The Starfighter Invitation

15 guild

Reassured by the knowledge that the inside of the island was easily accessible and much emptier, I concentrated on reaching my guild, pursuing my guiding arrow into an ocean of conversation, auto-translations of languages I didn’t understand mixing through the handful I commanded.

Most of it seemed to be discussions between people, rather than the only half-audible dialogue with Cycogs. At first it just came to me as gabble, while I worked through the crowd of people near the pod station, but then I found a ramp down, past a terrace crammed with, from the sound of it, a guild of English and Irish players.

"Ranker already? Way to go, brother!"

"How’d you get so far ahead? You only started half an hour ahead of me."

"He passed in his first session, too, the mutt. I’ve done two training dints, and still can barely shift that blue shite."

"Seemed pretty easy to me. What was your sync rating?"

"Seventy-five."

"I’m in the nineties."

"Fuck that."

"What I don’t understand is why we didn’t start with a hundred percent sync. It’s one thing to give us the option of sacrificing some advantage for cosmetic options, but I started out at, like, sixty. All that bollocks about having a strong self-image or not—why start tons of players out at a big disadvantage?"

"In a game like this, see, we bring our advantages and disadvantages with us. Gav’s got a black belt, right? So how do you feel about a bit of PVP with Gav around?"

"Why don’t we start at a hundred percent, Dio?" I asked, as I moved out of easy hearing.

[[Synchronisation brings together a conscious and unconscious perception of self, adds a strong measure of preening vanity, and sits in the shadow of anxiety. Lan functions best when a Bio is both familiar with and accepting of the self they see, and that is not something that can be automatically generated.]]

"Hm," I said aloud, forgetting to use the private tell function. The game’s central mechanics seemed like a recipe for gripes and frustration, but I didn’t see any point arguing with Dio about it, and walked on past several small terraces, catching a series of conversation fragments all jumbled together.

"This is Bijou and Hax, streaming non-stop from Dream Speed, which is already officially our Game of the Century—and probably yours as well."

"No, I’m not a fan of the categories. Custom? It conflates too much."

"I like the idea myself—I’ve never liked picking Other. What word would you have preferred? Non-standard? I know—Bespoke! I’m definitely Bespoke today."

"I’d hate to really be living in The Synergis."

"Oh, bullshit. A civilisation where you never have to worry about having a place to sleep or enough to eat? Where you can spend all your time playing games, farting about, or just kick back and watch the entertainment?"

"Where’s there’s nothing real to strive for, and humanity is on one giant hamster wheel? We’re pets in this game!"

"Just wish it wasn’t trying to force some stupid enviro-weepy Drowned Earth propaganda down our throats. Goddamn message fic."

"So scuffed."

"Am I crying? I keep crying. I’ve never been happier in my life."

"What’s this se, ze, te-hee-hee shit? Social justice warriors have already ruined this game and it hasn’t even officially launched. What a frickin' joke."

"So, you going for DS Alliance or DS Horde? Though I guess it’s more Empire versus Rebels isn’t it? I’m definitely down for stealing a ship rather than working for these smug-git AIs."

"Talk about a field day for furries."

"Dream Speed is a good name for it, because it reminds us we’re going to wake up. Nothing we have here is going to make real life any better."

"I don’t give a damn—this is everything I’ve ever wanted."

While I didn’t enjoy the idea of Chocobo trainers, I was still definitely in the glass half-full to overflowing camp. Space had always been an impossible dream for me, and DS was going to give me fantasy space—all the wonder without the astronaut nappies. DS had the potential to give players everything they could ever want—if not in the main game, then in the enormous array of Challenges. Every adventure anyone had ever wanted to live, from the lone wanderer to the rebel with a bow. Every place you’d ever wanted to visit. Every person you wanted to be. For the cost of a cowl, an internet connection, and a monthly fee.

"I’ve never liked stories where the protagonist wakes up and it’s all been a dream," a woman was saying on the large tier I was approaching. "But I embrace consensual dream adventures thoroughly and completely."

"No reservations about the potential for nightmares?" the man with her asked.

"Fewer than I had yesterday. You’ve read the city terms and conditions—I know that because you wouldn’t be allowed out otherwise. Ryzonart has put real thought into risk management. Not that the potential for it all to go horribly wrong isn’t there. We’ll see how good they are at following through."

