Was it worth it?

My thoughts came slowly. Incomplete.

No, was the answer. What was the question?

My life? Traded for a week in a game. No, not worth it.

Not a game.

Something burned, somewhere inside. Wheels spinning, no traction.

Sound. Language.

“But sir, he’s been shot in the head!” Reluctance. Incredulity. Questioning the hierarchy.

“And yet, he is still breathing. He has the highest anomalous energy reading we have yet seen, literally off the established scale. Take him, that is an order.” Reasserting the hierarchy. Greed. Improvement of one’s personal bargaining position.

“Yes, sir.” Resignation. Subordination.

A call. Familiar.

Walls. Grey. Rough.

Crystal. Pink.

Floor. Unable to stand. Coordination? Wrong shape. Different limbs.

A face. Familiar. Blonde. Ally.

Sounds. Speech. Concern.

Too much strain.

Blackness.

I see a… white room? Things are hazy. Someone nearby is speaking, but I can’t understand.

“…been largely unresponsive, which I would expect from this sort of major trauma-” Nervousness.

“Stop. You said there was something unusual. What is it?” Irritation. Anticipation.

“Right, right. Well. It’s just that we can’t find any projectile in the wound. There is stippling on the skin, definitely a gunpowder firearm, but no fragments, no bullet or slug, no trace of anything. Just an unusually shallow entry wound.” Unease. He doubts his observations.

“I knew it. He’s one of them. Treat him well when he wakes up.” Vindication.

“Captain Zhou, with all due respect, this man will never wake up.” Fears a miscommunication. Fears for his position.

“You have my instructions, doctor.” Blind to his subordinate’s discomfort.

A bright room, but I see only the floor. Flashes of pain and cold on the inside.

“I can’t believe how much tech he’s got inside him. You reckon he’s somebody important?” Vague interest.

“No, look at the scar tissue here, and here. These were probably all installed by a machine.” Focus.

“God, it’s like they have an assembly line for their people or something.” Vague disgust.

“This doesn’t look like rejection, not at all. Hand me the retractor.” Worry.

“That one next to the spinal cord looks especially nasty.” Vague interest.

“Yeah, that’s going to be delicate, if I don’t want to do more harm taking it out. Keep quiet for a few, alright?” Concern. Focus.

“Sure, doc.” Passive agreement.

Time passes. Wheels spin.

Large roaches swarmed, clumsily ripped in half as the void lurched out. Control of limbs and power was improved, but not good. Pieces broken down inside into useful materials. Once all were converted to material, I set about my task.

Nearby, large reptile ally guided the body away from the material gathering area, radiating concern and sadness.

Light. A different room. Trees outside.

Here, this body, can’t move at all. Too heavy.

People come in sometimes, replace the hanging bag or adjust the tubes or machines.

Beep beep. Beep beep.

Finally, traction.

My eyelids fluttered, and I gasped. I found myself sitting in a thick bundle of piled cloth, in a tiny room with white brick walls. I stood and nearly stumbled. My whole body felt weird, like I hadn’t moved in a long time. I felt light, like I could push off the ground and just float away. There was a bone-deep buzzing that was becoming more and more apparent the more I focused on it. My whole body was soaked in some kind of magic. It looked almost like… ah.

I throttled down the essence flow to my sun, and the insistent buzz faded away. I was still drenched in spent solar essence, but it was probably fine. A moment later, I saw Joe’s reptilian head peek in the doorway. There was something sad about him, though I couldn’t pin down what. He was dressed not in the grey starter clothes of the towers, but was instead wearing the style of the NPCs, er locals. When I met his gaze, he seemed surprised.

“W-Will?”

“Hey Joe. Where are we?” I asked. My thoughts were still fragmented. I was pretty sure we were in that little settlement that we found, but it felt like that was a long time ago.

“You’re ok!” he smiled, placing one of his massive hands on my back, “We didn’t know if you’d recover.”

“Right,” I said, feeling a little awkward, “Where are we right now? The town we found?”

“Yeah, Finxi. I’ve been stuck here. Had to go native.” He gestured to his clothing. “Turns out these bodies have all the, uh, usual biological stuff going on, hunger and all that, so coming here certainly seemed smarter than trying to survive by scavenging candy bars and cooking giant rats.”

He was stuck? Why did that sound familiar?

Then it hit me. I remembered the attack, Joe apparently unable to log out at the time. In a rush, the images of my disastrous flight through the arcology slammed into my consciousness.

“That motherfucker shot me!” The words rushed out involuntarily.

“Someone shot you? During the attack?”

