The Dystopia Game: A Complete Novel

By Adam Wodyk

"Boundlessly creative and entirely unique."—Self-Publishing Review

 

"A thrilling, white-knuckle ride..." —The Prairies Book Review
 

[This work contains the three The Dystopia Game parts, originally released in serialized form.]

 

The Emperial Metropolis is the scene of a dangerous game: teenage actors are used as toys in movies in which everything happens for real.

For Max Stranger, this means living in a trap. He never knows what might happen during his performance. Like other actors, he is sedated beforehand so that the filmmakers can turn on an artificial consciousness installed in a nanochip in his brain. The actors call this consciousness the Movie Character. When Max starts to play the role with his dormant mind, filmmakers send orders and impulses to the nanochip, forcing the Character to do everything that the script requires.

The worst scenario begins when Max and his girlfriend, Lara, are drawn by the ruthless autarch into a dangerous cinematographic experiment called the Seven Players series, which will be filmed in the outer mutant-infested wilderness and transmitted in real time on TV.

Death may be lurking at every turn out there. Anyone may die. Even the leading actor…

Previously published as Seven Players.

 

Reader reviews

"A sci-fi drama that will leave you at the edge of your seat with much excitement."—Goodreads reviewer

"The synopsis had me thinking it might be an attempt to copy The Hunger Games series, but this book was incredibly different."—Goodreads reviewer

 

"Fast paced and feels like you're in the story! It is a post-apocalyptic, science fiction, and fantasy type of book, but it is unlike any other in its genre."—Amazon reviewer

"It has Ready Player One tones, but is unique in its plot—I definitely recommend it!"—Goodreads reviewer

"A read experience that takes you along with the characters; danger, fear, and hope."—Goodreads reviewer

 

"This is quite a different but delightful read. A dystopian world, special nanochips and mutated creatures are some of the condiments of this catching novel."—Goodreads reviewer

• Language: English
• Publisher: Adam Wodyk
• Release date: Jan 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9798201234034

Adam Wodyk

I’m a huge fan of the fantasy genre. I love worldbuilding and storytelling. I’ve spent years working on the first draft of Ainavel – my fantasy novel about the world of Erydan. I also love sci-fi, dystopian and post-apocalyptic survival stories. I can be found at https://adamwodyk.com

Book preview

PART I

THE ENERGY

1

I wake up drenched in sweat and narrow my eyes, ready to take a punch and hit back harder. But after a few seconds I realize there’s no assailant and I’m safe in the basement of our ruined house in the Aquila Enclave. My gaze shifts slowly to the others. Everyone is sitting on their beds, my Lara too. I let out a deep sigh of relief.

I hear Othello playing with the radio again. He’s been doing it for two days; I don’t know why. The radio is fairly new, plugged in, but it caught the last signal three years ago. Besides, within a radius of several dozen miles, our Enclave, Aquila—the ruins of several houses—is probably the only concentration of living beings in this part of the desolated world. It would be difficult to connect with some station or another Earth’s Enclave. But Othello seems to ignore these facts. He turns the dial to the left and to the right repeatedly as if he can’t resist some desperate need. His swarthy face is more gloomy than usual and his eyes flare with obsession.

There’s a sudden hiss, and a strange sound comes out of the radio—low-pitched but clear and strong as if echoing behind the wall of our house.

Good evening, all of you who are still trapped in your Enclaves! It’s a glorious day for the history of our globe. We proclaim the new constitution of a global government, which we proudly call the New Order.

I feel a sudden grip of fear. The voice has spoken. The first voice from the outside in three years. It shouldn’t be real. But it is. I don’t like it. I glance at the others and notice they’ve all pricked up their ears, even more surprised than me.

You’d probably like to know why we have been hiding so long, the voice goes on, just going to the surface from time to time. Why we have been kidnapping your children like creatures from dark tales, not like the founders of your luminous future. It was because our planet became too dangerous—contaminated by the radiation of the last bomb that wiped out everything three years ago. We intended first to test and improve our new tools to cleanse the Earth of harmful radiation and many other toxic substances.

I swallow hard and lean forward, my fists clenched so hard that the color drains from my knuckles. Shivers course through me as I realize what I’ve just heard. Out of the corner of my eye I notice that Othello has turned to stone and the cook, Ayanna, has turned pale. Our boldest hunter, Jonathan, looks at her as if trying to find some words of comfort, but he’s too shaken and dumbfounded to utter a word.

Having heard this announcement, I realize that this voice from the radio represents ... them. The Scavengers. Malicious vipers. Scum. That’s what we call them. And they deserve it, because they’re the ones who look like people but don’t act like people. We know they’ve got hiding places somewhere underground, and sometimes they go out with their mysterious mutants to kidnap children and conduct dark experiments on them. Real venomous vipers. Scum.