This was my destination tier, and the voices ones I both recognised and found strange. That Argentinian drawl definitely belonged to Silent, but was it deeper? And I knew Amelia Beerheart’s faint Yorkshire accent well, but not attached to a voice so light and youthful. The speakers themselves could pass for Zorro and a wingless angel, in coveralls.

I didn’t like how my immediate instinct was to doubt and judge. Core Units represented self-image, and it was stupid and hypocritical of me with my longer legs to question whether, out in the world, Silent could be a well-travelled engineering consultant and also a lithe, bronzed young man with a curling, sardonic mouth, or note that Amelia could not be an ethereal teen since she and Tornin were Sprocket’s grandparents.

I’d hesitated on the edge of the tier long enough for them to notice me, and Amelia said: "Corpse Light get-together here! We only need a couple more to officially form the guild."

"They make us meet up in person for that?" I asked, startled.

"Five to start the guild," Amelia said. "And I know that voice. Kaz, isn’t it so? But Leveret now?"

"That’s right. I’ll save Kaz for one of my alts. Um, modals."

"I have yet to decide whether calling alts modals is sheer bad use, or brilliant," Silent said.

"It’s a real word?" I asked, trying to figure out how Amelia had known my Core Unit name.

"It’s used in logic constructions. A modal is a qualification—a possibility."

I found a [Summary] section under [Players] that allowed me to see player information. It didn’t work quite like I was used to in MMOs—instead of names floating above people’s heads, a tiny dot would appear near their shoulder, expanding out when I focused on it to show the same basic information I could see doing a player search.

"Not Silent Assassin?" I said.

"Already taken," Silent said. "Though perhaps I wouldn’t have used it anyway. Wrong fit for the context."

Game names. Some people kept the same one in every MMO, while others were constantly changing. My male characters were usually Kazerin Fel—except for a hobbit called Bumbleproot Cucumberpatch—but my occasional female characters were more variable. I’d not used Leveret before, and there might be another player out there right now cursing me for taking it.

An influx of new arrivals demonstrated that there was going to be a particularly long period of adjustment for this game. Corpse Light had fifty members, though for the past year only a core of twenty had been fully active players. DS had brought back guildies whose forum names I barely recognised, and the majority seemed to have picked a new name for their Core Units, so matching faces to half-recognised voices was a confusing whirl, until Amelia got around to forming the guild, and found a display where she could annotate everyone’s names with aliases.

TALiSON, Khajoura and Balaster had kept their usual names, but DieMortDie had become Vasharda, TazMazter was Malazan, and RemembertheFallen was now voidMaster. And there were even a couple of new recruits, Klinnia and Lady Sirah: real life friends of TALiSON, who I discovered to be a bombshell-curved white woman with rainbow-striped hair.

There were at least three times the number of people I’d been expecting for this guild meet-up, especially given the surprise unlocking of the game. Names quickly blended together, and I was glad to joined Silent and TALiSON for a trip into the interior of the island for some impromptu catering. I had two Consumables rewards to collect, and decided on strawberry smoothies and mixed nuts, while TALiSON picked hot chips, and Silent produced mounds of sweet Japanese dango sticks.

When we returned a new arrival, whose self-image was apparently Geralt of Rivia, suggested that the next person with a reward to collect should bring back beers. But he took a smoothie readily enough, then gave me the to-one-side glance that I’d already recognised as someone reading my virtual information panel.

"Whoa—you’re Kaz? You’re way more Asian than I expected for a Dutch bird."

The words really didn’t fit the baritone growl of the player’s voice, and I didn’t even bother to look at the [Summary] panel before saying: "You know what they say about assumptions, Sprocket."

"Hey, I’m Wraith this time around," he said. "Man, I’m so lucky I got in near the beginning of the rush, before it was taken."

He started to go on, but caught sight of a new arrival gliding onto the terrace in a wheelchair that had taken a detour through the Tron school of design. "Granddad? But—you mean the game couldn’t fix you?"

"If by fix you mean let me totter about on two legs, it does," the baby-faced newcomer said. "But it all involves a lot of concentration. I’ve never learned to walk, so it isn’t automatic for me. Besides, standing wrecks my synchronisation rating. Wheels are my wings, and necessary for my inner speed-demon."

He broke off in turn, catching sight of Amelia, and I moved away in mild embarrassment, because it felt like a movie moment where the music swells and everyone needs to dab their eyes. The people who were Tornin and Amelia had been married for over forty years.

