My insides felt like they were fast on their way to becoming outsides as I struggled to look up in search of where I was being taken.

To my surprise, there wasn’t a flying saucer to see, no secret government carrier either, just the stars and the moon.

I had no idea where the girls were or when I was going to stop, but as the air became thin and my sweat turned to ice all I could think about was whether or not I’d been spiked with something.

Hurtling towards the moon, somehow not suffocating as the cold vacuum of space drew nearer and nearer, I failed to make sense of the surreal and frightening experience.

Someone had stuck me with a needle, surely, and I was having a bad trip, or maybe I’d been hit with some kind of hallucination-inducing venom.

I’d have probably started listing off monsters that could do that, but thinking clearly was becoming a struggle as the empty blackness of space began to give way to a kaleidoscope of color.

My skin felt like it was being peeled off but in an oddly satisfying way, like I was a snake or something, and before long I’d lost the desperate urge to breathe, replaced instead by the knowledge that I didn’t need to.

I’d have been confused, but as far as I was concerned my bad trip had become a mostly okay one.

Then, without warning, I was on my feet, wearing nothing but a pair of cartoon-style white boxers complete with little red hearts, standing in a glass tube and looking out at a strange thin man in a black turtleneck and blue jeans as he worked away on a computer on the other side of the room.

“Just a minute,” he called over his shoulder, “I don’t want to keep you waiting any longer than I have to, but… you get it.”

I went to respond, stopped, sighed, and instead decided to look around the room we were in.

It was dark, save for the racks upon racks of computing equipment against the far wall, their dim green lights flickering in a way that I’m sure is comprehensible to someone but certainly not me.

Other than that, there was the computer my captor was standing over and not a whole lot much else.

“Where are Liz and Millie?” I asked curiously, strangely unfazed by what was happening.

“The vampire girls?” my captor replied without turning around, “I’ve already finished with them. Don’t worry though, I won’t send them back without you.”

“Send the-” I started before catching my tongue.

I didn’t know why I felt so compelled not to bark at him, I thought that it could’ve had something to do with the fact that I didn’t see him as a threat, but then he finally finished what he was doing and turned to face me.

For a moment I was lost for words, his welcoming smile, his magnetic warmth, his majestic balding grey hair, I’d seen it all a thousand times before in stain glass windows and various books.

“You’re…” I murmured before realizing my jaw was hanging open and straightening up, “You’re Nimda.”

“You make me sound like the Wizard of Oz,” Nimda joked as he made his way towards my glass enclosure, “sorry about the containment, it’s for the best, believe me.”

“I do, I do.” I replied emphatically, nodding as I did.

“Good,” Nimda said with a smile, “now, I’ve got good and bad news. Well, mostly bad.”

“Am I dead?” I asked, thinking that was the only reason I’d be face-to-face with God.

“What?” Nimda scoffed amusedly, “No, no you’re not dead, which I suppose makes the real bad news not so bad, huh? No, this is about your leveling.”

“My leveling?” I asked confusedly, “What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing to do with you,” Nimda explained as he turned and moved back towards his computer, clearly having had this conversation enough times to know how people reacted, “it’s a little bug in the system, makes you get XP way faster than you should be.”

“I figured we were just lucky.” I muttered timidly, fearing I’d somehow accidentally cheated the system.

“Like I said, not your fault,” Nimda reiterated, “only reason I didn’t fix it when you were a baby, or ideally before you were born, is that I can’t see who has the glitch until after they Prestige. The truth is that you’ve been carrying this corrupt bit of coding for your whole life, passed it on to your friends too.”

“I…” I trailed off, fighting the urge to apologize again, “What happens now?”

“I fix it,” Nimda replied coolly, “and hopefully someday soon, I’ll have ironed out the bug completely.”

“And then what?” I asked, sensing I wasn’t getting the full picture.

“And then…” Nimda murmured scratching the side of his head and looking over his shoulder at me, “Well, that’s what the bad news is. You see, I can’t have you and your friends getting around all juiced up before your time. Not only is it not fair to everyone else, but it’s not fair to you.”

It took me a second to realize what he was getting at, and when I did I couldn’t help but droop, “You’re going to reset us, aren’t you?”

