Cyber Harem 2200

by Logan Link

  I shook my head. “Just fucking shoot, you fat fuck.”

  The cold metal of the gun dug into my forehead. Uh oh. This felt too real. I could feel myself nearly panic.

  But then I glanced away from the gun to Kanako, this time not staring at her tits (although they were still very prominently there, trust me.)

  “Hey, Jackson?” she said, holding something up. It was a small canister the size of her fist.

  “Huh?” the enforcer said, turning his head to look at her but continuing to dig the gun into my head.

  “Know what an EMP blast does to a jacked-up Upgrader like you?” she asked, gritting her teeth and flicking the pin from the thing in her hand.

  A grenade!

  Blue brilliant light fizzled and then exploded. My PLEX HUD immediately shut down, and for a second it had an effect like a flashbang — I was blinded. Almost deaf, too, but my listening wasn’t so impaired: I instantly flinched as I heard Jackson’s Desert Eagle blast near me.

  No searing pain. He didn’t hit me.

  In fact, as my vision returned, I could see there was a growing distance between Jackson and me. I glanced down and saw rapid motion. Then I registered it. There was no car floor now, just road.

  Holy shit, the limo split in half!

  I watched Kanako, tiny as she was, improbably try to grapple Jackson, slamming him repeatedly against half of the car door he had been leaning against.

  I looked down to see my severed half of the limo contain two still-moving wheels. I held onto the door handle, for lack of anything better to hold against. Meanwhile, my PLEX was rebooting: but all I could see was garbled text flashing all over, obscuring my vision to add to the nausea I was feeling from the sudden, jerking motions.

  My half of the car was swerving away rapidly, while Jackson banged a fist against the window that separated the driver from the passenger section. “Drive the fuck on!” he yelled, as Kanako tried to peel him off from the car and into oncoming traffic.

  I couldn’t see the rest, because I was spinning and spinning and spinning. I lost all sense of direction. Then there was an almighty crash, and I felt myself jolted out of my carseat.

  I didn’t think I would ever play a game that could actually make me physically black out, but here I was.

  My vision went all black, leaving me with only the glitching, garbled text of my HUD.

  2

  “Well, well, well, look what the Cadillac dragged in,” I heard a silky voice say, as I came to.

  I didn’t know how much time had passed. What the fuck, how did a game make me pass out like this? I was seriously impressed. I wanted to meta-observe, wanted to explain how it managed to do that. Glancing around there was no server clock or anything to give me a sense of what time it was in the real world.

  Probably an immersion thing and likely not necessarily legal — not that there’s a governing body that knew how to manage these state-of-the-art things.

  My surprise with the game immersing me this way was rapidly replaced by my surprise over where I was waking up.

  This wasn’t some dirty cyberpunk street clinic. I saw stripper poles and stages, and the music was some sort of porno jazz with a techno beat. The lights were all pink. Everyone was bathed in pink.

  I raised my hands and saw that they were pink too.

  “Okay, wow,” I murmured, first impressed by the graphics, but now impressed that I was surrounded by some of the most beautiful women I had ever seen.

  Like, we’re talking about perfect tens who are hotter than perfect tens in real life. These weren’t anime babes or Instagram filter junkies. These were real women, with killer bodies, and fatal faces. They were hot.

  The one kneeling over me, who spoke just as I woke up, was a woman who reminded me of Olivia Munn at her peak, except she had lighter skin. No blemishes anywhere, and while she was just dressed in a bra and panties — lacy stuff, stripper stuff — she had poise as if she wasn’t just prancing around in her underwear.

  “What’s your story?” she said.

  I looked past her, catching the variety of women around me. Well, you know how the real world makes a big fuss about diversity? This strip club knew it. There were white girls, black girls, Asians, Latinas, every kind of girl. There were short girls and tall girls, angelic young girls and older MILF types. Thicker girls, slimmer girls. The whole range.

  The only thing that brought them together was that there wasn’t a single girl here who didn’t have amazing tits or an exceptional ass.

