I awoke feeling like I was in a vat of syrup and a sense that this was vaguely familiar.

  There was a brief moment of total and complete peace that I don’t think I had ever felt before. A peace I have been chasing since Trisha died. Every part of my body sang with the warmth of it. There was no care, no worry, no stress in that vastness.

  Was this real?

  Then the panic of what had happened before waking up hit and I was pulled out of whatever unconsciousness I had been engulfed in. I tried to open my eyes, but they were already open to the blackness that encased me.

  The more I came to, the more I realized I couldn’t really feel anything at all.

  Even with the panic creeping around my body, I still felt at peace somehow and this made me uncomfortable but not scared. I felt my panic diminish without resistance, felt like I didn’t have to try to remain calm - I just was.

  At first it felt like there were no sounds, but that wasn’t quite right. I could hear everything inside me, from my heart beating to my blood flowing around, to the full cycle of my lungs - but I couldn’t hear anything outside of me.

  The only difference now was I didn’t think I was in any kind of liquid, just… suspended somehow. Whatever I was being held in felt thick and dense, but not wet at all.

  I couldn’t move anything except my eyelids, but I still couldn’t tell if I was blind or not. I tried to struggle against the invisible bonds holding me down, irritated at being held against my will.

  That irritation tried to turn to something closer to panic as I remembered I was held against my will on an alien spaceship. But even this was calmed.

  Squirming didn’t seem to do anything as I began to imagine there being some sort of probe happening. Would I even feel it? Something just rooting around inside me, while I was too drugged up to know what was happening.

  “Why do so many of your kind obsess about things being stuck up your rectums,” a voice said. It was a soft voice that sounded rather androgenous. I couldn’t detect any kind of accent or drawl, but I suspected that was the point.

  “What?” I asked slowly. I realized I could talk but it was laborious since my mouth didn’t move. How was I talking?

  “It’s probably best if you don’t speak. It’ll make the translator harder to implant,” the voice said.

  Whatever was talking had a very rhythmic way of doing so that was almost like someone speaking poetry in a weirdly monotone voice. I wasn’t sure if it was a robot or an alien but I really didn’t think it mattered at all at this point.

  I wasn’t sure if my apathy was part of whatever was happening to me or if it was just my brain shutting anything emotional down. I felt myself growing drowsy as my thoughts wandered.

  Wait, did he say implant?

  Darkness again.

  More floating.

  More nothing.

  Am I still on the ship?

  Were we still parked over the hospital?

  Was this real?

  Darkness again.

  When I opened my eyes sometime later, I was greeted by pain as lights shined in my face. Something was holding the lights, but my vision was too blurry and the light was too bright to see what it could be.

  I remembered, dumbly, that I hadn’t put my contacts in when I had left the house. Had I already remembered that? Wasn’t there another reason?

  My panic intensified and I sat up with a gasp. I tried to blink away the daggers stabbing my eye balls while I got my bearings. As soon as I did the bright lights were gone and with it a residual numbness that had been consuming me earlier.

  I was on the floor of some kind of stone room. It was lit by what looked to be plain, boring torches. As in actual flame torches, which was something I don’t think I had ever seen in real life before. There were two of them, one in front of me and one behind me.

  The space was roughly the size of a really large living room. There wasn’t any furniture in the room that I could see, or anything on the walls outside of the torches.

  The walls of the room were made from some sort of grey bricks, and the floor was made out of a different kind of smooth stone.

  Granite maybe? I was no expert at all on stone so it could have been anything. It was weird either way, and it felt cold and hard against my body.

  I was still wearing the smock but I had plain slippers on my feet – like fuzzy slippers an old man would wear. Plain, canvas pants covered my legs and felt itchy against my skin. They were not my size and even sitting I could see they were riding about halfway up my calf.

  My eyes shot open as it sank in that my calf was no longer injured at all. There weren’t any stitches that I could see. The wound seemed to be completely gone and only a little blood remained.

  I pulled the pant leg up further and grabbed my calf tentatively in case there was some sort of trick being played with my vision, but it felt perfectly fine. There was nothing at all wrong with my leg outside of it being attached to my generally out of shape body.

  Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “This is fucking bizarre,” I said, looking around.

  My throat felt… full? It was like there was a marble sized lump in it. Hadn’t the voice said something about an implant? My hands shot to my throat and I felt all around it. There was my Adam's apple, my esophagus, my… other stuff I think should be there.

  There was a small lump just underneath my jaw. I wasn’t a doctor, so it was a clumsy self exam. I had no idea what I was looking for and doing so just made me more uneasy.

  “Hello,” I said, testing out my voice.

  There was for sure something there. More than that, my voice echoing off the walls sounded different to me too. Not just hoarse or scratchy, but like there was some kind of delay to it.

  What the hell did they do to me?

  Who the hell were they?

  I scrambled to my feet the full weight of the events of the last few hours coming full circle.

  “What the fuck is going on!” I screamed.

  Welcome to Session One, James.

