Dylan Ramirez is walking through an infinite city. He comes here often by dipping into his VR rig, a top-of-the-line setup that slides shut like a coffin. In real life, he's not walking at all. He's stuffed in a box, breathing through tubes. And he'll be in that small steel box for hours.

There are plenty of games to play with the expensive VR set, but he hardly plays those anymore. Instead, he jailbroke his set and downloaded over a dozen torrents to hang out in the Deep City.

Before the VR revolution, the closest to the Deep City would've been the Dark Web, but that is not the best comparison. The selling of illegal services and items will always be more straightforward through text posts without the added bulk of having a body. Of course, those people do exist. And your traditional dark-web freaks also still exist, grabbing players by the throats and using their better set-ups to pour horrific downloads into players' files. 

But he has never said anything about these experiences. You don't say something; rule number one of the Deep City. 

No, the Deep City is mostly yielded as an escape, mostly for edgy boys. It's always night, slightly chilly, and the windows glow red. When Dylan brought his girlfriend there, she refused to come back. Not out of fear, but out of disgust. She said it made her pity them. 

Dylan breathes in, taking in the artificial smell of car exhaust, trying to push thoughts of her away. Dylan will protect the Deep City in any argument, even with her. It's not the weird ideologies that draw him here, though he tolerates them. It's not even the freedom of being totally untraceable, though it's a bonus.

It's that smell of car exhaust. That it sometimes rains, light and misty. That there are bars and that you can buy "beer" that warps the way the world looks. Some of the more ambitious City Dwellers are even working on giving food a taste. These advancements are far too complicated, too expensive for the big VR companies to implement. 

Not to mention that altering rigs is illegal. If you want to work on these at all, you have to work in the dark.

 He enters an unmarked building he's come to every Friday at 8:00. It's small, all wood paneling, simple brown booths, and the faint smell of fried food. And here, The Boys are wrapped around a bar table. There's an NPC with large purple eyes behind the counter, wiping out a glass.

"Hello, Coil! The usual?"

He smiles at her, remembering his girlfriend looking at the cute automata in shock. "Is this what you want me to be?" she'd ask. "No," he'd said. "I mean, she's cute. But I promise I like real people so much more. Now, the other guys in here, I dunno."

"Yes, ma'am. On the rocks." He slides into a wooden stool next to four men he will never meet, but knows better than anyone he has met. Wolf, Wire, Soda, and Jackal.

Their avatars are funky. Outside of the city, avatars look more like the NPC. Big-eyed, doll-like. They wear clothes more detailed than the character models themselves because its fifty bucks a shirt. Here, they're just...strange.

Wire is a shimmering loop of wire. Wolf is a wolf, with gray textured fur and dark eyes. Jackal wears a tee shirt and jeans, his face swallowed up by a fanged smiley face. Soda is a void, just the dark outline of a person. And Dylan, or Coil, is a detective. A long beige jacket, a fedora, a knotty tie. He programmed it so his hat would always shadow his whole face. Physics doesn't matter here. It's wonderful.

The bartender slips the glass across the table, bowing. Dylan raises his hand to pat her head, customary for his ilk. But he can't bring himself to do it. Buried in his mind is his girlfriend's squinted eyes when she saw him doing that earlier. They like it! They're programmed to! The Boys guffaw.

"Aw, you fucking dork!" shouts Jackal, his fangs glistening like a cobra's. It's an A/I generated voice, fifty adult male voices smashed together to make an unreal, non-entity vocal box that will sound vaguely familiar to anyone that hears it.

"You say that about me everytime. What can I say, I'm an old soul."

"I bet you're fifty years old," says Wolf.

"And I bet you're a wolf."

Wire clears his throat. "Anyway? Anywhere you wanna go? I torrented NightPath—"

"Boo!" they all hiss, including Dylan. Wire still wants to play games. And playing games had been fun at first, something to do, but they all noticed that the games were wrong. The trigger pull on the guns was too light. There were no smells. The other players bragged about their equipment constantly, like teens bragging about their shitboxes to racecar drivers. And then The Boys killed them all easily and stood alone in a pathetic, empty and glitching arena.

