I paced the private waiting room, small though it was. I couldn’t stand to sit down at the moment. I felt… I wasn’t sure how I felt. It was like I was basking in the sun on a clear day, except on the inside. It felt nice, but at the same time was deeply disturbing. It felt completely real. I inspected the part of my consciousness related to game functions, seeking anything that might let me disable feedback from the game while logged out. Nothing. That was worrying. The control interface was weird and opaque, but it was also pretty intuitive about the functions that it did have. That suggested that there wasn’t actually a way to fully disconnect from Dreamshards.

Carefully, so as not to trigger anything by accident, I queried the game interface if there was a way to fully remove the key. A message bloomed into my awareness:

[Warning! Your synchronization is too high to safely remove your key! Attempts to remove it manually will result in severe spiritual damage!]

Spiritual damage. Great.

Well, I’ve already had my fill of spiritual damage from getting killed by and then fighting a spirit of entropy, so I guess I wouldn’t be attempting to remove my key any time soon. Not that I was going to in the first place… but it would have been nice to know that I had the option.

I continued pacing, anxiety building as I wondered which of my feelings originated from me, and what was from the game’s influence instead. I felt my pigeon project feelings of calm confidence. Loosening the barriers I had put up to prevent his influence, I let the emotions he projected wash over me.

If I was to become an amalgam of myself plus whatever elements I picked up from the game, then I would need to be much more careful with what I collected. My pigeon was a good pick. Confident and poised. I was fine with being more confident. I could see him preening at the praise, in his little office bubble.

My new personal ball of magical fusion? I was more ambivalent. It made me feel… over-caffeinated. Like I was sitting on the razor’s edge between giddiness and anxiety. It felt like there were some other impulses mixed in, but it was too muddled for anything to shine through clearly. I’d need to find a way to moderate its influence. My power was feeling tapped out, though, despite my body feeling quite energetic. I’d have to work on that later, after I gave it time to recover.

A nurse interrupted my pacing to let me know that the doctor would see me now. She led me into an examination room down the hall. The room itself was no larger than my waiting room had been, though much of the space was taken up by machines that I couldn’t even begin to identify. I guess this would be a pretty thorough checkup. The walls were largely unadorned, except for a few posters talking about patient rights, workplace safety, and a few other such things. Those were probably mandatory, I figured the doctor himself probably preferred to avoid decorating his workspace.

Before I had a chance to examine any of the machines, the doctor came in. He was an older man with tanned skin a shade darker than mine, head full of wispy grey hair, and an easy smile under his thick beard. Doctor was one of those jobs where you tended to rise continuously as you became more experienced, instead of stalling out like most workers. This would be the first time since graduating university that I would be seen by a doctor older than myself. If I stayed on this path, I suppose I would just have to get used to being in the presence of my social betters.

[Your new peers] my pigeon insisted.

“Mr. Bekker? I’m Dr. Perez,” he said, offering his hand. I shook it, noting that he had a surprisingly firm grip compared to what I had expected from his advanced age.

“I’m a research and differential diagnosis specialist out of the Johnson and Johnson Medical Center. DA’s got me on contract though, so don’t worry about speaking freely! I’ll be in charge of monitoring you brave lab rats, and hopefully preventing you from spontaneously sprouting any eyestalks!”

“I, uh, yeah. I’d also rather avoid the eyestalks,” I said. “So how does this work? This seems a lot more elaborate than the quick check they gave us right after we got our keys.”

He motioned towards the chair in the center of the room, “Those were probably just cursory tests to get medical baselines and make sure there was nothing obvious to be learned.”

His eyes grew unfocused, probably checking my medical records.

“Yep, just simple stuff, it looks like. We will be doing a much more extensive battery of tests. I just need you to sit down, follow my instructions, and we’ll knock out as many tests as we have time for this morning. Some of them will probably be uncomfortable, but you’re a big boy, so I’m sure you can handle it.”

I took my place on the examination chair, rather less comfortable than the one in the waiting room. Dr. Perez was still reading.

“Hold on, it says here that you are experiencing some form of discomfort already?” he asked.

I explained to him the sudden, shooting pains that I had been dealing with the past two days.

“Well, I don’t like the sound of that. Not one bit. Let’s chase this and see if we can figure out what is going on.”

And so, over the next few hours, I endured a number of tests. Though I didn’t really understand most of what was going on, I did notice that a disproportionate number of them seemed to deal with nerves or my nervous system. The doctor stepped out of the room a few times while tests ran.

“Well, I’ve got mostly bad news, I’m afraid,” the doctor said, returning to the room after a particularly long imaging test of some sort. “It looks like you are experiencing acute Foreign Body Rejection. Your body seems to be attacking your implanted augmentations.”

“What? Doesn’t that happen right after you get them? I’ve had these for nearly ten years!”

