“Hey there!” The policeman announced with a smile.
“H-hey” Rachel replied with a stutter, trying her hardest to avoid any sort of eye contact.
“How are you today?” He asked.
“F-Fine,” Rachel stuttered again. ‘Come on Rachel, pull it together’ she instructed herself.
Before the policeman could speak another word, the suited man appeared at Tim’s door and beckoned for the policeman to re-join them. Rachel watched him walk away and then scowl at the suited man when they were within talking distance again.
Rachel’s heart rate began to steady. ‘They aren’t here for me’ she thought as she postulated that the policeman was just being friendly. ‘They aren’t here for me.’
After twenty minutes and a long mental list of what Rachel thought might have been the reason for the policemen’s visit, all three of them and Tim emerged from the office and walked right up to her desk.
“Rachel, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind coming with us?” Tim said apprehensively, although he made it sound more like an order than a request.
“Of course,” Rachel replied, keeping her voice in check this time. “What’s this about?”
None of the men answered her, rather they led the way silently down the stairs to the meeting room and pulled a chair out for her. The policemen both remained standing while Tim and the suited man each took a seat on the opposite side of the table.
“May I call you Rachel?” The suited man asked.
“Sure,” She said.
“Rachel, these are my colleagues P.C. Whitman and P.C. Carter. and I am C.I. Faraday.” He gestured to the policemen behind him. “There are a few questions that we would like to ask you.” As he spoke he retrieved a small notebook and a pen from his inside jacket pocket, flipping open the notebook. Rachel nodded in response as she knew that saying anything at all at this point would probably have been a bad idea.
“Did you receive a company memo at some point last week?” He asked. Rachel nodded.
“Was this the memo?” Faraday pushed a piece of paper across the table to where Rachel sat. She skimmed it and recognised that it was indeed the memo that she had received detailing the plans for an integrated social structure for Freedom Online. She made the effort to speak this time, sounding off a quiet “Yes.”
He was scribbling in his notebook while they both spoke, presumably taking notes for later review.
“Do you know a man named Glen Poitras?” Faraday continued.
“Umm…” Rachel thought out loud before giving her final answer. “…Is he that football player?” she asked innocently. There was no hiding it though, as a trained detective Faraday wouldn’t be fooled by such a thinly veiled attempt at deception.
“No, he is not a football player, Rachel. He is the man that you sent this memo to no more than a week ago in an attempt to break your non-disclosure agreement with Rapture Entertainment. And to save you any further embarrassment, we know this because not only did you send the memo to your personal email account from your workstation – all of which was logged on the company servers, but Mr. Poitras was kind enough to raise this issue with Rapture Entertainment himself.
Rachel couldn’t muster up the energy to answer. She felt like a ton of bricks had just smashed into her face-first at the news that the very person she’d leaked the memo to had betrayed her confidence.
“Of course he didn’t name you directly, citing an anonymous source…” Faraday continued “but it wasn’t too difficult to put two and two together.” Rachel’s world was crumbling down around her. How could she have been so stupid? She could have just taken a photo of it, or scanned it but no, she had to email it to herself.
“Can I…” Rachel searched for any escape that she could think of, “…use the bathroom?” it was the only thing that came to mind.
Faraday visibly deflated and sat back in his chair before waving his hand at her to go. As she left the room, the two policemen followed her out and took up residence in the foyer outside the toilets.
She spent an inordinately long time sitting on the toilet with the stall locked just waiting for the world to swallow her up. She knew that there was no escape out of the tiny window that didn’t open properly in the bathroom, and with the two policemen standing right outside the door that didn’t seem to be a viable option either.
Rachel opened the door as slowly as she could so as to not make any noise but to allow her to take stock of her situation and to her delight, the two policemen were engaged in a rather animated conversation about formula one or football or some other subject that she found completely mind-numbing.
She didn’t need to be given a golden opportunity a second time and slipping out of the bathroom and out of the main front door she didn’t spare a moment to look back.
While she drove her car as calmly as possible from the office car park she couldn’t help but notice that the two policemen were still arguing in the reception area and hadn’t noticed her departure in the slightest.
Rachel pulled over to the side of the road once she had been aimlessly driving for the better part of an hour. It was long enough to ensure that she hadn’t been followed but she was very surprised that she hadn’t received any calls on her mobile yet. Thinking about her mobile she cracked the case open and removed the battery just in case they could use that to trace her whereabouts.
There was only one thing for her to do, to go into hiding. But in this day and age how was that even possible any more? Everything was electronic, ID’s, money, everything. She tried to remember the last time she had actually used cash – the ever-decreasing form of currency in this technological age. Everything was electronic…’everything is electronic,’ her mind repeated. ‘So why not embrace that?’
