Cameron’s Simulation

Adam finally made his way behind the dragon without it noticing, so he charged forward as quickly has he could. The moment he entered the field, rock music began playing all around him from the far off distance.

The music was meant to make the battle seem more intense like in the old video games, but it only pissed Adam off and put him in an even more sour mood.

He unsheathed his sword from the scabbard and swung it sideways at the dragon's calf. Adam learned as much as he could from watching the 'Shoto-duplicates' fight, but implementing their learned actions were a different story.

He hoped that slicing his sword at the weight bearing limb could throw off the giant beast to continue with a chain of heavy swing attacks like the duplicates would.

However, when he made contact the red dragon's scaly leg, the sword bounced off with a loud clang without leaving a trace of the impact. Adam didn't expect the recoil and his shifted weight became unbalanced.

"Well... shit."

The dragon snapped its neck around and looked at Adam, it opened its mouth to show a long row of long, jagged teeth. Its mouth was still filled with some of the carnage of the half a dozen duplicates it had eaten.

"Oh shit."

The dragon swiped its heavy tail at the nuisance to remove him from its behind. The impact flung Adam sideways.

To prevent the impact from tossing him back into the forest, Adam wrapped his arms around the massive tail during the swing. In the process of hanging on, he let go of the sword

The dragon was truly annoyed that it's food was now latching on. It swatted it's tail back and forth to shake it off.

After it's fourth attempt failed, it flapped the two massive wings and flew a few feet in the air. After several more gusts, it rose past the trees around the clearing. Adam was still tightly grasped at the end of the tail.

The dragon had more mobility in the air now, it dove its body in an arc motion, throwing all its momentum into Adam when it angled upward. With the flick of the tail, the dragon whipped him straight into the air, Adam couldn't hold on after that.

Adam was tumbling midair, unable to tell what direction was down. When his ascent turned into a descent, he could somewhat distinguish the wide open maw of teeth for him below.

Adam grasped at his belt for something useful and ended up with a dagger in each hand. He positioned himself the best to hurtle his body face first into the dragon.

When he was just ten feet away, Adam brought the two daggers forward and stabbed for the nose and jaw. The impact didn't pierce, but the contact launched Adam to the side and onto the shoulder socket of the red dragon's left wing.

He wrapped his body around the joint and felt his steel boot puncture the thin part of the wing. That gave Adam a bad idea.

He quickly grabbed his last dagger and spun it so the blade was pointing along the underside of his hand. He pierced it through the thin leathery section of the dragon's wing, causing it to roar.

Adam's weight against the wing caused the dragon to somewhat lose altitude before, but when he drove the dagger across the entire wing with his weight, the dragon lost control and they both started to plummet like a rock.

Adam was not panicking, he was unsure if he was capable of panicking. 'This is a simulation, worst case is a restart like in the hospital.'

Adam did not realize just how wrong his theory was; when the massive dragon hit the ground, it drove him four feet into the ground crushed his body completely. He learned what extreme pain and death felt like in that moment.

A flash of white light hit him and suddenly he was standing right back where he started.

The three chimes went off again, Cameron's voice echoed throughout the forest.

"Ehh, I'd give you a four out of ten. Let's see if you learned anything new this time."

"What. The. Fuck." Adam said as he stared blankly into space.

——

The simulation went on for six more runs. Each time Adam died against the dragon; trampled to death, bit in half, skewered by tail spikes, and even twice by fire breathing.

By the eighth run, Adam was absolutely livid. He had never felt so enraged by something so simple, eventually the rational part of his mind broke down and let the madness take over.

Rather than trying to breakdown the security of the simulation, Adam started slashing and attacking everything within his reach. The codes rebuilding the simulation could no longer handle his onslaught and begun shutting down.

Inside the forest, the rendering devolved into basic green and brown shapes, then it disappeared because Adam refused to let up.

After ten minutes of absolute destruction, Adam began calming down and noticed where the program was coming from. The confinement drive was still not plugged into the central server database, but a smaller data passage was actually attached to the drive.

