The Console

This was it. I had exactly one shot to pull this off. The elusive white buck was at the edge of my range and yet I was confident I had the advantage. It had taken hours to track this legendary target. I had stalked him through the sparse pines, down the slope of a mountain, across a green valley, through a tangled forest of oaks and maples, and finally into the clearing where he now grazed. He was a truly magnificent creature. He had sixteen points on a symmetrical rack, and although he was known as the white buck, his pelt was more of a creamy tan, much lighter than others of his species but far from the brilliant white of my Arabian horse who even now was following behind me at a distance.

The buck had no idea I was so close. The wind was in my favor and if I focused, I could smell his musk on the stiff breeze. Twenty yards. It was a long shot for a bow, especially against the wind, but I dared not move any closer. A single twig snapping beneath my foot or a crow calling out a warning and this hunt would be over. In one fluid motion I pulled the bowstring to my ear, and, just as I loosed the arrow, there was a chime from my iPhone. The arrow flew afoul and plunged into a nearby tree with a loud smack. And just like that it was over. I cursed and slammed my mouse into the desk causing the batteries to roll out onto the floor. I thought I had silenced my notifications. Apparently, I was wrong. Still muttering under my breath, I picked it up to see who had ruined my hunt.

It was a notification from my Ring doorbell camera. I tapped the notification which took me to the app. So help me if it was those annoying Jehovah’s Witnesses again, I was going to find something on the way to the door to throw at them. It wasn’t. No one had pressed the button on the doorbell, rather, it was a motion activated notification. I tapped the little blue button that said, “review footage” and sat in confused silence as I watched an enormous drone fly under the awning and stop just inches from my front door. It paused for a moment before slowly descending and dropping a smallish, brown cardboard box on the doormat. A moment later, it was gone, flying off into the distance without making a sound.

Fueled by curiosity, I threw on a dirty t-shirt and rushed to the door. The box was bigger than it looked on the camera. I mentally scrolled through my recent Cyber Monday purchases trying to guess which it might be. I knew it wasn’t my new keyboard. The box was the wrong shape. My new Bluetooth gaming headset? Maybe, but I would have thought the box would be heavier. Maybe it was the three-for-one vanity World of Warcraft t-shirts my girlfriend had ordered for me. That had to be it. I would have to be sure to text her and tell her how Amazon is delivering now. Drones. Good for me, but not so good for the delivery guy.

I tried to peel the edge of the tape away from the cardboard with my fingernails, but it was no good. The tape seemed to be one with the cardboard. I carried the box into the kitchen and retrieved a dirty kitchen knife from the sink. I had meant to do the dishes last night, but I had gotten carried away playing Red Dead online. I slid the knife across the tape at the top of the box, but that wasn’t any good either. Odd. I knew my kitchen knives weren’t exactly razor sharp, but they should be sharp enough to cut tape. I tried to push the tip of the knife directly into the gap where the top flaps of the box meet, but the tape didn’t give. Must have been some kind of new tape meant to keep boxes from coming open midflight.

Frustrated, I put down the knife and examined the box more closely. That’s when I started to get suspicious. First of all, there was no blue amazon smile logo anywhere to be seen. In fact, there was no label anywhere on the box. The only visible markings were a handprint on either side. They were surprisingly intricate. It was as if someone had rolled ink on their hands and pressed them to the sides of the box. I could actually see the dermal ridges and grooves. More out of instinct than curiosity, I pressed my hands into the handprints. Interestingly, my hands fit precisely into the prints as if I had made them myself.

“Identity confirmed.” A robotic female voice said. I watched in wonder as the impenetrable tape loosed itself from the box and vanished into thin air. I was so startled I dropped the box and took several steps back. Was I dreaming? I didn’t think so. I watched the box, half expecting something to burst out of it, half expecting it to explode. It did neither. I gathered my courage and picked up the box. I didn’t know what I would find inside. I wish now that I had never opened it to begin with.

I sat at the kitchen counter and carefully opened the flaps. Inside was a silver rectangle the size and shape of a small laptop. I sighed in relief. It was just a laptop. It wasn’t mine, obviously. I hadn’t ordered a new laptop and even if I had, it wouldn’t have been this small. It had to be some kind of mix up. Amazon got it wrong and delivered the box to the wrong address. But then why did the box open for me and why did it say “identity confirmed”?

