Dagger Forum

Chapter One

“Here you are, sir. Filet mignon, medium rare, cooked in rosemary butter, served with a side of fresh grilled shrimp and crostini. Please enjoy.”

Casey Park politely bowed his head and withdrew from the table, striding back through the restaurant and pausing to pour water for a few guests before retreating to the server station near the back of the room. It was a busy night, as always at The Ladybug. It was the classiest establishment in City 24, set on the eightieth floor of a mighty skyscraper overlooking the entire cityscape. It was warm, and well lit, two luxuries not typical for denizens of the city, and the food was freshly caught and prepared instead of being served in plastic packaging out of vending machines as Casey was used to eating. It was a strange job, serving extravagant meals that he’d never even get a chance to eat if he saved up his entire life, but it paid well enough and it kept him on his feet.

Most people these days simply preferred to retreat into The Game, a massive virtual reality dreamscape that could be plugged into with nothing more than a simple headset. You could be anything, do anything, start relationships, even work your job online. Most people opted for such a lifestyle, working bureaucratic gigs in cyberspace, keeping the wheels of the machine turning by pushing around meaningless numbers so that everything could stay afloat. Casey never much had a taste for it. In his earlier years he’d been absolutely hooked on playing, but ever since he hit fifteen he’d simply… grown out of it. His first fight and his first kiss had really awoken him to the joys of reality, crappy as it could be at times. He refused to live in an illusion. It just made him feel dirty.

“Casey, I’m cutting you,” his manager Jack spoke from behind, resting a hand on the young man’s shoulder. He was nineteen now, and had been waiting tables for a few years until finally managing to land this gig. “Hand me your checks and head home. We’re overstaffed.”

“I still have a few tables to-”

“Marcie’s taking them. Don’t worry about it.”

Sighing quietly, Casey nodded and withdrew the crumpled collection of receipt paper from his apron pocket, laying them out neatly and handing them to his boss before clocking out on the digital pad and heading to the staff elevator. You will never be caught dead using the same elevator as our guests, he remembered Jack emphatically warning him on the day he was hired. It’d been a decent shift, he made some good money, enough to pay the bills and help get him through one more week. That’s how he liked to take things, one week at a time, but recently it had been closer to one day at a time. It was all he could ever stomach to think about, like he was immersed in an endless body of water with no dry land in sight. Most days it was all he could do to stay afloat and avoid drowning.

The filthy elevator creaked and screeched as he descended all eighty floors, waiting quietly and browsing his phone. Once upon a time it held the same power over him as The Game did, but these days, even the wonderful little glowing box was starting to lose its charm. It was always the same crap, all the time. Either people were playing stupid games filled with explosions of color that forced them to spend money to progress, or they were obsessing over people’s opinions of them on social media, or they reading something stupid and pointless like the news. Who needed to constantly listen to stories of horrible deaths and tragedies all day long?

Still, there was nothing else for him to do, and the idea of sitting in silence without any stimuli to keep him engaged was a horrific proposition. He liked to scroll through images of nature, of mighty and ancient trees, beautiful snow-laden mountaintops, fresh rivers and lakes. He always wondered whether they really looked like they did in the pictures. He’d never seen a tree before, not in real life. They must smell so different, too, he wondered to himself. Hopefully they didn’t reek of urine like everything else in the city did.

Finally the elevator shambled to a halt and the doors creaked open, leading to the building lobby. Casey offered the doorman a polite nod and exited onto the street, withdrawing his Cloud and sticking the rectangular box right between his lips. A blast of cinnamon flavored vapor filled his lungs and calmed his anxiety, helping him to decompress after the lengthy shift. Just as he finished exhaling a blast of translucent smog, he noticed someone in a dark coat striding towards him with a sense of speed and purpose.

Nervously he reached into his back pocket and kept a tight grip on the handle of his knife. The man, strangely clean-looking and rather unblemished by the grime of the city, suddenly reached out and extended a black leatherbound book with no title on the cover.

“Here, I think you should have this.”

Raising a brow, the young man accepted the tome and clutched it to his chest nervously.

“What is this?”

But the figure simply walked off wordlessly and vanished into the night. He stared at the thing incredulously. A physical, paper book? What year was this? Nobody read these things anymore. Most people didn’t even bother to read them digitally anymore, not when they could just watch something instead. Still… maybe it’d be more interesting than what the phone held. It couldn’t hurt.

After the lengthy walk home through trash-laden streets, past ruined storefronts and rusty chain-link fences, he reached his apartment and unlocked the door with a quick thumb scan. “Hey babe, I’m home,” he greeted but received no answer. Lara must have been at work still, or maybe out clubbing.

He took a moment to remove his apron and unbutton his work shirt, sitting down on the couch with a deep sigh and opening up the book to its first page. The pages were waxy, or glossy perhaps, they felt pleasant to touch and had a nice look to them. His eyes squinted, unused to reading in this manner, slowly adjusting to the light of the room.

