I cursed myself, I cursed everything.
I was tired of being in pain.
I was tired of being disabled for periods of my life.
I would have been happy if I didn't wake up the next day.
Sure it wasn't permanent, but the constant crushing of my hopes and dreams every time I seemed to get close to achieving something had taken its toll. I had been striving for greatness for twelve years and every other year was a year spent in recovery. I was a complete and utter failure who lived off the kindness of others, while lying in bed in pain.
But, I did wake up.
After the pain started to subside a few weeks later, I found I couldn't even walk or stand up for more than two or three minutes. I used crutches to get around the house and sat in the shower. That persisted for nearly seven weeks until I ended up throwing away my hesitation with drugs, and purchased illegal research peptides that had shown great healing effects in trials.
I started injecting.
They weren't steroids or growth hormones but they were awfully similar. A peptide that aided in wound healing and regenerating torn muscles, something that had been in the US research system for nearly seventy years but was never legalized despite there being no evidence of negative side effects.
The companies simply didn't make any profit off of them in an injectable state, so they had yet to legalize it. The research companies that purchased the rights to the drugs wanted to sell them in an oral tablet or as a topical cream, something that simply didn't work effectively but would make an excessive amount of money if it did. For $175 USD I had all of the necessary equipment and the powdered vials to last me three months. There was no profit to be made there.
Reconstituting the powder in the vial it came with was easy. All I had to do was take an insulin syringe, draw 50 units of bacteriostatic water and inject it into the vial. Once the powder dissolved, draw the liquid and inject it into a subcutaneous layer of fat somewhere in the body.
I had plenty of fatty spots to choose from now.
Spot injection worked the best though. My swollen shoulder that hurt so bad that I couldn't move it and wouldn't reduce in swelling despite the 875mg prescription pill I was taking for anti-inflammation twice a day, disappeared in three hours after direct injection.
The pain never came back either.
I ended up doing injections every other day for nearly a month to get myself back to a condition where I could actually walk and stand up for more than thirty minutes.
All from a research peptide that was "illegal" for human use.
It did what the prescribed drugs failed to do.
It did what the doctors failed to do.
It did what the therapists failed to do.
And, it also healed my mind.
The peptide was being used in research for traumatic brain injury and had shown very positive signs in rats. The studies for human-use were still on-going but there was little to no evidence of any negatives. It was a risk, but the evidence supported it. Lack of profit kept it illegal.
I'm testament that it worked, at the very least.
And then one day while lying in bed and browsing the internet on my laptop, I came across an advertisement for a new Virtual Reality game that was in development.
Everything I had ever wanted from a video game was being presented right in front of me. All those months that I was stuck lying in a bed with nothing to do but daydream of a better life, of a fantasy life filled with adventure and accomplishment, was now possible. Free from the constant reminders of my failure, of all the expectations that everyone held for me that weren't even remotely met. The expectations that I had for myself that I couldn't meet. It was now possible in a complete virtual state.
I could escape.
The technology for virtual reality had already been out for years but there had been large strides made recently, and now this company called AIcorps was touting out a new line of hyper-realistic virtual reality.
To say I was hooked to the idea would be an understatement.
I quickly browsed through the advertisement and found the one catch, the price. But it didn't matter to me; I had long since lost my attachment to my old hobbies. It was an easy decision. I applied, was accepted, and just had to pony up the extreme amount of cash.
The cash situation was something that was hard to overcome. I had plenty of bills that were piling up as I wasn't physically capable of working and had long since lost my confidence in my mental aptitude.
So, in the end I sold a portion of my resources.
One of my hobbies was fixing and restoring cars, specifically sports cars. I bought rust-buckets that needed a lot of work for a few grand and then stripped the entire car down to nothing but a bare metal frame that could be picked up by one or two people.
From there it was a complete process of sanding, grinding, welding in new sheet metal, welding in new frame supports, refurbishing parts or finding spares in the junkyard, at the worst I would buy new parts, and then assembling everything and painting it.
Doing all of the custom interior work myself which included seats, panels, dashboards, sound system, roll cage, gauges, and all of the electric wiring as well.
By the end of the long process with an excessive amount of man hours, I had a car that had quadrupled in value without much actual money put into it.
Parting with something you put hundreds of hours into was hard, but I had long since lost my attachment to the outside world with all of my health problems. At the end of the day I wanted to play in the virtual world more than I wanted to play in the real world.
And just like that, I sold one car and used the money to buy the game, signed up for the $750 USD Ultra-Realism Program, and called it a day.
Chapter 5: A Step to Greatness
(Saturday, January 2nd Game Day / January 1st Real Day)
Gazing into the sun as if it could grant the answer to my life's questions, I continued to stare, waiting… waiting for nothing. Captivated by the single brightest event known to the sky I had hoped to find an answer but only found myself reflecting on the unknown.
The answers I sought remained elusive.
In the end the darkness of the night was more befitting of my reality, for the darkness always came. The sun may always rise but it doesn't always beget life.
I had no interest in waiting for a miracle anymore.
Yeah, if I wanted success I would have to take it with my own two hands. That's how it always has been. That's how it always will be. To take one step, then another, and another until I reached my goal. Just as I was doing now and just as I will do in the future, I will continue to trek forward one step at a time.
As I took that one step forward into the forest, I found myself denied of the sun's warmth beneath the shade of the canopy above. The trees were spread thin but remained filled with the winter's cold. And it was certainly cold. A single breathe would cloud the vision, but I continued on. Trudging slowly through the snow I soon came upon the first of my quarry, the [Northern White Rabbit].
It was finally time to get started.
Sliding the bow off my shoulder with arrow in hand, I gauged the distance of the rabbit to be within twenty feet. Drawing a bead on the target I then drew the bowstring and released with the consistent thwack I had grown accustomed to.
The shot was off.
The arrow glanced off the rabbit's rear as it sprang to life, jumping and leaping through the snow in a desperate bid to escape. Cursing under my breath I drew again, this time pacing the rabbit and leading it as I turned.
Thwack.
Thud.
Looking at the tree where the rabbit had disappeared out of sight, I made my way forth. No movement was good movement. Approaching the spot, I could barely make out the faintest amount of a blood trail leading directly behind the tree, a reassuring thing to see.