This ungodly contraption of mine demands ever more of my time.

I had a simple complaint: the newest, most revolutionary, most bizarre, improbably technologically advanced, questionably physically possible game-to-end-all-games came out, and I had nowhere near enough money to buy it. Normally that wouldn't be a problem- for every single VRMMO to this point, my family has received a complimentary control system or digital copy, just as a matter of good business sense. Yes, I can pry a "gift" like that from my beloved parents' death-grip. It isn't easy and rarely comes without concessions, but it's doable. Convincing them to give me the cash to buy such a thing outright? That would be the death of me.

This VRMMO, though... The first game I've been interested in for a few years? No pod, not even a discount. To make matters worse, it costs about three times as much as the runner up. For good reason- if even half of their claims are true, tactfully above the minimum court mandated truth-value to avoid fraud lawsuits, then the game is more than worth what they're asking. Fine, if I can't get it free, I'll just have to buy it myself. That idea right there is where the simple complaint ends and my entrepreneurial spirit takes over..

I keep a stash of money, pooled together from digital ventures and my (modest) allowance. The issue is- right before all this, I spent an enormous chunk of it upgrading my old computer.

Why would I blow my savings right before the game of the century comes out?

Because absolutely no one knew that it was coming.

This game, this G.C.O., went from pre-orders to live service in a month. Half of that time it was fairly underground, until the company got a booth at NEXTPO, my favorite tech fair, and did a live demonstration of the game in action. After that, the game's proprietary pods were completely sold out world-wide, both the pre-orders and all new pods for nearly a week after release. The broad appeal, the novelty, the wish-fulfillment, it is a game that is larger than life, for all ages and interests.

What was I to do? Miss out on the first game to ever satisfy my deepest, most needy and impractical video-gaming wishes and desires? The more I heard of the game, the less I believed I could hold out. My solution: if I could not buy the pod for full price, surely I could find one used. Only, as weeks passed, there were no used pods on the market- at least not at any sane price. With insanely high retention rates and "try it once and pawn it" rich kids being converted into lifelong players in real time, used pods would sell for more than a new one.

Fine, then. If I can't buy it used, why not get a bootleg, or an off-brand? Most companies would lean into a third-party if the supply was too tight, and those third parties might not honor the contract to the letter- I could get the nicest bootleg I could find, buy the game properly...

That direction sent me down a rabbit hole of Carrollean proportions. Not only was the pod built for G.C.O. a kind of discrete, brand new wetware, with all sort of esoteric security features designed to impede shared accounts, it had no third-party equivalents at all. The company seems to have a total monopoly on sale and production, which is a huge red flag for a first title, but not suspicious enough to stop me from wanting to play the game, damn it.

Still, I am nothing if not a stubborn fellow. I scoured the NET, but no matter how unsavory the "neighborhood" got, I found nothing of value- even in the corners best left untouched. I had to stop and refer domains to the police on more than one occasion, which was increasingly frustrating and time consuming, especially when they realized it was the same person reporting and they tried to bully me into either divulging my identity or explaining how exactly I was finding these locations. The best I could come up with was a clean chip for the game from a gutted system (the owner allegedly "dropped it," as if you can drop a several-hundred-pound, thoroughly reinforced pod. It was overpriced anyway, and I had no system to play it in. I began to lose momentum and hope.

That's when things got old. I mean that literally: one interesting trick to finding hobbyists- sort your nodes by age of creation, and then filter sort the oldest thousand results by how active they are. You find nodes created years or decades ago, but still updated even to to-day, usually regularly updated websites or blogs from people as old as dirt and endless experience. I had absolutely no hope that any such person would have a solution for me in this case, however. They generally spend their time patiently eking out industry secrets or trading the passwords of high-level CEOs like it's a game. What old codger would bother poking around with brand new wetware for a video-game, like this?

Motherfucking JIMMY BOB, that's who. The first four results were irrelevant, just random chatter caught by my search terms, but then I came to a node maintained for over twenty-two years and updated regularly, almost monthly, for that entire time.

At first glance, "JIMMY BOB'S EMPORIUM" was a travesty of aging web design, chock-full every user experience mistake in the book. The main reason I locked onto this page in particular was that I had to redo its entire style-sheet to even dare to try and read it on my device. I played along more for stress relief than anything else, and when I read the headlines of a few of Jimmy Bob's past articles, I nearly dismissed the whole node out of hand.

