The Screen Went Black

Sometimes You Gotta Trust The Process

I’ve been in something of a creative slump recently. There are two or three ideas I’ve been kicking around that don’t seem to be materializing. Today I spent the afternoon trying to edit, (rewrite, if I’m being honest) an essay about AI that I had started that just felt, well, bad.

My mother (God bless her) made strongly encouraged me to go to a writer’s group she’d found on meetup. Very reluctantly I agreed to go and sat down for an hour with three strangers to write based on the following prompt: “The loading screen had ended but this was not the game I logged in to play.” So in the interest of showing that sometimes process is more important than product, I am posting the results of that exercise here in all it’s raw, unedited glory. Without further ado, The Screen Went Black:

The Screen Went black

The screen went black for a few moments. I was sure it was just a glitch. I’d been playing this game for months and I’d never had trouble booting it up. It was one of those turn-based strategy games I’d loved so much as a kid. Something I could enjoy without thinking too hard about, although sometimes I enjoyed the challenge of facing a particularly tough boss or tricky combat scenario.

When the screen came back on it was a close up of a character I’d never seen before. He was sort of pixelated, distorted. Like he hadn’t quite finished rendering. He looked straight at me with digital blue eyes. Text appeared in a speech box below.

“Thank God you’re here, we need your help.”

I frowned. Was this some kind of DLC that I’d installed and forgotten about? I hit the escape key trying to get out of the game but the computer didn’t respond. There was only a blinking arrow in the bottom right hand corner of the screen.

I clicked.

“They’ve got us trapped in here. We don’t know how they did it. All we know is for any chance of us getting out of here we need someone to beat the game.”

This must be some kind of game mode I hadn’t encountered before, I thought. I leaned back in my chair and clicked the flashing arrow again.

“Will you help us? Y/N”

I clicked the Yes button.

Suddenly the screen went black again. Another glitch? When it came back I looked in horror at the image in front of me.

A new character had appeared alongside the first. It was me. I stared, mouth agape at my in-game likeness. Is this some kind of prank? I looked around my room but nothing seemed out of place. I looked back at the screen and new text appeared in the dialogue box.

“Now that you’re here we can get started.” A tutorial of sorts began. “First, it’s very important to keep in mind that every decision you make is permanent. In this game there will be no save points or reloads, so be very careful not to make any careless mistakes. Second, any character that dies, whether an ally or an enemy, dies permanently. Both in the game and in real life. Including you.”

I stood up and pushed my keyboard away. This was too far. A joke in bad taste, the kind of thing you’d read on the nosleep reddit, or an old creepy pasta. Whatever it was, I wasn’t interested. Just as I moved to go to the kitchen for a glass of water a loud ping emitted from my speakers. The text in the game had advanced on its own.

In the dialogue box was a list of my personal information. Everything you could imagine. My age, address, full name, social security number birthday, childhood pets, first girlfriend, you name it. At the bottom, in bold italics, three words: WE HAVE YOU.

I sat back down, shaking a little. The first character reappeared. “Are you ready?” The camera panned to my avatar, the Y/N buttons hovering menacingly.

What if I pressed no? I wondered. Would someone really kill me? Is there a man with a gun waiting outside my door? That would be ridiculous, wouldn’t it? Even if they had all this information about me, even if they knew where I lived, whoever “they” were, they wouldn’t really hurt me, right? I started laughing. What a dumb joke. And how dumb was I to have started to panic about it. Probably some internet troll with too much time on their hands had found my personal data (and god knows who else’s) and wrote some sort of malware or something.

I sighed at how silly the whole thing was and hit “N.”

The world went dark.

I woke up in a white room with no doors or windows. In fact there wasn’t anything in the room at all, except, I noticed tucked away in a corner, a simple device with four buttons on it. It was kind of like an old school video game controller, without a joystick or a direction pad. The buttons were numbered one through four. I picked it up and tried hitting a few of the buttons but nothing happened. The controller didn’t seem to be connected to anything anyway. Slowly it dawned on me that I had no idea where I was or how I’d gotten there. Wasn’t I just at home playing a game? Had I fallen asleep and was having some kind of strange, lucid dreaming experience? Oddly I didn’t seem to be worried about it. In fact, I didn’t feel any emotions at all.

The boredom was just starting to settle in when the walls around me lit up. Images of a grassy field were displayed all around me. It was like being in some kind of virtual reality environment. I could move my head around and “see” different aspects of my surroundings but I couldn’t move. I found that I couldn’t speak either. That was, until the figure of a person appeared as though teleported right in front of me. A figure, eerily familiar. I tried hitting one of the buttons on the controller. Words not my own left my mouth in a strange garbled voice:

“Thank God you’re here, we need your help.”