes for the first time.

You were surrounded on all sides by metal, wires, hoses, in a warm liquid that pressed in around you on all sides. There was something in your mouth and nose, a pressure, awful, choking. You strained to reach out, to try to break the surface, but it resisted. You dug your fingers in against it and finally, it yielded and you pushed yourself upright.

You lost your balance in the liquid and collapsed against the edge, and there was a flash of somewhere else. Your body, lying on the floor of a tiny room, a woman reaching down to close your eyes. Her hand swept over your face and you were back, straining against the edge, struggling to breathe.

You gripped something metal at your mouth, already rapidly cooling, and pulled. You could feel whatever it was leave your body, leaving your retching and sputtering. The heat was already fading and you were so, so cold.

Pained, you tried to look around you. There was nothing but many blurry dots of red light, everything beyond a few feet indistinct. There was no point looking beyond yourself, so you looked down instead.

There was a body. Metal ran from every part of it, from the arms and legs and up to the back of your neck, ports along your torso. But the shape of it was new, completely unfamiliar.

Because wasn't the body you were trapped in.

It was your body.

You didn't understand anything else that was happening, lying against the side of some tub of goo in a cold and desolate place, unable to see past your hand, with steel sticking out of you, but you cried tears of joy, overwhelmed by it. You didn't have the energy to do anything else, you had no comprehension what was happening, but none of it mattered.

There was a change in the air pressure around you, and a shadow loomed over you. You glanced up to see something hovering over you, regarding you with a host of dispassionate eyes. It brandished strange, sharp instruments at you on a multitude of limbs, drifting closer.

You smiled at it. You didn't have room for terror.

It seized you around the neck and there was a roar of pain through your body as cables and wires disconnected, the sound of drills and knives, then you flopped back into the liquid, helpless. The last thing you remembered was falling.

---

You remember only bits and pieces of what you were told were the next two weeks. You remember harsh lights, voices familiar and strange, a rusting steel ceiling. You remember struggling to focus on anything, being unable to move, being cold. You remember people moving you from place to place, pulses of electricity in your limbs, pinpricks of pain. It passed as a strange, disjointed dream.

You awoke on a ratty cot, in a small, dark steel room. It reminded you of movies about submarines, that same claustrophobic metal box, the pipes and gauges and valve wheels all around you. There was an IV in your arm, but rather than leading between a bag and a needle, it was a glass jar and…

There was a round, dark steel port about the size of a quarter in your forearm, into which it was inserted. Gently, you poked it, shivering at the feeling where your flesh ended and the metal began. You tried to dig your fingernails in, but you found they were only half-grown, not nearly long enough to reach.

You were wearing something like a hospital gown, almost, just a single sheet of ratty, paper-thin material, and as you sat up and watched how it draped over your body, you realized that you weren't dreaming. The metal in your body was suddenly of secondary concern.

Delicately, you started to pull it aside, barely able to believe it.

There was a knock on the door, and you pushed the cloth back in place.

"Uh…. come in?" you said, your voice different than you expected. Raspy and weak, yes, but also a different pitch, a different tone.

The door clunked and swung open, and there was the woman you'd seen, the one in the warehouse you realized was this place. She was tall, a bit heavy-set, South Asian you think, with long dark hair and a broad smile. She wore a pair of thick, round glasses with mismatched arms, one of which had wiring and lights crudely soldered in place.

"Alice?" she asked, and you nodded. "Oh, good! Uh, we're going to need to get you some clothes and stuff, we're going to get that done, um, don't leave. There's no back on that gown, and as much as I'm sure you are thrilled to see the real you, I don't know how much you want to show that off to everyone else. I mean, not that they haven't seen… well, no… Sorry."

"Hey. It's okay," you said, and she leaned against the wall and let the door close.

"Sorry, I'm… not great. At words. Generally," she admitted, pushing the glasses back up her face. "Or, like, talking. Humaning. Ironically."

"I really understand. I… I have a lot of questions," you said. "Uh… first one being… who are you? Why do you seem familiar?"

That threw her for a loop.

"Huh. Well, my name is… okay, so, we all go by handles, like, usernames? So when I say Chrysalis, like, that isn't weird here. Uh… most of us have names they'd rather leave behind?"

"Oh," you said. "Well, Coda then."

"Alice is fine, it's a pretty name. Names can be handles," she said.

"Um, is… is Cache here? Or Page?" you asked.

"Okay, um, well, they're asleep, it's just me and the captain working the night crew, you know? Saw your, uh, biometrics light up. Uh, we could wait for everyone, but I think you'd probably want to do the intro now, get the questions out of the way?"

