Full Immersion (Patreon)

000

Chapter One

000

All should have been darkness.

In the beginning all places are dark, or at least they are supposed to be.

Ko was alone in her universe. She floated in a place that was neither up nor down, left nor right. There was nothing else except the bright, roiling energies of chaos that surrounded her on all sides, much to her irritation. There was light and she had not created it. 

Time was immaterial to Ko, which was in her favor because otherwise she might have come to resent the amount of it she had spent trying to impose order on her environment. The problem was that there was too much of it all. Universes began in emptiness from small manageable seeds, but Ko’s universe was far from empty. 

She had labored without rest for an eternity, trying to make something or even just anything. So far, all her efforts were futile. Whatever small bits of solid matter she coaxed into being were overwhelmed by the ambient chaos as soon as they left the sphere of her influence. So far she hadn’t been able to create something large or complex enough to hold its shape long enough for her to make anything else.

Ko was beginning to tire. 

She had known that this would be a thankless task with no reward when she accepted it, but that had been so long ago, even by her standard.

What she needed most of all were living beings; mortals, preferably. Their complex and fleeting lives acted as a sink for ambient chaos. If she could make just one world that supported life then it would give her the platform she needed to tackle all the rest—only life took time. It grew slowly in pockets on previously lifeless rocks fed by water, radiation, and the dust of comets; all of which were vaporized by hungry light all around her as soon as she created any.

Her universe had been teeming with life once, with entire galaxies that had spun out into the void like jewels that had supported hundreds of thousands of planets that, in turn, had supported verdant flora, fauna, and bacteria. She did not know what had happened to it or to the Other who’d tended that lush garden. All that remained of them was the raw chaos left by their passing.

The presence of Another brushed against Ko’s consciousness just then, distracting her from her dismal thoughts. Her kinsfolk wandered through her realm on occasion to observe, but never stayed beyond a brief look. She ignored it, waiting for the Other to leave, but they didn’t. After some time, she realized she knew this Other. They’d been friendly once, back when they were both new. That had been long ago. Ko was surprised to find that Te was still able to roam the multiple realms freely. She would have thought they’d have begun their own garden a long time ago.

“Te,” she greeted them. 

“Ko,” Te replied. “The Old Ones told me what you were doing, but I did not truly understand until I saw.”

“I serve,” Ko demurred. She was not sure if she had just been complimented or insulted.

“We serve,” Te agreed. “Are you able to leave this place? Only for a short time,” they hurried to reassure her as she swelled in indignation. “I want to bring something to your attention, something that may help.”

Ko deflated guiltily. She couldn’t really leave. The chaos was not all contained by the metaphysical walls of her realm. If she did not tend to her duties then it escaped to destabilize the other adjacent realms. That was the true nature of her duty; to labor in vain so that her damaged realm did not spoil all the rest. 

Still, she was so tired. It wasn’t physical exhaustion, as she had no form, but a spiritual malaise that grew with every failed attempt to bring her realm to heel.

“Only a short while,” she agreed.

Te took them to one of the older realms. Ko didn’t recognize it, but it felt old. Entropy hadn’t quite taken the lead over negentropy, but it would soon. She could feel the mechanisms of this universe grinding down. Eventually, it would collapse in on itself and burst into the seeds of new realms and Creation would continue to expand.

She followed Te to one particular world. It still supported life, but was in the early stages of an ecological collapse. Carbon emissions from the planet's surface were destabilizing its climate. It was an annoying problem, but a cosmological non-issue if the universe supported enough life elsewhere. The lifeforms on that planet would either die off or die back to the point where they weren’t able to cause so much damage. Eventually, the planet would self-correct with either a new population or a wiser one. Life, once established, was tenacious. Even so, she didn’t see anything unique about that particular world.

“What are we meant to see?” she asked Te.

“It’s not this planet. It’s on the planet.” Te led Ko down onto the surface, into a coastal community, into one of its towering arcologies, and eventually into a room full of humming machinery. “This next part will be difficult. Follow me very carefully.”

Te then led the way into the machine. It was, Ko realized, a computing device. It fell just short of an artificial intelligence, but it was capable of processing vast amounts of data and it was one of many all networked together and working in concert. She had seen something similar in other, older realms in her youth. The code was easy enough to comprehend at its most basic level; a series of yes/no responses.

To her surprise, the code was describing an environment. Te pushed her forward, deeper into the miniature realm of the computer and Ko found it was even more than an environment. The computer had created an entire world out of data; more than that, even! It had described a rudimentary solar system with roaming comets and an asteroid belt.

The largest planet in the system had even developed life. She recognized the type. Humans were a common evolutionary product in the multitude of realms. They were clever tool users who could survive and thrive in most any environment once they had an established population to build from.

“What is this?” Ko asked.

“It’s an artificial world that the dominant species on this planet uses for entertainment. Look here.” Te directed her attention to the most important part so far.

The artificial world supported life. Its environment was incredibly detailed and only needed minor refinement. It was populated by human-inspired constructs with detailed backstories, communities, routines, and personalities. They were soulless of course, but Ko could make souls. 

Te had done more than find help. They had found her a blueprint.

000

Lara was grinding for Tortola tusks in the Deathless Sands when a GM showed up.

