Cult Fiction

By James Dwyer

Municipal City: the only place on earth where you can be anyone. Anyone from your favourite movies, books, tv shows, comics, video games or any cult media you can imagine. This is not virtual reality. This is real. Tina Lockhart arrives at the City to do exactly that, and is willing to pay any price to get in, willing to take the Elixir drug she needs just to breathe the air, and willing to kill, and risk being killed, just to survive.
Municipal City: the only place on earth where you can do anything. Anything can be replicated, given the right technology, and anything can be done as long as you follow the rules of the game. But someone isn’t playing by the rules. Someone is murdering players in the safe zones, something that should be impossible. As dangerous as this is for Tina Lockhart, things get worse as she becomes the one accused of these killings, and Tina desperately needs to find the truth in her world of cult fiction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: James Dwyer
• Release date: Jul 10, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310987120

James Dwyer

Born in the 80's, and lived the 90's, brothers James and Brendan Dwyer live in Cork and Dublin, Ireland.Cult Fiction is their first published novel.

Book preview

CULT FICTION

Copyright ©

James Dwyer & Brendan Dwyer

2014

Published by Paused Books 2014

at Smashwords

ISBN 978-1-3109871-2-0

This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance between these fictional characters and actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

First Edition

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

www.pausedbooks.com

Level 1 Secret Identities

Level 2 Suit Up

Level 3 The Competition

Level 4 Red

Level 5 First

Level 6 Focus

Level 7 Fight

Level 8 Continue

Level 9 Guns

Level 10 Luck

Level 11 Rule of Law

Level 12 Nothing

Level 13 Team Work

Level 14 Game On

Level 15 Time

Level 16 The Best

Level 17 Strength

Level 18 Trust

Level 19 Solo

Level 20 Elimination

Level 21 Conversations

Level 22 Contact

Level 23 Power

Level 24 Bombs; Lots of Bombs

Level 25 Finally

Level 26 Fantasy

Level 27 Reunion

Level 28 Face Off

Level 29 To Win

Level 30 To Live

Author Biography

Level 1 Secret Identities

I tried to be nice. Yes, Sam was infuriating, but I needed her to get this right so Randy could stay in his good mood.

‘Come on, Sam, just think of all the best nineties actors, like: Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, or Kevin king-of-the-nineties Costner! No? Well, what about comedies: Adam Sandler, Mike Myers, Jim Carey, Robin Williams? Come on Sam! Action movies! You like guns right? So what about Willis, Stallone, Schwarzenegger –‘

‘Oh I have one!’ Sam said excitedly. ‘Definitely the best movie of all time and it was one of the Batman films, those were nineties right?’

‘Some of them were, Sam, but... which Batman film are you talking about, exactly?’ Randy’s voice was crying out with the suspicion that Sam was about to get this answer very, very wrong.

‘I don’t know, Randy, it was the one with Batman in it. How am I supposed to know what it was called?’

‘This is very important, Sam,’ Randy said calmly. ‘Who else, besides Batman, was in this film - this film, that you have just uttered to be the best of all time. Now, I don’t expect you to know words like Nicholson or Walken, but what about animals? Cats? Penguins? How about a psychotic clown that goes by the name Joker?’

‘I don’t think so, but that Schwarzenegger guy was in it, he was blue.’

Surprisingly, Randy still remained calm. ‘Sam... are you saying, out loud and with words, that you think Batman and Robin, the movie with Bat Girl, George Clooney’s nipples, and a Tom Hardy-less Bane, was the greatest film of all time?’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I thought it was cool, like the Schwarzenegger guy, Mr. Cool.’

Randy got up and left.

Anna nearly fell off her chair laughing, but I followed after Randy. I needed to catch him before he got too far, or before he did anything stupid. When I heard him roar, I rushed out to see what happened and, stopping at the exit of the cafe, I saw Randy just kneeling in the street, in his best Shatner dramatic performance, howling mindlessly. A heavy rain fall would have been good right about then to add more effect to his melodrama. I placed my hand on his shoulder.

‘Calm down, Randy,’ I said, helpfully.

I think he started laughing at that, but he could also have been sobbing.

‘She has to die, Lockhart, I have to kill her now. I’m sorry, but her life must end.’

One thing I’d learned about this city was if someone talked about killing someone else, they meant it. And a couple of weeks ago, before I came here, killing someone over horrendous movie taste might have seemed unreasonable, or at the very least an over-reaction. But now, I was actually considering it. Have I changed that much?