  “Thank you, digital fantasy,” I murmured. I wasn’t speaking to anyone — the game couldn’t parse my words as dialog, right?

  Wrong. The girls all reacted with either smirks or mildly offended looks. I imagined they were programmed to react to certain tones with a preset range of possible reactions. The developers did an amazing job selling how real their facial expressions were.

  I looked back at the babe kneeling over me. “Sorry, what was that?” If this was a traditional RPG, this would probably be the bottom dialogue option, the one that goes: [REPEAT LINE]

  She sighed. “Eyes over here, pal. I asked you what your story is. Why did you smash right into our neon sign?”

  “I did?” I said, jerking forward as I sat up. Ouch. That felt disorienting, not in a rapid VR motion sort of way, more like a ‘I just survived a car crash’ sort of way. “Uh… something about the mafia. Kobayashi Yakuza? Plexer?”

  I could see the looks of fear on the girls standing behind the talkative one. Uh oh. Probably shouldn’t have led with Yakuza talk.

  “We don’t want any trouble,” she said, her voice taking a distinctly serious turn. “You’re a Plexer?”

  “Apparently,” I said.

  She blinked, looking like she was trying to think. Then she stood up, shooing the rest of the girls. “Back to work, girls. Just because the place is dead on a Saturday afternoon doesn’t mean you get paid to rubberneck at car crashes all day!”

  So game time paralleled the real world. Got it. “Hey, what’s your name?” I quickly asked.

  An important NPC like her no doubt had a name, and I imagined she had a dialog response trigger for this. I wondered about how advanced the dialog system was — so far I was really impressed.

  How much had the devs programmed? How deep in could I get with an NPC before they just rattled repeated lines?

  “I’m Liana,” she said. “What about you?”

  Just as I predicted: the game paused, the screen in front of me blurred. A keyboard I could trigger with my fingers, or by focusing my gaze at each individual character, showed up. There was a little audio icon at the bottom right, so I could probably just say it too.

  “Dan,” I said. Might as well use my real name. Except I wanted to sound like a badass, not a friend. So I quickly added, “Daniel, that is.”

  I realized too late that now I was going to be running around with the username Dan Daniel That-Is.

  “Daniel, got it,” Liana said. “Follow me. This way.”

  My head still felt dizzy. She offered her hand to help guide me. Being the clumsy fool I was, I nearly stumbled, except I managed to grab her by her shoulder, my other hand landing on her lower back, just before the curve of her ass.

  “Ooops,” I said. I made an embarrassed face. I mean, I shouldn’t be, right? What’s the game going to do? Kick me out for failing a harassment policy test?

  Liana laughed — part of it flirty, part of it thirsty, but most of it unsurprised. “Baby Plexers are all the same.”

  “Accident, I swear,” I said.

  Wow, did they program conversation triggers for grabbing an NPC’s ass? Some designer out there really did think of everything.

  “You’re a Plexer — so am I. Was,” Liana said in clipped, staccato phrases she rushed. “We don’t have any time to waste.”

  This was the manager’s backroom. There was a big leather couch resting on the same long wall where the door was. I knew better than to sit there. I chose to lean against
another wall, where a duty roster was.

  Level design was really something else. This place felt real, and every object looked dynamic. The duty roster was drawn on a whiteboard. Impulsively, I wiped away the “R” in “Ruby”, a stripper who was working every weekend until next month.

  I saw ink on my fingertip. Whistling with admiration, I returned my attention to Liana. She sat on the edge of the desk.

  I wonder what would happen if I pulled her legs wide open while she sat teasingly at the edge there. Could someone have sex in this game? I looked down to see a bulge in my own pants.

  It wasn’t easy thinking back on what I was wearing before I started the game. Hell, Cyber Squad 2200 was doing an amazing job making it hard to even think outside the game. It took details like being impressed by object design and the physics engine to pull my mind away from the fact that I was in fact playing a game.

  But I wasn’t magically transported to the year 2200. For one, I was wearing a sweater and sweat pants in real life. Here I was wearing dark blue jeans and a black t-shirt.

