Despite the copious amounts of coffee I had consumed during the meeting and while writing my gaming summary, I managed to fall asleep rather quickly after I finished my write-up. Actually, in the end I had a hard time keeping my eyes open. I was surprised by that because it wasn’t that long ago that I had slept on Belt Station. But then again, it was ingame, so no clue if there were the same benefits.

The next morning I woke up just after 09:00. And when I came to, I nearly had a panic attack. No vac suit, no face plate. I couldn’t breathe. I would die any moment. I would lose all my skill points. Fuck, why did I not update my CLON. And what had happened, why did my suit disappear…

After some flailing and panicking my mind cleared enough to catch on. I wasn’t in the shelter on an asteroid. Not in deep space. Just in my little room in the testing center. I took a few deep breaths and ket reminding myself of that. That little bit of meditation, focusing on my thoughts and breathing were enough to get my heartrate back to normal and the feeling of panic under control.

A quick shower later I was dressed and sat in the cafeteria with a bowl of cereal in front of me and checked my messages while I munched on breakfast.

I had received my schedule and my physical examination was at 15:00 today, then a cognitive test at 22:00 and the psych eval was scheduled for tomorrow at 10:00. Going back into the game was scheduled for Monday evening at 20:00. While today looked really busy on that schedule, I was happy that it gave me quite a bit of time on Sunday and Monday to have a bit of a walk around, to enjoy some good food and meet my friends.

Talking of the latter, I also had a message from Damian that he was out of immersion and wanted to catch up but that he hadn’t heard from Nicola yet. So I sent him my schedule and told him that we will find some free time to get together.

Then I started reading up on the things I had missed during the last week. Apparently the investigation that Ben had kicked off after the surprise win against my team was still ongoing and there were no conclusions yet. After that I read some of my favorite gaming news sites. Apparently something had leaked because I found an article titled “Lirium’s Announced Game - The Ultimate Hoax Or Coming Soon?” The article discussed mainly rumors that apparently a ton of gamers had been contacted by the company and that something must be going down but nobody knew anything.

My physical later that day was a mix of the ones I had when I was in the police force and the ones I started doing once a year after I had joined the pro-gaming circuit. Needles, sensors, peeing in a cup… the usual. Additionally they had us do strength and agility exercises and measured everything. The other thing that was different was that they tested pain perception - getting poked and prodded and indicating the pain on a scale. Although the pain went never above a five out of ten, the process was not pleasant. And it took nearly three hours all in all. By the end of it, I was truly done with the whole thing.

Then I went for a walk and a nap. Considering I would have a cognitive test at 22:00 was not something I was looking forward to, so I wanted to be fresh for it. In the beginning I actually thought about asking them to reschedule for some time earlier in the day. But then again my gaming hours were all over the place and while I was in immersion, I had kept a schedule that was based on rolling 30 hours. So I was all out of whack as it was.

I think that this test went well. There were your standard IQ test questions, then some around spatial awareness and some exercises around quickly learning something and correctly recalling it. After a total of two hours of this, I was told I was done. A quick check showed me that Damian was free too and while Nic had come out of immersion by now too, she was asleep after having written her gaming summary.

I decided to get dinner or whatever meal you have at half past midnight with Damian. And although we were burning to share game experiences with one another and ask all kinds of questions, we decided that this would wait until we got together with Nic. Might as well not bore each other when we started rehashing everything for her in the near future. The only thing that came up was that he was in testing group red. Which was followed by a whole bunch of speculations if there was a system to the split or not. In the end we were no closer to the answer but I enjoyed the easy social contact.

Between the meeting with Damian and my psych interview, I spent the time floating around, listening to the other players and asking questions. I wanted to learn more about what they had learned and figured out, if they knew about ancient outposts or legacy items. And while most of them were cagey with information, I found some independent players that I at least got some information about legacy items from. The thing is that they didn’t seem to bring any benefit other than being a collectible and could be traded with certain NPCs for quite a bit of money. In turn I shared with these players what I had learned about mining and money making.

It was good to finally be able to learn from others and share some of the things. Not having a knowledge base or wiki or message exchange groups about a game seriously hampered the play style. Information was everything and right now all the testers were struggling to find as much information as possible. The most annoying thing was that the clans and gaming collectives were completely unwilling to share any information, not surprising but definitely annoying.

