The border wall looked odd. Created as barriers between habitats to keep flora and fauna from escaping into different biospheres, they normally looked like a slow-moving waterfall held in a moment of stasis.

This…flickered. Like fish swimming and darting under the water. And based on present events, I doubted it was an artistic upgrade.

Picking up a stick, I assumed a fencer’s position, and like any intelligent ape-like descendant…poked at it. The stick entered the portal, but apart from making the shimmers move faster, passed through without any trouble.

Pee-Eep!

I looked down to find my semi-bald buddy eyeing the stick hungrily. In the short time we’d been together, I’d come to realise that keeping his belly satisfied was going to be a full-time job until I could find some way to allow him to graze without being eaten or left behind.

I patted his stout body through the jersey and smiled. “A bit ambitious for you, little guy. Let’s get you a nice, healthy leaf.” I dumped the stick and offered him a broad-leaf from my top pocket. I’d learned in the last few hours to keep a few ready to hand to prevent rustling-through-holding-bag delays.

The chick set upon it with the rabidity of the genuinely starving, pecking so hard the pain registered in my hand despite the lowered sensitivity in my haptic gloves.

Bloody hell.

I was going to have to jury-rig a bird feeder.

Dropping my bag, I fossicked through my trove until I chanced upon my favourite mug. Made of plasteel and sporting a large bowl with “Ugh, People” printed on its side, it was clearly ideal.

Tying the handle to my chest harness with a piece of string also fetched from my bag, I let it dangle close to the neck of the carrier and added another piece of string to secure it firmly and stop it from hitting me while I walked. Then I stuffed the bowl full of leaves and felt the chick’s attention shift from “Mum, what the fuck you doin’?” to “Mum, you’re a genius”. Within seconds the cup was swinging and tapping against my chest in a weirdly comforting way as the chick vigorously made in-roads into the packed cup.

Then a sparkle at the corner of my eye caught my attention. Which it would. Sparkles in any natural habitat are not exactly common except when around water, and the only water that should be in sight was the waterfall-barrier, shining from the opposite direction.

The unnatural effect was coming from a stick. No, not just a stick, the stick that I had used to scientifically examine the portal. A strange dusting of glitter appeared to be stuck to one end, and this seemed…glossier than the ‘handle’, as if it sported a brand new lick of varnish that encased the glitter.

Based on the evidence presented, I could only conclude that the portal had messed with it, changing its nature from pedestrian twig to souped-up fairy wand.

This was concerning. There was no other way to pass between habitats and I really, really needed to find help. But I didn’t know what the transition would do to me if I walked through. Turn me into a razzled-up My Little Pony rip-off? Transform me into a walking Midas? Or—more disturbing—dissolve my consciousness entirely? Maybe I would pass unchanged, but this seemed dangerously optimistic.

Back to the scientific method.

Using my stick in its time-tested manner [see above: poking] I jabbed a stone midway through the portal, then quickly retrieved it by tapping in the opposite direction.

The stone immediately split down the middle, one side black obsidian, the other grey, average silica. On closer inspection, the obsidian half contained a dense glittery highlight that seemed to permeate the entirety of the piece.

So all indications pointed to a probability of an extra sparkly side being added to my avatar. Not a real problem for a bard. Although it might give the redneck players pause before they laughed their asses off. And probably pummelled me to death as an afterthought.

Extra data was needed.

This time I found a large feather to dip into the portal. No change apart from a faint shimmer added along its length.

Finally, after easing a multitude of my personal items, plus sticks, rocks, branches, and another large feather through, I concluded that organic items seemed to weather it fine—albeit with an extra zazzle—and the inorganic fared…badly.

I grimaced at the ruined items from my personal belongings that lay at my feet, looking like they’d been dipped in fairy tar. Fork, plate, and rubik’s cube would have to be left to be reclaimed by the game world. A total loss as there was currently no way of replacing them.

Like food, items with an RFID tag could be brought into AoD, though not without restrictions. Nothing that created an electrical or mechanical field i.e. engines or modern tech could be brought in, and no items bigger than a small child. The small child was also out, as anything alive was on the no-go list as well. (One particularly brave or stupid guy surgically inserted a tag into his arm and got his mate to take him in as inventory. The arm made it, but not the rest of him, and he eventually went mad, convinced that his arm had disappeared, despite clearly being still attached. SharkBytes closed that loophole pretty smartly.)

