The Starfighter Invitation

12 starter city

As before, an arrow appeared to guide my way, though this time it looked to be heading out of my Snug. When I reached the door, a detailed Code of Conduct popped up, and I had to read it before the door would open. Nothing particularly surprising: no grabbing or attacking outside Challenges, no exposure of genitals in public areas, no transmission of speech excessively pejorative, or intended to distress, which was nicely vague. Penalties starting with warnings and leading all the way up to account cancellation.

"Does suspension mean being kicked out of DS for a while?"

[[No, hung up in a cage in a public place,]] Dio said, drifting along behind me.

I really can’t tell when Dio is joking. "Hung up in a cage? Really?"

[[With your Link access cut off, since most Bios seem to find boredom worse than being pegged out on display. Length of punishment determined by the city’s administrator, but more to the point, you receive a red mark. The ranking trials and some of the more prestigious Challenges can’t be undertaken with active red marks.]]

"You can get them erased?"

[[Only converted to grey marks. Avoid gaining any. A Bio with a large accrual of grey marks is of diminished value.]]

An [Open] command popped up in my HUD. I activated it, and watched the door’s previously flat surface divide into petal-like segments, then smoothly retract. I hadn’t even been able to see the shape of them before they’d opened. Beyond was a small room and another hexagonal door.

"Airlock," I said, pleased with this reminder that this was a spaceship just waiting to happen.

Triggering the outer door, I stepped into a city that was arguably one massive corridor. The cavernous space outside my Snug was the inside of a giant tube. I stood on a curving white walkway looking over an indoor park—trees, grass, paving and a fountain—to a set of four walkways on the opposite side of the tube. Above arced what I almost took to be a ceiling aquarium, but the torpedo shapes that flashed beyond a semi-transparent blue screen were not very fish-like.

The view across to the topmost walkway opposite mine gave me an explanation, as one of the torpedo shapes dropped down from the ceiling and settled by a platform, then lifted away, leaving behind a person dressed exactly like me.

Everyone was dressed exactly like me: newbie gear taken to the extreme of sameness. The only variation was the occasional person who’d chosen the Magneto-Gwen look over the ear piece. They were, most of them, acting just like me, too: emerging from their Snug airlocks and gaping.

Beside them, all of them, were tiny balls of light.

To my left, a tall man spoke in Japanese, asking who took care of maintenance if no-one had to work. As I glanced at him, the man paused, then spoke again as he walked tentatively onto a hexagonal shape near the outer edge of the walkway. The hexagon stayed in place, but a blue shimmer rose up, taking the man with it, his arms shooting out for balance as he vanished toward the walkway above mine.

"Dio," I said. "When you talk to me, am I the only person who can hear you?"

[[Unless I choose otherwise.]]

"If I think at you, can you hear it?"

[[Thinking, no. Directed thought, yes. Your [Communications] menu has a number of options on how to handle conversation over the Link. Worried about sharing your opinions too freely?]]

"I suppose that would depend on how easy you are to offend," I responded, trying out my [Directed Thought] option, which was basically just a private voice channel…except sparing me the necessity of actually speaking.

Which was no little thing.

Dio made clear my success by responding with [[Not at all,]] and my attention fell down a rabbit hole of functional telepathy, and sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic, and where Dream Speed sat with Clarke’s Laws.

With my thoughts so distracted, it was fortunate I’d seen the function of the hexagon-lift before my guiding arrow led me to it. Staggering off the thing two levels up, I was wondering if the easy replacement of bodies had led to a lack of simple safety measures like hand railings when I nearly collided with someone.

"Sorry!" I said, and then almost stumbled a second time. That was a reaction to a face: high cheekbones, incredible brown eyes, precisely cut lips. Physical beauty on a scale I’d never before personally encountered.

He sidestepped and gave me an apologetic grimace before continuing on along the walkway. Even at an increasing distance he stood out spectacularly because, unlike every other person I’d seen so far, he wasn’t wearing a green-grey jumpsuit. Instead, the man was dressed in unrelieved white made doubly brilliant by the darkness of his skin. Two strips of cloth, about five inches in width and ending with triangular in-cuts, snapped back from his shoulders like horizontal pennants, and on his head he wore what I could best describe as a futuristic ceramic crown.

"NPC?" I thought to Dio.

[[Just so,]] Dio replied, bobbing lazily above my head.

