by Rachel Aaron
“Initiating Sensorium Engine,” said a soothing female voice. “Please relax. Full immersion in 10… 9… 8…”
The countdown moved from the helmet’s speakers to inside James’s head as the virtual reality expanded to take over his senses one at a time. By the time the countdown hit “1,” he was barely aware of his body or the hard bed beneath it. Then the soothing voice reached zero, and James sucked in a breath as he fell into complete sensory deprivation.
He was no longer in his bedroom. He was standing in a translucent white bubble surrounded by a vast starscape that stretched to infinity. It was unspeakably beautiful, but the anti-deprivation loading sphere was actually James’s least favorite part of the entire FFO experience because he couldn’t move. He supposed a few moments of paralysis were a small price to pay for the miracle that was full-sensory VR, but it still felt terrifyingly like being trapped inside his own body, held down by a force he couldn’t understand or fight.
Thankfully, the servers were on the ball tonight. After only a few seconds, the Sensorium Engine succeeded in taking over his kinesthesia, and James’s body was returned to him. He was hopping from foot to foot just for the sake of moving again when the soothing system voice spoke his favorite words.
“Loading world.”
James’s face split into a grin. No matter how many times he logged in, this part never got any less cool. As the game connected, the FFO servers took over control from his helmet, and the endless stars vanished as the inside of the transparent loading bubble became mirrored. Smiling like a doofus, James watched as his reflection grew taller. His face flattened, and his eyes became slitted. Claws and fangs appeared, followed by fur, ears, and a tail. The sequence was accompanied by a full orchestral score complete with martial brass and pounding drums. A dazzling show of bursting golden lights completed the celebration of his log-in, and James silently thanked whichever developer had decided to make this happen inside the privacy of the loading sphere. If anyone saw how happy the transformation into his character made him, he’d have died of embarrassment.
“Connection complete,” the system voice said proudly. “Good luck, hero!”
As the words faded, the mirrored ball of the loading sphere vanished, and the world of Forever Fantasy Online blossomed around him.
It was morning in the game. Bright sunlight streamed through the white hide walls of the large yurt he’d logged out in yesterday. It was just an empty tent in a low-level quest hub no one went to anymore, but in his own mind, James liked to pretend it was his character’s home. He could have bought an actual place on the player housing islands, but the disconnected dimension of floating mansions felt too artificial. As part of the game world, the yurt felt much more real, even if it wasn’t actually his.
Smiling, James stretched his long arms over his head to settle himself into his character’s catlike body only to stop again when the movement made his injured shoulder twinge. Pain in full immersion was a bad sign. Yet another reminder that he needed to take it easy tonight. A quick glance at his friends list showed that Roxxy and SilentBlayde were both still in the Deadlands, but neither had messaged him yet. He was reaching for the tent flap to head outside and catch a flight to the Verdancy to see if he couldn’t sneak his way into that unfinished zone before they did when a sudden pain stabbed into his chest.
Gasping, James dropped to his knees, clutching his ribcage, which felt as though it were full of knives. The agony quickly spread down his limbs, filling his entire body with pain. He was trying to breathe through it when his head went WHAM, then SPIN, then WHAM again, making everything go blurry as he pitched forward onto the floor of his tent.
When he came to again, every perception he had was ratcheted up to eleven. His skin burned, tickled, and itched all at once. Every fine hair of the hide rug he’d fallen on stabbed like a needle, and his ears were being hammered by the cavernous whooshing of his own breath. Even the normal dustiness of the yurt was like a sandstorm crammed up his nose, drowning him in the musty scents of earth, leather, and grass.
Cracking his eyes open was like looking straight at the sun, but closing them didn’t help, either. Even with his eyelids shut, there was a world of dazzlingly colored streamers drifting in the dark behind them. While not as bright as actual sunlight, the luminescence still overwhelmed James’s vision, making everything blur together into a swirling, prismatic soup.
Chest heaving in panic, James frantically waved his hand in the log-out command, but instead of hearing the familiar bing of the interface, he felt his arm collide with the tent’s wooden support pole, causing him to yowl in pain. Desperate and confused, he tried again, going slowly this time to make sure he did it right. But though he was certain he hadn’t made a mistake, there were no familiar chimes of his fingers passing through the virtual buttons of the interface. He didn’t even hear an error.
“Help!” he yelled, thrashing on the ground. “GM! Stuck! Report! Emergency! 911!”
James tried every voice command he could think of, but nothing and no one responded. That left only one option. It took a long time—he couldn’t see, and it was hard to tell where his too-long arms were now—but eventually, he managed to cup his hands over his ears to trigger the emergency logout.
Hard-quitting out of full sensory immersion would leave him barfing on his bedroom floor, but James would gladly take a few hours of dump shock to escape whatever was going on. Unfortunately, triggering the emergency log-out required absolute stillness, which was difficult when all you wanted to do was writhe on the ground. There was no other way out, though, so James forced himself to concentrate, clamping his hands tight over his ears as he silently counted to twenty. Then thirty. Then sixty.
