STORY ARC 7: BEYOND THE ETERNAL FOREST
The Ghosts in the Machine?
A chapter of a ‘Choose your own Adventure’ story.
This is a collaborative series; you might want to start the story at the beginning, here. Want to go back one chapter? Click here. And please check out this article to find out how you can contribute to this and other ‘choose your own’ stories in this publication!
You enter through the doorway marked |1|
In binary, a language you studied for only one semester in school, ones and zeroes could be used to write a script that a simple program could execute. Zero was ‘off’ or ‘no’ and One was ‘on’ or ‘yes’. Immediately your mind flashes back to the Matrix, but you push it out of your head.
Yes sounds like a better option than No, so you push your way through the door and into — no surprise — a waiting portal, this one a gorgeous emerald hue.
You nearly fall flat on your face as you emerge on the other side! The portal is just a bit higher off the ground than in the bathhouse.
“Uh, yeah, sorry ‘bout that,” comes a hoarse voice. You look up and see another deer-man, this one dressed in a hideous brown suit that could have been worn by your creepy uncle, and sporting dark square sunglasses, even though it was quite shady where you exited. “I keep tellin’ ’em they gotta put that step in, but — ” he takes a long drag of his cigarette, “ — they just don’t listen to me.”
You brush yourself off, even though you didn’t really fall, and your clothes are as good as the day you bought them. Something about this scenario just feels wrong. Dirty.
“Who are you?” you ask, looking around. You’ve been deposited deep within a thick forest, with the sun lost somewhere overhead. This deer-man, who talks like he’s some kind of wannabe Rodney Dangerfield, towers over you, and unlike Holly from the Bathhouse, he doesn’t seem like he’s all that eager to serve you.
He walks over to you, exhaling his cigarette smoke and bathing you in a purplish gloom. “I’m Buck,” he responds. “I’m the Headman here in the Eternal Forest.” He looks you up and down. “And you’re a customer, by the looks of ya.”
“Have you seen any other, uh, customers? That are like me?” you ask.
He shakes his head. “Nah. Not in a few hundred years.”
A few hundred years? Your eyes nearly pop from their sockets. So nobody has been here for generations?
Buck takes another long drag from his cigarette. “Look, bub, I ain’t got all day,” he flicks his ash away into the foliage. Isn’t he worried about starting a forest fire or anything? “You wanna see the goods or what? Sheesh, for a customer, you’re pretty laissez-faire, ain’t ya?”
You simply nod. This guy is nothing like Holly! “Yes, show me your wares, uh… man,” you answer back, doing your best to mimic Buck’s peculiar mannerisms. He pulls down his sunglasses to glance sidelong at you.
He leads you deeper into the woods along a path that ends at a small cottage with rustic architecture and a pleasant smell from the smoking chimney. Nothing quite like the scent of a wood-burning fireplace, you reminisce.
Buck motions for you to go inside first. You press down on the door’s latch and push your way in, curious as to what you might find.
Inside, the cabin is smoky and hot, not at all what you were expecting. There are five or six children with antlers — kids? They all have metal restraints attaching them to the workbenches they are at, hammering away at metal components for what look like robots.
One of them looks up at you with reddened eyes like he hadn’t slept in days. “Would you like to see my wares?” he asks with a raspy voice that should never escape a child’s lips.
Buck slams the door as he stalks in behind you angrily. “You do not speak to the customer unless spoken to first!” He picks up the child as if to throw his emaciated body against the wall.
“W-wait, Buck,” you manage to stammer out, holding out your hands to stop what you feared was about to happen. “I asked him what he was building. I spoke to him first!”
“Oh?” He drops the child back onto his stool with nary another thought. “He nudges the child to answer, taking another puff from his nearly-spent cigarette. “Go ahead, the customer asked you a question.”
The boy holds up his work hesitantly. It was a kind of bionic arm, made mostly of a lightweight metal you can’t identify, patched with leather in some places to provide flexibility. “It’s an arm for a robot,” he says proudly. “I had wanted it to shoot lasers but the Headman said that’s not allowed.”
“In case the robots rise up, you know,” Buck adds, tossing his cigarette butt out a window. This guy is a walking fire hazard!
“Robots, yeah.”
