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  "So how does this work?" I asked, looking around the room. The place didn’t look like any lab I’d ever known. There was a round couch in the middle, and doors all along the walls. Everything was empty. "And where the hell is everybody else?"

  "Everybody else?" she asked.

  "Well yeah," I said. "I figured there’d be a lot of people coming in here to check the game out!"

  That was good for a couple more blinks. Like we were both speaking the same language here, but clearly we were having very different conversations.

  She smiled and shook her head. It really was captivating when she did that. Even if I knew she wouldn't give me the time of day if she didn't have to as part of her work study, or whatever the hell it was that put her behind that desk in this lab.

  “That’s a good one,” she said. "Everyone has their own Etherea rigs. It's been quiet here ever since the dedication yesterday. You're the first person to come in to actually use the lab!"

  She seemed to realize, just a touch too late, that she’d inadvertently insulted me while explaining the situation, but I was used to those casual insults.

  She didn’t even look all that embarrassed. Her mouth just twisted down as though she didn’t like that she’d suddenly been reminded there were people less well off than her running around her school.

  "Yeah, well I'd like to try it out," I said, trying to keep the distaste from my voice and not doing a good job of it from the way her mouth turned down even more. Clearly she wasn't used to people she considered lower on the pecking order talking down to her, but what the fuck ever.

  "Right," she said. "If you'll follow me?"

  The lab was small by the standards of some of the other computer labs at the Academy. Labs I was familiar with that were usually just as empty as this one. Everyone else could afford their own computers, after all, while I had to rely on the hardware that was provided thanks to the tuition paid for by my scholarship.

  I figured I might as well get as much use as I could out of that scholarship money, even if I did get weird looks from the people running those labs. It was well known that a job running one of the computer labs was one of the cushiest positions you could get in a work study considering hardly anyone ever used them.

  The school gave everyone slates to use for class, but if you needed something with more power it was down to either relying on mommy and daddy to provide a state of the art computer, not an option in my case, or relying on the state of the art hardware paid for by the Academy’s outrageous tuitions that usually sat gathering dust.

  Apparently the VR lab operated on the same principles.

  “Pick any booth you like," she said, forcing a smile.

  I found myself distracted for a moment. Damn was she pretty. It was a reminder that my social life had been more or less nonexistent ever since I came to the Academy.

  None of the royalty and ultra wealthy who went here wanted to interact with the plebes from down on the surface, after all. I was the riffraff, but whatever. I was going to take full advantage of this while I could. I almost didn't care that she was looking down her nose at me.

  Still, I could look even if I knew there wasn't a chance in hell that anything was going to happen. She had bright purple hair. Bright colors were all the rage these days.

  It was riff on some subculture from the dirt poor slums in some part of South America that’d been gaining popularity with the rich and famous lately. That was the funny thing about the children of the wealthy up here in the elevator. They had no culture of their own, and gleefully stole from down below while looking down their noses at those rizon cultures they were stealing from.

  It was pretty much the same fucked up dynamic between the rich and the poor that’d been going on since time immemorial, and I tried to ignore it. Though I did enjoy looking at the way she filled out her clothes, and that purplish hair was unique, to be sure.

  I wouldn’t mind having a personal VR session with her, if you catch my drift. Though again there was the little problem of something like that never happening thanks to the divide between rich and poor that extended to dating as well as everything else at the Academy. Assuming she was even willing to experiment with a girl, which was a big if.

  "I guess this one will do," I said, pointing to a random door near the back.

  "Sure thing," she said with a smile that looked strained. I'm sure the exertion of being pleasant with a rizon for this long was driving her insane.

  She held her slate up to a slate in the wall next to the door. That slate glowed green after a moment and she smiled again.

  "The rig inside is now tuned to your biosignature. You're supposed to only have a couple of hours in one of these booths before I kick you out, but realistically no one is using them so I don't think you're going to have too much trouble. There’ll be a warning when you have to pop out to eat or use the restroom though. Try not to get too addicted.”

  I smiled and shook my head. I’d read about people who got so addicted that the devs had to put in limits to keep them from overdoing it. Apparently the lure of the game world was so great that there were people who preferred spending time in the game to spending time in reality.

  Which was totally something I could understand. Here I was in paradise, at least that’s what I thought it would be when I was struggling to make it here, and all I wanted was an escape.

  Though I had trouble imagining the rich people who were enjoying the game right now wanting an escape from their reality. I guess the grass is greener and all that.

  "Thanks," I muttered, stepping into the small booth.

  "Sure thing," she said. "Let me know if you need anything."

  She paused and hit a button. The door slid shut behind me. There was something about her tone that said she really hoped I didn't need anything.

  I didn’t know if that was because she thought her job was going to be nice and easy since no one should’ve needed to use this lab, or if it was because she didn't want to serve the kind of person who’d need to use this lab.

