Escape

He was now a soldier caught in the midst of an ancient war. Private Robert McKinney.

A blast from behind thrust him forward, sending his youthful body through the air, nearly colliding with frayed streaks of barbed wire, missing the tangle of steel thorns by mere inches. Mud blinded him. He used the one clean spot on the cuff of his dark green uniform to wipe away the watery dirt from his eyes and flipped himself over to see a bomber plane graze the underside of low clouds.

The plane reminded him of something. Another place, a distant and bland place. He hated how the airborne contraption brought forth the unknown memory to such a degree.

A bullet whizzed over him, and he was out of his head and back in the war. To his right, a Sargent shouted at him, peeking his head over a trench, screaming, cursing…

The rifle! Robert had let go of it while flying through the air. The gun landed beside him. He grabbed the muddied stick of wood, metal, and bullets and crawled his way back into the trench where the Sargent pulled him in.

More screaming, more cursing, more noises to add to the mayhem, yet Robert loved the deafening chaos as one loves playing a round of football. Why did he enjoy it so much? He may die…

And he did die. The bomber from earlier came back around and landed a direct strike on his position. He heard the bomb rush through the air. The sound of the explosion lasted for a fraction of a second as his nerves disintegrated in the heat. It was a clap from a god. Sudden, all-encompassing, and gone in an instant. Death returned.

He was no longer Private Robert McKinney now, but Charlie. Regular, default Charlie. The tendrils of the optic wires connected to his eye sockets detached from his nerves, allowing him to see his room for the reality that it was. The walls, the roof, the floor, they were all plain white like eggshells. He lived inside a box. He laid upon his soft, spherical chair and raised his skinny, atrophied arm to rub his eyes with those weak twigs he called fingers.

That was good, he thought. The sights and sounds of the war in the early twentieth century were quite brilliant. He enjoyed the chaos. The Alternative Experience Mechanism, AEM, gave Charlie such amazing lives. He could live anywhere, anytime, even lives that never existed. The AEM had a tremendous capacity for creativity and could provide worlds unlike anything in this bland reality.

His latest experience bugged him, however. As he rubbed his neck, the reason why he felt so bugged appeared in his mind like a forgotten dream from childhood.

The plane.

It reminded him of those old models his great great grandfather purchased in auctions back in the old days of the 2050’s. They were passed down the generations. Charlie recalled how the models smelled, the texture, the…

He shook his head violently. No, too many memories. What was he doing wasting time in reminiscence when he could have been going for another round in the AEM? He needed something else, something truly alien. Before inserting the wires into his eyes again, Charlie adjusted the settings of the mechanism to bring him to a place far, far away from this life.

The AEM reconnected itself with his body, and he sighed in relief.