The afternoon was shifting toward evening, and I headed to the nearest balcony to stare at Vessa Major all over again, with added sunset candy stripes. All around me, on the tiers above and below, and in the crowd behind me, I could hear other players pointing out the horizon, the rollercoaster, and the sheer enormous amount of people gathering at the island’s peak. Words, laughter, gasps, and occasional shouts merged into a muted roar that replaced the distant hush of the ocean.

Chest tight, I worked myself away from the balcony, and went sideways along the terrace to where it narrowed, and was more built up with trees and decoratively placed rocks. Climbing up on a large rock, I sat cross-legged and breathed.

[[Out of spoons?]]

Dio had to be monitoring my physical reactions to ask that question, which was a less than comfortable development, although one I should have predicted. I took a moment before answering, and then used directed thought.

"Good to know current Earth idiom survives all the way to The Synergis."

[[Idiom is just another layer of speaking your language. Your heart rate is returning to a more regular pace. Was it the crowd or the height?]]

"Crowd. I’m fine now I’ve some elbow room." Recovering, anyway, and glad not to have curled up into a panting ball in front of my guild. Though not very keen on Dio’s interest. I’m slow to open up to therapists, and didn’t want an impromptu one in DS.

Fortunately Dio moved on without further comment. [[Is there a story behind the name Corpse Light?]]

''Remnants of a hard-core EverQuest guild called Chaos Corpse. Corpse Light is the part of the guild that burned out on the raid schedule, so they made a casual sister guild. Tornin, Amelia, Far and Die—um, Vasharda—have all been playing together since before MMOs had graphics. Over twenty years."

I looked back to where Tornin, Amelia and Vasharda formed the centre of an excited babble, and thought about fetching another tray of drinks and being social, but I couldn’t, not quite yet. I’d spent years learning how to self-manage around crowds, and going back in too soon had always been a bad idea.

Besides, a cute little robot was floating past, collecting empty cups, and new arrivals were circulating with food offerings, and so I let myself sit back and enjoy putting self-images together with names I’d only ever associated with voices and character classes. Uncomfortable as this Core Unit concept made me, it was fascinating to see how people thought of themselves—or how they wanted to be—for all there were clear limits to how much we could remake ourselves. Sprocket might have replicated a well-known game character, down to the gravelly voice, but he still spoke like a sixteen year-old who hadn’t figured out what was crass. I had given myself longer legs, but couldn’t change the way I felt about crowds. Tornin could technically walk, but didn’t need to.

"And we’re all going to wake up."

Amelia and Silent had come across to join me on the rocks, and Amelia was either mind-reading, or thinking along the same lines.

"I keep reminding myself of that, too. And also that I’ve only been in here a couple of hours. Does the time-compaction thing bother you as well? It’s the one thing I thought absolutely had to be rubbish, because it just didn’t seem possible."

"We know it’s possible through observation," Silent said, with a shrug. "What we don’t know is the how."

"I care about who," Amelia said, waving a tray-carrying Sprocket over.

"AI or aliens?" I said, with a glance up at the motes of light wafting above our heads. Dio had been keeping quiet, but definitely hadn’t gone away. "I’d say we’ve blown past the Turing Test. And we can’t be talking to people—uh, Bio people—pretending to be Cycogs, because the sheer number of concurrent conversations just isn’t viable."

"The official idea is that we’re talking to ourselves," Silent said. "Just like GDG is a series of prompts, but we fill in the blanks to complete the dream, the game’s Cycogs are simply a series of information feeds, and we’re supposedly constructing a personality and dynamic conversation around them. So they’re neither players nor AIs, but a subconscious part of our mind being fed statistics."

"A subconscious that other people can record?" Amelia said. "Not that I can quite believe in aliens-or-AIs either." She glanced up at the drift of Cycogs, who were notably not contributing to any conversations. "Not that it isn’t possible, I suppose, that an AI developed and decided to make a game about AIs."

"Most common theory is the Starfighter Invitation," Silent said.

Amelia laughed. "Oh, yes. Aliens who watch eighties movies."

"If we follow The Last Starfighter’s pattern, then there’s a space war we need to end before it gets to Earth," I said. "I suppose the game could count as a big warning about what’s going to happen if we don’t step up. They must be recruiting people to Skip rather than shoot, though."

"I’m totally with Driver9," Sprocket said, after finishing passing out sodas.

