The thread pulsed directly to the front door of a shop across from the landing pad. Once it hit the door sill, it hooked along the base of the door, up and around, running a complete circuit of the door every two seconds. As signs go, I felt this was a fairly obvious one.

“The Shop” as the weathered neon and metal sign extending away from the building proclaimed itself, dominated an entire corner of the floor I was on. Strangest of all, it was comprised entirely of tan brick. I had to look at it for a second or two before I could put my finger on why that was significant, until I remembered that I was standing on the side of a skyscraper, and clay bricks probably made incredibly shitty skyscrapers.

Glancing around, most of the other buildings were made out of a variety of metals and glass, but most looked like they belonged halfway up a high rise.

I shook it off, actively reminding myself that I was inside of a computer simulation. Humanity had thousands of years of impractical ideas, wasted on a reality that couldn’t sustain them for one reason or another. The virtual worlds were probably the only place for most of them, islands for misfit thoughts.

The thought made me smile. When I was a child, my mother told me that there was a place in the world for everyone, but that little nugget of wisdom was just another in a long line of shitty advice that parents give their kids. An entire generation, raised to thrive in a world that would never exist. At least, not for most of them.

As I finished inspecting the outside of the shop, I wondered if it was overly idealistic advice given by decades of overmatched parents that had driven my generation to design and build the alternate digital realities of the d.o.mai.n universe. I guess it made sense that large portions of the population, reared on fantasies of altruism and the golden rule, would set about creating that reality for themselves inside of a digital dream world upon reaching adulthood and not finding anything approaching the reality promised to them by their parents.

Our parents no doubt sold us that line of gilded horseshit because they thought if they impressed upon us a desire to live in a utopia, that over the coming decades we would create it for ourselves.

Of course, that’s not what happened. Instead, the idea that everyone would be honest and decent just set us up for the inevitable fleecing to come. Like Lucy holding the football, any ounce of trust was taken advantage of. Re-education from a legion of grifters and con artists, no doubt raised by parents with a much less optimistic view of the way reality would become.

So, denied the reality promised to us by our parents, we’d created it with strings of code.

In our digital worlds, we could live in safety. Here, we could be loved for who we are on the inside, because whatever you wanted to be on the outside.was only a few clicks and credits away. The creators of the d.o.mai.n universe had made right the promise of the previous generation through the only means available to them.

Lost in reflection, I barely noticed the person leaving the shop until the opening door almost struck my knee.

“Oh...sorry.”

Coming back to myself, I looked up to meet the man’s eye. He was around my height, with broad shoulders and short hair. His shirt looked to be painted on, giving an impressive showing of the underlying musculature. He nodded in my direction, pulled out a cigarette, and kindled it in a practiced motion as he leaned back against the storefront..

I thought he looked every bit a middle eastern Tyler Durden, but that could have been a remnant of the vaguely mutinous frame of mind I had been in.

“You new?”

His words caught me by surprise.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t hear what you..”

“I asked if you were new...to UNDR?”

I smiled. “That easy to tell?”

He took a drag off his cigarette and chuckled as he exhaled, the smoke coming out in bursts. It reminded me of the old steam locomotives in the ancient Wild West movies my grandfather used to make me watch when I would be dropped off at his place after school while I waited for my mom to get out of work.

“Yeah, you all have that same expression, same way of standing next to the exterior walls of the building in an effort to get as far away from the drop as possible.”

I turned around and glanced at the empty space between the towers.

“Well, in my defense, it does look like a long way down.”

He answered again between drags, “You have no idea, friend.”

As I gave the drog a final glance, he took one last pull from his cigarette and cast it away. I watched it as it flew, saw as it dematerialized into particulates that diffused into the air like breath in winter.

The man gestured with his head towards the door.

“Well, you’d better come in then.”

He pushed the door open and waved for me to enter. I didn’t move.

“What is this place?”

The man looked confused.

“What does your HUD tell you it is?”

“HUD?”

He laughed. “Damn, you are a noob. The Shop is a hub for players joining UNDR Online from the Eastern Time Zone. There are others, even in just the New England area, but they serve as markets, training grounds, networking centers, among other things. Judging by the fact that you don’t even have a heads up display yet, I’d say you’re exactly where you need to be.”

He extended a hand. “I’m Raul, by the way.”

I took his offered hand and shook it.

“Nice to meet you, Raul. I could probably use someone to show me the ropes. Anyone in particular I should ask for?”

He gestured at his chest.

“You’re looking at him. Now come on, we’re letting the smog in.”

I thought back to the atmospheric graying out of buildings in the distance, and wondered just how health it was to breathe the air outside. Then, I remembered that this was a video game, and there was no such thing as virtual cancer. That I knew of.

I stepped past Raul and into the Shop, and my eyes went wide. From the outside, the building looked like some sort of diner, but I’d only been able to see around ten feet into the building due to the dark tint of the windows. The tables and chairs that I had thought extended all the way through the building were only balconies that wrapped around the first floor, before giving way to a larger lobby with a staircase leading down a level in the building. The entirety of the interior was lit indirectly, with the light squeezing out from behind gaps where the crown molding met the cuiling far above, as well as below the mopboards and along vertical wainscoting seams every few feet. The amount of light coming from each source wasn’t a lot, but the combined illumination from what must be hundreds of locations, arranged in a grid on every surface, gave the place a strange quality that I couldn’t put my finger on right away. The staircase terminated at a round, glowing floor surface that I recognized as an amalgam of every teleport pad I’d ever seen in video games and movies growing up.

