Freebie Mondays: Cerulean Sky (Prompt Novel Chapter 5)

For 2024, I have decided to devote my prompt writing time to a novel. The twist is that the novel plot will be generated entirely by the writing prompts I chose to use for the project – which were rolled randomly using my trusty dice and a few online prompt lists. You can find the Table of Contents here.

For Chapter 5, the prompt was: “a man gets lost in a virtual reality sim and can no longer tell what is real.”

One thing I really love to play around with in my writing is dream sequences. Lots of writers say you shouldn’t use dream sequences at all. They represent false promises. When the sleeper wakes, nothing that happened to them is real. But if you can find a way to make it real, then you don’t have to worry about the pitfalls of a dream sequence.

Like dreams, a computer simulation is a place where you can play with the normal physics of reality. Time, imagery – everything is in the character’s head but, to him, it seems real. This is the perfect type of prompt for playing around a little with how our mind interacts with our environment – especially if the environment is tuned to react back to those thoughts and feelings.

If you’d like to see this chapter come together, you can watch the VoD on Youtube!
…

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Alyial asked for what had to be the fifth time as his fingers moved anxiously across the twist of wires attached to the contraption Nala just thrust into his hands.

At first glance, it looked something like a tiara – the sort a teenaged girl might wear to her high school prom or sixteenth birthday. Except instead of being decorated with cheap plastic jewels, it was held together with bundles of metal foil and plastic clamps. The wires coiled in tight arches as they connected the diodes and chip boards that would allow the technology to function.

“No,” Nala stated flatly in her usual matter-of-fact tone. It was the first time she had actually answered the question, however, so Alyial considered it a victory. “But do you have a better idea?” she demanded and crossed her arms in front of her chest.

Alyial swallowed the answer he wanted to give, which was, yes, we could go back in time to when this all started and find some way to not break half the equipment available in the institute’s stores. Because that seemed just as viable and likely to work as the proposal they were acting upon.

He still wasn’t sure why or how everything had gone wrong, but he knew he could trace it back to the moment he knocked his coffee onto his keyboard. That first shower of sparks served as a harbinger of doom, and every day since then had been a constant struggle.

In fairness, he continued to tell himself, most of the computer equipment offered as replacements for the overheated and shorted tech was a decade or more old. All of the hard drives ran outdated software and all of the hardware was old enough and chunky enough it was a wonder it ran at anything greater than a snail’s pace. Much of it was unsuited to work of any kind anymore, which was why it had all been shoved in closets  or dusty storage rooms or shipped from supply depots with mere shrugs in response to the requests.

But that didn’t stop Alyial from blaming himself for this whole sorry mess. Because it was never Noodles who broke the new-old equipment. It was never Nala who crossed the wires despite double and triple checking the board port assignments.

It was always him. He always managed to miss something, drop something, or turn his eyes away at the critical moment.

He was starting to think he would have to give up his career and move to some mountain top monastery devoid of all forms of technology just to keep the world safe from the destructive force he had become. But he was also fairly certain after his visit to The Raven’s Quill that there was more at work here than just a string of carelessness.

After all, he asked Eidas and Noodles to check his last several hardwires and they had all three agreed it was safe to flip the power switch. Yet somehow, nothing worked for longer than a few hours. And if it wasn’t Alyial who was cursed, it was almost certainly their office space – or their project.

That last thought made him shudder.

The silence that filled their small office space in response to Nala’s demand was resounding. It echoed in Alyial’s ears like the fading remnants of an explosion, and he swallowed hard to suppress the nervous tingle that rose from his gut.

They had pushed all of the desks to the far edges of the room. The computer screens had been shifted so that they all faced the center of the room. The towers and server cores that held the results of long months of tireless labor were all clustered on what had once been Noodles’s workstation, and the office chairs were perched next to the monitoring stations so that each member of the team could easily access the system they were supposed to operate.

In the center of it all, a space that had once been occupied by programming books and stacks of paper, was a cot. Next to the cot was a single hat-rack which held a veritable forest of wires that traced back to the Frankensteined tower of computer monitors.

One thin tendril of wires extended from that rack to the computer chip tiara still clutched in Alyial’s hands.

His fingers shook as he lifted the contraption and slid it over his head. It had been measured and designed to fit snugly against his forehead, so he supposed he couldn’t change his mind at the last minute and thrust the thing toward Eidas or Noodles.

He drew a deep breath as he lowered his hands and allowed the cool metal to settle against his skin, but it felt tremulous and unsteady – just like his hands.