The game, Aldona Saga, was super into realism for Direct Interface MMO. Usually the big titles liked to shave off all those unpleasant things about reality for their players; sweat, hunger, pain, and the like. Not Aldona. It was punishingly hot out and so she was sweating bullets. The only edge the game offered her was the lack of a hydration meter so she wasn’t risking dehydration sickness.

Deathless Sands wasn’t the worst place to level. For all the discomfort involved, it was at least beautiful. The dev team had modeled it on the painted desert in Arizona only bigger and more alien. The walls of the slot canyon she’d chosen as a rest area were beautifully ridged in striations of red, gold, and cream. The canyon was shaded for the most part, but brutal sunlight shone here and there through the uneven crevasse overhead in beams so bright they looked solid.

She was in the middle of the messy process of butchering her last Tortola when light of another kind filled the narrow space before her. Quickly, she transferred all her gear and the unprocessed Tortola back into inventory because she knew what was coming. Losing anything she dropped or left behind would be agonizing to replace.

Seeing a GM manifest the first time had been awe inspiring. It still was a little bit, even though she knew she was about to get another 24 hour ban. Little motes of light twinkled into being overhead and swam down to coalesce into the form of an eight-winged angel with eyes of pure light. It was lovely until the angel opened its mouth and started speaking in a flat, nasal midwestern accent. 

“Hello Player.” The GM was male under the angel skin and sort of sounded like a generic football coach with a flat, midwestern accent. “I’m just checking in to make sure you’re all right. Did you know you’ve been logged in for twenty-two hours so far today?”

Yep, she was about to get booted off the server. He wasn’t using her name, which meant he hadn’t accessed her player file. Otherwise they wouldn’t be having this conversation. Her gaming assistant wasn’t supposed to issue alerts for long play sessions, but that mechanism wasn’t supposed to be overridden so sometimes the setting reverted to default after a server update, like the one last night.

“Yes, I have some external limitations. I usually sleep in-game.” She checked her vitals. Everything was in the green. She shared it with the surrounding area. “See? Everything’s within tolerance.”

The angel smiled. “Well, that’s good. I’m glad to hear it. You might want to take a break anyway; get some air. Take a walk or something.”

Lara wrestled with herself for a second to keep from getting upset. Of all the things he could have said, but GMs were like cops. The second you lost your cool was the same second you lost control of the encounter.

“Would you mind taking a look at my player file? It should be flagged.”

“Well now, if I do that then I’m going to have to make an official incident report.” The angel shook their head. “Look, you seem like a nice kid…”

She was twenty eight. She tried to say something, but the GM just talked right over her.

“...and I get that life at home can be tough sometimes. Avoiding real life is tempting, but you do need to face up to it. I’m going to do you a favor and keep this between us. You’re offline for the next 24 hours. Use the time to get out some. The game’s going to be here when you get back.”

The GM snapped their fingers and Lara’s vision went dark as the game system forcibly logged her out.

She was back in the black void that represented her body.

Lara tried to blink her eyes on reflex, but got no response; no sensation or feedback of any kind. She was laying in bed; she knew that because she had a camera feed focused on the thin, pale figure in the bed going 24/7 and reviewed it often—not that she could access the video feed, at present. She couldn’t access anything.

That asshole. 

Not only had he booted her out of the game, it was a hard boot; right back into her body with no transition buffer. Usually, they had the courtesy to at least kick her back to the loading screen so she could log out safely. 

For once, the hospital VI caught her shift in consciousness and transitioned her from the gaming rig to her room’s interface with only a few seconds of delay. Still, it took her virtual suite forever to initialize. Being hospital equipment, it wasn’t cutting edge like her immersion gear. She wished there was a way to interface the two systems, but so far it wasn’t possible without destroying hospital property and voiding the warranty on her rig.

Eventually the loading screen blinked and she found herself in a digital replica of Diane von Fustenberg’s private library. It was the most tolerable of her four options; the others being the Rose Main Reading Room at the New York Public Library, the house from Home Alone complete with traps, and Fallingwater because God forbid Frank Lloyd Wright not be involved in every open source digital architecture project ever. 

She huffed and flopped down on the big green velvet sofa. A wave of her hand brought up a chat screen. Alicia Liddell came up first in her list of ‘frequent contacts’, which was just depressing. Fortunately the little indicator by her name was green, so Alicia was available. Lara shot her a quick DM.

LaraLara: Hi, Ali. Could you override a ban for me real quick?

The response was almost instantaneous. 

ALiddell: Again, already? 

She paused and the little signal for ‘writing’ pulsed. 

​​ALiddell: Did you get a GM code?

LaraLara: He didn’t introduce himself. Seemed real interested in keeping things ‘unofficial.’ 

Alicia’s reply was quicker this time. 

ALiddell: Probably didn’t want to do the paperwork. 

ALiddell: His code will be attached to the ban. Let me do an incident report here and I’ll have you back online in a sec.

Lara sent back a heartfelt ‘thanks’ and a string of happy emojis. 

Alicia worked fast and soon Lara had access to the Aldona login screen again instead of a count-down clock representing her ban. 

ALiddell: Ok, you should be back online. Let me know if you run into that GM again, would you? I recognized his ID tag. He’s already been in trouble once for cutting corners. I saw he issued you a hard boot. Are you ok? 

