Inescapable Escapism

I hesitated, glancing in both directions as I debated where to go first. There wasn’t anything particularly eye-catching in either direction, and that made it harder to decide. Normally, in Ice Escape, there was a clear path for us to take. It wasn’t always obvious, but if we looked hard enough, we generally found something that showed us which way the developers wanted us to go.

Normally, that was in the form of something bright yellow, like a cloth or an abandoned high-vis jacket. They trampled it a little bit, made it muddy, so it was harder to spot, but we always found it. And then we ignored it.

For a little, anyway. The marker always led further into the level, towards the boss, but the other way was usually a dead end, and most of the time, there was loot there. Or a monster. Or both. That was most common.

I scoured the rubble around us, searching for even a hint of yellow, but found nothing. The only brightly coloured items were the pink flowers dotted amongst the vines hanging from the ceiling. We couldn’t rely on the devs to tell us which way to go, and that excited me. It made the game more difficult.

Sweeping my torch around, I eyed our options. If we went left, we’d need to go down to the next level down. The ground was too unstable, and it had collapsed from age or whatever had happened in the lab. There was no way to get across the chasm to the other side, but it looked like the collapsed floor formed a pretty nice slope for us to climb down.

It seemed a little more stable to the right, though. There were still spots where the concrete had crumbled away, leaving gaping holes, but I was pretty sure they could be avoided easily enough. We’d just need to move slowly and carefully.

“Can you see anything on the right?” I asked softly.

Dina’s torch moved in a wide arch as she scanned the area to check for monsters before squinting into the distance. I could sense her excitement and impatience to start exploring, but she held herself back, waiting for me to make a decision.

“Not really,” she said. “I think there’s a wall or something over there, but… I’m not sure.”

“Okay. How about we head in that direction for now and see what we find? We can always turn around if there’s nothing there.”

Dina nodded, her torch sweeping the cavernous lab again before she looked at me.

“That sounds good!” she nodded. “Do you want to take the front as usual, and I’ll make sure nothing sneaks up on us?”

“Sure!”

I paused, clipping my torch to the top of my rifle before looking up at the darkness that seemed to stretch out in front of us forever. Anxiety bubbled in my stomach, but it was overpowered by excitement. Normally, the idea of sneaking through a research lab would have filled me with fear, especially knowing that there were creatures inside just waiting to murder us, but I barely felt any. I wasn’t sure if it was just Dina’s palpable eagerness or my own need to explore the lab, but something was helping.

Dina fell into place behind me as I started to edge forward, moving slowly and scanning the floor and area around us. The concrete beneath my feet felt pretty solid, but I listened closely for the telltale trickle of stone giving way, unable to trust it.

Well, it was more the devs I didn’t trust. I’d played the game enough to know they absolutely would tempt us into an environment like the lab, distracting us with the promise of loot and knowledge before burying us under a tonne of concrete and stone. That would not be a good way to go, even with the limited pain settings.

“Wait,” I hissed, stopping suddenly as the hairs on my arm stood on end.

A loud rustle of fabric behind me made me wince as Dina stumbled midstep, trying to avoid walking into me. I wished we weren’t wearing the damn suits. If we’d found the lab later, even in a couple of levels’ time, it would have been so much easier to sneak about. We would have been able to upgrade our clothes to the silent snowsuits, and we could have had vision buffs or something. That would have made me feel so much better.

“What is it?” she asked, her tone tight with anxiety and expectation.

There was something in the distance. I couldn’t see it properly; it was just a huge shadowy shape, but it almost looked like it was moving. Maybe it was just my eyes playing tricks on me in the torchlight, but I didn’t want to risk it. If it were a creature, we wouldn’t be able to fight it properly from where we were standing. The floor was too patchy. We’d be at a disadvantage, and we wouldn’t even be able to run if we needed to.

“Three o’clock,” I muttered, squinting into the darkness. “I swear that thing just moved.”

My heart pounded as Dina’s torch turned towards the shape, and I forced myself to do what we’d done a hundred times before: prepare for the fight. Scanning the ground, I tried to commit what I thought was a safe path to memory before sweeping my torch in an arch behind Dina to make sure nothing was circling behind us while we were distracted.

“I don’t think it’s anything,” Dina decided after a tense couple of seconds.

I glanced at the potential creature again, unable to make any details out. Maybe Dina was right. She usually was about things in the game.

“Okay,” I muttered, starting to pad forward again, my eyes flicking between the giant shape and the path in front of us.