  Whatever. I shrugged it off and turned around. Looked at the VR interface. A tingle of anticipation ran through me. That wonderful feeling I got any time I was about to play a new game for the first time, only this time that feeling was dialed up to eleven.

  Gaming had been the one outlet I had when I was studying on the flatland, and it was the only escape I had from the real world now that I was up here in the elevator among my “betters” who refused to talk to me. I couldn’t wait to try this baby out.

  I'd read all about the hardware, of course. Everybody knew about it. At least everybody who was focused on the gaming world.

  It was something straight out of a fantasy movie. Or maybe a science fiction movie with a bit of fantasy flavor to it. A single crystal shard stuck up out of a column. The crystal glowed faintly as I brushed my hand against it, and I felt a slight warmth.

  "Welcome to Etherea Online,” a female voice intoned from everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

  Shit. That voice was in my head. I jumped. Sure everything I'd read had about this game told me to expect that, but it was one thing to hear that they had the ability to beam thoughts and voices directly into my head, and a very different thing entirely to have it actually happen.

  I closed my eyes. Took a deep breath. Sat down in front of the thing.

  The chair was ridiculously comfortable. As I sat the thing started to recline as it molded to my body. It turned and positioned me so my head was right below the crystal. I twisted to look at the crystal and saw it pulsing and glowing.

  Of course. Ergonomics were an important thing for this game, so the game took control of your mind and put the body into a comfortable position. Supposedly it also did things like keeping the body twitching to keep people from getting a really bad case of bedsores which probably wouldn’t have been very good for the designers of Etherea Online from a lawsuit perspective.

  Especially since they were currently aiming their product at the k
ind of people who had very expensive and nasty lawyers on retainer ready to rip anyone apart if they so much as looked at their clients the wrong way. Not that I had that luxury. Not that I gave a fuck as long as I got to try out this game.

  "Are you prepared to enter the game?" the voice asked.

  I licked my lips. A tingle of anticipation ran through me. I couldn't believe this was finally happening. Here I was with one of the famed crystal interfaces. I was actually going to get a chance to play the game that was the must play videogame experience of a generation, and I didn't have to spend a small fortune to get my advance copy!

  I guess that scholarship and all that studying was finally good for something. I’m sure the people who gave me that scholarship wouldn’t care to find out that the most value I was getting out of it was access to a video game, but what they didn’t know wasn’t going to hurt them.

  Besides, I was well past the point of having to bullshit my way through convincing them to give me money. That money was mine now, and they couldn’t take it from me.

  "Yes," I said. “I’m ready.”

  The transition was instantaneous. I don't know what I'd been expecting, but it was nothing like what actually happened.

  The real world switched off. Like it's literally as though there was a switch that was flipped in my brain. One moment I was looking at the dark but comforting confines of my room in the Etherea lab, and the next moment I was falling through a tunnel made of pure light.

  I probably should’ve been terrified. Like I'm sure if someone hooked up an ancient caveman to this thing, or even someone from a hundred years ago, it would seem like some terrifying magic. But all I felt was pure exhilaration.

  This was the VR system interfacing with my brain. Preparing me to enter the game world. I let out a whoop of triumphant joy as my body careened down that tunnel of pure light. As I found myself hurtling towards something.

  The words Etherea appeared in front of me, and then I found myself in a dark room that looked like something straight out some set designer’s idea of what a medieval wizard’s chamber should look like.

  I took a deep breath. Let it out. I was in the game. This was real. This was fucking happening!

  3

  Character Creation

  I faced a pulsing point of light in the middle of the blackest darkness I’d ever seen. Like we’re talking real “middle of the void” type stuff. What I imagined it would be like to be floating in a ship that’d somehow been spit out of a wormhole in the middle of the Bootes void or something.

  Look it up.

  “Um, hello?”

  “Greetings adventurer, and welcome to Etherea Online! Let there be fun!”

  I rolled my eyes. Though of course when I looked around I didn’t actually have a body I was attached to, so I guess I didn’t really have eyes to roll.

  Whatever.

  “So are you the character creation helper or something?” I asked.

  “Of course! Choose your adventure!”

  I chuckled. That reminded me of books I’d read when I was a kid, though of course this promised to be an adventure that was way more awesome than anything that’d happened in my imagination reading scans of those ancient books that’d somehow wound up on some obscure corner of some ancient file sharing server featuring stuff from the 1980s and 1990s that no one cared about anymore.

  I flipped through the options. Class creation was easy enough. There were a lot of different classes. A few healing options. Some glass cannon magic damage dealers. A few tank options. I finally settled on the Bladedancer though. That seemed appropriately badass.

  Bladedancer: Use the power of the shadows to deal heavy damage to your foes before they even know you’re there!

  A figure appeared before me dressed all in black. I grinned. Or I would’ve grinned if I had a body. I felt a surge of adrenaline spike through me, at least. Yeah. That girl looked badass! That was the kind of shit that would have me kicking ass before I was even a couple of levels into the game!