The domain was designed to expire the oldest article, only ever four at a time presented to the user. All four current articles made seemingly ludicrous claims, to say the least. DIY tricks for things you should never, ever make at home, one was giving programming tips for dead programming languages- in what I can only describe as an act of dumb luck, I tried to scrape domain's past articles before I left. It was just a pithy little script that would download all the pages on his blog. I wanted to have something funny to read through if I got bored.

Nothing came back. Nothing at all.

I tried again, failed, moved up the ladder of tricks I had on hand, even tried writing something new. I wasn't even getting error messages back. The EMPORIUM was eating every crawler I sent at it, even the "robot-proof" ones. I got more aggressive, tried different tricks to see if I could penetrate the domain, spoof it, take it down- no matter what I could barely scratch the surface of the node, let alone dig into its depths. That was... uncommon. There were pages made by "security specialists" who were less secure than this random relic of a bygone era, so perhaps "baffling" would be more apt.

Only then did I try actually reading an article. The oldest one- nearly falling off the page- was "Jimmy Bob's Guide to DIY Stasis Pods." That was suspiciously similar to exactly what I needed, so I hopped in, hoping to at least get a good laugh out of the read.

Jimmy Bob shared what he described as "purely hypothetical" ideas in creating a DIY stasis pod. He wrote "purely hypothetical" in quotes and followed it with a gaggle of little ";)" symbols, which have been obsolete for about a century now, but I got the point. It was a guide on what he claimed was the correct method of building and maintaining a modern stasis pod- entirely from scratch. I skimmed the article and my stomach did flips as I read through some of the horrifically unsafe ideas Jimmy Bob casually shared.

Building or modifying wetware at home would have been impressive, to say the least, but to my absolute horror, Jimmy Bob wanted to make the thing entirely of hardware. The whole thing!

That was absurd. No, impossible. The very idea of it contradicted everything I knew, and I knew many, a great deal, many things. Yet as I read on... Jimmy Bob's "hypothetical" did not appear to be insane. The jury is still out on whether the man himself is a nut, but the equations worked, as long as you let him play around with the value of a few constants. More adequately, he acknowledged the improbability of his system operating under the old paradigm and explained that his DIY Pod concept was made possible by his own innovation of what he called "re-chained wires."

That was a concept I had never once seen before. It set off not even the vaguest spark of recognition. Definitively, that means that these "re-chained wires" are either a legitimately new idea, or ancient, far older than Jimmy Bob's own node.

Wiring and mechanical interference were long regarded as the greatest flaws of hardware design, but his novel configuration allegedly turned that disadvantage into a tool of obscene potency. If it works, it's a game-changer, a paradigm-shift. Hardware is still thoroughly outclassed even by his estimation, but it would still turn the common sense of current information technology upside down.

He referred to "last week's summary of re-chaining" over and over, but the page where he explained the concept itself has long since locked down and beyond my reach. Still, by tracing his steps in the Pod guide and throwing together some miscellaneous garbage around the manor, I reverse engineered the phenomenon on a smaller scale... and the design concept worked. It worked!

Were he to publish this innovation alone, Jimmy Bob would be the regarded as the foremost, and perhaps the only still-living, computer engineer walking the planet.

This revelation turned my situation upside down. While a wetware pod would be quieter, smaller, more durable than any hardware pod, a hardware pod was infinitely more modular. I could jerry-rig just about anything I needed together to make this thing work. Inputs and outputs- hardware was until a minute ago totally obsolete, it still is as far as anyone else knows but the total dominance of wetware is still recent. As with any seismic shift in technology, eclipsing the old format takes years, and everyone wanted "compatibility."

