Connor woke to another early Tokyo evening, after having slept, eaten, and then slept some more. The skies outside his unblinded window now an unhealthy—but fairly appealing it had to be said—mixture of pinks and turquoises. From somewhere outside, there was the sound of energetic, fast-paced Z-Pop wafting up from the streets below.

Connor loved these moments, right after a payday, when he felt once more as if the whole world was open to him. He was no longer the flunkie drop-out student, afflicted (along with millions of others) with ARD, but instead he was GhostEffect; at the top of his game, known and feared throughout the gaming world.

With a few hand gestures he had activated his screens, booted up his private server and navigated to the premier Game-Hack sites, scurried away somewhere on the Dark Web.

The Hack Leagues! Updated every 45 minutes!

Game-Hacking was the practice of selling your skills as a gamer, coder, and hacker to anyone wanting to get somewhere in any of the super-massive virtual reality games. It was technically legal in Tokyo, but in a whole lot of other nations around the world is was very much considered a criminal activity. That was one of the primary reasons Connor had stayed there after being booted out of college.

‘Only a single-use player can register, join, and receive the in-game credit rewards…’ stipulated many of the game-worlds. That was because most of the supercomputers allowed players to be rewarded real-time credits from the in-game experiences. Just last month, in fact, Connor had heard of yet another start-up firm selling magical items online making its first million dollars of revenue in very short order.

With all of the super-storms, pollution, targeted wars, and countless other maladies that afflicted the middles of the twenty-first century, entire companies, schools, even communities had moved most of their work online. Kids just as often logged into their school simulations to ignore their pre-generated teachers, and corporate boardrooms could be found styled on spaceships or the Tower of Sauron in the virtual world.

Tokyo, essentially the birthplace of true VR tech, was at least saner than most other places. Connor didn’t have to jump through too many hoops in order to be sitting there, looking at the latest league charts for people just like him.

Game-Hacking still had that underground, edgy vibe, however. The anonymous community prided themselves on being outcast, piratical even, as they tested and probed the weaknesses of the newest games.

“What the actual living f-!” Connor burst out when he saw the updated rankings.

1st: PaleRider

2nd: IkigaiMoon

3rd: DeathStormBeBop

4th: BadEgg

5th: ShakeYourMoneyMaker

He had to actually scroll down to find his name, GhostEffect, all the way down at number twelve. He had dropped down seven league places overnight, from where he had previously been enjoying fifth place.

“I mean, what the hell!?” Connor hissed. “Have they even updated their board rankings yet?”

But the super-fast, direct-beamed wi-fi had indeed been updated. There was no way to NOT update in a world where wireless internet was beamed down to mass transmitters, straight from satellites in space.

“I mean, what did I do wrong?” He groaned, already suspecting what the play had been, and yet unwilling to admit that he had been so stupid to admit it.

Game-Hacking, due to its shady nature, was a hard gig to correctly assess. The clients that Connor worked for liked to claim that they had done all the serious leveling up in their respective games and kept the general public and adoring fans none the wiser.

But there were work arounds. That was why it took time and money to get anywhere in the professional game-hacked world. You had to run your own anonymous servers, operating out of a Dutch non-extradition supercomputer, from which you could securely log your screenshots and game IDs, and upload them to the Hacked Leagues.

I’m sure I did that last night, didn’t I? Connor checked. He had.

That only left one option: LordCrimsonReignsSupreme, that rich kid from Missouri who had hired him to crack BattleWorlds in the shortest time yet wasn’t real. The only explanation was that LordCrimsonReignsSupreme was themselves just a fake account for another game hacker like him, and they had sent their updated game IDs along with Connor’s hard-worked hours of gameplay.

“Rat-Womble,” Connor swore. He should have seen it coming. It wasn’t unheard of in his world, it just wasn’t generally the done thing.

Pff. Honor Amongst Thieves, huh?

Connor cursed himself for being such an idiot.