I can’t understand their attempt to talk to us through the radio now. Why have they dared to establish a more civilized communication with our Enclave? In the last three years they have created the foundations of a hidden state and now they want to share with us this fantastic news? I don’t buy it. Now I understand why I woke up scared. I must have sensed a real threat.

Don’t leave your receivers, please, because we’ll give you further instructions soon.

Silence falls again. My gaze drifts slowly across the basement and finally settles on Lara. She doesn’t seem worried about the news. Suddenly she cocks her head and looks straight at me, wanting to meet my gaze, but at the same moment I glance away like a coward. I know too well what I’ll see in her eyes: The same thing I’ve seen almost every day for two months. Melancholy. I sigh and approach her awkwardly. I can’t explain why, but I feel like an unfaithful lover.

Hey, sweetie, come on, I say, whispering because I don’t want the others to hear me. I tuck a strand of her brown hair behind her right ear. How much longer do you want to be so sad?

Until you become the man you used to be, my Max, she replies quietly.

Again the same mantra. And at such a dangerous time! I shake my head. It’s months since we hunted together in the forest that ill-fated evening, and despite the passage of time, Lara is still acting in the same way as she did right after that ... weird thing attacked us in the meadow near the Slope. I’m still not sure what that phenomenon really was. Every time I cast my mind back, I only recall a sudden blink of light near the Slope and Lara’s scream. But I know that this thing managed to affect my girlfriend’s thoughts in some way, because since then, Lara has been treating me like a stranger. Almost every day she says that I’m not myself and I need to recover. Every time I look into her eyes, I see only a strange barrier, a dark cloud of melancholy. I cannot get through. And what’s worse, I have no idea how to help her.

Did those bloody Scavengers hurt her in an inexplicable way with one of their mysterious weapons that evening? But how? According to Jonathan, the Scavengers showed up in this forest less than a year ago and didn’t kidnap any of us. We were alone on the hunt. No one followed us.

Lara, I say to her again, trying to break through her melancholy and connect with her real thoughts, if there are still any. This broken radio has been heard for the first time since the Extinction. Do you realize that? The first time in three years! We’re in danger.

Leave her alone, Jonathan snarls gruffly, crossing his big arms over his chest and staring daggers at me. How much longer do you want to keep on making your psychological sessions?

I don’t pay any attention to this annoying bruiser. Every time he can’t say a word of comfort, he starts to growl like a sick, rabid dog.

I’m your Max, I whisper to Lara.

At this moment, I hear a snap. Somebody has turned off the radio. I jerk my head and notice that Othello has got up with a grimace of anger and disgust and is walking slowly to the door, dragging his feet as if the movement costs him a huge effort.

I won’t wait to be captured, he growls angrily. "Those bastards know where we are. They know everything about us. They’ve watched us from afar like scum in white aprons. We’re their experiment! You don’t know that? I—"

He pauses, because our young cook Ayanna breaks in softly, Still, I want to hear what else they have to say. Then she turns the radio back on as if nothing has happened.

As you wish, Othello mutters flatly and shrugs his shoulders. I feel that this silent boy resembles an active volcano. I prefer the strength of his rage to be postponed until the Scavengers arrive. There’s also something strange about his attitude and behavior—something extremely unnatural. I can clearly see that he’s hiding some terrible secret.

The voice from the radio booms out again, interrupting my thoughts. The new message is much more horrific than we could have imagined.

Cleansing the Earth of harmful radiation wasn’t the main reason for our actions, though. We found out there were some individuals among you exceptionally strong and resistant to the radiation of our desolated planet. Immune to all kinds of mental attacks and telepathic weapons. Individuals with extraordinary abilities. We need them now.

Mental attacks. Telepathic weapons. I tremble, riven with fright, and my hands start to shake like never before. A terrible truth comes to me in a blinding flash. An echo of the accident near the Slope when I was on the hunt with Lara resonates in my mind and ruffles another flashback. A strange blink of light in the depths of the forest—light so ethereal, it’s more like a ghostly flash that flickers far away in the gloom. It’s so sudden, you could think it’s some demonic hallucination. But it’s not a ghostly flash or a hallucination. It’s a mental attack.

I swallow hard and look into Lara’s eyes. Then I draw down my eyebrows in a frown, shocked at what I see, and glance away instinctively. But no, my eyes don’t deceive me; I’ve just seen it clearly. There is no such thing as melancholy. What I called melancholy is just a reflection of something much more scary and hidden deep inside. It’s a kind of other consciousness, ethereal and intangible like thought, which must have been implanted in Lara’s brain that evening near the Slope in an inexplicable way. It seems that the masked Scavengers of Astrea used one of their mysterious telepathic weapons. They sent some specific verbal information to Lara’s mind, probably in the form of an electromagnetic wave—a special wave programmed to carry a nanochip and attach it to a human brain. Through this wave they directly affected my girlfriend’s consciousness. Now she has an invisible nano-implant connected to the central nervous system in her brain, impossible to detect and maybe even to remove, and the Scavengers can control her thoughts and feelings. That’s why she always repeats these disturbing words: Until you become the man you used to be, my Max. She can’t recognize me because she’s not herself anymore, and she perceives the whole world through the prism of the Scavengers’ mental nano-implant.

