Chapter 2 – Unbox, Log In and Online.

Lantis hurried home and turned on the lights with haste before he went for a shower.

Although immediately going for a dive seemed very tempting, even our veteran gamer Lantis didn’t want to smell like a rotten egg in his unconscious state. On top of that, he most definitely wouldn’t be coming out of his VR console for a very long time once he went in.

“Keu, seems like mom is not at home. Most probably went to granny’s house to spend the vacations now that I can stay alone; It feels good to have my own freedom.”

“Those students from science stream really have it hard. They are still preparing for their exams while students from other sectors have already gone for their honeymoons. Pei! How I pity the lots of them.”

Lantis was currently living in an apartment by the Nazareth, near his institution with his mother. Since his father worked abroad and only came home once in a month or so. Most of the time, he was used to being alone. Although being the ambiverted guy he was, it was not that bad as novels make them out to be.

His room was quite big and spacious. It was filled with various cutting-edge electronic gadgets and appliances, books on various topics filled his shelves and dresses shined on his drawers.

Eventually, Lantis finished showering and ate something light to fill his appetite.

He slowly went to his table, wore a medical glove, took a syringe and filled it up.

“God damn, it always hurts me when I do this.” Lantis lamented.

Whenever a person used SITIS these days for long-term sessions, it was recommended by specialised medics to take adequate measures, so as to reduce the impact on the body from external interferences.

It was especially true for those competitive and professional gamers who went into dive mode for long hours and sometimes days.

This reduced the chances of a dire issue happening greatly.

He put an armband on his arm to restrain the blood flow. Then he double-checked to see if it has the correct amount of medication and slowly injected it into his arms. After a short period, he pulled the plunger and threw the syringe into the dustbin. Last, he wiped his arms with an alcohol wipe.

He stood there for a while before he sighed.

“This should do for 6 hours I guess. Now, it’s time for something fab, preparing the baby for the party.”

He went towards his wardrobe and pulled out a large box. He carefully put it on his table and unpacked it with scissors.

Inside the large box contained various tools, cables and electronic parts of what seemed to be the main components of his VRware.

“Man, I could make an unboxing video out of this and publish the shit on YouTube. Who knows how much likes it will net me? Most probably thousands if not millions, after all, it’s the premium edition we are talking about after all.” Lantis giggled on his naïve thought as he put the console

He kept the blue console box on his table near the bed where he used to keep his previous VRware. Then he plugged the primary cables with the UPS and the headband, what was conveniently named “Dreamcast”. Then the same process continued with the secondary cables connected to the surround speakers, desktop computer and the wireless connect pod, also known as “x-pod”. Last, he inserted the memory core and the game hard drives on its assigned slot.

“Phew, all done. The X-pod will take care of the rest by connecting other stuff; my desktop will be the home server.”

He powered up his machines and lay down on his bed wearing the headband.

Suddenly, his eyes blanked out for a split second and a single screen appeared before him.

Ting!

-The HELIX team>>

“Alright, I guess and a thank you?” Lantis responded. This was not the first time he bought a VR console or a game and it definitely won’t be the last. So, preface messages like this were a pretty common sight for him but they did help in making a positive impression for the company.

Ting! Ting! Ting!

Now, a newbie no-brainer would have directly joined the bandwagon and went online like many others do in web novels. But Lantis disdained such actions from such so-called ‘gamers’. After all, they are not utilising their resources to the max. What is the point of playing a VR game if you are not using it for maximum efficiency?

Lantis would rather use some time to optimise the game then to become the first player who entered the mother-fucking game. With these thoughts, he gave commands to the system through his mind.

“System, start command line-mode now.”

This command was normally used by the developers and testers to make advanced changes in the hardware program and its usage was not recommended for casual gamers. It was understandable as it brought changes in the entire hardware. One will need some basic knowledge and awareness to reset the settings again.

“Clear caches and possible obsolete memory files and data.” He urged.

“Yes.”

“With this done I can run the game, my way now. “Lantis calmly thought as he lightly smiled. He was very fond of customisations and freedom. To the extent, he took the hard work to learn some basic things about advanced VR programming even though he was himself from humanities stream.

“Enable root mode, enable selective processes”

“Well, looks I will need a guide, time to get a girl now.” Lantis thought as he gave another command.