I also couldn’t store my other inorganic items on this side of the barrier for safekeeping as anything introduced to the game via RFID disappeared if a player moved more than ten metres from it. I could only hope that the combination of preservation runes and organic leather would keep them intact during transition.

Because transition is what I was psyching myself up to do.

I took my time preparing, removing anything that was inorganic from my body or had parts that were inorganic. This was surprisingly a lot.

My leather harness, for example, had metal buckles and studs—not to mention a handy-dandy synthetic cup/bird-feeder. Off it went. My standard tabard seemed fine, though it billowed like a sail without the harness to hold it down. Boots—not sure, but not worth the risk. Off. Socks, grubby but organically so. Stay. The clip that struggled to hold my hair out of my eyes was synthetic and metal, so into my holding bag it went.

After repacking the rejected items I wrapped my little chick back into his jersey (he had managed to escape when I removed the harness) and against his objections, cradled him against my chest as I faced the sparkly menace of the portal.

Here goes. Challenge accepted.

I held my breath and dived right in.

——

Into chaos.

Colour. Sparkles. Activity. Noise. A giant Candy-Cane-Crush experience of sickening, dizzying proportions. Cartoon children brandishing lollipops as big as their heads…tiny pink ponies with small, squealing girls bouncing on their backs…boys tackling sad-looking teddy bears that reanimated in perfectly timed intervals…a miniature train covered in glowing stars and rainbows…. There was so much to see and be horrified by.

It was truly my vision of hell.

As a library assistant in a particularly family-centric neighbourhood the sight and sound of small children making noise and zooming about an enclosed area was not new to me, but it did make me freeze in some some sort of PTSD flashback. I hadn’t had my usual time to prepare myself.

Sharp pressure on my leg brought me back from the brink of losing it.

“Whatcha doin’ here? You’re big. And ugly. Big ugly people aren’t allowed in this room.” The voice came from a boy somewhere around my knee area and I looked down to meet a pair of narrowed, suspicious eyes. Evil eyes.

He poked again with what seemed to be the non-productive remnant of an already eaten lollipop. Its stick, in fact.

I leaned over and gently removed the offensive weapon from his possession.

I am not stealing candy from a baby. There isn’t even any candy left. I’m just—

“Waaaah!”

I gave it back, and instantly suffered another, harder prod to my knee. “You’re mean. I’m going to tell the addies on you.”

A lightbulb went off in my head. “Yes. Yes, you do that. My name is Arline Johnson and I’m currently stuck in a game called Age of Decep—“

“Dozzer!” a larger boy yelled, prompting the little demon in front of me to jerk his head up in recognition.

“Dozzer, look what Iii’ve got...” He waggled the decapitated head of what looked like Winnie the Pooh in a taunting fashion.

And psychologists wonder what prompts small adorables to turn into psychopaths. The answer is: they already are.

Dozzer made a small growl that turned into a blerk of rage and flung himself at the decapitator with commendable vigour. I could see a career in law enforcement in this kid’s future. He’d clearly gotten the drop on the bully. But as they made contact, the system sensed the violence and they disappeared from the game.

I tried a girl next but she seemed to have a limited vocabulary. “Pony!” she said and continued to say as I repeated my desperate story.

“Remember: Arline Johnson.”

“Pony?”

“No. Age. Of. Deception.’ I repeated it slowly, in the universal hope that slow equals easier to understand, before giving up to find a taller tot.

The tallest was a boy with spiked hair atop his cartoon head, building a fort out of candy floss and eating enough of its construction material to make the structure unfit for purpose.

“Excuse me?”

The boy turned a red stained mouth in my direction. (Honestly, it was so distinctive I didn’t notice any other features).

“Yeah?”

“I think you missed a spot,” I said, in the mistaken idea that making a joke was a sure-thing for buttering up little kids.

“Who the eff-ta-fah cares?”

The existence of profanity restrictions blocking subscriptions had meant the development of work-arounds for swearing in G-rated games.

Ah, young people. So innovative.

I tried a different tack.

“Look, Dora, Diego, whoever the fu—-“

“Uh, uh.” He waggled a red coated finger obnoxiously. “No bad words.” His voice dropped to a dramatic whisper. “Big Brother is listening.”

Well, at least he was more articulate than ‘Pony’ girl.

“My name is Arline Johnson,” I began.