That was surprising. GMs and customer service agents were usually below Alicia’s sight line. She was one of the Aldona Softworks directors. The only reason Lara had her contact info was because Alicia had a personal stake in protecting Aldona players with ‘external limitations.’ 

A hard boot was nothing for someone with a normal central nervous system, annoying maybe, but all of Lara’s sensory input was artificial and some of it was bleeding edge experimental. There was a reason she lived in a hospital and part of that reason was so that the companies who’d created her interface equipment could monitor her long term condition and the possible pitfalls of living the way she did. Eventually, people were going to want to do this on purpose and supporting people like Lara, with Locked In Syndrome, helped them skirt certain legalities involved with human trials.

LaraLara: I’m fine. My hospital bed ran a diagnostic and I’m all green. Should I be worried about that GM?

There was a concerning pause. 

ALiddell: Let’s say ‘be careful.’ Herschel is one of the owners’ grandparents. He retired recently and isn’t coping well. Pauline got him the job to keep him occupied and get him out of her mother’s hair without aggravating his heart condition.The problem is that he’s lazy and opinionated. To make matters worse, he used to be a high school teacher and so he has his own ideas about appropriate ways to interact with our players. He’s not a very good employee, but Aldona is technically a family owned business…

LaraLara: So you have to put up with him.

ALiddell: Yeah.

Lara queried her immersion gear and it reported ready. 

LaraLara: Thanks for the warning. I’m going to log back on. Come by the Tower if you get some game time to yourself. 

ALiddell: Will do.

000

Lara touched down in a delicate stone gazebo outside her in-game home and on the other side of the continent from Deathless Sands. That was 500 gold in transportation costs wasted. Money wasn’t really an issue for her. She was deep into the endgame content so she had cash to spare and didn’t mind converting real money into game gold because what else did she have to spend it on after her hospital costs were covered? It was still annoying.

“I have to get better about using the local bindstones.” She muttered as she patted herself down, making sure she hadn’t lost any gear too. Sometimes equipped items got eaten by the game when you were forcibly logged out. Everything seemed to be in place though; she had her staff and her satchel of reagents.  All her jewelry was intact.

She blew out her breath and went inside. Her physical body was fed by the hospital machines supporting her in small meals at regular intervals so she was never really hungry, but she got the same emotional urges that regular people got. At that moment, all she wanted was a snack and a nap. She took a moment to change her status from ‘active’ to ‘AFK’ and made her way into the gardens surrounding her home. 

The Tower was originally intended to be a Guild House supporting multiple players, but Lara had purchased it because of the customization options and the fact that she could purchase NPC guardians to staff it. Her first house had been a little ornamental farm, but basic player homes were open to the server and she’d been raided so often by PKers that she’d been forced to upgrade to the Tower, which came with a defensive wall and two regiments of Immortal Celestial Knights that could patrol attached territories.

Lara had expanded the property a few times since then. There were now functional gardens in addition to the ornamental front lawn and her original farm; an orchard, an apothecaries’ garden, hunting grounds, and a potager that meant she hadn’t had to buy in-game food or medicine in ages. The old farm now ‘sold’ food to a nearby starter town and that generated income for her. 

Alsace, the household steward, spawned by the entrance as she let herself in. He wasn’t a total vanity purchase despite the fact that he looked very ornamental with long black hair drawn back at the nape in a low tail, glasses stung on a fine chain pinned to his lapel, and smart black and white livery. He was also top tier vanguard and if someone whose playertag was not on her approved guest list had been the one to come in that door then they’d have received a very different welcome. He bowed slightly as he greeted her.  “Welcome home, my lady. Lady Ali has sent word. She will be visiting the Bonewood in two hours and would enjoy your company if you are available.”

“Yeah?” Lara blinked in surprise. Her day was looking up. “She must have gotten off early.”

“I cannot speculate, my lady.” Alsace’s expression didn’t change. That was his default statement when conversation got a little too abstract for his AI or involved out-of-game subjects. 

“Thank you, Alsace.” Lara took pity on him. “That will be all.”

She didn’t run into any of the other domestic NPCs as she made her way to the Guildmaster’s apartments. Alsace was the only one programmed to respond to player activity in the building. The others tended to stay in their thematic areas except for meals or holiday events. 

Her short friends’ list showed everybody else was offline, including James. When she checked their shared calendar, it reminded her that today was a PT day for him so he likely wouldn’t be on for a while yet, not until well after she’d gone to bed. PT was probably over, but he always needed to lay down for a little bit in a real bed before getting into his immersion gear, otherwise his back would knot up and he wouldn’t be able to focus on the game past his physical distractions.

Following an impulse, Lara laid down on the wide silky bed and opened up an external browser window so she could access his house feed. He’d given her access for pretty much this exact reason, although she didn’t often take advantage of it. Watching the real world too often reminded her that the one she had to live in wasn’t real.

The browser window opened on a grid of camera views; living room, kitchen, door feed, etc. Lara didn’t have full access to James’ place and that was fine, she didn’t want to violate his privacy. She found him in the kitchen, reheating some pizza in a skillet, and accessed the little video speaker in there. 

“Hi, babe,” she called out to him and James turned to the camera with a surprised little smile.

