Everything was black. A giant void of nothingness. Was this the afterlife? For what felt like an eternity, Ray’s mind was simply swimming in circles. He couldn’t see anything, or hear anything, but he was strangely aware. He could think. Great. An existence with nothing but his mind, that always ends well. He tried to move, tried to breathe, tried to feel his own body and got nothing back. If this was death, it was the most boring kind imaginable, and Ray couldn’t tell if seconds were passing or hours. The worst part was that his thoughts had nowhere to go. No distraction, no noise, no flicker of anything. Just him, and the memory of the flash, the sirens, and that final impact that his brain refused to accept as real.

  [You have died… Respawn token supplied. Respawn Zone: Earth is no longer a valid zone… Please Wait…]

  The words hung in the nothing like they belonged there more than he did. Ray’s thoughts stuttered. Earth is no longer a valid zone? That was not a sentence his brain wanted to accept. It sounded like a game message, the kind he would have laughed at while sitting on his couch with a controller or keyboard, but this wasn’t a screen. This was everything. He tried to shout, to swear, to demand an explanation, but he couldn’t voice his thoughts. If this was hell, it had a user interface. Ray tried to hold onto the simple facts. He had been in Sydney. He had stepped outside. He had seen a flash. He had seen a cloud. Then the blast hit him. None of it made sense, but it made more sense than a message calling Earth a respawn zone.

  [Respawn zone not found... scanning individual… Ray Atton… Data Not Found…]

  Wait? What the fuck? Ray Atton not found. I’ve been around for 28 years, this is bullshit. Was he doomed to be here for the rest of his life? The message made it sound like he was a file that didn’t exist, a person that couldn’t be located. He tried to focus on one thing at a time, tried to tell himself this was a dream, but he couldn’t wake up. There was no bed. There was no body. Only his thoughts and those words. Ray’s mind spiralled into the stupid questions that he hated himself for thinking. Did this mean he was deleted? Did the blast erase him completely? Did the company scan his licence and wipe him out? He tried to push Sarah’s face into the front of his mind, tried to hold onto her voice so he did not start panicking properly, but even that felt distant, like it belonged to a different person.

  [Error… Individual not ready for deployment…. Attempting Override… Successful]

  Ray didn’t like the word override. He didn’t like any of it. Not ready for deployment made him feel like a package, not a person, and successful made it worse because whatever was doing this did not care if he agreed. He had a sudden, ugly thought that he was being shoved somewhere, whether he wanted it or not, and the only reason it was talking to him at all was because it had to follow its own rules.

  [Ray Atton – Data Collection Complete….. Zone Respawn: 1,167,950,221; World: Arkus]

  Ray had no idea what was going on. Arkus? What was that? Errors? Data collection? It felt like his life had been reduced to labels and scans. He tried to think back to the last real moment he remembered, the System Tech building, the street, the sirens, the flash in the distance. He remembered fire. He remembered the feeling of the shockwave hitting. Then the sign. Then nothing. He tried to decide what was worse, dying in a blast he never saw coming, or waking up somewhere new knowing everyone else might be gone. His brain kept trying to reject it, like denial was the only thing keeping him from cracking.

  [Welcome.. You have been chosen by The System as a respawn candidate.. Unfortunately World: Earth has been destroyed.]

  The words sat there like a blunt fact. No comfort. No grief. No apology. Just destroyed. Ray’s mind tried to latch onto Sydney, onto Sarah, onto his apartment and his stupid breakfast and his boring job, and it all slipped through his fingers. He wanted to argue, to deny it, to tell it that it was wrong. Instead he got another prompt, like his feelings did not matter. If Earth was destroyed, then what was he even supposed to do with that information? He couldn’t even scream.

  [You will respawn on World: Arkus… As you are not registered on the system, you will start at Town: Data not Found.]

  Town: Data not Found. Ray almost laughed, but it came out as a bitter thought he couldn’t express. Even in death he couldn’t get a straight answer. It was like the system had rules, and he had already broken them by existing. He had never been unregistered anywhere. He had a tax file number, a licence, a birth certificate. He had a job. He had rent. He had a stupid gym membership he never used. None of that mattered here. He didn’t like how quickly his mind started trying to treat this like a problem to solve. That part of him wanted structure. The rest of him wanted to fall apart.

  [You will respawn as… Race: Human-Error… Class: Error… Level: 1… Good luck.]

  Good luck. That was almost insulting. Ray’s anger flared again, then the void snapped.

  Ray woke up and immediately threw up. His stomach cramped so hard he nearly folded in half, and he didn’t even have time to figure out what he was throwing up onto. Dirt and wet leaves. The smell of soil, the sharpness of plants, the taste of bile. He was on the ground, hands pressed into mud, body shaking like it was trying to remember how to work. He coughed, swallowed, tried to get air into his lungs, and his hands slammed down again in frustration. It wasn’t just nausea. It was the feeling of being forced back into a body too quickly, like the wiring didn’t match. He spat and tried to wipe his mouth, then froze when he realised his hands were not clean, and his sleeves were not his suit.