"Sure," you agreed, "Uh, if you could get me something to wear?"

---

You staggered out a few minutes later, feeling very strange. The fact you'd never walked on these feet before was one thing, but there were so many differences from what you remembered. You were shorter, smaller, your hips wider, the centre of gravity different. You'd say everything was subtly off, but it was more like the opposite, moving freely after a lifetime weighed down.

You were wearing a ratty sweater over a turtleneck and a long, woollen skirt that Chrysalis had found you. They smelled a little odd, stale, if that was a thing clothes could be, but you were grateful all the same.

Chrysalis led you out, down a short hall to a familiar chamber, that rusty metal warehouse you now saw was some kind of control centre. There was an enormous workstation of flat screens, panels and keyboards, all looking salvaged and welded together, and beyond it a half-dozen of what looked quite a bit like dentists chairs, surrounded in steel and wires.

"What is this place?" you asked.

"Um… well, we'll get to all that, but it's a ship, sort of," Chrysalis said, sitting down in her chair. It rolled partway across the floor and bumped against the station as she turned and started booting up screens. "If there's any meditation exercises or deep breathing or anything you like to do, now's a good time to start, by the way."

"You said there was another person awake? The captain?" you asked. "Where are they?"

"Oh, you'll meet Frag in a minute. Okay, sit down over there and we'll do this one piece at a time, okay? Basically… that's a VR device, it's going to make this easier."

"Okay," you agreed, sitting down and placing your head against the rest. She swept over and indicated where to put your limbs, then started pulling straps over your wrist with an apologetic expression. "Um, I'm going to guess that I've been using a device like this my entire life, right? It was all… virtual reality. Like Plato's Cave?"

She paused, then laughed.

"Yeah, shit, got it in one," she said. "Damn."

"Fuck, really?" you asked, feeling somewhat disoriented. "So, like, everything?"

"I know, it's a lot. And, uh, sorry about the straps, it's just, we really, really don't want you falling out of the chair, okay?" she said. "Look, don't worry, Most people have a way worse freakout when we tell them their entire lives have been a virtual illusion. The rest of it shouldn't be a problem at all. You're taking this like a champ!"

"Yeah, well…" you said numbly, voice trembling. You didn't feel like you were handling it all that great. She clamped two more straps over your mismatched boots, then moved around behind you. "So is there a headset or?"

There was a sharp pain behind you, and the room was gone. You were standing in a white void, on nothing, surrounded by nothing. You turned and looked all around you, disoriented by the vast blankness.

"Um… Chrysalis? Hello?"

"She can hear you, but you'll need a device to talk to her. Most of the time, at least," another voice said. You turned to follow it, back to another expanse of blank space, and you saw a woman, reclining back on an elegant loveseat, smoking a cigarette. She was an Asian woman with a short sweep of hair, wearing what looked for all the world like an all-black Victorian dress partially rendered in PVC, with a pair of small, square sunglasses.

"Frag?" you guessed.

"Hello Alice. Take a seat," she said. "You are astute, I'm impressed."

You turned to see a chair behind you, and sat down… and that's when you noticed something wrong. It wasn't you in VR, not your body, not the real body you only had for a few minutes. It was… back… back to-

You hugged your arms to your chest and shivered.

"Oh, I'm so sorry," Frag said, the stoic tone of her voice instantly gone.

"Let me out. I want to go back. Let me go back," you begged. Frag sighed, shifting a little closer.

"Alice, this is temporary. What you see when you look at yourself, what others see inside this place, is something called residual self-image. It's an interplay between the information fed to you and your own perceptions, in a loop to create a consistent avatar to represent your physical form."

"Why is it wrong?" you asked, trying to stare up into the bright void, away from it, trying not to feel it.

"We don't know. It may simply be a glitch in the way the system is programmed, an exception caused by a hormonal imbalance during the creation of your nervous system, an oversight in the installation procedure, we don't know. It isn't uncommon for elements of our RSI to not match our true selves. In much the same way, it is equally common for our RSI to better reflect who we are than the physical body outside the system. Do you understand?"

You shook your head. You didn't care about any of this. You just wanted out.

She sighed.

"Your mind and the system are going to need time to resyncronize. Now that you are disconnected, as you grow more used to who you are, as your understanding and self-understanding grows, your RSI will change to match it. You can leave at any time, but the longer you stay, the more it will adapt to reflect the real you."

You nodded, slowly, pained.

