Dimension Tripper

It was only after one really massive mess up that I realized it was possible. A small line of coke, three energy drinks from a company I was far too loyal to without receiving anything in return, and an eight-inch white chocolate protein bar set the stage for the situation. 

Unsurprisingly, the first few items got my heart racing, and I felt like I could conquer anything. Especially the task at hand, which was nothing more than a friendly feud in the digital dimension. Ugly aliens and attractive guns were what my eyes saw, while my ears heard the slurs being hurled their way. To some it may have seemed a silly thing to spend one’s Saturday night on, but I can assure you, this was my every night. It was all I needed, and I was never for even a slight second ashamed of it.

The shame that night was unusual, and came a few minutes after a decisive victory against a rather dour gentleman who held the handle of BucketsOfCome1488. He couldn’t stop talking in the lobby afterwards, and I suppose I couldn’t stop taking the bait. And as he waxed on unpoetically about the shifting face of Scandinavia and why that ought to make us sad, I began taking a few bites out of my bar. The thing was remarkably thick, and challengingly chewy.  Right as I went to swallow some of it, another asshole came in with an excellent rebuke of Come’s complaints and I couldn’t help but chuckle. But then, I couldn’t seem to breathe.

With my windpipe winding down and my throat full of thick gunk, I gasped, or tried to, over and over again. As those two assholes kept on going at it over their opinions, I began to feel my body more fiercely than I ever had before. It was through the pain that perception seemed to come. With each agonizing grunt and grimace I came to know a new part of myself. The insides of my throat, every inch of them, the internal length and dimensions of my lungs, and my hard working heart were all with me so intimately as my veins bulged throughout my body there at the end of my life. Or what I thought was the end, as I fell off my seat and scrambled across the carpet before collapsing in a heap and hearing nothing but, “COPE” and “SEETHE” through my headphones as darkness engulfed me. 

It was some time before I saw the light, literally. I felt as though I was floating through some gelatinous orb, and if I were to go too far in any one direction, I would be bounced back by its borders. Lacking any visual stimulation, there was plenty of time to think and so I contemplated my choices in life. From the big to the small, the insignificant to the monumental. I was wishing I had spent more time shoplifting when my eyes opened and I was back in my room.

But not on the floor, or even on my makeshift nest of blankets I kept in the corner, instead I was on a mattress. Strong with springs and actually clean, it put me off. I owned no such thing. I could hardly afford to keep the internet going and had pawned off my pillows the previous week. The discomfort of these comfortable surroundings increased exponentially with each new discovery. As I got up and walked around the room everything was wrong. From the naked walls, devoid of posters, post-it notes, and even the puncture marks made with my fists which those posters and post-it notes were meant to conceal. To the lack of a monitor on my desk, and the absence of a PC below it. 

I took a step out into the hallway and that’s where things really started to strain my already stressed conception of the situation. It was almost completely barren. No shoes, no cardboard boxes, and no piles of clothes. Just one long landscape painting of what appeared to be the plains of Africa hanging against the wall. 

“You awake, honey?” 

The soft and sensual voice stopped me dead in my tracks. It came from the kitchen, and I lived alone. 

“Honey?”

I slowly stepped forward and craned my head around the corner. Standing upright in a silk sort of slide over was a woman I would have only ever seen on the internet. Black, beautiful, and buxom. A dream come true in any other situation, but I was freaked out of my mind. “Who the fuck are you?” I spit out in slurred speech.

“Honey? What’s wrong? What’s going on?” Her tone changed and her face went concerned. The softness of the voice was going semi-hard.

“Who the fuck are you, bitch!?! What the fuck are you doing in my condo?!?”

“Bitch!? You need to calm the fuck down! Are you on drugs again?!” Now it was fully hard.

“Fuck yeah I am, you cunt. Now get the fuck out of here!”

The woman went quiet, turned toward the stove, grabbed a saucepan from over an open flame, and catapulted its contents directly at my dome. The searing hot half-cooked pasta and its boiling broth collided with my eye sockets and I screamed out in agony, “Oh fuck, you fucking whore!” As I stumbled down the hallway and towards the front door. Opening it in a hurry, I didn’t think that the geography may have shifted outside as it had inside. By the time my foot went flying out of it, and down through the air without landing firmly where the raised patio ought to have been, it was far too late. My entire body toppled forwards, and my head slammed full force into the concrete at an awful angle. My neck must have surely snapped.

After a lot of pain, I was back in the orb. That strange and fleshy thing which I still know not what to call. Floating through its fluids I had plenty of time to think, plenty of time to contemplate, I saw every memory multiple times inside that orb, and I began to realize my mistakes. But before it all came to a real interesting epiphany, I was ejected.   

