The beginning

Clay was in a state were she was awake enough to feel her body and the cool air on her face but she wanted to enjoy the bliss of sleep for a bit longer , so she still kept her eyes closed and her body lax.

It had actually been a nice rest for Clay .

Usually , hee dreams were plagued with her parents and how their faces had looked when Clay had been called to identify their bodies or on worse days , he was plagued with Jade's face joining her parents in that cold room .

But today had been different , maybe because her sleep had been drug induced , she had dreamt of absolutely nothing .

She had to remember to thank her cousin for that .

A loud siren went off , jarring Clay from her lax state .

She opened her eyes and sat up , she shook her head to clear the remainder of the sleep from her eyes .

She was on a makeshift bed in a small room that looked like a cabin .

Where the fuck was she ?

She wanted to pay more attention to what lay around her but the siren was buzzing in her head , louder than anything she had ever heard.

Clay groaned loudly and put her head in her hands .

The siren abruptly stopped as soon as Clay had done this .

Clay lifted her head slowly to ascertain that her head and hands were not some secret code .

The siren did not go off again , she sighed .

Clay looked around her , it was a really old cabin .

The wood had began to rot , the fireplace had masses of spiderwebs and the room was just so dusty .

Even the bed she had been laying on was not only dusty but filled with dead insects , Clay scampered off it and fell in a heap on the ground .

Clay had scrunched hee face as she fell , waiting for the pain to set in .

When she surprisingly did not feel any pain , she looked down at her body with ill directed excitement and enthusiasm .

She was wearing complete combat fatigues , boots , knee and elbow braces and even a tactical kevlar vest .

What in the world was going on ?

Was she still asleep ? 

No , that siren had been too real .

Clay closed her eyes , something was eating at her.

She felt as if she was forgetting something very important, something as important as her name .

ALL REMAINING PLAYERS WILL NOW BE INTEGRATED FOR PROCESSING.

PLAYERS ARE WELCOME TO CHECK OUT OTHER PLAYERS JUST ABOVE .

Clay had fallen into a mess of tangled up dusty bed clothes and heeself when the mechanical voice had come up just as loud as the siren .

She rushed to untangle herself as she hopped to the door of the cabin .

When she reached the wooden door , she realized that there was no handle .

Clay was already panicking , so she just threw her body into the door .

" Fucking hell !!! ".

The door burst open , splinters flying about while Clay stood at the edge of her life trying to maintain balance , lest she fell to her death .

It was no ordinary cabin , it was a cabin that had somehow ended up on the roof of a derelict high-rise .

Clay did not want to think of how a cabin had ended up on the roof of an eerie looking building but when she had thrown herself at the door , the force had propelled her to the edge of the porch .

Yes , the cabin had a porch , a porch that had eventually saved her life .

And If she had taken just a step off the porch , someone would be clearing and cleaning her innards off the street very soon.

Clay took a deep breath and pushed herself back into the room , it took a brief moment but when she fell , she fell towards the room and with her eyes facing the sky where she saw a picture of himself .

There was a picture of her in the sky.

It took Clay another moment to figure out that the picture wasn't a record for people that should have died today but an actual picture of herself alongside some other people she did not know .

It must have been from the impact of hitting her head on the hard cabin floor but anyhow Clay had been struck with a not so distant memory .

It flashed before her .

Her cousin , the car , signing the agreement , cooking , leaving home , meeting another version of her cousin and then drinking the spiked drink .

She was partaking in the game. 

The loud siren had been for the game , the announcement that had rang in hee head too. 

The faces she was staring at where the other participants .

Clay did a quick scan of the faces , James was not on the list of players .

Had he lost already?

It made sense now , the porch and the fall were virtual and a part of the game .

Falling would have taken him out of the game , there had been no real danger except disappointing James and her sister.

Clay heaved a sigh slowly and then chuckled .

This was probably one of those Virtual Reality game universes that were accessed with 3D glasses .

Dhe really should have learnt to play videogames .

The imaging on the sky was changing now and Clay focused on it. 

All of the previous pictures had been in an horizontal arrangement but after sometime some pictures had dissapeared while some pictures had moved on to another horizontal line above the previous one , Clay's picture was one of those that had moved on to the next line .

If the new lines kept forming above the older ones , it would end up being a pyramid .

And on top of the pyramid would be the winner .

