1

Harper heard the banging at her door, but she chose to ignore it. After working all week at the subway, this was her one day off. The game was Nuclear Nights, and there was money to be made. A lot of money. It surprised her how many people signed up for these elite gaming tournaments with absolutely no hope of winning. Meanwhile, the pot kept building, and since the government wasn’t forgiving student debt anytime soon, Harper continued playing.

IID wires snaked from her gaming chair to the twenty inputs on her body. Some were nestled in her shoulder-length brown hair, others were buried under her clothes. Her game screen lay somewhere between her brain’s frontal and occipital lobe, rendering game visors obsolete.

She took out the veteran players first, allowing the newbies to fight among themselves. Just two veteran players remained. After that, the noobs would be easy pickings. Harper pressed a button on the side of her earpiece. “Silo, you wanna team up?” she asked, reclining in her gaming chair.

“Team up? Haha. Yeah, right. In your dreams.”

“Come on, man. Bigfoot has got you overpowered. Let’s join forces and take him out.” Harper grinned. “Then you and I can square off for the pot. What do you say?”

Silo silently contemplated the offer. Harper knew him as an English dude living in Liverpool. Nice guy. More importantly, another college grad in need of money. “Okay, you’re on,” he replied.

“Good choice, Silo.”

They turned their plasma beams onto Bigfoot as Harper heard more banging on her door. What is going on? she wondered. Is that—

Her thoughts were interrupted by Bigfoot. “Hasta, vat are yoo doing? Let’s yoo and I team up,” he pleaded.

Hasta was her name on Nuclear Nights. It was short for her avatar name: Hasta La Vista Baby, a pop culture reference that hardly anyone got anymore. “Sorry, Bigfoot. I got bills to pay.”

“No!” Bigfoot cried. Bigfoot was short for Bigfoot Bjorn, a single dad living in Seattle, trying to make ends meet like everyone else.

“This one’s for you, Megan,” she said. Megan had been her sister for twelve years. They loved art and had grown up wanting to be graphic designers. But only Harper would make it to college. Megan was diagnosed with cancer and the disease took her life one year later. “For my baby sister,” Harper said thickly.

As Bigfoot’s hit points depleted now, she knew it was time to gear up for Silo. After she won the pot, she’d donate twenty percent to the American Cancer Society as usual and keep the rest for her bills.

A loud splintering noise drowned out her game audio, and before Harper could react, a pair of cold hands started pulling the IIDs from her body. Harper spun around and saw a female police officer leaning over her. The officer reached for the wires buried beneath her shirt. She pushed the police officer away. “Get your grubby hands off of me,” she shouted. “I can pull these off myself, now that you have completely ruined my game.”

The officer backed off.

As Harper removed her IIDs, she looked at her apartment door. The lock was busted, and the door was hanging askew. A man in a business suit stood nearby, holding a crowbar. “Hey! I’m going to have to pay for that damage,” she yelled. “What the hell?”

The man in a suit raised the crowbar like a weapon. “We will take care of that,” he said dismissively. “Are you Harper Benson?”

Harper felt a shiver crawl down her skin. She studied the two strangers standing in her apartment. They looked angry and impatient.

“Are you Harper Benson?” Business Suit asked, louder this time.

She gulped. “Um, yes.”

He smiled at her. “Then we have an offer for you.”

2

Business Suit sat on Harper’s couch, next to her, while the police officer tried to pry her door back into place. He gazed from the woman back to Harper. “That woman knows nothing about what we will discuss, and it must remain that way,” he whispered close to her ear.

Harper shrugged. “Okay.”

The man removed a folded letter from the inside of his suit jacket and handed it to Harper. “Here is what we are offering you,” he said.

Harper gazed at the letter, and her jaw dropped. Beneath the Cloud Nine emblem was a generous retirement pension. She gaped at the man, who just nodded. “Oh my god,” she whispered as she started to feel both giddy and light-headed. At the same time, it scared her. “What… what is it you want me to do for this?”