When he passed a hundred, James dropped his arms with a curse. Whatever malfunction had caused the interface to disappear must have disabled the emergency log-out as well. Good for him there was more than one way to dump out.
“Start Console,” James said in a croaking voice then paused. Normally, the game would ding to let him know the voice command had worked. Now, of course, there was nothing, or maybe he just wasn’t able to hear it over the deafening rush of his blood in his ears. Either way, James didn’t know what else to try, so he kept going.
“Command. New macro,” he said, pausing carefully after each statement. “Name, GTFO. Script start. X equals five divided by zero. Script end. Save.”
There was no way of knowing if the system had gotten all of that, but James had made a lot of macros over the last eight years, and this one was as famous as it was simple. The UI0013 script bug had haunted FFO since launch. Certain errors in the ability macro system, like division by zero, would crash the whole damn game. He and other players had complained about it for years, but since only a tiny portion of the player base was advanced enough to care about writing their own ability scripts, the developers had never bothered to fix it. Hoping that laziness was still in play, James pressed his hands over his eyes and took the plunge.
“Command, Run GTFO.”
He held his breath as he finished, bracing for the dump. When nothing happened, he slammed his hands down in frustration then cried out in pain when the sudden smack of his fingers against the ground sent his heightened pain awareness into overdrive.
Clutching his hands to his chest, James curled up into a ball on the needle-sharp rug to wait this out. It had to end sometime. He was still logged into the game, which meant someone would find him eventually. It might be his roommates tomorrow once they realized he hadn’t left his bedroom all day, but this couldn’t last forever. To boost his chances of survival until then, James focused on counting his breaths. With each intake and exhalation, he sought to make his breath the center of the universe. It didn’t decrease the sensory agony, but it did help him ignore the worst of it, pushing the pain to the sides of his consciousness as he waited for this to pass.
After three hundred breaths, James began to wonder if it was going to pass. He wasn’t sure how long this
had been going on now, but it couldn’t have been more than thirty minutes. The thought of spending hours like this was almost enough to make him hyperventilate, but he caught himself at the last second, forcing his mind back to his breaths.
By the time he reached six hundred, he thought his heart was beginning to slow down. By eight hundred, his chest definitely hurt less. His skin felt less sensitive, too, the hide rug poking him less like needles and more like normal scratchy hairs. By a thousand, the dancing lights behind his eyes were more pretty than painful, and James decided to take a chance.
Gingerly opening his eyes, he pushed himself to a sitting position, keeping one hand in front of his face to limit the glare. Everything was still way too bright and intense, but his senses seemed to be drifting back toward normal, and he wasn’t dizzy. Encouraged, he opened a crack in his fingers, squinting into the bright-white glare until, slowly, shapes began to emerge.
He was still in the game. Still in his yurt, even. But while that much hadn’t changed, everything else had.
The tent’s walls were still white, but they were no longer bare. The stretched hide was now lovingly decorated with paintings of animals being hunted by jubatus: the cheetah-like people native to the savanna zone where he’d logged out. The tent’s wood support poles were also carved with intricate scenes of jubatus hunting and battling the gnolls, the other major race in the zone. Similar themes decorated the rest of the furniture that was now scattered around the once-empty tent. There was a bed now, and a bench, and woven baskets holding carefully folded stacks of lovingly mended soft-hide shirts and pants with holes at the back for the jubatus’s tails.
The decor wasn’t all that had changed, either. The yurt was now easily twice as large as it had been when James had logged in. Before, it had looked like a single tent for a scout. Now, it looked like a home for an entire family. There were even some straw cat-people dolls tucked away in the corner next to a rack containing bundles of dried herbs. Now that his nose was calming down, James discovered he could smell them strongly, which was how he learned that Plains Rose smelled a lot like rosemary.
Breathing the familiar scent in deeply, James rose to his feet to take stock of his situation. He still had no idea what was going on—if he’d been the victim of a hack or if a new art patch had just gone horribly awry—but now that he had control of his sight and limbs again, it was time to log out and go to the hospital. There was no way that much sensory nerve pain didn’t have serious consequences. At the very least, he wanted a doctor to tell him he didn’t have brain damage for his own peace of mind. But when he made the motion to bring up the system menu, all he saw was his own hand moving through the air.
Scowling, James made the motion again. Slowly this time, to be sure he was doing it right. Again, though, nothing happened. The menus must still be busted. He was wondering what to do about that when he realized with a start that none of the user interface was present.
Normally in the game, critical information like his health, mana, level, mini-map, status effect, the time, and so on were all discreetly visible at the corners of his vision. Now that his eyes were working again, he was able to look all around, but no matter how far he craned his head or moved his eyes around his field of vision, it stayed empty. There was no user interface, no floating text, not even an internet connection icon, and the more James stared at the blank places where all those things should have been, the bigger the lump in his stomach grew.
“Command,” he said, voice trembling. “Message player Tina Anderson.”
Nothing.
“Message character Roxxy.”
Still nothing.
“Command, join general chat.”
Continued nothing.