“Yes! A fucking Enforcer shot me in the face!” I said, my voice rapidly rising above polite levels in this confined space, “That bastard! He escorted me most of the way to safety… I was even starting to like that asshole.”

Joe stepped away from me and scratched the scales under his eye. “So, uh, the attack. Do you know what happened?”

“No, not really. People raided the arcology. Either they attacked literally everywhere, or they knew exactly where to go to find Dreamshards project personnel and where we would try to hide.”

“Wow, surprisingly close to what everyone else knows,” he said, “Only thing Lindsey was able to find was the official line: Terrorist attack on Digital Arts, the entire New York area is locked down. Supposedly it was extremist tech ethicists using leaked proprietary data to somehow track people down.”

“You didn’t ask anyone else on the team? Any of them that made it should have been able to tell you, and you should be able to get to any tower from here.”

“Will, it’s been three weeks since then, and I haven’t seen anyone from the team come through town.”

Three weeks? It was then, trying to find my lost time, that the fragmentary memories started to come into focus. What in the world had I been doing? How had I been moving around at all if I was so damaged?

[I allocated your body to my own tasks while you were absent.]

Nico? Your own tasks? Wait, you mean the new minion. Is he done?

I looked inward to find an absolute mess. My sun had more than doubled in brightness in its little bubble, and that weird truffle’s mycelia had grown into a cobalt blue tangle of pulsing tubes, some of which somehow managed to grow out from the bubble I had made to contain it and into the substrate of whatever my inventory was sitting on. That felt like something I’d need to address sooner or later.

The only thing that was less of a disaster than I’d left it was the state of my minions. The worker butterflies moved efficiently, the larger ones patrolling for some reason, the smaller ones ferrying office supplies from little sorted stockpiles down to the makeshift office that Nico had set up for himself near the massive crystal table. The wooden dog with the weird stealth power sat nearby, perfectly still. The green crystal spider was dipping one of its legs into an ink pot and taking notes.

A quick look through some of those notes dashed my hopes of using them to figure out exactly what had happened to me these past few weeks. It seemed that my minions’ perceptions were filtered through my spirit or mind or whatever immaterial thing I was made out of, rather than through the physical organs of my body. Even if Nico had been in the driver’s seat for a bit, his ability to perceive the world was deeply stunted without me.

And finally, there was Nico. Still working on my largest butterfly. It still wasn’t done?

[This project is over budget. We require additional building materials. The others are all complete.]

Others? I felt Nico direct my attention to the crystal spider and the wooden dog. The dog had two greasy films of essence covering his form now instead of just the one. I wasn’t sure that having two layers of weird stealth essence was more effective than one, but it had been an acquisition of opportunity more than anything, so whatever. The spider was slightly more disappointing. The damaged area of its internals had been repurposed as a control area, and Nico had been successful in turning it into a secretary. Unfortunately, its deeper functions, such as being able to teleport itself and bring back random objects, remained out of reach for now.

Satisfied with my inspection, I looked back outside. What had Joe said last? A quick look at my spider’s notes reminded me.

“So, uh, how did I get into your house?” I asked.

“My friends list still works, so I’ve been coming to see when you log on. You mostly just have been clearing floors at random and storing all the monster bodies. But you’ve been super clumsy and usually die before you finish if we don’t help you, and then afterwards you’d just sit there. So I started bringing you back here. I didn’t really have anything else to do, and it didn’t feel right just leaving you out there.”

“Thanks,” I said, “So did you get a job or something? I haven’t seen more than this room, but I can’t imagine the rent is cheap regardless.”

“Ha!” he barked out a laugh, “Sort of. I’ve been making good on our promise to train their sorcerers. I don’t know how much good it will do them, but they seem excited. Especially that Kyber kid.”

“And that pays enough to afford a place?”

“Yeah, anything to do with their sorcerers seems to be a big deal. I make enough to be comfortable here. At least until I recover from whatever happened to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you recovered from being shot in the face, right? I’m sure I’ll get over this coma or whatever sooner or later. Though we missed our deadline for finding keys. I’m not sure we’ll like what is waiting for us on the other side. You can tell me tomorrow, I guess.”

“About that…” I trailed off, thinking about my broken segments of memory, trying to put together as much as I could. The words people had said around me were still jumbled, incomprehensible mush, but something about the scenes made me uneasy. “I don’t know that I’m in the arcology at all anymore. I’ll know for sure tomorrow.”

We both fell silent at that. I suspected that neither fate would be pleasant, but ending up captured might actually be marginally less bad than ending up an R&D asset. Hell, I was considering running off anyway. This just meant that half the work was done for me.