He was sure that the Hacked Leagues would be looking into the double set of game IDs, but it would require them to get direct access to BattleWorlds admin server to truly sort out. Connor knew that was probably too much of a pain in their ass to just sort out rankings, not to mention highly illegal.

“Urgh!” Connor groaned, collapsing back onto the bed behind him with a moan, and wondering how screwed his job prospects looked now. He had still got paid, which was a good thing, but the contracts on offer to those game hackers outside the top ten were in an order of thousands of dollars less than those offered to those inside.

Goodbye BodyBox, hello three months of measly rent payments.

Brrp! His screen blinked with a new message. An incoming video call, actually.

“What now,” Connor didn’t move for a moment. If it was going to be some kid asking him to get to the next level of Candy Crossing FunPark then he was going to lose it.

GhostEffect / Personal Message Board

49 New Messages...

1 Awaiting Video Call: Arianna…

Arianna. Connor’s lip twitched in a ghost of a smile. At least his oldest friend would understand the crapstorm that he was being put through.

“Yo, Ari!” he slumped forward, accepting the call with a wave of his hand. The image of the girl he had almost grown up with suddenly appearing from on the other side of the world.

“Hey, Loser. Looks like you’re losing that magic touch on the Hacked Boards, am I right?” The image of a girl with long dark hair and tanned skin gave him a look that was a mixture of playful mocking and genuine sympathy.

Arianna Moore was like that, and Connor told her where to jump as was customary, before they both snickered with a throwback to teenage glee. It had always been this way between them, from the very first day that a fourteen-year-old Arianna had marched into their ‘study’ classroom in New York School of St. Anthony’s, to find Connor trying to get a faintly unimpressed team of callow youths interested in an Advanced Fantasy RPG game played with actual paper and dice.

She had merely said, “If you think that you lot can be a bunch of heroes then, quite frankly I think you should give up now,” then had slammed her Advanced Players Manual on the table, before taking several hand-painted figurines from her pocket.

“Let me show you weirdos how it’s done.”

After that, Connor had fell instantly, and annoyingly in awe of the dark frizzy haired girl, who was the first of their group to get a piercing, a date, a tattoo—not to mention the first to get a Vision 100 headset, though that was much later than New York St. Anthony’s.

“So, now that you have brought shame on your line kiddo, when are you going to leave the land of the rising sun and come back home to New York, flunkie-boy?” Arianna asked, throwing her head back with a playful laugh. Behind the grown twenty-something woman was a much lighter, much plusher apartment than the one he lived in. Connor could see actual house plants, wall-sized windows, and in the corner a whole selection of screens and hard-drives.

And something that looked suspiciously like a BodyBox.

“What the ever-loving son of a . . . I mean, how the hell could you afford a damn BodyBox!” Connor, although he admired his friend to death and back, could also hate her right now.

“And no, of course I’m not going to leave Tokyo. The only city where what I do is legal, I hasten to add! Why would I go to crappy New York, and get my connections limited, or worse, locked out completely!?”

“Because there is more to the world than being some other player’s gopher,” Arianna said with a smile that was probably meant to be teasing but was in fact a little too hard. Connor had the suspicion that she was veering toward the ‘friendly advice intervention’ category.

“And that BodyBox you see there? It’s on loan from Tir’Nan’Og, They want me as an Early Tester for their new game-world, you heard of it? Legends of the Six Realms?”

“Never heard of it. Nor Teer – Teayer – Tare – Terrible Nana, or whoever they are,” Connor lied.

He had definitely heard of Tir’Nan’Og, but he was playing it cool. He’d read in the latest industry announcements that a new supercomputer was expected to come online any day now, based somewhere in Old Europe, and that it already had its own game-world in construction.

“Hrrmph!” Arianna laughed, her previously parental tone broken. “Liar,” she called him out.

“I can’t believe that even one of the lowest-ranking professional game-hackers doesn’t know when a new supercomputer and world opens up, and Legends is going to be six worlds. Six, all rolled into one!”

“Bah,” Connor groaned, but of course she saw right through him. She always could.