Before, I used to walk around in ripped-jeaned dungarees, one strap hanging down, and a pink tee underneath, with a provocative hand print on one of my breasts. Now I walked around with a sword and a shotgun attached to my backpack, silver pistols strapped to my thighs, a skin-tight full-body armoured catsuit underneath my clothes, and my veins were pumped full of the Elixir drug, giving me mutant super powers of speed, strength and healing.

So no, I hadn’t change that much, I was always awesome.

I remembered when I first heard about this city, I couldn’t believe it.

Fifteen years ago, a group of billionaire geeks who had all seen one too many holodeck episodes on Star Trek, who had all read one too many copies of Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One and tried one too many times to create the OASIS, or the Matrix, or the Metaverse, and who had dreamed for too long about digitising their molecules to become a part of Tron; all suddenly realised that together they had enough money to do whatever the hell they wanted, and that they didn’t have to wait for technology to catch up. They decided to forget about virtual reality, and recreate it all for real - a city where you could walk into your favourite book, movie or TV show, or become a player in your favourite video game. And this was no Dream Park either, not just a futuristic theme park where players battled against holograms or actors, this was Municipal City: a country-sized city, where people could live their entire lives in their own fantasy worlds, and they didn’t just compete against virtual enemies; they competed against each other. It was the greatest thing that had ever been built in the history of the world, ever.

When I turned eighteen, I managed to wait an entire week before I left my old life to come here. I lived with my older brother, John, and I felt bad about leaving him – felt even worse for stealing his motorbike – but he didn’t need his little sister around anymore and he shouldn’t have given me the starter app for his bike. Keys went extinct about ten years ago, cash followed not long after that. Everything was done by phone these days. I used my phone to steal my brother’s motorbike. I used my phone to pay at the charging station on my way to the airport. My phone held my passport and background history to get me past the five hours of security checks, and it bought me a protein shake and nutrient bar while I waited for my flight.

Municipal City was in Europe, bought up by the billionaire founders in a business move to convert a debt ridden country of civil war and poverty into the richest, most powerful, most awesome place in the world. The USA still sulked over that but I was an American and I didn’t mind. I was from Rhode Island, and no, there wasn’t a town called Quahog there, but yes we did have state troopers named Charlie (and Hank probably), and yes the first time I played Shining Force 2, I thought that Dr. Rohde’s name was spelt wrong.

But why build your own country? Well you only had to look around. The twenty-first century had grown to feel more like 1984: suffocating censorship; lawsuit-nation political correctness; anti-terrorist security measures; anti-massacre security measures; every time you touched or looked at something, information about you was collected and stored by everyone – it was a lot to put up with. Some states (and countries) had banned all video games and violent media, others banned pornography, more banned smoking and some had even brought back prohibition - all that was missing was for me to hear about a village banning rock n’ roll music and disco dancing like in Footloose.

In America at least, it was all the NPG’s idea. They were an organisation put in charge of protecting the youth of America. It stood for National Parental Guidance, but I liked to think of it as the opposite to RPG. Instead of Role Playing Games, it stood for No Playing Games. Most weeks I’d pick a different old movie to compare the way the world was turning, like Minority Report, Escape From L.A., or Gattaca, but I reckoned Demolition Man was the closest. We hadn’t reached the point where you got fined for swearing, but it was still no wonder that the young, the smart and the awesome were all flocking to Municipal City.

When I got on my flight, I looked around and I saw a few people like me. They were often easy to spot, with their long leather coats, and longer greasy hair, but others were more difficult. Sometimes you couldn’t tell if you had a fellow cult companion until they shuffled by you and muttered lines from Fight Club to themselves: Now, a question of etiquette – as I pass, do I give you the ass or the crotch? But you couldn’t get a flight straight to Municipal City, only to one of the countries bordering it, so most of these people could also just be mainstream.

Mainstream wouldn’t know what cult fiction was. They wouldn’t understand the difference between a thousand people watching a movie once or one person watching a movie a thousand times. They didn’t know that there was a completely different world available to them if they only gave their lives over to it and immersed themselves completely: that conversations could be had purely of quotes; that situations could be made better by imagining how a certain character would act in the exact same circumstance; or that arguments about real life were pointless and fleeting, but debates on the cold hard facts of fiction were vital and timeless. They might read books, dabble in video games, watch a movie once or twice, see a few episodes of a TV show they like, enjoy a song as it plays on the radio, but they didn’t get it.

