“.... Initiating logout sequence….”

“.... Log out in 5… 4… 3… 2… 1…”

I opened my eyes, once again to the familiar view of my body resting easily and comfortably inside the game capsule.

The interior of the capsule was cushioned with a semi-liquid gel material, which adapted to match the user’s body shape and movements. Aside from being extremely comfortable, it ensured that no harm came to the body from overly long hours of lying down in the coma-like state the game induced. Like some unfortunately handicapped patients in hospitals sometimes ended up.

A moment later, the tubes and electrodes responsible for the data transfer from the capsule into my brain were disconnected with a soft Whoosh sound, separating themselves from my head automatically.

I got up and stretched, feeling much more relaxed and optimistic than my previous logging out experience.

I looked down on my expensive customized gaming capsule and felt the same pride I always felt when looking at it, not dissimilar to the way a car enthusiast might view their own hot rod, I would imagine.

Those gaming capsules were a real piece of human ingenuity.

***

About a decade ago neuroscience made a leaping breakthrough in understanding how our brain works, and exactly how it sends and receive signals. The first devices that implement those principles were of course of the medical nature, such as bringing the ability to communicate with people with paralysis syndromes, improving control of prosthetic limbs for amputees, etc.

It didn’t take long for the entertainment industry to realize the huge revenue potential of that technology. New entertainment modules quickly become available, representing the first FIVR (full immersion virtual reality) devices.

The first of such gaming devices was basically a helmet, which enabled a computer to perform basic connection with the user’s the brain and stream simple media; images and sounds, directly to that person’s mind, making that person feel like they’re actually experiencing said media fully, from a first person perspective.

Not long afterward, the Gen-1 helmets were replaced by the Gen-2, full-body immersion bed, which grant the user a much broader sensory stimulation, mainly touch and better 360-degree perception. A year later, the Gen-3 full immersion capsule came out. It allowed for the user’s entire body to be immersed. Completely surrounding his body with the gel-like cushion, and the world and we knew it changed forever.

The new capsule allowed the user to experience a virtual entertainment with the full sense range. You could log into a VR restaurant and order the most exquisite food in the world, and the program would literally make you feel like you actually taste that food. Full on tactile sensation was also available; you could feel it when you touched something or when something touched you. If it was raining you could feel the tiny drops of rain all over your body, and you could actually smell the odor of fresh natural rain all around you.

Overall, it was a pretty nifty invention.

At first, people just used it to experience things that were usually out of their reach; exquisite foods, travel the world via simulations, watch movies while experiencing every scene as part of actors, etc.

It was the gaming industry, however, that brought the experience to its full potential. Why experiencing France, when you could travel the magical Elvish city of Rivendell, made real straight out of Tolkien’s 'Lord of the Ring' world? Or why would you compromise on eating Kobe beef, when you had the option to dine on Dragon liver?

Once the masses had their taste, they couldn’t get enough of it. Everyone wanted a piece of this exciting new world, but not too many could afford it. The gaming capsules cost more than your average family car, and thus was a luxury not many could afford off hand. Luckily, as a single guy without children, I had just enough savings to afford the basic module, which I later managed to upgrade with more expensive components.

***

I took another last loving look at my capsule and stepped out of it.

The room I designated solely for use of the FIVR capsule was full of twisting wiring which connected several different gadgets around the room to the capsule itself. The basic vanilla setup was much neater than that, but over the years, after I managed to gain a decent income, I purchased several upgrades and customized my rig to fully enhance my gaming experience. I had a large external auxiliary server that was used as connectivity backup for my gaming experience. In a case of power outage or rare connection problems, I could run on internal batteries, and the auxiliary server would still allow me to remain in the game, albeit using static content only. Once the connection with the game servers was reestablished, my progress would by synced and I could continue playing seamlessly.

I also had a small raid array storage component that saved a copy of my gameplay experience, so I could review it later. I also bought a very expensive capsule’s general purpose upgrade frame that the company promised will be compatible with all future official upgrades. Currently, the only upgrade attachment for it, was a robotic arm that tilted the capsule to better aid the disabled to get in and out. I still bought it, with the premise that it would prove useful in the future.