Even so, he forced himself to move woodenly to the cot and lower himself into a laying position so he stared straight upward at the bright, flickering fluorescent lights. He tried to relax his body as he exhaled, just like the meditations he’d been taught in high school – but instead his muscles coiled more tightly than before.

“We need to do something drastic to get this project back on track,” Nala lectured, not for the first time. Alyial wasn’t sure if she hoped to sound inspirational; the time for reassurance had long since expired.

“We all know the situation, Nala,” Eidas retorted. Alyial didn’t shift his head to glance up, but he could hear the eye-roll in his companion’s voice.

“But do we all understand it?” Nala shot back and her ice cold tone cracked like a whip, once more plunging the room into silence. The only sound for several seconds was the whir of computer fans; then Nala sighed. “These incidents haven’t just set us back a few weeks. We’ve potentially lost months of work if we can’t confirm our updates have stabilized the system.”

“And if we can’t prove our progress they’ll shutter the project and can us all,” Eidas snapped. “We get it.”

He didn’t say that was no excuse to skip all of the safety procedures that would usually be required before they began human testing. Nala would only reply that they had been on the verge of considering it safe before the first snafu – which was the argument she used to drive them to this point in the first place.

“It’s fine,” Alyial said softly, though it was the exact opposite of how he felt. This was his chance to redeem himself. And given how bad things had gotten lately, he didn’t think he could shed the responsibility. “Just activate the connection program, and let’s get this over with.”

He couldn’t see any of his companions from where he lay, but the quality of their silence suggested they were exchanging glances over his prone form and swallowing the last of their protests.

“Remember,” Nala stressed, “you just need to test the basic foundations. Go down the check list, then return to our office in the simulator. You can eject from there.”

Quick, simple, easy. That was the plan.

Or so they had convinced themselves while they set this all up.

“I know what I need to do, Nala,” Alyial replied through clenched teeth. Then he squeezed his eyes closed and added, “Just flip the switch before I change my mind.”

He heard the soft click of fingers on a keyboard before he even finished speaking.

Then he felt a slight tingle in his temples and the darkness behind his eyelids flickered and crackled as it shifted.

*   *   *

The sky looked like the sky. It was a strange place to start, but he supposed it spoke to the accuracy of their creation. He would have named the color cerulean – that color so hated by editors and poetry critics, the deepest deep blue generated by the bright light of a summer sun.

In the real world, Alyial was certain smog would have choked the clarity of the sky, turning the distant specs of fluffy white cloud into dark grey smears. But he saw no sign of that here.

He wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

I’d better get moving. If he returned with nothing but some notes about the city’s skyline, Nala would explode.

Alyial lowered his head and, as an afterthought, tucked his chin against his chest so he could keep his eyes on the ground as he walked. He shoved his hands into his pockets and took off to his right – which he was fairly certain would carry him south.

The pavement, like the sky above, was as accurate to the city he lived in as it was possible to be. Tiny little rocks stood out among the mass due to shape or shifts in color, and there were even smears of gum and oil that had been scratched away and faded by long years of boots passing overtop of them.

He couldn’t remember writing such intricate details into the program that generated this place, but he had spent more time on the subroutines that governed interactions between sprites – what gamers would have considered NPCs. It was reasonable to assume that when Noodles built the framework for this place, he fed the generator dozens of pictures of various cities from the real world. And if they had included the scratches and smears of the pavement, there was no reason for the iterative AI to leave them out of the final product.

I just didn’t expect it all to feel so real.

He had expected flat blocks of smooth texture that granted the impressions of city streets and buildings looming high above. Like an old CG movie that evoked the idea of a grass field with a tangle of jagged lines overlaid atop a solid block of green. He expected the people to have hard edges and uncanny faces and to move like the models in a claymation film – with obvious pauses and noticeable jerks.

Instead, everything felt fluid. The people who smiled at him when he glanced up could have been the same people he encountered on his morning commute. They could have been the people who lived in his apartment building or shopped at the strip mall down the street.

He didn’t recognize any of the faces – that would have scared the hell out of him. But he didn’t get the impression he was moving among specters or even computer generated images.

He felt like he was walking down a normal street on a normal day. The streets were seamless and flowed one into the other. The traffic moved the way he would have expected city traffic to move. Horns blared, street lights moved between green and red. Pedestrians filtered around stopped cars when it was time for them to cross the street. People branched off into buildings or emerged to continue about their business.

So we can strike one off of the checklist.

As far as Alyial could tell, the visual subroutines were stable. Nothing glitched into or out of existence – at least not while he was looking at it. He didn’t turn any corners into a blurry haze and there was no abrupt cessation of the world when he reached street junctions.