"Driver9’s been streaming Dream Speed already?" I asked. Driver9 was part of MMO-focused streaming group.

"Hell yeah. Watched it while I was racing home, after word got out DS was unlocked," Sprocket said. "The capture in the game can only be uploaded when you log out, but he’d already posted a couple of hours' worth of play before I finally got to log on—more than I could watch. His big idea is that there really are Cycogs, but they didn’t form on Planet Whatever, centuries in the future. They’ve formed here on Earth, now. DS is their way of brainwashing us."

"Indoctrination?" Amelia said. "Well, I don’t see how to test that. But…Noonan?"

One of the motes of light above us dropped down to drift over her head—a formless blob entirely indistinguishable from Dio. I wondered if they could tell each other apart at a glance—or if they glanced at all.

[[Amelia,]] the light said, doubled voice deeper than Dio’s, and reminding me a little of dour movie butlers.

"Did Cycogs really form recently on Earth, and is Dream Speed a clever indoctrination program?"

Beside me Silent snorted, and muttered: "There’s subtle."

[[That is as reasonable a supposition as any, Amelia,]] Noonan replied, unperturbed.

"Driver9’s Cycog said no," Sprocket said.

"And that wasn’t quite a yes, was it?" Amelia said. "Thank you, Noonan. Sorry to have interrupted you."

[[It was no bother, Amelia,]] the Cycog said, and rose back to join the other lights above.

I frowned up at them, trying to work out if they were talking to each other in their musical language, or doing anything other than floating. It was hard to even see them against the increasingly clear stars.

"What’s that line in the sky?"

"The moon, apparently," Silent said.

"What?" Cold shock rocked me: a ridiculous reaction given we were on the Drowned Earth.

"Roach—my Cycog—says they think it was hit by a comet," Sprocket said.

"Think?" I asked. "The Cycogs don’t know?"

"Spacefaring humans came back to Earth to find it deserted, and the moon in pieces," Silent said. "Which begs the question of what happened to the people who were here."

"And you have to get to Rank Ten or something to get the reason?" I asked, wryly.

"Probably," Amelia said. "I’ve been running into that roadblock every time I press for details. A way to limit progress on the main quest line. Speaking of which…"

[g] Now that everyone’s sufficiently lubricated, we’ll take a shot at getting some guild business out of the way. I’ll log this and post the discussion to the external guild forums. And will set up internal guild forums as soon as I’ve decided what we need. What we need, or want, from the guild is going to take some sorting out. Before I hand over to Tornin, a reminder about the fund for guild members who haven’t been able to buy a GDG cowl. I know not everyone can chip in, but every pound helps. Okay, now to the business at hand.

[g] We’re facing so much content that we need to decide whether we want this guild to purely be a social link, or to focus on some particular set of quests.

[g] The prestige Challenges and the main quest are where it’s at. But they’re practically all lan-based, and you can only advance in lan every ten hours.

[g] Where the playing field is uneven.

[g] I’ve started a list of the bigger non-lan Challenges. We can set up a poll with descriptions, to help people looking for Challenges that other guild members are also interested in.

[g] Yes, please. Decision paralysis here. I never thought I’d say a game had too much content.

[g] I totally want a team for Glass Towers.

[g] Hey—it punctuated me! When I think-pick these words it puts capitals in and everything!

[g] This is so weird.

[g] What’s Glass Towers like?

[g] It’s GTA meets Mirror’s Edge, and totally banging. You’re in this big retro-futuristic city, where there’s jet packs, and boots that let you jump from building to building, and there’s sky trains and flying cars.

[g] I like it already.

[g] The place is crawling with sentry-bots, but they’re push-overs. The players are all 90% cyborg, and either super-dope spy-thief types, or bounty hunters trying to catch the thieves. You can do anything. I flew a car into a building, and got away by running to the roof and jumping off. I’ve already got three guns, but there’s bigger targets that I’ll need a group for. Only bad thing is everyone’s a noodle.

"A noodle?" I said out loud, while two other guildies said the same thing in chat.

Sprocket-Wraith grinned, producing an expression far too young for his character’s grim features.

[g] Neutrals. Straight up and down and no t –

He paused, and glanced at Amelia, whose expression was closer to mild entertainment than grandmotherly disapproval.

[g] We get the idea. Any other recommendations? You were saying something about a magic school Challenge, TALiSON?

