Prologue: The Logistics Officer

Cal scribbled out on the form projected by his tablet, his e-pen’s writing meticulous even as the software of the program he was writing within auto-corrected and formatted his script into perfect text that fit neatly inside the parameters of the form he was filling out.

Technically, he could do this with just a thought by connecting his neural link to the company device, but there were laws and regulations regarding the usage of a personal neural link -which were all neural links- in places of business. These regulations were driven mainly by the concern of using what were increasingly intimate pieces of technology that allowed one to interface with devices that were corporate owned, designed, and maintained. 

Usage of one’s neural link opened up a pathway and connection directly to one’s central nervous system, and protecting that pathway was less a matter of financial stability, privacy, and identity security; and more one of life or death. Getting one’s body hacked was a costly thing to fix, likely involving intensive surgery and hundreds of thousands of UEC, United Earth Currency, or tens of thousands of DSC, Distant Systems Credits to fix. Money one might not have access to depending on how deep that invasive hack went.

The personal nature of a neural link made people hesitant to use them in day-to-day jobs in which more primitive, but still effective methods were viable without such an inherent risk. Companies were quick to join in after their efforts at lobbying the various offices of the United Earth Government, Colonial Command, and the Galactic Board of Legalized Cybernetic Augmentation failed. With companies unable to provide guarantees for their employee’s safety -for it took just one malicious and accurate attack to compromise a device- they capitulated.

Cal’s cybernetic right eye scanned the next shipment he was inspecting and verifying. It was his job, being an inspection officer for the Far Home Space Port’s loading and storage bays. An exhaustive job that had him working twelve to eight hours a day, documenting, verifying, inspecting, logging, investigating, fixing, correcting, or researching the contents, destinations, and payment methods of various packages and shipment orders  Getting paid a very sizable amount of money, a total of eighteen DSC an hour with a plethora of benefits and per diem to live in what was effectively his dream home.

The Far Home Space Port was Saturn’s largest Space Station. A monolithic structure that orbited Titan and its colonies, and it granted Cal some of the greatest views of the second gas giant within Sol’s boundaries. His living arrangement wasn’t the best, a mere six-hundred square feet, although for one person that was far more than enough. His diet was healthy, but wasn’t exactly satisfying as a grass-fed beef hamburger; consisting of nutrient packages and vitamin supplements. He didn’t mind exactly, as he’d managed to install a modular flavor upgrade to his neural-soft, allowing him to modify the tastes of what he ate. Sadly it did little to affect the texture of his food, but he’d settle for eating what felt like a strange consistency of ice cream or richly flavored gravy.

Cal was ever if not adaptable, and in the age of cybernetic transhumanism, the ever-growing and developing space age with terraforming technologies, and distant news of colonization on distant exo-planets in other galaxies popping on through the faster-than-light network systems, had him adapting with ease.

He immersed himself in this age of humanity. Vicariously living through AR and VR, Artificial and Virtual Reality. From the landscapes of great jungles filled with engineered life forms -so-far no complex alien life has been found save for microbial entities- and broadcasts of grand colony ships that were manufactured out of the nuclear transmuted atoms of Sol’s stellar body. The soul-deep feeling of progress that so encompassed his species in this golden age of exploration filled him with a mysterious sense of hope and ever-lasting future.

Humanity has taken great steps forward, claiming worlds and stars to conquer and spread its claim across. At a very rough population estimate of four-hundred billion across the stars, with said population expecting to skyrocket to the trillions within the next generation or two, it’d only grow to be larger as their footprint expanded to the void, the stars, and the rocks they sought to call home. Those population estimates were limited only to the Milky Way Galaxy, after all, projected by the census taken by Colonial Command. There were thousands of fringe groups and rogue sections of humanity splitting off into different sectors and galaxies of space; many leaving the Local Galactic Group!

It was an age that took any man or boy, girl or woman and threw their yearning souls towards the stars. They dreamed of utopias and civilization, of lives and generational wealth.

Cal was not an avid dreamer, or at least, his dreams and ambitions were kept realistic.

