I looked down at my left hand and the balls of energy spinning in it. Arthur C. Clarke’s line, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” always comes to mind as I spin fire and lightning in my hand like they are Chinese medicine balls.
When I think about how far I have come, how little I understood and just how effortless this has all become… I keep finding myself coming back to the question: Is it cheating when the creator of a system intentionally designs its interface to look like magic?
“Two hours now, Captain,” the helmsman reported. I looked up at our destination. To think our journey was coming to an end after all this time. So much preparation and hard work had gone into this. Friends lost along the way. New friends made. A journey like nothing I had seen before…
“Thank you,” The Captain said with a smile. She reached out and touched something on her console. “All hands, less than two hours. Please ensure all final checks have been completed. This is it, people. This is it.”
I let the balls fade and turned to my own console. A final check wouldn’t hurt.
“Elliot.” I looked at the Captain. “When we first met all those years ago… did you think we would ever be here…” She waved her hand to the bridge around us. I figured she meant the ship and what we were doing…
Which made me think back to the day it began.
Back when I had thought it was just a game…
Using my foot, I closed the front door and waited for the latch to click, confirming it was shut. I kicked off my shoes and dropped my school bag next to the hall table. I shuffled into the living room and, with a slight hop, fell face-first over the arm of the sofa into a lying position. I grunted into the pillow and allowed myself to relax. The last day of school was usually an exhausting one. For students, it was an enjoyable romp, where all the work was done and they got to relax before the summer break. For staff, though, it was the final hurdle, between the stress of dragging some of the students kicking and screaming into completing their work, long hours of marking that work, and management breathing down our necks, about ensuring the ‘Value Added’ was there… It was exhausting. But I was done. At least at that school. It made my last day that bit more tiring. Saying goodbyes to people I had been fighting the good fight with for several years, was never one of my favourite activities. But it was done with and I now had six weeks of holiday, before I started at my new job, and eight weeks before I would have my first class. Which meant for the first time in years, I would not have to think about work at all… not to say I wouldn't be… but I wouldn’t have to and that made it better.
I asked Ava, my house AI, for the news. It didn’t respond. I tilted my head away from the pillow and asked, “Ava, gaming news,” this time without the pillow muffling my words.
“In today’s gaming news, EA&T announced the latest Feefa…”
“Next,” I grumbled.
“The Steamer ‘Felicity Stronx’ was arrested today when the bath water she sold turned out to not be her bathwater…”
“NEXT,” yeesh, the lengths those people go to for attention.
“A number of gamers have shown shocked excitement when Techson Numerix’s newest title Velkaria, was quietly released today with little fanfare. Slated to be released next Tuesday, a spokesperson for the company said that ‘as they had got everything up and running and early indications showed everything working as intended, they didn’t see the need to make anyone wait.’ Anyone who had already bought the game would be able to log in from today. Early reports from people in the game is that the content shown in the combat open beta a few months ago is blown out of the water by what has been seen so far.”
Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.
Velkaria is out? I had been looking forward to this game since I saw footage 6 months ago. A full immersion MMO, the beta had shown large-scale PvP combat fighting over several square miles of terrain, 3 different races with their own ways of fighting. I’d tried out a sword and board tank character, and been hooked. I had to dodge and strike myself. There had been people with real world fighting experience who were dominating with their skills, but the speed at which we were all picking them up and learning how to fight soon made it a more even playing field. It was also clear we were only scraping the surface of what the engine could do, as they supplied us with a very limited set of items and some people had claimed they had started gaining supernatural abilities, even if the beta weekend ended with only hints of what could be achieved.
It occurred to me I had muted my messages when we went into the final staff meeting a few hours ago and forgot to unmute myself on the way home. “Ava, un-mute my comms.”
She stopped reporting the news I had momentarily stopped listening to. “Communications resumed, you have 14 new messages from Jacobs.” One of my gaming friends, 14? I’m guessing he picked up on Velkaria coming out as soon as it happened. “Message 1: ‘DUDE!!!! It’s out! I’m downloading now!’
Message 2: ‘Downloaded! Gah, you are going to kick yourself when you get this’
Message 3: ‘Character creation is even more amazing than in the beta! You are going to love it’
Message 4: ‘Sorry, dude, I know we were going to explore the race options and play together, but we can’t wait! We are going human! Join us as soon as you can!’
Message 5: ‘Ahh man! The tutorial is amazing, we were planning on making our chars and rushing to the PvP zone…but there is so much more to explore! Jenny is bouncing, there is MAGIC! And it kind of works…hard to explain, wait until you are in! Think steampunk!’
Message 6: ‘DUDE! Where are you? You are missing out!’
Message 7: ‘You ignoring me?’
Message 8: ‘Hello??’
Message…”
“Ava, are the rest similar?” I asked, standing up and heading for the stairs.
“Yes, the latest is a series of links to major streamers showing the game, with more reminders of how much you are missing out.
“Please respond with ‘OMW now, be with you shortly. Don’t think that head start will help you beat me though’ and is the game patched?”
“The Pod was patching earlier…checking…confirmed it was the unlocking of Velkaria. The game is fully enabled on either of the devices.” I grinned.
I made my way upstairs to what used to be my home office. Now it was dominated by two large coffin-sized tubes, big enough for me to lie down in. TN’s latest in full dive interfaces, a perk of my new job, technically working for them. Come September, I will be teaching Computer Science in their remote learning facility. Arguably, a simulated school which would allow students, who, for various reasons, such as being too remote or being physically incapable, would be unable to attend a normal school. Funding the school was one of their tax deductions, but it also gave them access to some interesting avenues of research, and digital security was looking forward to seeing how quickly the students found ways around their safeguards.
They had finished installing the pods last week. I only needed the one, but to ensure the redundancies were complete, it was supposedly cheaper if they came in pairs. I hit the button on the pod’s console marked open and the top half opened up revealing the soft rolls of material inside. I stripped off my clothes and threw them into the corner near the door. I tried it out last weekend and ran through the calibration exercises. I could have kept my clothes on, but the recommendation was to maximise exposure to the sensors to optimise the interface responsivity…I put my phone on to charge before I forgot. I then laid down in the pod, wiggled myself comfortably and hit the button to close the lid. Once closed, I felt the systems cycle through, the rolls I was lying on wiggled slightly. That was part of the system to stop bed sores from people in the pod for long hours. The light then dimmed, I had a slight falling sensation, as my eyes grew heavy and I felt like I was falling asleep.