  I lurched back from the words, feeling dizzy. They were overlayed on a dark blue rectangle that was floating in the middle of the room like some sort of projection. I backed further away from it and the thing seemed to follow my movements.

  A few things occurred to me at once. The first was that I could read the words without glasses. The second was that the words seemed to be somehow coming from inside my eyes.

  When I blinked, I could still see them, though they weren’t as easy to read. How could this even be possible? I opened my eyes to look around and the words disappeared.

  “Who is doing that?” I asked, backing up more until I could feel bricks against my back. “How is this happening?”

  In order to mitigate confusion, we will be issuing you a new name as there are currently 2,754 contestants with the name ‘James’ and 214 with the last name ‘Marlo’.

  Your new name will be randomized and based on the theme of the games.

  One moment.

  There was pause as the ‘one moment’ blinked in and out. It was the longest pause of my life. The words seemed to grow as I tried to wipe them away with my hands.

  My eyes grew wide open with confusion and fear, but under that was a growing curiosity. I couldn’t fully accept that this was real. I just also had no explanation for what was happening and wanted to see what happened next.

  JAARLO is now your new moniker.

  So, it had combined my first with my last name and somehow that was random? I waited, thinking it was going to give me more information, but none seemed to be coming yet.

  I moved away from the wall and started feeling around my extremities. I didn’t know what else they had done to me and I was scared at what I would find.

  When I reached the base of my skull, I was pretty sure I could feel another lump but I just couldn’t be sure. I did an inventory of my body as best I could and felt another lump on my left arm near the wrist.

  There was no mark or scar at all and for all I knew this could all be fake. I took another look at my calf and it also had zero scars on it. I was thankful for that even though it was slowly making me feel crazy.

  My pants did not have any pockets, and my smock was still gaping open. At least my ass wasn’t hanging out anymore, though the pants left little to the imagination. I did my best to pull the ties up behind me and in doing so realized that my shoulder also didn’t hurt.

  Years ago, I had messed up my rotator cuff pretty badly during my somewhat limited time in BJJ and it never healed properly. It was part of the reason I quit doing it.

  That, and Trisha had been asking me to stop for a while. She had said it was making me act too aggressive and macho. I hadn’t really seen it which had created some tension between us.

  When I hurt my shoulder, she lumped that in with reasons I should quit and I had finally relented. God, that had to have been, what, almost 15 years ago? Since then, I hadn’t been able to move my arm back a certain way without some sort of pain.

  Even the scars from the surgery seemed to be gone. That arm was covered in a tattoo sleeve of nerdy shit I liked and thankfully that all was still there. How had they fixed that? And what the hell did they put inside me?

  You will notice that you are feeling better than before you arrived. This is by design. We want our players to be in the best shape they can be before entering the game.

  We haven’t augmented you in any way but you have been healed to your genetic prime for your age, race and pedigree.

  We have taken the liberty of implanting you with a few devices designed to help us monitor your activity and to communicate with you.

  They will also allow us to make sure you don’t do anything impulsive, like try to escape. Doing so could result in involuntary expulsion into the deep recesses of infinite space - so it is not advised!

  There was a pause again and my mouth went dry. We were in space.

  WE WERE IN SPACE.

  There were other people here with me and we were all being held captive by whatever had come to earth and started scooping us up. And now we were all players in some sort of game?

  The good news is that you have been brought aboard to participate in an exciting adventure game based on the robust lore and mythos of your world.

  These adventures are designed to test your merit and give you an opportunity to win some amazing prizes. More than that, some lucky few will be able to win their freedom and return back to earth to rejoin your loved ones.

  Isn’t that exciting!

  But first a few things need to be covered. Please pay close attention as this will not be repeated.

  There was another pause and I felt my heart bashing into my chest. I was so focused on the words in my vision I was forgetting to breathe. This continued to feel like a fever dream.

  This session has been populated with what your kind would call ‘non-player characters’ and they are designed to interact with you while you make your way through the various stages of this game.

  Some may interact with you in a curious manner, some may be interested in helping you, and some may have a desire to carve bits of your flesh off your bones!

  Part of the fun will be discovering what kind of NPC they are! Your decision on how you interact with them is up to you!

  Of course, it may not be in your best interest to let something rip your flesh off but who are we to judge how you make it through the game world.

  It may not be the worst idea to do the same to that shop keeper that you are pretty sure scammed you out of some gold pieces! It’s really up to you!

  (Note: Certain acts of torture or sexually explicit mishandling of NPC’s can result in your sudden expulsion into infinite space,)

  Outside of these NPC’s there will also be different creatures and monsters meant to provide a little challenge as you work to survive inside the game! These monsters may or may not try to murder you in very interesting ways, so it is advised to always be on your guard!

  You will be provided with some tools to help you as you progress, one of which is a book designed to provide you a tomb of all the useful information you will find throughout the game world. It will be extremely useful as you advance.

  You will find that in the center of the room this book has appeared on a pedestal. This is how you will track your development, your stats and levels, and even your inventory (though there will be other ways you can interact with that as well). There is even a map!

  How thoughtful is that?