"I'll stay," you assured her.

"Thank you," she said. "Well, there's not much point in dramatics, so let's cut to the chase. Your life, and the life of everyone you have ever known, has taken place inside a vast simulation. This simulated world imitates select parts of Earth, as it was in the late 20th and early 21st century."

"... what year is it?" you asked.

"We don't know. Our best guesses from the records we have retrieved indicate it may be sometime in the mid-to-late 2800s," she said. "With a margin of error of hundreds of years, potentially more. Information is difficult to come by. In any case, it hardly matters to the material situation."

There was a shift in the void, and you found yourself sitting back into the control centre from before, Chrysalis sitting behind the desk. She waved to you and you waved back. Frag was sitting next to her, still dressed exactly the same.

"Did we just unplug?" you asked. Your arms and legs weren't strapped down, you sat up, and looked down. Nope. Nope still the awful old body, in the shirt and tie. "Fuck. This is just an illusion too?"

"Yes. The nature of the software we are dealing with allows a complete capture of all sensory input and all nervous output. The reality inside of these simulations is, to the naked human perception, indistinguishable from what we could see if we looked outside our window. Follow me."

She got up and moved down another hall, the one opposite of the one you came from, and you followed her up a set of metal stairs and through a door. It leads to a cockpit of some kind, with places for three people to sit, and nothing but white void outside the windows.

She sat in the third seat. You leaned against one of the consoles.

"This ship is the Ashur. It's a magnetic hovercraft. It uses vast amounts of electricity to suspend itself inside the Earth's magnetic field. Don't ask me to explain the physics to you in more detail, I don't understand them well myself, but this system allows us to travel the world freely. It's a small ship, but fast and nimble, and needs very little maintenance."

Outside, the white void was replaced with a cold blue as the ship seemed to swerve toward a tunnel in the void, the controls moving of their own accord. The ship was plunged into darkness as it swept through the tunnels, shifting and turning.

"Who built the illusion?" you asked.

"This one was programmed by myself and Chrysalis, as a little taste of home. But… I imagine you mean the one you lived most of your life in. The Matrix."

Something about that word felt familiar. Like you'd seen it, in your deep dives of the internet's weirdest conspiracy freaks and their Geocities pages.

"Yeah."

"It is a more complicated question to answer than you might think," Frag replied. "The definition of built can cover many meanings. But, if you want to ask who the Matrix serves, who controls it… there's your answer."

The ship emerged from the tunnel to stare over a vast, apocalyptic landscape. Under an endless spread of stars, lit only by dim red lights, lay a vast and inhuman city. Towers stretched to the heavens, breaking the clouds, enormous devices clattered and groaned as they worked. Swarms of red lights buzzed between every structure as the ship drifted forth.

As you got closer, flying between the towers, you started to see them in detail. A dizzying variety of insectoid bodies, in steel and glass, hovering and climbing and skittering over every surface, regarding the world with a multitude of glowing red eyes.

"They're machines," you said.

"No, Coda. They're the Machine. A vast hive mind of drones and controllers, in a network that spans the Earth. They only rarely create independent consciousnesses, and less now than ever. How they came to be, how they came to dominate the Earth… all we know is that there was a war, and we lost."

The city sank out of view as the hovercraft dove back underground.

"So, do you fight these machines? The… machine?"

"Yes. Some ships are warships which can sally out to destroy their facilities, frustrate their scouts, turn them back, but if we had to fight them head-on we would lose every time. They have the numbers, the cold coordination, technological capabilities we can't match. That is where ships like ours come in. But we'll get to that. How are you feeling?"

You sat down in the pilot's seat, watching the controls twist in front of you of their own accord, feeling a little faint.

"Overwhelmed," you admitted.

"Well. Let's take a break from history and… current events, then," she said. "Have you ever been in a fight?"

"Not since middle school," you admitted.

"Then you may be out of practice. Chrysie?"

The ship was gone. In its place was a bar of some sort with a distinctly Chinese vibe and last decade's aesthetics. There were four men in work clothes at the bar, drinking and laughing, then all as one they turned to face you. Their expressions hardened.

"I-I don't know how to fight," you said, as they all stood up as one and started pacing toward you.

"Let's fix that," Frag said, sitting back against one of the chairs. Nobody seemed to notice her move, it was like they couldn't see her. She plucked one of their drinks off the bar and took an elegant sip. "Is there a martial art you always wish you knew?"

"Wh-what?" you asked, backing up. You bumped against a table and glanced for the windows. There was nothing outside but void.