Worry built in my chest as we moved. The path was taking us towards the creature or bolder or whatever it was, and the holes in the floor made it impossible to go any other way. Not unless we went pretty much all the way back to the start of where we’d come into the lab and went right along the edge of the balcony, but that felt like a horrible idea. The wall had crumbled too, and if one of us made the wrong step, we’d plunge to our deaths.

Instead, we just had to continue towards the shape that I was almost certain was a monster. My heart pounded in my ears, the noise somehow drowning out the almost deafening crinkle of our suits, and I forced myself to breathe as evenly as possible.

“Told you so,” Dina muttered as we drew even closer, nudging me softly in the back.

I tightened my grip on my gun, trying not to jump.

“Oh yeah,” I said with a slightly shaky laugh. “Just a bolder, I guess.”

Still, I couldn’t stop myself from scanning the shape and searching for movement. It was clearly a rock or chunk of concrete, but there could be a monster under it. It wouldn’t be the first time the devs had done that to us.

“Are you okay?” Dina asked softly. “You’re kind of jumpy today.”

“Yeah, fine,” I answered immediately.

Dina paused, and I knew she didn’t really believe me. I wouldn’t have either. She was right, after all. I was being jumpy, and I had no clue why I felt so much more on edge and nervous than usual. It was just a game, nothing more. I wasn’t actually on the surface, exploring an abandoned lab, and I likely never would be. I was in an arcade in the city, far above any danger.

The thought did make me feel a little better.

“Is it because of the officials?” Dina asked, her tone lighthearted and helping to make me feel at ease. “Did you get a zip from your parents already?”

“No, no,” I reassured her, my eyes flicking up to the top of my screen to check my notifications. “I’ve not got anything from them. I bet they don’t even know we left school.”

There was a slight pause before she spoke again, her voice much softer.

“Are you still thinking about the results?”

I swallowed, anxiety flaring in my heart again.

“No,” I lied as I paused to step over a short, crumbled wall.

Dina snorted softly, and I saw her torch move out of the corner of my eye as she clambered over too.

“It’ll be fine, Clea,” she promised me. “They’ll post them any day now, and I know they’ll pick you. They’d be stupid not to.”

“Thanks,” I said, unable to sound as sure as she did.

It was hard. About a week ago, I’d said the exact thing to Dina when she said she was scared she wasn’t going to be picked to become an artist. I still didn’t understand how they could have overlooked her, and selfishly, that was making me feel more nervous about my own chances.

She was incredible. If they could look at her work and say she wasn’t, the board could definitely reject me as well. Dina was so much better suited to become an artist than I was to become a doctor, and I knew that. I always had.

My heart started to sink as anxiety clawed at me, and I pushed the thought away, scanning our surroundings in an attempt to distract myself. Part of me wished the devs had developed some kind of mind-reading tool because I knew if we were attacked by a monster, I wouldn’t be able to keep worrying about the results and my future. I’d be too busy focusing on the fight.

But no attack came. It was a little disappointing, but I barely had time to think about that. Something had appeared in the distance.

“Slow,” I whispered, warning Dina I was changing our pace. “Nothing bad.”

“Got it.”

We’d already been moving at a crawl, but I needed to go slower. We were starting to approach the wall that Dina had seen in the distance before, and the floor was even more pitted and unstable. If I chose the wrong path, we’d fall straight through, and I didn’t trust that we’d be able to get back up. The other way, the ramp, would disappear the moment I made a mistake, and I knew it.

But, as I led us closer to the wall, I realised something was wrong with it. The stone, or concrete, or whatever it was made out of, had crumbled long ago, exposing the metal below. It wasn’t just support beams or metal panelling like we’d seen before. The entire wall, the whole space, was a solid metal wall.

And it was huge. It stretched the width of the entire balcony we were on, easily twenty metres or so, but I couldn’t tell if it was just the one wall that was made out of metal or if the entire room was a metal box? That didn’t feel right, though. Why would it be?

It was used sometimes to protect against certain types of radiation and things like that. We’d been taught about that before in school when they discussed the survival efforts, but the bunkers were generally buried in the ground, weren’t they? Why would they need something like that on the top floor of a research facility? Was it because of whatever they were researching? The biological warfare?

Knowledge slammed into me. Somehow, I hadn’t been able to access it before. I didn’t know what biological warfare meant. In that world, the one where I lived amongst the clouds, it wasn’t a thing. We’d never even been taught about it in school, and it wasn’t in any media. But the real me knew what the words meant, and that filled me with terror.