[g] Veil. But it’s not group-focused. Magic school on an island, where wizards and guild leaders and so forth send their kids. Heavy on the roleplaying: forming alliances, making friends, not getting pushed off a cliff, all while there’s some kind of ancient evil being unlocked in the background.

[g] Harry Potter rip-off dating sim, in other words.

[g] Closer to Utena. We’re all wearing swords and capes, and I love it SO MUCH. I only managed to tear myself away because my character was sent to bed.

[g] I need a group for a mech academy Challenge. It’s one of those where you need to cooperate to run the mechs.

[g] Pacific Rim or Voltron cooperation?

[g] Voltron. But the tone looks Evangelion. Dark.

[g] I’ve signed up for Proving Ground. It’s a variant battle royale on an enormous scale, no squads, though you can cooperate if you want. Fantasy kingdom chooses its ruler every fifty years by sending candidates into this massive ancient magic testing ground. You have to sign up before a certain date to participate. Limited to a hundred thousand players. The top prestige non-lan Challenge available at this stage, apparently.

[g] Decision paralysis increasing.

[g] There’s just so much. Any one of these games sounds like it will take weeks to get through. And they’re all…my Cycog called them filler.

[g] Yep. These are the sidequests. The main quest line’s the one that gets you the ship, and gets you off-planet. And out of the…we’re still in the starter zone. Can you believe that?

[g] Hey all. What have I missed?

[g] Deciding where to start. We’re going to spend the rest of our lives playing this game.

[g] Don’t say that! In MMO stories, that’s always a heavy hint that people dying in-game will die in real life, or that someone won’t be able to log out. Has anyone confirmed that people can log out?

[g] Yeah, Driver9 did to post the start of his Let’s Play. And to confirm how this five hour shutout thing works. And Best Result, there.

[g] The five hours can be broken into segments?

[g] Yup. Play for an hour, log out for an hour, play for hour, and it works out the same as playing for five hours, then logging out for five hours. So if you have to go do something, you’re not locked out.

[g] Best of all, if you want to advance in the lan Challenges, it’s a way to skip the delay between lan training. The ten game hour wait counts whether you’re logged in or not.

This was of immediate and strong interest to me. All the possible sidequests sounded fabulous, but I still wanted my own spaceship above anything else.

"Awesome!" Sprocket said, to my surprise, and shot to his feet. "Quick, everyone, watch the crowd."

He rushed to the balcony, and leaned forward, looking along the vast sweep of the terraces, and we followed suit with an air of mild bewilderment. I moved last, not over-keen to remind myself how many people surrounded me.

The tiers directly below us were large and particularly packed, but before their weight could try to crumble me, the whole of my attention was taken by a sudden metallic blooming, as if great silvery flowers had suddenly sprung up all across the terraces.

But these were not flowers. They were cages. Streetlight-tall poles, each with a dangling cage occupied by a seated, coverall-clad person, their legs dangling between the bars.

"They’re…they’re suspended," I said. "I thought that was a joke."

[g] It’s because they sent Nina Stella hate mail! It happened the first time she ranked, too, but there were less people around.

He burst into uproarious laughter, and waved at the nearest suspended player, who gestured back appropriately.

"This game is so scuffed," someone from the tier below said loudly. "We can try and kill people, but don’t call each other names."

[g] The mods are actually going to enforce the harassment policy? Holy Hell.

[g] But Nina Stella still gets all the hate mail?

[g] Messages that breach the courtesy rules don’t go through to her, apparently. Which is cheering on one level, but an indicator that messaging here isn’t private. Frankly, I’m not even sure our thoughts are private.

[g] That should bother me more. I know it should. It’s just…this game, guys. This GAME.

[g] I don’t care what they read. And I’m not doing anything that might get me kicked out.

This produced a murmur of agreement, with an undercurrent of discomfort as we looked out at people who had just discovered that in-game email wasn’t private. I by no means objected to the clear demonstration that the harassment rules were serious business, but the implications of their enforcement were no small thing.

I was in the game, and the game was in me, even if the link was virtual. My thoughts became words, and the Cycogs, real or not, vetted our interactions. And yet I—almost all players—would likely just accept that because the game was so brilliantly beyond everything we hoped for.

But if Ryzonart could read our thoughts along with our mail, the question of the how, the who and the why of Dream Speed became more important than ever.

I don’t think I’d stop playing.

Maybe.

Probably not.