"So 'to be or not to be' is not the whole question. The question is also who we are. Are we really human beings of flesh and blood? Does our world consist of real things--or are we encircled by the mind?"
--Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder

“Where the hell are we?”

“Who the hell are you?”

Four teenagers, consisting of a gothic boy, a prep, a druggie, and a Korean schoolgirl, were stuck in a white room with four corners. None could recollect how they had ended up in the room, and none of them knew the other. For the sake of simplicity, let us christen them G, P, D, and K respectively.

“Does anyone remember how we got in here?” G asked his fellow stranded teenagers.

“Dude, I don’t know about you guys, but I must’ve had too much pot,” replied D.

“시발, 어떡해 된 거야?” SHIT, wtf happened?

“O M G are you like, Chinese?” P asked K. “I like, TOTALLY love your skirt. It’s SOOOO cute.”

“뭘 봐??” What the FUCK are you looking at?

“Hey hold on, what’s that?” G pointed to a slowly increasing chain of words above them. “Is that a blinker? Someone’s typing a story.”

“Hey, you think we could get outta here if we climbed up those words?”

“Dude, that is totally gnarly. I’m going first.” And with that, D hoisted himself up on the nearest noun and began to climb up the ladder of words, but as he began to ascend the ladder it kept growing l o n g e r a n d l o n g e r a n d l o n g e r, growingfasterandfasterandfasterandfaster until he was afraid he couldn’t keep up with the words. He began to scramble frantically, wide-eyed and gasping for breath, but the words just kept coming. “DUDE! The words just keep coming, man!”

“OK, thank you captain obvious.”

G stared up at D with one hand shading his eyes from the LCD light and the other on his hip. “I guess it’s no use. Get down here, man.”

“Dude, it’s so frikkin far,” he said shakily as his batophobia began to take effect. “Shit, I need some pot, man.”

“It’s OK, dude, just climb down on the other words.” G turned to the other members of their rather odd group. “OK, so does anyone have another idea of how to get outta here?”

“Um, YEA. That’s why I’m spilling out every word of my brilliant plan to you right now,” scoffed P as she played with her nails.

Meanwhile, K was squatting by herself in a corner, staring at the screen of her cellphone.

“Hey,” G walked up behind her, “what’re you doing?” He watched the screen over her shoulder as several middle-aged bald Korean men stood in a line, slapping their foreheads in various ways. “Do you think we can use your cellphone to call someone?”

Without even glancing over her shoulder, she replied, “No, it’s no use. You won’t get a signal from here.”

G’s eyes widened in surprise. “You can speak English?”

“Yeah sure. She let me.”

G’s eyebrows furrowed together. “Who?”

“The author. Hasn’t it become obvious? We’re stuck in a story.” P overheard this and began to walk over to G and K. “It’s not a very good one in my opinion. Obviously the author doesn’t think much of it either, because she just typed those words into my mouth.”

“Hold on,” P said anxiously. “So… we’re stuck… in a story? But then, like… that means we’re not really real. Well, I mean we must exist somewhere, but in reality we’re just figments of someone’s imagination, transient electrical impulses being transmitted across the brain in the matter of .00980943975 seconds, dying as quickly as we’re thought up. Oh my God, that is so totally depressing,” at which point she walked off into a corner to light a cigarette.

Meanwhile, D continued struggling down the sentences.

G stared thoughtfully for a while. “So to sum it up we’re not real. Is that what you’re saying?” K nodded. G shrugged and called up to D, “Hey man! We’re not real!”

“What?”

“Just jump, man! It won’t hurt.”

SHOOO

He landed with a loud thud and crack as both his legs broke under the pressure. The bones tore out of his skin, causing gallons of blood to soak through his clothes and splatter the surrounding area. “SHIT, man! What the hell’s going on? You said it wouldn’t hurt, man!”

“That sick author.”

D’s legs immediately healed, and the blood disappeared. “Gnarley.”

“So anyways, we’re nothing more than figments of someone’s imagination, and she’s writing a not-so-good story about us.”

“Oh, a she is she?” D asked slyly. “Is she hot?”

To which the other three characters replied, “NO!”

“Huh, bummer.”

“But how would we know that?” P questioned as she returned from her corner to join the others in the other corner.

“Because,” K started as she closed her phone and slipped it into her pocket. She sighed, got up, and dusted off her skirt. “We’re a part of her. She’s telling us what she wants us to know about her.” She leaned against the page margin and continued, “It’s almost the end of spring break for her, and she got bored. She got the idea for this story after reading Sophie’s World.”

D asked, “What’s Sophie’s World?”

“It’s a book on the history of philosophy that also happens to be a mystery. It’s full of romantic irony. Her history teacher assigned it to her and the rest of her class. She enjoys it very much.”

“Well that was rather dull writing.”

“And who’s saying all these sentences?”

“It doesn’t matter anymore. We’re fictional.”

“But what happens once she gets bored of us? What happens when the story ends? Do we die?”

“But I don’t wanna die.”

“I don’t even remember having a beginning.”

“But we did. See, look up there.” All four fictional characters stared up at the top of the page 1. “‘Where the hell are we?’ That’s our beginning?”

“No, we began earlier in her mind, but she didn’t start typing until about ten minutes later, and a few months later after typing us out she decided to edit us because she thought the story was retarded.”

“This story’s getting boring. I feel sorry for the reader, and so does the author. The end is near.”

“But I don’t wanna die,” whined D.

“It doesn’t matter dumbass, we’re fictional,” snarled P.

“So is this it? We’ll just disappear from the world, never to be heard of again?” questioned G.

“OK, just because you’re a fucking Asian doesn’t mean you have to know everything.”

“She chooses mainly to talk through me because she’s Korean, too.”

“Could you ask her a question then?”

“You could ask her yourself. She can read, you know.”

All four characters stared far into the white abyss where they thought the author might be.

“Do we mean anything to you?”

No.

(Delete.)