“Activate AI controls and buffer zones.”

Ting!

Ting! Ting!

Lantis smirked as he got the notification. One of them must be his home AI, Isabelle, a true-type general AI assistant running the entire house right now and the other two should be the offline ones already in the system. Isa won’t be of much help inside the game but perhaps through her, bypassing more intricate commands could be possible.

He looked at the detailed log and spoke.

“System, ping Isabelle. Schedule Luna for later run and disable Cortana”

“ Isa, can you hear me?” Lantis asked in the middle of nowhere.

“Yes, I can. What do you need me for?”

A clear feminine voice rang out from across the room. The voice seemed entirely calm as if it didn’t have any emotions of its own but was pleasing to the ears, none the less.

“Try to take control of admin rights. And change the immersion process.”

After a short while, Isa’s serene voice once again rang in his ears.

“I have found the required files. There are 2 methods you can choose; one is the soft immersion and the other hard immersion. Soft immersion is enabled by default; it doesn’t have much impact on brain and is much safer. Meaning, the memory core is used as the partition device and acts as the middleman between your brain and the console. If someone removes your headgear or you remove it yourself directly, it will not cause any vital issues. The same can’t be said for the hard immersion. It is still safe, but issues can happen at the cost for better performance.”

“So, in hard immersion, a volatile partition is made in the brain?” Lantis asked pondering.

“Positive. But only temporary, but you are still recommended to use the console cautiously. Otherwise, the chances for a bleeding effect to happen will increase.” Isa replied calmly as ever.

Bleeding effects were after-effects to prolonged usage of virtual machines. The user starts to receive hallucinations of their gameplay sessions in real life. It was not a big deal if it happened once in a while, but continuously happening may lead the person to receive a trauma. The government has thus reinforced strict regulations, controls and policies for that.

But hard immersion did have some benefits, as it was uncovered during the CSBDIS case. The immersion quality was much more better in this state and everything seemed more flexible and controlled under a player’s hand and for a player like Lantis- quality, control and flexibility mattered for everything. And as you will see, it will matter in the game too.

“Hmm, I understand the risks. Change the process to hard immersion now.” Lantis commanded.

“I have changed the variables. Consider it done.” Isa confirmed.

Now, that those primary settings were over. Lantis moved to those settings that will affect his in-game experience. He opened the graphics console. Switched on every setting, moved the slider all the way up to “Exceptional” graphics. Then he quickly balanced it by activating multi-threading, threshold and raising performance maintenance slider all the way up as well.

It was quickly followed by Isa’s voice but this time with uncertainty, “You have tempered with the console too much, and the machine might overheat with these settings. I recommend enabling the secondary power coolers, any more commands? Further tempering with the settings may result in your warranty being void. “

At this stage, the game will probably test the very limits of Lantis and his VRware. Lantis was not afraid though, in fact, it was quite the opposite.

A smile crept on his pretty face; everything seemed to be going well as he expected it so far.

Testing my very limits huh? I like the sound of it; it has quite a nice ring to it. The game has not even started and I am already being a badass. Great rewards call for great measures, that’s it.

He enabled automatic updates, steam updates and looked at the in-game time zone for the difference in dilation. He was very amused by the notification.

One day in Helix was one hour in the real world, thus it meant if he dedicated 6 hours a day to gaming; it was equivalent to 6 days in the game. This was already really cool.

Even though he could and will like to spend many hours playing a game, he was not naïve enough to abandon his real-life needs altogether. Plus this being a strategy game, outsourcing was a necessary shit here.

“Isa, you can go back now. Look after the house, in my stead and close the session after 6 hours. Download any updates you get and ring me up in any details should something happen. Ok, reboot the system.”

“As you wish” Isa’s voice which now seemed very distant was heard for the last time.

Ting! Ting! Ting!

Ting! Ting! Ting!

Alright, everything is ready now. What remains now is to do the deed; there is no turning back now.

Taking a deep breath, compressing his excitement in the furthest corner of his mind, Lantis prepared for something unknown.

He had read too many things about it; saw so many reviews about it on forums, heard praises about it from peers and now here he is, playing it first-hand.

“Begin.”

One word and that’s all it took.

The world turned completely blue in his eyes and…

That was the last thing he saw.

That catchphrase was cool though.