He’d been so real! Which was a stupid thing to think in a virtual world. And, after all, I’d been having a conversation with, presumably, a non-player character ever since I’d logged in. The Cycogs would have to all be NPCs for there to be one for every player, and NPC’s usually had limited conversation. There was no way Ryzonart could have enough employees to handle so much clearly non-scripted chat, so it had to be the game itself I was talking to, capable of producing people indistinguishable from…people.

I took a breath, and shelved for the thousandth time the question of whether Dream Speed could really involve true AI. That meltdown could wait.

The hexagon-lift had taken me up above the ceiling of blue to a transport level, and I followed my arrow to a marked waiting area. Within a count of ten a white, pill-shaped object—rather like my Snug except only large enough to fit a handful of people—glided to a stop, an opening melting into existence along one side.

Glancing at the bottom of the pill, I saw a faint glimmer of blue-green, but no other clue to what was allowing the thing to float about. I almost laughed at how hesitantly I stepped aboard, given that one of my favourite pastimes in MMOs is finding really tall things to jump off. Magic science meant I didn’t have to care about the physics, but I still felt too real to abandon it.

"Do these things have a name?" I asked as I sat, not bothering with the [Directed Thought] option since we were alone.

[[Pods.]]

We began to move, and I gripped my seat, trying not to gasp. Remembering the rollercoaster shape of the rail I’d seen from my Snug, I braced for a plunge-over-a-waterfall experience, but the pod remained horizontal as it shot through the blue ceiling stream. Sadly, there didn’t seem to be any part of the ride that involved views outside the city tube, though the pod moved so quickly and smoothly that it hardly mattered.

The announcement had been both audible, and blazoned in text across my field of view, and I jerked and flinched a little, then tried to pretend I hadn’t.

[[There are options for how system messages and other communications are handled,]] Dio told me, with just the faintest suggestion of Cycog laughter. [[By default they will be suppressed while you are in a Challenge, but you can also specify priority contacts, or any variation of what you’ll see and not see.]]

"How far am I off Rank One?"

[[It’s probable you will achieve it in your next training session. Your progress was solid.]]

While this Nina Stella must have reached Rank One in her first session. I worked out how to search for players, and found the player information fairly limited.

I wondered what it would be like to instantly become the most famous player in Dream Speed, and had to admit to envy. But I shrugged off missed opportunity as my pod slowed, then stopped. My arrow led me back to the concourse level, and into a maze of doors.

This was frankly confusing to look at. They were not doors standing by themselves, but leading into small, free-standing block-shapes, as if someone had scattered the place with cut-down shipping containers. Script in at least two different alphabets was blazoned all over the containers, in no language I recognised.

My arrow led me through the maze to one of the containers and pointed right at the door, but I hesitated. "What’s the difference between virtual and physical Challenges, given I’m playing a virtual game?"

[[Physical Challenges take up space on the Drowned Earth, and in Dream Speed will be primarily lan-related. Virtual Challenges will place your Core Unit into Storage, and load you into the Challenge via the Link.]]

"So why did I need to travel here to join a virtual quest?"

[[There are some—the larger Challenges—where you will be able to place yourself into any Storage on the planet to join, but many virtual Challenges use a limited portal upload to restrict opportunities for interference, and to minimise any possibility of delayed communication. You would not believe the tedium of Bios insisting they lost a Challenge because of transmission lag. Besides, it makes a Challenge ever so slightly more of an event to oblige a Bio to walk here.]]

"But what happens if a whole bunch of people want to take the same Challenge?" I asked, considering the small size of the container dubiously. A fit for five people, perhaps.

[[A waiting list. Or the Bios, ever fickle, find something else they want to do.]]

My destination door slid open, revealing the mirror-shimmer of Soup. MMOs often used instances to handle complex quests, phasing players through a portal into different iterations of the same experience, but that had never involved parking a physical self at the entrance. I looked around at dozens of other doors, realising that behind them all would be the same silver shimmer.

"Are there empty people…Core Units…all around us?"

[[A mindless horde’s worth.]]

"Are they safe? From harm, I mean, not the prospect of them turning into a mind-controlled horde."

[[If this were a location where the city Cycog had some animus against me, then there are extra security precautions it would be wise to take. But I have no particular enemies here, and you are far too minor a Bio to be considered worth taking direct action against.]]

"Well, let’s change that," I said, and stepped into the shimmer.