In the span of a breath, Vy’s blade left its sheath to hover between her and the beast. She’d been tracking it all morning, this foul-smelling, ghastly hulk of a wolf. This across ten miles of swaying summer woodland, to arrive at the beast’s den deep in the foothills. She stepped forward. As she did, the wolf looked up from its late breakfast—leftover townsperson, from the look of it—its muscles going tense beneath its blood-matted fur. A growl emerged low in its throat. Just then, a sudden shiver up Vy’s spine. Not from fear but as if from . . .

There was no time to think about it. Like a trap sprung, the wolf lunged from its position, its teeth bared and hungry for tomorrow’s leftovers.

Brinng-brinng! Brinng-brinng!

. . . With the glimmering blade half down the beast’s gullet, she paused the simulation to take the call. Like paper set aflame, the bristling summer forest withered away to reveal before her a cramped and low-lit apartment. The great hush of the forest, the warmth of the sun across the back of her neck—all vanished to return her to normal everyday life. Or as everyday as life got for a party member for hire anyway.

With a click, the neurowear ring snapped open around the crown of Vy’s head and she pulled herself down from the VR apparatus to land on the cold tile floor. The cold. She suspected that was the source of her shiver earlier. While the simulation had been telling her brain that the world was a balmy eighty-one degrees—which matched the neural input of the virtual woodland—she now felt the chill of the real world again. Little known fact about envirtualization: the professionals are all nude or near to it when they go under. A sudden fluctuation of temperature is one thing; unpredictable cross-chatter between the two realities regarding something like the weight and fit of your armor is another thing entirely. A successful envirt needed to feel completely immersed in the illusion of her armor—for Vy, being down to nothing but your skivvies did just that.

Of course, it helped if you remembered to close the window.

“Yeah, yeah, hold your horses,” she said to the continued ring of the call emanating from a speaker on the drone buzzing nearby. “Just a second.”

Shaking her pearl-colored hair out from the mesh connection cap, Vy squeezed past stacks of equipment to arrive at the open window, which she promptly closed shut. There was a small metal sink attached to the wall beneath the window and drinking from the faucet she threw an eye at the cityscape standing in front of her, from this perspective a dozen closely spaced buildings piled with small, sad-looking windows. She stood and leaned in against the glass to peer up at the hint of blue sky tucked away up there in the heavens. She sighed.

“Vy,” she deadpanned, signaling the drone with a movement of her hand to begin the call. Before anyone could even speak she signaled again and the drone began projecting a display in front of her hand—a wide array of swords and armor and other equipment.

From the drone’s speaker, the sound of muffled voices talking over each other. Someone had their hand over the microphone but didn’t realize that flesh and bone was a weak armor against anything at all. This told Vy all she needed to know about the people on the other end.

“You’ve got about five seconds,” she said, extending the “five” for dramatic effect as she swiped through the selection of swords floating in front of her. Midway through was a sword called Swansong, her favorite, and alongside the projected image of the sword was an array of stats. She peered at the numbers a moment and then blowing her hair out of her face she flicked away the display.

“Well, it’s been a real pleasure,” she spat, reaching up to signal to end the call.

But before she could, a voice spoke up. “—Yes, I’m calling for a Vivian Thornheart?” The voice had a low croak to it, probably the result of poor communication skills but Vy was willing to go so far as to assume it was a cold.

She screwed her face up as if there was anybody to see. “You mean Vivian Thornheart, the Incognita avatar? Because you believe that an actual person would have the name ‘Thornheart’ . . . ?”

Again the call went muffled as the two voices bickered back and forth: I told you to let me handle the. . . Oh and what do you know about—? No, she isn’t, she. . . Well, if you know so much why am I the one to. . .

Vy interrupted the chatter with a deliberate clearing of her throat.

“Ah, yes, I—I’m sorry,” came a different voice, this one more pleasant to the ear, at least, “please forgive my colleague, he’s obviously spent far too many hours in intellectual seclusion. Vy, you say? So you’re the pilot of the avatar known as Vivian Thornheart?”

She leaned against the sink a moment only to stand up straight again at the touch of the cold metal against bare skin. “I’m not a pilot. . . .”

The croaking voice returned. “Well, in theory, the interface system best matches that of the traditional coupling of man and mach—”

“Skip it,” Vy cut in. “What do you want?”

