Glitchworld Read online

  “Yeah, yeah, I guess I know all of that already. I just can’t understand it,” he said.

  She nodded. “Yeah, I get that. Another thing to think about, you are using your real body to do real things so it all counts for exercise. Ever wonder what you’d look like with a six-pack? Now you’ll know,” she said.

  “What if I make an ass out of myself though? I’m a noob. Remember when the space worms came in issue #233 Masked Midnight and Blue Jay and they went ahead and used them as bait for their fishing trip? What an embarrassing screw up that was.”

  “I’m here to make sure you get it all right. Oh, Derek, it’ll be like high school again, but this time I’ll be doing the saving!”

  “Oh man, I bet you could give yourself any stats you wanted. Oh wow, do you remember in Masked Midnight when . . .”

  Derek didn’t catch her eyes dilate and her face go slack as he went on. He quoted the comic a few times, and only stopped when he noticed her staring at his chin. Maybe he had something stuck in his teeth? Shit.

  “Oh, hey, sorry. Do I have something on my face?” he asked, wiping at what he hoped was the right spot with a handkerchief. He kept one in the breast pocket of his t-shirt at all times.

  Meredith giggled. “Yeah, you got it. So, I went ahead and got us upgraded gear and everything. Plus we can stay in all the cushiest accommodations…”

  He wasn’t listening. Derek had plunked his head against the huge window and fallen into his daydream lala land again. Honestly though, he was completely justified. She got to see this everyday… They were nearing their destination.

  The Hub, he thought dreamily.

  Derek had seen pictures online, and he’d even led a raid on a VR version, but he’d never actually seen the Hub in real life.

  It stood a good forty stories above the featureless, flat terrain of what had once been northern New Mexico, ringed by towering mountains hours of travel away. It was a world away from the rundown suburbs of Jersey, or the crime-ridden mess that had once been D.C. The whole thing was at once bland and perfect: gleaming white walls with dark tinted windows running in stripes over the strange geometry: it had twelve sides, to match the number of genre gameworlds to choose from. The train sped straight for it.

  He turned back to Meredith and found her staring at the back of his jeans. “I’m the luckiest man alive.”

  “I’m about to be the luckiest woman alive,” she muttered.

  “What’s that?” He hadn’t been paying attention. She had to know how exciting and important this was. It would be the most memorable and amazing experience of his life, and afterwards nothing would ever come close. He was literally hopping around, unable to stop himself from looking dumb enough that people were noticing.

  “Where do you think we should go first?” he asked.

  ***

  To bed. That’s right where she would take Derek if she had her druthers. He hadn’t cottoned onto her plans yet… she’d have to play it slow. Ease him into the idea of shacking up in midair as superheroes or in a plush alien space station or something. He was going to pick the superpowers gameworld, and she was going to be able to see him in a skintight bodysuit, and he would peer through those goggles and see curves she might not actually have. There would be drool. Lots of it.

  “Mare?” he asked.

  “Huh?”

  “You phased out there. Where do you think we should head first?”

  “TITS first,” she said.

  His eyes flashed downward, before he ripped them back up to her face. “Umm… care to explain?”

  “Training and Immersive Tutorial System,” she explained. “First we make your character, then you try out various simulations for a short time and get used to the AR goggles and haptic bodysuit, then you have a chance to alter your character before heading out into the gameworld itself.”

  “And… why call it TITS?”

  “Whatever do you mean?” She ticked the words off on her fingers. “You go through Training in how to use the equipment, it’s all Immersive, it’s a Tutorial, and the whole thing is a System. A very complex one, might I add. What, would you call it SITT or something? That would be a stupid name. You don’t sit around, you really have to get on top of the TITS and figure out how to work it.”

  He just stared at her a moment before darkness swallowed them. For a brief moment, she considered just jumping all over him and trying to see if she could stuff her tongue down his throat and see if that gave him the hint he very clearly needed, but before she could choose, soft track lighting flared to life along the center of the car and in the aisle.

  “One minute to arrival,” a soft female voice announced.

  Meredith tried to gather up the gumption to put a hand on his forearm and tell him she’d be waiting for him to finish playing with TITS, but the train pulled up to the stop and the whole wall flew up. Derek fairly spilled out of the new opening and onto the mirror-polished white tiles. When he stood, it was before a leggy blonde in a skin-tight futuristic bodysuit full of diagonal lines that freaking glowed. Lines that also hugged her perfect body and led the eyes towards… never mind.

  Meredith had never been in this entrance. It was a hell of a lot glitzier than heading in through the employees only doors. The entry hall was simply enormous, easily on the scale of Grand Central Station, ringed with more identical plastic leggy goddamn blondes all with their perfect lip gloss and their brain-squeezing ponytails. Mare checked to see that her kinky black fro was still in the volcanic eruption ponytail she’d put it in earlier. It didn’t matter; Derek was looking everywhere but at her.

  “Holy…“ Derek breathed. “Are they… real? Are they NPCs?”

  “They’re real, and keep it in your pants, horndog.”