“And I’m Peewee Herman,” smartass offered right back.

“My sympathies. I’m stuck in a game—“

“No you’re not. Kinderbear has stringent auto logout protocols.”

What was this kid—a mensa prodigy? Some kind of juvenile Doctor von Doom? “I don’t mean this game.”

His brow furrowed in confusion before being obscured by a cloud of candyfloss as big as his head. He practically inhaled the sickly pink mound, licking the edges of his mouth in a way that made me realise why the red was so well spread. “Whatcha mean?”

“I somehow travelled through a dodgy portal between the game I logged into and this one. Some kind of glitch. But I don’t know how long I’ve got before I’ll be sent back.”

“I’m surprised Kinderbear’s virus detection software hasn’t already cut the connection.”

Definitely a prodigy. “Can you tell your parents? Someone who can do something? The game is Age of—“

The toon world shuddered and dissolved mid-word, dumping me unceremoniously into the Australian Outback.

“—of Deception.” My bare arm touched the ground and reflexively spasmed away as the heat from the sun-baked earth seared my skin. “Damn.”

——

In a land far, far away a twenty year old toddler named p33w33herman logged out of his game. “Huh,” he said profoundly, and darted into the bathroom to throw up.

——

One thing AoD had no problems recreating was heat. Crippling, overwhelming heat.

Back in my flat in Christchurch I had no doubt the twitch suit was sucking up power greedily, trying to recreate blistering conditions on what was already a perfect summer day. Early users of the suits had thought they’d solved all their winter heating woes—until they received their next power bill and more economic models became desired.

Mine, as I explained earlier, was cheap. And old. Therefore the double-whammy of power voracity. (Why is that, by the way? Why are more energy efficient appliances always so much more expensive than the energy greedy? It just means that the people who have the money to buy them—and can afford a bit extra in their power bill—save money, while the rest of us schmucks with less to spend up-front end up paying through the nose forever.)

It also meant that the insistent little bar at the corner of my vision started climbing. I couldn’t stay here long. The moisture lost through sweating couldn’t be recycled, and the more water I used, the less time I had to get myself out of here.

I touched the bundle strapped to my chest for reassurance.

My own.

The little guy had weathered the portal experience better than I had, although not without some minor alterations. He’d shrunk a little—not much, just enough to make me have to readjust the carrier a smidge—and he’d gained a smart new striped feathered suit of yellow and black, with a slight shimmer that only showed when exposed to direct sunlight. He’d nodded off not long after our Aussie arrival and now whistle-snored contentedly in his fluffy papoose.

My own sparkle hadn’t materialised, thank god. Summit Entertainment would not be approaching me for the third Twilight remake.

After over an hour of walking across the hot sandy desert I was both miserable and relieved. Miserable because of the heat, and miserable because I had yet to rest. I was paranoid that the act of sitting would attract angry/hungry/opportunistic creepy and crawly things.

But I was both miserable and relieved because I hadn’t detected one single player in this whole messed-up place. Where once there had been hundreds, even thousands in its heyday, there remained only the game’s inbuilt fauna. No coarse laughter, no rogue griefers with their tags dimmed, and no PvP throw downs.

Though I did have an eerie feeling I was being followed. And who—or what—my follower was I hadn’t figured out yet.

So, yes. Not much good amongst the bad. The only actively positive thing I could say about the Australian habitat was that I wasn’t dead. Yet.

Inevitably, one second later, my foot caught in a tiny tuft of dead grass and I stumbled face-first into a dragon.

Frill extended, it hissed in challenge, loud enough that the chick against my chest peeped in question. Amazingly, this seemed to give the dragon pause, its impressive head display relaxing a little before it decided it still didn’t like me and opened its mouth wide to hiss again. A little bit of spit flew out and hit me on the neck.

Ew.

It appeared to have been created from the same genome as the iconic frilled lizard featured in many Australian nature documentaries; often filmed sway-running with head comically fixed into position. The real version wasn’t so colourful as the monster before me though, and certainly didn’t grow to this size.

And of course version 1.1 also didn’t have a lvl 16 marker bobbing above its head.

I skipped backward a little too quickly for my feathered friend who tumbled out of his carrier and into my hastily assembled arms. I lowered him to the ground in the hope he would flee if this went pear-shaped. The chick would hardly make a tempting meal for the big lizard.