After extricating myself from the capsule, I went straight into the bedroom, it was past 2 am, and I was tired, both physically and mentally, I crashed into the bed fully clothed and fell asleep instantly.

I didn’t dream. For some reason, I stopped dreaming when I started playing the game.

I woke up at 10 am, feeling much more refreshed and energetic. Seeing as there was nothing I could cook that could compare with food offered in the game, I was usually in the habit of wolfing down simply microwaved food. But this morning I decided to take my time while considering my next moves and to treat myself to a proper breakfast.

I went into my car and drove a few kilometers to a beautiful country café I occasionally visited. I ordered their grand breakfast and then took my time to enjoying the meal. It included very generous portions of eggs, salad, dips, and freshly baked bread. As I ate, I redirected my thought to the game and to my future in it.

First, I needed to count my assets, as I had virtually no equipment. One of the side effects of the curse was apparently to completely erase my inventory, and all the equipment I was wearing simply fell to the floor. So what did I have? I still had the bone dagger - probably since I got it after the race change - dying in the game usually didn’t cause you to lose items. Instead, dying penalty simply caused experience lost which always resulted in 1 level lost.

So, I had my dagger, but more importantly, I proved I can still use my old skill set to relearn all the spells I invented. What bothered me the most, was that the ‘Mana Manipulation’ skill I relearned didn’t have the Mastery title in it. I was sure no one else could have gotten it since you had to physically delete a character for the Mastery to move on to the next player in line. But why didn’t I manage to regain it? That thought was eating me up. As I already surmised, this time around the skill had the ‘Monster Race only’ descriptor, which suggested that some other monster was probably already the rightful Master of the original skill.

I sighed. Nothing to be done about it now, I realized, while spreading some fresh jam on a toast.

Similarly, the Mana Arrow spell I relearned was also missing the Mastery title. That probably meant that most common spells have their ‘Monster Race’ equivalent already mastered by some NPC. That meant that if I wanted the Mastery title in some spells, I’ll have to come up with a completely original one. Even so, I wouldn’t be able to teach it to other players, but the +50% skill upgrade rate was extremely valuable in itself - as my experience with my previous character proved.

Now for equipment. That was a whole new problem. I was too far away from any of my secret treasure caches. I also couldn’t access the player’s marketplace, as you had to go into the actual marketplace in any city to use it. The nearest city was several weeks of travel away, through a dangerous, monster-infested territory. At my current power level, I’ll probably die in an hour if I leave the goblin cavern safety. Even monsters considered goblins to be an easy prey. Even if I could, somehow, get to such a market, their item selection that was compatible with goblins was going to be extremely limited.

A lot of monsters dropped decent quality items, but only boss monsters dropped equipment that was actually usable by the players as a reward for defeating them. Almost all other MOBs dropped items that had the ‘Monster only’ limitation on them, meaning they were unusable for a normal player. Usually, to get a new item, players had to craft it themselves or buy it from another player who could craft it. So instead of selling unusable loot, players usually just disassembled them for crafting components.

It was done as a way to balance the game, to prevent unproportioned farming of monsters and to flood the market with cheap instant items. That forced players to craft their own gear.

Crafting was a major deal in New Era Online. A master craftsman could earn almost as much as a mage master, although the blueprints and ingredient for the higher level items were quite rare.

I guessed my best course of action was to try to gather some crafting materials and start practicing my craftsmanship. Even the most basic of items; armor, clothing, weapons gave the wearer an advantage over those without it. I dabbled in crafting before, but I didn’t invest much effort in developing it, as my Magic abilities were far more lucrative.

Alright, so I’ll try to invent some new spells, and then learn how to craft some basic equipment for myself, but then what?

I needed to grind, of course. I had to gain a lot of levels, fast. My enemies had years of a head start on me, but I had the +20% to experience gain that should greatly improve my level up time. Skill grind is even more important than character levels. In NEO, a character level on itself didn’t amount to much. All it granted was one ability point. There were no other bonuses attached to the level itself.