“Yes, quite the puzzle, isn’t it?” he mused. His tone was still light, but he was no longer smiling. “It’s good that you got this looked at now, you would have been at a much greater risk of nerve damage otherwise.”

He walked over to the sole smartscreen in the exam room, and called up an image of my head. It looked like an MRI, but I couldn’t be sure what exactly it was. The doctor motioned for me to approach, and when I did he pointed to a number of tiny lines running through a few areas of my head.

“These are the nanofilaments which connect to your visual cortex. There are a bunch of them laced throughout your peripheral nervous system too. Do you see all these tiny breaks in many of the lines? This shows that your body has started to break them down. You are probably already running on the bare minimum necessary for your augmentations to actually function. The pain and numbness is likely from inflammation around the affected nerves. The good news is that this particular brand of filament is well known for failing gracefully, so you aren’t likely to suffer any brain damage.”

I let out a breath I hadn’t realised that I had been holding. Brain damage was one of those nightmare worst case scenarios. Even modern medicine had trouble there, and what little it could fix was inevitably locked behind very expensive procedures.

“That’s the end of the good news, though. You are going to need surgery, probably this week, to remove the remaining components. Worse, your white blood cell count isn’t elevated, so I can’t prescribe you the meds that would normally go with this situation. You’ll be stuck with only some anti-inflammatories. I would fudge the schedule and get it done today or tomorrow, but we’ll need to wait on some of the results to come in to do it safely.”

“So… I’ll be ok? After the surgery?” I asked.

In a show of terrifying nonchalance, Dr. Perez shrugged. “Considering the evidence that it isn’t your immune system attacking your implants, as would normally be the case here, coupled with the timing, this is probably a reaction to the alien tech you’re running. There isn’t a doctor in the world that could tell you that you’ll be alright, not without proving himself to be a liar and a fraud.”

That was reasonable. Not reassuring, but reasonable.

“So will I be able to get a new set, after my old set is removed?” I asked. I had been unwilling to upgrade partially on principle, but also because I couldn’t easily make the payments with my old pay rate.

“We will need to evaluate after you recover from your surgery,” he said, then his eyes unfocused once more, “hmm, it looks like you are the only one on your team using a last generation interface. I don’t recognize the model though.”

“It’s the, ah, ‘enthusiast’ model.”

“Ah! That’s right, you are the hacker on your team, aren’t you?” he asked, his smile had returned.

“I wouldn’t really call myself that. I am more of a modder than anything. Modding games has been a hobby of mine for a long time, though at times it was difficult to keep my software modification license up to date.”

“Yes,” he nodded sagely, “I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. But an enthusiast set of modern augmentation will certainly cost a pretty penny! But you will be fine, you’re making that big alien money, right?”

“Hah, I suppose I am.” I said.

“Well, as much fun as this has been, Mr. Bekker, my afternoon is occupied, so we will need to continue the testing another day. Go ahead and talk to the front desk, and they’ll set you up with an appointment for your removal, and a temporary set of AR glasses. Your data and wireless connections will be fine, but your sense link could fail at literally any moment.”

I made my way through the halls of the arcology, making my way to the office. I gestured to pull up the email I had received as I was leaving the clinic:

Will,

We have an all hands meeting this afternoon. We will be discussing standardizing our game terminology, and also certain other topics that are relevant to you specifically. Please attend.

John

The thick black rims of my temporary AR glasses stood out at the edges of my vision. I hated them. I probably look like someone from the 30s, before internal displays were common. The field of view was so much worse, and they failed to register some of my gestures, but it was better than nothing at all. The doctor had been right, the visual portion of my rig had failed on the way home.

I considered the contents of the email. It was missing John’s… Johnness. Suspicious. I wondered what he had for me in particular. Maybe it had to do with my medical misfortune. To be totally honest, I would have probably attended even if it had just been about standardizing terms. I always hated it when games called things by ridiculous names, and it was even worse if those terms were supposed to be used by dev teams, or in this case, the testing team. I guess it was fine if you wanted to call your magic by something silly like ‘Will of the Gods’ or whatever for lore or story reasons, but having to call it that while working on the game was just crossing the line.

I rounded the corner leading to the office, and instantly knew something was wrong. There were two Enforcers outside the door, and the transparent wall had a sheet hung to block the view inside. I passed the Enforcers without issue - I was supposed to be here, after all - but they always made me nervous. I knew that was silly, I had nothing to hide after all, but it was just something that I couldn’t shake.

I entered to find that everyone else was already present and seated at the large meeting table near the back of the office. John was sitting at the head of the table, with a man in a sharp suit standing behind him. The man’s eyes snapped to me as I entered.

“So good of you to join us. Take a seat and we can get this taken care of quickly,” he said, his impatience clear in his voice.

