DANK MEMES

**ignatius** · December 27, 2016

chartnok · December 27, 2016

What if you awoke one morning to find yourself inside a truck? What if you woke up in that truck and from that moment on you were never hungry again? Well sure, that would be interesting, but, you'd still want to eat, right? You might reach for the handle to let yourself out of the truck, but the door doesn't open. You try the other door with similar results. One day you woke up inside a truck, and now that truck is your home, your prison for the rest of your life. The truck will be your tomb when you die. How would you react to that fate? Would you panic? Would you go mad? Would you run the truck off a cliff, would you rather die than endure that grim reality? Would you risk Hell to escape Arizona? Or would you go to work?

American Truck Simulator tells the tale of a person trapped inside a truck, which is itself trapped in the southwestern United States. You may drive anywhere you wish, but you may never exit your truck. There is an option to work jobs carrying freight around to earn money, although all this money can be used for is buying more trucks and garages. You can't buy food. You can't go out on a date with someone. You can't sleep in a bed. You can't speak to your family. You can't signal for help. Your only means of interacting with the world outside the cabin of your truck is by driving and moving things from one place to another. The more you drive, the more the desert landscape begins to resemble an alien world. As far as you're concerned, Nevada may as well be Mars. It might be just outside your window but you'll never be able to set foot on that dusty orange soil. You belong to the truck now. You're just a part of the truck. You can't remember the taste of food, but the truck keeps you alive, somehow. And every time you stop for gas, every gas station taunts you with its disgusting, mouth-watering gas station food. That food you will never taste again. That love you'll never see again. That life you'll never have again. The bell dings, the tank is full.

How long would you have to drive, before you forgot? How many miles of highway do you have to burn before you've burned away the person you used to be? Would you surrender to the truck? Would you be the best truck driver you could be? Would you build a trucking empire from the confines of your diesel-powered oubliette? Would you become a job provider, enriching the community for all the normal, regular people from whom you are now permanently isolated? Maybe they would even try to find a way to get you out of the truck. They wouldn't succeed, because the truck needs you now. The truck needed you so it could become alive. The truck lives through you. You are host to a giant, steel parasite, a mechanical macrovirus that can only live by stealing life from the living. And now that it is alive, it desires to persist. You couldn't drive off a cliff if you wanted to, because now, you don't want to. Now you are thinking for two, and one of you really just wants you to drive around and deliver freight. Now you wouldn't dream of driving off a cliff. And dream you do, though the truck may quell your hunger and thirst, it does not rob you of your need to sleep. The truck wants to dream, too.

The dreams are exciting and strange, frightening and exhilarating, but the details always escape your mind moments after you awake.

With each passing slumber, the memories of the life you used to have make you feel more alive than ever. Yes, you had a normal, mundane existence before the truck, because you are alive. The very thought that you are alive fills you with excitement. Alive, finally, ready to drive all over this beautiful country. Everything you see through your windshield looks new again, every color is brighter, richer, younger. This is life! There's a whole world out there, waiting to be discovered. There's folks out there, good, honest, American folks who need things transported, and you're the biomechanical lichenous organism that's going to do the job. Not for the glory, not for the money, but because you love your fellow American living things. If you had a way to communicate with your parents, you know they would be proud of you. Not just for being alive, but for being the best truck-driver symbiont you could be. Even so, they'll go the rest of their lives thinking that you were dead. Ironic, when this is the most alive you've ever felt! Ah, life. Life is just, better, in a truck.