  “Yeah, that’s definitely it,” I said.

  “Class accepted,” the point of light said. “Please customize your appearance.”

  I was treated to a series of sliders that gave me all sorts of options for creating a character that would be badass. It looked like the game started with a version of me that, if I’m being totally honest, was just a little more attractive than the me in the real world.

  Of course it was totally wrong. I had my hair cut short in the real world and I usually dressed in clothes that could be charitably described as “tomboyish.” Not at all like all the designer crap that most people at the Academy wore.

  But if I was going to be a badass then I was going to go for something more butch. I’d never really tried the whole femme thing, and I figured I wasn’t going to do that in the game either. Not if I was going to be a Bladedancer who kicked serious ass.

  Being all pretty and glittery and sparkly didn’t seem like a good way to kick ass, thank you very much.

  I messed with the settings for a little bit until I had something I figured would be pretty awesome. I stared at a woman with broad shoulders and rippling muscles. Think Conan the Barbarian but with breasts and maybe not as big as Arnold in his prime and you’ll start to get the right idea. The woman still looked a little like me if you squinted your eyes and looked from the right angle, but she was pretty far from the real me.

  I didn’t have that kind of money to spend on a gym, and I didn’t have enough room in my pod back on the surface to do much in the way of exercises. Dodging bums who might try to knife me so they could thumb some booze credits from my account back when I lived on the surface didn’t count as exercise in my book.

  “Are you finished with your character creation?” the floating point of light asked.

  “Yeah, I think so,” I said.

  “Choose a race.”

  This screen was even more interesting. It had the usual fantasy races that’d been kicking around in games and books since Tolkien set out the rules for the genre, but it turned out choosing my race had an impact on what my character looked like.

  My options were high elf, wood elf, dark elf, half elf, human, dwarf, and halfling. I guess when they put together the game world they didn’t spend much time doing more than a copy and paste from Tolkien’s stuff. Then again there’d been so many different versions of Tolkien ripoffs that they were just generic fantasy tropes at this point.

  The people who made the game might not have even read the master. Whatever. Their loss.

  I flipped through a few of the options, but the only one that looked right was a human. Sure I would’ve gotten some bonuses to my stealth abilities if I went with a wood elf or a dark elf, but they were so delicate and… pretty. They were nice to look at, but I couldn’t imagine them being worth much in a real fight.

  No, I figured looking badass while I was sneaking around with my daggers killing people who didn’t even know I was there was more important than having a few extra stats.

  Finally everything was finalized.

  “You have chosen Human Bladedancer. Is this correct? Once these choices have been made your character slot will be filled, and you will not be able to change this without deleting your current character and creating another.”

  “Yup, totally correct,” I said, not thinking of a single reason why I’d want to do something stupid like delete my awesome character. “Let’s do this!”

  “Choices finalized! Welcome to the world of Etherea Online! Let there be fun!”

  Again I groaned inwardly at the cheesy tagline, but the character creation screen didn’t seem to care that I was mocking its parroting of marketing department pap. I was surrounded by an impossibly bright light again that resolved to a bright world all around me with a blue sky overhead.

  I stared at that blue sky in wonder. I had trouble believing it. I mean I knew a blue sky was something that’d existed once upon a time, back before someone had the bright idea to seed the
sky with junk to cool everything down and sort of save civilization from global warming, but this was amazing.

  Someone must’ve gone into the archives and done some color grabs from old photographs of the world back before it was dimmed and most agriculture moved to the vast levels on the various elevators that could still get enough sun to photosynthesize reliably. Add on the fact that I lived down on the ground level and you had a situation where I’d never seen a sky like this before in my life.

  Not that anyone living on the elevators had ever seen a sky like this either outside of a simulation or old movies considering they didn’t exactly get colors other than black once you got out of the atmosphere, and any of the levels that were in the atmosphere saw the same burnt dull orange that the rest of the world saw.

  It was amazing. The bright light burning overhead was blinding when I looked at it. My eyes watered and I had to look away. I wasn’t sure if they were watering because of the pain of looking at that light, or from the sheer overwhelming emotion of seeing the sun hanging in a blue sky.

  Even if it was a fake virtual sun hanging in a fake blue sky created by some game designer.

  I took in a deep breath and let it out. It felt weird to take a deep breath like that. That wasn’t the sort of thing that was possible when I was wearing a mask while I was out and about down on the surface.

  Sure I could do that sort of thing on the Academy grounds, but it’s not like breathing in antiseptic dry recirculated air was all that satisfying.

  “This is going to be fucking amazing,” I said with a grin, and headed out to see what there was to see.

  A large tower stood off in the distance, and if I didn’t miss my guess I needed to go there if I was going to get some quests and level up!

  I got quite the welcome when I hit that tower.

  “Oh hero! I am so glad you are here!”