Canberra. A wetland nature reserve inhabited by squawking birds, sleeping frogs, venomous snakes and platypuses, and the deadliest member of the desert nation's indigenous fauna, sun-burnt Australians.

Before the university tour, Henry and Little Liu had been enjoying the laid-back retirement life. After a session of bird watching and snake handling, they were in an on-site laboratory with a class of tourists analysing water samples. The uncle was operating a microscope, and the nephew sat in front of a monitor, smacking a screenshot button whenever he matched a protozoan from a bingo chart.

Henry, a blue organism swimming in a circle within his lens, was reminded by its aimless revolutions of The Trickster God and The Cycle—

"Nope."

Refocusing on the real-world, he glanced up. A pretty girl, a part-timer from the local university, was steadily progressing in his direction as she checked on one tourist after another. Detecting his gaze, she turned to him and exchanged a friendly smile.

Henry'd been working his charms on this one for a while, his latest target in the quest of a semi-ordinary love. Now was the moment to strike.

When the tour-guide was about to reach him, Henry sketched something on a square of paper, which he folded into an origami heart. He then, in a Forbidden Knife-Boxing sleight-of-hand shown to him by his Digital twin, covertly slipped the paper like a dagger point into the girl's palm, before tapping the top of her hand to bring her awareness to the gift.

The tour-guide giggled at the trick. Following a gesture from him to unfurl the heart, she found a drawing inside: a malaria plasmodium in a suit and a Toxoplasma gondii cell in an evening dress, both courteously seated before a spread of Thai food.

The picture made her groan in delighted revulsion.

Henry tapped a caption.

'5:30?'

A dinner invitation

The tour-guide glanced with consideration between her dashing suitor and the sketch. However, at the sound of a button being slammed, her attention was shunted over to the mute toddler playing bingo, to the mic'd-up camera necessitating this wordless flirtation.

Her face faltered.

Henry recognised the defeat screen. Sighing, he motioned for her to keep the silly picture, his contact info having been hidden in it in case the girl reviewed it later and changed her mind.

As the tour-guide moved on, he opened up a spreadsheet on his e-assistant and documented this latest failure.

He was unsure whether the flaw, beyond the toddler and his monitoring grandmother, had been in Rose's art-gift technique, the choice of unpalatable figures for the drawing's subject, the pacing, or something else. Further testing was needed.

That marked his 28th rejection so far today. Nevertheless, he was happy to have achieved some progress, this girl at least entertaining his advances.

To create a foundation to his romantic technique, he'd dusted off spy material he'd used in constructing NPC personas, focusing now on previously neglected segments about sexpionage, the secret ways of wooing.

Thanks to his fortunes, projected through his expensive garments, he'd solved the first basic step in seduction, which was fulfilling the minimum standard to register on another's romantic radar.

He'd also, after 28 rejections, obtained consistency in engineering a semi-organic opening that seemed casual and serendipitous. His biggest error in the opening had been trying to fast-forward by explicitly presenting the positive factors that qualified him for a suitable mate (immediate rejection 8 out of 11 times). That'd been especially true for first mentions of wealth (4 out of 4). It seemed, like with a joke enjoyed most without explanation, women preferred to romance in a state of ambiguity and partial confusion. Henry had been amazed by this finding, previously believing romantic indirectness to be a trope from fiction, a contrived device for generating dramatic tension.

Everything after that, however, i.e. almost everything, remained a challenge.

The biggest hole in his study material was regarding flow. Like in war or duelling, he sensed a delicate movement to the romantic interplay, both parties alternating roles of gesturing, interpreting, reacting, and responding, the dynamic evolving between phases and tempos and moods, tactics losing and gaining viability at various stages. None of these subtleties were conveyed in his texts, which like a map of a city, captured merely a slice of one aspect of the subject.

As applied to the mastery of anything, in order to dance with flow in the field of love or any other, the occasional step or technique could be gleaned from the page, but, ultimately, the steps' precise execution and the smoothness that connected steps had to be acquired through experience. Only through experience, collected first- or second-hand via observation, only through packing into the unconscious substrate enough action-memories connected to failure and success, could one synthesise the meat of the body that performed the steps. The possession of this experience-material was perhaps the defining distinction between knowledge and wisdom, between theory and practice, between flowing and fumbling.