He did not seek to join those desperate, adventurous, or foolish souls on their journey across the stars to distant worlds. He was satisfied with seeing glimpses of his old home, Earth, the distant little blue gem that twinkled whenever the station, Saturn, and Titan’s orbit just so aligned with Earth’s. He was satisfied with the artificial rotation of the station’s gravity, and the periodic moments of zero-gravity when the station needed to adjust itself. He was content with his pay of eighteen Distant System Credits an hour, pulling overtime and holiday pay whenever possible to scratch together nest eggs that he’d used wisely in diverse investments. Investments -that through a string of luck- made him a wealthy man with a fat bank account.

He was living his life, a job that while boring, with the assistance of his cybernetic augmentations was made relatively easy. A stable job that wasn’t truly easy by any means, protecting him against a replacement with automation; such things could be made fools of and allow contraband or faulty shipments into the station, possibly compromising the station’s security. For while getting paid eighteen DSC an hour sounded like he was barely making above minimum wage, real minimum wage was paid at around two to five DSC an hour -often not paid in DSC in the first place-, and to convert a single DSC into United Earth Currency, a current exchange rate of 8.323 UEC to one DSC, he was making roughly 149.81 UEC an hour, with benefits and not accounting for bonuses. He was making roughly 400,000 UEC, or around 54,000 DSC a year.

UEC wasn’t a weak currency by any means either, and while inflated to high heaven, it was backed by Earth’s governments, propped up by said governments and used to gatekeep many products that were essential or at least demanded by spacers and void borne alike; making that much money an hour seemed criminal in the right markets.

However, to say that Cal was getting paid too much for his job wasn’t correct. He had a lot of paperwork to go through, metric fuck tons in fact. Without at least a Neuron-Silver Neural Link™ and its accompanying software and auxiliary hardware, one would be hard pressed to do the job at a rate that’d not see one replaced by a more capable person. 

To be an Inspection Officer, one would be trained as an investigative officer, capable of accessing restricted networks and records to verify purchases, act as a customs officer for imports to Titan and the Station, along with exhaustive logistical work that needed to be documented, logged, and then verified. 

That required a highly competent individual to complete. Paired with the unique living arrangement of needing to live on the Far Home Space Station, at times dangerous living conditions as his department crossed over with several others including Station Security, which meant interacting with dangerous individuals, along with a bit of investigative work that could see ships and cargo being raided for evidence of smuggling; it was a broad job title that demanded a high amount of competence. Competence that was provided by his cybernetic augmentation.

When he’d first gotten his job, Cal was already well and deep into the transhumanist frenzy that was sweeping much of humanity. 

His family was rich, and while separated from them for more than a decade; Cal would admit to having been raised with a bit of a silver-spoon in his mouth. He broke out of the mold quickly, always having been a rebellious child that hated handouts and having things done for him.

Ever since he was at the age of five he remembered desiring independence, and that streak and desire culminated when he’d just…left his family.

He didn’t really remember why he left, what spurred him on, what broke the camel's back. He was twenty-eight, and he left when he was fourteen. For what little he could remember of his thoughts at the time, he was likely having a fit of whimsy; deciding to ‘give being an adult a try’. 

At fourteen, through his parent’s carefully cultivated bio-modification during his gestation period, Cal was developmentally equivalent to a sixteen to seventeen year-old; and thus old enough to receive a basic neural-ware package. His parents didn’t half-ass such a thing, and obtained him something he’d come to rely on to get him through the rocky bits of adapting to his new independent lifepath.

The Neuron-Ultima was a part of the top one-percent of Neural Links, and while now irrelevant, Cal having upgraded to a QuasiMorph Neural Development Hardware-Line 77 Alpha;  it was with those critical pieces of technology that allowed him to perform exceptionally well in positions that needed someone with a brain between their eyes. 

This proficiency allowed Cal to select a line of work that suited him, and one that had long term sustainability. One that used his smarts, half-complete private education, a desire for independence to work his way up to eventually heading off-world, a path that admittedly appealed to a childish desire of heading to space.

The benefits of living in space were varied. The quarters weren’t great by any means, and by not having a wife, child, or any dependents, one actually got more benefits. Taxes within space were weird, but Cal paid very low taxes to the Far Home Station itself, which paid for things like Oxygen, Water, and Amenities of the station. Most of the station’s funds came from tariffs, making those who lived on the station’s a bit richer. The actual usage of the tax money was far better than whatever the hell the other nations and political parties of humanity were using theirs for.