A nervous laugh from the second, more agreeable voice. “Of course, yes, someone like yourself would want to get right down to it. Ah. Ah. Hello. My name is Elliot Orenfall, a student at the University of RM—”

“RM?”

“Reformed Massachusetts.”

“Mmm.” Vy didn’t really keep up with political stuff; it was all too volatile and prone to chaos for her tastes. She much preferred the clockwork regularity of the virtual world. There an overthrow of the central government could be rolled back as easy as a systems update. The same could not be said about the world outside of the Cog.

“Alright, boys, since you’re reticent to get to the point, let me see if I can guess.” She nodded at the drone to follow her as she made her way back through the stacks of equipment toward the far side of the apartment. There she picked clothing at random from the vast array of articles that dangled from this or that right angle and began slipping herself inside. “You’re looking for an easy route toward some high-level loot? Or might you only need an ace in the hole for a clan faceoff? No, I’ve got it: You two are having a hell of a time completing the Nine Trials of Dragondale? Yeah, that’s a tough one, I tell you. . . .” Vy had been a party member for hire for three years now, long enough to know that 99% of jobs were solving one of three basic problems: loot, rivalry or skill. In fact, even that percentage was leaning pretty hard on the benefit of the doubt—in all her years she’d yet to encounter that elusive 1%.

That was, of course, until today.

“Well, actually, our needs our quite to the contrary. You see, a few of my colleagues and I are putting together a—oh what to call it?—survey group to travel into one of the Incognita.” Elliot paused a moment as if awaiting a response, which never came. “Anyway, we depart tomorrow morning for a month-long excursion. I understand that all this is very last minute. But your role would be to act as a . . . well, as a guide, I guess you’d call it.” Once again, Elliot paused to allow for Vy’s reply, and when he didn’t get one he raised the stakes. “. . . A role which URND has specifically set aside funds for, in the event of what they call ‘extra-academic costs.’”

Bingo. There was no quid pro quo like cold hard cash; they had her full attention now. “So you’re saying you need a bodyguard. And you two are . . . debuggers?”

Through the speaker, the collective snicker of both voices, as if Vy had just told a joke—which she demonstrably had not. Elliot cleared his throat as the realization dawned on him. “No, no, we’re graduate students, not . . . debuggers. Academic researchers. My field is techthropology, my colleague is an algoarchaeologist. There would be two more with us, a glitch biologist and a simuphysicist.”

Vy was fully dressed now, and stood looking at the drone with her hand on her hip. “You are aware that these words don’t mean anything to me, right?”

Elliot stammered. It was hard remembering that not everyone lived in the same bubble as you. “You’re absolutely right, how presumptuous of me. The short version is that we all study the fundamental nature of the computer-generated simulation. Myself, I am writing a dissertation on the historical intersection of artificial intelligence and man, ‘technology’ + ‘anthropology’. The expedition is actually out of that department—”

“—There’s a whole department of . . . tech—techthro . . . ?”

“Techthropology, yes. It’s a brand new field, but then again so are the simulations themselves. It boggles the mind to think that mankind has in just the last ten years begun employing artificial intelligence to build inhabitable worlds for it. AI that, per the articles of SiMBIOSIS, bar mankind from looking directly at the source code for these worlds. It’s like the onset of Newtonianism all over again—instead of simply parsing code we must test and retest the virtual world looking for its underlying principles—”

“—And while you’re at it, it seems, waste as much money as possible,” Vy quipped, now standing back alongside the VR apparatus where this all began. The drone beeped and projected a notification into the air in front of her: there was apparently a car arriving for her soon. She blew at the air and made her way back to the window. “Elliot, did you send a car?”

She didn’t even give him a chance to answer: “Look, bud, I’m just going to come clean: you don’t need me. The Incognita has special exemptions for universities and research missions; if you put in a request they’ll give you an avatar even higher level than I am, so thank you for the offer, but . . .” Vy had the window open and was leaning out to peer down at the vehicle now parking alongside her apartment building. The drone beeped again and she turned to see two options projected into the air behind her: ACCEPT or DISMISS.

The two voices bickered once more, but this time for their shortest duration yet. When they stopped it was the croaking man’s voice speaking to her again. “Vy, look,” the voice said, “I’m afraid we’ve misconstrued the matter.”

