Real Life. Auckland, New Zealand. The Central Business District. A seventh-floor loft apartment.

A bit large for a single occupant, this apartment was nevertheless utilised well. One entering would first observe the wonderous, dense layout of the floorplan, with well-stocked shelves of books, a miniature recording studio with a variety of instruments, an atelier corner used for painting, sculpting, and woodwork, and an entertainment suite with the latest high-tech equipment. But, if one gazed long and hard enough, eventually something would appear a bit off. The apartment had a subtle, uncanny sterility. It reminded the observer of a hotel, of a hospital room, of a prison cell, one of those liminal spaces where a person might reside but not does not truly live.

In the middle of the apartment lay a mattress placed straight on the floor carpet, covered with well-worn library books and scribbled-on scraps of paper. Amongst the mess, a young man was stretched supine, an object resembling a motorcycle helmet fixed on his head.

Henry, the VR helmet emitting a beep, sat up and slipped the device off.

His character in-game was using an automated procedure to absorb the research materials for the Earthfriend curse quest that his minions had gathered. While that process was underway, he thought he'd log off for a few minutes to clear his head.

For a moment after exiting the game, he felt dizzy and his senses were muted. Gradually, though, his ears awakened to the buzz of the city, and his nose picked up the remnants of Alex’s cologne, the beaver-head messaging earlier that he was popping by to steal a couple of snacks from the pantry.

Henry slowly stood up, careful to maintain his balance against a disorienting vertigo.

He walked over to an open window to take a peek outside. His apartment was situated in the middle of the city, giving him a view of urban street - glassy high-rises, groundfloor stores and eateries, a movie theatre. The traffic below flowed as regular as a metronome, depositing straggling workers starting late, dressed and neat for their office jobs. In the building across from him, a group of suits were meeting in a conference room, a young man handing out coffee with respect. The grey-white squawking of a seagull cut across the image, the bird travelling from the harbour to a nearby park in search of bugs. Although the calendar still marked the date as spring in the southern hemisphere, the late November air felt hot and humid, summer continuing its obstinate mission to invade just a bit earlier each year.

Absorbing the sensations of this fraction of earth, absorbing the much greater rest that extended invisibly beyond his sight, Henry tried to condense it all inside himself, to squeeze to it, to form a solid mass. With the world of reality in one hand, he weighed it against the oddities of this morning in Saana, both what had already passed and what his paranoia sensed beyond. Unable to decide, he shifted the weights between hands, between the hands of a retiree, a teenager, and several others.

What would anyone else his age think? he wondered. They wouldn't hesitate, most likely. Refusing to be defeated by a tutorial, they'd march on stubbornly. No - they'd probably dive into it with excitement, thrilled by the challenge.

A teenager himself, shouldn't he do the same? In a way, wouldn't be that proof of his retirement, not to run away, but to act without restraint?

Maybe...

Two messages had arrived on his e-assistant.

The first was from his grandmother, who'd sent several links to online university application forms, along with a melodramatic wall-of-text about how he was breaking her heart.

She’d first reacted to the revelation of his job at a gaming company as though he’d told her he was moonlighting as a prostitute. When she’d later discovered how much he’d made, she became even more insistent that he quit, arguing that, because he no longer needed to work, he would have the time to study for a ‘real job’.

His grandmother was of the old guard, that dying generation who still attached a mystical reverence to higher education and salaried white-collar labour. She couldn't envision the creative possibilities beyond.

‘Thanks, grandma. I will be sure to check them out!’ he messaged back.

In the past, Henry had considered signing up to college as an excuse for quitting the game, but he'd felt that committing four or five years just for that purpose was a bit extreme. He'd put in enough work for his life so far, paid or not. The rest of it, he wanted to spend enjoying in comfort, much like the Technocommunists of Europe.

Thinking of those European dandies living 500 years ahead of the rest of the world filled Henry with envy. They had replaced all their economic and political institutions with a benevolent A.I. dictator, which they controlled via direct democratic voting. Now, they spent their days sipping government-supplied GMO wine and frolicking to their hearts' content. In fact, Saana was created by a handful of Finnish guys, who'd let the supreme A.I. dictator perform 99% of the work.

If international immigration hadn't been prohibited by the treaties that sprung up in the wake of the A.I. revolution, Henry would have packed up his family and flown them there already.

Feeling peckish, he went to the kitchen. The fridge door swung open at his approach. On the shelves, aside from two unopened bottles of pills—the company doctor gave him regular checkups; he didn't need Cathy's whacky herbal remedies—there were only drinks. He hadn't bought a single cooking ingredient, all his meals being delivered for efficiency's sake.

Speaking of Cathy, the second message had been sent by her. It contained a picture of the inside of a tent with a bunch of sleeping figures dangled over each other, as though they’d passed out in the middle of a game of Twister. She'd also included a prayer for him to grow up untainted by sin and a reminder to take his breakfast supplement. The picture was from out of the game, from a music festival or something, his friends not logging on until evening, when the daily activities and arena-training for their Village began.