The little guy made a strange thrumming noise in his throat that felt oddly soothing, and I suddenly remembered my class.

Get it together…bard.

I slowly loosened my instrument, not wanting to startle the creature into any hasty decisions, and strummed the first chords of Banshee Shriek.

“La-la-laaaaa…”

I held the last note, its level of discord rising with every second, as a general migration of bugs, birds—and even a mega koala that I hadn’t noticed in the trees—exited at their best speed.

Except for the dragon. It closed its eyes in pain but endured the Shriek, refusing to move. I held the note nonetheless as it was my best weapon and wouldn’t be able to be used again for another hour. But it still wasn’t budging.

Faltering for lack of breath, and hoping I’d have time for the flee option in my arsenal, I prepared to end the note and begin a new song.

Until I felt its power boosted by a throaty booming hum.

Accompaniment skill activated!

+20% to all active skills!

50 XP awarded!

The little guy was standing tall, his neck stretched up and singing the most goddawful harmony a bird could produce.

Hommm-bobba-hooommm.

It was too much for the lizard. Hissing one last spittle of defiance and spinning quickly, it waddle-lurched away, tail lashing behind it with the speed of a whip. A regular reptilian Indiana Jones.

Letting go of the note, I sucked in a breath, almost collapsing with relief.

Except I heard another hiss, a different sort of hiss, one that even someone who hadn’t heard it IRL could readily identify.

A snake. It was behind me so I didn’t know what breed of demon it was, but I doubted the programmers had bothered with anything but the most venomous or squeezy varieties.

My bard abilities were useless in this situation. Snakes—at least in the AoD world—don’t ‘hear’ as most animals do, they primarily feel vibrations through the ground, and are therefore not as susceptible to aural attacks. The trembling of so many animals scuttling away from the area had no doubt pissed it off mightily, and it had turned on the one being still here.

Me.

I stayed as still as possible in the forlorn hope that it would consider me a rock formation and move on. IRL the body produces heat and smell and a thudding heartbeat that give the game away, but my avatar had no such tells.

I just had to not move.

In another universe a blowfly buzzzed. And landed on my hap mask.

As any mammal so afflicted, my nose IRL scrunched as it attempted to dislodge the offending pest, and my right hand jerked reflexively.

An action that was recreated in the virtual world.

I felt the snake move and spun to face it (stupid I know, I should have tried running), but before I completed the movement a ball of yellow and black fluff exploded upwards and stomped its taloned feet hard on the serpent’s…neck?…pinning it down as a sharp beak stabbed at its exposed throat. Within seconds, the fledgling had killed the snake.

We were beyond fortunate that the snake proved to be only lvl 2. Though still lethal if it had struck, it had none of the defensive armour or spit-based range attacks of higher-level snakes in this habitat.

Nonetheless, the chick was certainly proving a worthy companion. Less than a day in and he was already saving my ass. Twice.

I really need to find a cool name for this guy, I thought. Gung-ho, maybe, or perhaps Yippe-Kai-ye of mother-fucking fame.

I reached into my holding bag for some of the fuschia flowers, figuring that he’d earned a slightly unhealthy treat, but looked up to discover that my little Gung-ho had other food in mind. He’d straddled his kill and was trying to stuff it down his throat like an earthworm, despite it being nearly twice his width.

“‘You’re a better man than I, Gunga Din,’” I quoted, admiring his ambition. As an experienced amateur in the field of binge eating, even I wouldn’t have attempted such a feat of greed.

He peep/honked in frustration, a sound not dissimilar to a boy experiencing the first signs of puberty, and I wondered if my guy was older than I’d thought. He certainly seemed to have regained all of his original weight, and his feathers had a brown tinge I hadn’t seen before. Maybe using his skills accelerated his growth?

I gingerly picked up the snake, and since he seemed so keen to devour it, suppressed my repugnance for long enough to gut and dismember it in long, thin lengths that would be easy for Gunga to swallow. He jostled insistently against me as I worked, slicing my hand with his talons when he mistook my movements for a reanimation miracle and pounced upon the piece of carcass I was holding.

Talon Strike!

You take -1 damage to health pts!

Regeneration in 5 seconds!

I snatched my finger to my mouth and…didn’t suck on it. I’d been chopping up snake meat, for god’s sake. I retrieved a wet wipe from my bag instead.