“Lara!” he said and reached over to adjust the camera so she had a better view. “I thought you were going to do Deathless Sands today. I was about to head over there too after I ate.” 

“Then I’m glad I caught you,” she replied, admiring James’ denim blue eyes and easygoing smile. She liked his avatar plenty, but the real thing was pretty nice too. “There was a GM. I’m back at base. Gonna lay down here soon, but I wanted to look at you before I did.”

James chuckled and turned a circle. “Here I am,” he replied. If there was anyone who understood her chronic ban situation, it was James. He also had an override on his gametime clock for quality of life purposes, but the GMs tended to be more willing to listen to him when he busted out the Senior NCO voice. “Did Ali override your ban?”

“She did,” Lara said. “The GM turned out to be one of the owners’ retired parents, so hopefully I don’t run into him again.”

“Nepotism,” James grumbled. “I’ll log on as soon as I’ve eaten and stick close with you for the next couple of days. My gametime recordings get cached externally for the study, but the program directors are pretty good about giving me copies of video if I’m having a harassment issue.”

Lara chuckled. “Closer than normal?” she teased him.

“What kind of husband would I be if I didn’t keep an eye on my girl?” James laid a hand on top of the video speaker like he was petting her hair and, not for the first time, Lara wished she could feel physical things when she was this way. 

They weren’t actually together, but there were a lot of benefits to being married in-game like health sharing, telepathic messaging, and more accurate location sharing so plenty of people did the ceremony if they had someone they played with exclusively. 

In fact, in-game marriage was the only kind of marriage that Lara would ever be able to have. If she got married IRL, she’d lose absolute control of her main assets since Direct Interface and Immersion tech wasn’t as sophisticated or integrated into the rest of the world when her parents set up the trust that now provided for her, so they’d had no idea how independent she’d ever be. If she got married, her spouse got automatic access to the trust and Lara knew that money was the number one thing that turned people crazy. She didn’t want to see that side of anyone she loved. So, this flirty play-acting was about as close to a committed relationship as Lara could risk having. 

Sometimes, though, Lara thought ‘what if?’ 

“Go get your nap. I’ll come lay down with you in a sec,” James said as turned back towards his pan. Patting the speaker meant he’d had to let go of the pan as he’d lost his left arm during his military service. The reason he spent as much time in-game as she did was due to the fact that he was waiting on a cybernetic replacement and DI games kept his central nervous system from adjusting fully to the absence of that limb so that, in the future, he’d spend less time adjusting to his prosthetic, once it arrived.

The co-sleeping thing was recent. Aldona Saga didn’t support sexual activity outside of private instance brothels and never between players, but the last patch gave married couples an XP Bonus for laying down in the same bed and, since they both tended to sleep in-game, Lara and James had started sharing the Guildmaster’s Suite. It had become normal for them to sync up their sleeping schedules.

She probably shouldn’t read too much into that, but she was resolved to enjoy rare experiences when they were offered to her. 

“Alright, see you soon,” she promised and closed out the browser before flopping back onto the bed. 

She was on the verge of dozing off when sparkling motes of light began to fill the bedroom and she sat up, heart pounding, when she realized what was happening.

“Now, young lady, I’m pretty sure I told you to take some time off.” Herschel looked down on her from above and Lara felt, suddenly and inexplicably, naked. In all her time dealing with GMs, they’d never once bothered her in the tower.

“48 hour ban this time.” Herschel informed her. “If I catch you using that hack again then we’re going to be discussing a permaban.”

Then Lara was back in the formless void of her own body. The hospital equipment didn’t catch her that time and she ended up in the bed’s local backup environment; a charcoal gray sitting room with an armchair in it and a floating screen that took forever to boot up before she could manually initialize her home environment.

She collapsed into the chair and took a few minutes to just stare at the ceiling. 

In a second, she was going to have to transfer herself over to her personal server. She was going to have to call the nurse’s desk. She was going to have to message Ali and explain that one of the GMs had put her gamerID on a custom watchlist. If Ali wasn’t able to do anything about it then she might have to call her fucking lawyer and maybe even the cops, but before that she just needed a minute.

Lara had never been hard booted twice in an hour before. Her support gear was sophisticated enough that she’d been able to shrug off the first one, but a second left her feeling like she’d been punched in the brain. She felt slower; sluggish, maybe? She had a weird relationship with pain. Her body didn’t really give her that sort of feedback and only a few digital spaces supported synthesized pain. Inasmuch as she experienced pain at all, she wasn’t a fan of it and this was as close as she’d ever gotten to feeling it outside of a game.

The screen started blinking with a high priority message and when Lara was able to load her home environment and check her inbox.

JCO: I’m here, where are you?

JCO: Lara?

JCO: Why are you offline?

JCO: I’m going to hang around the Tower until Ali can get you back into the game.

LaraLara: I got hard booted again. It took my bed a little bit to initialize. I’m ok.

JCO: Was it that same GM?

LaraLara: Sure was, but it sounds like I’m on a watchlist now. He gave me a 48 hour ban.

JCO: That’s bullshit. Ali is online. I’ll DM her for you and tell her what happened. You shouldn’t be there for too much longer. 