  BANG.

  The sound ripped through the trees. Not an explosion. A gunshot. Ray froze, then looked at his hand, where he had felt the recoil. He was holding a small pistol. His mind went blank for half a second as it tried to make sense of it. He had never owned a gun. He had never even fired one outside of a range once, years ago, and he sure as hell had not been holding one when he died. He wanted to throw it, but his fingers were locked around it like his body had decided it was important before his brain caught up.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck, what the shit is this?” Ray’s first thought was to throw the gun away, but before he could, he heard a chittering sound behind him. It was not a sound that belonged in a normal forest. It was too sharp, too deliberate, like claws tapping on hard wood. Ray’s head snapped around and his eyes struggled to lock onto movement through the trees.

  Ray turned, and about 15 metres away through a line of trees he could see one of his worst nightmares, a giant spider.

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  The spider was pitch black with eight fist sized eyes, almost as tall as he was. It looked like it had recently been in some kind of scuffle because it was bleeding on one of its legs. Ray’s brain tried to tell him it was a trick of the light, that it was some animal he was misreading, but the shape was wrong and the size was wrong and the way it moved was wrong. It skittered forward, and Ray managed to get a closer look as it started running towards him. The bullet from Ray’s gun had hit it clean in the leg.

  The spider had clearly spotted him as it was charging straight at him. Only one thing for it. Ray jumped onto his feet, lifted the gun, aimed in the general direction and squeezed the trigger. BANG. He missed, or more to the point, the spider could seemingly dodge bullets. Ray’s breath caught because it moved like it understood what a gun was. The spider suddenly lunged towards him. As it was in the air, its pincers flexed forward, and Ray felt a wave of panic hit so hard it almost froze him.

  Realising that the spider couldn’t move in mid air, Ray aimed and quick fired. BANG. BANG. Two shots fired, two shots hit. The first hit the spider’s abdomen, the second right in the head.

  Unfortunately for Ray, the momentum of the spider’s leap still pressed onwards. It knocked Ray over and landed right on top of him. The weight drove the air out of his lungs. One of the pincers scraped his shoulder, leaving a small gash. Scared for his life, Ray tried to scuttle out from under it, only to realise the spider wasn’t moving. He slowly lifted himself out from under it, then proceeded to inspect it. The spider was clearly still alive, however Ray must have hit some vital point as it could no longer move. For good measure, Ray put the pistol right up to the spider’s head and shot.

  The pistol clicked in his hand afterwards, and Ray realised he had just burned through almost everything in the gun. He looked down at it properly for the first time and tried to work the count out in his head. Six shots originally, that felt right somehow, like the gun itself was telling him. He had fired once by accident when he woke up, once when he tried to shoot and missed, twice in the air, and once to finish it. That left one shot. One. Ray’s grip tightened until his knuckles went pale. He didn’t know why he cared about counting it, but he knew that last round was the difference between having an option and having none.

  As soon as he confirmed the spider was dead, Ray felt a warm tingle run up his body. It was quick, like a pulse of heat under the skin, and it made him stiffen because it did not feel like adrenaline. He didn’t know what it was and panicked. He hadn’t noticed the pincer hit him until after the scuffle. Was he poisoned? Ray inspected his wound and himself. Thankfully the wound was superficial, a thin cut that bled but didn’t look deep. Ray was covered in blood but most of it wasn’t his own. He waited for dizziness, for swelling, for anything that would tell him he was dying again, but nothing happened beyond the tingling fading away like it had never been there.

  During the inspection, Ray noted that he wasn’t wearing the same clothes he last remembered. He was in a black cotton shirt and dark grey trousers. It was not his suit. It was not even close. He checked his pockets properly, hoping for something familiar, a wallet, a phone, keys, anything. There was nothing. No cards, no cash, nothing he could use to prove to himself that his old life existed. For some reason, he felt like there was some deja vu but couldn’t quite put his finger on it, like he had lived this moment already but out of order, like his mind had watched it happen once and forgotten until now.

  Upon looking at the spider again, Ray gagged. While the sight itself wasn’t that gruesome, the smell was. He hadn’t noticed it during the fight, but this beast reeked. It smelled of rot and acid at the same time, like a dumpster fire mixed with chemicals. Ray decided not to touch the monster, and instead try and get as far away as possible. He was afraid that if there was one spider, there could be a hell of a lot more, and he had exactly one bullet left to argue with them. He forced himself to listen for more movement, kept his breathing quiet for a few seconds, and hated how loud his heartbeat felt in his ears.

  Since Ray wasn’t good with directions and had no clue where he was, he did a quick survey of the woods and simply picked a direction that looked like the flora was thinning out. He figured thinner meant closer to an edge, and an edge meant a chance of finding something, anything. He began walking, keeping the pistol down by his side but ready, trying not to let his eyes dart too much because every shadow looked like legs. Every time a leaf shifted, he felt his body tense like it was preparing to run again, and he was already exhausted.