  My bulge was real. Thinking about fucking Liana right here, right now was real. Looking at how hot she turned me on. The game didn’t program these reactions out of me. I was feeling them.

  Liana looked annoyed by my salacious grin. “Are you ready to talk business?”

  I exhaled. “Okay, okay. Sorry. Just… disoriented. The crash, you know?”

  “Right,” Liana said, her skeptical tone way too real to be programmed. This was some AI next-level stuff, damn. Did the devs have some special neural-learning system, the combined processing power of all other players making their NPCs seem realer and smarter than any I’ve ever seen in any game?

  Oh wait, yeah. Liana was talking.

  “You’re a wanted man. If the Kobayashis know you exist, the D’Angelos, the Chens, the Vory, everyone’s gonna know about you. I used to be a Plexer, then I gave up and settled down. Well, as much as running a chain strip club franchise counts as settling down.”

  I nodded. I was okay with letting Liana brief me about the game world, as long as she didn’t mind my wandering eyes.

  “Can you tell me the version number of your PLEX wetware?” she said, gesturing with a seductive come-hither motion of her hand for me to step closer.

  “Where is it?”

  “Bottom right of your PLEX, where the copyright info is,” Liana replied.

  “Uh, my PLEX HUD isn’t showing up. I took a direct blast from an EMP grenade. I know my tech, I’m guessing electro-magnetic pulses damage cybernetic systems like this, right?” I said, amused that I was behaving like a try-hard, wanting to show Liana that I wasn’t a total dumbass.

  But she laughed at me.

  “What?” I asked, frowning.

  “It’s not ‘PLEX HUD’, it’s just PLEX,” Liana said. “The Permanent Logic-Environment Extension is a handful, so just PLEX. It’s a given that it’s a heads-up display, so there’s no need to actually say it.”

  “Okay…”

  She reached for my hands. I gave them.

  Fuck, I felt good to be holding someone’s hands. Tinder dates with shy college freshmen who only handled one night stands when their boyfriends back home didn’t give them attention didn’t quite give me that sort of intimacy.

  “Yeah, I can see it,” Liana sighed. “Your PLEX is fucked. That’s sort of a good thing, I guess?”

  “I see garbled text everywhere, and it feels like these glitches have burned into my eyeballs, actually,” I grumbled. “Doesn’t seem good to me.”

  “It does mean you’re not broadcasting your PLEXlink beacon. Kobayashi goons won’t be storming this place. I was going to flash a hacked ROM so you didn’t have to use stock software — trackable stock software. Then you’re free to do your thing like all Plexers do. Hunt bounties, take up mercenary jobs, trade, fuck, whatever.”

  “Which one did you do?” I asked.

  Liana only winked at me. “A little bit of everything. Let me tell you something though, this is a world where lone wolves like you don’t live long. You need to squad up. Find and recruit a team with a diversity of skills. You can’t do everything by yourself. That’s the surest way to end up dead.”

  “Squad, got it,” I said. She was starting to sound like a tutorial, for once. I looked down to my hands, which she was still holding, her grip gentle but strong.

  “I need to fix your PLEX. And then get you going. You can’t stay here. This isn’t exactly a safe haven, and you’re putting the girls and me at risk.”

  I frowned at her, and she pouted right back. “I know, I’d rather keep helping you too. Maybe come back once you’re not a fucking level one noob and I might have something for you.”

  “Oh, shit, I’m level one,” I laughed.

  She let go of her hands and moved towards my neck. First she massaged me — and fuck, did that feel good, the way she was kneading her thumbs and fingertips into my neck and head — then she hovered her thumbs over my eyes.

  “Uh… Liana?”

  “This’ll ache a little,” she said, right before pressing her thumbs into my eyeballs.

  No fucking kidding. The pressure gave me an instant headache. I felt like if she pressed just a bit harder, my eyeballs might just rupture, action movie style. I felt like Oberyn from Game of Thrones getting — oh shit, sorry, no spoilers.