I’d read too many books about it; I think that was the issue. Watched too many post-apocalyptic movies too. They were Phoebe’s fault. She loved them. And, as I stood there, staring at the wheel in the centre of the wall that probably unlocked the terrifying metal box, the awareness of exactly what type of lab we were standing in washed over me.

Maybe I was wrong. Perhaps there weren’t actually flesh-eating bacteria or viruses that could turn people into zombies or cause their eyes to melt out of their skulls or anything like that in the lab. It could have been something less terrifying. More…

I couldn’t think of a way to finish that thought. Every single idea I came up with was more horrifying than the last, but I couldn’t stop my feet from moving forward. As scared as I was, I had to know what was inside the room before me.

It was something important. It had to be. They wouldn’t have protected it like that if it wasn’t, and it was just a game, anyway. A game we’d sunk hours and hours into to try and complete. The key to killing the final boss could be in the room, and I was too stubborn to turn my back on it just because I was scared. I refused to be that pathetic and weak about something that couldn’t even hurt me properly.

“What is that?” Dina breathed, staring at the metal door, her eyes wide with wonder.

She’d never seen a lock like that before, I realised. I hadn’t either, not really. I’d seen them in movies before, obviously. There were always huge vault doors that had a wheel in the middle and some kind of complex way of opening them, but I’d never actually been able to reach out and touch one.

“A lock,” I told Dina before adding, “I read about it in a textbook once.”

It was a weak lie, but Dina was too distracted to notice.

“How do you open it?” she asked, glancing away to check our surroundings.

I paused, unsure how to answer her. I had no clue. People either just twisted the wheel in the centre or… I was pretty sure sometimes people exploded the vault doors in movies too, somehow leaving the contents completely unharmed. It seemed unlikely either would work for us.

The door was probably locked so it wouldn’t just twist open, and we didn’t have any explosives yet. I’d picked up a couple of grenades, though. They might work, but it felt too risky. We had no clue what was inside the room, or safe, or whatever it was, and I didn’t want to take the chance of destroying it.

Plus, the building was too fragile. I didn’t know how the metal room hadn’t gone plunging through the floor straight to the ground already, but I didn’t want to tempt fate.

“I don’t know,” I told Dina as we reached the strip of solid concrete floor in front of the safe. Thankfully, the developers had been kind enough not to make us balance on a thin stretch of concrete as we figured out how to open it. “There’s a keypad, though.”

“There is?” Dina asked, sounding shocked as she leaned around me to stare at the ancient piece of tech.

I was just as surprised as her. In all the years we’d been playing Ice Escape, we’d never come across a keypad lock. There were mechanical locks on all the chests, of course, but nothing like the one before us. It probably wasn’t a big deal, but it felt like it.

Everything in the lab felt different and new. It was more realistic than the rest of the game too. Even the keypad before me looked like one I’d see in real life. The numbers had been rubbed away from age or potentially use, and the rubber below was crumbled. In some places, it was completely missing. Five numbers. The rubber had been worn away on five of the numbers.

That must have been the code. The buttons that were used most often would have been the weakest. They would have succumbed to decay first. My heart leapt in excitement. We knew what numbers the code used; we just had to figure out the order, but that wouldn’t be too hard. There would be a clue somewhere.

I started to look around, checking the remaining walls and floors for graffiti or anything that stood out before a realisation hit me. Turning back towards the keypad, I snapped my torch onto my shoulder and fumbled with my gun as I pulled my snowsuit sleeve back, revealing the soft thermal layer beneath.

“What are you doing?” Dina asked, her voice slightly breathy from anticipation.

“I just don’t know,” my mom’s loud sigh broke into the world, causing the lock to swim before my eyes as dizziness assaulted me.

Fear spiked within me as I clawed at the world, fighting to stay in it. I couldn’t be dragged back into reality. Not when I was so close to… something. I wasn’t sure what exactly, but I knew I didn’t want to miss it. I couldn’t leave the world for even a second. If I did, I could die. I could ruin our chances of figuring out the secrets of the lab and completing the game. Who knew when we’d find the lab again, too? It might be years or potentially never!

If a monster attacked me when I wasn’t in the world or was grappling with the dizziness that accompanied jumping between the worlds, I wouldn’t be able to fight back. My body wouldn’t listen to me; I’d be completely defenceless. We were only on the first level; the monster might not be that strong, but I couldn’t risk it.

Plus, my mom wasn’t talking to me. I knew that. She was just talking aloud because she wanted to fill the silence or to get some kind of reaction. That was why she usually did it. She was probably getting frustrated at her own inability to make a decision and wanted to take it out on someone so she’d feel better. It probably wasn’t even me but the shopkeeper, Malcolm. I didn’t need to respond to her. In fact, it would probably be better if I didn’t.