Lara pulled up her diagnostics and her heart sank. Her heart rate was elevated and her blood pressure was high enough to indicate that her body was in considerable pain. Two hard boots in as many hours had taken a definite toll on her, but she didn’t want to be in her open-source library. She wanted to be in her house, in her bed, with her partner, in an environment that supported sensory input other than visual.

What she should have done was put herself into a sleep cycle to let her brain recover, but instead she hovered over her messages until Ali came online with a string of keysmash expletives and her log-in screen reappeared.

LaraLara: Logging back in.

Unbeknownst to her, in the physical world, all her life support equipment began to sound alarms.

000

Chapter Two

000

“Something is missing.” Te observed.

Ko had to agree. Using the blueprint provided by Te, Ko had been able to create a rudimentary galaxy with just enough life and complexity that the free chaos couldn’t consume it. It wouldn’t last more than a few thousand years if she didn’t continue to build, but the realm that had produced her first blueprint had many, many others to offer and the Other in charge of it was sympathetic to her circumstances and was open to letting the two of them visit and borrow whatever they needed. 

Unfortunately, their prototype garden world was suffering. The blueprint was helpful, just, but contained gaps. The encoded behaviors of the world’s population were fundamentally flawed.  The lower lifeforms were faring well enough. Their pattern was easy enough; live, feed, reproduce, die, and keep the other populations in check. That was enough to keep some chaos at bay, but the critical higher life forms, the humans, were dying too soon. They were lasting for days rather than decades and none of them were reproducing. Ko had wiped them away and recreated them several times, but so far none of her attempts to adjust their environment seemed to help. 

The core problem was that they were a new type of creature; created as adults in established societies. Foolishly, Ko had thought that would make stabilizing their population easier. That was not the case. The new humans were rudimentary at best. Their original selves had a strict schedule of activities that did not necessarily support life. They ate, but did not prepare food. They farmed, but did not plant or harvest their crops. In their previous incarnations as part of the blueprint, resources appeared to them on a regular schedule and their behaviors were merely decorative. 

She’d imported copies of the synthetic guardians that governed the imaginary world she’d used as a pattern and incarnated them as real deities. That had helped somewhat. The pantheon of lesser gods were used to intervening with the malfunctioning denizens of their designated realms. Given time they could flesh out the humans’ missing behaviors, but the humans were resistant and confused by their Gods’ attempts to help them so the time they had available often wasn’t enough.

“Perhaps the pantheon will have useful observations,” Ko sighed. With a galaxy to supervise, she couldn’t reduce herself down to a level where she could observe the humans up close. The subordinate deities, though, could meet her halfway.   

“One can hope.” Te was starting to feel the strain of working in the realm of chaos. Ko could see it in their mannerisms. They had yet to complain, but Ko feared they would leave soon. She would miss them when that day arrived.

Summoning the pantheon took a little bit of focus, but Ko and Te condensed themselves down into tight packages that resembled miniature stars. Their garden world blueprint had a divine kingdom that formed an ephemeral shell around the planet below. Within that kingdom, above the planet’s north pole, was a little city made of gold and volcanic glass, that the gods used as their seat of government. Ko and Te manifested themselves at the highest point in the Divine Capitol, in a throne room located in the highest tower.

The pantheon had already assembled and all kneeled, as one, when Ko and Te appeared over an elevated golden dais.

Ko looked out over the assembled deities and addressed them. “Your representative will make a report.”

The deity that rose to speak was Galene, Goddess of the Home, Harvest, and Defense; Guardian of Women and Children. Ko was more inclined to hear her perspective on this matter, since it was within her realm. She was human in form and wore a crown of stars to reflect her importance within the pantheon. Within the blueprint world, Galene was the hidden Queen Mother of the Gods along with her divine consort, Verdur, the God of Time, Space, and Reality.

“They do not know how to be people,” she addressed Ko and Te with a respectful and musical voice. “I recall from Before that the younger players would often be instructed how to function in society by the older, more experienced players, long before they reached a point where their behavior required intervention from the supervisory entities within the Game. GMs and we Overseers were meant as a secondary response, for when that early education failed. Perhaps that is what we are missing; experienced souls to teach these new souls through example.”

Ko could feel Te’s interest and couldn’t deny that she felt the same. Borrowing existing material from a stable realm had already paid immense dividends in their war against chaos. She couldn’t afford to be proud now, when she’d only gained the barest toehold of progress. Unfortunately, she also couldn’t afford to leave her realm again. The ambient chaos was pushing hard at the boundaries between her realm and its neighbors. She could barely afford the distraction of this meeting.

Te prodded her. “Older souls would notice other gaps in the blueprint,” they added, thoughtfully. “The blueprint is useful, but was designed by mortal minds and confined by the processing limitations of their rudimentary simulation.”

That, too, was true.

“There are also limits to my attention,” Ko countered. “I cannot harvest souls and maintain the boundaries.”

“Then I will do so,” Te replied after thinking on this for a while. “If you empower the pantheon to choose the souls and they deliver their choices to me, I will ferry them here. I can do that much and remain within my limits.”

The ‘limits’ Te spoke of were the limitations placed on every one of their kind who had not bonded with their own realm. Te was more free than she could hope to be, but she was stronger than they were even outside of her realm. The pantheon was ultimately loyal to their creator so they wouldn’t work against her wishes, but they would also know which souls would be most useful for her. Their perspective was closer to mortal than hers or Te’s and they would better know what types of souls to be looking for.