A plan started to formulate in her mind with those thoughts, where was the one place that no one could forcibly remove you from? Where was the one place beyond prosecution, beyond incarceration? She had been selling it this whole time. Freedom Online.
She presumed that her ID card would still be active – well presumed might be a little strong of a word, more like she hoped beyond hope that it was still active and that her privileges hadn’t yet been revoked because she was effectively ‘on the run’, and she also hoped that the little flaw in the system that meant that all Rapture ID’s opened all Rapture doors was still unaddressed.
The drive to the Charlotte Street FIVR centre went by agonisingly slow, but walking through the front door, flashing her ID and smiling at the air-headed receptionist just seemed all too easy by comparison. She played the perfect part of someone who was supposed to be there even though every fibre of her being was screaming at her to turn tail and run away as fast as she could. She knew what she needed to do though, it was the only way.
Rachel power walked with purpose straight to the back of the centre where she knew where the immersion pods were. Luckily as part of her training, all of the sales personnel had been briefed on how to use the pods, what was to be expected when using them and more importantly all of the emergency features, such as self-reimmersion in the case of pod failure.
There was one last locked door between Rachel and the long-term storage pods and she couldn’t help but hold her breath as she swiped her ID card. When the pad illuminated green she exhaled heavily and walked into the huge hangar-like room filled with thousands of immersion pods. To her surprise, although all she ever seemed to do in her sales role was to tell people there was no space in the centres until further notice, there did seem to be a large number of open, unused pods.
Each pod sat at a forty-five-degree angle to the ground so that the person inside was neither laying flat or standing completely upright, studies had shown that this was the optimal position for long-term immersion.
The pods that had players in had their glass fronts closed and Rachel could see their inhabitants inside with their eyes peacefully closed. Rachel took to her own open pod and the front closed automatically behind her as it sensed her prese
nce.
The initiation process was extraordinarily simple, all Rachel had to do was press the big green button right in front of her and drift of peacefully to sleep. After she was no longer conscious the pod would then take care of the more ‘biological’ concerns.
She pressed the button with a tentatively outstretched hand and closed her eyes. The pod filled itself with a cooling mist and Rachel did nothing to hold on to her waking state. She had escaped. Even if they managed to find her they couldn’t pull her out for at least a year. Well that wasn’t strictly true – they could pull her out after six months but if she happened to suffer any ill effects from an early release, which she would definitely play up to – Rapture would have so many questions to answer that it wasn’t even really worth it.
There was now only one way to go.
Welcome to Freedom Online
If this is your first time within a FIVR Centre, you can be assured that your physical body will be well looked after and when you are ready to leave Freedom, it will be exactly as you left it. At that time, you will also be reminded to reclaim any belongings that you may have left in your storage locker.
Please Note: By playing Freedom Online, you are hereby waiving any rights you have to claim damages to your person or possessions during your time in the FIVR Centre. For more information and to view the agreement in full, please click here.
The next screens are your character selection. You can always tell system messages as they are shown with a grey background, like this one. Each type of message has its own colour scheme, which you will discover in-game.
Chapter Sixteen, Industrious
Name: Tandy
Level: 7 (33%)
Race: Human/Male
Attributes:HP: 60/60MP: 5/5
Strength:6
Wisdom:1
Social:0
Skills: Analyse6 (85%)
Lumberjack3 (25%)
Packmule1 (10%)
Friend to All1
Healing Aura1 (0%)
Balanced Diet2
Smelting1 (0%)
Crafting1 (0%)
Construction1 (0%)
Equipment:None
Reputation:None
A
few days later, my armourer module had been completed and I had set up two new workers inside, ensuring that they had a constant supply of materials with which to ply their trade. My instructions to them were simple, one should make armour and the other should focus on weapons. That should mean that (and I did check that my presumptions were accurate) the equipment production speed would be fairly balanced, and I wouldn’t have a settlement full of goblins with no armour and loads of weapons or vice versa. I also told them that making something specifically for me should be at the bottom of their to-do list, as I would always respawn and had no plans to head out anywhere yet anyway.
My settlement had turned into a bit of a marvel of industry. The wood generation was good and basically automated, I had enough stone that I didn’t even know what to do with it and my food surplus seemed to be growing at a fairly regular rate. Of course, I knew that as I raised more bellies to feed it would mean that the swing of food would eventually turn to the decline and it certainly was an issue that needed to be addressed, but right now I wasn’t exactly sure how to go about doing that.
I thought about what I would have done in the real world, but that didn’t really help me – I mean I couldn’t exactly just run down to the nearest Tesco Express and pick up a few bits. I did have a few tradeable resources though – at some point I was sure I would be able to strike up some new trade deal where I could swap my wood or stone for the invaluable food that I would definitely need, providing I could find some new trading partners.