I reached into the box and retrieved the tiny laptop. It was even lighter than I had expected. I think my iPhone may have been heavier. I sat it in front of me on the counter and began searching for a latch to release the screen. There wasn’t one. I tried to manually open it, but it wouldn’t budge. I didn’t want to pull too hard, I didn’t want it to break, but I found myself getting more and more frustrated. “Just open!” I said out loud.

“Please confirm your identity.” The same robotic female voice said. The voice came from the laptop this time. I watched as a handprint suddenly appeared on the cover and began pulsing red and orange. I held out my hand, hesitated for a moment, and then pressed my palm into the handprint. “Identity confirmed.” The voice said again. “Welcome Bradley Carson.”

A chill ran up my spine. How did it know my name? I removed my hand from the cover and watched as the laptop like box opened by itself. The top was indeed a screen, though it was unlike any I’d ever seen. It had absolutely no glare, and the depth of color on the home screen was better than I thought possible. The bottom, however, was not a keyboard, it was a stand. This wasn’t a laptop, it was a tablet of some kind. I propped the device up on the stand and a light shot out from the bottom forming a holographic keyboard on the counter in front of me. “Unreal.” I said. I was seriously impressed.

The home screen was a colorful abstract of random shapes and lines with a single application icon in the upper left labelled, “Console”. I was hesitant to open the application without knowing more about what I was looking at. It didn’t look like Windows or IOS. This was something all its own. I tried the first command I could think of. I typed “ALT+Control+Delete” on the holographic keyboard, which made clicking sounds as if I were actually tapping keys, but nothing else happened. I figured as much but it was worth a try. I began typing a series of commands trying to bring up a menu of any kind, but it was as if the keyboard wasn’t even functioning.

“Okay.” I said, “Let’s try…” and I swiped up from the bottom of the screen. Nothing happened. I swiped down first from the left corner and then from the right. Again, nothing. The only thing left to try was the icon. It was about the size of a postage stamp and simple in design. It was a white elongated, sideways “s” on a brilliant red field. I hadn’t recognized it at first, but now, looking at the design and the word, “Console” together, it clicked in my mind. That wasn’t an “S”, it was a tilde. I recognized it from using the same button on a keyboard to call up a console menu in many of the PC games I played. I could use console commands to force the game to do any number of things that I wouldn’t normally be able to do. If I needed extra gold for a new set of armor, for example, it was as simple as pulling up the console menu, typing in a coded command and voila, the extra gold I needed just appeared in my inventory. Or, if I really wanted to cheat, I could simply type in the code for the armor and it would appear on my character, no purchase necessary. Was it cheating? Yes. But why not? It was just a game after all.

I was curious now. I reached up and touched the Console icon on the screen. I wasn’t prepared for what happened next. It was like having an out of body experience. I saw myself on the screen in third person as if I had a camera floating above my right shoulder. At the bottom of the screen there was a long black box with a flashing white line indicating that it was awaiting a command. I spun around looking for the camera, but there wasn’t one. At least not one I could see. My heart was beating in my throat and beads of cold sweat began to run down my forehead.

“Welcome to the Console, Bradley Carson.” the robotic voice said.

“I don’t understand.” I said.

“Please enter a command.” The voice said.

“What is this?”

“This is the Console.” The voice said. “You have been chosen at random to test our latest technology. Congratulations.”

“I’ve been chosen at random by who?”

“Classified.” The voice said.

“Who’s Technology?”

“Classified.”

“What is the console?”

“Console is a state-of-the-art augmented reality program designed to allow the user to augment, modify or otherwise manipulate their own reality.”

“This can’t be real.”

“Please issue a command.” The voice insisted.

“What commands are there?” I waited for a response. “Hello?”

“Please issue a command.”

I let my fingers drift to the keyboard and typed the first command I could think of. One that generally works in every game that has a console. “/Help”, I typed.

The black box extended to fill the entire screen as a long list of commands scrolled down. I spent the next two and a half hours just parsing through all of the information. This couldn’t be real. I grabbed a notepad off the refrigerator and jotted down a list of commands I wanted to try. Surely it couldn’t hurt. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that all of this was either some kind of wild dream or an elaborate prank. By whom, I didn’t know, but it didn’t really matter because there was no way it could be real. Or so I thought.

