by Sean Shake
“So”—she took another fry—“tonight, say, six PM?”
He almost said it’s a date, but stopped himself. “Okay. You’re sure it wasn’t hacked? I know someone mentioned something about it. NU-Link safety… or something.” Though he wasn’t quite sure. Usually by the time he got home and watched streamers, he was either dead tired, drunk, or both.
Not the best condition to form lasting memories.
At least not by yourself.
“Like I said, wouldn’t still be running. Plus, it’d be all over the news if it got hacked. First multiplayer NU-Link game unsafe? The media would eat it up.” She tapped her vRing. A scrolling line of text popped up into the air above her knuckles. “See, nothing. And I have notifications set. It’s fine.” She stole more fries. “So, what do you say? You game?”
8
Hans Grinham finally had some free time before his next job. He was still on the road, between jobs, but had access to plenty fast enough of a connection where he was staying.
It was a safe house of sorts, provided not exactly by his employer, but something like that.
He also wouldn’t be bothered while he was plugged in.
He opened up his brand new NU-Link, had to go online to figure out how to use it, and then entered a world very different from the one he’d known.
Ten minutes later, he was standing in the starting area, having royally screwed up.
Somehow, he’d ended up as a dwarf, or what passed for a dwarf in this game.
And now he had to wait an entire day to reset his character.
He’d at least managed to select a berserker, which based on its name alone had to be good.
Disappointed, but not willing to waste this rare bit of free time, he went out into the world and started killing things.
Eventually, he’d killed enough that he was able to purchase potion reagents, and take up alchemy.
This was what he really loved. Yeah, quests and killing monsters was fun, but this was better.
And, since he often had only little snatches of time to play, it was a lot easier to do a bit of tradeskilling in those stolen moments than to do part of a complicated quest or venture out into the wilds or down into a dungeon in search of monsters and loot.
In the middle of making a potion, a gorgeous girl with cat ears, a tail, and wearing an outrageously skimpy outfit passed by him, a werewolf-looking guy trailing behind her like a puppy.
Hans turned to watch her pass, her hips swaying, her beautiful, full ass hardly even covered by the loincloth she wore.
Damn, he thought, now that is—
Suddenly his foot caught fire, and he looked down to see he’d dropped the anti-venom potion he’d been crafting.
He had no idea why it caught fire upon dropping and shattering, but he had bigger things to worry about.
After putting out the fire, and letting his foot heal, which took almost a full minute, he decided to take a break from alchemy.
He sold the few potions he’d made to a vendor, bought the cheapest axe they had—he couldn’t believe the game didn’t provide starting weapons—then limped along back out into the wilderness in search of experience and loot.
It took him exactly twenty-two minutes before he died.
Which—though he didn’t know this—was a new record for shortest time to first death.
9
When Samuel got home he changed his cheese-stained pants, then browsed online to kill time.
He didn’t see anything about Nerathetan, though he swore he’d seen something about it earlier.
He watched a few streams, trying to find any mention of a hack.
They weren’t actually playing the game, since that was impossible to stream. There were several people working on a way to output data, but the NU-Links were locked down, and the only ones which had been exploited were the ones with the very first firmware version.
And then only the ones that never connected to the internet and auto-updated.
So there weren’t that many left.
Even the people who had an unpatched NU-Link didn’t get much more than garbage output.
Reading the mind was a difficult thing, even when you only had to reverse engineer it.
So, streamers mostly spent their time talking about the game in-between play sessions.
Symbiosis had promised streaming capability, but it wasn’t here yet.
For some reason some people streamed themselves as they played, which was rather boring to watch since it just looked like they were sleeping.
After watching several streams, he gave up, not finding anything.
Maybe he’d dreamt it.
There were a lot of videos of people talking about their experience with the game so far, even though the game had only been out since Thursday, and even then only for beta users. Probably because of that, actually.
It was the new, hot thing. What everyone was playing right now.
This would be the first time he got in on the ground level of a game.
Maybe he’d actually do well.
He was excited to get to use his NU-Link for an actual game. He’d spent a month’s pay on it nearly a year ago, and while he got some great use out of it from… uh, intimate sims, he hadn’t played any real games on it.
There hadn’t been any worth playing, in his opinion.
Getting thirsty, he grabbed a beer from the kitchen and then went back to watching streams, waiting for Audra’s call.
Probably should sign up for the game first, he thought.
He created an account for the game and set up autopay to withdraw from his crypto wallet. He had a credit card, and it offered 15% cashback as an enticement to get people to use it over the crypto alternatives they were bleeding customers to, but he preferred being anonymous and not having to deal with bills. Especially for his sims.
Audra finally called a little after 6 PM and he anxiously answered it.
“You ready to do this?” she asked.
“I'm ready. And I've got a beer ready.” He glanced at the three empty bottles he’d already downed.
It wasn’t a lie, since only one bottle still had any beer in it—the one in his hand.
“I've got a whole bottle of wine. Actually a box of wine, but no one needs to know that. Do you know how to log in?”
“Of course.” He didn’t, but he was sure he could figure it out. Couldn’t be too different from his sims.
“See you in-game then. My name is Leena. What’s yours?”
“I haven’t created a character yet. Killshot I guess, if it’s not taken.”
She laughed.
“What?”
“Nothing. See you in-game, Killshot. Make sure you choose North-West Launia to start in, otherwise we’ll never make it to each other.” And then she hung up.
Samuel opened his NU-Link box.
Inside was the NU-Link device itself, which comprised two black globes about the size of flattened eyeballs. One attached to each ear, and once sealed, fine microfilaments would extend from it and into the ear canal, past the eardrum and connect to… something.
Samuel wasn’t a neurologist. Or would that be the domain of a neurosurgeon?
Whoever would know about that kind of thing, he wasn’t it.
All Samuel knew was that when he put it on, he was transported to a world filled with hot—
Er, that could be filled with anything. Like, kittens.
Or trees.
He fitted his NU-Link and settled down onto the couch.
Once comfortable, he tapped them twice to activate, and entered another world.
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