by Vic Connor
“I’ll take that as a yes.” She smiled and adjusted her glasses. “Shall we continue, sir?”
“I don’t remember you wearing glasses back in the capsule,” I said. “And with this being virtual reality, why would you even need glasses, anyway? Can’t you just set your sight to 20/20? I mean, it’s not like we’re seeing all this through our eyes—it’s directly in our heads, right?”
“Well, maybe I don’t need glasses to see, that’s true. Then again, you have to look the part and play the role, and there’s nothing like small details to make an awesome outfit.” She tilted her head forward to fix her eyes on me from above the black rim. “And they sure make me look good, don’t you think, boss?”
I shifted on my rocket chair, self-conscious and in a dire want of witty comment.
“We can only push the boundaries so much,” she said in a much more serious tone. “This is what you’ve signed up for, Jake. No one has attempted to merge the mind and software to such a degree ever before. Istoria’s level of realism is part parallel processing and part collaborative storytelling between your brain and our servers—and then, your brain networks with all other players’ brains on an unprecedented scale. There’s a lot of things NozGames is learning as we go, and chief among them is that human brain and mind are sometimes stronger than our servers and software. Think of your legs,” she said, not a trace of playfulness in her voice. She readjusted her dark-rimmed glasses. “The integration between the mind and the game is deep. We’ve found the greatest success when we allow the player’s mind to reconstruct itself in here pretty much as he or she sees themselves out there. It covers everything, from things like their real-life ailments—” She nodded toward my left arm “—to charming little details like the cute hummingbird flying around bleeding-heart flowers you have tattooed near your elbow.”
Indeed, I had signed up exactly for this. A couple of years ago, when the first news about NozGames’ experiments with Istoria went public, my imagination flared. Not with throwing fireballs and swinging broad axes, but, you know, with walking. I vividly remember the sour taste of disappointment when, during the Alpha, a NozGames rep had elaborated on an important point: The game was so real that an undisclosed—but sizable—percentage of the first testers had suffered a range of serious psychotic breakdowns when their brains couldn’t cope with their avatar’s meticulously modeled “reality” being too different from what the players, deep down, knew was real.
In the words of NozGames’ CEO, “It’s as if a healthy brain has no problem with fantasy when it knows it’s fantasy, so we have experienced no issues with books and movies and low-rez VR. But when fantasy feels entirely real, like Istoria attempts to do, the fantasy and the daily reality cannot differ too much before our brains become unable to cope at some fundamental level. It’s like when we tell ourselves ‘this has to be a nightmare’ when we’re inside a dream, trying to wake ourselves up.”
Neither NozGames nor NozHealth wanted to leave things at that. NozHealth was optimistic that, given enough time, things could work in reverse and our brains would learn to accept fantasy along with reality—and, maybe, even change reality itself.
Like, for example, rehabilitating paralyzed limbs.
That’s one reason I had gotten a chance to make it into the Launch Tournament, and why I had signed each ‘we’ll monitor everything in your brain and body’ release NozHealth had thrown my way. They were curious to learn what would happen to my mind, and myself, as I progressed through the game.
But I’d the start game as a cripple. To their credit, I have to say, they didn’t sugar-coat it. My wheelchair would follow me into Istoria, so to speak.
At least, at first. What would happen to my brain, my mind and my legs as the days passed, neither they nor I knew.
I slumped my shoulders and sighed, and Sveta leaned across the desk and placed her hand over mine. I jolted under her touch, but when she squeezed gently, it felt warm, tender, caring. Nothing like the metallic heaviness of the Gadium, but equally real.
I pulled my hand out from under hers and rubbed my temples. Then, I straightened myself up and caressed my power tie.
“I’m having a tough day here, Svetty dear,” I said, all CEO-like again. “I’ve been so busy that I’ve spent my entire day in this chair, not a second to stretch my legs. And our day isn’t over yet, far from it. There’s no rest for the wonderfully successful folks like you and me, I’m afraid. Would you be a dear and fetch me another cup of coffee, please, so I can better deal with the rest of our busy schedule?”
She beamed at me. “Sure thing, boss. Right away!”
3
Hardcore
Four coffees later, I had gotten a decent grip on myself. Sveta was explaining the general rules of the game, after confirming I had full use of my sensorial spectrum and could see, hear, smell, taste, and touch in the Lobby as well as I could in real life.
She had conjured two large countdown clocks that faced each other from opposite ends of the boardroom, both showing the time remaining before my mind fully fused with Istoria and I could jump into the game properly.
“We have about seven hours before the full merger, give or take,” she said. “We need to cover a few things in the meantime: two tutorials and some legal stuff. Up to you which we tackle first.”
“What are my options?”
“The legalese needs about two hours,” she explained. “Then, the Pain Tutorial and the Safewords—”
“The what!?” I interjected.
“I know. I don’t choose the names, boss. I just work here.”
I chuckled and took a sip of my fifth coffee. It was grand to chain espressos non-stop without worrying about nuking my liver or developing a terminal case of insomnia.
“Legalese, Pain Tutorial, and Safewords.” She enumerated the items with her polished nails in the air, arching an eyebrow as if saying, don’t laugh. “You can also re-skin the Lobby.”