  Chapter 2 - She Ogled My Character Sheet

  A chime rang out, followed by an announcement. “Welcome to Prestige Gaming, the premier gamestop for the ultimate gamer. You are moments away from your Randomized Prestige Gameworld experience. All guests please exit the doors on the left.” The announcement was followed by its repetition in a dozen different languages. Derek shook his head. This was unreal.

  “How did you manage… I mean…”

  Meredith chuckled. “It’s a vacation package to any lead coders. I’m team lead. They’re hoping we evaluate the system as we go through it, so we can invite someone. Since my folks… since we don’t, you know, they don’t talk to me anymore, I figured why not my high school lab partner? The guy who saved me from the drama geeks.”

  “Thanks!” He was always profoundly embarrassed to get credit for anything. Ever since the high school drama ended in disaster and the crowd roaring laughter at him, he’d shied away from the crowds. A shame there wasn’t money to be made being a video game geek. “I just wish… I totally wish I’d gone to college. Investing all my savings in Rick’s restaurant was a terrible idea… actually working there while it spiraled out of control was even worse.” The only decent moments in that fustercluck were when Meredith had come in to eat the slop they tried to pass off as food and listen to Derek moan about whichever girl was mistreating him at the time.

  Meredith gave him a companionable tug on the elbow. “You’ve been beating yourself up over it too long. It’s time for a full on relax session. Two weeks, no worries, just you and me.”

  He grinned. It was a shame her parents disowned her. To be fair, though, she always had a fiery temper with them. He remembered waiting outside their house sometimes, going to walk with her to school, and listening to Mare about blow her stack. But Derek’s Meredith was butterflies and sunshine– and if they weren’t going to spend two weeks in Meredith’s dreamworld, well, he was happy to take their place.

  The two of them exited on the left and joined the well-dressed crowd already moving forward in a queue. Derek was surprised to see how many people were going to stay here. This place was very expensive and he hadn’t realized that there were this many people who could afford to blow millions on a week or two week vacat
ion. It intimidated him to see jewel-infested fedoras, checkered suits, and the stylish v-neck button up shirts that were all the rage these days. All he had on was blue jeans and a dorky shirt from his favorite series, STELLAR VOYAGER 7. It had the picture of his favorite character, GlarpNarb, standing in all of his multi-tentacular glory behind the weapons console of a starship. Underneath the text said, in bold capital letters, THIS TIME IT’S NOT STELLAR VOYAGER 6! Ugh. Plus it had a pizza stain.

  Meredith must have noticed him looking at his shoes because she’d flashed him a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry, dork. Your sneakers are about to come off. Everyone has the same shot at glory in Prestige Gaming. Speaking of, those pants are going to come off and that shirt as well.”

  “Ooooh, I’ll be all… nekkid.”

  She waggled an eyebrow at her, and he honked laughter loud enough to attract plenty of attention, which immediately shoved him back into his shy cocoon. If there might’ve been a moment between them, it was swiftly crushed.

  “I am going to wear so many awesome outfits.” He couldn’t wait to be awesome. Ever since moving out of his parents’ place, his life had been a series of disappointments, setbacks, and facepalms. There was the pizza delivery setback, where he’d somehow lost over two thousand dollars in one twenty-four hour debacle. Closely followed by the pool boy facepalm, where he realized about a month after he quit the job that one of the bored housewives had been trying to bone him. And who could forget the Grace disappointment, where he’d been going out with this girl only to find out she was filming him and posting a YouStreamIt series about what a loser he was. And that was just age twenty-two.

  Meredith rolled her eyes and sighed. Derek, in true Derek form, completely missed it.

  Up ahead the crowd was dividing itself into lanes and lines. Prestige employees stood at turnstiles, above which each had a huge sign, one marked Rated F– for Family!, another marked Hardcore– Time to Paaartay!, and a final one marked Vanilla. The families with kids were filtering over to Rated F, and what appeared to be a party of corporate employees headed to Vanilla.

  “So what are we, Vanilla?” Derek asked her.

  Meredith pulled them into the line ‘Hardcore– Time to Paaartay!’ along with the other youngish people, and one distinguished fellow in his fifties maybe, going it alone.

  “Just like movie ratings,” she explained. “You got your PG, your PG-13, and your R. It’s the best way to separate the sex freaks from the children and jealous wives,” she said, and then she bit her lip. “Or maybe the adventurous wives? Anyways they all have different safeties and censorships. But where we are going, well, the sky’s the limit. If you know what I mean.”

  Derek’s face fell. “So no space stuff?”

  ***

  Meredith shook her head. For a gamer, he could be really thick at times. She could see the moment he realized what he said was dumb, and the cute way he ducked into his shoulders and looked around to see if anybody else had heard. “Don’t worry, man, we can have space stuff. We can have basically anything we desire.” She gave him the arched eyebrow.

  Which he missed.

  The line was moving quickly. And they were the next to check in. There were several women in blue business suits standing behind holo screens, each throwing a dusky bluish ray of light up and over the registrees as they stopped to the line. The device would beep and then render their government ID’s for their perusal and approval. As a further precaution they all then had to submit their fingers to the woman, who pricked and swabbed them for DNA analysis. Prestige Gaming left nothing to chance.

