Interlude (1/2)

Eegleet finished working at his menial job at the factory, a job too low for the corporation to purchase and maintain a robot to perform, and made his way home. Mass transit was crowded that day, with everyone looking down at datapads, working or not, or seemingly involved in conversations on ear-buds. Eegleet pretended to be the latter, wearing a non-functioning eye-piece that wouldn't perturb him if it was stolen. By pretending to be in conversation with someone, just mumbling to oneself, no other being would bother him, panhandling or raving or just lonely.

Eegleet knew a basic fact that everyone learned on Gulmisvan.

Life was lonely.

Still, Eegleet felt a surge of anticipation as he entered his small dwelling. It had a basic food dispenser, a basic waste disposal, and a single room. The only two things inside were a comfortable nest, at least as comfortable as someone of his economic status could afford, and an EVR rig that he had recently upgraded to the best he could afford.

Even better, he had entered a contest recently and won, which meant his EVR rig was capable of more than he had ever imagined.

Today was the day.

Eegleet had been looking forward to it for almost a third of a Great Cycle, since message boards and virtual meeting places had begun talking about it.

A new game.

It took effort to find information about it. It took effort to even get any previews of it. Eegleet had heard it referred to as an ”Alternate Reality Game”, where there were hints hidden all over, some even in real life. At one point he had found a broken food dispenser with a shiny keypad. He had followed the instructions and punched in his comm-code.

That night he had received a GalNet address, a one-time use GalNet address. Navigating to it with a text-only communications program had earned him another address, this one deep in the old abandoned sectors of GalNet, where virtual reality games had been tried and failed over the eons.

There a rusted and battered robot had given him an orb. The orb contained a file, heavily encrypted, that claimed to be a prize, and it was inscribed with a real-mail postal address to a location that the curious had discovered was an old abandoned scientific research station on the edge of the Outer Rim Civilized Races territory.

He had mailed his address and ”I WANT TO BELIEVE” on the actual, physical paper.

In return, he'd won a new EVR rig, but had to promise to keep it secret. After all, supposedly agents of the ”GalWiz Corporate Security” were looking for any ”outlaws” who possessed the rig.

It was exciting, to play the game.

Eegleet, like many others across the Unified Civilized Races, had furrowed out the clues, deciphered the riddles, decrypted the files, and bit by bit, sometimes literally, had discovered more and more about the mysterious game.

Each drop of information had intrigued those searching out the data even more. Set on a world before star-drive. Containing only a single species. Set in a world much like their own where corporations ruled everything and government was just a place for the corrupt and incompetent to earn an easy paycheck off of the backs of everyone who paid government extortion.

The game promised to be in real time, to link as many players as logged in, with full EVR support.

The only downside was it was a single race game. But what a race. Able to accept cybernetics without pain and suffering and mental anguish. Able to accept enhanced biological parts without rejection.

Able to commit violence and give back some of the misery beings like Eegleet felt every day.

Everyone knew someone, a tenth of a Great Cycle, who had been allowed to play the Alpha, and then the Beta, test. Who had gotten to experience the world. There were bugs, problems, in the Alpha, but by the Beta they had been ironed out.

Except one.

That bug had become a feature.

The chance of crippling, agonizing pain if you were ”killed” that lasted for cycles and couldn't be disconnected from.

It even worked player versus player and Eegleet, like some others who would never admitted it, felt a thrill at the idea of inflicting such agony on another being.

It had been an entire third of a Great Cycle.

But today, today was different.

The flashing light that the download was complete. Even the Day One Patch had finished.

Even at Eegleet's slow GalNet connection that was the same that everyone had a right to by the Civilized Races Rights and Entitlements Compact.

Eegleet ate sparingly, preferring to wait to eat his tasteless paste till he was in The Game. He had found the ”Sal's Diner” area during his searches, and found that purchasing a meal there and then eating his own sustenance gruel made it so he tasted what he ordered.

Only a hundred or so ARG players knew about ”Sal's Diner” and yesterday the owner, one of the stocky bipedal primate race, had given him a ”key” that would allow him to find the diner and enter it in the game.

A reward.

Eegleet shivered with anticipation when the EVR synched up with his body. It was a non-invasive model, a dermal contact rig, but amazingly it worked. He leaned back and closed his eyes, consciously surrendering his two motor control cortexes to the EVR rig.

WELCOME TO CYBERLIFE

YOU ARE NUMBER 23121351 OUT OF 23121357

appeared in front of him.

But his participation in the ARG had given him something better. He reach out and tapped the little bouncing whiskered cartoon creature called a 'dawg' twice, scratched its belly, then said its name.

”goodboi”

The scene in front of him, a fairly boring GalNet holding wait screen, vanished. He felt like he was being sucked through tubes that looked like they were made of neon and electricity. It stung, slightly, which thrilled him because he knew that it wasn't a lie, pain was part of the risk.

It dumped him out in darkness with a single window.

WELCOME IAMEEGLEETMALE

YOU ARE 15 OUT OF 16

The number dropped to zero and he felt a surge of disorientation. It stung again, but once again, it thrilled more than bothered him.

He found himself on a street. It used black pavement, an archaic form of roadway that the ARG players actually had to look up in ancient data-archives. He was sitting against a wall, made of red brick, dressed in black clothing. His stomach hurt and in his hand he held a projectile weapon.

Blood was around him and on his stomach.

”Come on, we gotta get moving,” Another avatar said, reaching down. ”Can you walk?”

Eegleet nodded.