I sat in the only open chair, across the table from Joe. Though we had only had the one session, it was already strange to see him as a normal guy instead of a huge lizard pyromancer. That happened sometimes, especially for testers who saw each other more often in game than out, but I was worried that the eerie realism of Dreamshards would magnify the issue.

“Now that we are all here, we can begin,” the executive, probably Jay Roberts, said.

“To keep things short: direct recordings from Dreamshards are being added to the intercorporate export restrictions list. You will face severe criminal penalties if you share one, or even discuss one where it could be overheard by someone who is not part of this project. I strongly recommend that you wipe your personal recordings after submitting your reports. I also caution you against discussing these recordings over any electronic medium, hence the need for this meeting.”

He looked down at John for a moment, then continued.

“John here will share with you the updated protocols for submitting your reports, once he has finished writing them.”

And with that, he clapped John on the shoulder, gave me a look that I couldn’t parse, and walked out. We all watched in silence as he went.

[You are inconvenient to him right now, but potentially useful later] my pigeon helpfully interjected, apparently able to parse what I couldn’t. I really needed to name him, now that I had reduced the barrier against his influence and he was contributing more. Unfortunately, I was still feeling mentally drained.

[Do not name me poorly]

Sorry Nico, it is too late for that warning.

[... It could have been worse]

It sure could have, buddy.

“Well, today has been an exciting day!” John said, instantly springing back into his normal shape once the looming cloud of direct executive observation had passed. “For now, I want everyone to omit direct links or even references to video from your reports, and submit your video only once you arrive at the office for the day.”

He addressed me specifically: “Will, I know you’ve got the security certificates for it, so you can just submit all your accumulated videos whenever you end up passing through. Does that work for you?”

I noticed a few of my coworkers were giving me strange looks. Probably the dumb AR glasses. I nodded at John’s suggestion, and he continued.

“Great! So we can move on to our actual topic for today. We need to standardize our terminology. We haven’t got any clear standards set out, so our reports are looking messy. We’ll start with the terms the game itself uses.”

“Power,” a woman near the head of the table spoke up, “The game consistently calls our ability sets by that name.”

John generated a shared document for us and added that to it.

“Synchronization,” I called out, “The game said the different power options had it in varying amounts, or gained it at different rates, and apparently if it is too high, you aren’t able to remove your key.”

That got a few more looks. John looked thoughtful, then turned to the woman to his left.

“Maria, try to remove your key. If it asks for confirmation, don’t go through with it.”

She concentrated for a moment, then reported: “It looks like I can, but the game warns me that I will lose my avatar and have to start from nothing.”

“Great! We can adjust your characters if we need to change our strategy. Your avatars, I mean.” He added Synchronization and Avatar to the list. Round and round it went, until we had a reasonably comprehensive list of terms that the game itself had used, either in the interface itself, the tutorial folder, or the tutorial NPC.

power - abilities granted to each player at character creation

synchronization - mentioned under character options, prevents removal of key

avatar - official term for character

soul - mentioned under 3rd character option

The Dream - the tutorial zone

essence - magic

the vault - where The Dream keeps the stuff it hands out with its random drops

deeper realms - where treasures in the vault come from?

Great Spirits - world bosses

key - game term for subscription

skill - ability granted by your power. 3rd option doesn’t have this.

skill augment - improvement to a skill. 3rd option doesn’t have this

equipment - magic items appear in this interface. 3rd option doesn’t have this.

It was a decent start. I tapped my foot involuntarily. I was still filled with nervous energy, and that sucking emptiness in my chest. I wanted to get home and take a nap, or maybe run a few dozen miles on a treadmill and then go home and take a nap. But unfortunately, there was more work to be done.

I spoke up again, bringing up an issue that had been annoying me from the start.

“What should we call the various character options? We can’t keep calling them first, second, and third, but the game doesn’t seem to actually have terms for them,” I said.

A man to my right spoke up, “A few of us have been calling the first two options ‘Archetype’ and ‘Freeform’, I’m not sure about the third option though.”

A lot of people at the table nodded along to these names, and so John added them to the list.

“Will, since you are actually playing that option, do you have any suggestions?” John asked.

I didn’t. Maybe something to do with nature, since my progression had no levels and was modeled in a much more natural way? Or maybe something to do with manual, because all the automatic game systems and user interface was stripped out for the third option?

While I was thinking, Joe had apparently also been thinking.

“Shaman?” he suggested.

“What?” I guess that had something to do with nature, so we were thinking sort of along the same lines.

“Well, you commune with weird magical things that the other two character options can’t see. How about ‘mystic’ since you have mystical senses that the rest of us don’t?”

I wasn’t enthusiastic about it, but I wasn’t in any condition to argue, nor did I have any better ideas. I could see some nods of agreement around the table, so I nodded my assent and John added it to the list.

I guess I’m a mystic now.