Personal Narrative Essay

EVEN IN THIS desolate, mangled world, where the foundations of all things have collapsed, there were some things that endured. There still existed things of everlasting value. Whiskey, for example.

Jack had noticed the shine of bottle glass in the truck bed on a previous walk and decided to stop here, should he need the money. This is what those items of eternal value were for - to help one through rough times.

There were no longer automobiles that ran on liquid fuel and few people knew that these kinds of truck were called pickups. Jack knew. He generally knew quite a lot about the old world because he earned his living as a Walker, which meant that he roamed the Wasteland in search of old-world treasures. If he were to be honest, though,

he simply liked to travel. He always dreamed of making his way to some far-off place, where no one had been before. At least, not any of the residents of the Clusters dragging out their boring, miserable existences near the Barrier of New Atrium. The problem was that the further you got in the Blighted Wasteland, the more dangerous it became. You won't get very far...

The rear tires of the pickup had sunk into a deep hole, so the cabin had gotten stuck raised toward the sky, and in the truck bed, bottle glass gleamed under a layer of dirt and mud. Jack looked around, detected nothing new on the grey plain under the grey sky... and tossed his backpack down, pulled on tarpaulin work gloves, and got busy excavating.

He raked aside the broken fragments and tugged an unearthed bottleneck out of the caked trash, then shook off several years' worth of hardened dirt. The remnants of wooden boxes turned to dust under his gloves and the infernal flies buzzed overhead. When he had reached about halfway to the cabin, he found the first intact bottle. Jack wiped it reverently with his sleeve, gently shook it to hear the sloshing of eternal value inside, checked the sunlight... and began to dig again.

Half a day's work and his haul amounted to nine bottles. Jack stowed them in his backpack, each carefully wrapped with rags. No one travelled at night in the Wasteland - he was stuck here for the night. The cabin door, naturally, was locked. He would have to break it. It was easy, as everything here had rotted away or rusted through long ago. It was odd that the glass was intact. The driver, too. There was even a half-smoked cigar hanging between the yellow teeth of his skull. In the skeleton's right hand was a revolver, in the left - a crumpled, blackened lump. Jack wondered what the dead man had grabbed when he set out on his final journey. It turned out to be a charred banknote with a barely recognizable "100" on it. The driver had thoroughly filled up on the whiskey from the truck bed - an empty bottle stood on the dashboard in front of him. Then one last cigar, lit with a hundred-dollar bill. Then... bam.

Very carefully, so as not to disturb the driver, Jack sat down beside him in the passenger seat.

"You ever been to Alterra?" he asked the man, who died God only knows how long ago. "I bet you'd love it. Judging by the end you set up for yourself here, you were an okay guy, knew a thing or two about games. Pretty classy, deciding for yourself when and how to die."

In front of the driver and Jack, through the thick patina of dirt on the windshield, a huge, red sun sagged toward the straight line of the horizon. The pickup was heading west when it broke down. Maybe it had been evening then, too, and the sun had shone like this on the driver's face as his lit his last cigar with the bill...

"Decide for yourself, when and how you die," Jack repeated, uncovering a bottle. "It has a lot of class."

He planned to deliver most of the whiskey to a merchant for a very nice sum of money, but he did open one bottle. Took a drink. He felt a pleasant wave of heat slide down his throat... and reached for the glove compartment.

"Hey, brother, I see I wasn't wrong about you!" Jack declared, pulling out a small console tangled in thin cables. He had to set aside his bottle so that he could carefully fish out the sensor gloves and blocky goggles, which were fitted with a plastic ring that wrapped around the head. "You were one of the originators! In the beta version of Alterra! I'd heard that it dated back to before the catastrophe, that we inherited it from you, our ancestors."

Jack almost reverently tried on the antique VR headset, fiddled with the sensor gloves, and carefully wound up the cluster of long sensor cables. It was a pretty unwieldy system. Nowadays, the console to enter the virtual world looked much more compact. The batteries had obviously run down. He decided to recharge the device and try to enter Alterra from the pickup driver's account. However, it could only be charged in his trailer and then... And then he could try to enter Alterra from the driver's old account.

"If you left any unfinished business, buddy, I'll try to finish it," he promised the dead man. "It can't be that fate accidentally brought us together. Nope. This is a quest line that someone thought up, up there."

Jack took another sip, his eyes narrowed at the red rays of sunset and thought: this guy brought all the most important things - whiskey and Alterra. Fantastic choice! The only choice. Definitely things of everlasting value.

* * *

ALL THE NEXT DAY, while he walked across the grey plain, Jack wondered what the late pickup driver could have left in Alterra.

When the Gendemic began, it destroyed everything - daily life, culture, laws... and Alterra. Civilization survived on a few small, safe islands. Those like New Atrium. Evidently, it was to one of these splinters of the safe world that the driver was trying to escape. He brought with him only what was most important... but never made it to his destination.

Gradually, life of the survivors adjusted, namely when the alpha-citizens of New Atrium restored Alterra. They even allowed the omegas, the residents of the ghetto, to log into this wonderful world. But in the restored Alterra, just like in real life, the alphas had far more opportunities. The driver had seen a version of Alterra, where everyone had equal rights, where all the joys of the virtual world were equally available to everybody.

The Blighted Wasteland were behind him, and the Clusters of the ghetto stretched out before him. Walking through the slums, Jack could barely restrain himself from running home, so he could leave this filth and try to dive into Alterra, not through his own avatar, but through another older character - a sort of granddaddy of the virtual world. And all the while, he had to constantly look this way and that because these areas were rotten to the

core.

Admittedly, even the most bat-shit crazy creeps didn't bug Jack, as a rule. That he was one of the veteran drifters was enough to scare off the riffraff. Jack took deliberate care to look menacing. Husky, slouching, with a shock of sun-bleached white hair sticking out from under a wide-brimmed hat and his face covered in scars... and, of course, a large, formless canvas cloak with dirty, frayed flaps. You could hide anything under that kind of cloak.

Today, Jack only once noticed a group of teenagers, who had stopped as he approached and begun to whisper. Dangerous guys - too puny to fight. These guys might use any dirty trick to bring you down fast, with the first hit. It was enough that he held back a step and stuck his hand under his cloak. The little suckers scattered like cockroaches. Jack liked this cloak. It always worked like a charm.