I tapped the tilde key on the keyboard and the black box disappeared. I was left looking at myself from an over the shoulder point of view. I tapped the tilde key again and the small black box at the bottom of the screen popped back up. “Let’s try…” I said as I typed, “this.” I finished the command and hit enter. A new message appeared in the black box. “Command Accepted”, it read, and an alert chimed from my pocket. I unlocked my iPhone and gasped. Did it work? The alert was from my banking app. I touched the alert on the screen which pulled up my bank account information. I had to put my phone down and rub my eyes before checking it again. There it was in black and white. “Account Balance – $1,000,000.00”

I called into work the next day and let them know I wouldn’t be coming back. It wasn’t the most tactful way to resign, but who cares. I would never work another day in my life. From this point on I was going to do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. I was going to cheat at life. And cheat at life is exactly what I did.

Anything I wanted I could buy. I discovered a menu that let me manipulate my own physical attributes. Overnight I went from a skinny, nerdy, thirty-two year old to a super fit, supernaturally intelligent and athletic stud. I had rippling muscles to rival The Rock and intellect to put Steven Hawking to shame. I purchased a home for myself in the Maldives and another in the Swiss Alps. Wherever I felt like going at the time, I went. Nothing was out of bounds. I lived that way for years.

And then one day, I woke up. Not literally. I wasn’t really dreaming. I woke up philosophically, existentially. I began to notice that no matter how delectable the food I ordered was, it just didn’t taste as good anymore. It didn’t matter how many women I wooed, there was no emotional connection. Sex held no meaning anymore, no excitement. I took no joy in driving my Tesla or Bugatti or any of the other sports cars I had always dreamed about having.

I found that the more I cheated life, the less meaning life had. The depression that set in that day was overwhelming. I had everything I could ever want, and yet I felt like I had nothing. I searched even harder for happiness. I tried drugs, I would have tried counseling if I didn’t think I would get locked away in a mental ward somewhere. I tried meditation and spiritualism. I tried everything, but all I ever felt was emptiness and what makes it worse is that I should have known better.

There was a reason I had a rule with every video game I played. I had to complete the game first without cheating before I would go back and replay it with console commands. I made that rule because I found that if I made the game too easy, I would lose interest. Without a challenge to keep me going, the game would soon become boring and not worth playing. Now I had done that very thing to my own life only with real life, I couldn’t just start over and do it right. Or could I?

I opened the tablet that I had come to hate so much and began to search through all the commands once again. There had to be a way to manipulate this console. There had to be a way to undo everything that I had done. Maybe there was a menu from which I could load a previous save. Maybe there was a reset command. There had to be something. I dedicated my life to finding a solution. It took decades, but eventually I found it. I used the Console to hack into the source code. I wasn’t ready for what I uncovered. My entire life from the time the drone had delivered the package had been nothing but a simulation. An experiment. A game. But where there is a source code, there must be someone who wrote it. It was complicated, but eventually I figured it out.

“Console”, I said and put my palm on the glowing handprint on the back of the device.

“Welcome Bradly Carson. Please issue a command.” The female robotic voice said.

“Execute Developer login”, I said.

“Please verify identity.”

I typed in the username and password I had created just moments before.

This time there were two icons on the screen, one labelled “Console” and the other labelled “Program Files”. I tapped the latter. Within was everything I needed to bring this simulation to an end. An hour of searching later I discovered a file that was named “deliverto.exe”. I selected the file and opened it. Inside was a list of names, too many names to count, and at the end was my own. It all made sense now. Every name on this list had done what I had done. They had beaten the game and passed it on to someone else. I typed in the first name I could think of, saved and closed the file.

Immediately the screen went black and random images from my life began to appear beginning with today and moving backwards in time. The images moved faster and faster until it was all nothing more than an unrecognizable blur. Finally, it arrived at an over the shoulder view of me at my PC. I had one hand on the keyboard and the other on my mouse and I was deep in the world of Red Dead online. A notification chimed on my iPhone, and I pulled it out of my pocket. As I unlocked it, in the blink of an eye, I was back at my PC. I had just missed my shot at the legendary white buck.

I looked at my phone again, expecting to see a notification from Ring but it wasn’t. It was a notification from my girlfriend, whose name I had added below mine on the list. It read, “Brad! You’re not going to believe this!”