“Let’s get over the boring part first, Svetty dear.” I reclined in my rocket chair. “What do the lawmongers have to say about our current situation?” I knew the contract by heart already, having read and re-read it thoroughly before signing up, but NozamaTech’s Legal Department required me to listen to it once more while logged in.
“Something about making sure your virtual self also knows the whole deal,” Sveta said. “Apparently, the lawyer boys and girls are afraid somebody may pull some ‘I-knew-but-my-Avatar-did-not’ loophole, so we have to review it in its entirety in here.”
And we did. Nearly two hours with her droning clause after clause, and me replying “I know” and “I’m aware” and “I do” loudly and clearly in all the proper places. With painstaking detail, she went through all the data and variables about my body and my brain that I was allowing them to monitor and record while I was inside their capsule. We could have saved a lot of time if she’d blanket-stated, “everything that NozGames can conceivably measure and then some,” to be honest, but their lawsters felt the need to make me agree to a detailed list of every bodily and mental function known to science.
We then went briefly over the general rules of the game.
“I know them all,” I told her. “The rules, I mean. Earn VPs by performing outstanding deeds, from completing quests to exploring to conquering a kingdom. Then, either spend them to level up, the way you use stat points in pretty much every RPG, or hoard them. Whoever has the most VPs by the end wins, so it’s a balance between spending VPs to become more powerful or saving them until the end to win. Right?”
“That’s right,” she said. “The Victory Points you save are your score, sort to speak. One prize goes to whoever achieves the highest score.”
Not any one prize, mind you, but the fattest, juiciest million-dollar prize. The game offered dozens of other, smaller rewards—everything from best crafter, to having the most player kills, to playing as a pacifist with no kills at all, to the most consistent roleplay, to the ruler of the largest city, and more tail
ored to specific play styles—but the fat one was open-ended, and straightforward: most unspent VPs takes the million home.
“What I’m really interested in,” I said, “is how the game works. What are the skills? What are the classes? What’s the best strategy to level up, overall?”
“I can’t tell you any of this, Jake,” she replied.
I knew that, but it was worth a shot. NozGames was revealing Istoria to the world as we spoke; until then, the game had been under wraps while ten thousand players had gone through several rounds of closed Alphas and two rounds of Betas, under a thick layer of the most impenetrable NDAs the NozGames lawyers could come up with.
The players selected for the exclusive testing were either especially good, popular, or rich.
NozGames had conducted Istoria’s closed Alpha by the book and had only invited a couple thousand top-tier pros from other games to their first rounds of testing, aggressively seeking a piece of the e-sport pie by making sure the cream of the e-athletic circuit gave them early feedback. Another couple thousand seats appeared in the first Beta round, filled with high-profile streamers and bloggers who NozGames had kept tight-lipped but who were unleashing bucket loads of content all over the web as Sveta and I spoke, now that the NDA had expired. The second round of closed Beta had added six thousand seats by auctioning them: Those were sold to the highest bidders, bigshots with deep pockets who’d pay through their cetaceous noses for the privilege of being among the first to discover what Istoria was all about.
NozGames hoped this third round of closed Beta would be the last before Launch, and were doing all they could to drive the already hysterical hype through the roof. A month-long tournament with huge cash prizes; NDAs lifted, allowing all streamers to broadcast; and NozMedia, NozamaTech’s gargantuan content-producing arm, ready to push their weight to showcase Istoria everywhere.
That’s where scrubs like me came into the equation. NozGames had added forty thousand accounts to this last Beta round: some cherry-picked from among the best and most famous in the competitive circles; others allowed once more to buy their place by throwing cash at NozGames; some through several contests all around the world; and some because of their willingness to test not just the game, but NozHealth’s avant-garde premium capsules—allowing their minds and bodies to be tested and measured in any way the corporation needed to have the capsules approved by medical regulators.
The odds for any scrub to win the Tournament were slim; the ten thousand experienced players from previous Beta rounds had two massive advantages over the rest of us. To begin with, they already knew the game. Perhaps many of them also already knew each other, meaning several well-run clans were likely already on their way to the top.
But a slim chance is still better than nothing, and I had no other choices.
Two and a half hours later, we’d finally reached the end of the legal swamp; by that point, I was becoming afraid that no amount of coffee, no matter how good, would keep me awake.
“So, boss,” Sveta said, “I bet you’re wondering how you can move around?”
I wasn’t, actually—I was wondering how I hadn’t fallen asleep. But any change of topic was okay by me.
“Very much so,” I said. “I hope you won’t have me crawling on my elbows? This would be undignified, for a corporate executive of my position.”
Bright, arrow-shaped buttons glowed on my rocket chair’s armrest; very much like my wheelchair’s controls, but fancy and expensive and high-tech as heck.
I whistled, then pushed down on the ‘reverse’ button. The chair floated backward.
“Holy crap!” I exclaimed. “That’s why this chair feels so smooth. It’s frigging hovering over the ground. How does it even do that?” I looked at her, caught her smirk, and finished my thought before she could. “Anti-gravity, or magnetronics, or nanotech, or any fancy technobabble. The perk of none of this being real is that things are this way just because they are cool. Like your floating screen.”