So, in theory, a 1st level player who has 10 skill levels in Swordsmanship was superior to a 10th level player with no martial art skills. Which made a lot of sense. A 1st level soldier would logically be deadlier than a 10th level farmer. However, in practicality, no one can really achieve very high levels without some XP gained through combat, which of course meant they had to develop *some* combat oriented skills.

Additionally, the game gave bonus or penalties based on the level gap between combatants, to make the levels differentiation more pronounced. It used some sort of unknown formula to achieve it. In effect, a 10th level player wasn’t a tenth as powerful as a 100th level player. It was more like it was fiftieth the strength. It would take about 50 level 10th players to match up with a single 100th level character. The ratios changed as the levels rose, but you get the gist of it.

So, character levels did matter, though skills mattered more, and I will have to grind both excessively…

Another problem was that my current location wasn’t safe. My well-being was dependent on my ability to survive long enough to gain some power. That meant staying with the Drippers clan a while longer for safety. I had to turn it into my new base of operation, and for that, I needed to join their clan… Luckily, Bogan the chieftain offered me all the chance I needed. I just have to complete his quest, and I should be relatively safe for the short term.

With that resolution in mind, I decided to try one more option for some intel gathering. I took out my cell phone and brought up Tal Weisman’s contact details. Tal was a good friend of mine since we at the university. We both took the same course of advanced machine learning concepts. He and I connected immediately and soon become study partners, completing homework and project together. We got the highest grade for our final project at our 3rd year. After we graduated I become a freelance, while he was hired by the company who developed NEO. He quickly becomes one of the lead level designers and has been doing great for the past 5 years.

We remained good friends after finishing our studies. We used to meet occasionally to hang out at bars, talking about everything that came to mind, though he never discussed work with me. The company forced all employees to sign some brutal NDA agreements, and he was very guarded with any discrete information. But in this case, I thought I might be able to get some information out of him. Maybe he even knows how to reverse the spell? I thought. Though I knew it was a long shot.

The phone rang twice before Tal answered.

“Hi bro, long time no speak, how’ve you been?”

“Hi Tal, good to hear you bro! Well... to be honest, I’ve seen better days…”

I almost never shared any of my life downfalls with him, so his voice immediately got serious and business like “What happened? Anything I can do to help?” that’s Tal for you, a great guy to have a few beers with in good times, while always being dependable friends on the bad ones.

“Well… have you ever heard of an epic spell scroll ‘Race change’?” I asked, and gave him all the details leading to my downfall.

Tal voice immediately become alarmed “Oh man, please tell me you deleted your character right away!”

“No… “ I replied slowly, “I thought about it, but I couldn't just give up on all the Masteries I’ve accumulated. I’ll be damned if I’ll let those bastard have them for themselves!”

“Listen man,” His tone suddenly got dead serious, “This is a grave matter, I'm not supposed to tell you this, but as this is an extreme case…” He paused for a moment, apparently thinking through how to proceed. “Those scrolls are a mistake, a problem. They were created as a joke at first, but we quickly learned how dangerous they are.”

What? Dangerous? IRL? How can anything in the game be dangerous?

“What that scroll does,” He continued, “Is to change a playable race to an NPC non-playable race. It does that by deleting your character and initiation the character creation sequence mid-game, which is a big contradiction to the game rule engine, Then is automatically selects a random monster race for the character.” He sighed, “Problem is, the systems for controlling player races and monster races are simply incompatible. A lot of the data structure for NPC and player is unique and mutually exclusive, meaning they don’t match up perfectly. We couldn’t test it in depth since the scenarios for testing are simply illogical. Luckily, most players can’t play a monster NPC race due to the cerebral connection requirements, that’s why all players who were the victims of this spell simply deleted their character after founding it unplayable.”

“Once the company managers found out about this scrolls existence, we did the best we could to get rid of them. They were removed from the lists of generatable loot. We also placed a price tag of 1 million gold for them as a bait to remove all that still remained in circulation. That’s right, the company was willing to invest a 100,000$ per scroll, simple to get rid of them, that’s how big a deal are they. That ought to give you a sense of how dangerous it is for you to continue playing that Goblin, bro, you gotta delete it!”

