This is the life.

I scratched my nose with the lyre's head and wondered if a fly was taking liberties with my face in real life. The hammock swayed with the motion, threatening to dump my ass into the lush ferns bordering my nest.

Not that it would have put me in any danger. Not only would it have been a soft landing, but the pain levels in Age of Deception were among the lowest of any VMORPG system ever released. It was one of the reasons why it’s popularity tanked when more realistic games were released. Players wanted an immersive experience in addition to better graphics and less lag.

Personally, I thought it was all a heap of shit. If I wanted pain I just needed to go to my workplace. Library work, contrary to popular opinion, was no cake walk.

A superstitious, loyalist majority of ageing rate payers kept print books alive in this age of digital superiority, citing the power of the original medium as some kind of holy relic. This meant actual bodies were required to maintain the collection; actual bodies expected to stand for seven hours a day, and answer politely to dependent, often hostile customers.

AoD provided a sanctuary, a place of low-conflict, low-pain—and low-people contact. And as I had done a little fiddling with my personal stasis software, I could be pampered 24/7 in an open world, able to travel quickly to NPC-run taverns, massage facilities (no happy endings thanks to parental controls), and any environmental setting of my choice. All while my real body lay lifeless in a haptic-lined stasis suit in the tiniest, blandest apartment in the biggest, blandest apartment block in Christchurch, New Zealand.

With the most persistent fucking blowfly in the country. I waved the lyre around my nose again and grimaced as lag stutter created a rainbow blur.

Lags, glitching, and crashes had become common in the last few days, its makers abandoning the game as they worked on their new, much anticipated super VMORPG due to be released next week.

I frowned as a red popup startled my eyes before I automatically swiped it away. Fucking popups. Ever since the game had started to lose popularity SharkBytes Gameworld had sold its soul to Big Commerce in the form of advertisements, trying to squeeze out its last coins. (And thereby hastening its demise.)

I found it remarkably similar to the fly I’d waved away earlier. A nuisance that had started to make me wonder if paying a little extra for a new game that boasted a no-ad experience might not be a bad idea. My lack of social life was at least of benefit to my pocketbook, even if a librarian’s pay was a joke.

Another pop-up.

[Swipe]

Pop—

[Swipe]

Bastards.

An annoying niggle started in my brain. They weren’t usually this incessant. Even SharkBytes weren’t stupid enough to piss off their few remaining loyal customers.

I wonder what that message was.

I raised an eyebrow to bring up the game menu—another feature that had raised complaints from the non-brow-dexterous—and found it greyed out.

Eh? That’s weird.

I waggled my brows in a way that had sparked hilarity among vid bloggers everywhere. It had even surpassed the wii’s original controller as a geek’s favourite running joke.

Nothing.

I browed left again more insistently, but the menu refused to open.

Close by—yet an Age away—my body, encased in its twitch-tech suit, began to sweat.

I. Can’t. Fucking. Log. Out.

A spurt of panic dumped adrenaline into my system, and the suit—cheapest on the market—struggled to cope with the added demands. A bar appeared in my bottom vision, a tiny suggestion to calm the fuck down.

Okay, what am I worried about? The GMs will soon correct the fault. You weren’t going to log out any time soon anyway. Nothing to worry about.

Except—are they paying any attention? My mind’s eye helpfully provided a vision of an office with a single monitor, and a single tech playing solitaire on the single computer dedicated to keeping track of their least paying game.

Shit.

I would have to go out into the wider AoD world and find someone to let the administrators know about my predicament.

A world where Player vs Player proponents now made up the majority of its population. As the strictures and oversight controlling random attacks had relaxed, many people now logged on solely to beat each other to a pulp in unregulated grudge matches. They were at least easy enough to avoid, a red symbol tracking their movements and warning bleeps sounding when within a click of their presence, but they made for bad neighbours.

I would have to find a sympathetic ear among the rednecks and cybertrolls that I generally avoided like the plague (a horrible death that only an obscenely expensive vaccine-potion can protect you from).

I eased myself to the edge of my hammock and barely saved myself from face-planting into a fern bush. Two years in this fucked-up game and I still can’t figure out the best way to exit this bloody thing.

Mind you, I wasn’t the most graceful individual in any setting. A lack of co-ordination was one of the reasons I chose the bard class. Another was a lessening of the need for conflict resolution—with my fists that is. Contrary to logic, I had no singing ability, but as a Discord Bard I had no need of one. The Banshee Shriek skill alone could scatter anyone below my level of 18 and Sound Gives You Wings ability allowed me to flee before anyone over that. And as the only player of the class I gained +5% experience points.

Pretty good, you might say. But as both abilities had an hour cooldown period, I didn’t use them all that much. I hadn’t levelled up in over a month.

Which made approaching meatheads somewhat unpalatable. Nevertheless, as the minutes ticked by with no change in the status of my menu, I began to prepare to head out.

I detached the hammock from the two fern trees it was hanging from and packed it into my bag of holding. Then I inserted my emergency supplies: virtual Twisties, Belgian chocolates, shovel, axe, M&Ms, pillow, blanket, Rubik’s Cube, song book, fire pellets, string, hand wipes, bucket, dishes, perfume, lighter, cutlery, pot, duct tape, butcher’s knife, footstool, foot spa, recliner…just the essential supplies.

A good bag of holding was necessary to a person’s comfort and continued well-being in any VRPG. I had splashed out on the deluxe 100 slot purse within a week of creating my character, even before upgrading my lyre from its most basic model.

Food was thankfully a simple and bloodless matter (I had no desire to run down helpless little bunnies, and my most powerful Banshee skill made prey run away from me—not exactly the best way to catch a meal).

A player had merely to be within a preset distance of packaged food items that contained an RFID micro-dot when logging in to add them into their inventory. My limit was a pathetic thirty centimetres, and new suit models had a maximum expanded capacity of two metres—though I’d heard that there was a five metre model that was due to be released in the next week or so. Even empty packaging transformed into actual food in the game world, a fact that had caused a spike in dumpster diving.

TradeOne had even set up a category specifically for the gaming market. It proved lucrative; a plastic container that originally held oysters could net the seller 50% of its original purchase price. You had to be wary of scammers, though. A tag was single-use only.

Speaking of which, that raised a concern. If I spent too long in the game I ran the very real risk of dying of hunger while lying amongst a feast. The suit could recycle water from urine—not a circumstance I had ever courted, though I’d heard some hardcore gamers had no problem with it—but even that resource wasn’t infinite. The human body would eventually dehydrate or starve, whichever came first, though how much time I had I didn’t know.

Maybe a week? About a month in the game world. It sounded a little high to me but I’d take it.

No menu equalled no access to the Entertainment District; the section of the game that housed and provided access to bars, salons and other urban comforts.

This restricted me to the environmental, the biggest part of ABE, and the most dangerous.

And, unfortunately, I knew exactly where I needed to go.