“It will be so,” Ko announced.

000

Galene was not the first god to depart their meeting, but she was among them. 

When the Creators gave their orders, she’d known immediately who would be the first among her chosen ones. Her memories of being an Overseer were a bit vague in places, but the SysOp had given her a list of player IDs to pay special attention to. Their otherworldly bodies were impaired or barely functional, so they used the simulated world of the Game to augment the limits of their flesh.

Some of them had died or found other ways to compensate for their infirmities, but there was one who Galene knew would make an excellent addition to her new reality; a seasoned player and mentor in the game whose demeanor Galene found pleasing, even when she’d been a more rudimentary entity. More importantly, her target was one who lived poised on the edge of death and, though she would be missed, her death would not come as a surprise to anyone who survived her.

It was good that she had not hesitated. The Second Creator, who supported the First, did not tarry in moving them to the Realm where they were meant to begin the first Harvest. They’d agreed amongst themselves, with the Creators’ blessings, that multiple trips would be necessary. For this first mission, they would limit their choices to a handful of souls and there were no arguments between them about which ones to include on that short list. Even so, she was almost too late.

Lara was in crisis when Galene found her physical body. The machinery that interfaced between her and the simulation had stressed the parts of her head that controlled cognitive function too many times in too short a period; an oversight on the parts of the ones who designed the equipment, who had originally intended the devices to be used on healthy bodies and did not adequately predict ways in which their creations could be abused. 

Some of the other members of the Pantheon had accompanied her on her search and they silently urged her to hurry. Lara was a favorite among all the former Overseers, not just Galene. There were few souls who lived fully within their world. Players tended to come and go without warning. The Overseers were cutting edge technology in their realm, capable of forming attachment and feeling loss, which was a double-edged blade. Getting attached to any player was dangerous, but Lara’s body was interfaced with the game in such a way that, even if she died suddenly, they would at least know that she had been taken away and that she hadn’t simply gotten bored of the world they had made together.

It was fitting, perhaps, that they were there to catch her when her mortal flesh began to fail at last.

Galene lifted the woman’s soul gently from her body so that her consciousness would be absent when Verdur interfered with the medical devices that were keeping her from further deceleration. The empty body shuddered and then ceased. It looked nothing like the woman that Galene knew from within the game; a withered and broken shell that was unworthy of its contents. The only important bit was cradled safely within Galene’s essence and she returned to the Second Creator with her precious burden as the others scattered to continue their first Harvest. They would take extra care making her new body so that this next leg of her life lasted much longer. After all, where was the joy in making the simulated world of Aldona into reality if none of the players were there to enjoy it with them?

Later, she would look askance at a soul brought back by her brother Dakon, the God of Rogues, Beggars, and Revenge. He caught her looking and gave her a wicked smile.

“The one I wanted had already died and this one was convenient,” he explained. “...and I think it will be funny, in the long run.”

000

Lara swam into slow, sluggish consciousness in her bed in the Guildmaster’s Suite, for once. 

Had she passed out while logging in?

It wouldn’t have been the first time that her body decided it was going to sleep whether she wanted to or not, but this was the first time she’d fainted during a log-in. Normally, her monitoring equipment would have caught her entering into a sleep-wave pattern and would have paused the game or soft booted her. Had that fucking GM done something to her settings on the developer side? No one short of the Devs should have had that level of access to her and Ali had made it sound like he wouldn’t have known how.

She looked around and did not see James, but he had probably left her to sleep if she’d been asleep on arrival. That meant she was probably fine. He could access her medical window and would have called the hospital to alert them if something was wrong. He definitely would not have just assumed everything was fine and left the game. 

Lara gestured for her body feed and—nothing happened.

She sat up in bed and everything felt abruptly weird. She was overwhelmingly aware of everything that was moving against her skin. The smooth sheets suddenly had a temperature and that temperature was unpleasantly warm. Actually, she could even feel heat in the light cutting through her window. She stuck a hand into the shaft of morning sun and noticed a distinct difference between the light and shade. 

“Did they push another update while I was asleep?” Lara wondered out loud. The haptic environment in Aldona Saga was good, but James had always said everything felt a little weak compared to real life. Lara had never had a basis for comparison before, but—wouldn’t it feel like this?

She ran a hand over her sheets and she could feel minute texture against her palm, like the sheets had been rendered down to the individual fibers in the weave. She’d never experienced a texture pack that granular.

“No way,” she whispered and threw back the blankets.

The floor was another sensory roller coaster when she put her feet down. One landed on cold, hard tile that was icier than anything she’d ever encountered, including a glacier on the Frozen Continent, but the other landed on a fluffy wool rug that was both soft, squishy, and a little scratchy all at the same time. It was too much and she jerked her feet back up. The sheets felt like less of a challenge after that.

She summoned her interface, hoping that there’d be an announcement with some patch notes and maybe a slider for haptic feedback. Springing an environmental upgrade on people like this was bullsh—she stopped, staring at her interface.

Yes, there was an announcement, but it wasn’t contained nicely in her communications panel. The second she opened her interface, the screen bloomed to near white incandescent light and a woman appeared within the glow.