A tight breath hissed between my lips as the world around me solidified, and the dizziness started to retreat. Relief slammed into me. I’d done it. I’d managed to stay.

“There’s no power,” I told Dina as I scrapped the grime away from the small screen above the numbers.

“Okay,” she muttered. “So we need to find a way to restore the power? I can do that.”

“Mmm, I don’t think so,” I replied. “The lab is ancient, right?”

“Right?”

“So, there’s probably nothing left in the generators.”

There was a slight pause, and I could almost feel Dina’s mind spinning as she considered solutions.

“Okay, so we need to find a way to generate some power? Maybe we can make a solar panel with some of the equipment here?” she suggested. “It shouldn’t be too hard. There are enough holes in the roof. As long as we find a good one, it shouldn’t take too long to power up.”

I examined the door again. There were no exposed wires leading away from it. They might have been concealed in the floor, but the concrete was too solid around the door. It had to be intentional, which meant…

My eyes found the wheel again. If the lock was powered by electricity, surely without it, it would open easily, right? It couldn’t be that simple. There had to be something in place to stop people from being able to just cut the power to a building so they could break in, but… we were in a video game. Real-world logic didn’t always apply.

“I don’t think we need that,” I said slowly.

“Okay… what are you thinking?” Dina asked.

I stared at the wheel again. It was old, so old, but somehow, the rubber coating on it was barely damaged. The metal spokes were perfect. I could only see a tiny speck of rust on the door at the base of the wheel and none on the wheel itself. That had to be intentional.

“This might be a bad idea.”

If I was wrong, the devs would probably make that very clear. But I had to try it.

“I love bad ideas, you know that,” Dina said, clearly grinning as she spoke. “What’s the idea?”

“I think I’m just going to… try and open it.”

Dina didn’t reply for a couple of seconds, and I felt anxiety growing within me. Was it that stupid of an idea? It didn’t feel like it.

“Might as well try,” she said.

I glanced at the darkness surrounding us before taking a deep breath and looking down at the rifle in my hands. I’d need both hands to try and open the door, but the thought of slinging the gun across my back scared me. Rolling my eyes at myself, I hit the safety before slapping the gun onto my back, where it attached automatically. It would take me a second to grab it if I needed it. I was being dumb.

Reaching out, I wrapped my fingers around the surprisingly solid feeling wheel and looked at Dina, checking to make sure she was prepared. Her back was to me as she watched the darkness, her gun held aloft and ready to attack. In another world, she would have made a fantastic soldier.

Or a spy. I almost wished I could pull her out of that world and into the one with the Academy. She would have loved it there, and I knew she would have done so well. If she couldn’t be an artist, maybe a spy was the next best option for her.

Goosebumps started to creep down my arms, and I blinked, shaking my head slightly as I scolded myself internally. I needed to stay focused. Why was I getting so distracted? That wasn’t like me.

“This might be a fight,” I warned Dina. “It feels like a boss.”

“Oh, I know,” she said, bouncing on her toes as a grin spread over her face. “I’m ready for it. Honestly? I’ve been ready to hit something for the last few days. Ever since that asshole rubbed it in my face that he’s been chosen and I haven’t...”

My smile faltered slightly. Days. She’d been struggling with that for days, and I hadn’t even noticed.

“Well then, I hope we have to go hand to hand,” I told her, trying to hide my shame as I looked back at the door.

A soft snort came from behind me.

“Even if I don’t run out of ammo, I might just drop my gun. There’s probably something sharp in there that I can stab the beast with. Or maybe I’ll just punch it to death,” Dina sighed, sounding wistful.

Unease turned in my stomach, and it wasn’t just because of Dina’s words or her longing tone. It was because I understood how she felt. I knew how satisfying it was, and that scared me. It was just a video game. I knew that, but it still felt wrong to enjoy murdering something even if it wanted to kill me too.

But even as I thought that, a memory floated to the front of my mind. It was so visceral, so strong, that it felt like I was actually there, plunging the blade into a bear-type monster’s neck. It took a surprising amount of force to get the knife in, and I could still feel the warmth of blood on my hands as it spurted from the wound. The dying cries of the animal echoed in my ears as triumph danced in my heart.

It was just because it was the first time we made it past level sixteen. That was why I was so happy. It wasn’t because of what I’d done. But even as I thought that, I wasn’t sure I believed it.

“Okay,” I said, tightening my grip on the wheel. “Here it goes!”