Municipal City got it.

‘Can I get you anything?’ my flight attendant asked.

I laughed but she didn’t get it.

‘Do you have any Wumpa Fruit?’, trying my best to hold a look of sincerity. The old man sitting beside me frowned, trying to figure out what that was, but I just told the equally confused flight attendant I was fine and shook my head with a polite smile. It was then that I discovered the girl on the other side of me was a cult companion.

‘I think plane people tend to stay away from things to do with crash,’ she said softly. ‘Bandicoots included.’

I eyed her suspiciously. It wasn’t often that I found another girl around my age who knew about classic games like Crash Bandicoot. But, to be fair, she was probably headed to the same place I was.

‘Do you think they’ll have anthropomorphic bandicoots there?’ I asked excitedly, not needing to say where there was (or what anthropomorphic meant).

‘Well,’ she replied shyly, ‘the place is certain to have a lot of evil geniuses hanging around, so I’m sure one of them could make one.’

I assumed that the city would be full of gamers and movie fanatics like me, I hadn’t even thought about the super intelligent evil geniuses. This place was going to be so cool.

‘I’m Tina,’ I said, putting out my hand. ‘I mean, Lockhart. Well, Tina Lockhart, but I’m changing it to just Lockhart when I get there.’

‘Like Tifa from Final Fantasy VII?’

My entire body sagged with relief that I found someone who got it straight away. I wanted to kiss her but instead I just nodded with a goofy grin.

‘My name’s Francine,’ she said.

‘From American Dad?’

‘Greatest female role model of the twenty first century,’ she confirmed. ‘But my real name’s not as cool as yours, so I won’t say it.’

‘Wait until you hear the rest of my family’s names,’ I said. ‘My dad was called Clint Lockhart, grew up in the nineties, and introduced me and my brother to all its wonders, but my mom, her name was actually Sarah Connor. Can you believe it? Probably the only reason my dad needed to marry her. She let him call my brother John Conor Lockhart, but she wouldn’t let him call me Tifa. She wasn’t really into all this, you know, not as much as we were.’

Thinking about my dad and mom always made me sad, but now thinking about my brother John had to be added to that glass case of emotion too. I did try to talk him into coming with me, I mean John used to love all this stuff, he used to be cool. But he had his fat fiancé to think about now – alright, to be fair, she was pregnant – and he didn’t have much time for his little sister anymore. It was a big decision moving here too, our dad always wanted to, but Mom talked him out of it each time. No place to raise kids, she would say. Well, I was eighteen now.

‘Tina’s close enough,’ Francine said politely. ‘None of my family is into this either, no cool names, and they weren’t that disappointed to see me leave.’

‘Oh, sorry to hear that.’

‘No, don’t be, have to live my life, not theirs. But what about you, did you say your dad and brother were actually into this?’

‘Yeah, they used to be. Dad was a total nineties nut, and me and John would try to show off and out-nineties each other. But I’m here on my own.’

‘Oh,’ Francine said. ‘Well, what kind of things did you and your brother do to out-nineties each other?’

I tried to think of an example that wouldn’t sound too weird. This girl was kind of cool, but I was still very weird, so best to keep things as normal as I could.

‘Well, there was this one time (at band camp) and John had just shown me Clerks. Then he left the room, but I didn’t really pay any notice until he came back in and demanded that I shake his hand. He wanted me to admit his nineties victory in uncovering the Kevin Smith archive. I mean, yeah, I thought it was strange but I shook it. Then he offered me a bowl of melting chocolate covered pretzels as we sat down to watch Mall Rats.’

Francine put her hands up to her face. ‘Oh no.’

‘Oh yeah,’ I sighed.

You see, while we watched Mall Rats, I discovered what stink-palming was. It was when the crack of your ass was at its sweatiest and you slipped your hand down there to absorb its power. Then you shake the hand of your enemy, infecting them with the sweaty stink of your own ass. This was what John had done to my hand, and then watched with super-villain glee as I thoroughly licked the melted chocolate off my fingers from those pretzels.

‘It’s alright though. I took my revenge on John by gluing everything he owned to the floor of his room in Empire Records style. He tried to argue that I went too far, but I just said I didn’t feel like explaining my art to him. Our battles got worse from there, never quite reaching Eric Cartman levels, but they got close.’