The man shook his head and held up the palm of his hand. “We are offering you a choice,” he said. “You can have the pension, effective immediately. Or you could have a permanent, full-time job with Cloud Nine, designing our game worlds.”

She gasped. Both options appealed to her. But there had to be a catch. She could feel a sense of trepidation creep in on her. Harper swallowed. “Like I asked, what do I have to do for this?”

Business Suit smiled at her.

“I can’t tell you anything until you have signed this,” he said as he pulled a second letter from his jacket. Written across the top were the words Non-Disclosure Agreement.

3

As Harper read over the legalese, Business Suit decided to make conversation.

“So, you’re a game tournament champion, I hear?”

She glanced up at the man, annoyed. Is he trying to distract me from reading this? she wondered. Harper went back to the letter. She had seen NDAs before and they usually amounted to the same thing; breathe a word about anything and the corporation gets to pound you into a fine pulp. God, I hate reading legal stuff! But she knew she couldn’t afford a lawyer either. Harper made herself read the document, grinding through each word.

“I understand you have no immediate family,” Business Suit interrupted again. “Anyone who might notice if you were missing for a few days?”

Harper felt the blood rush to her head. “Do you mind?” she said hotly. “I am trying to read this!”

The female police officer glanced over. Business suit raised his hands. “Sorry, go ahead.”

Harper tried to concentrate on the NDA, but her anger made comprehension more difficult now. Fuck it, she fumed, they’re all the same. She slammed the paper onto her coffee table. “Okay. I’ll sign it.”

Business Suit grinned and shook his head. “First, I want you to answer my question.”

Harper’s fury rose again. She suddenly felt hot and tugged her shirt to let some air cool her chest. “What question?”

The man cleared his throat. “Do you have any immediate family we don’t know about?”

She looked at the man, bewildered for a moment. “No… no, they’re all dead!” she yelled.

Business Suit smiled. “Sign, then I will tell you more.”

4

Business Suit and the cop left thirty minutes later. By then, Harper had tentatively agreed to be part of a rescue mission. She couldn’t help but laugh at the idea. The man told her she’d join a ten-member team that would be transferred to the banned and corrupted Epiphany16 realms. Then the search would begin. He informed her that many of Epiphany’s fail-safes no longer worked. Pain filtration was nonexistent and her emotions would be intensified. “Oh yeah,” she whispered to her empty apartment, “and I can die there.”

Harper had known about Epiphany16. There was a whole subculture of gamers who followed the records of these early game world iterations. Details about Epiphany were well-guarded corporate secrets, but over the years, some info had leaked through the digital grapevine. And if that information was accurate, Harper knew she was taking a big chance.

She’d heard stories that chilled her to the bone. Tales of crippling deformity, permanent hallucinogenic states, and eventual institutionalization.

Business Suit had told her she would get the pension or the job, even if they didn’t find Harris.

“All you have to do is try,” he’d said, reassuringly. Harper scoffed at the thought now. “Try and die,” she muttered. She walked into her bedroom and flicked on the light switch. An amber glow flooded the room from the red bulbs she had plugged into the overhead lamp. Harper’s bedroom had a very different atmosphere from the rest of her small apartment.

This was her safe place. Her sacred place. Colorful prints were scotch-taped to the room’s walls. One was a Picasso. Another print was from Salvador Dali’s classic period. On her left side was a large bookshelf. It didn’t have a single book in it. Her sister’s urn sat on the middle shelf beside a framed picture of the both of them. Harper had taken the photo years ago, on Long Beach, after their mother died from the same disease that would take Megan. They were sitting on a waterfront patio, drinking tea. They both had blue eyes and a face full of freckles. Although they’d been heartbroken at the time, they had their arms wrapped around each other, each trying to be strong for the other.

Now Megan was gone, and Harper was alone.

“What should I do, Megan?” she whispered.

She touched one of the many succulent plants that were arranged in a circle around the urn. She felt its silky surface glide against her finger. Her simple life, the one where she worried about her bills and her debt, seemed like a distant memory now. Gone with it was the feeling that this was her safe place and that her life was on a mundane, but secure path.