“Admit it, boss, they’re cool—my screen and that anti-grav chair of yours.”
At my direction, the hover chair spun in place a few times and then began gliding around the room. “Damn,” I breathed. “This thing has just ruined all my future wheelchairs for me. Nothing will ever come close to it.” I made it face Sveta. “So, remind me, my dear Svetty… What’s the rest of today’s schedule looking like?”
She glanced at her floating screen. “You’ve got your Pain Tutorial in a few minutes.” To my right, a classic MMO portal, pulsing and shimmering with a reddish glow, emerged from the floor. “In about four and a half hours, you should make your way to the final mind-merging step and enter your single-player shard of the game.” Another bright glow, bluish this time, appeared from my left as Sveta summoned a second portal. “They’ve just finished installing the vault door, right behind you.”
Behind me, I heard a loud metallic rumble, like huge steel gears turning and grating against each other.
I swung my chair around.
A large, circular vault door, at least seven feet tall, seemed somehow welded into the glass walls. It was closed shut, its stainless-steel surface reflecting the blue and red hues from the portals.
“What’s behind?” I asked, turning back to Sveta. “The Million Dollar Prize?”
“Very much, boss. Finishing the single-player shard,” she said, pointing at the blue portal to my left, “will unlock the vault. The MMO portion lies right behind that cold metal door.”
The Istoria devs didn’t seem to be big fans of subtle metaphors: that vault door had You Ain’t Unlocked This Yet written all over it.
I glanced at the red portal. “Pain and Safewords first though, right?”
“Afraid so, boss.” She tucked a strand of hair behind her right ear, and her dangling opal and silver earrings twinkled like police car lights under the red and blue glow of the portals. “But nothing a man of your position cannot handle.”
We would have to see about that.
I had searched for every angle I could find to get myself into this Beta and have a shot, however slim, at the million-dollar price. I wasn’t a world-class pro, I wasn’t a well-known streamer, and I had nowhere near the cash to auction for a spot. Instead, I had a very detailed medical record, making me a good guinea pig for NozHealth to find out how those with disabilities reacted to their capsule. And, with me not being able to use my legs, I’d also be a guinea pig for the system’s pain tolerance configuration.
They planned to launch the retail version of Istoria with full pain control, from “Nothing” to “Just Barely” to “Ouch!” to “Slightly Masochistic” to “Hardcore.” A slider would allow players to adjust this setting at any time, but with this being the final Beta stage, NozGames was focused on calibrating their game’s pain tolerance correctly. And guess who was among the lab mice that had signed up to play with the slider locked on “Hardcore” the whole game?
“Let’s get this show on the road,” I said as I hovered to the red portal—the Pain Tutorial.
“Good luck, boss.”
“From this point onward, my dear Svetty,” I said, “I would like to encourage you to stop calling me ‘boss’ and call me ‘Jake,’ instead.” My legs were swallowed up by the reddish glow as I commanded my chair forward. “Or, even better, Hardcore Jake.”
4
Tengu
The reddish glow fades to green and blue.
I’m in a clearing in the middle of a forest, surrounded by tall trees. Pines, oaks, and others I don’t recognize.
I’m still wearing my can’t-crumple-this power suit and straight tie, and still riding my hover chair. Below me, there’s lush, green grass, and a cloudless blue sky above. It’s noon; the sun is shining straight over my head.
Leaves rustle softly in a gentle breeze.
New Message!
The blinking pop-up appears as a holographic translucent screen, hanging in the air like the one Sveta had in the Lobby boardroom. I reach out to ope
n it.
FROM: System Message
Re: Safewords & Pain Sliders Tutorial
Welcome to the Safewords & Pain Sliders Tutorial!
Feel free to explore the clearing and the woods surrounding you. The woods are infinitely large, and you could literally walk forever in any direction. Don’t worry—even if you get lost, you will be back in the Lobby after finishing this tutorial.
Once you’re done exploring, say “I’m done exploring.”
I hover around the clearing and reach the edge of the forest, the sun’s rays biting rather sharply into my never-outdoors face.
It’s nice once I position myself under the shade, though. The pines smell exactly like pines; their bark is dotted with little droplets of resin, which feels as gooey and sticky as the real thing when I rub it with my fingertips.
I’m even able to smear my power suit’s nanofabric with the goo, and it makes me chuckle. “So, there you go,” I tell the suit as the nanofabric tries to clear the mess I’ve just made, “no matter how super your powers are, there’s always some kryptonite out there.”
The level of immersion and detail is beyond incredible, from the bark and resin to a gentle wind blowing against my cooling skin and birds chirping among the canopies above. By calling this “Fully Immersive,” NozGames are selling themselves short—this is downright real.
I’ve got no interest in exploring infinitely large woods, though, especially if I won’t ever see them again once I’m done with this tutorial.
“I’m done exploring!”
New Message!
All right, let’s see…
FROM: System Message
Re: Safewords
Your safeword is how you exit the game and return to the Lobby. You can jump back and forth between Lobby and game at any time.