Carbon Dating, or Hikikomori

By Homer Cook

Way back in the late 2010s live Jerome and Polly, two recent college graduates. Jerome is a man with very strong convictions who is too disgusted by the world to take part in it. Polly is a girl with very weak convictions who is too intimidated by the world to take part in it. When a chance meeting causes their parallel paths to converge, each finds the most surprising thing of all: a friend. The question that remains is whether each has found a companion for venturing into a dark world—or simply company for lamenting the world's misery.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Homer Cook
• Release date: Sep 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393368076

Book preview

1

Jerome Adams leapt out of the helicopter, and he tried to hold back a grin. The beautiful world started to come into view beneath him. The lake merged with the sky on the horizon, gray points formed into skyscrapers in the distant city, and the branches of the trees beneath him started to become distinct. There would be a great world to explore when he hit the ground, a world out there that was all his.

He kept trying not to smile. A trace of a joyful, almost blissful feeling was arising in his heart, a feeling he hadn’t experienced in a long time, one that used to be common but seemed to have left his life in the past few years, though not for lack of searching. He had to be cautious, however. This was hardly the first time he thought he had found that joy again, and he had been let down too many times to let himself get too excited or hopeful now.

But as he opened his parachute and drifted perfectly between the trees, feeling a graceful but impactful rumble as his legs smacked down on the grass below, he couldn’t help but wonder. It was a beautiful world, and there was so much to do in it, at least from what he had heard. He put his parachute away, and he undertook his first task in this strange new land: walking.

He walked through the forest, heading toward the lake, almost overwhelmed by the beauty of his surroundings—the faint fog, the leaves crunching beneath his feet, every splinter visible in the bark of the trees around him. It was a good world to be in, he thought as he walked.

And continued to walk.

And walked some more.

And walked.

And then...

...continued to walk.

And walk some more.

He no longer had to put in an effort to avoid smiling. This was a feeling he knew too well, one all too familiar in his life the past few years, maybe even the past decade.

But he kept walking. He wasn’t going to give up yet. He finally arrived upon a sword on the ground and picked it up. Maybe things would get more exciting now.

The world froze. You have acquired a sword, the message read.

No kidding, Jerome thought.

Press the right arrow to sheathe your sword.

Jerome obeyed.

Press the right arrow to unsheathe your sword.

Jerome obeyed. And proceeded to walk farther into the forest.

The game froze again, right in front of a suspiciously placed tree.

You can cut branches with your sword.

Cut branches? Jerome screamed.

Hold R1 to cut the branch in front of you.

Jerome obeyed. His character that he had spent so much time designing to look just like him cut the branch from the tree.

A branch has been added to your inventory.

Jerome pressed the continue button.

You can access your inventory at any time.

He accessed it.

Here is your inventory.

Your branch has been added here, with an arrow pointing to the only slot filled in the inventory, in case he couldn’t see it.

When you acquire new items, they will be added in these slots, with accompanying arrows to show the empty slots.

Press circle to return to the game.

Jerome did so.

Press L2 to access your branch.

I’m glad I put it away, Jerome grumbled.

You can tear a leaf off your branch. Hold R2 to tear off a leaf.

Press triangle to consume the leaf.

You have acquired health. Your health bar is located here. Another arrow.

Eat another leaf.

You have acquired experience. Your experience bar is located here.

You gain experience when you kill an enemy or consume a leaf at full health. Experience is used to upgrade your health, weapons, skills, and armor later in the game.

The game finally unfroze for more than half a second, so Jerome continued to walk. A scream came from a nearby tree as a creature ripped itself from the bark, emerging as a treelike being with branches for arms and legs.

Press square to attack.

Jerome did so, hacking off the creature’s branches with no problem.

Several more enemies emerged, and he was taught how to block and evade. He did so, but he mostly kept mashing square until all the creatures were destroyed. He then continued to walk for a few more minutes, interacting with various trees and objects in the environment.

Until he came across a gun.

Now we’re talking, he muttered.

He picked up the gun and was given ten more messages about how to equip it, put it away, switch to his sword, aim, and fire. He shot targets for a while, until more creatures came for him to shoot. It was alright. The thought of switching between sword and gun in an urban fantasy environment seemed interesting, so hopefully the game would pick up soon. After all, he was just starting it. Sometimes games took a while to get interesting.

Especially these days.

He walked on until he finally arrived at the beach by the lake and was met by a massive troupe of attacking enemies. Now he hoped to get into the flow of combat. To his anger, however, the game froze again.

Press square, square, R1, L2, L3, up, X, triangle to execute a ranger’s combo.

Jerome frantically tried to remember the sequence, and somehow he pulled it off. He forgot it immediately after the execution, however, so he would have no chance of doing it again.

Press square, square, square, square, square for a swordmaster combo.

That one was easier to remember.

