A Furious Fiction entry from smack bang in the middle of Covid-19 lockdown. Only I wasn’t locked down as my day job was deemed and essential service. In fact, we were busier than we had ever been up to the point in time. I work in online retail, the definition of essential service being somewhat elastic in the era of late period capitalism.

Of course, I was extremely fortunate to be able to continue to work, and the people I work with are some of the best people in the world, so you won’t get any complaints about my personal pandemic experience. What you will get is this little story which was written on a weekend when I couldn’t go anywhere or do anything. Perhaps that at least partially explains the theme of the story?

I can’t recall the original title, so I made up a new one, and I don’t remember the original prompts, so you’ll just have to take it as it is. Hopefully you enjoy it, and hopefully we’re never locked down again.

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Jungles certainly aren’t for the faint-hearted – he knew this intuitively, as well as from the countless dime novels he read when he was a child; firsthand experience he lacked.

His companion, on the other hand, understood all too well the abundance of dangers present amongst the tangled vegetation. Not only had she played this game before, she had survived.

The game was sold to him as the ultimate adventure, a very real opportunity to break away from the monotony of modern life and take part in the most immersive simulation experience ever engineered. Forget your paintball, your escape rooms and your virtual reality headsets, this was the real deal. The world was begging for the future of entertainment, it was delivered to them through journeying into the past.

By the time the sun dipped below the horizon on the second day he had made up his mind that she was crazy. But if they were to stand any chance of winning this game, and he had every intention of winning, he would need to trust her implicitly, something he wasn’t entirely convinced he could do.

Achieving victory would also require him to compromise his moral principles to a degree that he had never come close to before, but he knew that before he signed up. It was likely a moot point, his companion had already exhibited an aptitude for behaviors which the average Jane might deem immoral or unethical.

The turning point came sometime around midday on the fourth day. Up until that point he had all but forgotten that they had competitors in this game. Neither of them had seen another human being since they disembarked the boat. When he closed his eyes that night, he wished that they still hadn’t.

He understood perfectly well that anything that happened during the game was 100% permissible, that the laws of society did not apply to the participants in this competition. Watching a person follow that path to its logical conclusion was a little different to understanding.

The specifics of his achievement were lost to him, as though his mind, in protecting him from recalling his complicity in so many atrocious acts, had also taken from him his memories of triumph as tariff. He regained consciousness whilst they were still at sea, and when told that his partner had missed the boat, he cried tears of joy. It didn’t seem appropriate to label himself the winner.

Twelve days after stepping onto the vessel that would ferry him across the ocean to a wilderness that promised to test him in ways that he could never imagine he would be tested, he was carried from that same vessel a broken man. Was it ever worth it? Was there all that much to gain? He wasn’t a religious man before this experience, and nothing that happened in the jungle made a convincing argument for the existence of a God, but there was one piece of theological guidance that played over and over in his head: judge not lest ye be judged.

James Farish-Carradice