By the time the psych eval rolled around I was actually ready to hit the hay again and for a moment I considered skipping it. But there is the word professional in the title professional gamer. And while I did not like the idea of going to this tired, taking the hit to my reputation was an even worse outcome. Plus we were told that we needed the evaluation to log back into the game and I am sure that there would be no extra appointments.

So I made my way to the scheduled location. It was in one of the outside parks of the arcology pyramid. A guy in his late twenties, early thirties waved me over to a bench he had been sitting on, reading something. He got up and extended his hand.

“Hi, my name is Seth, I will be working with you through your gaming report and psych eval.”

It threw me a little that he only introduced himself with his first name. I contemplated if this was some form of ‘making me more comfortable’ routine or if he was genuinely this informal. Then I chuckled internally. I was here to be evaluated and it wasn’t my job to evaluate him. Sometimes I just couldn’t help myself.

“Hi Seth, my name is Kade. Nice to meet you.”

He gestured at the bank, next to the spot he had just been sitting at. “Have a seat.”

After I sat down, he took a moment to check the tablet he had held in his left hand, then he looked over to me.

“So what do you think about Black Space?” he asked.

“Pretty amazing so far. And far more realistic than anything else I have played or interacted with online. I mean, even the hub doesn’t have that level of detail and realism.”

He nodded. “Which is exactly the reason we are going through these evaluations.”

“Makes sense.”

“Let me come right out of the gate instead of doing small talk. How would you describe your gaming experience until now?”

“It was a lot of fun. Did some missions to try them out. Talked a few... natives into joining me on a mining claim and now we are making a good chunk of money all together.”

I could not bring myself to call the other people on the claim NPCs and I am sure that Seth had noticed my hesitation. In turn, he did not hesitate to jot down a quick note on his pad.

“Okay. How would you describe your playstyle?”

“Hm, not sure. I think you could say roleplaying maybe!? I have a goal or a few goals in mind and I am pursuing them. The people I met along the way have been helpful or hostile but all with their own motivations. There is no discernible scripting about them and they act as real as you and me. So I have had my conflicts with some of them and found others that work with me.”

“Yes, I have heard similar sentiments and feedback from other testers. They were all quite adamant that the NPCs act like real people.”

I knew he was trying to rattle me by emphasizing the words ‘NPC’ and ‘real people‘. I guess he wanted to find out if I was still sane enough to know the difference. So I shrugged. Would he be able to get my goad? Eventually but not yet.

“Well, I don’t know the programming and infrastructure behind the game. But the people are intelligent and self aware. If that is because they have been seeded with AI shards or because they were ‘born’...”, I signed air quotes when I said the word born so that he clearly understood. “... that way I don’t know. What I have observed is the truth of the statement.”

He nodded and made another note. “What would you say is your biggest accomplishment in the game right now?”

“I don’t have any great accomplishments yet. I am working on a bigger one. For now I can only say that I managed to be quite a bit ahead of the money making average as this has been my focus. It is a means to an end kind of a situation but earning credits is something that I will always have some focus on. From what I have seen, money makes the world go around in the game as much as here.”

“Have you been in any life threatening situation in the game during your first immersion?”

“Hm… that honestly depends on your definition of life-threatening. For one, life threatening… it’s a game, right? So it is threatening to my character’s life. Now if I consider that, then being in space in a rickety old mining ship in an asteroid belt is life threatening all by itself and not having a CLON contract will reset my character. At the same time, if you are asking me if I was in a fight for life and death, I can say: Not yet.”

“Okay, assume you would be, what would you do? How would you react? Who would you protect?”

“That is a hard question.” I said pensively. “And I am not sure that I can answer it with certainty. As you know, in my time as a police officer I had my fair share of scraps. And they never go the way we would like them to. That being said, I think the circle of responsibilities is clear for me. First is me, then friends and family then the rest. So I would act in that order if you would ask me now. But I can’t say that I would act this calm or logical when it came down to the wire.”

“Well, that sounds like you have a good grip on the situation, understand the difference between real life and game and there is no problem that I can see.”

He got up and reached out with his hand, which I took to shake. After all the other tests, I was surprised that this one was only a few questions. I was just about to leave when I heard his voice...

“Oh, one more question. The health monitoring equipment in your room showed a spike when you woke up yesterday. It almost looks like a panic attack…”