Press square, square, square, square, square, square for a swordmaster execution.

What’s the difference between that and the last one? Jerome screamed.

Press square, R2, square, R2 for a variation combo.

Press R2, square, triangle, X, up, down, L2, triangle, triangle to disembowel an enemy.

Disemboweling an enemy makes them more likely to drop an item or pick-up.

The enemy has dropped an item. You can pick it up by pressing triangle.

You have acquired an item. Items can be accessed from your inventory.

After about five minutes of explanation on how the menus, inventory, items, upgrades, armor, and everything else interacted, none of which Jerome would remember, he went back to the game.

Hold down L2 and R2 to enter Fury Mode.

Jerome did so, and he enjoyed Fury Mode. He hardly knew what was going on, but his character was very easily slaughtering everyone in sight. When Fury Mode had worn off and he was finished with all of the enemies, he moved down the beach, only to meet another group of adversaries. He charged head-on, frantically pressing square because that was all he could remember from the tutorial, and it seemed to be effective.

The effectiveness only lasted for a minute, as an enemy he tried to attack blocked him, knocking him off his feet. Before he could get up, a bullet came from out of nowhere, and his character was dead. Someone had shot him from about a mile away in a tree. The screen faded to black.

Use a ranger’s combo to prevent reinforcements from sniping in trees, a message read over the blank screen.

Fucking shit! Jerome yelled, tempted to throw his controller. Because he had no desire to buy a new one, he settled with turning the game off and yelling.

How was I supposed to know that? And how was I supposed to remember that combo?

When his fury wore off he sighed, disappointed but hardly surprised. It wasn’t that he died that bothered him. Far from it. Many of his favorite old games were quite difficult. It was the game itself that bothered him. How it somehow held his hand too much and was too overwhelming at the same time. How he had to walk for about ten minutes through the forest, only to cut off a branch and then randomly fight hordes of enemies. Could the game decide if it wanted to be realistic or not? Even if it did decide, he knew it would still be garbage, as every game was these days.

Jerome had been in denial for a while, but nowadays he fully admitted that video games, like practically everything else, had gone downhill since his childhood. No matter how much people praised a new game as the greatest thing ever known to man, he never seemed to enjoy it. Almost all his favorite games were still the ones he had played as a kid or teenager, most of which he was no longer able to play because he no longer had the consoles required for them. He could still play the handful of PC games he had enjoyed over the years, but as great as some of them were, there were only so many times a man could play Half-Life before desiring something more.

That was why he had made his own game, a side-scrolling platformer named Side Quest. If no one else could make a great game these days, he would do whatever he could with his limited resources and experience to try to fill in the gap. He had finished it earlier in the year, around the start of May. He was waiting to finish polishing it before posting it online, and he was working on other games and projects in the meantime. He had plenty of ideas.

As much as he loved video games, it would be alright if they were the only thing that had gone downhill. He could live without them if there were other good things in the world. The problem was there weren’t. Practically everything had declined since his childhood. The whole world was constantly plummeting further and further downhill, and he was doing all he could just to stay back and avoid going down with it.

He sat on his bed pondering this phenomenon for a while. He didn’t get up until he heard a knock on his apartment door. That would cheer him up. Pizza was one of the few things in life that had not gone downhill, and hopefully it never would.

Jerome opened the door, hungry and excited. Then he almost jumped back in horror when he saw the brown-haired kid with the beard holding the pizza in front of him.

Hey, how’s it going? the deliveryman asked.

Crap! Jerome thought. That’s the same guy I had last time!

Good, thanks, Jerome managed to say. He could tell from the look in the boy’s eyes that he remembered him.

Just a large cheese, correct?

Yeah, yeah.

Alright, that’ll be seventeen-fifty.

Alright, you can just keep a twenty.

Thanks so much, man. You have a good night, alright?

Yeah, you too, Jerome said, taking the pizza and closing the door.

That was terrible. This same guy had brought Jerome his pizza three nights ago on Monday. Jerome was mortified not just by the fact that the guy was starting to recognize him, but also by what he must think about him. Ordering a pizza from there twice in the same week, with no one else in the apartment sharing it?

He seemed nice, and he didn’t seem to be judging Jerome, but it didn’t matter. Maybe if it had been a cute girl delivering the pizza (which it never was) he wouldn’t have minded seeing her twice, but he wasn’t even sure about that. He was also angry at himself for considering behaving differently around a cute girl. He should be more disciplined than to have thoughts like that.

The only consolation Jerome had for the rest of the night was that pizza is delicious. The day pizza stopped being delicious might be the day Jerome would ask the pope to reevaluate the Church’s stance on suicide. Thankfully, even Jerome didn’t think that day was anywhere near.

All he thought was that he should probably go to the drive-thru the next time he got Ricky’s Pizza.

