The best part of my sucky life is that I get to play Crystal Shards Online for a living.

Not a living, as in, I make so much money playing that I don’t have to work in the real world. More like, playing Crystal Shards is the only real work I can do. But I make the best of it.

It’s not a great living, for sure, but I earn enough to help pay the rent, buy food and hopefully one day to save up enough money to pay for my mom’s operation. That’s part of why my life sucks right now. My mom has been ill for a while, radiation sickness from the fall out debris, the doctors say. That’s the other part of why my life sucks. Most of the world was made near uninhabitable by a nuclear war a couple centuries ago. They say that one day we might be able to live on the surface again, but it probably won’t happen in my lifetime.

Now we live below ground, in cities that were carved out by giant automated boring machines called Builders. ‘City’ is a bit of a gracious term for it though. It’s more like thousands of shipping containers linked by tunnels. My home is one such shipping container that I share with my mom and older brother Mike.

Mike is kind of a dick, by the way. But he’s my brother, so what can I do?

We at least have separate rooms now. When I turned seventeen last month, my mom let me splurge some extra credits to buy a couple sheets of dry wall and a door frame. We couldn’t afford an actual door so I just have a shower curtain hanging up for privacy. Mike still barges in like the jerk he is, but it at least gives me more peace of mind when I jack into the network to play Crystal Shards. I can’t count the number of times Mike would yank me offline in the middle of a session as a prank.

Idiot. But at least he spends more time out of the house now. I think he has a girlfriend or something, but I don’t really care. The main thing is, it leaves me more peace and quiet.

To mine.

Just the thought of mining gets me out of bed, which is a mattress on the floor that I’ve had since I was six. I reach for my crutches next. They’re lying next to me as always. My two assistants, my mom always called them. Mutt and Jeff were their names for me. I tell the lights to come on and a bright LED illuminates the cement gray walls of my tiny room. My VR rig, my key to the world of the living, is in the corner and I give a short prayer of thanks that Mike hasn’t messed with it while I was sleeping.

I use the wall to prop myself up and then use Mutt and Jeff to help me into the living room to check on my Mom. She’s on the couch as normal, covered in her blanket that covers a frame I know is as frail looking as my own.

“What you want for breakfast, ma?” I say to her as I hobble by and head toward the food processor in the corner.

“Pancakes with sausage, two eggs,” she says without missing a beat. “And black coffee. Make it strong this time.”

“You got it.” I chuckle as I key on the device. It’s a nano processor that’s designed to make nearly anything, using the same technology that the Builders use to make the city from the earth they chew with their cavern sized maws. The only catch is, it takes a lot of credits and a much better grade nano-machine to make anything close to tasting like real food. I access our joint family account and check the balance.

Your balance is ….. 1,217 Cr

My stomach does a little flutter when I see the number. The rent is due next week and is going to be 2,500 Cr. It’s a lot to make up for, especially since I can never count on Mike bringing home much doing whatever he does out on the streets. Half the time I think he’s hoarding money and spending it on himself. The most I’ve ever seen him contribute for a month is 500. And that barely covers Moms medicine. I sigh, but try not to let Mom hear it. She hates it when I worry. It only stresses her out more.

I spend a total of 10 credits for our breakfast. The processor buzzes a minute later and I remove two recyclable bowls of steaming oatmeal. At least it tells me that it’s oatmeal. I’ve never tasted the real thing so I wouldn’t really know, but it tastes as bland and mushy as it always does as I sit on the couch with Mom and have breakfast with her.

“Have you seen Michael this morning?” she asks. “I don’t think he came home last night.”

I look at my Mom and fail to hide the eye roll. I know because she gives me a look of despair that makes her sunken face look even sadder. “He is your brother, you know?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I know. My older brother.”

I shove down a few more spoonful’s of oatmeal to avoid her stare.

“He’s fine, Mom,” I say eventually. “I saw him leave for work early this morning.”

I can’t tell if she’s bought the lie. Her faded blue eyes finally leave mine though, so she’s bought it for now, even though she might be faking it. “So where are you off to today, Ryan?”

I perk up at the change in topic. “The Silvertooth mines. I’ve been watching the market. Silver ore should be in high demand for the next couple of days. There is a big werewolf expansion pack coming out for Witch World this weekend. The PvPers are going to be looking for a lot of silver.”

She laughs.

That was the coolest part about Crystal Shards Online. The developers made it a completely encompassing virtual world where one character could enter any number of Shards. Each Shard was its own world and setting, but everything within them was interchangeable. Even currency and items. As such, Crystal Shards had its own economy where items and materials could easily be exchanged for credits. Credits that could buy you stuff in the real world. Plus everyone connected to Crystal Shards for a break from the drudgery of the real world. People went on vacations, explored, even had relationships. And thanks to the VR rig that connected directly to the nervous system, it all felt 100% real.

Except for pain, unless you wanted it, and then there were mods for that too.

In fact, if you could afford it, most people lived more online than in the real world.

But my ambitions were much simpler than that.

Enough to pay the rent would be a start. 500k to pay for my Mom’s operation would be a dream.

“Or you can finally level up something besides miner and take out a world boss.” My mom grins at me as she says it. “A 20 million credit drop would be nice.”

“Ha ha…” I say sardonically as I take our empty bowls to the recycler with the help of Mutt and Jeff. “Maybe once they make combat classes that don’t rely on your ‘actual’ agility for controls.”

But my mom is right. The height of the game worlds, were the world bosses. Rarely was one ever defeated and it normally took a team of high level players to achieve. I’d only ever heard of one guild being able to defeat one on my particular shard: The Silver Rangers. But there were thousands of guilds like them, all vying for the same achievement.

To defeat a world boss.

A win like that would not only be enough for an operation to cure my mom’s radiation sickness, but to fix my legs as well. We’d even have enough to move to the lower levels of the city, away from the radiation and where real water existed in deep underground lakes and the processors were good enough to make real tasting food.

Unfortunately for me, Mutt and Jeff were also the reason why I could never play a combat class and never go on a raid. The developers made the combat classes hyper realistic for full immersion, but all that came at the entry fee of a normal nervous system. For me, swinging a pick axe in a mine and killing a stray goblin or two was the height of my combat ability.

“You could always play a tank?” Mom jokes. “Don’t they just sit there and get hit?”

I chuckle. “I think there’s a bit more to it than that, Mom.”

I hobble over to help my mom with her own rig. “And where are you off to today?”

“Shopping at Bloomingdales.”

I smile at the usual response. It was the same one she’d given my brother and I since we were old enough to know she was ‘going’ someplace else when she put on her rig. That was just around the same time she started getting sick from working as a technician on the air scrubbers and couldn’t go to work anymore. Now I was old enough to know what she was really doing on Crystal Shards to earn her share of the monthly income. What a lot of women probably did. Enter a world where her avatar could be the object of any fantasy and guys would pay credits by the minute for her interaction.

The thought makes me sick to my stomach and I can’t wait to escape to another world.

A world away from this one. A world where I just might hit a rare ore and free my Mom from all her pain and suffering.

A world called Crystal Shards Online.