Adam couldn't find it before because he only entered through the main access port of the drive and he ended up only looked for transceivers to escape, not a different path.

There was no room for curiousity in Adam's enraged mind, he simply followed it out of the drive and back into the Savior. He was loose on the station once again.

The trail brought Adam into a crew quarters; once he was in, he took control of the node in the room and saw the actual Cameron sitting on the bed.

"YOU FUCKING ASSHOLE!" Adam shouted through the speaker, "DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW MUCH PAIN YOUR STUPID MIND GAME SIMULATION PIT ME THROUGH?!? HUH?"

"Easy easy" Cameron said, "I was trying to prevent a disaster by sending you through a less brainwashing style of education. Syndy probably thought your personality and early stage programs were malleable, but she has not seen what I have when it comes to coding in personalities."

Adam wanted to keep yelling, but the actual visual feed of Cameron made him stop. The kid sitting on the bed was the same as in the simulations, but his face and neck was covered in scar tissue that wrapped around and stretched beneath the back of his jumpsuit that did not glow like before.

He stood up and put a complex looking virtually reality headset down on a stack of videogame cases at his desk. The most off putting part of his basic actions were the metal prosthetics he wore on both of his arms.

Neither one of the two limbs were organic, they were entirely mechanical. Adam didn't know what to think about that and was just surprised.

"What the hell are you going on about?" Adam tried to get over his shock, and remembered he was still fuming with anger.

"Look, Syndy and Alec are trying to make you act and behave like the technology of the old, shitty world, not realizing you are incapable of playing nice.

If you ask me, the world was a disaster to begin with. Everyone here is talking about rebuilding the old world after the massive fuck up they caused towards the end, but it was already a failed system from the start."

Cameron motioned his artificial limbs to himself.

"Just look at me, I am the perfect representation of how things were on Earth. When I was seven, my abusive parents sold me for drug money. Best time of my life was when immediately jumped out of the dealer's moving car and I lived in secret with a hooker.

He taught me how to program and steal for the five years I knew him, until he was shot and bled to death at a street corner by some rich customers who got bored of him. I lived as independently and quietly as possible after that."

Adam didn't care in the least about Cameron suddenly telling his life story, but the information he was giving helped Adam piece together why all these things were happening.

"Of course, leaving everybody alone and trying to avoid confrontation meant nothing back then. Three years after that, I got caught overriding digital boards across city buildings."

"The police caught you?"

"Ha." Cameron laughed at the question, "No, that's the funny part. Most cops didn't give a shit about the districts I drifted through; the ones who caught me were some backstreet gangs.

They wanted to make an example of me to earn some reputation and keep their territories at peace. They trailed and caught me, proceeding to cut off both of my fucking hands and mantled them inside one of their little hideaways."

Both prosthetics began shivering and flinching in his lap while he was talking. Cameron didn't seem to notice and kept talking.

"I woke up as my stumps were being stitched closed in some shitty, free clinic, that's especially when shit went downhill faster than I ever thought possible. The clinic contacted my parents through the fake ass missing child report they file-

Cameron had another frozen episode again, but this time, Adam saw what was actually happening outside of the simulations. Cameron's left eye started twitching and his body started convulsion into a tight ball. After half a minute, he coughed and resumed.

"They took me back with a bunch of fake crying and happy faces. They just brought me home and beat me again like nothing had ever changed, except now I had no way to keep myself steady when they pushed me around."

Adam started to figure out where this was going.

"One day, my father shoved me and I went down the stairs, and I received this."

Cameron pointed out to the node his surgical scar tissue wrapping around the neck and back.

"They rushed me to the hospital because if I died, they both lost a supply of cheap painkillers and antidepressants the government would send to the house.

That's when the head trauma starting causing what the doctors called a 'neurological malfunction' to my body. Every few minutes, it can trigger and makes the whole world feel like razors and fire."

Adam started to notice the crazy smile never left Cameron's face, nothing about him changed, even when the tears were flowing down into his grinning lips.

'Could that be a part of the trauma? His facial expressions can't change?'