“Misconstrued how so?” She was back inside now, the drone’s projected image having boxed her in against that side of the room.

The croaking man’s voice became somber in tone. “The truth is that our expedition isn’t for research at all. You see, one month ago, a number of our peers in the program, including the lead professor of the department, they set out to the Incognita to conduct a field study on—well, it doesn’t matter really. It was research related is the salient point. Anyway, three days ago, communications stopped entirely. We received one last transmission and after that . . . nothing. It’s like they’ve just vanished.”

Vy waved away this new twist in the job. “Okay, then why don’t you just wake them up? Disconnect them from the Cog and you can just ask them what happened.”

With the band-aid of their real purpose pulled off, Elliot’s voice returned. “Here’s the thing, Vivian—I mean Vy—this was not a proxy connection. The research team was working directly out of the Reservoir.”

“They’re inside the Rez,” she said, shocked, “connected directly to the AI? Is that even . . . legal?” Indeed, Vy was beginning to wonder if the same question could be asked of this very phone call.

Elliot made a sound of uncertainty that didn’t exactly comfort her regarding either question. “Legal, well . . . not in some opinions, no. Which is why we can’t just ‘wake them up’ as you suggested. If we give the acting government any reason at all, they won’t just shut down the department—the entire university would be culpable for breach of SiMBIOSIS.”

There was your next reason Vy stayed away from politics: Ever since the government was overthrown by the Pillar, the threat of persecution had become more and more a daily occurrence. Yet if what the two were saying was true, that meant the job—illegal or not—had just graduated from being about an imaginary score in the virtual world to being about actual life and death. Judging from the cavalier way that Elliot and his colleague were discussing the matter, she wasn’t entirely sure they fully understood that themselves.

If these students (and professor) were in the Rez, that meant they were wired directly into the simulation. At that speed of data transmission, the failsafe systems that prevented the brain from shutting down in the event of the perception of severe trauma couldn’t compete with the immediacy of the simulation. There in Vy’s apartment, for example, the VR system could interrupt the so-called “zero-sum scenario,” wherein an envirt whose life points were reduced to zero actually underwent the simulation of death. Like waking up from a dream just before you hit the ground, the user was dropped back into the real world. However, wire someone hot to the Incognita, and there would be no waking up at all. The brain, faced with the simulation of death, responded exactly as it would to the real thing—it died.

Vy didn’t need to think any longer. “Tell your car I’m on the way,” she said, pushing past the drone to head for the closet. There she found a bag and began stuffing it with clothes.

Elliot hesitated. “You mean you’ll help us? Vy, that’s—”

“Why does it seem like you are speaking to me and not to the car . . . ?” She was tossing things in the bag that she wasn’t even sure what body part they went on. In truth, she wasn’t entirely sure she needed to pack anything at all; once they were inside the Cog the issue of ‘clothes’ became an avatar’s problems. Still, the process kept her mind focused, and when she had packed everything she thought she’d need she went to the VR system and initiated its shutdown and made her way for the door out of her apartment.

All the while, she heard the croaking man speaking to someone else. When he was done, he returned his attention to her. “Okay, we’ve told him that you’re on your way down. And Vy, there’s one more thing.”

She paused as the door—of course there was more. “Let’s hear it,” she said. She motioned for the drone to return to its charging nest and off it went back into the apartment.

The voice was farther away now, but not so much that she couldn’t hear the croaking man speak. “The short version is this: You’re not the only party member for hire. Remember how Elliot told you that the university has funds set aside for guides? Well, we know that because the research expedition hired one, too.”

Now things were beginning to fall into place. The two didn’t just pull her name out of bucket—they had found her while trying to contact another for-hire entirely. And she had a feeling she knew exactly who.

“Let me guess,” she said, tossing the bag around her shoulder by the strap, “an avatar by the name of Edston Brinvar?”

Elliot’s voice returned. “That’s right. So you do know him?”

Vy shook her head in disbelief. “Yeah. I know him.”

---

Excited to know more before next week's chapter? Well, be sure to check out the first book in the I, Speedrunner series, The Infinite Lawman, available now on Amazon. While not a part of the series, Party Member for Hire takes place in the same universe--albeit some years before the events of The Infinite Lawman.

Thank you so very much for reading!!! See you next week :)