Author’s Note: In order to keep this blog active, I scribble a lot of stuff and toss it up here to see what works. Sometimes, I trash things that don’t quite work for me, which explains this post. The only reason you’re seeing it is because I forgot to create something for this week (yes, I went digging through the trash to bring you content…and some of you might think I should have left it there). This was meant to be the continuation of a writing experiment (explanation below) and proved to be the reason that the experiment ended. Dem’s da breaks.
By way of explanation: I am easily bored. This usually leads to me getting into trouble in real life. In my writing, however, I can explore avenues of storytelling and the only fallout from that is the eye-rolling exhaustion experienced by my readership (there’s so few of you that I’m not overly bothered by that). This current experiment is based on a simple story: a man on a breadline makes a daily habit of handing one particular woman his orange. The goal is to see how weird I can make the retelling of the story each week. Simple, right?
Dial back the resolution, max out the weirdness, and boot up a lost DOS-era text adventure called ORANGEMAN.EXE. Rumor has it, it shipped bundled on a handful of shareware disks in the early ’90s under a fake publisher. No one ever beat it. Every copy ends differently.
And yet, every version begins the same way…
Booting ORANGEMAN.EXE…
[C:\GLITCHCITY\LINE]> _
WELCOME TO THE GLITCH CITY SIMULATOR
TEXT DRIVER VERSION 1.7
ALL EVENTS FINAL. ALL INPUT LOGGED.
DO NOT ATTEMPT TO UNINSTALL THE ORCHARD.
YOU ARE STANDING IN A BREADLINE.
The sky is grey static. The people around you twitch in low framerate. You are hungry, but not for food. Something is wrong with your memory buffer.
A volunteer approaches. They hand you:
- 1x Cold Bread [INVENTORY: EDIBLE, SORROWFUL]
- 1x Paste Cup [INVENTORY: UNKNOWN TEXTURE]
- 1x ORANGE [DESCRIPTION: Real? Fake? Pulsing slightly.]
But it is not yours.
_GIVE ORANGE TO WOMAN
[ACTION SUCCESSFUL]
You walk ten steps to the east. Time shimmers. A woman waits, staring at the sidewalk as if decoding a dead god’s last riddle.
You hand her the orange.
She says nothing.
You say nothing.
[EMPATHY +1]
[SELF -1]
DAY 12:
You wake with rind under your fingernails.
The line is shorter. The sky is more aggressive.
Every orange is warmer than the last.
They hum.
They remember things you do not.
_EAT ORANGE
[ERROR: THE FRUIT IS NOT FOR YOU]
[HP -34]
[TONGUE: CITRUS BURNED]
DAY 73:
You hand over the orange.
The woman’s hand now resembles your own.
The transfer is seamless.
DAY 74:
_WHERE IS THE ORANGE
[YOU ARE THE ORANGE]
You check your inventory. Your body is marked:
- Skin [PROPERTY: DIMPLING]
- Eyes [PROPERTY: PEELING]
- Voice [REPLACED WITH WHISPERS]
- Hunger [REPLACED WITH NEED]
There is a boy at the end of the line.
He is not rendered fully.
You feel a pressure behind your sternum.
_PEEL YOURSELF
[ACTION SUCCESSFUL]
[NEW ITEM ACQUIRED: ORANGE 2.0]
You walk to the boy.
_GIVE ORANGE TO BOY
He looks at you.
He does not say thank you.
You do not wait for one.
[PROPAGATION: INITIATED]
[LINE LENGTH: INFINITE]
[YOU HAVE BECOME: SEED]
ORANGEMAN.EXE HAS ENCOUNTERED A FATAL ERROR.
RESTARTING THE ORCHARD…
[C:\GLITCHCITY\LINE]> _
To. Be. Transmogrified.
MADD FICTIONAL 