‘That sounds so cool. You know there’s supposed to be a real South Park village in each of the different decades,’ Francine whispered. ‘Can you imagine if there was a real Cartman?’

I looked around nervously, but I didn’t know why. We weren’t doing anything illegal by going to Municipal City, and half of the people on this plane were probably going there too, even if most of them wouldn’t get in. There was a citizenship test before you entered to cull down the herds, to prove that you legitimately deserved to live there, that you knew enough to get it, and that you weren’t some terrorist sent in to destroy it. Religious lunatics and political nut-jobs from all over the world would try their luck at getting into the city all the time, to destroy the heathens living their life of fantasy hedonism and godless idolatry.

Thinking about them made me suddenly decide to be loudly self-righteous about our sinful lifestyle,

‘Hey, when you get to Municipal City, what decade are you going to?’

I said it loud enough that a lot of heads turned to look at us. The old man sitting next to me got up and left, and Francine tried to shrink into herself. I didn’t care. It wasn’t something dirty or perverted we were doing. I knew a lot of people thought of the whole city as just one big cult, but if anything, it was a city of lots of little cults. It was divided by decade - eighties, nineties, noughts, teens, twenties, modern – and recreated nearly every cult media from those time zones. Francine was still shying away from all the attention I had brought on us, but I needed to keep pretending that I didn’t care.

‘I’m going to the Nineties Sector,’ I announced. ‘I like all the other decades too, but my dad loved the nineties, so I thought I’d live there for a while. You can still travel to the other time zones too, can’t you? It just costs money to cross over or something? So which one are you going to?’

Francine kept looking around as if we were about to get arrested, but if she was leaving her old life behind to start a new one in a world of weirdoes like me then she’d need to toughen up.

‘Am, the noughts,’ she whispered timidly, ‘but nineties are good too.’

She was acting very uncomfortable now and I supposed I might have come across a little strong, over compensating for my own nervousness. So I whispered back to her, in an attempt to renew our previous conspiracy.

‘I hear the people there can get very touchy about liking more than one decade, did you hear that? I hope it’s not true, because I mean, I love the nineties, but there’s so much other good stuff out there too, right?’

Francine just nodded and grinned nervously, and I could see I had scared her off. She started reading something on her phone, trying not to appear rude, but cutting off any more conversation all the same. If I had to guess, I’d say she hadn’t told anyone she was coming here, that she was so afraid and vulnerable that she was almost embarrassed, or ashamed, of her decision. I knew what that felt like, and I knew she didn’t want me blurting it out to the world now. I figured I should probably apologise to her later, but for now I’d just leave her alone for a while. So I told myself to shut the fuck up, Donny, and get some sleep. I thought maybe I’d have a Big Lebowski dance dream while I was there, but I knew I’d only dream about Municipal City. I was obsessed.

I didn’t dream about anything though. I just blacked out and when I woke up, I found a gaggle of flight attendants surrounding me. I looked to my right and saw that Francine was gone. In fact, everyone was gone, the plane was empty. How long was I asleep?

‘Miss?’

‘What’s going on?’ I asked.

‘We’ve landed, miss. We’ve been trying to wake you.’

‘Sorry,’ I said, and stood up, pulling my backpack out from under my chair. I looked around for Francine again, thinking it pretty harsh that she just ran off, but I guessed that was the trouble with finding other people like me; in the end, we all preferred our own company. And here I was heading to a city with twenty million more assholes just like me.

I got a little depressed as I tolerated another three hours of security checks in the airport, until I got to the railway station and then my giddy excitement bubbled back to the surface as I saw the time-travelling train-timetables heading to Municipal City. Each one was going to a different decade, and I made my way to platform three – destination: the nineties. My goofy grin had returned, and made even goofier as I saw that every carriage on the train was Tribble-packed full of excitable geeks and freaks just like me, each one fragrantly sweaty with anticipation, some already dressed in costumes as if we were travelling to just another convention, but Municipal City was so much more.

Municipal City was the place where everyone had taken the blue pill to go deeper into the Matrix and told Morpheus to shove that red pill up his ass. It was the city where the few good men who couldn’t handle the truth, had told that truth to go fuck itself and found something even better. It was the living oxymoron of real-life fantasy and science-fiction fact where you could go anywhere, do anything, be anyone, and I was about to be a part of it!

