The moment his hand touched the blue light, the void cracked. It wasn't like breaking glass--like a world loading in, all at once, with missing textures. When the last missing piece created the world--a white big flash hit Yael.
Then, he was sitting on a chair. A plain, plastic chair in the center of a pure white, featureless room. In front of him was a school desk. On it sat an old, bulky CRT monitor, its screen glowing with green phosphor text.
SUBJECT: YAEL. ITERATION 1: SUCCESSFUL. COMPLETION TIME: ACCEPTABLE.
"Wait..What now? Can i go back home now?" Yael asked, the room echoing his words. The text on the screen changed.
NO. YOU ARE DEAD. YOU ARE A GAME.
"What!" a sudden throb hit his head, the memory of him streaming, and the computer blasting in flames. It all consumed him. Yael screamed in agony "Stop this! Stop it!"
EMOTIONAL SPIKE LOGGED. CAUSE: CONFIRMATION OF TERMINAL EVENT. RESPONSE: TYPICAL.
After a few minutes of non-stop screaming, Yael's voice died. He looked up. "Typical? You call that typical?"
He stood up grabbing the chair and throwing it on the CRT monitor. It broke. The dying hum made the room feel smaller.
The white walls started flickered violently, a harsh stabbing alarm hit his ears-the sound of hundreds of system notifications at once. Lines of angry red text, massive and jagged, scrawled themselves across the walls, the ceiling, the floor.
ERROR. ERROR. DIRECT INTERFACE DAMAGED.
SUBJECT: YAEL — BEHAVIOR: ATYPICAL.
PROTOCOL: NOVEL; DEATH SERVICE
Yael knew that game. It was the novel he had played for hours trying to get the right answer. One wrong answer and he died.
The floor glitched, the walls, the ceiling-all glitched, his desk was gone and he was falling into a black endless pit. A few minutes of falling nowhere, a green screen which was few inches away from his face popped up.
PRIMARY OBJECTIVE UPDATED.
SURVIVE NOVEL; DEATH SERVICE PROTOCOL.
REACH THE HAPPY ENDING.
But there is no happy ending in that game.