A new supercomputer—or, to be precise, a new super-supercomputer—was a big deal, not only for the gaming community, but also for the entire world. There were only six, and now seven, of these behemoths in existence, each of which was accompanied by their own networked connection of smaller supercomputers.

These programming, data-crunching giants were literally what powered the world, and everyone knew that. These servers provided the space for every application, business, community and government on the planet, and they rented out vast quantities of their space to the various game-worlds like BattleWorlds, StarsFall, and now, Legends of the Six Realms.

The thing was, that nearly everything was done in the virtual these days, and just about everyone with some electricity had an avatar. Because of the ravaging storms, toxic smog, wildfires, and worse outside of the cities, citizens were actively encouraged to lead their lives online.

All of which came with the added bonus that, while the players conducted business meetings or decapitated goblins, the game algorithms also worked to crunch data, with every supercomputer specializing in different projects.

Connor knew that the Russian super-supercomputer used its players and citizens network activity to help crunch the next Mars mission. The US super-supercomputer used its online participants to help prop up the international stock market. People logged into Copenhagen mainframe powered the efforts to find a cure for cancer with every sword thrust and avatar profile change.

Which is why the game-worlds are so widely encouraged, and why in-game experience can be traded for actual money, Conner knew.

It was also why game-hacking was deemed pretty illegal, too, he figured a little warily, before quickly shying away from thinking about that too much.

“Alright, Terrible Nan’s then?” Connor asked. “And this Legends. Why’d they hire a cheat like you?”

“Pot and kettle!” Arianna shot him a sharp grin. “Look, Tir’Nan’Og—teer-naaan-ohg to you—is different from the others. They’re only running one virtual reality game world. Just one and one alone, no more.”

“What, they’re not leasing space to the others? Then they’re fools, clearly,” Connor pointed out.

“Legends is too big,” Arianna insisted. “That is the kind of commitment we’re talking about. It’s not a case of you spend a couple months logging in and then you’re at Level 20 or whatever.”

“The new fantasy game-world is so large that it is six game-worlds all together. What other mainframe has space or processing power for that? We’re talking about, like, a year at a time, two maybe, of unrepeated gameplay before they even have to release updates and patches. And that’s for the hardcore gamers out there, who log in every day. For the rest, the weekenders and evening crew. . .” Arianna shrugged.

“Some of those kids are going to grow up in Legends, probably spend the best years of their lives in there. That is what makes the game, and Tir’Nan’Og, so different!” she ended on a flourish.

“Okay, okay, gimme a look…” Connor said, relenting. He had to admit, at least to himself, that it did sound promising.

Arianna’s hands flew over her screens in distant New York, and an instant later, there were in-game shots and short cut scenes, all in first person, of a lush fantasy marketplace.

The town itself was mostly classic medieval fantasy, but with a few differences. There were also elements of gaslight, steam, ether-tech, from what Connor could gather. Buildings that were made of stone and wood with peaked roofs, and in the distance a tall, white stone tower that elegantly curved skyward in the glow of morning mists.

There was a flicker as an iridescent butterfly with purple, orange, and green wings fluttered past the camera.

A shadow crossed the streets as a sleek airship in the skies crossed overhead. The ship had no balloons to support it, but instead canvas sails stretched out to the side of a gleaming metal hull, while a giant steel ring which emitted an eldritch blue glow propelled it forward and kept it aloft.

The details were intense, Connor had to admit. Of course, he expected such things from a virtual game, but everywhere he trained his eyes, he could see small, distinct features. He saw the drift of blown leaves from a majestic sycamore tree where birds flitted, and some purple-furred mammal type creatures chased each other in the treetops. He could see the dirt and dust of the roadway, replete with puddles from a recent rain.

Even in this, a mere recorded scene from the game, Connor could almost feel the sharp tang of the air on his face.

“It’s good,” he breathed, admittedly awed.

“I knew you’d like it,” Arianna agreed. “Legends starts with all the usual fantasy races, and it’s developed its own virtual simulator extensions. It’s going to be the most immersive game ever!”

