The first thing I noticed was my body, or rather my character’s body, sitting in some kind of chair. A slight vibration running through it. I slowly opened my eyes and blinked a few times.

I was sitting in the cockpit of a spaceship alright. But it had nothing in common with what I had seen in the introduction holo during my visit to Lirium. The space was cramped, I was literally wedged between consoles. Luckily the chair swiveled or I would have climbed over the backrest to get out of it. Half the space above the consoles was taken up by a large screen with all kinds of status reports on them and the other half was a window into space.

The view took my breath away and not in a good way. I expected to see colors, nebulas, galaxies swirling. But I got none of that. What I had here were huge rocks as far as I could see. They were illuminated by a blue sun that cast everything in some kind of dreary light. What a disappointment. I was in space alright but this did not live up to the hype I felt before.

I glanced at the screen with the status reports. The top showed the ship status, life support, modules installed and active, shields, hull, energy consumption and other things that didn’t mean anything to me right now. Ship status was sitting at 88% and life support at 95%. That seemed alright for now.

I decided to have a look around. Swiveling my chair around a little fast I promptly banged my knee on a console that stuck out a little further.

“Motherf…” I stopped myself from swearing. It hurt. Have you ever banged your little toe on a coffee table and wanted to throw it out of the window because it hurt so badly? Yeah, that was about how I felt.

At the same time I noticed a red bar pop up in the upper left corner of my vision. If blinked a few times and a number next to it showed 99%. Ah yes, the obligatory health bar. Neat implementation but if banging your knee for 1% health loss hurt that much… I vowed to myself to never find out what losing 25% or, gods forbid, half your health would feel like.

I had been stabbed, shot, beaten up, blown up and about any kind of other violent injury you can think of, both ingame and IRL. This was way too close to IRL memories for my comfort. Why the hell did it hurt so much?

I knew that the neural link could transfer sensations that the player should feel in the game but not like that. It felt like 100% transfer. No neural link was ever configured like that. Early studies had shown that a hundred percent setting lead to all kinds of problems. In some cases gamers had died when their character had died because their brains and bodies shut down believing the sensations. In other cases it had led to severe PTSD and a whole slew of other problems. Even the guys at Lirium had talked about that and told us the link would be set to 70%.

Yeah, I was totally going to yell at my Lirium VIP coordinator when this immersion was over.

I finally got up and left the cockpit. A narrow corridor led to a wall panel showing engine stats. On the left side of the corridor was a door marked “Airlock”. Yeah, let’s not open that right now. On the right was another, unmarked door. I opened it as stepped into a small cabin. A tiny desk, a bunk on top of it, a locker on the wall and barely enough space to turn around. Next to the locker was what looked like a fridge door including water dispenser and a drawer. And finally in the corner something that resembled a wide pipe with an oval shaped board around labeled ‘waste disposal’. I assumed that was my toilet.

That was it? That is the extend of my ship? How was I supposed to earn fame and glory in the universe in this tiny ass rust-bucket? It felt more like a prison cell than a spaceship. I sighed and then remembered that I had picked the hard start.

“I’ll show you, you damn game. Just watch me!” I mumbled, venting my frustration which, to be honest, was mainly directed at my own stupidity.

I noticed that my health bar had faded out of my vision again. I assumed that meant I was back to 100% health. However I wasn’t sure when that had happened. Guess we have to go on a working assumption here that 1% health is restored on a tick happening somewhere between 1 and 15 minutes.

“New incoming message from system command.” A digitized voice pulled me out of my mood.

I walked back to the cockpit and the screen above the consoles was flashing an incoming message icon.

“Display message.”

The screen flashed and the image of a blue humanoid shaped armor filled the screen. The faceplate was modeled short and wide, the golden visor split in the middle and an assortment of tubes ran downward from the bottom of the mask.

“Quirt System Command Blue Belt, Foreman Len-dren. I am speaking to contract miner WA12ZL96?” The voice sounded a little muffled and gravelly.

“Uhm… Malcolm Solo.” After a moment’s hesitation I added “Sir” to the end of my statement. For some reason that seemed the right thing to do.

“Yes, miner… Solo… I have been notified by command that your employ with us is getting cut short. Your new contract goal is 10k Endrite. After this has been mined successfully you are to report to Belt Station.”

It seemed like this was part of my integration into the world. I desperately wanted to pull up some wiki site to tell me about Endrite or how mining in this game worked or how much 10k was. But no wiki for Black Space. Otherwise I would have started looking this rust bucket and its functions up.

“Did you hear me miner?” I guess I had been silent for too long.

“Yes Sir. Contract change, 10k Endrite then Belt Station.”

“Get to it!”

The screen switched back to the status reports.

“Mission Log updated with new contract conditions” the digitized voice informed me.