Part 2 - Outside the Dungeon
Chapter 9
I finally woke up to my throbbing arm. Sometime in the night it had gotten wedged between me and the bed, and it was painful. I forced myself out of bed, grabbed the provided painkillers, and dry swallowed them. I stared at my messy room, the school backpack still in the middle of the floor where I had dropped it several months ago, a few ancient posters hanging from the walls of bands I’d never be able to afford to see live, and a pile of clothes that I had never bothered to put away. I studied the peeling paint near the ceiling critically.
I didn’t know what to do with myself. Mom thought she could get me a job with her work, a cleaning company that had contracts with several hotels. I wasn’t thrilled by the prospect of cleaning up after a bunch of rich assholes, but my mom was right. I needed money and in two years, when I turned 20, the government was going to expect me to either have a job or I’d be joining the American Alliance Force for a mandatory five years.
Joining the military didn’t sound half bad to me, it sounded a lot better than scrubbing toilets, but I also had Roosevelt’s month of training still in my head. I really didn’t want to deal with another Vita drill instructor that thought push-ups built character or made you a better diver. I was pretty tired of push-ups.
Technically I had money. Well, I had a little bit less than a quarter of a c-coin. The government’s idea of a universal basic income was to give everyone an electronic currency you could ‘mine’ with your brain. The more you let companies burn your brain out mining, the more cerebral coin you would gain.
It was no longer enough to live off of. After two decades, it was getting harder and harder to mine new coins. Supposedly, the chain wouldn’t end for another 100 years, but I didn’t see how that would benefit anyone. When the program first began, people were earning enough to, if not live comfortably, earn enough to survive. Now, if I spent all day letting it run in my head, I’d get a day or two of food, if that.
Mom was always getting on my case about how I needed to keep the UBI program turned on, but it made me feel like shit the entire time it was on. I don’t know how she could also work and mine at the same time.
I squeezed my eyes shut tightly until I could see bursts of lights, and then opened them again. Nothing had changed. I looked up at the cracked ceiling above me. My ceiling fan lazily turned with a single blade still attached to it. It did little to cool the air, and if I turned it up any higher, it’d lose that last blade. Broken and squeaky it may be, it was better than sitting in a stifling room.
Slowly extricating myself from my bed, I felt another pain, this one on my chest. I really wanted the painkillers to work faster.
My chest really hurt. I looked down my shirt and saw that there was an ugly purple-blue bruise in the center, over my heart. It was about the size of a baseball and it hurt every time I moved an arm. Wonderful, a throbbing arm and another painful reminder that I had lost the dungeon yesterday.
I got up and changed, leaving my old clothes in a pile on the mattress and finding some clothes that smelled clean. Leaving my room, I jumped down the stairs and reached the kitchen, grabbing the kettle and a pack of freeze dried ramen, this time it was Spicy Be’f Flavor. Pouring the hot water over the ramen, I flipped on my feed and was greeted by a 30-second ad for a pizza company.
I opened up my messages while the ad played, reading the first message while a smiling woman ate a big piece of pizza and smiled at me.
“Real cheese flavor is just down the corner!” The ad said, populating a map of me walking down my street, Bristol, and up to Pitkin Ave where the pizza parlor was.
I looked through the woman’s smiling teeth and saw that the last message I had received was from Daniel, he had messaged me… I unfocused my eyes and my HUD was populated with a quick menu.
Huh, it was only noon, I thought it was later.
I returned back to Daniel’s message and saw that he had sent it this morning, only an hour ago.
Daniel // Hey - ur mom told me. Srry about Roose. Lunch?
I sighed. It had been over a month since I had last seen Daniel. The last thing he told me was that I was throwing my life away and that I should focus on my grades. It was easy for him to say, he had a 3.9 and was doing extra credit work to push it higher. I’d never got mine above a 2.4, and that required spending every day studying and struggling to retain anything useful.
It was awful. I had quit school a month before graduation. I had no idea if I’d even graduate since I hadn’t taken my finals yet, my grades were in the toilet. Besides, I wasn’t intrested in completing it. It wasn’t like you needed it.
Aurea // can’t vry busy
After messaging back, I looked at my other messages. I saw several from Huck and one from Elise, but I ignored them. I didn’t want to look at them. It’d just be Huck saying how good of a team we were and other phrases he’d pry heard from a movie, while Elise was just wanting to talk about… well, everything.
Minimizing my messages, I started flipping through my saved feed vidcasts. There was a dungeon dive in the San Antonio Missions Dungeon Stadium - it was Lethality Moderate and featured a favorite diver of mine, Reece, but I couldn’t bring myself to mentally command the program to play. I gave a resigned sigh and turned on music, shunting my feed into a corner of my vision where it wouldn’t get in the way.
I hesitated briefly. I maximized my feed, turned on the UBI program and immediately felt my brain turn sluggish and fuzzy. The back of my neck grew uncomfortably warm, the sunburn felt like pinpricks.
I minimized the feed again and went up stairs for my sneakers, and then left the house. Hopefully I could clear my mind by running.