Far Home Station was a very ‘neutral’ party within political situations, generally refusing or shying away from taking a side in any true debate or issue save for ones that directly hindered Titan and the Belt’s Moons. In a way, Cal considered himself a citizen of Far Home far more than he did of any nation back home on Earth, although he still did consider himself an ‘Earthling’ more than he did a Spacer or Void Borne like some of his co-workers.

He sighed as he rolled his neck around, the action unstimulating, not feeling any pops of his spinal fluid within his neck, as he lacked such fluids or even a spine to make such a sound. Such remains of human expression were slowly fading the longer he existed as a cyborg, but VR and AR gave him some biological ticks as using those technologies simulated the human experience.

The lack of pops was due to the fact that his spine was an ARCCNSA, or an Ascendent Reflex Cerebral Central Nervous System Augment, one that was given to him by a passing soldier from a war-front in Andromeda of all places. He’d met the man at the station cyberdoc, the soldier wanting to sell much of his highly illegal -by Sol’s standards- and very much expensive cyberware for civilian-ware and a new face.

While Cal was very much an officer of the law and would never break any rules…

Nah, he was playing. He broke all kinds of rules.

Part of being Neutral meant Far Home, Titan, and the Saturn Belt of Moons were all ‘secretly’ smuggler dens that smuggled goods into and out of Sol that were otherwise illegal in the more controlled areas of space. It was hard to enforce a trade ban on a specific good several light minutes away, after all, and what Earth disliked wasn’t much of Saturn’s concern beyond things like truly horrific drugs, slavery of any sentient creature artificial or not, degenerate bio-mods, scams, and non-cloned organs.

…He’d seen some stuff, to say the very least.

Anyway, a lot of his body was made up of illegal or barely legal products, and it was his second largest hobby; upgrading himself with cybernetics, installing the latest software patches, keeping to date with the most recent research papers, that kind of stuff.

Where his father had his space-cruisers that he’d take out for a joy-ride around a star, Cal liked collecting shiny limbs and organs that he used to make himself better. A strange hobby he’d admit, but one that felt worthwhile. Each credit spent was a personal investment that made him better at his job after all.

He knew that the current Logistical Manager of Far Home was looking to retire; the man was a hundred and eighty three years old and had been in his position since Far Home was constructed. Cal was one of twenty nine other Inspection Officers, and he knew that he was attracting some attention from the LM; good attention at that, the kind that got people promoted. He hoped to be promoted to Inventory Manager this year, taking over Hanger M through Q would net him good contracts down on Titan and would allow him to start making headway into networking with the other moons of the Saturn’s Belt. 

His logic processor estimated that he’d be promoted to Logistical Manager by the time he was around thirty two to thirty five, sooner if he could wrangle in some big gigs and gather a large enough network that’d apply some pressure to the LM to retire and let new blood take in. He’d need to hope for a desire to boost the currently already thriving economy of Far Home and Titan to obtain that, as the LM was already making great works, no need to have a potentially tainted hand crumble them to dust and ruin what was already good.

Once he was LM he’d be in the perfect position to start networking in the big leagues, as he saw the Saturn Belt as a perfect staging ground to develop a shipping company. Establishing his own shipping company had always been his goal, and Saturn had the infrastructure, but due to being a relatively fractured, somewhat neutral collection of colonies and stations, had failed to capitalize on their solar ‘centralism’ and lack of regulation to become a lifeblood shipping magnet that he hoped to one-day build to outer-galactic scales. Instead Jupiter, Mars, and Venus were building towards that future, with Cal predicting a future corporate war between the three rapidly industrializing and militarizing planets.

While they fought, he hoped Saturn would play quiet and calm, allowing him to reap the ashes and build a kingdom from their soot.

Such plans were only in their infancy, idly planned and plotted decades into the future. He saw little reason to not climb the ranks, and establishing his own company was but the next step and conclusion of a logical action.

However, right now he was a lowly Inspection Officer, and…

His shift was over.

With a light grin lifting his lips, Cal snapped the hard-light tablet closed and saunted his way through the labyrinthine storage cells of Warehouse-V. Towering dark crates lit up dimly by periodically placed lights hanging far above a distant and dark ceiling. The warehouses were massive structures, his boots clanging with the mag-locks automatically engaging and disengaging as they secured him to the floor in a zero-gravity environment.

Warehouses were actually separate to stations, built relatively close and grav-tethered to the station itself, they were ultimately their own structures with specifically designed purposes built into them. Warehouse-N and Warehouse-J for example were liquid storage vaults, holding the facilities needed to store any type of liquid; from liquid natural gas, liquid helium, or soda. 