The other line of thought was the ‘Real-Time Strategy’ games that I had loved in the past. The first thing that I would do upon starting any game was to construct as many farms as I could in order to satisfy the needs of my base until later on in the game when they could be either upgraded or replaced. This sounded like a good strategy to me, but I wondered if goblins would actually even make good farmers, or if they would eat the crops that were produced. Come to think of it, what crops would be produced and how would I go about getting their seeds or whatever. If only I had spent more time learning about growing plants and how they managed it during the two world wars, when the availability of goods was low but people managed by growing…tomatoes? Potatoes? Who really knows any more. I strained and strained to think back to any information that could help me in this case but it simply wasn’t forthcoming.
There was one type of farming that I could think of that I at least knew something about though. At one point in the last few years, I had been enamoured by a tiny little computer that fits in the palm of your hand that could easily be programmed to carry out a wide range of tasks. I had played and played with the machine, following online instructional videos until I had found one on using the computer to make a fully automated hydroponics system. The one that I’d followed had me growing tomatoes under artificial light with no soil and I have to say, although I am not the biggest fan of tomatoes, they had come out bright red and juicy, although the whole process had taken about a month. Don’t get me wrong I have never really been into farming or growing, but you know, computers.
Would it be possible for me to scale up this operation to satiate the needs of my entire clan? Would the game even recognise what I was trying to achieve if I did in fact manage to visualise it?
I closed my eyes ready to visualise a huge complex system of tubes, pipes, netty pots and plants running on timers and automatic air pumps, like I had used before, but no matter what I thought of or how much I wanted it, the game simply wouldn’t respond to my idea and I wasn’t too surprised.
I brought my hands up to my face in defeat when after a long enough time had passed that I was sure that I wasn’t going to achieve anything this way.
‘What am I doing wrong?’ I berated myself. This time there would be no use in talking to the other goblins about my plans, as if trying to teach them about camshafts had been difficult enough – hydroponic farming probably wouldn’t be happening.
‘Wait, was that it? Was it because I wouldn’t be able to explain how it was done?’ I thought about this revelation for a moment. It had been difficult to explain steam power to the goblins but I had actually managed it. There would be no explaining this – is that why the game wouldn’t initialise my construction?
I closed my eyes for a second time with the task in mind to simplify the farm. I removed all of the previous hi-tech thoughts from my mind and started with a big empty hall, in the same architectural style as the barracks – hell if it’s not broke don’t fix it.
Inside the hall, I cleared everything away so that I was left with just dirt on the ground. Then I covered the dirt in long benches the length of the building and covered them in copper trays that were each connected with copper pipes, all the way to a huge copper container. I mentally filled the container with water and then filled the trays with leafy green plants until I couldn’t see anything but the sea of green
I imagined the water system working via a gate. Periodically the gate should open and allow water to flood the copper trays before ebbing away and back around into the container, thus watering the plants as necessary but not allowing them to drown in an excess of water. The whole process would of course need manning as water could move uphill, or by itself but it should allow a couple of ‘farmers’ to yield a huge number of crops where otherwise they might not have been able to.
This time once I had finished my visualisations, the game dutifully accepted what I was trying to achieve and presented me with a new message.
You are attempting to construct a Farm.
This farm is of a special design which the Human Tandy has envisioned. The farm provides a yield of crops at time intervals depending upon the crops in question and may require workers and/or additional resources in order to function.
Material Cost:
Wood 150
Stone: 20
Copper Bar: 3
Would you like to start construction of the Farm? Yes/No
This was the first time I had to select ‘no’ as an answer to one of the game’s choices. One hundred and fifty wood? Was this supposed to be some kind of cruel joke? It seemed that every time I constructed a new building, the cost of doing so rose substantially. Hang on, that sounded exactly like what was happening. I made a mental note to revisit that particular hypothesis once I moved on to my next construction.
I needed to check the status of my camp’s resources to make sure that I did indeed have enough of everything to fill this ridiculous order. I just hoped that the farm would be worth it in the long run.
I had two hundred units of wood. The sawmill was clearly doing its job as was intended. Stone was definitely not a problem, as I had a shade over fifty but to make three copper bars I would need to use all twenty-seven of my ingots up, leaving nothing behind for a rainy day. As much as I would’ve liked to start using an alternative to copper, it just always seemed like the best metal to use for construction purposes, after all if it wasn’t, then in the real world it wouldn’t be so widely used. I did have a few bits of iron since I’d lit the way for Matuk in his mine but it seemed that since he had moved deeper in the search for metals, his stone yield had fallen significantly. I did have a lot of stone but that was mostly stockpiled from before when he had been mining exclusively on the outside.
Why did I always have so much to do all at once? Was there ever going to be a time where I could just sit back and enjoy everything that I – or should I say we – have created? I added ‘make the mine more efficient’ to my list and moved back to the task at hand.
The Copper Rose Page 22