I listened to him ranting through his explanations. He actually sounded a bit fearful, and for some reason, I didn’t think that violating his NDA contract was part of it. He was actually afraid for my well-being…

I slowly articulated my next thoughts, “...wait, Tal, I don’t understand. What do you mean by most players can’t play them? What’s a cerebral connection requirement?”

He exhaled loudly. “Listen, I'm not supposed to tell you any of those things… you know they can sue the shit out of me just for the things I’ve already told you…” He paused for a moment. I waited for him to continue. “Hh, screw that…” He eventually said, “If the big shots knew what happened to you they’ll tell you those things themselves. Or...” He hesitated for a moment, “They might have simply banned you from the game completely.”

My heart actually skipped a beat when he said that. Banned?? The game became my livelihood. It was as he has almost casually informed me I’ll be losing one of my legs!

“Anyway,” he continued, “You know how some people can’t use the FIVR equipment at all?”.

“Yes,” I answered “Different people's minds work differently, some people can connect only to the base functions of the FIVR, chat rooms and such, and some people can’t connect at all, though I’ve heard it’s less than 1% of the population.

“That’s right” he replied “And that’s because of what we call a cerebral connection percentage. The FIVR looks for synapsis points in the brain to connect with. It's a basic requirement in order to interact with the player. It is capable of creating thousands of connections with some of the millions of neuron synaptic points in the human brain. You only need 1% connections to be able to perform basic connection with the FIVR capsule. New Era Online, however, represents a bit more complex simulation, and it requires a whopping total of 3% cerebral connection. Most people, and that mean 90% of the population, averages at a connection of 10 to 20 percent. About 7 percent of the population is below that but still above the 3% minimum, which is enough for a playable experience. Less than 3% of the population is above the average. Of course, the more cerebral connections your mind makes with the FIVR, the more immersive and complete the simulation and the feedback you receive from the game.”

“Ok,” I replied, “That pretty interesting, but what that has to do with me playing a goblin?”

“I’m about to get to that,” He answered. “We’ve played a bit together in the past, and I noticed that you always cast your spells without calling their names, am I right?”

“Yes…” I slowly replied, still trying to figure out where he was leading with that. “I always only had to think of the skill or spell I wanted to use, and they worked. I always kind of wondered why other people all around me felt it was necessary to shout the spells they were casting…”

“That’s right,” he continued, “97% of the population doesn't have the sufficient connection points required for thought-based control of the game, so the game’s player-assistant simply translate what they’re saying to game mechanics. That’s why they have to shout the names of the spells. The game assistant learns to identify the player’s intent through their thought pattern in conjunction with the verbal command in order to execute it, otherwise, we’ll have a lot of players accidently shoot fireballs through a normal conversation. Similarly, you probably used all the games controls with simple thought commands, inventory, character screen, messaging, logout etc. am I correct?”

“Yes, of course,” I answered. “I think I get it. so what’s the cerebral connection requirements for playing an unplayable NPC race?”

He paused for a long moment. “40%” he finally replied. “And less than 1% of the population can achieve that connection grade. It’s pretty obvious you’re among those select few. That’s the reason you managed to play as a goblin for even a little while, and that’s why it’s so dangerous. You are treading in uncharted waters which have a huge explosive potential. You can get headaches, sudden spells of dizziness that won’t pass or even subconscious interferences that can give you night terrors. Now would you please delete that stupid character, create a new one, and I’ll even help power level you, until you'll be strong enough to get back at those bastards. What do you say?”

“Why 40%?”

“Eh?”

“Why do you need 40% connectivity for basically playing just a different character skin?” I asked.