Back in my room once more, I looked around for any differences. Would there be another woman, perhaps one less rude? The posters on the wall suggested there wouldn’t be, and as I lifted them up to examine what was underneath, I found the familiar dents. I gently pressed my closed fist against each of them, it was always a perfect match. I was home, and I must have been off on nothing more than an awful little dream. 

Powering up my PC I got back into the swing of things. Blasting bad guys, shouting slurs, and leading the leaderboards. Everything was going my way until I entered an all too familiar lobby.

“If we’re being honest here it’s all Churchill’s fault, the fat fuck should have minded his business.” As the words thrust themselves into my ears, my eyes focused in on the blinking icon in the shape of a bullhorn, it was right next to the name BucketsOfCome1488.

It couldn’t be, I must have dreamed it. All the same, I looked towards the protein bar to my side and noticed it was slightly different. Now it was dark chocolate, when I could have sworn I bought white chocolate at the gas station, I always bought white chocolate. All the same, I scoffed at my concerns. Taking one extra large bite out of the bar, I laughed.

A few minutes of agonizing pain later I was back in the orb. Its fleshy walls bouncing me back and forth as I realized how real this really was. Would I be heading back to see that woman? Perhaps somewhere new?

My eyes opened to darkness. The smell of sulfur was everywhere, and my hands felt filth between their fingers. The moans of men and women slithered through my ear canals. I tried to move forward, and found my face hitting what felt like flesh, I jolted backwards from the shock, and that was when the lights came on. Slowly, across the ceiling, one after the next, the hanging bulbs illuminated all. 

I was in a sea of people, all of us on all fours and completely nude, crawling through bloody shit that caked the metal floor. The flesh that I had bumped into was a man’s ass, and as the lights came on he started to piss all over my arms. I wanted to vomit, but my stomach was empty, and soon I had no choice but to crawl forward as everyone behind me pushed ahead. Not wanting to be trampled, I tried to go faster, and I began to push the others out of my way. It didn’t take long for me to be the leader of the pack, I was the fastest man there. I sped through the crowd and came to what must have been the exit, a long metal ramp that led up and into another room that seemed much brighter than the one we were currently in. No one else wanted to mount the ramp, so I crawled over two women who were crying, in the moment I thought perhaps it was on account of their small breasts. But making my way on upwards towards the light, I had no time to assuage their concerns.

Blinding as it was in the next room, with its very clean and entirely reflective metal walls, my vision quickly adjusted and I realized why no one had wanted to enter. Directly in front of me, against the opposite wall, were dozens of unmoving human bodies, apparently taken from where I knelt, to where they lay, by a conveyor belt beneath my feet that stretched from one side of the room to the next. And standing on a raised platform, slightly off from the center of the room, was what looked to be E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. A small, inhuman and ugly creature, its gray skin wrinkled like a scrotum across its entire body. It smirked at me as it lifted its left arm and pointed what appeared to be a pen in my direction, then a light began to emit from the tip of that pen-like object, and I felt an immense heat on my forehead. I began to spasm, to gyrate, as my body knew not what to do. I fell to the floor and saw that across from me, on the other side of the room, which was growing closer by the second, those unmoving bodies all had holes through their heads. 

Blood dripped down over my eyes before I awoke back inside the orb. Floating around through those fleshy walls felt different that time, as if I had been granted some secret knowledge, shown some esoteric aspect of being. I was enlightened to true meaning, to new purpose. I would never be the same.

On my next return to my room I threw the chocolate bar into the trash, and poured my drinks down the sink drain. I no longer needed them. I knew what I must do, and only the coke was necessary for that. I turned on my PC, inhaled the line, and re-entered the game. Blasting away those alien bastards like there was no tomorrow. I ignored the familiar voices in the lobby, and continued on, gaming until exhaustion. My K/D ratio had never been higher, and when my fingers could no longer press the buttons, I turned off my computer and went to the kitchen.

It was empty that time, devoid of woman, and cluttered with the empty cardboard boxes that once held many microwaveable meals. They had served me well, but I no longer needed them, pushing them aside I looked for the right place. Opening and closing all containers, I finally came across what I needed. Beneath several napkins in the drawer next to the stove, I found the steak knife. I took a deep breath before holding it up, pointing it my way, and then quickly plunging it into my throat. 

My return to the orb was swift. There, floating through the fluids of that fleshy paradise, I prepared for my next return, and my next return, and my return after that. For there would be no dimension in which I was not prepared for the alien menace that awaited me. No more eating, no more sleeping. From then on, it was all game, orb, repeat.