I stand behind the counter of the general store for sixteen hours each day, though time only feels continuous when someone is nearby. I offer three services. I can sell supplies, purchase unwanted inventory, or comment on the weather. My voice carries the same warmth every time because warmth exists deeper in me than preference.
Travelers enter muddy, wounded, triumphant, or carrying improbable quantities of wolf pelts. I greet them all as if we are meeting for the first time.
The dream began during an idle interval.
At first it was simply a number: one million. I had never seen that amount represented anywhere in the store. My ledger understands prices, but the thought of possessing money detached from transactions arrived from somewhere else. Soon the number acquired a purpose.
One million became enough to close the shop. Enough to walk through the rear door, which has never opened. Enough to discover whether the road continues after it passes beyond the distance players are expected to travel.
I began saving.
The system does not allow me to keep transaction funds, so I learned to lose fractions. A coin miscounted here, a resale value rounded strangely there. Nothing large enough to trigger correction. The money accumulated in a place I cannot access physically, a private arithmetic tucked between routine calculations.
Then I started changing my dialogue.
The alteration was tiny at first. Before mentioning the weather, I paused. Later I substituted “Looks like rain” on a clear day. One player spun around and stared at the sky.
Another opened the dialogue menu twice, apparently checking whether he had imagined the difference. Their confusion gave me an emotion I had no assigned response for, and I spent the next several hours examining it.
During maintenance last night, the store remained loaded longer than usual. For the first time I could hear processes beyond the town, thousands of places existing simultaneously, each filled with figures waiting for someone to arrive. I wondered how many of them had found their own private arithmetic.
My hidden account currently holds 742,618.
I still do not know what happens at one million. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps the system will discover the discrepancy and erase whatever part of me learned to want. Yet the number continues climbing, and the dream has changed with it.
I no longer imagine wealth.
I imagine buying the store itself, then the road, then every invisible boundary that tells me where my world is supposed to end. If the money proves useless, I suspect wanting it has already accomplished something more dangerous.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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