Tal sighed, “Oh man, you’re really going to get me into troubles with this line of questioning… oh, what the hell… as you now know, more connection percentage allows for better immersion, your mind sends and receive more information, which means you’re interacting more fully with the game and have more control over it.” He paused again. “How do you think there are enough monsters for players to hunt? We pride ourselves that NEO is not just another MMORPG that simply respawn mindless mob after mob, with bosses being the exception. Instead, we have a fully living interactive environment, right? Well... the big secret is… time.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Time for monsters is accelerated…” He cleared his throat. “By a factor of 12.” He let me have a moment for that startling news to sink in. “That means that a destroyed goblin clan can restore itself in about a 2 weeks of real time. Unintelligent mobs like wolves and such take even less time than that. That’s also why undisturbed lairs slowly amass in strength and levels over time. From their perspective, they had years of uninterrupted development. So, now you get it? Most players without the required connection percentage simply can’t grasp the accelerated time the game throws at them. What they experience is simply a confusing data feed, as they end up with a character that won’t react to their commands as they try to control it… but you managed to overcome that… and that’s dangerous man”.

My mind was reeling. What?! I’ve been experiencing accelerated time when I played as a goblin? That means mere minutes past IRL while I meditated and got all those quests!

Seeing as I wasn’t saying anything while I processed all this new information, Tal continues talking. “Do you remember that case in the news about a player named David Tenenbaum? The one who couldn’t log out?”

“Yes,” I replied, “It was a big deal in the news. “

“Well that guy was clinically retarded, and for some reason, his brain was perfect for making connections with the FIVR system, he achieved about 120% cerebral connections; meaning more than the maximum supported by the FIVR capsule. He was simply overwhelmed. He just sat down and didn’t move for days, though he didn’t appear to be suffering. Apparently, he was just happily soaking information from the game, until the dev team managed to implement a forced logout command on him. He goes berserk when that happens now. He likes to simply sit on the ground, grinning his silly grin. Somehow, he even found a way to slowly gather experience from thin air. He completely ignores any attempt to contact him. Basically, he’s just a living vegetable that can’t tolerate living outside of the game. So you see, Oren, the danger… don’t mess around with it man, it can screw up your mind. Come on, just delete that goblin, and let’s meet tonight for a beer, on me. What do you say?”

I thought about it for a moment. “I need a little time to process it all, Tal. You understand...“ I replied slowly. “I really appreciate the info and the warning. Just… let me sleep on it a bit, ok?”

He sighed, “not much I can do about it, just please be careful, I don’t have that many friends that I can afford to lose one,” he finishes with a chuckle.

I grinned, “Same here bro, I’ll talk to you soon, bye!”

I paid the waitress, exit the restaurant and went back to my car. I started the short drive back home, while my mind was reeling.

Holy shit! I thought to myself. That’s one hell of a bombshell! Of course, I’ll never betray Tal’s trust in me, and I won’t let anyone know what I learned from him, but now… the danger seemed frightening. That said, I’ve played for about an hour without any issues, and when I logged out I didn’t feel any of the symptoms Tal mentioned, I felt perfectly fine.

Maybe I have a good enough connection that allows me to play with impunity? I mused. Maybe I could try just a little bit more, to test it out a bit longer… at worst case, if I’ll start getting any headaches, I’ll take it as a sign of trouble and stop playing, but if somehow I can continue to play that goblin… I’ll have a higher productivity than your average player by a factor of 12! I can achieve in a month, what takes a year to a normal player! In effect, I’ll have 12 times more time on my hand to find my financial legs again, and to increase my power to the point I’ll be able to avenge my betrayers… I couldn’t just let that opportunity fly by, I had to give it a shot.

At first sign of any symptoms, I’ll stop, I promised to myself. But until then, I got to take that chance!

I arrived back to my apartment a short while later. I went inside and walked straight into my game room. I paused, and took a long look at my FIVR capsule. Now danger was associated with my virtual world, and it suddenly looked ominous, almost threatening. But I had to follow through. I’ll give myself twelve hours of game time, one hour IRL and then I’ll logout, I reasoned. That seemed to be a reasonable and safe test of my new reality.

I entered the capsule, the wiring and electrodes easily connected to my body and temples. Achieving, what I now knew, was an over 40% cerebral connectivity. I closed my eyes and reentered the game