  While Ray was walking, he attempted to take stock of the situation. The last thing he remembered was coming out of the System Tech building to horrific scenes, then he woke up in different clothes with a pistol. Was it just him, or did he seem lighter too? He still had his stomach, but it seemed slightly smaller, slightly more toned. He tried to ignore it because it sounded insane, and he had enough insane problems already. A part of him kept trying to tell himself that the mushroom cloud, the sirens, all of it might have been a hallucination, a drug, a kidnapping. That explanation at least had a shape his brain could accept. A system telling him Earth was destroyed did not. He kept thinking of the word destroyed and how final it sounded. It was the kind of word you used when there was nothing left to argue about.

  As Ray kept walking, he could see in the extremities of his peripheral vision a blinking up arrow. He had no clue what it was, and it wouldn’t go away. It kept distracting him as he constantly thought there was something moving to his right, only to realise it was the damn blinking arrow again. He tried turning his head quickly to catch it properly, but it stayed just out of focus, like it knew exactly how to annoy him. He waved his hand through the air like he could swipe it away. Nothing changed. He tried closing his eyes for a few seconds and opening them again. The arrow was still there, blinking patiently, like it was waiting for him to understand.

  Ray didn’t know what to do with it, so he kept walking. He was alone and scared. He had never really been in a situation like this before. The only real camping he had done was school camps back in Year 9 and 10. Otherwise Ray was mostly an indoors person. He enjoyed his games like Dota 2 and dabbled in FPS games, but he wasn’t the best at those either. The one thing he did know was that forests were not forgiving, and people who thought they were the main character usually died first. He wanted to yell out for someone to find him, but he didn’t. He wasn’t sure if yelling would save him or just call something else over. He kept his mouth shut and tried to walk like he belonged there, which was ridiculous, because nothing about this place felt like something he belonged in.

  He tried to think of scenarios on how he came to this situation. Had he been kidnapped and drugged reminding him of the nightmare? He thought this was the most likely. If he was kidnapped, maybe the whole mushroom cloud experience was simply him coming down from a high. Maybe he had been dropped off in the middle of nowhere and someone thought it was funny. Maybe this was some sick test. He hated how much he wanted that to be true, because the alternative was worse, and his mind kept circling back to that line.

  Earth is no longer a valid zone.

  After about an hour of walking, Ray was getting tired. He had no food or water, was not the fittest person in the world and was just trying his best to avoid getting any more scrapes and bruises. Ray was acutely aware that if he did something stupid with no one around, that could be the end of him. He kept a reasonably steady pace, but with no end in sight he was starting to think about the night ahead. He needed shelter, water and food if he were to survive long term. Thus far he had none of those. The pistol felt heavier the longer he carried it, and he kept checking the trees without meaning to, expecting movement, expecting eyes. Once he heard a rustle off to his left and stopped dead, waiting, raising the pistol slightly, only for nothing to appear. He stood there for a full minute before he forced himself to move again, annoyed at himself and also terrified of how fast he had reacted.

  Even after travelling for as long as he had, he had no sense of the time of day. The light through the canopy made it hard to tell, and the air felt the same no matter how long he walked. Ray kept going until his legs started to feel like they were filled with lead, then he promised himself the moment he found a decent spot to stop, he would. He needed time to plan properly. He needed to work out if he was going to keep walking until he dropped or build some kind of shelter and hope nothing found him. He hated how quickly his thoughts had gone from panic to planning, but planning was better than losing it.

  After about thirty more minutes, he started to hear a faint trickling sound.

  “Water!” Ray yelled and began running towards the sound. Ray had completely forgotten about trying to stay quiet. He didn’t have to go far. Ray came across the stream in a small clearing. It was barely even a stream, more like a thin line of moving water that cut through the dirt. It looked harmless. It looked like relief. He splashed his hands in the small stream, felt the coolness running over his fingers, and without thinking too hard about it he cupped his hand and took a sip.

  The sweetness hit immediately.

  Ray froze with the water still in his mouth. His stomach dropped as his mind screamed at him that this was wrong. It was too sweet, almost like a bubbling soft drink, and for a second his brain tried to argue that he was just dehydrated, that his taste was off, that anything could taste strange after hours of fear and stress.

  Then the burning started.

  It ran down his throat like he had swallowed acid. His vision blurred. His legs buckled. He stumbled, and for a second the clearing felt like it tilted, like the trees leaned in, and Ray’s mind snapped on a single thought that made him feel sick in a different way.

  Hadn’t this already happened?

  He knew this. He had lived this. He had woken up with a pistol. He had fought a giant spider. He had run until he found water. He had tasted sweetness that was wrong, and then the blackness. It was the nightmare. It was the prologue. It was the thing he had woken up from, except now he was inside it, and he could not tell where the loop started.

  Ray collapsed.