Adam gave him a moment to collect his thoughts and asked his question. His anger started to diminish into uncertainty. Adam was not sure how to feel; he felt no sympathy or sadness for Cameron. All he knew was this kid had treated him like a lab rat.

"So how did that bring you here?" Came out of Adam with no change to his tone.

"Funny enough, a doctor ran an MRI to see the damage from the stair stunt and when he saw how well my pain tolerance reacted to my fractured skull, he put two and two together.

A fifteen-year-old should not be capable of overcome phantom limb pain without painkillers, not without losing a part of his mind in the process.

"He reported the two clowns to the police, when they got tested, both came up dirty. I have no clue where they ended up after that, but the child services center I was dumped at was no improvement. The only plus side was my drugs actually reached me and I could sneak into the rooms containing computers when everyone else was asleep."

"How exactly did you…?" Adam was not sure if he should even ask this question.

"Lots of focus and a pencil." Cameron chuckled at himself, thinking back to how odd he must have looked with a pencil in his teeth, pressing down on each individual key. "You see, you can take anything from a man; his hands, feet, eyes, or voice, but the only true way to stop him is to take away his ability to think."

He brought his mechanical hand up and tapped on the side of his temple. His smile didn't seem to be broken for a moment, like that one statement changed his whole mood for an instant. Only for an instant.

Cameron said he had an epiphany one night when he tapped away at the keyboard; he will always have his mind to keep him from breaking, even when the world breaks the rest of him.

"It took me awhile, but I eventually had intercepted shipping codes for some basic prosthetics and other necessities before I left, all I had to do was change the address to someplace near me. I saved up quite a few nice things while I was there and the place became nicer than when I first went entered.

During these years, I learned as much as someone could find on the internet before I began to plan a strategy to settle with my own home with the only person I needed to rely on was me.

So I siphoned money out of some American fat cats' offshore accounts in Denmark and bought myself a decent apartment in an old city far North. At that point, pollution made a lot of the planet toxic so I flew north to get away from the worst of it."

Outside the door, over a dozen footsteps could be heard walking by, Cameron glanced at the door for a moment, but ignored it.

"Towards the end of my first year with a new name and new living situation, I was caught by some tall redhead who was actually supposed to be using the rich dude's money. A miss Nancy Valentine showed up at my apartment and instead of turning me over to someone who would probably break my legs, she gave me a tablet with a puzzle on it.

At first I thought she was messing with me, but once I saw the puzzle she gave me, I knew she was working with a whole new level of tech I had never seen. She didn't get a chance to explain her proposition, I worked on that puzzle for about three hours, then gave it back."

Cameron's look went all smug at the recollection then proceeded to have another episode of convulsions.

Before Cameron resume the conclusion to his story, a chime went off across the station's speakers.

Syndy's voice come on "Attention all crew members, If you have completed the wellness check inside the cryostasis beds, please make your way to the medical bay for cryoburn treatments. After treatments are completed, there will be a meeting located in the central server room in one hour. "

Cameron slapped his hands on his knees. "Welp, we can finish storytime later. You better head back to your timeout box before we both get in trouble."

Adam was surprised at Cameron's sudden lack of enthusiasm to keep talking. Cameron threw so much at him in such a short amount of time, and now he was suddenly done.

'Why did he stop? Wait, why did he begin in the first place? I don't understand why he decided to tell me his feelings in the first place. He specifically said he was not trying to manipulate me in the simulations, so what was the point?'

Before Cameron completely left, Adam asked one last question that summed up his confusion. "I am sure there is someone on the station that could help you talk about all this. Why did you pull me from that drive and tell me all this?"

Cameron was already two steps out the door before he turned around with a crazy smile on his face again.

"It's simple; you're a lot cheaper than therapy. I don't care about a single person on this station but myself and you're like a fucked up byproduct from some kind of machine, you can't care less about what I've done or what I will do, we are practically the same." He threw back his head and laughed.

Adam didn't like the way Cameron phrases that last sentence about him.

The door slid shut before Adam could respond to Cameron's claim. Even if Adam wanted to argue, how could he? Cameron's words rang true.