2

Polly Caldwell had underdressed. The temperature had been steady for the past few weeks, luring her into a false sense of security, before plummeting today. She saw a sign outside the dining hall that said it was thirty degrees out, and all she had worn was her light winter jacket without a hat or gloves.

Polly didn’t particularly mind. She actually liked the cold weather. It made her feel more alive, and she preferred dressing for winter than for summer, as she could cover up more of her body without standing out in any way. She wasn’t even that cold, since she always kept her face down when she walked and her hair covered her ears. What bothered her was that everyone she passed had a hat on, and she was sure she must look ridiculous without one.

Despite her insecurity, she was still sad at the thought that finals would be next week, and then it would be Christmas break for a month, meaning she would have to give up her walks on campus. When there were thousands of people walking in every direction she could relax, knowing she was just one drop of water lost in the vast sea of humanity. When campus was quiet, however, anyone traversing it was noticeable, as an individual, to everyone else, and the thought petrified her.

She would miss the human contact. She never talked or interacted with anyone she passed, but she still liked being around other people. It was why she liked coming back to her college campus even though she had graduated in the spring. Nobody she saw knew she had graduated. To everyone around her, she was just like everyone else. It was a land she could roam freely and inconspicuously. It wasn’t like a movie theater or restaurant where people would give her funny looks for being there alone. It was a place where she could be around other people and relax.

Except for today, because she was the only idiot not wearing a hat. She would blend in well with high schoolers who were too cool to wear hats even in subzero weather, but this only made the matter worse. Everyone passing her would think she still had a high schooler’s mentality. As much as she had looked forward to her walk, she knew she had to leave quickly.

She made her way back to her car and sat in it for a while, putting her bookbag down in the seat next to her. She made a mental note to keep a hat in her car at all times in case this situation arose again. It had never been a problem in the past, because when she was a student and had actually used her bookbag as more than a prop, she had always kept her hat in it. She had taken it out after graduation when she took everything else out of her bookbag, thinking she wouldn’t need it in there anymore. When she loaded her bag back up in the fall so that she wouldn’t be walking around with a conspicuously empty bookbag, it hadn’t occurred to her to put her hat back in, as it didn’t change the bag’s outward appearance.

Polly had no idea what to do now as she sat in her car. She didn’t want to go home, mainly because she knew her mother would start asking why she was back so soon. She loved her mother, and yet she had been getting on Polly’s nerves lately. It mainly started after graduation, as she began spending more time with her parents than before and had less to tell them about what she was doing. She couldn’t place her finger on exactly what had been annoying her about her mom and dad lately. It wasn’t just that they were too nosy, though that certainly didn’t help. All she knew was that this moment, in which she had nowhere to go but was afraid to go home and explain things to her mom, felt like the prime example of everything that had been driving her crazy lately.

She decided just to sit in her car for a while until she could think of something better. She examined her reflection in the rearview mirror. Her blonde hair was loose, coming down on both sides beneath her shoulders, strands going in every direction from the wind. Her cheeks were rosy from the cold. She thought she looked nice by her standards.

Satisfied with her appearance, she turned the radio on and gazed at the street outside. It was the same song she heard practically every time she turned on the radio. She had always enjoyed pop music very much, yet recently she had been growing almost bored with it. She felt as though she had heard practically all there was to hear, as the same five songs she heard every day sounded just like the five songs she had heard every day last month, and the month before that, and the month before that. She was worried it was a sign she was beginning to take things too seriously.

Students would occasionally pass her, getting into cars or just walking by (all of them wearing hats). She was glad nobody paid any attention to her. One girl passed in a cute white sweater that Polly really liked. She wished she could have told her how much she liked it. She watched her walk away and started imagining that she had gotten out and told her how nice it was.

Thanks, I just got it, the girl would say.

Oh really?

Yeah, I went shopping with my mom at the mall on Black Friday and we saw it on sale.

Wow, I wish I had known!

Well, I like your coat a lot, too!

Really? Thanks, I—

No, not really. Who was she kidding? She was wearing the most generic black coat she had, the one she always wore when she went out, the one that looked like the one practically every girl wore when she didn’t have the time or desire to grab anything nicer. Still, it was a fun conversation to imagine, even if it wouldn’t have gone like that. Obviously it wouldn’t have, since the girl would have run a mile away if Polly had gotten out of her car just to tell her that.

Polly waited a little longer, slightly depressed at how boring she found the music. When Love at da Club came on for the second time, she figured she had been waiting around long enough, and she might as well go back home. If she took a long route, her mom might not ask too many questions upon her return. She had tried to be as vague as possible about what she was doing, giving the usual crazy story about wanting to do some work and sometimes finding it more enjoyable around other people at the school’s library. She wished more than anything that her parents would just go away and she could go where she wanted and do what she wanted with no explanation