Within minutes, I find a card reader that works with the G.C.O. chip. I find a warez forum trying to cut into the game's security (unsuccessfully) using old firmware hacks, and track down one hacker's readout of the input and output formats for each element. I match each one- a way to sense my neural impulses, a way to send me neural impulses, a computer "brain" to process them, parts to make that "brain" work, an ancient hardware chip that runs a few thousand routines known to bypass. I knew these things existed but I never really processed how much more secure wetware was compared to hardware. I found a backup generator, a backup for the backup, budgeted for redundancies and spares, and then I tallied everything up. One of my options instantly stood out:

One official G.C.O. sanctioned wetware pod with (required) eternal membership: 16,000 (shipping included)

One used G.C.O. sanctioned wetware pod with a properly flashed memory chit: 14,800 (+s/h)

One highly inadvisable and dangerous hardware pod using revolutionary technology and a random chip from a "broken" pod: 400 - 980 (+s/h and two hundred square feet)

It would still take me some few months to save up enough money for all the parts, let alone to construct the thing, but it was the best answer by far. The security bypass chip could fail, there's an ever-present risk of hardware failures, and who's to say any of this hardware still works in the first place? What if the hacker was wrong about what formats the game was using to read or write information? Horrible things to my brain, that's what.

This plan was a gamble of gambles, but now I could feel the game in my reach. Some things are more than worth the risk, and the sensation of it was more than enough reason to sink a few hours into reading Jimmy Bob's domain over and over again. By the time I got to the end, I accepted Jimmy Bob as my lord and savior and manually transcribed all of the articles he had up at the time, which now hang on my wall. Praise be, Jimmy Bob! Praise be! I now understand the practical application of lethal nuclear radiation in "manually refactoring" a stick of RAM, how to write an "if, but" statement, and so much more.

As soon as I was done learning everything I needed to about the DIY pod process, I set to work acquiring the necessary parts from every source I could. My meager savings vanished and so too did the stock of a number of third-hand hardware refurbishers and suppliers. That was just as well- the time it took them to restock was spent with weeks familiarizing myself with the parts and tools, then weeks more to begin assembly. I had never so much as touched hardware before, and in this sort of situation ignorance is dangerous. "Hands-on learning" was not an overwhelming fraction of my education, which made recalling the movements and patterns arduous.

Still, no matter how difficult the task was, I poured hour after hour into bringing it to perfect clarity. Now, that electrical and mechanical knowledge is practically engraved onto my soul. I mastered each and every skill like my life depended on it.

Because my life does depend on it.

I cannot understate how obscene, dangerous, and obscenely dangerous this plan is. While the Guide to DIY Stasis Pods used re-chained wiring and a number of other clever tricks to minimize the size and number of parts needed, this "pod" still constitutes enough junk to fill an entire room. Making a comparable pod the traditional way would require enough hardware to fill up an entire factory, which would give it a statistical part failure rate high enough that not a single user could access the pod for an hour without getting their brain fried.

Jimmy Bob's strategies were a massive improvement, but the process still had plenty of failure modes, far more than off-the-shelf wetware might. On a deeper level, hardware is 'hard' precisely because it is a purely physical and Newtonian moiety, and that means subject to inopportune forces like friction and gravity. Hardware can and does indeed fail, and failure of a Stasis Pod can kill you. Kill you twice, in fact, if the failure occurs while you are "re-emerging" from stasis. I can put every redundancy in place but if the key elements are faulty and I don't have any guarantee I didn't forget to plug in something key. I have to be better than "good" with wiring to make this work.

On some level, I hoped for a while my parents might put two and two together and intercede. Even Jimmy Bob impressed on the reader that this DIY project was tantamount to suicide for any but an expert. Even if that intercession wasn't giving me a real pod at full price, which would amount to the sum change in their pockets on any given day, then at least to express concern, or tell me to quit working on this and go do something else.

Whether or not they figured out my little project, they didn't bother to intercede. My parents... are nothing, if not hands-off.

Regardless, my little crusade continued on. Onward, men! We march to the Great Crusade Online, come hell-fire or violent, brain-detonating electrocution!

New challenges arose in my twisting and turning journey to hardware supremacy. Wire management, it turned out, was not my forte. It simply was not a part of the curriculum, and learning to coordinate the room in such a way that the wires would line the walls would take far too much time and effort. This I overcame by embracing it- I weaponized the increasingly complex cobweb of wires to ward off the manor's servants.

If I go "under" for hours at a time, playing G.C.O., the absolute worst case scenario is that someone tries to pull me out without realizing what they're doing, or accidentally unplugs part of the hardware. The manor staff aren't stupid, quite the contrary, they're astonishingly well trained and universally armed to the teeth, but they are very much still human.

