Game

• Ethan James Lee, Grade 5
• Short Story
• 2014

I was nervous, and extremely excited. My brain kept spasming as my fast hands ripped through the cardboard, tearing the clear tape. My eyes looked around for a particular thing: a dark metal object with a big logo on the front, "Tàngës dß Rectusox". Incredulously, I wondered whether the special glasses would make you feel as if you were in a game itself.
A cold sensation rippled through my clammy palms as the console became magnetised to my blood. "Whoa, cool," I thought aloud. Slowly, I picked up the console and looked into the wide slit in the side of the metal box. My perfect vision became blurred, and my thoughts blocked out.
PLEASE STATE NAMES AND DETAILS!
I looked at the screen in front of me with puzzlement and then quickly somehow used my mind to enter my name.
'KESTER FOX'
Below the blue 'Name' box was a box that asked you to state what you liked to do in games, for example, hacking, playing or cheating. I registered myself as a hacker and it said, 'BOOTING UP'.
I waited and then suddenly a big, white swirling mass floated toward me and engulfed me in a golden flash. Codes and programming floated and flew around me in a vortex, sucking me down to the bottom of the maelstrom, and plunging me into the gaming world. Where am I? I thought.
'It's like Megalopolis appears out of nowhere,' my voice echoed through a barren, desolate land, where just the tip of a city protruded out of the dusty cracked ground. A moment passed, and another, but nothing changed, not even a breath of wind. I walked, and then ran, trying to get to the city with an overwhelming lack of success, running but not even getting close to the beautiful, unscathed dark city. The gears of my brain whirred and clicked, ‘I was a hacker, born to be wild,' I thought. I spoke a command, 'Bring up code.' Instantly, lines of 'old text' font code washed away my weird surroundings into an awkward mess into the corner.
I started hacking, quickly. Deleting the unnecessary code and modifying extreme data to bring up the city and release restriction of movement. The code disappeared and the ever-more shiny city grew up out of the ground like a tree.
Jogging towards the city was still arduous though, as I had only taken off a little of the gravity from the near impenetrable code. Suddenly, I had a thought. I tried to take my console off, but how could I take it off, using my computer-generated arms?
That was when it happened. Panic came out of the dark and consumed my mind, overpowering me. I couldn’t get out, not even by hacking. This game was a bit scary, but being trapped in it was absolutely horrifying.