Cal arrived at the loading bay entrance, idly watching a large cargo ship enter Loading Bay Delta-C, drones deploying into the air to go scan through the contents. Drones were an Inspection Officer’s greatest tools, as while they did the heavy lifting in scanning and identifying the cargo a ship held within its hold; the Inspection Officer did the thinking and negotiations with the ship’s captain, or whatever company they represented. That wasn’t his duty today though, and instead he was confirming exports and import logs, taking inventory and confirming the quality of various imports. The amount of steel he’d needed to void because it was scrap hidden under a layer of decent quality steel…

Technically a Drone could do that kind of job, but there were separate concerns regarding automated verification processes that could be subverted.

He turned away from the happenings and punched in a nine-digit long code into a terminal which opened up a small doorway leading to a secluded hanger. Within the hangar, four small space-craft rested. Before he left he used the terminal to open up his time-slot app and clocked out, before heading into the hangar.

Cal strode over to his personal space-craft, sending an IFF to the craft that responded back with a request for confirmation codes and passwords. He sent the data over, which validated his identity, and then unlocked and started an automatic diagnostics.

The worker climbed up the angular structure of the craft, locking himself into the seat. He flicked several switches and grabbed a helmet that hung from the cockpit’s roof. Securing it to his head, he ran his hand along the cranial crown and found several wires that connected to the ship’s hull. He took one that was hanging loosely and guided it to the base of his neck, plugging the omni-jack into his neural port.

He let out a grunt, closing his eyes as his non-organic eye transmitted an image of various camera angles to his brain. His hands rested themselves on the manual controls, currently disabled and merely used as a means of establishing correct flying posture; Cal controlled his ship with his mind.

The engines started up, ion flares burning as the grav-drive operated, floating the ship upwards, and then pushing it towards the energy shielded hangar doors.

The ship exited the shield gracefully, banking left along the massive metal fixture that floated within space, distantly tethered to a visible Far Home by a grav-tether; artificial gravity holding the structure in place relative to the Station.

Cal flipped several switches inside his cockpit, his organic eye roaming over the board, before he adjusted a microphone on his helmet. “Inspector Three-Alpha-Core; coming onto the radar. Please respond. Inspector Three-Alpha-Core; coming onto the radar.”

His hail was met with a brief flux of static, before affirmation. “We read you Inspector Three-Alpha-Core. Respond with verification codes.”

“Nox-Charley-Delta-Fox-Tango-Tango. Repeat, Nox-Charley-Delta-Fox-Tango-Tango.”

“Code’s green. Welcome home, Inspector. Over and out.”

“Glad to be, over and out.” He responded, taking his ship to Dock-A.

He flew through the shielded docking port, practical muscle memory at this point guiding him to his reserved parking space within the station, and he set his ship down with a soft jolt of the rubberized magnetic landing pads finding lock.

A twist of his neck had the cable locked into his spine disengaged, and his cybernetic eye’s vision returned to normal. He gave a brief full body jitter, before slapping the release on his cockpit and crawling out.

He dropped down with a grunt, giving his neck a scratch, before commanding the ship to re-engage security measures and decided to head on home.

He walked to the hangar door, and after a five minute walk on a moving walkway, he made it to a third dimensional elevator network system. He punched in his address, and the glass box rose into the air, before floating through the grand arcology that made up the center and more popular shopping centers of Far Home.

The Arcology and Far Home itself was a massive tourist trap, one built on accident, but a happy one indeed.

Current FTL technology allows for disgusting distances being eaten up in relatively short amounts of time. Cal could get on a ship and fly off to Andromeda and be there within a month or two depending on the size and class of the FTL Drive. However, the FTL Drive doesn’t exactly work so well within the system. Overshooting was the greatest problem, and while it functioned by phase-shifting a ship into an alternate dimension with different rules of reality allowing for faster-than-light travel speeds; accuracy wasn’t something it was known for.

It often missed by a few light minutes or more, although long and lengthy calculations could narrow that margin of error down greatly; allowing for an accurate, but still rough jump ‘within the solar system’. This meant sub-light travel was a necessity, and that ships could either take days if not weeks calculating and calibrating a jump-drive for an accurate jump to say, Earth, or take a rough jump to Sol and jump somewhere around Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, or even the Kuiper Belt.

