Belt Station looked like my ship. At least in that it resembled a rust bucket. I had seen drawings of possible space stations in my real life. There were even 3 of them circling Earth’s orbit at the moment. But neither the real ones nor the ideas of artists had anything in common with what I saw before me.

This thing was built in and around an asteroid. I assumed it was hollowed out and most of the structure was at one point contained inside. Now however there was an assembly of flotsam and jetsam strewn all over its rocky outside. Everything was there - tubes, boxes that looked like old school shipping containers, dome-like structures that appeared to be made out of plastic wrap, old ship hulls, antennas in all shapes and forms and probably some kind of other junk that I didn’t see yet. Let’s just say the idea of landing or docking there didn’t fill me with a lot of confidence.

The autopilot however had no such dilemmas and followed its course to the end. The lights on the console changed from purple to yellow at some point and one of the monitors indicated that the steering of the ship had been handed over to station control and I was docking on tube 17.

On the final approach my tub shook and twisted to align with docking tube 17 or, as I called it in my head, junk protrusion 17. Brake and stabilization thrusters fired. Then I heard a clank and Rustbucket shuddered.

“Docking complete. Docking seal 97%. Welcome to Belt Station Epsilon Tau 7813” the computerized voice of my ship informed me. I took a deep breath and spun my chair around, this time successfully avoiding banging my knee on the console. I pushed myself out of my seat of captaincy and headed for the airlock.

“Galaxy, here I come!” I declared in my most theatrical voice.

For some reason I can’t say if that came out more hero or more villain but it sounded cool anyway. I guess we have to see where life takes me. GAME! Where this game takes me. I yelled at myself to remember that this was nothing but the beta test of a VRMMOG. I did not know why I had such trouble with this here. Fair enough, the game was much more immersive than any other I had ever played. Everything seemed so much more real. I guess that is what the first VR immersed people experienced. But they had also gone crazy and were unable to live in the real world. Not going to happen to me!

“Oh, by the way”, thinking about realism got me thinking of something else: “Computer, what are the atmospheric conditions on the other side of the airlock?”

“Current condition: 83% Nitrogen, 14% Oxygen, 1,5% Carbon Dioxide, less than 1% of several other gases. Atmospheric pressure 0.82 bar. No toxic substances detected. Temperature 18° Celsius.”

Ah, good. Wouldn’t do me any good walking out of my spaceship and ending up at the nearest graveyard for respawn. Talking of which.

“Personal Log. New Entry.”

New Entry: Malcolm Solo.

6) Figure out how the death and respawn system works in this game.

Yeah, I’d rather not run into any death by suffocation or exposure to vacuum experiences or something like that. As real as the pain felt I am sure I would not want to experience that. Plus I was finally starting to get the hang of things and did not want to reroll if death turned out to be a persistent thing.

I grabbed my jacket, that somehow looked eerily like my favorite motorcycle jacket IRL from my locker, flipped the switch on the airlock took a step forward.

I don’t know if I expected some kind of heroic soundtrack playing like I had seen in the trailer or whatever but my first step into my first space station was ruined by my foot getting caught on the airlock frame. So my small step for this man ended up as a giant leap for “The Universe’s Funniest Home Videos”.

After regaining my balance and swearing for a moment I turned around, closed the airlock and swiped my right wrist in front of the sensor. The green light on the control panel switched to red and my Rustbucket was sealed.

That was actually something that I was more or less used to. IRL we had “watches” that contained all our bio data and information. As I had learned in my research over the last few days everybody in this game had a chip implanted in their right wrist that did pretty much the same thing.

Finally done I turned and headed into the station.