Raul continued down the stairs and hopped onto the glowing pad. From a distance, the pad appeared to glow white, but once I stepped on it, I could tell finally see that it was just an extremely brilliant shade of blue. I wanted to close my eyes, but the entire journey took place between the time it took me to think about closing them, and the muscles in my eyelids actually flipping them shut. So, not really in the blink of an eye, but about a hundred times more quickly.

The first step I took to continue following Raul was a bit shaky, but other than that the teleport was uneventful. I’d expected to be met with a bout of intense nausea or vertigo upon arrival, but learned long ago to not question something that worked out better than anticipated. The uniform gray illumination of the main lobby gave way to a hallway with no visible lights in the ceiling, but that was lit by the actual walls themselves. The walls looked like translucent panels lit from behind, darkening slightly at the edge of each section.

The designers of UNDER really had something against LEDs.

Raul peeked over his shoulder to make sure I was still following.

“You doing alright?”

I squinted back at him through the excessive brightness of the space.

“Yeah. Why is this hall lit like a damn tanning booth?”

He glanced at the walls, like he had forgotten that they were unusual, and smiled.

“The lighting in The Shop is all omnidirectional. The reason for it is that much of the camouflage and stealth abilities in UNDR Online are darkness or shadow based. If there are no shadows…”

“...then they can’t sneak in unannounced. Got it.”

Raul nodded. “Now you’re catching on.”

The doors were all the same, save a single LED about three quarters of the way up the center of each. All of the doors we passed were lit with an overly obvious shade of red. Raul stopped at the first door with a green lit LED and pushed it open. No unlocking of the door, no latch mechanism, just pushing it open like a gunslinger walking into a saloon.

Sensing my question, he called back over his shoulder.

“The doors in The Shop are all bio-encoded. Or, at least what passes for biology in UNDR Online. If you have access, you just push them open. If not, well, you might as well be pushing against the Great Wall of China. The spaces themselves are all shared, we Mentors just grab the first room available, and a standalone instance of our study loads in as we enter.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but didn’t want to further Raul’s impression of me as a complete noob, so I’d kept it to myself. I was envisioning some sort of hippie commune, a shared workspace or an eastern bloc hostel. None of the ideas seemed all that fun to work in. As I stepped through the entryway, my eyebrows furrowed in confusion.

The room beyond was...empty. A gridlike pattern of the same blue white from the teleporter broke up the six walls of otherwise uninterrupted satin gunmetal into six inch squares. Raul stepped behind me, making sure that the door was securely closed, and as soon as the door clicked into place, the room began to change.

The segments of gunmetal extended in places, retracting in others. The changes formed rudimentary chairs, tables, and from the walls and ceiling, shelves and chandeliers. The majority of the ceiling retreated, along with the top third of each wall, creating another balcony, one that my logistically bound mind told me had to extend back into the high-ceiling hall that we had just come from. Of course, inside a simulated reality, they don’t always concern themselves with petty things like laws of physics. Once the objects became structurally complete, the gunmetal sections began to subdivide and add more complex geometry, each square facet decreasing in size but multiplying exponentially in number.

Raul continued walking towards the center of the room, unimpressed with what must have been to him an everyday sight. I, however, was enthralled by the casual and flippant use of processing power. There are times when, even knowing that it is only three dimensional computer graphics rendering at an insanely high level, the primitive parts of your mind refuse to see it as anything less than magic. This was one of those times.

In the amount of time it took Raul to reach his chair and sit, the room had gone from looking like it had been built of edge lit metal cubes to a full realized study, complete with deeply lacquered, almost amber wall treatments, a winding staircase leading up to the second level, and several panels of abstract art that looked to be constantly evolving, morphing from one masterpiece to another. I’d never been someone who put a lot of value in having some grandiose place to hang my hat, but even I had to admit-I knew I was going to miss this place when the time came to leave.

“Raul...this place is amazing.” The words came out in a breathy, awe-filled gasp.

Raul looked around, as though trying to see if anything impressive had changed since the last time he’d been to his study. A slight, confused frown gave away that he hadn’t noticed any changes.

“I guess…”

His lack of deference irritated me. It’s been said that human beings can take even miracles for granted if they see them enough, that novelty is coveted above all else, but this was the first time after hearing the adage that I realized how right it was.

Sensing my mood, he elaborated further.

“I designed this study about a year ago, so I’ve seen the startup sequence a few thousand times. After a while you get used to it.”

I shrugged and shook my head slightly at the same time. It was the nonverbal equivalent of, “If you say so, but I don’t think I’d see it that way.”

Raul mirrored my shrug without the shake of the head. A moment passed where I could feel him taking my measure, and just before it passed the line into awkwardness, he extended a hand, gesturing to the chair to his left.

“Alright, I just reviewed your stats, and if you’re ready, we can start setting you up with a class.”

“Nice rolls, by the way. It makes this part way more fun when your stats give us the leeway to pick from some of the more...interesting classes.”

The smile he punctuated the sentence with was honest, and contagious, coaxing out one of my own.