Any ordinary person might not see much harm in yanking some weird helmet off my head to try and force me to go eat or meet my parents... that is, if they could physically get to me. There's a much more instinctual fear of pulling out a plug on accident. Even wetware still needs power, if barely, and faced with a bizarre network of hardware, the staff would be walking on absolute eggshells around my new "game room"- which very well could save my life. Bad cable management is now my first line of defense, although shamefully it took me a good few days to learn to navigate the room safely myself.

I cobbled and hacked together my monstrosity, the spiderweb, a Frankenstein's machine. Every day it grew in complexity, in number of back-ups and redundancies, in functionality... The further through the process I progressed, the clearer it became Jimmy Bob's recommendations for "budget items" included some truly ancient machinery. Total isolation helmets (his answer to the sensory deprivation of the stasis pod) are old-fashioned these days, hardly used by anyone outside of astronauts. I had to hack together my own, mainly because no one is legally allowed to buy, sell, or own the "ST-54," the model helmet that Jimmy Bob recommended.

Initially I couldn't even find the model online, and I thought that it was the first bit of mis- or dis-information in the guide so far, but trawling through a military catalog from twenty years ago I found a recall notice, along with other interesting tidbits. It was a strategic Man-Machine Interface ("M.M.I.")-isolation helmet combo, and even when it was legal it wasn't sold on the open market. The ST-54 was intended to be used as a full axial armored vehicle control system, released fifty years ago, and it had some legitimately astonishing specs for a piece of its era. Which makes it a fantastic recommendation, if you enjoy being executed in a military tribunal, or if you can somehow avoid that fate.

Regardless, while I worked on my DIY helmet and assembled the computer "brain," I found a roughly comparable M.M.I. to pair with it from his budget alternative list. This one, the "Praxis Motor-System," was an academic piece, sixty years old. It was once used to train new surgeons in their craft, as a clever way to reduce the burden of cadaver practice. It was generally regarded as 'excellent' at the time, with the caveat of 'but unsafe,' mainly because it was introduced before people acknowledged the need of an isolation mechanism of some kind to reduce neural stress while going "under." Eventually abandoned for better, newer versions, my particular Praxis wasa rotting in a second-hand trash-yard. It only cost 8, which was astonishingly low, even for such an old piece.

I refurbished it so well as I could, but at the end of the day the thing is a bit... unnerving. The shape, the theme, the purpose, it's very clinical, almost morbid, function over form. It doesn't help that these ancient M.M.I. often combined their newer M.M.I. features with a nerve Interface. Subtle distinction: while frying the M.M.I. components could scramble the brain if you were in to deep, any issue with the nerve interface was guaranteed paraplegia for the rest of your life, assuming it hadn't taken control of autonomous systems as well, in which case you would just die outright.

Surgeons of years past must have had nerves of steel.

Would this old piece of menacing, literal junk even work in the first place? Who knows! I sure don't.

More challenges. How would I activate the stasis with no modern trigger mechanism? I rigged my own mechanism on a timer with an old toy game-show podium from my youth. Where would I stabilize my body to avoid atrophy or injury? I found a Super Comfort X beanie chair, a suitably space-faring innovation designed to stabilize you in place while simultaneously acting as a perfect cushion during rocket launches, just right to match my home-brew space helmet. Actually, these weird beanie chairs are essentially the same type of cushion they put in real Stasis Pods. That technology has endured remarkably well.

I ran out of wall-space, wire-mounts, prongs... Eventually, I began to cannibalize furniture, and one entire half of the room became totally uninhabitable due to all the clutter. The other half has a thinner web of wires and a brief respite from the dark, not that there are any decent lights- I extracted those ages ago to make space for, you guessed it, more wires.

Even as I learned the room, maintenance became exponentially more difficult. Not only did I have to navigate my wires by memory, sometimes in the absolute dark, but because I had warded off the nosy manor servants, I was the only one who could dust and wipe the whole thing.

Whoops!

Honestly, I don't know how I didn't think of that, but this is the price of safety, I suppose. So in the months of work that ensued, it became a major, almost overwhelming part of my day. One that will hopefully diminish once I fire the thing up, since the ungodly contraption has more squeaky fans than your average boy-band concert.

Eventually, I had a hard time so much as going online. Not just for lack of time, but also because G.C.O. spoilers were absolutely everywhere, and I wanted only the barest of hints about the game going in... In isolation and madness I worked.

