CHAPTER THREE

For the second time that morning James awoke with a start. Around him, the room was dark and quiet. His mind still a little fuzzy with sleep, he thought to himself “Where am I ? Am I in the game ?. Why is it so dark ? I can’t see a damn thing.” Confusion clouded his reasoning and he started to panic slightly. Slowly, as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw numbers glowing with a greenish tint floating in the air to the right of where he lay. Reaching out towards these floating numbers his hand bumped into something, jamming the tip of his middle finger back into the palm of his hand. In reflex, he pulled the hand back, but then carefully reached out again until his fingertips met the resistance he had felt before. Fumbling about the object, he used his fingers to trace out the shape of the object he had touched, then suddenly realized why it felt so terribly familiar. It was his bedside clock and it was displaying the time as being ten twenty-seven. He laughed in a slight barking way, as he realized that he was still at home, in his bed, and had only been dreaming about being in the game. Memories that he had laid down for a bit after contacting his parents, to let them know he was going to be unavailable for a couple of weeks, surfaced. He must have nodded off without realizing it. “Ah, well, the sleep would have done me some good”, he thought.

Getting up, he spent a few minutes in the bathroom refreshing himself by splashing water onto his face. After drying off he started to feel a little bit more normal, then made his way down towards the lounge room and the Pod, but just before getting there, he changed his and veered towards the kitchen instead. A coffee and something to eat would probably be the best thing for him before he got into the pod, he thought.

After preparing everything, he sat down to drink his coffee and mentally go over what he knew about the game after reading the manual. The first thing he would need to do when he gets in the pod is to set up his game character, but the manual didn’t give any hints or advice on this other than to follow the prompts. Once his character was ready he would be allowed to access the training zone, where a teacher of some sort would train him on the basics of the game. Until he had passed the training he wouldn’t be able to enter Haven. After that, it was all up to him on what he wanted to do. Again, the manual advised that this process would take a couple of hours. He looked up at the kitchen clock, it was now about quarter past eleven. He rubbed his hands together in anticipation, but knew he had a few things he needed to do before he started playing. If I’m going to stay in the pod for at least a week, I need to make sure that everything around the house switched off or secure. Don’t want to come back later to find the foods gone off, or the house burned down from the kettle left plugged in.

He spend the next fifteen minutes wandering about his small house checking everything, as well as unplugging or switching off unnecessary appliances until he felt satisfied he hadn’t forgotten anything, then returned to the kitchen. Sitting down, he had another coffee, then spend a couple of minutes in the toilet, again, as advised by the manual. Finally the moment had arrived and he stood in the living room next to the pod, just looking at it. He couldn’t help but run his hand over the smooth surface again, feeling the cool metal slide smoothly beneath his fingertips. After a couple of seconds he slid his hand down the side to the button that opened the pod, hesitating only slightly, then continued on to push it in.

The mirrored egg split in half along its horizontal circumference and slowly and smoothly opened, hinged on the side that was facing the wall. It reminded him of an oyster, the two halves somehow reminiscent of the shells parting to allow access to the goodness within. Inside, it seemed to be lined with a cream colored quilted surface, and he couldn’t help himself from reached in and placing one hand onto the padding. It felt silky to his touch before giving way beneath the pressure he put onto it, feeling a lot like one of those memory foam mattresses. Withdrawing the hand, he watched as the dimple that his pressure had put in it, slowly returned back slowly to its original unflawed state.

The manual had informed him that when entering the pod a person should only be wearing shorts with no top, as various sensors set in the padding needed unimpeded access to the various parts of the body they required. Already dressed in such a fashion James lifted one leg and slid himself into the pod, positioning himself comfortably, with his head braced on a raised pillowed section with an indentation in it, obviously to support the neck and head while lying supine. Reaching across his chest, he unclipped a cuff, resembling those that are usually found as part of a sphygmomanometer, from the side of the pod and placed it on his left arm above his elbow. It was attached by two lengths of tubing to the side of the pod, and an experimental squeeze on one of the tubes gave James the impression it contained a cable of some type. He lay there for some moments, everything done as advised in the manual, except for the closing of the top half of the pod. The butterflies in his stomach started up again and he was sure that his palms were sweating profusely as well, so he nervously scrubbed them against his shorts. He located the close button that was set in the raised top half, and positioned one finger over it, closed his eyes and pressed down firmly on the button.

After a brief moment of waiting, he opened his eyes to find that the top of the pod had closed and the darkness inside the pod was total. Blinking a few times didn’t seem to make any difference and he would have tried waving a hand in front of his face to see if he could see that, but as the manual told him it was best to lay still once inside, so he held back on that urge. In the enclosed space, the only noise that he could hear was the sound of his own breathing.

Suddenly on his left arm, the one on which he had placed the cuff, he felt a slight prickling sensation, almost ticklish in intensity, followed by a feeling of coldness spreading out from that point. He tried to turn his head to look towards where the cuff lay around his arm but his head suddenly seemed to be leaden and the effort of trying to turn it caused a spinning sensation to overcome him. It felt a lot like that time he had drank way too much then lay down on his bed. It was like the world was spinning around his helpless and unresponsive body, but the expected nausea hadn’t put in an appearance. Slowly, against all his efforts to stop them, his eyes started to close, bit by bit, and the last thing he remembered was thinking that he hoped he wasn’t going to soil himself.

Slowly he came back to himself, as if his mind and thoughts were emerging from the sea of mist that filled his head. The darkness remained absolute and movement still seemed to be denied to him. In fact, it felt a lot more like he had nothing that he could move, rather than something was stopping him from being able to move, there was no sense of feeling, no body presence, nothing at all. It was as if he was a mind without a body, a mind that was stored in an extremely dark box.