And, in the field of love, Henry's dancing experience amounted to nil. His romantic corpus before today had been limited to two entries, the alpha-pleb and the stalker. For both, he'd been a passive participant, tugged along blindly, observing and learning nothing. For the while being, therefore, he was doomed to clumsiness.

That was his rationalisation for failing so much.

But, hey, a few stumbles were expected in any climb. Considering his naivety in love, he wouldn't be disheartened by a lack of success during this excursion to Australia. Each rejection should still be valuable data for later, when he'd speed-date the candidates procured by his inner circle - his guild-mates, eager for the prized Legendaries, had so far presented him 29 acceptable potential ordinary girlfriends.

'Boys,' said his grandmother through the camera speaker, 'enough stalling. Get to the campus.'

Henry gave the toddler a pat. Slipping out of the class, they went outside to a waiting auto-taxi. Henry collected a couple air-delivered packages dropped beside the vehicle before entering it.

The car sped up to a dizzying speed as it merged onto the city's main thoroughfare. In two minutes, they'd travelled ten kilometres to reach the university campus. For Henry, conditioned to medieval ambling of Saana's transportation, the—

"Nope. We're completely used to this pace - just two modern dudes, riding a modern mode of transport. Isn't that right, Little Larry?"

The nephew shrugged in confusion.

The uncle wound down a window, absorbing in the sight and the minty-sweet fragrance of eucalyptuses lining the road. The weather out was nice, but only a smattering of staff and grad-students were strolling about, the university on siesta between the semester's end and summer school.

Watching a library zip past in a blur, he felt a small sense of respect that always struck him when visiting any institute of learning, these sanctuaries where the nobler pursuits lived on amongst the wasteland.

Did others ever feel the same awe before his monuments in Saana? Probably very few. Quiet libraries weren't a quarter the spectacle of burning castles. Especially quiet libraries in a videogame where the impermanence of things was much more apparent, where random blue-shaded disasters could erase it an hour of being logged off.

Was any of it worth clinging this desperately to? Hard to say. Sometimes, it wasn't clear whether what he clung to was the thing itself or everything he'd lost and gained pursuing it.

Henry sighed. "Those who build new heavens find the strength from their hells."

Little Liu, hearing the trigger word of heaven, inched closer across the seat, relocating from the proximity of the nephew to that of the son.

The unprompted statements had caught Henry's eavesdropping grandmother's attention. 'What did that mean?'

"I'm paraphrasing Nietzsche," he replied, "praising Australia's economic recovery, getting into the academic mood for this lovely tour. And we're getting changed."

Shutting off the camera, he opened up the parcels he'd had delivered. They contained replacement costumes for him and Little Liu. If the university found out about him being filthy rich, they'd enrol him regardless of behavioural problems, just for the prospect of future endowments. Thus, Henry needed to dress down. He decided not to stoop too low, though, choosing low-tier luxury attire whose value was projected unsubtly through labels rather than fit and material quality. This would both minimise his grandmother's suspicion and, for one who deduced his fake-teen-father backstory, indicate his fiscal irresponsibility. The singe father, instead of investing in his child's development, had wasted his cash on conspicuous wealth displays to attract more women, inevitably expanding the bastard brood.

Scuffing up his and Little Liu's hair, he turned the camera back on. The excuse he gave his grandmother was that a conventional undergrad adventure would be impossible if his peers' ability to view him as an equal was obstructed by his riches.

'When have you ever cared about being equal?' his grandmother countered.

Henry meditated on the accusation. "Right…I wonder what happened. Hmm…I have been playing with my high-school chums in this weird place with a lot of poverty and commie propaganda. Mrs Withers can confirm my location. The ideas of community…maybe they've rubbed off on me? Somewhere inside, maybe I've been reflecting on my humble upbringing and ignited an undetected compassion for the less fortunate? Huh. Wow. Amazing. So it seems that even at the age of 17, growth remains possible."

'Funny. I'm watching, Henry, listening.'

The taxi came to a rest outside the school of literature, languages, and linguistics.

Henry'd forgotten to plan the disposal of his bourgeoise garb, being accustomed to performing costume changes with a Spatial Bracelet. Thinking fast on his feet, he gifted them to a random passer-by, offering them the luxury e-assistant for accepting the rest, which they could keep or trash.

His hastiness proved wise. Not ten seconds after he'd offloaded the incriminating evidence, a fellow emerged from an office building to welcome them.

