The crowd at Inside Out was packed. It surprised me how being a gamer-geek suddenly became the new “cool.” This was the only virtual gaming den in Boston, and it was the only place other than the conservatory that I felt at home. I would spend hours upon hours getting lost inside the virtual worlds, and I now knew most of them by heart.
Tonight they had a brand new game, one that David, Gillian, and I had been dying to check out. It was called Mystreuce , and the owner of Inside Out said it was the hottest new game around.
Apparently, a few other virtual gaming dens that were in some of the trendiest cities in the country had received the game a few months ago, and now it had finally made its way here to Boston. I couldn’t have been more excited. Gaming had always served as an escape for me, even before my parents went missing.
I remembered spending half of my middle school years with my face stuck to my computer screen at home and the sound of my mother’s voice hollering up the stairs at me that it was time to go to bed. But now technology had come far enough to actually be immersed in the game, which made it even easier to lose track of time and reality completely. Plus, Mystreuce was a fantasy game, and fantasy was my favorite thing next to dance.
“This is going to be lit,” David said as he walked back toward Gillian and me.
“Did you get the key?” Gillian asked David he handed us our virtual reality headsets.
“Yeah. The owner said, and I quote, ‘Mystreuce is a world like no other.’” David grinned like a boy waiting up for Santa on Christmas Eve.
“Nice!” Gillian squealed.
We walked toward the room number on the labeled key—seven. The gaming den had thirteen rooms, and each of them was a private virtual experience for a guest or their group. Each room was programmed with the game you rented, along with the headsets, and as soon as you went in and closed the door behind you, the game began.
So far, the three of us had tried out every game in the place at least once. The role-playing ones were the most fun. I always set the timer so we would know when to hit the exit lever and jump from the game. It was easy to get swept up in some of them, and Athan would have a fit if we were late to rehearsals or if we came into the dance studio looking like we hadn’t slept all night. The longest we had ever stayed in a game was just under four hours, which could feel like days or even months, depending on how time passed in the game.
When we all got inside the room, David closed the door behind us, and we fit our virtual reality glasses and headsets on. Instantly, the room melted into a lush landscape unlike anything I had ever seen before. The terrain that spread out before me was nothing short of the type of emerald-green hills one would find within Middle Earth. The grass was so defined that each emerald-green blade seemed to dance synchronously in the breeze. Thanks to the amazingly immersive effects of the gaming den, I could feel the gentle wind on my face and smell fresh rain off in the distance. The only thing that seemed slightly out of place was the lighting.
It was illuminated but not bright, and from what I could tell, there was no actual light source—no sun, no other-planetary orb, no artificial lighting. It just seemed to be lit-up. Maybe that was something I could mention on the feedback that followed the completion of every gaming session. Aside from that, the world was so real and believable that if I hadn’t known better, I wouldn’t be able to tell I was inside virtual reality. I turned around to gawk at the impressiveness of this new scenery with Gillian and David, but when I looked back, they weren’t there. Strange, we entered the game at the same time, and therefore should have all spawned in the same place. Maybe there is some sort of glitch.
After what seemed like only a few minutes of walking toward the sprawling hills in front of me, the timer rang. There must have been a mistake. There was no way four hours had passed. I exited the game and removed my headset to find Gillian and David standing right next to me.
“Where were you guys?” I asked. “I didn’t see either of you anywhere in the game.”
“Where were you ?” Gillian said.
“Looking for you,” I answered as I tried to figure out what went wrong with the timer. “Maybe this is a one-player game?”
“Nah, it’s not,” David said. “Gillian and I were together as soon as we entered, and we stayed together the whole time while we explored and searched for you.”
“Weird. Well, at least it wasn’t that long. Maybe we’ll be together when we go back in this time.”
They both looked at me as if they were confused.
“But it’s time to go,” Gillian frowned. “Sorry we didn’t get to play all together, but we can try again tomorrow.”
I pulled my cell phone from my pocket and checked the time. There’s no way , I thought.
“You okay, Mara?” David asked me as he put his hand on my shoulder. “You look kind of pale.”
“Yeah,” I answered as I tried to shake the feeling of cobwebs from my brain. “It just didn’t seem like we’d been in there for so long. I thought maybe the game had glitched.”
“Nope,” Gillian said as she opened the door for us to leave the gaming room. “No glitch. And it felt like forever to me. We explored the whole city.”
“City? What city?” I asked.
“The giant capital city,” she answered. “I know it was just virtual and all, but I swear my feet actually hurt from walking all those streets.” Gillian laughed, and David nodded as though he were in agreement. “You okay?” she asked, obviously picking up on my completely blank expression.
“Yeah,” I lied. “I’m fine. Just tired. Cool game, though, let’s play it again tomorrow after rehearsals.”
“Sounds good.” David smiled.
On the walk back to my apartment, I couldn’t get the thought out of my head…there was no city in Mystreuce .
I should have just said something to David and Gillian about it; I wasn’t sure why I didn’t. They both seemed to have had the same experience in the game, and I was the odd one out. I didn’t want to come across as being crazy. I’d never heard of having a differing game experience while inside the same virtual room. I didn’t even think that was possible. I made a mental note to ask the owner of Inside Out tomorrow when I went back to play. I wanted to check out the city they were talking about, and most of all, I wanted to see what was on the other side of those rolling, green hills.