"This ungodly contraption of mine" is finally ready to be revealed. I let the wave of nostalgia fall away, crashing around me, I have to have gone half mad, ranting to myself in the dark as I stare at a wall and hundreds of hours of intense, highly specialized work in a dead art- all for some stupid overpriced video-game. I can't help but feel pride in my chest, despite it all, because I'd been telling myself it would be ready soon, and all I needed was the right wire to connect the M.M.I. and the chip reader... until that final piece came in.

Today was the day. Today is the day. If it works, I am officially the (second) most authoritative computer engineer of our era. Grinning, I jab the final wire in place, clamp it down, and skitter backwards through the wires. I take in the sight of my miniature command center. Tucked in the furthest, least cable-dense recesses of the room, occupying what used to be a closet, sits only the barest necessities.

The root of my pod.

I shine my flashlight straight at my bizarre M.M.I.. The skeletal machine hangs there idly, crowned with wires and surrounded by garbage. Dim, ambient lights from plugged-in hardware in standby mode provides just enough light to get a sense for the degree of clutter in the rest of the room. I'm finally going to do it, I'm finally going to make good on all this work.

I feel a sense of dread, but stronger still is the swell of adventure. Truth be told, I don't have much to live for, not anymore. A great project like this? I could live for this. I could live for a game like this, too. Until I got bored, at least.

At the same time, I also have the feeling this isn't be 'some game'. Maybe it's just the months of obsessive prep work, but I think I've bought into the hype. Four months after release, and the buzz has only grown, with promises one and all (allegedly) faithfully delivered. Great Crusade Online must be something truly special to achieve that praise from the bitter and brooding hardcore gamer demographic. Established competitors, other recently released MMOs, they've all fallen to pathetic subscription counts in these few months since Release Day- with much of their remaining userbase constituting people who couldn't afford to play G.C.O., no matter how much they tried to save up, and who weren't crazy enough to find a resource about "DIY" stasis pods, let alone try it in real life.

This room of mine is serene. This room of mine is also menacing. I might die in this room. If I die in this room, will they find me? I honestly don't know if the servants even try to get in, anymore. I remember finding the door cracked open once, about a month ago, and a single wire unplugged half of the way through the room- that was before my pod was even complete. I haven't so much as seen a trace of them entering the room since.

I take a deep breath.

No more stalling, I decide. It's time. The time is now.

I take a deep breath and slither my way to the podium. Carefully, precisely, I twist through the wires, freeing an arm, which I use to promptly slam the podium's one main button. Slap! Shing! The podium lights up! You have selected an answer! Is it correct? Who knows! I ripped out this thing's guts a long time ago. A boot cycle now lies where once a win jingle might have been. If the podium beeps, or rings, or, whirrs, then the machine has failed utterly. The combination tells me how, of-course, at least in theory. Meanwhile, four clicks in a row means that the "Stasis Pod" is ready to boot.

Click.

The room screams to life, dozens of machines activating at once, a hardware cacophany unlike anything I've ever heard. Is this what factories used to be like? Suddenly I understand some of the age-old resistance to working in them. Things are only going to get worse from here- the machines are staggered to avoid a power fault while everything is booting on or turning off.

Click.

Peripherals being to initialize. The room lights up, bathed in electric glow. The current is so strong I can nearly feel it, or so it seems. Logically, I know that is impossible. Pernicious sensations disagree, hackles on my neck rising. Is it the electricity setting the hairs on end, or anticipation? I hear a gentle hum as the most important of the non-processing elements wakes up: the chip reader. The game is now begging to initialize, assuming I processed the chip properly. I'm not letting it, of course. It thinks the pod has something "jammed in the door." You fool! Of course the door is jammed, there's an MTX Advanced Transcription Workstation occupying that space! I ripped out most of the hinges to make room for more wires, so it can't close properly anymore anyway! That's how much trouble I went through to make this thing work! Braggadocio aside, "unjamming the door" is the last step to booting into the game. I have a switch for it attached straight on my DIY Isolation Helmet.

Click.

The room begins to rumble and purr. Everything is online now, hundreds of fans desperately chugging to keep cool. Most of them are unnessecary, since even in poorer households modern cooling is the status quo, and modern cooling almost never changes temperature. Power is so cheap no one will notice the extra fee- well, my parents will notice that sort of thing instantly, but it'll be so miniscule they won't really care. Everything coming to life means everything, and for the first time in what must be decades the medical M.M.I. turns on.