And so, as the train engaged warp speed to boldly transport me to my new life and new civilisation, almost immediately I reverted to my old ways and hid in a corner. I didn’t talk to anyone, hung my hair down over my face, took out my phone and attempted to disappear into a few episodes of Family Guy. I even tried for as long as I could to block out all the topical arguments going on around me, but all too soon I became addicted to eavesdropping into them. The train was so full of so many opinionated, argumentative, socially defensive, over-smart and under-washed, awesome people, that I was in heaven just basking in their nerguments. Put any two cult fanatics in a room together, and get a dodecahedron die-worth of sides to every argument about book vs. movie, DC vs. Marvel, Trek vs. Wars, Who was the best Who, should Joss Whedon really have been allowed to have his own religion, which was the best ring, or best sword, or best Batman, or best Bond, or then to add greater depth to the discussions – which was the worst. I loved them all.

So many times I was ready to jump up and furiously explain why someone was so wrong in what they just said. But with great control, I refrained, learning from my mistakes with Francine that I shouldn’t try to make friends by being aggressive – the main lesson being that I just shouldn’t make friends because people were stupid. So I kept to myself, and at some stage I must have blacked out again because when I woke up it was the same damned scene as the plane. Two train workers were standing over me, and everyone else on the train was gone.

‘For fuck’s sake!’ I shouted as I opened my eyes and the two train workers jumped at my profane consciousness. They muttered that I had to get off the train and I dismissed them with a, ‘yeah, yeah, calm down.’

This was happening much too often lately. I used to never sleep, staying up most of every night running mighty movie marathons, and now it looked like I was being rewarded with narcolepsy.

So I got off the train and on the platform I was greeted with a refugee camp of cult-wannabes. I couldn’t decide if it was more like a pop-culture rock concert, or else the waiting line for the opening showing of the latest greatest movie, but why were they all just waiting here? We were still indoors, in a train station as much as I could gather, but with a sea of nerds and a long wall of what looked like airlock doors on the other side of the crowds. Some of the doors had green lights and others had red lights, and when I saw one person simply walk up and go through one of the doors with a green light, it only made less sense why everyone else was just grazing about out here.

No orderly lines? No help desks? Well, with no better ideas, I started to wade through the biomass towards one of those green-light doors to see if I really could just walk in, and as I waded, I caught fractions of passing conversations to help me make sense of things. I picked up that some people had to wait a few more days before trying the test again and a lot of people were going around asking for answers to very specific questions. Was the citizenship test really just a few questions? I saw more people walking around though with horrible burn marks on their skin and wondered if the tests were different for everyone. The burn victims looked like they had to go through a Danger Room from X-Men or something.

I continued walking and made it to a big metal door with a green light, all a little too easily. I looked around. There must have been some kind of catch, right? There was a panel under the green light, so I held up my phone to it like any other security check, (I found out later that the city took all my money at this point, no set price for entering, just everything you have for unlimited tries at the test) but as the metal door opened, I paused and looked around again. Was it really okay for me to just walk straight up and go in? I didn’t have to wait my turn or anything? No queue? A few of the cult-campers were looking at me alright, but not with any kind of disapproval and then I heard the two closest to me begin to bet over how long I would last. One gave me ten minutes and the other said I’d be out in five. Neither of those predictions did much to relax my rising panic, but I was here now. I could do this. If Vince Vaughan from Swingers was here: he’d tell me I was money, that I was a bear with claws, that I was so money that I didn’t even know I was money! I could do this!

I walked into the airlock.

Level 2 Suit Up

The doors slammed shut behind me and left a nice frightening echo to reverberate around the spacious empty room. All that was inside the airlock was a single tele-screen - a hologram projecting computer console, or, as kids today described them: a big phone – and another door, in the same forbidding design as the one I came in by. So it had victory doors for the winners, and humiliation doors for the losers. Great.

I cautiously walked up to the tele-screen, eyeing the rest of the room to see if frikin’ laser beams were about to start shooting down at me, but when I got to the console I found a friendly welcome message waiting for me:

‘Welcome, Tina Lockhart, you will now be given the citizenship test for Municipal City. The test will be a series of questions to determine your suitability. If you get a question wrong, you will be electrocuted and ejected from the city. You may not retake this test until seven days have passed. Do you agree to these terms and conditions?’

‘Am, sure,’ I said. Electrocuted? That seemed a bit excessive.

‘Question 0: Name the five difficulties in the first DOOM game.’

Question zero? I thought that was a bit weird but I didn’t hesitate in answering. I listed:

‘I’m too young to die. Hey, not too rough. Hurt me plenty. Ultra-violence. And Nightmare!’