I wish David and Gillian could have seen what I saw. Telling them about grassy hillsides would seem vastly underwhelming, but there was something about it inside Mystreuce that was more captivating than any other game I’d ever played. I wanted to go back in and find out what made it feel so enthralling.
When I got back to my apartment, I was way more tired than I thought. After a cup of hot tea and a small snack, I climbed into bed and pulled up my white Sherpa blanket until I could feel the fuzziness just under my chin. When I closed my eyes, my head sank into the pillow as if the bed was swallowing me up inside it. And when I dreamed, I found myself running over the crest of a high green hilltop that kissed the sky on the horizon. I could feel the soft grass between my bare toes as I curled them against the ground and looked out at the castle ahead.
The next day, I didn’t wait for Gillian and David. Instead, I headed straight to Inside Out on my own right after rehearsals ended. I absolutely expected them to give me shit about going off without them, but I was fine with that. My curiosity was burning hotter than my loyalty.
The owner of Inside Out was an older guy, probably in his early forties, and he always had on some sort of retro T-shirt that made him look like he was trying too hard.
“Hi, Mara,” he said as I walked in.
I felt bad; he always knew my name, and after more than a couple of years coming here, I still didn’t remember his. I thought it was something unremarkable like Greg or Bob. “Hey.” I smiled, hoping that a cute grin would distract from not knowing his name. “I had a question for you about that new game.”
“Ahh, Mystreuce ? It’s a good one, isn’t it?” He smiled slowly as if he were enjoying a sip of well-aged bourbon.
“Yeah, it’s pretty cool. Is there something different about the way that game operates?”
“What do you mean?”
Does he look guilty? I thought as I notice his odd expression. He looked both confused at my question and also not confused. There was a slightly unnatural lift at the end of his last word that made him seem as though he were overcompensating for something he’d done.
“I mean, when I was here yesterday with my friends, the game split us up. My friends were together in one part of the virtual reality, but I was alone in a different part.”
“How odd,” he said as he lifted two fingers to stroke the bottom of his chin.
“And the time seemed strange, too. I could have sworn I was only in-game for a few minutes, but when I exited Mystreuce , I saw that hours had passed.”
“Well,” he said as he regained his composure, “good games will do that to you. It’s easy to lose track of time inside VR.”
“Okay, but what about being separated from my friends? That’s never happened before. We all went into the same game room and entered the game at the same time. But they were in some city, and I was off on some green, hilly landscape,” I said.
He looked as though he had seen a ghost. “What did the hills look like? What did they feel like?”
“I think you’re missing the point,” I started to say; this guy was really starting to get annoying.
“No!” he nearly shouted at me. “I’m not missing the point at all. I just wanted to know what it felt like in there.”
Okay, he has completely lost it.
“Why don’t you go into Mystreuce yourself then?” I asked. Something didn’t feel right about this at all.
He immediately changed his demeanor back to one of routine doldrum. “Nah, I need to stay out here and help customers. You want to play something today or not?”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling a sense of trepidation start to vibrate beneath my skin. “I want to go inside Mystreuce again.”
He smiled and handed me the key and a headset. Just as I started to walk toward the game room, he called after me. “And by the way, my name is Greg.”
I looked back for a second and then continued toward the room. I honestly didn’t care what his name was. I only wanted to take a look inside this game again. I put on my glasses and headset and started the timer for four hours, although I wasn’t planning to stay in that long this time. I had rehearsal early in the morning, and I didn’t want Athan thinking I was slacking off.
The way the games always work was that you entered the virtual world in the exact same place that you were in when you logged out. But instead of the walls of the room giving way to the sea of emerald hills where I was the last time, they turned into the walls of a castle, and I found myself standing right in front of a towering gold palace; the same exact castle that I had dreamed about last night.
“This is impossible,” I whispered to myself. I hadn’t even seen this inside the game; I only saw it inside my head while I was dreaming. I walked forward and reached out to touch the cold, metal handle that hung from the massive door. When I opened the door and walked inside, the interior was dark, dimly lit only by a few candles that dripped a running stream of wax onto the stone floor. I heard voices whispering from within the corridors lining the wide, main hallway, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying.
I really hoped this game wasn’t going to have any jump-scares. It was marketed as a fantasy RPG, but sometimes the game designers liked to drop in a few scares or surprises just to be clever, and I really hated that.
“Hello?” I called out. My voice echoed off the walls and bounced right back off my mouth. “Is anyone here?”
The whispering stopped. So did the flickering of the candle flames. This game kept getting weirder and weirder. I slowly crept along the corridors of the seemingly abandoned—despite the eerie whispers—castle and took my time exploring each of the rooms and even some of the gardens in the courtyard. It was all quite beautiful, and it all had the same blank stillness that the lighting did, as though it both existed and didn’t.
When I had looked around the entire castle, I found my way back to the door to leave. I checked my timer before I opened the door to step outside, realizing that it felt like it might have been encroaching on the four-hour mark. When I looked at the clock, I couldn’t believe my eyes. It had never gone off, and although I knew I had been inside the game longer today than I had yesterday, I didn’t expect the amount of elapsed time to be anywhere near what my timer was indicating. Eighteen hours .
I quickly left the game, and as soon as my eyes had adjusted back to the real world, I checked the time on my phone. There’s no way , I mumbled to myself in disbelief. There’s no way I was in that game for eighteen hours. I raced out of the room and back to the counter, where Greg would be waiting to take my key and headset back. But when I got to the counter, he wasn’t there. In fact, no one was there in the entire place.