  You know what I mean.

  “Your PLEX is rebooting again,” Liana said. “I’m launching you in Safe Mode, flashing the ROM I was talking about, and then everything will go back to normal. At least, I hope. I’m not exactly a cyber-doc, I’ve never done this before.”

  “That’s really reassuring,” I grunted as she kept her pressure on my eyeballs.

  My eyes were closed. I saw black and red — practically could see irritated nerve endings just inches away from my vision. A dialog box showed up in the middle of this ordeal.

  ALLOW GUEST ACCESS? Y/N

  “Say yes,” Liana cooed.

  “Yes, goddammit!” I yelled, clenching my teeth from the pain.

  Then she released her thumbs. “You know, you shouldn’t trust random women to log into your PLEX. I could be a hacker, making you my slave. You could be part of a giant botnet of Plexers ready to do my bidding.”

  I was rubbing my eyes. Not exactly the most attractive look right now, tearing up because a hot stripper just tried to gouge your eyeballs out. “That’s really reassuring, Liana.”

  “I’m wirelessly connected to you, at least. So you don’t have to worry about me interfacing painfully again. Although… I can read your thoughts right now, and I’m pretty sure you’d like to interface painfully with me.”

  Liana was grinning.

  “Get out of my thoughts,” I said.

  “Would it really make you feel better if I did this whole process naked?” she asked, her grin expanding.

  “Um…”

  She turned around, stepping forward and then leaning provocatively to bend over a desk. “How about like this? If I put on a little show for you?”

  Her ass was perfect, and I was happy to ignore all the little loading screens on my PLEX to watch her. I wondered if I could just leap up, grab her, and pin her against that desk. With my dick.

  “Not with your stats,” Liana giggled, teasing me.

  4.85% chance of overpowering Liana with your Hand to Hand skill of (0).

  “I said get out of my head!”

  Liana wiggled her all-too-perfect ass to tease me a little more. “Just a bit longer. I’m saving my PLEXlink in your Contacts. This way you can come to me for help.”

  I pointed down to my crotch. “Hello? Liana? This is Dan. I need some manual help.”

  She walked over and slapped me playfully. “You don’t have the credits for that. Okay, I’ve flashed the ROM. If it’s working for you, the bottom right copyright info should be modified.

  She was right. It now said PLEX v1.1672 ModEdition (C) PLEX CORPORATION 2189-2200

  “This is a mess.
A baby Plexer getting a face full of EMP damage? You’re going to have to reset your preferences, get your system redone. That’s gonna take a while. Sit here. Want a drink? I’ll get you something while I check on the girls.”

  “Uh, a beer?”

  “One ice-cold Neocorp Fresh Brew coming right up. You deal with the system stuff. I’ll be back,” Liana said, glancing at me before exiting. “Don’t misbehave.”

  3

  After she left, an intimidating-looking screen took up practically all my PLEX real estate.

  Welcome, Plexer.

  Please insert name.

  I could have gone with my usual usernames and gamer tags but I had already introduced myself as Daniel so I wrote my real name instead. To my surprise, the game allowed it — I supposed there was no rule about having unique names. I probably had some other ID for the game to tag me with, like my computer’s IP, or my Reach’s device code.

  CLASS: Plexer (Uncategorized)

  Reset complete. Please invest 20 points between your nine base Abilities.

  * * *

  STRINTCHA

  DEXSMAPRS

  CONFOCWIT

  * * *

  Abilities affect the base success chance of your Skill uses. Abilities are increased only with XP injections and permanent or swappable PLEX implants.

  Most of the Attributes looked familiar, but I needed to understand them better. For instance, any gamer could tell what STR, INT and CHA were — Strength, Intelligence and Charisma respectively — but what about SMA, FOC and PRS?

  SMA

  Smarts. Your ability to come up with creative solutions. Not every situation requires a bullet: you will always gain more XP from clever and creative solutions.

  FOC

  Focus. FOC governs your ability to have multiple Powers running at once, as well as the multiplier for your Power Points usage per cast.