He might have felt better if there had been something, just the tiniest indication that this was all an image being projected directly into his brain. It might have eased his nerves.

Perhaps my mind fills in the blanks, Alyial speculated as he tried to remember the next thing on his list.

If the visuals were stable, he would need to test the sensational feedback. And talk to someone. If everyone in the city said the exact same thing, they would know the cultural and interactive subroutines needed work.

If the mind did more of the work than they anticipated, it was possible they might have overbuilt this place. Maybe he hadn’t had to spend all those months studying intricate interactions in downtown restaurants so he could write tweaks into the programs’ governing arrays.

Or maybe it just looks polished on the surface because I haven’t prodded anything yet.

He turned down a side street, following the flow of traffic, and entered a sandwich shop that had become a favorite during his research runs. It was a little too far from the office to be a daily lunch stop. He’d have to take a cab when he left if he wanted to get to this world’s version of his office. But it would make a good test.

The clerk behind the counter greeted him with the usual retail service industry smile and spiel. Then Alyial ordered the same sandwich he always did and waited at the end of the counter to receive it.

The interaction was as smooth as his walk down the street. Smooth enough to make him question whether or not he was actually inside the program.

How was it that the clerk had known to ask about the progress on his current project? He couldn’t remember building that level of detail into the subroutines. And even if he did vaguely recognize the face of the man who made his sandwich, he didn’t think his mind could provide that much detail to the computer projecting these thoughts into his mind…

Could it?

The sandwich felt solid. Alyial lifted it without a single finger passing through. It had weight and substance. And when he sat down at one of the tables in the corner to try it – because why the fuck not, he wasn’t going to waste a perfectly good sandwich! It struck his tongue with all the nuance of taste and texture he expected from his favorite sandwich place.

Alyial peeled back the bread after he ate the first half of the sandwich and prodded at the meat that sat between the thick slices. He received a fair number of odd looks from those who passed by him in the sandwich shop, and it made him squirm in his chair.

He could still hear Nala’s voice telling him to check the basics and get the hell out. But maybe she said that in the midst of a fever dream. Maybe he had simply had a particularly rough night and lost track of his travels while he was on the way to his office – or to lunch.

This sandwich certainly didn’t taste imaginary. And it was hard to believe the simulation could so accurately replicate flavors when they had spent almost no time on that portion of the project.

People weren’t supposed to use this simulation for lunch dates, after all.

It’s just another weird day in a string of weird days, his brain told him. You’re overthinking everything because you’ve spent the last several weeks overthinking everything. In fact, you don’t know how not to overthink things anymore.

Ever since his coffee fell onto his keyboard and kicked off some kind of universe Rube Goldberg machine that made everything in his life explode in his face, Alyial’s mind had been working at full tilt looking for an explanation – or a way out.

And what really made the most sense? That he currently occupied a computer simulation so lifelike he couldn’t tell the difference? Or that he’d had another shitty night of sleep and lost track of up and down while he was trying to sort it all out?

Occam’s razor certainly favored the latter.

Shaking his head to clear it, Alyial deposited the wrapping from his devoured sandwich into the garbage and returned to the sidewalk outside the deli. If he was supposed to be checking fundamentals, he supposed he could mark the check boxes beside touch, taste and conversation. The only things left would be transition – moving rapidly from one portion of the simulation to the other and the fluidity of time.

Maybe he could check that one off too. The clocks he glimpsed as he walked down the street didn’t seem to be jumping rapidly between hours or minutes, and the sun still occupied pretty much the same position it started in when he entered this place.

All arguments you’re just walking down a normal city street after a hazy night of sleep, he reminded himself. And no amount of shaking his head dislodged the thought.

Was he so out of sorts over this whole weird curse thing that he really couldn’t tell what was real anymore?

He glanced upward. For some reason he couldn’t define, he was certain the sky would be the key to determining whether or not he occupied the real world. If he was in a simulation, something should be off about it.

But the sky looked like the sky, and something about that simple truth unsettled him.

Alyial scooted to the edge of the sidewalk and hailed a cab. It took a couple of tries before one slowed to a stop on his side of the street – that alone should have been proof this was the real world. If the simulation could, indeed, divine his intent, it should have given him what he wanted on the first try – shouldn’t it?

He settled into the backseat of the beat up, worn old car and gave the driver the address for his office. There was no point not dropping by, even if he wasn’t expected. After all, it would be the fastest way to tell if this world was real or simulated. Their office was a designated exit point, for ease of access and memory. The moment he walked into it, he would know if the world was real or not because the simulation would simply hold a giant red button.