“In the beginning…” he read aloud. “God created the Heaven and the Earth…”

Chapter Two

Casey had not been able to pry himself away from the book. His attention span, damaged as it was from staring at screens and receiving an uninterrupted stream of dopamine his entire life, forced him to get up every five minutes and take a walk around the room. But he always came back, sat down, and kept reading. Slowly, it began to get easier and easier. The words flowed from one into the next, and they pierced his soul. He learned about things he never even could have imagined. This world had an intelligent creator, who existed before the beginning of everything, and made the entire Earth with his power. He made the forests, those beautiful forests which he’d admired only from his phone, from nothingness. All he had to do was speak, and they sprouted up out of the ground like they’d been there for thousands of years! He could hardly even imagine.

His entire life, he’d never given much thought to the origin of the Earth he lived on. His school had never addressed it, except that we were here now, in City 24, that we were supposed to work and eat and die. Some of us might pop out a few kids, some of us might not. After we die, there’s nothing, just a black void forever. One minute you’re here, then you’re not. That’s what Casey knew.

But… the idea of God. It was such a nice sounding word. God. He found himself repeating it out loud a few times, smiling to himself like an idiot. This God made everything in the entire world, and he made it for humans. The thought was stirring, and humbling. He reflected on how much they’d blotted out his creation with their own, replacing his trees with their giant towers of stone and glass. God probably wasn’t pleased with that.

There he sat, perched on the very edge of his tattered couch, simply one life in a rectangular apartment with concrete floors and concrete walls, stacked between two identical apartments like a hive in a bee colony, and merely a speck on the cityscape that a wealthy man would gaze upon from his view at The Ladybug for no more than a passing moment. The blaring fluorescent glow of advertising billboards and lights shone through his window, illuminating the pages of his book as he read voraciously. “And the woman saw that the tree was good for food…”

“What’s this about a woman?! You better not be cheating on me!”

The door swung open and a young woman sauntered in, her steps wobbly and misaligned, cutely kicking a heel off her slender foot and nearly cracking Casey right in the head with it if he hadn’t managed to duck in time. The other heel peeled off with a bit more ease, and the young woman sauntered over to her boyfriend with a drunken smile plastered on her face.

Her body was covered in luminescent paint, various swirls and patterns twisting across her body like ancient runes. She must’ve been at The Blacklight. It was a fun enough club, one where everyone arrayed themselves in a special paint so that their bodies would light up and glow on the dancefloor. They used a special kind of light fixture, or something along those lines.

“What are you up to, babe?” She giggled, wrapping her hands around Casey’s head and leaning into him with all 130 pounds of her weight. She loved invading his personal space when she was drunk, she knew it annoyed him.

“I was just…”

“What the hell is that thing!?”

“Uh… it’s a book.”

“A paper book? Please don’t tell me you wasted more of our money on something stupid like that.”

“No, some guy just gave it to me.”

“Well, what’s it about?”

“It’s about…”

She suddenly clamped a hand over his mouth, a delicate finger pressing over his lips and silencing him. Lara let out a teasing laugh and climbed off the couch, leaving her heels scattered on the floor and strolling back to the bedroom. She didn’t actually care, she was just tipsy. Casey watched her with a somewhat perturbed expression before sighing and turning back to the crisp, glossy pages of his book.

He stayed up almost the entire night reading, until it was four in the morning and his eyes burned from going so long without the comforting glow of a screen’s light. When Adam and Eve were exiled from Paradise, and their sentence was passed onto all mankind, he couldn’t help himself from sobbing uncontrollably, staining the pages of the book with his tears. Finally he fell asleep sitting there, book still open and in his hands, his shirt’s collar wet from crying his heart out.

Casey’s alarm awoke him three hours later. He’d forgotten that he was assigned to work the morning shift and open up for brunch service. Quietly he crept into the bedroom, doing his best not to rouse his girlfriend from slumber as he snuck into the bathroom and cleaned himself up as best he could. He stared into the mirror, and returning his gaze was a tall and lanky man with a slender build. His long, dirty blonde hair flowed in loose locks down to his shoulders, and he quickly secured it into a ponytail for today’s work. He kept a chin goatee, but hastily swept a razor along the rest of his face and neck with nothing more than a little water.

His torso, arms, and back were covered in ink. He’d been getting tattoos since he was in his pre-teens, and always enjoyed being the canvas for his friends who were trying to practice their own artistic abilities. Most of his art was pretty good, a few pieces were horrible, but for the most part he’d been pleased with the colorful swirls that adorned his skin. A thought suddenly crossed his mind.

Did Adam and Eve have any tattoos?

He pondered this while applying some deodorant, opting out of a shower this morning, quickly dressing in a buttoned shirt and some nice slacks before grabbing his apron and heading off to work.

