Jane accelerated her ground vehicle, swerving back and forth in a futile attempt to keep to the center of the narrow road. The controls were either too sensitive or they had a built-in delay, making it almost impossible not to overcompensate. This wasn’t a game. It was a torture device. She should have known it would be unplayable based on how inexpensive it was.

The road ahead came to an abrupt end. She tried to decelerate, but there wasn’t time. Her vehicle flew off the road, arching across a dizzying chasm only to plunge thousands of feet into an explosion of digital stars.

“It’s impossible!” She disconnected from the simulation and shook the rage from her manipulators. Earthers were twisted, presapient, uncultured masochists. Mother had wasted all those resources, all that time. She had built up their expectations for nothing.

Fortunately, she didn’t have that much fame invested in the game. Maybe a historical mating simulation game would be better. Ubiquity had been publishing some interesting experience feeds from one of the less known simulations and had up-famed over three orders of magnitude as a result. She checked the listings and found a used starter character for only five hundred. It would probably launch itself from a cliff and expire in an explosion of digital stars, but at least it would be better than swerving back and forth down a road.

She checked to see how much fame she had in her account and recoiled. One second, two seconds… It took three full seconds for her to recover from her cognitive jitters. She had over twenty-two thousand fame in her account. Where had that come from? She’d had less than three thousand just a few hours ago.

She checked the boards and found her name coming up over and over in connection with Is-To-Be’s latest experience feed. Dread chilled her to the core. Had Is-To-Be published her driving disasters? Surely, he had better things to do that play the lurker in a cheap vehicle game. He was ranked number three in Experience Arts. The vehicle game barely qualified as an experience, much less an art.

She plugged into his latest feed and recoiled again. Featured in his feed, her ten-thousand-fame Jane character was fighting not one, but two terrifyingly large monsters. She looked on, mesmerized, as Jane not only fought them, but defeated them—with only a little help from Is-To-Be and a few minor players. She popped out of that experience and plugged into the experience artist’s penultimate feed. At first it didn’t seem relevant. Is-To-Be’s character was in the middle of an interview with a couple of native NPCs when he was conscripted into the Intersys General’s army. The use of constraints was a bit shocking, but not nearly enough to justify all the hype. What did people expect? Once The General entered the game, of course the local players would be conscripted. Did they think The General would enter the game as a second tier character?

The experience played out like a philosophy lecture: establishing alliances with the other conscripts based on their shared experience, discussing forced military conscription with 82-Ranked Military Strategist Modulus, interviewing 2-Ranked Xenobiologist Infusion while she conducted physiology experiments on her character’s body… Jane was about to tunnel ahead when the cart to which they’d been chained stopped to allow the soldiers to conscript a pair of characters hiding behind some sparse vegetation.

It was her character and his exotic mate: Alf and Blix.

No… Jane shuddered, momentarily overwhelmed increasingly worse premonitions.

But it turned out to be even worse than she’d thought. Alf had fought The General’s soldiers. Not just fought, he had injured them and stolen their weapons. It was a declaration of war!

No, no, no… She watched in growing horror as he chased the soldiers away and stole the entire cart—including The General’s conscripts. And then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, he and his exotic mate convinced the others to join with them in their treason. It was suicide. Militarily, socially, emotionally, eudaimonially, logically… Anyway she looked at it, she was in for an eternity of trouble.

She plugged back into the EMFRPG, transition shuddering several seconds until she managed to transition her equilibrium. Her character was lying on the ground at the top of a high bluff. He was looking out across a green and blue valley. Beneath him, an army was working its way up a winding trail. She was too stunned for words. That was The General’s army. There had to be almost one hundred soldiers. What was Alf thinking?

“Explain again how I can be a species that does not exist.” A pointy-eared female lay pressed against Alf’s side. Based on his elevated heard rate and difficulty breathing, the female was making him extremely nervous.

“I’ll say it one more time. Back. Off.” The exotic native NPC’s voice sounded at Alf’s left flank. “If those guys see us, we’re dead. This is a stakeout, not a biology lecture.”

“Is my presence threatening to you?” the strange woman said. “Fascinating. Might I ask whether this a display of courtship competition or mated-pair territorialism?”

“This is a display of I’m-going-to-throw-you-off-this-cliff-if-you-don’t-shut-up ism.”

“Hey, guys…” Alf said. “We’re trying to figure out how to defeat the big scary enemy, remember?”

Jane had heard enough. “The General is supposed to be our commander, not our enemy!” she said. “What were you trying to accomplish? You were supposed to gain a strategic advantage over the competition—not annihilate my investment.”

“Where have you been?” Alf demanded—as if she were his character and not the other way around.

“I gave you fifty-seven hours to prove yourself.” Somehow she managed to rein in her temper. “That’s nine hours more than you asked for. And this is how you repay my generosity? You provoke a war with the Intersys General? What were you thinking?”

“I thought you wanted to win,” he said. “How can I win if I subordinate myself to another player?”

“You can’t. Once The General joined the game as your king, winning was never an option.”

“That shows how little you know about roleplaying games. Winning is always an option, if you’re clever enough.”

“Is that Jane?” The exotic’s voice. “I want to talk to her.” Alf turned until Jane’s vision was completely dominated by the exotic’s asymmetrical face. “Hello, Jane? Check Alf’s stats. He’s level five now, and your people still haven’t figured out what that even means. I guarantee that in five days, we’ll have the whole kingdom in an uproar. We’ll decimate the king’s army without fighting a single battle.”

“The probability of that outcome is so infinitesimally small one might as well label it impossible.” Alf repeated her message for the exotic.

“Everything seems impossible if you don’t understand the mechanism,” Exotic replied. “Give us five days, one hundred and twenty hours, and then tell me it’s impossible.”

“Jane, where were you all this time?” Alf interrupted. “I asked your opinion several times, but you never answered.”

“You’re not the only game I’m invested in,” Jane said with a dignified huff. “I am an important individual with many demands upon my time. The only reason I learned of your self-defeating antics was that I happened to come across one of Is-To-Be’s feeds.”

“Wait… Who’s to be?”

“One of the players you coerced into treason. His earth-character is Abraham.”

“Abraham’s been publishing feeds?” Alf scooted away from the ledge. “Everybody, listen up!” he shouted. “The King’s army knows where we are. We need to evacuate the area. Now! If you’re publishing any of this, stop immediately. You’re going to get us all killed.”

“Unbelievable.” Jane didn’t know whether to mock or mourn. “Now you worry?”

“Can’t talk now.” Alf ran through a thicket of dense vegetation. “I’ve got a war to win.”