The drive from this part of town to the research institute world have taken all of ten minutes if not for traffic. At this time of day, he expect to wait at least half an hour before the parking lot came into sight.

So Alyial settled into the worn upholstery and watched out the small window as the city passed by. Thousands of people went about their business, stopping at market stalls or waving to friends they recognized on the streets.

Too many actions, Alyial thought as he watched it all unfold around him. This is all far too many transactions for the program to keep track of.

His eyes drifted upward. This time they stopped short of the sky, however, focusing instead on a high building formed of glass and light steel. It was a hulking behemoth, comprised largely of office space based on its outward appearance.

Alyial glanced at it for only a moment before it seemed to shift within his vision. The steel became sandstone and the lines representing the window frames shifted into the squiggle of runes or hieroglyphs.

Alyial blinked hard because he was fairly certain he had seen the image before. It took him a moment to recall. It wasn’t a building in his memory, after all, it was an obelisk formed by the deft strokes of a paintbrush in the middle of illustrated card stock.

The Tower. It had been one of the tarot cards he glimpsed in the oracle’s deck when she read his fortune. It hadn’t come up during his reading – and he was grateful for that – but he had seen it snake free of the deck when she performed the final shuffle just at the end of their session.

He had been curious after all the odd happenings in the Raven’s Quill’s back room, so he had looked up the name of the card when he returned home.

The Tower was considered to be a powerful card even among the major arcana. And it was a bad card, a message of ill omen – a warning of bad tidings to come.

Alyial shuddered as the memory of the search danced through the back of his head. He blinked, rubbed his eyes and, when he looked out the window again, the steel and glass sentinel had returned to the place where the massive behemoth stood in the distance.

But of course he was hallucinating. It had happened in the back of The Raven’s Quill too – and he was certain that event took place in the real world.

It was the lack of sleep, the stress of the project and his constant assertion that everything going wrong was all his fault.

Find the Queen of Pentacles, the fortuneteller told him.

She was the only one who could break the curse.

A cold sweat covered Alyial’s body. He needed to stop acting foolish by questioning his every action – not t mention his surroundings. He needed a good night of rest, a hot, hearty meal and a pot of coffee when morning rolled around.

With a soft sigh of resignation, he leaned forward and requested the cab driver change destinations.  The shift would result in only a small alteration of their trajectory and not much of an extra fair.

Then Alyial settled back in his seat again and peered up at the sky. His bed was calling, and he had kept it waiting long enough!

*   *   *

“According to the tracking program, he’s moving quickly and heading roughly in the direction of our office,” Noodles announced with a sigh of something like relief.

Nala frowned and lifted her wrist so she could check her watch. Then she made a soft, thoughtful sound. “He hasn’t been gone as long as I expected. Only ten minutes. Either he’s supremely confident about the results, or he found something horribly wrong.”

With the way things had been going around here lately, it was hard to assume anything but the latter.

“Time is compressed inside the simulation,” Eidas reminded her curtly. “Don’t forget that it’s designed for training. Granting the user large chunks of time while very little passes in the real world is the entire point.”

Nala offered only a non-committal sound in response. They had no idea how much of the program was actually working when they sent Alyial inside. Though if they accounted for a significant time difference, that allowed for a greater chance of a favorable report.

“We’ll know soon enough,” she announced when no one else spoke. She lowered her arm and used a quick keyboard command to summon the image Noodles was monitoring.

The tiny red dot that represented their colleague’s movements through their simulated city drifted along streets, moving ever closer to the research institute that housed their office.

Nala almost relaxed. She had been adamant that a single positive development would turn this whole situation around. And one of the reasons she pushed so hard for one of them to enter the simulation was because it was the best way to confirm they had actually reached the point they believed they had.

Today would be the day. She had to believe that, or she’d lose her damn mind.

She tried not to hold her breath while she monitored the progress of the tiny red dot. But that only made it easier to gasp when it took a sudden and unexpected turn that carried it away from its intended destination.

“What the hell is he doing?” she demanded and grasped the edges of her computer screen as doing so would allow her to deny the sudden deviation.

“It looks like he’s heading home,” Eidas admitted, though their tone sounded doubtful.

No, Nala denied silently. No, this can’t be happening.

Why would he go home? Why would he go anywhere other than the exit point? No matter what he found inside the simulation, he wasn’t supposed to stick around for more than a couple minutes. Just long enough to confirm the state of the program.

But when the red dot paused on the edge of what was very obviously a large residential building, Nala was forced to accept the dip performed by her stomach.

“Fuck!” she snarled as she released her computer screen and shoved it away from her. “Fuck!” she added again for good measure. Because this was bad.

Really fucking bad.