As the elevator ascended up each floor, he reached for his front right pocket instinctually to pull out his phone. Pausing, he decided instead to pull out the book which he’d brought in his apron’s pouch and crack it open. It was more interesting to him anyway, and he could get a little reading in while he waited to reach floor eighty.

He couldn’t believe that even after God had punished Adam and Eve for breaking his one law, he still decided to clothe them with animal skins to keep them warm and protect them in the new world they were entering. He probably would have just thrown down a lightning bolt at them or something, if he had the power that God did. He figured that’s why he wasn’t the one making decisions.

“So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life…”

“What’s a Cherubim?” He wondered aloud, scratching at his chin. Maybe it would get explained later on.

The staff elevator doors slid open and he quickly closed the book, tucking it away, not wanting to be questioned or harassed about it like Lara did the night prior. Readying himself with a quick hit of his Cloud, which simultaneously served as his morning breakfast, he clocked in on the digital pad and hit the floor right away. He quickly attended to his work, wiping off the tables, setting down the chairs, making roll-ups with freshly washed silverware. The entire time he worked, however, his mind was fixated on his reading.

Adam and Eve, cast out from the beauty of Paradise. Forced to work and toil for their daily bread, just as he was now. He wasn’t a woman, but he could imagine that painful childbirth was probably a less than pleasant experience. Was it really worth it, having to go through all of that just for knowledge of good and evil?

Probably not, Casey thought to himself as he polished a delicate wine glass. It seemed like the worst trade in the entire world, in fact. They had a perfect, beautiful oasis to enjoy forever. God, who fashioned the entire universe, was there with them and dwelt happily with his creation. They were like one big family, humanity and all the plants and the beasts. I’d have told that serpent to screw off, he resolved within himself, silently judging Eve for making such a stupid choice. His thoughts, however, drifted to every time he’d disobeyed a command from his parents or an authority figure and ended up suffering for it- let alone God, the creator of everything.

In the span of an hour or two the restaurant was completely set up and ready for business. The lights went on, the music went on, and the waitstaff were left loitering around until their first guest arrived.

“Hey, Marcie. I gotta use the can, can you just come get me when I get my first table?”

“Uh, too much information. But sure.”

Casey briskly walked to the bathroom, shutting and locking the door behind him, before plopping down onto the toilet with the seat still down and pulling out his book. If he could get a few spare minutes to continue reading, why wouldn’t he take it? It wasn’t like there was anything else going on.

He learned that Adam and Eve went on to have children, and did their best to repent of their initial sin. Too little, too late, if you asked him… but nobody had asked. They had two boys, Cain and Abel, and Cain was plagued by anger and jealousy. He was furious with his brother because his sacrifice hadn’t been accepted by God, and so he came upon him one day in the fields and murdered him. Perhaps a bit foolishly, Casey found himself carried away with exactly how Cain might have done it. Surely they didn’t have any sort of technology back then, so a firearm was out of the question. Maybe he took a large rock and beat him over the head with it?

Whatever the case, it pained him the more he reflected on these words. He felt condemned, calling to mind the times his fury had blinded his better judgement. Thankfully he’d never killed anyone, but he had put someone in the hospital once during a fight. He never really thought anything of it, seeing as how repaying insults with violence was a perfectly normal way to handle things… at least, as he’d been taught. If you hurt someone, they stopped bothering you.

But he began to see this may not be entirely true. God punished Cain, sent him out to wander the Earth as a vagabond until he died. He supposed in Paradise there had been no need for insults, or for violence, or anything of the sort. After all, life had been perfect. Perfect. He kept using that word, but what did it actually mean? Did he even know? Or had he fallen so far, along with the rest of his society, that he couldn’t begin to understand what a perfect world would even look like?

He sighed and closed the book, and just in time, because a few knocks rang out against the door. He stood and flushed the empty bowl, then turned the sink on and off, just so it seemed plausible enough if anyone had actually been listening to him from outside.

Finally he opened the door and wandered out into the restaurant, greeting his first table and beginning his shift.

The hours passed quickly. He served food he could never eat, cocktails he could never drink, poured water that flowed from fresh streams he’d never see, and pretended to laugh at jokes that he hated. A few hours in, he paused at the server station, staring out at the tables. He watched the men in their suits, clean shaven and showered, laughing and stuffing their faces. The melody of the restaurant’s music suddenly soured in his ears, and Casey was stricken with a sense of profound coldness and emptiness. Everything felt hollow.

Why are we doing any of this? What’s the point? Everyone’s just going to die, and go nowhere. Who are we kidding with any of this stuff?

He reached down into his pocket, clutching his book, fingers tracing along the sturdy spine. It had explained so much to him already… he knew in his heart that it must have the answers to everything else. He just had to keep reading.

He just had to keep reading.

(To Be Continued)

finally got around to reading this, enjoyed it! the reveal at the end of the first chapter was unexpected and amusing

whether you're posting these for encouragement, critique, or simply for our enjoyment, keep em coming