Then, without any kind of warning, the darkness that blocked his sight was overlaid with blindingly harsh orange-yellow words.

Welcome to Haven

It had been determined that this is your first entry into Haven

Is this correct ?

YES / NO

James saw the words, and understood fully what he was supposed to do, but was a bit puzzled on how he could do it, trying to raise a hand to select the right option didn’t accomplish anything. He didn’t seem to have any limbs to control, he still couldn’t feel the presence of any of them. He thought about it for a bit and realized the only thing he had control over was his mind and thoughts… so logically he should try to use his mind to make his selection. He concentrated hard on the YES option , but to no avail. He tried to verbalize his choice, but he found that had no voice. The whole thing seemed impossible, and it looked like he would be stuck here looking at these words until his month of pod time elapsed and he was automatically returned to real life. Mentally, he slumped back in defeat. After a wait of about three minutes, more lines of text appeared below those already displayed in front of him.

If you are uncertain of how to make your choice, concentrate your sight on the option you would like to make, and state that option mentally to yourself.

Thank bleeding hell for that, he thought to himself, I should have realized that. This choice operation is something that really should have been explained in the manual. He returned his sight back onto the YES option, then thought YES to himself. It must have worked, for all of the writing faded away. More text appeared to replace it.

You have chosen the YES option. Is this the option you wanted to select ?

YES / NO

James repeated his choice of the YES option again. He also thought to himself that it was good to see that they double checked the choice selection here, especially for the new users of the pods. He could see how easy it would have been to inadvertently make a mistake. Just like the time before, the text before him was erased and replaced with fresh text.

Connecting to Holobyne Haven AI……….connected.

Detecting registered user……………done.

Configuring Pod to registered user.(James Carter)…………configured.

Download and installing latest firmware…………………………..failed.

Detect BioPod Manufacture Version……………………..done.

BioPod Version 2.1534 beta…. Current firmware incompatible

Search for Compatable Firmware………………………done.

Installing Firmware v2.01276a………………….done.

All Tasks Completed.

Enjoy your time within Haven, James Carter

Time remaining in this session….717 hours 32 minutes 16 second

What ? Two and a half hours had already expired from his 30 days ? I have been in this pod for two and a half hours ? No way. I’ve only been in here for twenty minutes at the most. The darkness that surrounded him slowly brightened until everything around him was a light grey. In front of him another line of text floated, this time in dark blue.

Enter Haven ?

YES / NO (Log out of Pod)

James was confused, he was supposed to create his character before he entered the game, yet the pod hadnt asked him anything about this process. How could he enter the game without a character ? Ah well, James mused, maybe they have changed the process with this version of the Pod and it’ll happen later. He then returned his attention back to the floating instruction. Making his choice by glancing at the YES option and thinking about it, the words slowly faded into the background. Now what happens ? he wondered. A few seconds later he noticed that the grey had started to boil about, as if being agitated by some other influence, like dark rainclouds roiling about the sky, slowly evaporating. It wasn’t long before all the grey mist had disappeared, leaving him looking at a large brightly lit space about the size of a school’s gymnasium. The perimeter of this area was lined with roughly hewn wood planks, the ground covered with what appeared to be coarse sand. He stood there, appreciating the view, amazed at the quality of the graphics, so realistic. Squatting down, he reached out and scraped up a handful of the sand, feeling the roughness of the grains as they gathered in his palm. As he let the sand slide through his fingers back to the ground, he was struck by the realization that he could feel each grain against his skin, individually and slightly sensual. He stood up again and scrubbed his hands together to remove the grains that remained stuck to his skin, seeing them fall, only to be blown off their downward path by the slight breeze that blew through the area. Sniffing, he found the air smelled much like a summers day at the beach that he had once visited, many years ago when he was only a small child, and he thought he could almost taste the salt on his tongue. He licked his lips, only to gain the bitter tang of brine within in his mouth. The realism on display was unbelievable, it was like he was really here, in person, and not just mentally.

Touch, taste and smell, he thought, all of them so realistic and without any discernible difference from reality. This was much more than he had expected, much, much more than he thought was possible. He had played many of the modern virtual games around, even if they didn’t have anything like the pod to access them, and while all of them had fairly advanced graphics, you could still see the pixilation within them. Haven, it seemed, had somehow managed to not only create graphics that were indistinguishable from reality, they also had the added bonus of touch, taste and smell, again all but indistinguishable from the real thing, as well as being accurate on what they were replicating so far.

While he was contemplating the effects of his physical experiences so far, another one made itself apparent to him. The space around him started to grow brighter and he felt a gradual warmth upon his skin. Looking up he noticed there was no roof above him, the walls that surrounded the area he was standing in rising up to a height of about twenty five foot. Above the top of the walls was a brilliant blue sky. Small puffs of clouds drifted slowly from right to left, beams of sunlight, reflecting off motes of dust floating in the air, crept slowly down the wall that was behind him. It was this sunlight that was warming his skin up as the light bathed him. He thrust both of his arms straight out from his sides, and facing upwards, eyes closed, just stood there and basked in the warmth. This part of his game experience, he decided while standing there, was not the same as in the real world. In real life, the airborn detritius from centuries of technological development had permeated the air with an unpleasant aroma, and sunlight, even on the brightest of days, was greatly diffused by pollution before it reached the ground. This sunlight was far better than the real one.

“Hold on a minute” he suddenly muttered to himself, frowning as a thought entered his mind. Lowering his arms, he took a look around again. “If this is the training zone, and I am now in the gameworld, then what the hell happened to setting up my character, and where is this teacher that’s supposed to be here ?” From behind him he heard the noise of sand being scuffed around, as if someone was dragging their feet across the ground rather than lifting their feet.