The greeter was a middle-aged man. The centre-strip of his hair had packed up and migrated to his jaw, the journey tinging it grey. Although not immediately apparent from a brisk, military pace, the lower-left quarter of his body had been replaced by a robotic prosthesis. He wore a smirk.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Henry grimaced, as though being approached by the concept of crap incarnate. "Oh, why are you here?"

The old man returned the warm greeting. "News has reached me of an upstart trying to wangle his way into the department. I told them to let me size the boy up. If he's no good, I promised to scare him off."

The pair were neither friends nor acquaintances.

This limping geriatric, Ray Abrams, held a prominent standing in the Australasian branch of the Contemporary Minimalist scene, the genre currently dominating fine literature. These post-AI-Revolution authors favoured simple, unadorned prose that could be appreciated by the everyman. Lamenting society's shifting shape, they'd made their central subject humankind before the revolution, and—like the Greek pastoral poets of antiquity idealising the shepherd uncorrupted by the city-state, or the 19th century Romantics idealising the noble savage—they wasted a lot of words on white-washed caricatures of these bygone phantoms. In simpler terms, they were plebs.

Henry—a student and member of the Post-Maximalists, who saw technological advancement as a chance to augment art and push it further—had been a long-time opponent of these past-gazing simpletons. Two years ago, in the months after Saana III's release and his mother's terminal illness, he'd exploited Saana exclusively to use the time-dilation to increase his writing hours. A novel he'd published during that happy interim, Infinite Leaves, had achieved notoriety amongst the top echelon of the world's literati.

Infinite Leaves - this two-thousand-page doorstopper with no clear beginning or end (infinite) had been a Post-Maximalist upgrade of Leaves, a slim Con-Min novella from 2039. The original, despite its artistic and spiritual insubstantiality, had been hailed as the greatest story of the recent era. Henry, the eternal climber, had sought through his improved version to free his literary peers of their delusions. However, as had happened with other occasions when he'd summited the mountain then descended with sacred tablets in hand, his cries against false idols had fallen on deaf and plebian ears. His masterpiece had been panned. The hordes of drool-chinned troglodytes had misattributed their unease from reading it for a flaw of the story rather than the true source: the anguish of defeat. (Well, that'd been his original assumption. In fact, his writing was so convoluted and poorly-paced that it was insufferable for anyone except two-dozen others on the planet – his fellow Post-Maximalists.) Thus, his Infinite Leaves, his artistic baby to whose gestation he'd devoted two whole months of his productive lifetime, had been reduced to nothing but a joke, a curiosity amongst literati, a novelty sitting unread on bookshelves for no purpose other than to sometimes spark a conversation.

Anyway, his grandmother had exposed him as the failed novel's author in his resume. Hence, the university had accepted him on the spot, dumped scholarships on him, and flown him out for wine-and-dining - successful or not, the book had been intellectually impressive, especially from a then 15-year-old. Hence also, this old geezer had appeared, to gawk at the freak.

The two exchanged the firm handshake of enemies.

"I meant," Henry clarified, "why are you here – at a university, employed to teach. You Con-Min frauds aren't fit to train puppies to lick their own arseholes."

His grandmother screeched. 'HENRY, what did you..what…oh my lord, professor, please, I'm so, so sorry. Henry, that's a professor! Have some manners!'

'Mr Lee, please, the child...' added Mrs Withers, concerned with his swearing.

But Henry had been emboldened after putting thousands of kilometres between him and his grandmother. "Nope."

The professor, caught off guard by the sudden attack, gave a perplexed look at the camera being aimed at him by a toddler wearing a shirt printed with a slogan, 'Sickest son in the universe!'. "The boy's question has its merits...there's no great reason for me to stay employed. My publishing manager is always asking why I insist on the struggle."

Contained was a jab back at Henry, his story obviously having also been a commercial flop. Infinite Leaves had sold even worse than The Invincible Cripple Saga. For the latter series, Henry's first major foray into pleberature by applying the Post-Maximalist method to a low-brow subject of gaming, he'd at least been able to trick some customers into purchasing it by giving the books priority shelf-space at his in-game chain of Flaming Sun bookstores.

Henry blocked the sales-figure blow with his shield of filthy richness.