Othello was right. For the last three years, we’ve been watched and followed by these vipers all the time. And only now have we discovered this terrible truth.

In exactly fifteen minutes, a rescue team from our capital, Astrea, will arrive in each of the Enclaves, says the voice from the radio. And from each of the Enclaves we will take one or two people and transport them to the capital for examination. However, all the inhabitants from the Enclaves Aquila and Centaur should be ready to leave. Thank you for listening to our announcement!

Aquila! How do they know the name of our Enclave? We haven’t revealed it to anyone from outside. We’ve had no contact with other people!

Then I hear a voice somewhere in the deepest corner of my head, a stranger, yet sounding familiar, as if I have always known of its existence. Max Stranger. You are part of the great experiment called the EMPERIAL SHOW.

I wince in response in a sudden attack of rage and panic. No! A mental attack, and right now? Get out of my head! Where have you come from? My heart is pounding with terror.

The headache is unbearable. And I don’t mean physical pain but an outrage combined with a sense of powerlessness, because someone from outside—those damn Scavengers, of course—dared to creep into my mind using one of their damn telepathic weapons.

At this moment I meet Lara’s melancholic eyes. Lara! This is the last word that my fragile and fainting consciousness sends into the ether. But before I drown in blackness completely, something else happens. Probably the worst thing of all.

Sorry, Max! I hear. I recognize the voice. It’s Othello. I can almost feel his boiling anger on my skin, the anger I thought would be directed against the coming Scavengers. To my horror, I find out that our good-hearted Othello has been directing his anger against ... himself all this time.

I understand the whole game now. Othello is one of them. Othello is the Scavengers’ spy. He knows the truth about their experiment, and he threw it right in our faces in rage and despair when he turned off the radio and shuffled toward the door. That would explain why he was checking our receiver recently. It’s possible that he wasn’t sure when the Scavengers’ broadcast would start and didn’t want to miss it because he couldn’t contact them directly. Maybe it was he who used the secret weapon that unlucky evening near the Slope and messed with Lara’s head? The clarity of these facts makes me totally stunned and petrified. I can feel through my skin that Othello is crazed with anger. He hates himself for what he’s done.

2

Cut! I always hear this word when I wake up from my acting dream—as we call our time on set—and come back to my true reality, panting loudly as if haunted by terror. I look around wildly. Familiar large windows covered with red curtains loom in the dim light. My room. Someone has just transported me here from the set. Again.

So it’s over. Fifteen minutes ago I took part in the first scene of Seven Players: Season 1. It’s the post-apocalyptic serial of the Emperial Metropolis—a production so big that it will gather around the screens all the inhabitants of the Seven Metropolises and perhaps also the poor people from the Outer Slums and the Underground District.

Of course, I don’t remember anything after waking up from an acting dream. Because I don’t perform normally, like a real actor in a film. The truth is ... I don’t even know what happens during my performance. When I’m supposed to act in a movie or a serial, I have to be sedated by special preparations—sleeping pills—and some quantum waves, so that the film coordinators can turn on an artificial consciousness hidden in a special nanochip in my brain. We call this consciousness the Movie Character. And when I find myself on set—not knowing when, sleeping—they activate the Character’s memories and thoughts with their highly advanced technologies I know nothing about. During filming, they send messages, orders, and various impulses to the nanochip in the form of quantum waves, forcing the Character to do everything that the script requires. I become a puppet on set, unaware of what I’m doing.

One could ask the question—what’s it all for? The reason is quite simple and clear. Everything featured in Emperial’s films is real and is broadcast live on TV and on screen. It’s a kind of reality show. Unconscious, we can follow the script without hesitation, whether we have to kill someone ourselves or ... get killed. What’s even more scary—not one viewer from the Seven Metropolises realizes it’s real.

When I wake up again in my room with the large windows and red curtains, I’m weak and confused, filled only with one bitter thought—I was used again, and I have no idea what I have done. Have I hurt or killed somebody? What if next time it’s my turn to become mindless prey?

After a while, a terrible truth about what has just happened reaches me. I have no recollection of anything from the set, it’s true, but I know that I’ve heard something strange in my head—something I shouldn’t have heard during filming.

Max Stranger. You are part of the great experiment called the EMPERIAL SHOW.