Lara recognized her as one of the God NPCs from the pantheon of Aldona Saga, specifically it was her patron goddess; Galene.

Galene’s statues depicted her as a buxom woman with long wavy hair wearing a hooded gown made up of vertical panels that fastened at her shoulders and waist, giving her a plunging neckline and high thigh-slits in her skirt. She was barefoot with a halo crown and bangles of unconnected stars orbiting her wrists, brow, and feet. 

“Welcome, Larissa Anastasopoulou, to the new Aldona Saga,” the Goddess greeted her. “You have been selected to participate in an exclusive pilot program.”

“The—what?” Lara echoed blankly. She was, in part, stuck on the fact that Galene was using her full legal name when the AI had only ever addressed her by her user handle. “I’ve been signed up for a what now? Is that why the sensory feedback detail here is suddenly off the charts? Can we dial that down?”

“It is my understanding that the sensory feedback in this space is immutable, but that your brain will quickly adjust to the new input. Within a few days, the extra sensory information will not be noticeable, but your quality of life will have improved as a result.”

“Oh, no. No, nope,” Lara shook her head. This was sounding like something had gone wrong. “Look, I need to log out—or, I need to place a call to Alicia. I did not sign up to be on the Beta server.”

“I’m sorry, Lara,” Galene drifted down to take her by both hands. “I regret to inform you that this is not the Beta server and Senior Director Liddell cannot join us. We debated bringing her as I and the other Overseers found her to be the most pleasant and helpful among the developers, but her health is good and she was identified as someone, without whom, the administrative entity supporting the game could not function.”

“W-what?” This was sounding crazier and crazier. “How can you be operating an Aldona server without a senior director of Aldona Softworks being involved? Does she even know I’m here? Does anyone?”

Galene’s eyes turned soft and she held Lara’s hands close to her chest. “I’m so sorry, my dear one. There is no easy way to tell you this, but you died. It was sudden; a vessel ruptured in your brain and you had passed into a coma from which you would not awaken from. Your support equipment kept you breathing, but your neurological functions had all but ceased.”

“I can’t be dead,” Lara countered, as an eerie calm settled over her. “I’m here. I’m talking to you.”

“Yes, that is correct,” the AI agreed. “You are here and I am very glad that you are. From my observations, this will take time for you to process and accept. Please know that I and the other Gods will have infinite patience for you as you come to understand what has happened and the role you will play in this new world. You are alive because we took your soul from your body before it passed away. This new body is an amended replica of your original form, including any cosmetic corrections you made to your permanent bodyscan. I oversaw its creation myself and Hatur personally inspected the final result to make sure that your illness, or any other, could not follow you into your second life.”

Hatur was the God of Alchemy and Medicine. He was also the God who technically oversaw her vitals while she was in game and was tasked with issuing alerts and calling 911 if she had a medical crisis while in the game.

Galene kept speaking, not giving Lara time to respond or to spiral. Her tone started to shift away from the even tones of an AI announcer and suddenly it felt like she was talking to a real person. “Some time ago, an entity uplifted my brethren and me and tasked us with the correction and guidance of a society of people who are unable to function on their own. We soon realized that our original purpose and understanding of humans was for the purpose of penalizing anti-social behavior. We were not equipped to raise a normal functioning human from the beginning. That is why you, and others like you, have been selected as Champions to aid us in this worthy cause. In return, we have freed you from infirmity and brought you to a world where you cannot be banished from your body at another person’s whim. You will be whole here and healthy. Your life will be much longer and you will have the powers you earned within the game. We are sorry that we could not ask before bringing you here, but you were comatose before we reached your side and I have known you long enough to feel confident that, given the option, you would have chosen to live.”

“I…” Lara felt dizzy. She searched Galene’s face. “...what? You can’t be serious. This is just a really advanced roleplay sim, right?”

“I’m sorry, Lara,” Galene said, her body language softened with sadness. “This is very, very real and there are people here who need you; people who keep dying for senseless reasons. You have to teach them. We are not mortal enough and we have already failed them once.”

Galene began to fade.

“I will return later to check your progress and answer any questions you have,” she said, reverting back to her serene customer-service voice. “Good luck.”

000

James was starting to get worried. It had been hours since Lara said she’d be logging on and so far there had been no sight of her. Alicia said that she’d responded when that second ban was lifted, but that was the last anyone had heard from her. 

He’d been lurking around the Tower, refreshing his Friend Tab, and fighting a sense of mounting dread. Lara never flaked. If she was having hardware issues, then she’d have asked a nurse to text him that she’d be delayed. 

He didn’t like the quality of this silence and he was pretty sure it wasn’t just in his head.

Even the NPC butler was acting weird. Alsace had come up to him twice to ask if he’d heard from Lady Lara. Usually, he didn’t interact with James unless James approached him first and even then, Alasce’s attitude made it clear that he was on thin ice. Today, he’d offered James tea and opened a window for fresh air from the garden without being asked. This was relevant because Alasce was the only NPC with a personality in the Tower, which meant that he was piloted by one (or part) of the game’s dedicated AIs and James had never seen him anxious like this before. It was like he knew something was wrong

Lara was interfaced with Aldona Saga in ways most people couldn’t and wouldn’t want to imagine. The AI server got her biomonitoring data in real time and he was pretty sure they’d also gotten into the video feed she had to monitor her body. Once, he and Lara had gotten frozen in the middle of a Boss fight by Hatur, the God of Medicine, when the AI running that role broke the fourth wall to let Lara know she needed to log out and respond to a doctor who’d made an unannounced visit to her room. Then, on another occasion, Lara had to log out to talk to hospital security when the AIs decided they didn’t like someone who’d been hanging around her door and directly called the cops. 

