“When I was a kid, I spent my days in an arcade down in the Agora district.”
“I was young, I was stupid, and I was absolutely obsessed with this one game. It was simple, a side scroller where you move across the screen as a cop on the streets.”
“Throw some quarters in the machine, grab the joystick, and you were in business.”
“With the click of a button you could fire bullet after bullet into hordes of incoming enemies and criminals. I hate to admit it, but looking back the thrill of killing those digital men? The red pixels splattering the screen? I loved it.”
“I felt so cool, so powerful.”
“And if I died in game? It didn’t matter.”
“Nothing mattered.”
“I’d lose a life, shrug, and keep on playing. And when my lives ran out? I didn’t fret, I didn’t cry, I just pulled out some more credits and kept on playing.”
“After all, I had bad guys to kill and points to rack up.”
“But, you know, part of growing up and learning to be an adult was learning the difference between fiction and reality.”
“In game I could jump from platform to platform, fire my pistol without stopping, and tank bullets to the chest like they were nothing.”
“And in reality? Well, I learned pretty quickly you don’t get a second life. When my bullets leave my gun and pelt someone it isn’t just a pile of harmful pixels. It’s a fucking splatter of blood covering the concrete as life leaves a real man’s eyes. You can put more quarters into the machine but you can’t put the life back in a corpse.”
“Failure in real life means death, it means consequences that haunt your dreams and dig into your heart with every passing day!”
“But you don’t understand that, Jinx. How could you?”
“You’re just a child in an adult’s world.”
“It’s all just a game to you, a way to rack up non-existent points in your mind as you go around hacking into computers, screwing with people’s heads and taking whatever you want without a second thought. As long as you’re having fun what do you care? It’s not like you could ever face real consequences for what you do, right?”
“I’m going to teach you a lesson you should have learned a long time ago.”
“No matter how good you are or how confident you pretend to be, there’s always a chance you slip up.”
“You mess with the wrong person, get hit by a stray bullet, get snapped up by some blood thirsty killer in the streets.”
“There’s no coming back from that.”
“No amount of credits you can pay once the life leaves your eyes.”
“Just blood, pain, and regret staining the Arcadian streets.”
“So leave while you can, stop interfering in Arcadia’s affairs.”
“Because if you aren’t lucky?”
“If you end up in the way?”
“Bang.”
“Hostile down.”
“Game over.”
“You have one life to live, Jinx.”
Try not to lose it.”