This weird message ... something is wrong with this message. It includes a reference to some show—maybe our Seven Players serial. But as an actor, I’m not allowed to know or hear about the details of the production or anything connected with it when I perform sedated on set. Therefore I shouldn’t have heard this message during filming. Why? Because hearing about the outer reality when you have a dormant mind might be perilous. One might simply ... regain one’s consciousness accidentally and involuntarily and, even worse, act against the script, as the actors would say—in other words, ruin the whole scrupulously planned scene. And waking up on set is strictly forbidden. In fact, it’s claimed to be the worst crime an actor can commit when they perform in an Emperial production. It’s a crime for which their loved ones pay. Usually, they pay the highest price.

I swallow hard, numb with horror. Maybe this happened fifteen minutes ago on set. Maybe I snapped awake, acted outside the scenario, and messed up everything the filmmakers had prepared, even unconsciously, unaware of what I was doing!

My thoughts flash back to this fatal message about the Emperial Show. Who sent it to my mind when I was deep in my acting trance? And why? Is it possible that one of the coordinators did it on purpose to make me act like an unpredictable maniac? To frame me? Why?

Even if this incident really took place, I won’t be able to prove my innocence. Nobody will want to check the registry of messages that the coordinators send to the actors’ minds during filming. I won’t be able to say that I took sleeping pills and visited the Quantum Cabinet, because fifteen minutes after waking up, that crap can’t be detected in the body or the brain. The coordinators will conclude that before going on set, I didn’t put my mind to sleep. I will take the rap for everything even if it isn’t my fault!

I bury my face in my hands. Horror.

In such a terrible situation, I can only ask myself: why the hell did I agree to become an actor? Why didn’t I refuse the offer from those agents who advertised Emperial Super Productions as an opportunity to become a film star? If I had done that, I wouldn’t have found myself in such a pickle!

But then I recall that I didn’t have a choice. When they saw me, they claimed that I had the face of a typical movie star and fitted into the romantic dystopian serial they’d been working on, so they took me to the studio straight from the Underground District without asking my permission. At first, I really thought it was my greatest asset, because I was sick of living the life of an orphan in the dirty underground barracks, robbing passers-by and having secret meetings with my girlfriend, Lara, who lived in slightly better conditions. I thought that if my social status improved, I would be able to see her normally—like normal lovers. I would earn money for my own home. I would live in it with Lara.

But I soon discovered a terrible behind-the-scenes truth: They were putting our consciousness to sleep and making us perform live. It is the life of an enslaved puppet. The worst thing is that no viewer from outside knows this, because as well as the real Movie Character, there’s a second one—the Celebrity Character created for the fan conventions, in my case for the marketing campaign for Seven Players.

Celebrity life specialists activate a celebrity consciousness in the nanochip in my brain, release me dormant from my prison, and transport me to the Communication Center. That’s how they begin another show. I meet fans from the Seven Metropolises waiting for a new production. As far as I know, these are mostly excited teenagers collecting tons of pics, wild with excitement whenever they spot their favorite movie star. That’s what my agents tell me. Is it true? I don’t know. Every time I find myself in the room with large windows and red curtains, I have no recollection of what happened in the Communication Center. I can’t have. This memory belongs only to my Celebrity. Where do they really keep it? Who controls it? Can I get to it and at least see what the meetings with the fans looked like? I have no idea. Nobody has told me that. And I guess nobody’s going to tell.

The truth is that I, an actor, live only in Actors’ House in Emperial. And only filmmakers and other actors know about it. Their loved ones don’t. Because it’s not me but my Celebrity who always meets with them. That’s right. My girlfriend Lara only sees me when I’m sedated by these preparations and quantum waves and the Celebrity Character has taken control of my mind and body.

The last time I really saw her was about four months ago when I signed the contract in Actors’ House. I didn’t know then that I’d handed down a sentence on myself and that I wouldn’t speak with Lara again. Celebrity memories are strictly controlled by the coordinators. Initially, I believed that these scum would provide me with a recording of the meeting so that I could see my girl, at least on screen. No way.

I was crushed. That must be pretty obvious. But I also felt overwhelming rage that gave me an incentive to take action. Next time, I decided not to swallow the sleeping pills and to skip the visit to the Quantum Cabinet. So I did. But for nothing. They have sensors in the exit door detecting the lack of these substances in the blood and quantum waves in the brain. No one can slip out without them. They check everyone.

When the janitors noticed I wasn’t sedated, they called Director Noah himself, the head of all directors. Apparently I was the first actor who had dared to do such a thing. Noah warned me with a hint of menace that if I did it again, Lara would suffer consequences. I stiffened. I knew what those consequences would be. I would have to watch a recording of her slow death or some kind of torture—maybe even sexual abuse. I’d rather not dwell on it too much. I realized he had me in the palm of his hand, and I had to obey to keep Lara safe.

That’s why, since then, I’ve