‘Correct!’

I nodded to thank the computer for that helpful little correct!

‘Question 1: What was the first FPS video game to use functioning mirrors?’

Hail to the king, baby!

‘Duke Nukem 3D,’ I answered.

‘Correct!’

This test was easy, hell, this test was fun! There was no way I was getting electrocuted. And those jerks outside said I’d be out in five minutes. Ha!

Four hours... I’d been doing this stupid, fucking, test, for four, fucking, hours.

‘Correct!’

I closed my eyes and muttered that of course it was correct. All of my answers so far had been correct and yet the tele-screen felt the need to patronise me every single time! Somebody definitely went out of their way to programme this computer into being a total asshole, I was sure of it. But I was also going crazy! I was on number two hundred and fifty four, and I prayed I had only three questions left. Surely, someone thought two hundred and fifty six was the right number to finish things, surely. And no, I will call you Shirley!

‘Question 254: In the 1994 movie Airheads, what is the name of the protagonist’s band?’

‘The Lone Rangers,’ I sighed. Adam Sandler, Brendan Fraser, and Steve Buscemi - the three, lone, rangers.

‘Correct!’

‘I know it’s correct!’ I screamed, but then froze as the tele-screen tried to register my voice. Shit! Did it just record that as my next answer? No! No, not after four hours, not after getting every single question right! Not now! Not like this!

‘Question 255: What are the rules of Calvin Ball?’

Oh, thank Zod! And good question too. It could have a few different answers though. My brain was pretty fried, but one of the rules seemed to be that Calvin never won the game, Hobbes would always outsmart him. Kind of a psychotic kid if you thought about it: making his sub-conscious imaginary tiger friend always being one step ahead of his conscious mind. Someone should have made a graphic novel about Calvin as an adult - a crazed, lunatic, serial-killing, adult. His tiger Hobbes could be the brutal killer of all the victims in his mind too, without going full Life of Pi style. I made a mental note to maybe do that myself one day – draw the graphic novel I mean, not become a serial killer – and then went back to considering the rules of Calvinball.

Was the scoring one of the rules? The scoring was completely arbitrary, right? Not much of a rule. The only rule seemed to be that the rules were invented as they went, weren’t they? Was that the answer so?

‘The rules of Calvinball are...’

Wait! No! There was only one rule and that wasn’t it. I changed my answer in mid-sentence hoping the computer wouldn’t read it as an error.

‘The rules of Calvinball are that it can never be played with the same rules twice.’

I waited.

The tele-screen in front of me didn’t seem in any rush to let me know if I was about get electrocuted, and when it spoke next, it did not say Correct!

It said,

‘Congratulations! You win!’

I win? With only two hundred and fifty five questions? Not two fifty six? Then I grinned and nodded to the test designers, who must’ve been working to the old eight-bit byte systems that could only store two hundred and fifty six distinct values, including zero. That was why Pac-Man’s level two fifty six was a split screen mess, and why the max rupees you could collect in the Legend of Zelda was two fifty five. Two to the power of eight minus one - some binary finery. Nice.

The victory doors in the chamber opened and I paused to take a few steadying breaths. I had done it. I passed the test on my first go and I was in! It nearly broke my mind, but I did it. Four hours of being hungry and tired, of searching every nook and cranny of my brain for word perfect answers, of fretting over the fear of electrocution if I failed the test, and almost the same amount of fretting about my overwhelming new life if I passed it. So with much trepidation, I stepped forward into my new world, out of the airlock and into... another airlock.

It was much bigger of course, and to my left and right I saw dozens of other entrances trailing down out of sight in a giant curve. Most of them were locked shut, with only one or two opening in the distance. Very few people passed the test I supposed. Not everyone was as obsessively committed to cult media as me (and the twenty million others already inside the city) and now, in front of me, there looked to be another type of test. Big guys with big guns were standing in front of big checkpoints, waiting to give me a big welcome to my big new home.

As far as I knew there were two kinds of security in Municipal City, there were the Law Enforcers, who made sure you followed the rules inside, and there were the War Enforcers, who made sure the rest of the world stayed outside. These guys at the security checkpoints, they were War Enforcers, and by voluntarily entering their city you gave your consent to being shot by them right now if they didn’t like you. The one directly in front of me was motioning that I should come forward and I really hoped he would like me. So I swallowed nervously and then tried to come up with the prettiest, meekest, girliest smile I could.