Unperturbed, he pointed at his fake-son. "Meet Little Larry, my s—my nephew. As for the camera, that's his 保姆," he switched to Mandarin for 'nanny', "and my grandmother, who didn't trust me enough to attend unchaperoned."

The professor exchanged awkward greetings with the weird cast of observers.

He then told them to follow him to meet the other promising new student, for whom this private tour had originally been organised.

The office building they entered was modest in its design and construction. It failed to impress Henry. After all, he was accustomed to the extravagancies of his in-game—he'd been to Europe, where the high-tech infrastructure had in-building networks that swifted the Technocommunists from room to room.

As they used the out-dated mode of their legs to move around, the professor inquired about Henry's current work, Henry publishing three novels before going AWOL - being roped into the guild.

"So, what mad notes have you been scrawling in the dark?"

Henry stared meaningfully at the toddler, his fake son whose age happened to be similar to the hiatus. "Not much. I've been too occupied for serious writing with...other interests." He pretended to snap out of it. "But I have managed to squeeze in experiments with alternative literary forms."

"Poetry?" The professor replied with distaste.

Henry mirrored the sentiment. "Accessible writing - your form, and worse."

The professor disliked this answer even more. "Don't bother, son. The exact word comes when we aren't resisting our nature. Your nature happens to be to speak inexactly, so that is your fate. No salvation awaits thee in conversion."

"Oh, no, I'm not the one converting." Henry, initiating a monologue, swept out his arm not holding Little Liu to unveil a resplendent vista. "Picture this, old man: one story, eight plots. Not eight sub-plots, not eight plots side by side in serial or parallel. Eight complete, fully-fleshed, engaging, and satisfying main plots running in unison. The same small set of characters, the same incidents and actions, but eight distinct sources of dramatic momentum depending on the dominant interpretive lens…"

He summarised the theory of his ultimate-pleb bait, whose synchronous plots had been adjusted in salience through the use of obfuscatory presentation techniques so that each became detectable only by those who'd obtained the skill suited to handle them. More crucially, incorporating the Belarussian psychologist Lev Vygotsky's notion of the zone of proximal development, he'd experimented with spacing the plots so that the reader engaged with one would partially detect the more abstruse plot above. The higher plot's visibility would be balanced so as not to intrude too much and cause confusion or fear yet enough to entice the reader for a second, third, fourth look, and to thereby promote their comprehension and growth. To begin, the pleb, or the literary newborn, in plot one read an adventure romance, light-hearted with a wish fulfilled on every page. And by the end, the patrician, or the newborn weaned by the pleb-bait into their adulthood, read in plot eight a Post-Post-Maximalist non-linear inverted modernisation of the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh.

Henry, staring into the future, squinted. "…others from my vantage point would laugh or cringe at the small state of man in the distance far across the chasm behind. I, however, could take no solace in either offering. Thus, I built a bridge for him to traverse the gap. Each of his steps forward will be lured by a glimpse of the greater goal ahead, baited by the breadcrumb-trail of plots beyond plots, until, unbeknownst to himself, he's standing by my side, burning with the stoked-up will to join me in leaping the chasms awaiting us beyond!"

He concluded the monologue with a grandiose bow. Little Liu, having listened to countless such speeches, gave an applause, his toddler eyes glowing brighter than usual with the extra admiration of the son for the father.

The professor didn't join in. "Awful."

As a veteran writer, the old man saw no art or genius in this type of thinking. Ignoring the conceit of categorising and ranking readers, he heard nothing in the theory beyond another pie-in-the-sky fantasy. It happened every few years. Some teen prodigy, ignorant of the history and depth of their field, waltzed in with dreams of sparking a revolution. Their attempts to reinvent the wheel, assuming they stuck with their obsession, would inevitably disfigure the thing until it no longer rolled.

For the notion of multiple, skill-adjusted narratives, any author could identify the fault. Readers were too elusive to be pinned down so precisely. Points that one intended to be understood would be missed, while secrets one thought masked would be guessed at in their first appearance. To hide a single thread of a story properly—to present it through foreshadowing, to slip in reminders that kept in the subconscious, and to finally have its full aspect grasped when intended—was difficult enough. Eight of them in the sense the teen had been describing…impossible.

The professor shook his head in a sober dismissal. "All anyone will get from your abomination will be madness. I retract my statement. Son, give conversion an honest go. You longwinded Po-Max hermits have caught a disease of the brain."