First aid ‘wet wipe’ applied!

Your boo-boo has been fixed!

Full health now restored!

Boo-boo?

My brows furrowed in such a way that would have brought up the menu had it been available. The AoD AI had never sounded particularly…human…in all its previous messages. I hoped it wasn’t symptomatic of more serious problems occurring within the game. Losing the AI would be catastrophic.

In the meantime, Gunga had stuffed himself with the butchered meat and looked in danger of overbalancing onto his beak as his eyes closed sleepily.

I scooped him up into his carrier before he could, then looked up as I felt a wonderful cooling shadow fall over me.

A shadow that coalesced into a man. A man with a big spear, painted stripes on most of his body, and fuzzy hair to rival my own. An aborigine.

One of the gentle leprechauns of AoD, they were notoriously difficult to find, even harder to catch, and as such prized by the heavy-breathers as a trophy. To interact with these elusive NPCs was rumoured to be beneficial to your Wisdom stats, as they would answer truthfully to any questions asked.

(In contrast, the Maori warrior NPCs in the NZ habitat had the tendency to split the head open of any encroaching player if they had insufficient Charisma, but once appeased were generous in trading fresh food and information. I hadn’t heard of anyone meeting whatever the criteria was for the native NPCs of North America. Bison riding had become a popular sport, which pissed them off no end. Just venturing across the plains was liable to get you skewered with enough arrows to imitate a hedgehog.)

“Um. Hi?”

His expressionless features suddenly cracked, revealing an unexpectedly sweet smile. “You no fight?”

“Actually, I’m more of a pacifist.”

“Blood on your hands maybe say other.”

I looked down at the snake guts still lingering on my fingers and quickly wiped them on my tabard. “Gunga Din fighter, not me. He, um, brave warrior bird. Save me from snake.” I indicated both the bird and the small amount of meat that wasn’t in his belly.

The man gave a glottal stop that sounded like admiration. “Cassowary brave, fierce hunters. Dreaming god approve.”

“It’s actually a moa from across, the um, ocean, back thataway.” I gestured vaguely in the portal’s direction.

He laughed, a rumbling sound that seemed to come straight from his toes. “That cassowary. Come. Show.” He tapped his spear against the ground and pointed at a patch of greenery far off in the distance.

“Ah….No thanks. I’ll take your word for it.” Poor guy probably didn’t have the dataset to distinguish a species not from his own biosphere.

“Come. Show,” he said more insistently. A frown suddenly clouded his features and I remembered that I’d just expressed my lack of aggressiveness to a man with a pointy stick whom I was pretty sure was programmed in how to use it. Besides, I was curious.

Using some of the broad leaf moa food to wrap the snake meat burrito-style, I packed it in my bag and headed out with my new friend, who’d set out at a slow jog.

I reluctantly followed his example.

My stasis health bar, already low, began to head toward orange at a heightened speed. I really needed to find a cooler, less demanding climate soon. At least the green that we were heading for promised shade and a refill to my water supplies.

Jogging was not in either my or my avatar’s exercise regime and my lungs soon produced a whine that had my companion’s eyebrows climbing. It didn’t make him slow his pace, though. He continued at a steady rate that I suspected he could maintain till he dropped down dead of old age. If he wasn’t an NPC, of course. As a virtual character he would continue unchanged until nobody was around to interact with and the GMs shut the game down.

Shut the game down.

Now that was a scary thought. Could that be what was happening? Had the GMs at SharkBytes decided it made no financial sense to continue and taken it offline?

I staggered to a stop as the full ramifications hit me.

I might just have participated in my own demise. The tiny bundle of bootlegged text I had added to my stasis software looped the code that prevented a person from playing longer than four hours consecutively. That limitation in the software had originally been put in place when concerns about lack of exercise and mental exposure to the real world had made game makers leery about law suits.

I had just wanted to give my body a rest it badly needed and binge-read my favourite ebooks for more hours than any brain reasonably had a right to. But unfortunately, it seemed that the code might also have bypassed the other safety feature entered into the stasis equipment’s software: the automatic logout of any player within a game when network connection was lost.

The aboriginal NPC suddenly froze mid-step, wavered a little, and appeared abruptly as an exact duplicate mid-run behind his clone-donor.

The game was glitching again. And this time, far from annoying, it terrified me. For if the game didn’t stabilise and let me log out, I would in all likelihood die.