“I am,” Nimda replied, nodding and returning to his work as he did, “thankfully, you guys have been busy so rolling that clock of yours back to when you hit the ripe old age of 21 is going to be… Wow, almost four weeks to the day. Sure, you’ll lose access to some stuff, but trust me, it’s worth it. Last thing you want is to be getting to the ‘End Game’ and having all your stats and whatnot messed up.”

“You couldn’t fix it without rolling us back?” I asked already knowing the answer.

“I could,” Nimda sighed, “but that particular process is painfully slow for one thing, and for another it doesn’t solve the problem of it not being fair. This way, you’ll be back home in a few minutes and it’ll be like nothing happened at all.”

“Damn…” I muttered, “I suppose if you think it’s right, it must be.”

“That’s the ticket.” Nimda chuckled.

Before that day, I’d never considered myself much of a religious-type, in fact I’d gotten pretty good at dodging church when I was a kid, but in the presence of God himself, there really wasn’t much sense in denying him.

Looking back it, I think it’s more likely that the Almighty made me okay with it while he was tinkering away on, well, me.

“You got any questions?” Nimda asked.

“Pardon?” I replied.

“Questions,” Nimda repeated, “most people have questions and I figure I at least owe you the answer to one.”

My ‘Pardon?’ hadn’t bought me nearly as much time as I needed to process the question and come up with an answer.

Like I said, not exactly religious, meaning I hadn’t ever really given much thought to questions I could ask Nimda if I ever met him.

“Why?” I asked.

“A common but good one,” Nimda said with a nod, apparently finishing his work with a flourish as he spun to face me and leaned against his computer’s desk, “are you sure you want the answer though? Could disappoint you.”

I took a moment to really think about it, or maybe scrape the paint on the walls of my brain and come up with a better question, but I came up with nothing but a dumb “I’m sure.”

“Alright,” Nimda replied with a nod, rolling up his sleeves and crossing his arms, “because I could.”

Wanting to prove him wrong, I did my best to hide my disappointment.

“I know, I know, it’s a tough one to hear,” Nimda sighed, scratching the back of his neck, “but I feel like honesty’s important. The God’s honest truth is that I’ve been alive for an awful long time, and Re.Gen’s looking to keep me going for a whole lot longer. It’s kind of like Minecraft, creating worlds is something constructive and peaceful for me, you get me?”

I wasn’t getting him.

“Yes,” I lied, “but… still, you have to know that this kind of flips my whole worldview, right?”

“It shouldn’t…” Nimda replied, looking at his computer for a second then back at me, “Yeah, no, you should be fine.”

I was fine, and I wasn’t even weirded out that he knew.

“Don’t worry, I haven’t broken you or anything,” Nimda said comfortingly, “I just feel like it’s going to be better if you remember all this, and the only way to make sure you don’t go postal with the knowledge that all life is an illusion is to insert a little something to make you okay with it. You also won’t feel compelled to talk to anybody about this.”

“I-” I started then stopped, “How do you know your life isn’t just an illusion?”

Nimda was obviously thrown by the question, “What?”

“Well, you just said all life is an illusion in my world,” I explained, “could it be possible that yours’ is as well?”

Nimda’s brow furrowed for the first time since I’d arrived, though he didn’t seem angry, baffled more like.

Maybe a little quizzical

“I don’t like that,” Nimda said, shaking his head and pulling out his phone to make a note, “I… Yeah, I don’t like that.”

“Sorry.” I replied.

“Not your fault,” Nimda chuckled humorlessly, “but I’m going to go ahead and make sure that doesn’t happen again.”

“What doesn’t happen again?” I asked.

“That whole questioning whether I’m real thing,” Nimda replied as his computer chirped happily, “takes me to an… uncomfortable place. Anyway, looks like you’re good to go. Anything else you’d like to say?”

Once again, I drew a blank.

“It’s alright,” Nimda chuckled, leaning over and putting his finger on the ‘ENTER’ key, “I get it.”

I’m not sure if I heard the key go down or if my brain simply filled in the gap as I fell apart and slipped away.

What I do know is that I was cold as I left Nimda’s world.

Not space cold, but cold nonetheless.

Much like the wind whispering in my ear, it was a familiar chill, one I’d experienced a few times over the previous month.

Before long, the gift of sight had been returned to me and I could see Nimda had dropped me off at home where an inch of snow was waiting for me and not much else.

Not going to lie, I was pretty pissed that he hadn’t at least put me back with a sweater.