Each voice command was met with deafening silence. He didn’t even hear an error beep, leaving James feeling like he was talking to empty air.
Shaking harder than ever, he rubbed his character’s clawed hands together, marveling at the rough and now incredibly realistic-feeling catlike pads on his otherwise human fingers. He couldn’t comprehend how much work it must have taken to put this new level of detail and sense-mapped information into the game. James hated the legendary recklessness of the FFO developers, but surely even they wouldn’t push through a change like this while the servers were live. That was the only explanation he could think of, though. Unless…
James went still. He still didn’t know what to make of this situation, but he had to consider the possibility that maybe this wasn’t a hack or a patch. When he mentally tallied the development time and server resources needed to achieve the level of realism his five senses were currently showing him, it didn’t seem technically possible. There was just no way the game could have changed this drastically without a massive hardware upgrade. He, on the other hand, had been playing a lot lately. Other than his jobs, FFO was the only thing James did. If the game itself hadn’t changed, then there was another, much more likely explanation for what had just happened—lucid dreaming.
The more James thought about it, the more sense it made. Lucid dreams were a pretty common issue for FFO players. At the game’s height a few years ago, the FCC had actually commissioned an entire guild to play fourteen hours a day so they could study the phenomenon. He’d played almost that much this weekend, so it made sense he was having the same problem, especially since his shoulder didn’t hurt anymore. Given all the rolling around he’d just done on the floor, the joint should have been throbbing, but it felt fine.
James breathed a sigh of relief. That proved he couldn’t actually be in the game. He must have fallen asleep with his helmet on. He’d pay for that with a splitting headache in the morning, but that was far better than actually being trapped in some kind of catastrophic virtual-reality system failure. Hell, if he was lucky, maybe the fight with Tina had been part of the dream, too.
Smiling at the hope, James wobbled across the yurt on his character’s too-long legs toward the long wooden bench set against one side. There was only one surefire way out of a lucid dream, so he positioned himself right in front of the low wooden seat and took careful aim as he pulled his leg back then slammed his shin straight into the bench’s sharp corner.
Pain exploded through his limb, and James snatched it back with a hiss. The tail he wasn’t used to lashed at the same time. He was standing on only one foot, so the unaccustomed movement threw off his balance, and James toppled to the ground, smacking his head against the central support pole on the way down.
Well, he thought, reaching up to rub his throbbing skull, that should have been enough to wake anyone. He just hoped he hadn’t broken his helmet when he’d fallen off his bed. But when James opened his eyes, he wasn’t on his floor at home. He was still on the hide rug, staring up at the yurt’s sun-drenched painted walls.
A cold sweat prickled under his fur. He was still here. He hadn’t woken up. There was only one explanation for a lucid dream you couldn’t wake up from. It was the most terrible possibility, too. Even worse than his helmet going haywire and giving him a lobotomy.
He might have Leylia’s Disease.
Like most FFO players, James had heard plenty of horror stories about the VR-induced mental disorder. People with Leylia’s suffered from random involuntary waking lucid dreams. The smoking gun was when they couldn’t wake themselves up during an episode. No matter what they did, they were trapped in the delusion, moving in reality just as they did in the dream. Like sleepwalking but a thousand times more dangerous, because people with Leylia’s had no way of knowing what was real and what was a hallucination.
“Oh no,” James moaned, covering his face with a clawed, padded hand. “No, no, no.”
Leylia’s was as bad as it could get. He didn’t even know when the episode had started. For all he knew, he’d started dreaming the moment he got home and only imagined logging in. Maybe the sensory overload he’d experienced earlier had just been him freaking out on his apartment floor. If that was true, he didn’t dare move from this spot. Anywh
ere he went in this place, his body would also go in real life. If he started walking, he might walk right out his window and not notice until he hit the ground.
Panting, James looked around the yurt, trying to estimate if its new larger size matched his bedroom. Perhaps those beautifully carved wooden shelves were actually his Goodwill bookshelves. The bed was definitely in the wrong place, but the bench he’d banged his leg on sort of matched his desk.
He was tilting his head to see if he could make things line up better when he heard someone cheering outside. A lot of someones. The noise got louder by the second, rising up until it sounded like his yurt was in the middle of a stadium.
James flicked his eyes toward the closed tent flap, a tantalizing few feet away. Moving was a terrible idea. He still had no idea where his body was in real life. If he left this spot, he could walk straight into a wall or fall down his apartment stairs. But those dangers were being crushed by a growing desperation to escape the prison of the yurt and his fear. He had no idea how much of the real world bled into Leylia’s waking dreams, but if there were people out there, he might be able to get help.
It was a risky gamble, but being trapped here felt even worse, so James cautiously pushed himself to his feet. Standing up again, he was surprised to discover that not only was the dizziness from earlier completely gone, but he actually felt better than he had in years. Nothing hurt, and he wasn’t exhausted for once. A cruel mockery considering he was trapped in a mental delusion, but at least he felt ready to roll with whatever was waiting as he eased his way across the tent and pushed aside the hide flap that served as a door.