“Anyway, did the Painter end up causing a bunch of trouble with my avatar? Am I a wanted man?”

Joe gave me a grin, but I could tell it was a little forced. “No, not yet. He’s only been around a few times. Made a big deal out of the town the first time he saw it. Apparently he needs more information to find the keys. Doesn’t exactly know what to look for, and you’re the only one with mystic senses that are acute enough. Lindsey’s got them, but either the way she sees things or possibly just the way she describes them is just totally useless for his purposes. I’ve got them too as of recently, but I doubt mine are a tenth as clear as yours, unless it relates to fire.”

“I don’t know that finding keys will help, at this point.”

He shrugged. “At least we could sell them. Either here, or in real life.”

“Pretty bold to say where the company could hear you.”

He shook his head and smiled. “Nope. I’d have run out of storage on day five or six. I’m free of Big Brother for the first time in ages.”

Big brother. What an odd way to think of our bosses. I was about to respond when I noticed a familiar faint feeling of pressure.

“Looks like I’m just about out of time. I guess I’ll see you tomorrow, Joe.”

“Oh! Before you are totally out of time, we should get you bound to the crystal in town. Spawning here is so much more convenient.”

He motioned for me to follow, and stepped out of the room. There was a crystal in town? That would have been good to know sooner. I followed, noticing as we left that his house was one of those manor houses, with a little yard and everything. The yard was all scuffed glass, rather than one that was excavated and filled in with dirt and grass, but it was still more of a yard than any place I had ever lived.

“It’s weird,” I said as we threaded our way through the cloth covered paths leading toward the central tower, “Why would they just have an extra house sitting around for you to rent?”

“I’m buying it,” Joe corrected me, “just paying in installments. Not like they have any banks around to give me a mortgage, but the previous owner is happy with the arrangement.”

“Right,” I said, moving around some of the pale, tiny locals, “so why did he have an extra house just sitting around?”

The streets seemed more alive than on our previous visit. I wasn’t sure if it was just that this time I knew that they were real people, or if there were actually more people up and about.

“I don’t think they need a reason to have player housing.”

Three weeks here, and he still didn’t know. Maybe since he had an actual game interface, it skewed his perspective a bit.

“Though they justify it with the local culture,” he continued, “They’ve had this prophecy about outsiders coming and then there’s supposed to be this golden age or something. It just makes sense that everyone would try to own some extra stuff to try to sell to the outsiders, whenever they finally arrive. And now we have.”

As we talked, we crossed beyond the noble estates, walking a thin pathway leading between the massive fields planted all around the central tower. Maybe they needed to be close to grow effectively from the massive fake sun that hung between the central tower and the upside down mountain.

We arrived at the central disk of glass, the area around the tower. I could see that there was a pink crystal just in front of the massive double doors.

“This looks… different,” I said.

“Yeah, the inside’s different too. Hit the crystal and we can take a look with the time you’ve got left.”

[Would you like to bind yourself to location: Finxi-Checkpoint?]

I bound myself, and we stepped up to the massive double doors. There were guards posted to either side, but they didn’t move to stop us.

“Unlike the starter towers, you actually have to make your way through each floor to get to the next one. And it’s instanced to groups who enter together. The floors are totally random, instead of having clear themes. The only things that are consistent is that there are never any people, and any complicated machines never work.”

“So that’s how they get modern looking boxes and cloth, but no actual tech?” I asked.

“Yep. The lower floors are apparently more often natural scenes, sometimes wildly distorted, but generally they hunt and collect plants and soil from there. The higher you go, the more wastelands and apocalyptic scenes show up. They’ve never managed to push past the seventh floor.”

Joe pushed the doors in front of us open, revealing a colorless haze.

“We have to step through at basically the same time for both of us to end up in the same instance.”

And so we did. We walked through the strange fog, and emerged onto a rocky overlook. There was a flash of light in the distance, forcing Joe and I to avert our eyes. After a few seconds, it had faded.

“And sometimes this happens,” Joe said, stepping back towards the hazy corridor that led back out of the tower, “Nope, fuck that. I’ll see you later.”

And then I was alone. There, on the horizon, was a little mushroom cloud. I watched it expand, toppling the distant buildings. There was another flash of light, this one larger, closer. I could feel my skin burning, cold and hot at the same time.

What was the point of being immortal, if you weren’t going to live a little?

I wrapped my power around myself, fully opening the way to my eldritch star. The ground around me liquified as I strode forward toward the next blast, this one even nearer.

Let’s see who would win. My little star, or an actual nuclear blast?