  “What–”

  “It’s a corporate espionage countermeasure,” she said. “Fuggedaboudit.”

  “That’s everything,” the woman told them. “Head through here and to the right so you can get acquainted with our TITS. And have a wonderful two weeks!”

  “Thanks!” Derek gushed.

  Meredith loved how he bounced on the balls of his feet and hopped around in circles to get a glimpse at everything. To be fair, most of the other guests were doing the exact same thing. The walls and ceiling of the enormous station were being constantly wiped and overlaid by images of what the building might look like in different settings: in one, it was a gothic cathedral with impossibly high flying buttresses, and the next a paint-peeling wild west church steeple, followed closely by the Parthenon of Athens, and how it must have looked thousands of years ago. It also gave her an excuse to take him by the elbow, get a preliminary bicep feel in, and steer him through the adults-only line.

  Sadly, she was forced to break off as soon as he turned in another bouncy circle.

  They only had about a dozen people ahead, and Meredith had seen two of them somewhere around the office. In the elevators probably. Maybe they worked on Dungeonworld.

  No matter; they were through the smiling, plastic beauty pageant, and she got her first chance to rub elbows with TITS as a guest. Unfortunately this meant separating from Derek.

  “I’ll see you in a little while!” she called, but he didn’t have time to respond. Ugh, had he even looked in her direction once since they’d been here? It didn’t matter; she was going to be his one and only partner in crime for the next two weeks. She just needed to be patient. She’d been so patient for so long: all through high school, the online and VR coding classes after school, on weekends, and after high school, then the internship and the tests to become a PRESTIGE coder. Now that he was here she was just vibrating to rip his clothes off and jump his bones. Super patience, and then payoff. He was going to show his gratitude for getting access to the most exclusive resort in the world, and that gratitude would be carnal.

  “Carnal Gratitude,” she breathed. It might make a good title for a Windswept Hearts storyline. She’d save it for the next weekly free share meeting.

  Oh damn! She didn't have to go to one of those snoozefests for the next two weeks!

  ***

  “I’m Lily,” the attendant told him. “And you’re Derek Hammings. Welcome again. You’ll want to get started as soon as possible, of course. You’ll need to get your bodysuit on and join me in the next room.” Through a gleaming, perfect smile the beauty told him, “Feel free to leave your clothes. We’ll have someone along to take care of them.”

  The attendant left Derek in a large, almost pure white closet to get changed into his haptic suit. This material had millions of tiny sensors and servos. It could buzz and rub against your body to simulate shaking hands with a virtual being, scrunch up and simulate the feel of being sliced, or whack you in the guts if you were punched or shot.

  Like the entry station, they projected images over the walls (or perhaps they had screens just in the walls themselves), though these ones were spaceships coasting through a starlit void, a Victorian castle with a horse-drawn carriage pulling up in front, and a high speed car chase through crowded Tokyo streets. Somehow Meredith had gotten his measurements because the haptic suit hugged him literally everywhere. He tried to loosen it up around the hips and crotch area, but it resisted his efforts. The suit itself was a mesh of some brand new material that both breathed and kept him warm. The RPG logo ran down the length of his arms and bulged with his thighs, in the same diagonal motif from the greeters in the station. The tiny words Randomized Prestige Gaming ran the length of the RPG logo.

  He exited the closet into an empty, multi-faceted room, like a microcosm of the Hub building. Lily stood with her hands behind her back, and that same smile plastered on her face. He was beginning to think it was kind of… off. How could she maintain it for so long?

  “Wonderful! You’ll now have the option of the Augmented Reality helmet, complete with the goggles, headset and haptic relays, or the AR overlay injection.” One of the hexagonal panels in the floor opened, and up popped a pedestal containing an X-wing pilot helmet, minus the colors, and a huge syringe brimming with blue liquid.

  He tried to process the idea of the helmet punching him in the head. He could always set the vibration
settings pretty low. “I’m… sorry?”

  “We inject a specific mixture of nano-machines into those guests who prefer a more immediate experience. Along with the bodysuit and the computers in your smart wearable, the nanites allow the Augmented Reality to be superimposed over your entire field of vision, through your eyes rather than the goggles. Those sounds created by the world are made directly into your inner ears. We can also simulate smells and tastes, though the settings can be dampened or turned off all together.”

  “And…”

  “It’s all safe, and pending FDA approval. We’ve reviewed your medical history and found no reason to suspect you would reject the AR injection. We deactivate the nanites with a protein shake when you leave the park. However, the choice is yours. Hundreds of guests have given us rave reviews with the standard AR helmet.”

  “I think… I think I’d rather go with the helmet.”

  “Of course.” She picked it up and settled it over his head. And just like the bodysuit, it was comfortably snug, especially once she pressed the button that caused it to suction onto, and then into his ears. So unbelievably snug.

  The goggles were practically invisible. He lost nothing staring through them and at Lily.

  “Many of our guests are familiar with many of the park’s functions and possibilities. Please tell me what you know, and we can make TITS as comfortable for you as possible.”

  There it was again!

  “Uh… I know there are twelve genre gameworlds, and different access tiers for each one. You need to do quests or finish stories or something to move up tiers.”