The M.M.I. twitches and writhes like a living thing, popping out of its standard column and bending and bowing as it swings about, moving like an nematode. The 'braces' attached to its sides begin to spin and flail. When one clubs the wall the sharper edge hits, leaving a gaping hole in the wood. I'm suddenly relieved I didn't try to put it on before getting the whole machine together... I watch in anxious anticipation. After a few minutes of rumbling fans and flailing M.M.I. antics, it solidifies back into a column, as though nothing had ever happened.

A robotic, feminine voice eminates from the machine. "RE-CALIBRATION COMPLETE." It says. "IT HAS BEEN twenty three thousand, five hundred and thirty two DAYS SINCE LAST USE. PLEASE WAIT PATIENTLY FOR AUTHORIZATION TO CONTINUE." The voice seems to have been synthesized from a human and re-processed, but it isn't very convincing. More confirmation this particular M.M.I. is old indeed. You can hardly tell the difference, these days. Diodes on the surface, near the Nerve Interface portion of the device, begin to blink. It is no-doubt looking for the authorization chit associated with a live unit or an "O-K" signal from a nearby admin model. I found a few references to such "O-K" signals in ancient troubleshooting forums, and I have a machine in the locker radioing a replica of one out. Let's hope that works!

"AUTHORIZATION CONFIRMED," the machine agrees. I'm modestly shellshocked at the idea of a tech forum being useful. This is perhaps the first time in human history taking advice from such a place has not immediately backfired. Yet, in a way, it has. Because what's worse than the device malfunctioning-

Click.

The machine has fully booted up, and the podium has confirmed it is "safe" to start the game. Therefore, I am totally out of excuses to quit before trying to play the game I've been working up to playing for the past ninety-one days. All this onorous effort for one, one big game. It better be worth it, it should be worth it. I have launched on an insane quest to make this thing work and it did first try and so I shall try it. As natural as butter on bread. You can't have all this effort for no reward, no pay-off. What kind of monster would spend all this time describing an ultimately unimportant series of events, an aborted quest? That wasn't how the world was supposed to work. Allegedly.

As I allow my thoughts to wander far from the existential danger I'm about to inflict upon my body and mind, I get into position, twisting and turning my way through the jumble of wires. Leaning my flashlight against the beanbag, I fumble first with M.M.I., unhooking it from the station and getting it into position on the seat. When the M.M.I. stops wobbling, I lift the improvized isolation helmet, hanging it on the back cushion. With some effort, I manage to slide myself into the beanbag with my implements. Careful, so careful, not to lean against the M.M.I. itself too promptly- an early entry would be a nightmare indeed.

I wiggle my backside and slide my feet. The beanbag gives way before I do, but I hardly feel it either way, and my body barely moves in the process. Ideal conditions for stasis, give or take. Lightly lifting myself up, I slide back further, curling my legs into the beanbag as best I can. I flop my feet down on the cusp, legs bent to my chest, assuming the "free submerse position," otherwise known as the "loose fetal position".

There were a ton of debates about how to best assuage the consequences of long-term immobility early in the life of dive VR, but at the end of the day, the scientific community decided to heed the very astute and blinkeringly obvious observation that, if the fetal position was good enough to keep babies limber and happy for nine months, it was plenty enough for nine hours. As academics are wont to do, they made up a fancy name for it so as not to be embarassed, and that was that. While the "free submerse position" handles circulation and swelling neatly, it does little for many of the other adverse effects. That fact lead to an increasingly ludicrous series of quality-of-life innovations that continue to this day. The safety and miniscule scale of wetware amplified that decadence to an entirely new stratosphere of unnessecary comfort that has resulted in health professionals swearing up and down that living in a M.M.I. would in fact extend your life expectancy by twenty to forty years.

I'm not on the receiving end of much of that advance, but my budget M.M.I. is, at least, new enough to have regularized nervous micro-stimulation. That feature is another way things can go horribly and fatally wrong, but if it works as intended, I'll actually feel more limber and refreshed after I wake up. If it doesn't work as intended, well, I'll probably be too dead to care about the neurological rugburn. Most of these "cutting edge neuroscience" toys were sold with life insurance policies in that era, and for damnably good reason.