Rough Jumping anywhere near a solar-mass -usually aiming at the third planetoid object and in- was ill-advised and risky, and thus most ships rough-jumped around the outer-edges of the Solar System, moving inwards. It took days and weeks, not months and years to travel such great distances; the advancements of sub-light travel are great, but not as amazing as Faster Than Lightspeed.

Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto were all remote locations; built up with research labs and foundations producing strange technology that got shipped out or picked up by whoever was interested. Saturn and its Belt was where the ships visiting Sol first got picked up -if the orbits were correct- and the Belt’s economy and exports were very strong compared to some of its competitors.

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The Belt was a tech heaven, put simply. The manyfold moons and colonies on Saturn were specialized industrialists and research labs, producing lab-grade and cutting edge equipment that was shipped back to Earth, Mars, and Jupiter’s moons where they were used for heavy and light industry. Sol’s economy was interesting as one got further out.

Starting with Pluto, the place was effectively just a few scattered isolated listening posts and research labs. Recently, however, there's been rumors of big activity on Pluto hinting at possible heavy industry moving towards the dwarf planet with asteroid mining soon to start swinging. Such a thing wasn’t done yet, as colonization and traditional methods of mining were far easier, traditional, and well-done to the otherwise unproven, risky, and hard to develop methods of asteroid mining. Better to just strip mine a lifeless moon than voyage out into the darkness of space getting one’s expensive mining equipment pelted and chewed up by the Kuiper Belt.

Uranus and Neptune were both hardcore science and research outposts with water companies doing some work there as well. Beyond that though, they were mainly focused on medicine technologies, along with a few big tech companies on Neptune creating competition with Mars and Io for shipbuilding.

Saturn was the ‘goldilocks zone’ of industry and research, fueling the industrial needs of the hungry mouths that were the heavy industrial work horses known as Venus and Mars. Jupiter’s moons meanwhile played a similar game to Saturn’s Belt, the rival gas giant cutting into their margins by being their ‘big brother’.

Lastly, was Earth, which played a game of politics, influence, and held a monopoly on Earthen products; being practically invaluable to the rest of the universe as the cradle of humanity and home to its living resources. Of course that monopoly was being broken by terraforming technology and bio-engineering; but those products lacked the acclaim that the Cradle held in respects of being home.

Earth was a revitalized gaia-planet, the centuries of industrial exploitations peeled away and reversed as new life was breathed into the planet; extinct animals were revived and entire nations were turned into natural habitats. The weather was tamed, and cities were rebuilt after the Unification Wars. The planet now sat at an unremarkable seven billion in population, a level of population that hadn’t been seen before on the planet since the turn of the millenia. Those seven billion were among the privileged and wealthy, with much of the population of the planet leaving or ‘leaving’ after the Unification Wars and a push to the stars.  

It was Far Home’s famous Arcology that held products purchased from Earth, sold at horrendously marked up prices, along with tastes of the Belt’s products; from ships with unique designs, cutting edge jump-drives and ion-engine technology, Golden Sand Weapon System Technology, Ice Bound Shields, Frozen Ring Computer Systems, World Ring Terraforming; company after company sold and advertised their products within the Station, for Far Home truly was the farthest ‘home’ of humanity within Sol, and the most dense and populous system of trade beyond Earth and its moon.

Cal’s elevator passed through the arcology, before swinging an abrupt left as it hurtled through the air and dove through a passageway hidden in the design of the arcology. He entered a dark tunnel system that flashed periodically with lights built inside of it. He flew through a few hangers and docking locations, before eventually reaching the living quarters of the station. His elevator touched down onto a landing mat, dozens more flying down and setting down. A synthetic voice called for him to exit the elevator, and the moment he was clear it jerked up and flew off.

Cal joined various commuters as they headed home. None he recognized beyond their clothing and what organization or job-type they held. Free-Lance Miners, ship captains, crews, visitors, rich men and women enjoying the sights of the ‘rough and tough’ outskirts of Sol; a majority of Far Home’s population was traveling or temporary. Although that depended on one’s view of temporary, as captains and spacers used the station as a ‘base’ for months if not years on end, holding rented ports and apartments for their crews to use on restocks when not in the void. Taxes and Fees were low, and while high compared to the taxes he had to pay; comparatively to any other polity that competed with storage and long-term rest was greatly superior. 