If the game was pyramid style , there would be no fixed number of games , they would all keep playing till one person was left .

In that case , seven days was just a safe timeline , the game could end before seven days .

Forming teams was also futile since it was a pyramid , there was bound to be betrayal when you knew only one person was winning. 

Clay had considered a team because it might benefit her but it could also cost her more so that was cancelled. 

Clay's musings were interrupted by the mechanical voice once again .

ALL PLAYERS HAVE NOW BEEN INTEGRATED .

PLAYER PROGRESS CAN BE MONITORED ABOVE AS WELL AS PLAYER PATRONS.

Player Patrons , What was that now ?

Clay was beginning to think that James did not give her any Information at all about what was going on .

More pictures began to be added on the sides of the previous pictures .

A picture of James was added to Clay's and on the far side , Clay noticed that a picture of his aunt had been added to some man's picture.

So Patrons were partners?

But ,why was this unnecessary ceremony needed when they were also players ?

ALL PLAYERS HAVE SIMILAR RESERVES TO CARRY OUT THE GAMING.

PLAYERS ARE WELCOME TO BUILD WEAPONS OF THEIR CHOICES WITH ANY OF THE AVAILABLE RESOURCES.

THE GAME RESERVES THE RIGHTS TO PLAYER LIVES AND WILL NOT BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR ANY LOSSES .

THE AIM AND ONLY RULE OF THE GAME IS TO SURVIVE THE DAY AND ALL OF THE COMING DAYS .

GOODLUCK .

The mechanical voice finally came to an end and Clay tried to make sense of all she had learnt .

She was coming up with a theory for the game but since she still did not know a lot about the game , her theory had a lot of loopholes .

She stood up from where she had been laying , she should look for what weapon hee patron had given her and at least leave the cabin .

She looked around the room , thinking of where a valued weapon could have been hidden but there was nothing in sight .

Going through the room was not a given , it was so dusty that she would probably sneeze for the rest of the seven days .

Or had she woken up in the cabin not by chance ?

Did James want hee to wait in the cabin till more people lost ?

It seemed logical and stupid at the same time .

If they had put so much energy into building the gameverse , it was probably impossible to hide out without participating in the game .

An out of place item caught her eye. 

Cly walked towards the object , it was a book or actually a journal of sort .

Unlike the other items in the room , it was neat and void of dust .

It was quite glaring that this was the item that James had left him , Clay was slightly disappointed , she had expected some fancy weapon that only existed in games. 

She opened the journal and flipped through the pages .

It had been used to keep records of a research on Autobots and the researcher had been quite detailed , he had signed every page of the journal .

It was signed DPW.

David Pierre Westbrook ,it was her dad's research journal .

Had this gameverse been created by her dad ?

There was a backpack on the floor , Clay picked it up and unzipped it .

Water , protein bars , a flashlight and a small emergency regeneration kit .

Clay added her journal and zipped the bag up .

The window of the cabin was wide enough to climb through , so she did .

She looked from the rooftop around the gameverse .

The game was taking place in a deserted town with destroyed buildings everywhere and abandoned cars lining the roads .

It looked like something had hurriedly wiped out all the inhabitants of the town and it inadvertently gave off the perfect game vibe .

Clay found the stairs and began to descend , thanking James for the game suitable attire .

She reached the ground floor and ran towards the opened door ,she was about to run out when ahe heard screams followed by a mechanical whirring .

A woman ran out of one of the buildings and caught sight of Clay , she began to run towards himee, screaming .

" Help ! Help !! ", She screamed , her face and voice the epitome of horror .

Clay was a second away from running out to her aid when the source of the mechanical whirring came into sight too , freezing Clay .

It was a large hunk of metal that was running after the woman .

Clay might have called it a robot , but it looked too sleek and it's eyes looked too human to be just a robot ,it was like humanoid technology.

A mutation was a better description .

Clay watched in perplexity as the mutation raised up one of its jacked up hands.

The arm turned into a large revolving gun and while Clay watched helplessly and the woman's screams intensified , the gun released a spray of bullets into the woman .

The mutation turned around and ran off .

Clay stared at the woman's mangled body laying almost at the entrance of the building , her blue eyes opened wide in terror .

The blood that had sprayed everywhere , including on Clay's face was too warm .

Too warm to be blood from a virtual reality .