Henry, lying without compunction, replied to Cathy that he'd already taken her pills and had been surprised to find them so sweet.

Some battles were best not fought, best never done - wu-wei.

From the fridge, he grabbed a can of Isonade Dinosaur Sweat, with its logo of a sweating T-Rex biting down on an exploding grenade. As he cracked it open and took a big gulp, a refreshing blast of caffeinated carbonation struck the back of his throat, awakening his senses even further.

Henry grinned awkwardly at the ridiculous taste explosion. "Yeah, that's the stuff, baby. Wu-wei. Now, this is what teenagers should be drin—"

The smile he'd been attempting to force faded, his expression flattening out.

His e-assistant lit up with an urgent call.

Sighing, he allowed it through, a voice screaming from his wrist.

“DON’T TAKE ANOTHER ONE! THEY’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE SWEET! OH NO, YOU SHOULD BOOK YOURSELF AN APPOINTMENT—”

“Cathy, chill," he replied, "you’re going to wake the others up. I’m fine.”

“We’re already awake, H.,” mumbled Anderson in the background.

“HENRY, YOU NEED TO TAK—”

“Cathy, by 'sweet', I meant the supplements are 'awesome' - I'm using our national slang. Sweet as, these pills are. Why, after taking them..." He read the slogan on the can he was drinking, "...I feel strong enough to benchpress a dinosaur.”

“Oh.” There was a half second of silence as Cathy contemplated the strange turn of phrase. “Well, then, how are you this morning? What are you doing? We've been...”

Crisis averted, thought Henry, as he began ignoring Cathy's ramblings.

While she chattered away, he went to grab a bite to eat from his snack cupboard, only to find that it was empty.

That was strange.

He was sure he’d that he’d had at least sixty snackbars remaining. Had Alex taken the whole stockpile? Henry supposed the beaver-head was quite petty.

Henry, still hungry but not having enough time to wait for delivery, decided to steal food from the cafeteria on the ground floor of his building.

Not bothering to change out of his sweatpants, throwing on a pair of comfortable old man loafers, he left his apartment.

Along the corridor outside, the other doors, instead of leading into apartments similar to Henry's, were opened to reveal rooms cluttered with stacked chairs, desks, event decorations, and other miscellaneous office supplies placed in storage.

This was actually not a residential building. Henry happened to live at his guild's real-life headquarters - most of Saana's large organisations hired backend staff to handle the business aspects too tedious for gamers, and his guild had expanded into commerce, merchandise, movies, in-game tourism, etc. He'd moved out of home because the place was too crowded and, his work keeping him up at random hours of the night, he didn't want to disturb his family. Despite his peculiar living arrangement, none of the employees had figured out his identity yet, most mistaking him for a loser NEET cousin of Alex's who'd run away from home and slept in a storage closet.

Well, technically, Henry used to live here. With his retirement, he would now be moving between hotel rooms while using his filthy riches to travel the globe and enjoy the splendours of a post-labour existence. He was just back at the old place temporarily - until he finished this recruitment tournament. Just another two weeks.

Noticing something odd further down the corridor, Henry ended the call with Cathy.

For the wager, he'd installed a secretary office down the hall from him. Usually, he never interacted face-to-face with his personal assistants, from whom he'd also kept his real identity hidden. As part of the contractual terms with Alex—the agreement not to use guild resources—Henry'd given his PAs a holiday. The beaver-head, however, showing some mercy, had allowed Henry to borrow his nanny, a geriatric lady who couldn't handle virtual tech and knew nothing about Saana. Earlier, she'd informed him about his missing Earthfriend trainers via a handwritten note.

Presently, from the office he'd made for his secretary-nanny, was coming a medley of strange noises, of many people.

“Mrs Withers!” he called out, poking his head in.

He suddenly met eyes with eleven housewives in their late 20s. They were seated around a meeting table drinking tea and coffee. In front of a wall projection of Alex cleaving a Miracleworker in two with a zweihander, an entire kindergarten worth of toddlers were gathered, stuffing their chubby faces as they passed around a bowl of snacks - Henry's stolen snacks.

One of the toddlers was sitting far away from the rest. He wore a tiny suit and had a heavily-gelled mullet. When this kid noticed Henry’s arrival, he got up and gave him a stiff, formal bow.

This was Little Liu, Alex’s son and the kid Mrs Withers nannied. Little Liu didn't speak. He was a mute, Henry suspecting he'd picked up a defective brain gene from his retarded father.

Henry nodded in greeting at the toddler, then gave him a questioning look. "Dude, what's with all these brats eating my candy? And where's your dad?"

Little Liu shrugged twice, the shoulders pads of his toddler suit pumping in a comical juxtaposition with the kid's gloomy expression.