"Well, what do you wanna do? Walk like usual?" It's hard to read Wire's emotions. He is, of course, just a lump of wire that doesn't even have a mouth to open and shut. When he speaks, his whole wire body rattles. Like street art in the wind. 

"I think we should watch the games," says Soda, his voice so deep it shakes the floor. His empty face turns to meet Coil's, two eyeless beings staring each other down. The bartender jerks her head up, her hair and chest bouncing when she does. A soft, dry murmuring splits the group.

For years, there have been 'games.' In the Deep City, it rustles like a whisper. Those who haven't seen them don't know what they entail.

Dylan has a rule: never interact with anything horrific knowingly. As a teenager, he used to. He walked through the small VR shock sites, watched videos of real people dying, pretended to brush them off and sometimes even laughed. He was an edgy boy, gleeful and proud of coming across as unaffected, messy, and dark. He is not that person anymore. That's why he's chosen the hardboiled detective for himself; he can square without being kicked from the group.

He loves Soda. But Soda is him from the past.

Dylan clears his throat. "Let's not destroy all the fun we're having by looking into the abyss."

Guffaws rise from the group. Soda clears his throat, an oddly mechanical sound. "We've been avoiding the games for years. And it's all because of Coil. You all can take or leave it, I know, but come on! This will actually, finally, be fun! We haven't had fun in so long."

"That's not true!" Coil lifts his fake whiskey and downs it in one gulp, as if to say 'see, fun!' "We have fun all the time! Why do we have to watch some, I dunno, potential gore orgy to have fun?" And as soon as he says it, he feels a flush of heat rush to his face. He knows he's fucked up.

Jackal exposes those long fangs, laughing. "What are you, our mommy?"

Dylan can feel his heart pick up. Every year, he'd convinced them all that the games just weren't interesting. Like football. But the games got bigger, more and more Deep City denizens spoke of them. Technological marvels! The viewing parties alone unveiled mouth-watering VR advances. He feared that this day would come when he could no longer keep them at bay.

And when he brought his disguised girlfriend in the bar, her disdain hardly hidden, he knew that he no longer was the leader.  No, he was just the old man. 'Gore orgy' was probably the worst thing he could say.

"Is that how you feel about the Deep?" asks Wire. What's probably his head twists into a knot, slowly, snakelike.

"NO! Of course not! I just don't understand why we have to watch these games. I mean, who likes sports?" Dylan chuckles, but he knows he's already lost.

"How bad can it be?" Wolf asks, the smirk clear in his voice. The boys burst into laughter. Even Dylan chuckles. The games could be anything; the Deep City is nestled so far away from any regulation it could just be filmed gladiator fights, people hacking off heads and limbs for entertainment.

"Are you scared?" Soda asks, his eyeless face never moving from Dylan's.

"No." Dylan doesn't waver either, holding the non-gaze. He can't be kicked from this group; aside from his girlfriend, they're the only friends he's ever really had.

"Then let's fucking go!" He laughs, sweeping his long limbs in a wide, wild gesture.

"Fine." But Dylan's torn from looking at him. It's the bartender, standing perfectly still. When not in use, they do that. But those giant eyes peer into him, and Dylan's stomach flips. He doesn't know why those big empty eyes unsettle him so. He doesn't know why he keeps fantasizing that she's asking him for help.

***

???

You are drowning. That's what it feels like when you're wrenched from your seat and shoved into a box so small you feel less restricted in the handcuffs. You make no noise; you're still the hunter, alone in the dark forest. Maybe a small sound eeks out of you when you're stripped of your jumpsuit, pushed down with your knees to your chest. Little sticky circles become lashed all over your skin. There are tubes stuffed into your nose that you know not to touch.

It feels a little familiar. VR? The letters waver in your brain. You think you remember soft, gentle laughter. You think you remember smooth hands brushing yours. But are these memories real? Your breath wavers as your blindfold is snatched from your eyes. There's a light, so bright, a man's masked face, and then a lid is smashed down over your head.

You scream. Even as the hunter, even though your survival instinct is all that's left of you, you scream anyway. This must be what it feels like to be buried alive.

And then you're falling, falling, falling, into a sky that is very blue.