Reality by Ben Fitts

Reality

By Ben Fitts

Charlie had to admit he was excited when the automated voice told him he was in a coma.

He felt selfish for having that reaction; he would be leaving his girlfriend Helen and all his friends behind and he was unsure who would be able to run the rehabilitation clinic in his absence. No one else in current staff had the necessary leadership experience, and they did good work there. Still, he was unable to help the way he felt.

“We wish you a speedy recovery from you condition,” the disembodied automated voice was telling him. He was disembodied as well, and all he could see around him was a field of white.

“In the meantime, please enjoy the programmed comma sequence as specified in your will,” finished the voice.

Charlie felt a grin on his face as he regained form. In truth, he never actually lost his form nor was the body he currently flexed truly his. His body was lying safely in a hospital bed, his brain hooked up to an immersive reality machine. The world around him as well as the body he was in were fake, nothing more than virtual simulations meant to occupy his mind while he was still comatose. It was fake, but everything about it felt real.

The body he was in felt and looked like his real one, based off his own memories. A little under six feet tall, skinny and wearing ripped jeans and a black band tee that poked out through a plaid flannel shirt, Charlie felt like himself. He kept grinning as he waited for the show to start, but it didn’t seem like it was about to. He frowned his digital lips and examined his surroundings.

He was in a rundown basement just as he had expected, but there was no band or crowd. Just a filthy, empty basement.

Each person described the immersive reality they would like to experience should they ever be in a commotose in their will. It was now standard practice.

The experience could be built upon memories, fantasies or some combination thereof. Many people requested that their experience be an unending highlight reel of their happiest memories or some fantasy vacation with their loved ones, but Charlie found those ideas a little freaky. He didn’t want to spend an indefinite period of time snuggling with a computer program simulated off his memories of Helen and slamming beers with fake, coded versions of his friends.

In his will, Charlie had described an event he knew he could enjoy even if he knew it was fake and would never get to experience in the real world: an intimate, marathon basement show performed his favorite band ever, Skullfuck.

Skullfuck was the biggest death metal to ever emerge from the humid swamps of southern Florida or anywhere else on Earth. They were best known by the informed but uninitiated for their graphic, morbid lyrics inspired by extreme horror films and splatterpunk authors like Edward Lee and Wrath James White, all written and belted by their vocalist John “Necrophile” Bell.

Charlie adored every note of every album the band ever made. Charlie knew each of their records by heart, but had never gotten the chance to them play. Necrophile had died of liver failure when Charlie was only twelve, three years before he’d ever even heard of death metal, and the band didn’t pull an AC/DC and continue without him.

Seeing the band he adored was an impossibility, so Charlie never hesitated when deciding on what simulation he would like to experience so the situation come up. Yeah it wouldn’t be real, but Charlie suspected that it’d be close enough that he’d still enjoy it and the thought didn’t creep him out the way fake versions of his friends and other loved ones did.

So Charlie planned his ideal Skullfuck show. An around the clock, sparsely crowded basement show where Skullfuck played every song they’d ever written close enough to him to spit on. The show would be enjoyed only by him and just enough computer simulated metalheads to keep a great pit going. But as Charlie looked around the basement, it was empty.

No Skullfuck tuning their instruments against the far wall, no grimy metalheads lining up in a semicircle, preparing for the ritual to come. Just him and a dark, moist basement that smelled funny.

Panic rose in his chest like bubbles in a kettle.  

Charlie didn’t know much about computers, but he knew enough to know that there were far too many people with notarized wills to have some tech geek personally program each of their comma scenarios.

The information provided in the document was fed into a program that then generated the necessary code. They didn’t test drive the results before uploading it to a disc and storing it with your primary physician. Even if someone wanted to test their program, it would be impossible; a brain had to first be in a comatose state to enter immersive reality which meant that most people never even experienced the scenarios they had requested be made.

This is why Charlie was panicking. If there was a mistake in the programming, maybe just one 0 missing in the line of code that contained the band and the crowd, no one else would have known. He would be trapped in an empty basement for however long he was in his comatose state. He of course had no clue how long that would be, but by judging the speed at which that bus had been coming at him in his last conscious memory, it might be a while.  

He wandered around the basement, his virtually simulated Chuck Taylors slapping against the grimy concrete floor. Everything around him was fake, but it all felt as real as anything. The cool draft nipped at his simulated skin and sent simulated goosebumps up his simulated arms, he could feel the snugness of his sneakers and softness of his flannel shirt.

The basement was larger than it had seemed at first glance and appeared to bend around in a semicircle, its other half out of sight. He passed shelves of power tools and hoarded supplies as he strayed towards the bend, desperately entertaining the hope that Skullfuck would be there waiting to greet him with a mid twenty-first century death metal classic.  

Charlie crossed the bend and could see the rest of the basement, then stopped dead in his tracks. There was a man there.

Something was clearly off about the man. His face sat lopsided on his skull, as if his cranium had been deflated. He said nothing, but began walking towards Charlie with spastic, jerking strides.

Everything about the man from his construction to his movements seemed unnatural, igniting some instinctual fight or flight beacon in Charlie’s mind. He tried to stay calm reminding himself that this wasn’t real, but only a computer simulation.

“Hey there,” said Charlie, feigning confidence. “So is there a Skullfuck show happening around here?”

The man continued moving towards Charlie with his lurching steps.

As he drew closer, Charlie got a clearer look at his crooked face and felt the acidic burn of vomit in back of his throat. Surprised that they bothered programming such bodily functions in here, Charlie took a halting, dazed step away from the approaching man.

The man’s face appeared lopsided because it was not his face. It was someone else’s face, peeled off their skull and draped over his own like a mask.