“I see you’ve drunk the Kool-Aid,” Connor laughed, as Arianna pulled the in-game shots back.

She shrugged. “I guess I have. Call it professional interest. Like I said, Tir’Nan’Og sent me the BodyBox in return for being a first adopter tester.” She said it like it was no big deal.

“I start at level 0, same as everyone else, then just throw myself into traps and quests, and provide feedback. Easy, huh?”

Connor had to admit that he was certainly jealous of that. “Payment?” He asked.

Arianna grimaced sheepishly. “Not great, but…”

“How much?”

She blew out a breath. “I get that BodyBox for as long my contract lasts, though…”

Connor watched as his friend dithered.

“You are getting paid, right?” he pressed.

Arianna’s face fell a bit more.

“Hundred forty dollars a week,” she admitted.

Connor burst out laughing. “Does that even cover your rent?”

“Barely,” Arianna admitted. “But I get the Box. I figure it will look great on my resume, being an official reviewer and all.”

“Bah!” Connor shook his head. “If I signed up for your deal, I’d have a month tops, and then I’d be back to square one. It’s just not worth it.”

“It means there’s no chance of Feds coming for you, or of getting juiced in the Hacked League tables,” she pointed out, once again sounding a little serious. In fact, she sounded not only serious, but worried for him.

“C’mon, Connor, how long are you going to keep doing what you do, anyway? When are you going to start putting your health first?”

The sympathy in her voice suddenly made Connor angry.

“Maybe I like what I do, Ari!” he stormed. “I’m one of the best in the world at levelling up.”

“Number twelve, you mean, and dropping every hour you’re not grinding out some other schmuck’s experience…” his friend, always just as hot tempered as he was, started to say.

“Oh, do me a favor,” Connor cut her off. He was angry at her for even suggesting that he give up on his career. Like she thought he was always going to be that sickly drop-out kid, hacking coughs over Fantasy Rule Books at the back of class.

Why can’t people see that I am GOOD at this?!

“I don’t need your sympathy, Ari,” he snapped. “Thanks anyway…”

“Connor, wait—” she tried to say, but Connor had already cut the connection, and sat back, fuming.

“Drekk!” He punched the bed blankets, futilely. He didn’t know what made him angrier: the fact that his friend had valued him so low, or that a part of him wondered if she might be right.

No way, he told himself. He was just still smarting from getting burned on the League tables, that was all. It was only a small setback. He’d be back in the game in no time.

Wouldn’t he?

Of course he would. Connor already had a plan of what he was going to do with that $2000. He furiously began swiping up some new windows.

GhostEffect / Personal Message Board

48 New Messages...

Search: Legends of the Six Realms…

He was going to show Ari, and everyone else, what he was capable of.

And he was going to do it right there, with his old Vision500. He didn’t need the damned BodyBox at all. He was going to make more money than ever when he aced this new game and this Terrible Nana computer or whatever dumb name it was called.

There. Just like he knew it would be, like he knew it had to be. There were already three offers from clients wanting to game-hack the new game.

With the release of every new game-world, there was always this flurry of activity. People wanting to get virtually famous by being the first to get to Level 10, 15, 20; the first to work out the solution to this problem, or complete that quest.

Normally, professional game-hackers like himself held back a month or so before jumping in. There was more risk of doing spectacularly badly in a game where you had no idea what the cheat codes were, or where the boss triggers were. Game-Hackers were a bold lot, but they also liked avoiding failure.

Well, prudence can go fish, Connor declared to no one but himself. He was good enough to work it out all on his own, without any tips or cheats at all!

The first couple of messages were ridiculous offers, even for him. Someone from Cleveland and another from somewhere called Lowestoft were offering worse than Ari was getting paid a week.

He grimaced at how bad the jobs were now that he was way down in the rankings.

But the third looked promising, if a bit unorthodox. Connor read through it once and immediately clicked ACCEPT.