I exhale deeply, then inhale. The ozone of the room is becoming heavy and heady, like a candle with a thousand wicks. Too thin to smell, were these machines used alone, as God intended. Yet God had no place here- this was a machine defiant of the natural order, only subject to Jimmy Bob's esoteric technological prowess, if even that. I am surrounded by their light, electronic stars scattered in every which direction and obfuscated by my web of wires. I shut my eyes. I have passed every roadblock of caution and logic and pole-vaulted fantastically beyond reason and sobriety. Now all that remains is to stick the landing.

Reaching over my shoulder, I twist, lifting the improvised isolation helmet far over my head. I lower it down, gently, waiting to feel the pressure and weight of a helmet as it slides over my head. The racket of the machinery vanishes, then the fuming ozone, but even still, no pressure arrives. In fact, there are no signs or sensations imparted by the helmet itself at-all, barring the dim weight of the thing as I clutch it tightly between my two palms! Have I fallen into an abyss? Is this a matter of extraphysical space, a helmet that is in fact larger on the inside?

No, that would be silly. Of course I can't feel the inside- it's an isolation helmet. If I could feel it, that would defeat the entire purpose. Wiggling my head a little, my hands feel the helmet's weight adjusting to better encapsulate my head. I exhale deeply, then inhale. The air tastes odd, squished through layer after layer of porous foam. I open my eyes, but I see only black. I open my eyes again, but that hurts to try and do, which I presume to affirm that my eyes are already open and I have successfully enterred the isolation helmet. I've tried this silly thing on a few times now, but frankly, I can't get used to it. Factory-made versions tend to have at least a few teeny defects, deliberate reminders that reality doesn't actually end when you put them on, but mine is (pridefully, regretfully) flawless.

Releasing the helmet gingerly, I slide my left hand about, searching for the game kill-switch. I find the glue and left my fingers glide over the plastic bumps, a bizarrely sensual feeling with the rest of my feeble perceptions now suppressed, to find the one most raised. I hit it, and the assembly vibrates, informing me that the game is no longer "hung".

Taking one last deep breath, I nearly choke, throat tight with anxiety. There last step is the most important- if I can do it once, just once, then surely this arduous process will become routine. Like any other game.

I lean back.

The M.M.I. ratchets into my bare back, suddenly shaped to my spine and then some, buzzing gently. At first I can feel an odd scraping as the top of the M.M.I. tries to bind to the back of my head, but apparently realizing it doesn't require that much length, that part pulls away. The sharp protruding graspers from its side dig into me gently, wrapping around and overlapping across my waist, and I feel a prickly sensation as they slide up and down my torso, adjusting ever so slightly as they search for the most appropriate spot along my body to brace. Apparently satisfied with the point immediately below my sternum, the graspers tighten up, which pulls the column along my spine tighter still.

What feels like a dozen millipedes run along my back as the neural interface adjusts itself, hunting for my C7 vertebrae. They jog as low as my lumbar before they run all the way back up, sending excruciating tingles up and down my spine. I supress my urge to scratch at my back as well as I can, only to realize that I don't have to. Somehow, I have already lost control of my peripheral motor functions. I try screaming, but as I do, the millipedes find their target, tiny mouths biting down deep into my flesh. The nerve interface digs through skin and muscle as it joins integrally to my spine, successfully performing the process I recognize as the "first-time install". Anodes scratch at my skin along the rest of my back, monitoring for adverse reactions, and my anxiety is rapidly suppressed as the device asserts chemical competence.

The feelings are so vivid in isolation that I may never forget them, even if my amygdala were ripped from my body. It's horrifying and I hate it. Everything is going right, so why does this have to be so thoroughly nerve-wracking?

Everything stops and I feel like I am floating. The M.M.I. doesn't have software. My mind is my own. My mind is alone. Will the emergency exit feature work, after all these years? Will I drift here forever, until my thoughts are inconsequential?

My worries are unfounded. The endless black is cut through with thin sheets of white. Unfurling into hypnotic spirals, and then undulating across my "field of view" like waves, the black and white war, until finally only white remains.

The endless white space is promptly disrupted. Large, pitch-black text scrawls across my "field of view", following it effortlessly as I look around, leaving a thin rapidly-fading trail of motion blur in its wake. The text read:

"WELCOME ONLINE™."

Tacky as that was, that could only mean one thing: I have done it. My longshot device of wonders is functional, or at least it can boot without my immediate death.

Let the game begin!