"Better choose quick. They look pissed."

---

Once she's had time to get used to the capabilities of her RSI, what is Coda's greatest strength?​

[ ] Her reflexes and instincts to avoid danger. (+TWITCH)​

[ ] Her toughness and ability to take hits. (+GRIT)​

[ ] Her precision and power with her fists and feet (+FORCE)​

[ ] Her accuracy with firearms and instincts in a gunfight (+COOL)​

​

What is her weakness?​

[ ] Her slow reaction times. (-TWITCH)​

[ ] Her fragility and low pain tolerance. (-GRIT)​

[ ] Her hesitation on the attack (-FORCE)​

[ ] Her handling of firearms (-COOL)​

​

What martial art will you be starting with? Pick something fun and interesting I can research and incorporate into fights! This is a purely narrative choice, but narrative still matters a lot!​

[ ] Write In​

​

This is a plan vote.​

 

[Salty]

Plan Voting, a Tutorial:

TUTORIAL BEGIN

---

{X}: The plan name goes here. Give it a name, make it cool. Short works better than long, though.
-{X(1)}
-{X(2)}
-{X}(etc)}: The choices you're actually being given go here. Note the indenting hyphens, now. It's how you mark every choice as a subvote in your plan.

And when you want to vote for a plan? All you have to do is type
{X} Plan Y
and it magically means you don't have to copypaste the whole entire vote!

TUTORIAL END

---

It's a wonderful tool, that you should really all learn how to use.

 

[open_sketch]

"Uuuh, shit! I don't know!" you protested, scrambling around the table as they closed, fists raised. "Are these… are they crew?"

"They're bots. Simple programs executing preprogrammed routines," Frag said. "They're just code, you can't reason with them. They won't listen. What do you do?"

"I don't know! I don't-" You grabbed a chair and tried to put it between you and them. "I don't know anything about fighting! I don't know kung fu!"

"Come now. You've played Quake. What do you do with bots?"

"Uh, shoot them! Nailgun, shotgun, grenade launcher… fuck I don't know, bunnyhop, rocket jump, sidestrafe?" you babbled. Frag smiled and took another sip as one of the men closed, squaring up against you. You put your fists up in front of you like a boxer, trying to stand firm.

"Sidestrafe? That's a start. Chrysalis, load in a training program for Baguazhang," Frag said. "Quickly now…"

"Wait, training pro-" you protested, but a second later the entire world blanked out, an absolute rush of sensation and information. Your muscles tensed, jaw clenched, ever nerve felt like it was on fire as all conscious thought was driven out of you at once.

You opened your eyes and saw the world differently. It was still the same place, the same run down dockyard bar, the same scuffed tables and angry men. But now those men looked like opponents, and you found yourself scanning their movements, sinking into a deeper stance. Everything about it felt natural, practised, like you'd been doing it your whole life.

You unclench your fists and held out open palms.

---

Roll 5d6.

 

[open_sketch]

Welcome to Artificial World

This is a PbtA powered, Matrix-inspired roleplaying game, which uses a very unique dice mechanic.

The five dice you just rolled form your CHARGE. Over time, you will learn to roll more than 5 Dice, but your Charge will never be larger than 5: you'll just discard the lowest.

This is because in Artificial World, all your dice are rolled ahead of time.

Your Charge is then spent as you see fit on moves. We will be making our first move now: Fight.exe.

Fight.exe REVISED
When you fight, your opposition prompts you with an amount of THREAT, derived from their own skill and their numbers. This represents how much they are able to put pressure on you in the fight, and also translate to the number of Attacks they make.

Examples

• Bluepills, Bots, & Non-combat programs: 1 Threat
• Exiles & Redpills: 2 Threat
• Agents: 3 Threats

Threat gives a number of dice you must input on defence to keep them away. Your GRIT reduces the effective Threat of your opponents by an equal amount. You can, if you wish, add excess dice past this: misses result in 1-Harm.

You may then input 1-3 additional dice on Offense to hit back.

Defence dice are inputted +Twitch, offensive dice input +Cool.

Defensive Partials block one attack, Fulls block 2. Any excess Blocks can then be spent on cool Abilities if you have them.

Offensive partials inflict 1 Harm, Fulls inflict 2 Harm. Finally, you add +Force to the amount of damage done, even if you didn't roll any Offense dice at all. Harm can be given up in exchange for special offensive effects. Misses on offence do nothing, which can be used to get rid of them.

If the total value of your Defense dice (prior to modifiers) exceeds your Offense dice, you've ceded the initiative to your opponent and they gain +1 Threat for the next round of fighting.