The man dug a trembling hand into his rancid overcoat and withdrew a long butcher’s knife, its rusty blade stained with dark splotches.

Charlie was stuck by the strangest sense of déjà vu as the man raised the weapon, but he knew the thought was ridiculous. If he’d ever experienced this before he was certain he would remembered. It wasn’t as if he was assaulted by strange men wearing other people’s faces often, computer simulated or not.

Pushing the notion aside, Charlie spun on his heels and fled, his sneakers pounding as he sprinted away.

He heard a panting behind his neck accompanied by a rotten odor. The man with a face to spare was upon him, pinning him to the ground with a swiftness Charlie wouldn’t have guessed him possible of.

The man spun Charlie over onto his back and straddled his chest, breathing on him with curdled breath, glassy eyes peering at him through two sets of sockets. Charlie tried to struggle, but couldn’t budge a centimeter under the man’s steel grip.

As the man rose the filthy knife above Charlie’s chest, he absurdly recalled the source of his déjà vu.

He had never actually been in this situation of course, but he had heard it described to him by guttural vocals countless times. He was living in a reenactment of “Flesh Suit”, the opening track of Skullfuck’s debut album.

“Ok, ok,” he said aloud to himself, calmer now that he thought he had figured out his situation, though still understandably flustered. “The computer program was just entered wrong and it’s simulating the wrong part of the Skullfuck songs uploaded to it…”

Charlie was cut off as the man plunged the dirty knife into his chest.

Charlie gagged on the blood that flooded his throat and poured out his mouth. A sizzling pain worse than anything he had ever imagined bloomed in the fresh wound. It felt exactly as if he had really been stabbed.

The man dug the blade out of Charlie’s leaking chest and buried it again and again, each strike bringing with it a new agony.

Eventually, Charlie realized that he wasn’t going to die.

Each cut with the knife may cause all the pain a real cut would, but ultimately it was still all fake. His actual epidermis probably wasn’t in the best shape after the crash, but it was untouched by this computer generated psychopath’s assault and safely wrapped up his organs and fluids in the hospital bed where his real body lay. A new dread filled Charlie when he realized that this meant that there was no way out.

He felt another sudder pass through his body as he remembered the lyrics that Necrophile belted during the breakdown riff in “Flesh Suit”, and before long he was living it. He was being skinned alive.

Charlie watched the man through eyes he could no longer shut as he sewed suit out of his recently removed hide. He was an immobile blob of exposed meat and organs and oozing liquids that would never have still been alive had anything he had just experienced actually happened to him. Merely existing was a pain worse than he had ever possessed the imagination for.

The man sewed the final stitch on the pants crafted from the skin on Charlie’s legs… and suddenly the pain was gone. Charlie was somewhere else, and he was whole again. He ran his fingers over the skin of his cheeks to make sure.

Charlie looked around to see where he had been transported to.

He was outside. He knew that for sure; he could feel a fresh, cool breeze tickle his neck and battle with his flannel, but that was all he could tell. It must have the dead of night and it was oppressively dark outside without a single light in sight. Charlie couldn’t see a thing.

He collapsed onto the ground, his skinny jeans brushing against the moist dirt, and thought.

He was sure the nightmare he had just experienced was unequivocally the lyrics from Skullfuck’s classic banger “Flesh Suit” brought to life by a horrible coding mistake in an unchecked program.

Charlie could do the mental work to see how the mistake may have been made. The lyrics needed for the show Charlie had requested were uploaded to the program, but were coded not as dialogue but instead as scene description by some careless office drone. The computer program tasked with fleshing out the descriptions it was fed into inhabitable immersive realities simply did what it was designed for.

But, that still didn’t explain how he had escaped and healed or where he was now. Charlie lost himself in thought as he stood up and wandered through the darkness, continuing to work out this puzzle in his mind.

“Shit!” he grunted as he stubbed his toe against something hard. After the torture he had just experienced he was surprised that something a trivial as stubbing a toe still bothered him, but it hurt as much as any time he remembered.

Charlie bent down to examine what he had bumped into, squinting to make out details in the night. He ran his fingers across smooth, chiseled stone. He traced his hand along the stone’s curves and onto its top, which stood roughly at his knee. Charlie had a suspicion of where we was now. He groped blindly until he found another stone of the same size a few feet away, then another, and another.

Charlie was in a cemetery.

He heard a low moan from behind him. He turned to look at the grave he had been sitting over, now able to make out some details that his eyes had had time to adjust. The ground was trembling. Dirt sputtered around the grave and a rotten hand clawed its way out from the dirt.

He staggered back in shock, as a decaying body in a tattered suit hoisted itself out of the grave and ambled towards him. There were lown moans and sporadic, heavy footsteps coming from all around him.

He pivoted and looked all around him as horde of rotting corpses swarmed over him like he was in a George A. Romero movie. Charlie had the the same feeling of déjà vu that he had felt in the basement before being skinned alive. Again, he realized why this was familiar.

He was living the lyrics of the zombie movie inspired song “Eaten By The Dead”, the track that immediately followed “Flesh Suit” on Skullfuck’s self-titled debut. The realization of the pattern dawned on Charlie.

First he had lived through the lyrics to the first song on the first Skullfuck album, now he was living through the lyrics of the second song on the that same album. During the sixteen years the band was together, Skullfuck had released eleven full length albums, two extended plays, three non-album singles and one split record with their labelmates Eulogy Of A Madman.

In all that time, the band never once softened their intentionally over the top, sadistic lyrics and Charlie was about to experience a track by track simulation of every twisted scenario John “Necrophile” Bell’s horror addled imagination had ever concocted until he woke up from this comma.

Then the dead were upon him, and Charlie could feel everything.

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