I kept my smile locked in place - probably looking a bit creepy doing it - as I walked towards my potential death, and I looked around to see the War Enforcers at each of the checkpoints were all different. Some were dressed in black suits and shades, either in tribute to the Matrix Agents or to the Men in Black, and others further down the line were dressed like Starship Troopers, Storm Troopers, and Super Troopers.

One War Enforcer manned each checkpoint - a giant transparent cube filled with all kinds of machinery - and behind the checkpoints was another long row of closed airlock doors, each one unique in design. Every now and again an armour plated checkpoint was placed about. They were still just cubes, except made out of steel and surrounded with automated cannons. I looked down then to see a blood stain smeared along the ground, as if someone had just been shot and dragged away from the checkpoint in front of me, and just then I spun around as heard someone screaming in the distance. What the hell was I doing trying to get into this place?

Too late to turn back, I stepped into my big glass cube and waved amicably to my War Enforcer. He didn’t look impressed. He was dressed like a Jaffa from Star Gate SG1 – which I still think should’ve been called MacGyver... in Space! He was in full chain-mail armour, complete with zat gun at his hip and blast staff in his hand. He looked so serious that I had to fight to suppress a grin. I wanted so badly to call him a shol’vah, or tell him to kneel before his god.

‘Step onto the circle,’ he said, not even bothering to look at me.

‘Okay...’

I obeyed, stepped onto the circle and couldn’t resist hoping that they had built transporters and I was about to be teleported into the city. Municipal City had all the best technology, luring the smartest nerds in the world here with the promise of unadulterated sci-fi fantasy. Those that weren’t nabbed that way were simply bought, given juicy visas instead of fret-inducing tests. The city was a multi-billion dollar entertainment industry with all the Reality Quests it broadcast, but selling its technology was just as profitable. It made the city into one big, vicious, profitable, dirty circle having the most money to pay the best minds to develop the top technologies, which the city then sold the worst of to the rest of the world to keep its money flowing in and perpetuating the monopoly. So they could totally have teleporters by now.

The circle underneath my feet turned green and I held my breath as a ring of light floated up from it. The ring slowly rose and mini spectrums scanned my entire body before vanishing again. It was all over pretty quick, and then there was an awkward silence afterward. What was I supposed to do next? I tapped my fingers along my leg to power up my patience, but it didn’t work.

‘So...’

A klaxon sounded and the green circle underneath me went red. That couldn’t be good.

‘Take off your backpack and place it in the circle.’

I shrugged off my backpack and dropped it to the floor. Stepping out of the circle, I went through a quick mental check that there was nothing contraband in my pack. Not that I knew what wasn’t allowed, but all I brought were clothes. I left everything else back at home, gifting my awesome collections to John in the hopes that it might kick start him into following me here. Not that I needed him.

The green light flashed up in the circle and the same spectrum of laser beams shot out at my backpack. Since there was less of it than there was of me, the whole show was even quicker. Then the same needless wait – a wait that definitely could’ve been filled with an explanation of what was happening – until finally, there was a positive sounding beep. The green circle flashed greener and apparently my backpack was free to go.

‘Pour the contents of your backpack onto the X,’ he said, barely motioning towards a big red X in the corner.

‘Okay...’ I was reluctant to just pour it all out, I mean, I had underwear in there. Did he just want a look? Didn’t my bag just pass the test?

I unzipped and tipped all my clothes onto the big red X.

‘Step back,’ he instructed.

That didn’t sound good at all. I had barely taken one step back before there was a flash of red, a quick whoosh and all my clothes were gone! I turned to the War Enforcer with my jaw hanging open, all ready to hit him with a what the fuck!, when he hit me instead with a:

‘Remove your clothing.’

I guess I was wrong when I said all my clothes were gone. I let fly,

‘What the fuck, man! They were my clothes!’

The War Enforcer sighed. ‘Only ferrisfibre clothing is allowed inside the city. You will be given a default skin now and you can purchase upgrades at your discretion.’

‘Ferrisfibre?’

I could see the War Enforcer was weighing up if it was easier to explain this to me or just shoot me, but surely he had run into this question from every single other person who had ever tried to get into Municipal City. I mean the city had secrets but that’s kind of a big one not to tell people, "oh by the way, no clothes allowed, so nude up!"

The War Enforcer’s answer was all just one big sigh. ‘Ferrisfibre is used for all clothing