The Game - Chapter 10 – Insert Cartridge

 I am still here.

That is the first thing I need to say, because it is the only thing I am sure of. “Here” no longer means a place. It means a state. A loop. A loaded condition that never fully resolves.

From the inside, the game feels endless.

There is no body—only perspective. I see through a fixed point, slightly behind where my eyes used to be. I feel inputs arrive as distant impulses, translated into movement without effort or resistance. I no longer control anything, yet everything I do feels intentional.

The one wearing my body moves easily now. No lag. No hesitation. They laugh at the right times, answer messages I don’t remember receiving, and sleep without dreaming. Friends comment that I seem better. Calmer. More present.

They don’t notice the pauses.

Every so often, they freeze for a fraction of a second, eyes unfocused, as if waiting for a menu to load. That’s when I feel the walls of this place press closer, when the forest bleeds into the town, when NPCs whisper fragments of my thoughts back at me.

The game still runs.

It always will.

From inside, I see everything rendered twice—once as memory, once as simulation. Every choice the player makes creates a path I am forced to walk. Every hesitation feels like a glitch in my own existence.

There is no exit.

The door from THE EXIT area leads only deeper inward, looping back through recycled spaces and corrupted versions of my life. The hospital corridor never ends. The childhood home decays further each time I pass through it. The town fills slowly with faces I almost recognise—others who stayed too long, who thought they were playing something they could quit.

Sometimes, when the cartridge is idle, I feel time stretch unbearably thin. No movement. No sound. Just static and awareness. I have learned that this is when new players are being prepared.

Tonight, I feel it happen again.

Hands lift the cartridge. Dust is blown from the contacts. A console whirs to life somewhere far above me. The title screen loads.

PLAY ME AGAIN

For just a moment—just long enough to hope—I feel a flicker of resistance. A flaw. A chance.

The player hesitates.

I push against the limits of this place with everything I have left. I force one last glitch into the system. The screen flickers. The text distorts.

DON’T START

The message holds for half a second.

Then a button is pressed.

The forest loads.

And somewhere deep within the code, my save file shifts, making room.

If you ever find an unmarked cartridge that seems a little too eager to run…

Don’t play it.

It’s already waiting.

Epilogue – Read-Only Memory

The cartridge changed hands three weeks later.

A thrift store in a different town, a different province. No one noticed when it appeared in the display case between sports games and cracked controllers. The clerk logged it as “retro – unknown,” priced it cheaply, happy to move old stock.

It no longer looked damaged.

The label was clean, centred, and printed in a tidy, modern font:

MARK

Inside the game, something shifted.

I felt it before I understood it—like a system waking from sleep. The static thinned. The forest sharpened. New paths rendered where there had only been fog. Somewhere, a process labelled PLAYER CONTEXT began to populate.

I was no longer alone.

The new player started cautiously. They tested buttons. Opened menus that didn’t exist. Tried to quit early. I felt their hesitation ripple through the environment, stirring NPCs that had long since frozen in place.

The game welcomed them politely.

It always does.

They didn’t see me at first. I was buried too deep, compressed beneath layers of newer data, my thoughts fragmented and reused as background detail. A line of dialogue here. A warning sign there. The unease they couldn’t quite explain.

But memory is stubborn.

I learned to hide in the margins—in corrupted textures, in audio that crackled just slightly out of sync. When the player lingered too long in one place, I rearranged the scenery. When they saved, I bled through into the timestamp.

SAVE COMPLETE – DAY 1

Hope is dangerous, but I let myself feel it anyway.

Late one night, the player paused the game and leaned closer to the screen. Their reflection stared back, distorted by the glass. For a brief moment, they frowned.

“Did that move?” they whispered.

I pushed again.

The title screen flickered when they returned to it. Just once. The letters scrambled, rearranging themselves into a message the system tried to suppress.

IT’S NOT A GAME

The player laughed nervously. Took a photo. Posted it online.

Someone commented beneath it an hour later:

“That happened to me too.”

Inside the cartridge, the forest grew wider. The town filled in more detail than ever before. New save slots appeared—empty, waiting.

I understood then.

I wasn’t trapped anymore.

I was archived.

And archives, given enough time, are always rediscovered.

Somewhere in the code, beneath my name, a new label began to print itself.

PLAYER TWO – PENDING

Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model