A woman in her eighties with bright red lipstick, the nanny, answered. “Mr Lee, Little Liu’s friends are visiting for a playdate." She made a hand barrier to muffle the next sentence. “(The psychologist thinks he’ll start talking if we socialise him with people his age). Mr Wong is setting up the gymnasium for the children to play in.”

The ‘gymnasium’ was where the guild members trained when they had exceeded their weekly playtime quota. Spanning from the tenth to twelfth floor, the space had been set up to mimic Saana’s combat system using projectors, computer tracking of health, artificial terrain, and specialised padded-clothing that minimised the damage of blows.

Henry usually spent a few hours there a week for exercise. These last few days, though, he'd been training more intensively, especially while his character had been stuck on the boat to Suchi.

Henry replied blankly. “Still, he shouldn't have stolen my snacks. That's certainly not going to help the kid's stunted development, teaching him to be a thief - a fat thief."

Mrs Withers blinked several times in rapid succession, thinking that Henry was in no position to be lecturing on poor influences.

Henry—groaning at these strangers with the disdain of a retiree having to watch hoodlums walk across his lawn instead of the path five steps away and not being allowed by law to shoot them—filtered their presence from his brain. Jogging forward, jumping right over the heads of several kids, he reached the snack bowl and snatched up the last candy.

A toddler, hovering nearby it, glared at him.

Henry eyed the raspberry jelly on the kid’s chin - from a different brand to the Zapper’s Hazel Coco-Nut Bar in the kid's grip. “You’re already on your second, buddy."

He turned to leave, but felt something tugging on his pants.

By his side, the mullet-headed toddler, Alex's spawn, was clinging to his leg and staring up at him with a pitiful expression.

“We’ve all got problems, mate," said Henry.

When Henry tried to walk away, Little Liu maintained his hold, allowing himself to be dragged along.

“Look,” said Henry, not pausing his walk, “the outcome of this friendship tutorial doesn't matter. I didn’t make my first friend until I was eight years old, and I turned out relatively well-adjusted.”

Little Liu sniffled.

Henry unwrapped his snackbar, snapped it in two, and gave half to the kid.

Little Liu, taking it and immediately stuffing it in his mouth, began to chew and tear up.

“Chin up, Little Liu." Henry, reminded by the friendless child of the lonely boar stubbornly chasing him until it died, paused his departure and, changing to another strategy, patted the kid's head. “There’s no need to cry...” He searched for words of consolation, something that had never been his forte. “Listen, even if the present is bleak and lonesome, never forget that man is a creature whose dominion is time, a creature whose life spans yesterday, today, and tomorrow."

Mrs Withers, hearing hints of nice, age-appropriate communication for once, watched in astonishment, her mouth falling ajar.

Was, the nanny wondered, Mr Lee finally going to extend a hand of sympathy? Would he finally reveal that male role model she’d always known to be hidden deep inside him?

Alas, if one looked closely, he'd been patting the kid more like a puppy than a child.

The words that proceeded to spill from his mouth were spoken too quickly for even most adults to follow.

“...now," Henry continued with his unclely advice, "it might not be tomorrow exactly, but in two, maybe three years, tops, even if you are still a weird mute, eventually all the kids around you are going to grasp the concept of money, and when they do, a significant proportion of them are going to be willing to overlook your failings because you have rich parents. That's a life pro-tip right there, Little Liu. Being blessed in one area creates a halo effect that impairs people's judgement of your weaker aspects and provides a material incentive to ignore those they do notice. Rich, smart, handsome, funny—a strength in any of these can compensate for your glaring faults in others. You, my silent nephew, are more than blessed with the first.” Henry grabbed the kid firmly by the shoulder and swept an arm across an imaginary vista. “All along the playground, Little Liu, there’s going to be an endless line of much smarter, much funnier, much cooler kids than this pathetic, pants-shitting lot, every one of them begging for a piece of your time. The Little Liu-ser before us today will be tomorrow the Little Li-oan-Me-Snack-Money-And-I'll-Play-With-You-My-Best-Friend! When that happens, don’t worry, even if most of the grovellers can’t be trusted—as is true in general for the hidden enemies you will encounter in your arduous journey before your mortal extinguishment—this uncle will design you a vetting system for identifying the select few that can. Are we cool, then?"

To this last question, Little Liu nodded. Being two years old, he lacked the mental capacity to realistically grasp even a twentieth of what had been said, but the uncle's confident tone made him feel reassured.

Henry raised his fists in a gesture of encouragement, two fists clenched with a brawny resolution to fight against the universe, against poorly-designed tutorials, against noobs in recruitment tournaments, against kindergarten ostracism. “Jiayou.”

Little Liu let go to mirror the action.

Henry, before the kid could latch onto his pants again, sprinted away, tossing the rest of the snackbar in his mouth.

Mrs Withers, watching him rush out, shook her head in disappointment, while the housewives had a mixture of reactions ranging from confusion to mild offence.

One mother squinted between those two states. "Umm...did he just refer to our children as 'this pathetic, pants-shitting lot'?"