Henry understood all the dude's doubts. But he had the benefit of having already successfully executed the plan, having witnessed Silver consume his ultimate pleb-bait as both its Rank 3 High-Tier Pleb satire form and, with prompting and re-reading, its Rank 5 Mid-Tier Patrician pastiche form.

"It is a hard task," he admitted, "but not impossible. For me, that is. For a writer of your class, Ray, yeah, it's impossible."

'HENRY, stop insulting the professor!'

The teen snapped at the camera. "But he accused my faction of being mentally ill!"

'It doesn't matter. Professor Abrams is your se—'

"Nah. Fuck age; we stand for meritocracy. As the superior au—"

'HENRY LEE, WHAT DID?! WHAT DID YOU, WHAT DID YOU—WHAT?!!!! Professor, oh my god, a thousand apologies. This is my failure as a guardian. I should never…'

She trailed off, muttering about her mistake in letting him go out alone and move into his own apartment, while Mrs Withers took up the charge of reprimanding him.

The professor was refreshed by the pretentious teen being scolded by the elderly women. "It's fine, ladies! The young should have some bite while they've still got their milk teeth to break. The boy's error will become apparent in time. Any hack can hide behind confusing pages of polysyllables; to come out and say what you mean in one true sentence, that takes much more courage."

Henry retched at the minimalist platitude. "Yuck. I'll leave writing for the everyman to you guys."

"Try it once, Henry boy. It won't kill you."

"Nah, I'm already doing one better." Henry glanced again at the future. "Me, I'm writing for every man and all the men dormant inside him. One story, eight plots, on a bestseller list next March. Read it, Ray. It'll bring you into tomorrow."

The ultimate pleb-bait had been ready for release after his first Overdream session. However, Henry'd maxed out the past few years of non-cyborg-feasible productivity with The Tyrant's global domination and now The Cripple's supreme martial art invention. Therefore, he would have to spend the months of his public life after the tournament frauding that he was finishing the climb of pleberature, pretending to compose the other three books in his tetralogy, polishing the plots with test-readers, etc.

The professor, sick of him already, made no request to preview his monstrosity.

When they passed a restroom, Little Liu tugged to request a genuine, unprompted bathroom break. The professor split off after pointing in the direction of his office.

Henry, soon as he'd plopped the toddler down on a changing station, had a healthy laugh.

"Hah."

Here had been the pay-off of never giving up. Despite being battered by one setback after another in his mission to dodge university, he'd kept his edge sharp. Consequently, he'd been ready when this windfall had landed into his lap.

With this pleb professor hanging around, it should be a breeze to orchestrate his academic ejection. Victory was practically guaranteed if he continued obnoxiously insulting the geezer. What would happen if the situation devolved into a fistfight? Would the university side with a tenured member of staff, a respected participant in the international literary community? Or a rude rabble-rouser with a history of troublemaking and an illegitimate son?

Escaping academia - easy.

While changing his fake-son's diaper, the fake-father pulled up negative reviews on the professor's books and memorised the most stinging zingers.

Emerging from the restroom with an arsenal of insults, he marched his way towards the professor's office, outside of which a young woman on a bench was studying an impressively thick novel.

Henry froze up.

At the sight of the young woman reading the book, a jolt in his chest brought his heart to a painful stop, killing at once the infantile him who'd been floundering with these petulant schemes to avoid his fate. At a second jolt, his heart, sparking back awake, seemed to have leapt into another host, pulsing for a new, transformed him, whose vision, cleared of the obstructions of his childhood, was able to finally discern that before him that held true importance in life.

He pinched himself twice.

Ouch – not dreaming.

Ouch – not in a game simulation.

It seemed to be real...

"My god…" he whispered.

Henry'd never been a believer. He'd held to no sense of god or higher cosmic order, and what little respect he paid to such symbols had been limited to the value they imparted to those who did hold them. Now, though, he was confronted with a coincidence too terrifying to fathom in the absence of divine intervention. For what except the smirking will of the universe could have contrived this miracle? Here, in this moment of his greatest desperation, here, where he stood on the edge of an irrevocable upheaval to his love and life, here, in the flesh, had been laid before his doubt-filled gaze a chance at salvation, a woman of impossible, impossible beauty.

His body suddenly shook as destiny roared inside of him.

Was this what they called love at first sight?

"My god...how could—but, of course...the other new student..."