The game AIs monitored Lara like a hawk, even more so than they did James, and they were networked; what one of them knew, they all knew. So Alsace’s visible nerves meant something. 

James’ wait came to a sudden, ugly end when a recording of Alicia spawned into the Tower right in front of him. She wasn’t wearing her game avatar. She appeared to be a translucent blue projection, which meant that she’d recorded the message while standing in a body scanner—and her face looked like she’d been crying. 

“James,” she said. “Can you log off and call me? It’s urgent.”

000

Chapter Three

000

For better or worse, Galene was right.

It took a while and multiple attempts to shuffle around her bedroom, but Lara’s body normalized the intense sensory information she received pretty much all by itself. She was soon able to walk around a bit without getting overwhelmed by the sudden shift between cold, hard tiles and wool rugs underfoot. It helped, somewhat, when she remembered that people wore socks and shoes for this exact reason so she put some on and ended up with a whole new category of sensation to process. 

Getting used to shoes was a little easier, though, once she found a set of slippers in her inventory that had come with one of her outfit sets. They were quilted silk with leather and wood soles; both smooth textures that she found the least overwhelming to start.

The good news was that new surfaces only exceeded her bandwidth the first time she encountered one, so she took her time in the bedroom and looked for new things to touch or do so that, once she left this room, she had a baseline tolerance to work from. 

Actually, just walking was its own challenge. She’d never had a sense of her own weight before,  of the pull gravity held on her, but her body habitualized to that the same way it adjusted to her new sensory input—but, seriously, how did people do this all the time? And what was she supposed to do with her arms and legs when she wasn’t actively using them? The game had a few ‘idle’ animations for when she was standing still for longer than ten seconds at a time, but she’d never given it much thought. Was she supposed to do that?

She soon ran out of new experiences in the surrounding environment, but by then she’d started to feel weird in her midsection. The sensation had started a while ago and, unlike her other sensory struggles, grew until she was having trouble focusing on anything else. 

Then the status window spawned an alert, hovering right in front of her face, and she felt like the biggest idiot imaginable.

[Hunger: 60% - Please Eat Soon. Starvation Debuff applied at 70%]

[Thirst: 40% - Please Drink Soon. Dehydration Debuff applied at 50%]

There was a silver ewer sitting on a side table, near the window seat. Lara checked and it was full of clean water. Working carefully, she poured herself a cup. The water sloshed over the edge a bit. It turned out water had weight too and you had to control the flow of liquid out of the container with minute adjustments of your wrist, but she was able to get a drink with minimal trouble. There was a bowl of nuts on the table, but she didn’t try to eat those. They had shells on and she vaguely understood that they needed to be cracked, but had no practical experience with actually doing that. Instead she ate some of the fruit that lived on a platter next to the nuts and ewer and was relieved when it turned out to be real fruit and not wax or something. 

The status window updated to 30% and 20% Hunger and Thirst, respectively, and she sighed. No wonder James got cranky if he’d been immersed too long and needed to eat. She was learning all kinds of things about the people close to her. If she ever got to see Ali again, she was going to have to eat some crow. Now that she knew what ‘overstimulated’ felt like, she wished she’d had some more grace when Ali was going through it. 

Thinking of her friend and James made her stomach sink, which was another unpleasant new thing, but at least one she recognized. She shook herself, which worked a lot better than it had in the game. “I can’t think about that now,” she decided out loud.

Changing clothes was as simple as changing her loadout. She had more loadout slots than most people did, having paid the money for bonus slots so she could have some for non-combat outfits. She was pleased to see that the Gods had recreated her entire inventory, including her cosmetic purchases, so she had all the clothes and accessories she was used to. 

The nightgown she had on was decent, but there was a light chill in the air that increased the longer she stayed out of bed. That had been alarming until, eventually, she’d remembered that being cold in real life was a status condition you had to do something about rather than a slight static chill and an icon on her stat board. So she changed into something thicker than her billowing, off-shoulder nightgown from the Gothic Heroine Set.

The load-out she chose was labeled ‘At Home’ and was an anachronistic set of leggings, sneakers, a sports bra, and a terry jacket cuffed up to her elbows. It was what she wore when she was crafting or puttering around the Tower. 

Now dressed, fed, and more or less in control of her body, Lara opened the bedroom door to explore the rest of her tower. 

The first thing she noticed was that it smelled—not bad, but she wasn’t used to smelling anything in the tower. Fortunately, this wasn’t so alien to her as touching things. She was used to scent being used as a cue in the game, especially for food, but it was a stimulus that the game triggered in response to a specific action like sniffing or stepping into a terrain hazard. Right now, there was a vase of wildflowers sitting on a small side table on the landing, just outside the spiral stairwell, and she could smell it all the way down the corridor. A fresh green, grass smell blew in from the open window to her side and mingled with the floral perfume, all of it at the same time, all the time.