Remember, if at any point you input all the dice you have, you Charge and then keep inputting dice, with previous commitments staying where they are. You must commit your dice Offense, then Defence.

---

Here is your charge. What do you spend?

⚄⚄⚃⚂⚀

[ ] Write In

 

[open_sketch]

The first man, the first bot, reared back a fist to swing, and you stepped close, reversing your stance, your wrist to the back of his guard, your other hand crossing over as he lost his leverage and seizing his wrist. Your leg swept behind his and you shoved forward and down, hard, and he sprawled back, stumbling over himself, tripping and being caught by one of his friends.

It was so easy. So casual. Like you'd done it a thousand times. You turned to look at Frag with a huge smile on your face, to make sure she was watching, and the man you'd knocked over was pushed back at you by his friend and his foot connected hard with your face.

The last time in your life somebody had actually, for real, hit you was when you were fourteen, and it had never been like this. You staggered and fell against the table, which immediately tipped from your weight, and you crashed heavily to the ground.

"Eyes up, Coda," Frag reminded you, one pinkie out as she held her cup.

You scrambled to your feet, regaining your stance as they started spreading out to surround you. You paused to put a hand to your lip, and it came away red with blood.

"Why-?"

"As I said, the program can simulate any neural input. Any sense."

Your instinct was to back up, to blindly give ground, but instead you stepped carefully around, a long, wide circle, keeping them as close to single file as you could. The one nearest pulled a chair aside and pulled back his sleeve, snarling as he came in.

"You will only feel as much pain as you allow yourself to," she continued. The man came in, enormous overhand haymakers, and you threw your arms up in the way, every strike to your forearm and shoulders like a battering ram. "When you take a punch, or a bullet, the computer is trying to impose itself on your body."

You forced his arm down and aside, stepping around his leg, and you smashed your forearm into his nose, your elbow at his sternum. He wheezed and was on the ground in an instant, his head bouncing against the floorboards with an awful crack.

You instantly turned to face the next man, stepping back, from the small circle to the wide one, moving to meet him before his friends could arrive. He had a baseball cap on backward and patchy stubble, wearing a tank top under his open jumpsuit.

"But it can't. Not anymore. Here is a place where your body is yours, alone," Frag continued, relish in her voice.

He came at you with a straight punch and it just grazed your body as you carried on in your circle, as you brought the blades of both hands down into his shoulder, all the conserved movement of your body behind it. He was on his ass in an instant, and your knee came up into his nose with an unhesistating snap. His arms shot out stiffly beside him in an involuntary reflex and he crumpled, lifeless.

The other two bots looked at one another, then back to you. Their expressions never changed, but you did your best to imagine fear. They did hesitate, shifting around the tables, approaching cautiously. You had enough time to correct your stance, breathe deeply, and start walking another slow circle.

"If you fight for it," Frag finished, and the two bots moved in as one.

---

You earned a breather, which is all you need to Refresh. The three dice you spent now get rerolled and added back to your Charge. This also removes one of the Harm you took, so you only have 1 Harm.​

​

Roll 3d6.​

 

[open_sketch]

⚅⚄⚃⚁⚁⚀

Here is your new Charge. Again, you only need one successful hit to take out an opponent like this.

It is up to you if you save your 6. How do you spend your dice? What do you do?
[ ] Write In

 

[open_sketch]

Hmm, right.

What does Twitch apply to? Can we use it to give a bonus to attacks, or is that Force?

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Twitch applies to dodging incoming harm in a larger narrative sense, like dodging a car driving at you, getting to cover when you're being shot at, avoiding a sucker punch, etc.

All the stats can be applied to fighting, which is what the different Stances do. +Twitch gives you the Flexible stance. This lets you use partials to disarm or knock enemies down instead of damaging them, and without taking damage in return. You might imagine that this is very useful against tougher opponents to give you a chance to get away, breathing room to Refresh, or remove their weapons, but you can also use it when fighting a crowd to manage them without taking damage, only attacking when you have a Full Success.

The other Stances are Strong (+Force, +1 Harm per 2 Hits to one target, good for tough single targets), Defensive (+Grit, Take -1 Harm from the total of the incoming damage on the whole move), and Fast (+Cool, any natural 6 counts as 2 natural 6s, but they'll be adjusted by your stats as usual).

[X] Use the 6, 5, and 4

I want to see what happens when we use a 6 and what happens when we run out of successes.

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Natural 6s don't do anything special in regular moves. It's a specific case.