66

Introductory Text

66th Post

Posted 24 May 2016 at 16:06:58 EDT

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> It started as a field trip twice a week. Get out of the home for a while, go play video games. Not just for a little bit on the staff's phones, but for hours on real rigs. Before then, my favorite thing was when we took walks in the woods behind the home, but this was even better. It was funny because the game we played was called *Children of the Forest*, which was basically where you walked through the woods fighting enemies.
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> In the game, you had to remember all these different paths, which were always branching off in different patterns. And you'd fight different enemies that all had different patterns. There was a lot of memorizing stuff and making decisions. Everybody liked the first 20 levels or so, but after that, most of the other kids got frustrated. Instead of going on, they just played the first few levels over and over. But I kept going higher and higher.
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> The final boss was called the Ancient Queen. You were always advancing on her castle, this huge dark castle that loomed in the background of every screen. Sometimes you would see her floating around her castle, just a shadowy bird-like shape, and she would taunt you from afar. "Come, my child, come and face me!" That kind of stuff. Man, I wanted to get her.
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> Even as a little kid, I got really obsessed about things. I wanted to beat the Ancient Queen so badly. I got to level 100, then 200, then 300. At this point, every branch in the path offered like 40 choices, and they came literally every second, plus you had to do the enemy patterns, sometimes mixing two and three enemies at once, kind of like playing two melodies at once on a keyboard. It got pretty insane, but I kept advancing. I was relentless.
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> It was nice to finally be the best at something. I was way better than any other kid. I mean, no other kid went past like level 40. Sometimes they had me play online against other people. There was a kind of battle mode. I beat everybody.
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> At first we could only go to play games like twice a week, and everybody was just dying to do it, since there was nothing to do at the home. But after a while they let me play whenever I wanted. This made the other kids jealous, and they started shunning me, so I just played even more.
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> I played all the time. I started sleeping at the game place, and I played from when I first woke up in the morning (or night) until I went to sleep at night (or morning). They brought me food while I played, whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted it. One of the people at the game place tried to spoon feed me while I played. It was creepy at first, but I got used to it.
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> I had pretty much gotten used to the fact that whenever something was really fun, adults would come in and take it away or tell me to not do too much of it. Or something bad would happen, and it would be destroyed. So when they told me I could play this all I wanted, it was like the ultimate freedom.
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> The ultimate freedom. Funny that.
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> I remember lying in bed one night, and I heard the theme music playing down the hall in the game room. The game was so fun, but kind of cheaply made, and it had this chintzy flute music that played over and over. I heard it now in the middle of the night and wondered who was playing, since I was the only kid there and the doctors never played it. So I got out of bed and snuck down the hall to see who it was. The game place was kind of creepy, with all white halls and everything smelling like plastic, and I was a little scared, since I was only 8 at the time. When I got to the game room, it was totally dark. Nobody was there. The music seemed to vanish. It had all been in my head. That's how much I played it.
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> I was obsessed with that damn Ancient Queen. She was like this huge mythical creature in my mind. In the game, she only had like a dozen taunts, and I must have heard each one hundreds of thousands of times. They were burned into my brain. When I was on the high levels and everything was flying at me at once, I kind just cleared my mind and let my hands play the game, if that makes sense. In these times, I would daydream about the Ancient Queen. What would it be like when I finally faced her? What would she look like? What would happen?
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> It's strange, but sometimes I imagined her as looking like my mother. That strange face that barely remembered.
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> After a few months, they gave me the surgery to install my direct sense jacks. After playing the direct sense games, I forgot all about the Children of the Forest and the Ancient Queen. I had found a beautiful, wonderful world where I was powerful beyond belief, where I wasn't just some little girl who lived in a home and didn't have any friends. So away I went...
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> A few years ago, I went back into the CIA files and found a copy of the game to see if I could finally beat it. I got past level 800. After that, it became simply inhuman. So I botted it to see the ending. It took a long time to build a proper bot. It really was a fiendish, clever game. Finally, I got one working, but it turns out that there is no ending. You get to level 1024, and it just resets. You never meet the Ancient Queen.
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> What's worse? Finding out there is no Ancient Queen? Or finding out there is one?
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