Saturn’s ring was harvested for Ice and Water, along with the hydrogen of the atmosphere’s hydrogen and helium. Massive balloon systems and other creative riggings were created, floating in the gas-giant’s constant storm, collecting massive amounts of the gasses that were shipped and processed back on Titan, but needed to pass through Far Home first as Titan had yet to establish a proper centralized spaceship hold or space elevator. Far Home held the infrastructure and connections that allowed them to lower mass quantities of resource goods down to the manyfold factories and industrial centers on the moon.

He roughed through the crowd, walking a long while to eventually arrive at his apartment block. He entered and scanned his security code to access the elevator, before climbing in and getting shot up to the eighteenth floor.

Cal made his way through the hallway, before arriving at his apartment’s door, and with a deep sigh and a mental flip from ‘work mode’ to ‘rest and relaxation mode’ he opened the door.

A bare and simple apartment. No kitchen was spotted, although he had a large fridge filled to the brim with nutrient packs and water bags. He strode in and disengaged the locks of his boots, removing the mag-boots and briefly stretching the joints of his cybernetics uselessly limbering up. It was more the thought that counted though.

A small sink rested adjacent from his fridge, and the rest of the space was occupied by an integrated closet holding hazard-suits, space helmets, old cybernetic parts locked away inside specialty cases, clothing, and memorabilia.

Beyond that was a small desk and tablet he used as an eating space to watch news, videos, or do work emails. This device he trusted to establish a direct connection to his neural link, so the emails and work he did do with the device was done blazingly fast.

The last addition to his rather barren apartment was a bed. Not just any bed, but rather the Electric Ram Neural Interface Bed. It was connected to the sat-comm of the station, a wireless connection system that allowed for information and data to be sent at Faster Than Light Speeds, allowing communications beyond the solar system, and with truly amazing examples of the technology; the galaxy.

The Electric Ram was the cutting edge virtual reality tech, literally released last year with theories on the next release not happening for decades due to how bleeding edge the technology had come. Any improvements would be infantsmall compared to the level of work and money that’d be spent designing a successor. 

Cal stripped out of his hazard suit, engaged his synthetic lungs to naturally draw in the station’s oxygen, having been empty and compressed to prevent a pressure collapse if he ever entered the void. Instead his body just siphoned oxygen from a supply pack from his suit, forgoing a helmet as anything that could compromise his chromium plated carbon laced vanadium skull and the inertia dampening fluids inside his skull would get through most all helmets. He preferred the freedom of movement and lack of blindspots to a clunky helmet that’d blindside his cyberoptics or other enhanced senses to a moving object.

With a deep yawn, an actually real expression of human life as his mind was tired, he stripped out of his undersuit and crawled into the small shower unit nestled into the corner of his apartment. He sprayed himself down, drying off with a gust of powerful hot air from the unit, before leaving the shower and crawling into the comfortable coffin-like structure of his Electric Ram. 

Cal leaned back into the slightly protruding ports, the machine responding to his presence as it linked up to his body, conforming perfectly around him. He automatically numbed his body with a thought of his neural link, not feeling the rather uncomfortable tubes entering his rectum and slotting over his genitals for waste disposal. He’d made that mistake when he first got the machine and he did not recommend it. 

Cal next opened his mouth and allowed the feeding tube to enter down his throat. Lastly, he heard his neural ports align with the bed’s protrusions, before their omni-adapting plugs slotted in neatly to Cal’s own ports. He didn’t jolt in surprise or any real reaction, instead watching as both his eyes imprinted text that overlaid in their fields of vision. 

The logo of a heavily cybernetic and outright demonic looking Ram glared into his eyes, an image that had been poked at by Old World preservers was an overt representation of Satan and had tried to get the company to remove its branding image. Neural Corp, the umbrella company over most all technology corporations that dealt with such things, was based on Enceladus and didn’t give a shit what old fogies thought about their company’s branding and thus ignored them.

The image then shifted to Neural Corp’s logo, that of a stereotypical brain with circuit graphics making up half of the brain faded into view, before vanishing. Next a series of security programs ran, confirming his neural layout and automatically logging him in. He waited for a few moments, before he felt his consciousness fading.

He woke in a pit of darkness, the unfeeling nature of his cybernetic augmentations long gone and now he existed as a baseline human with all of the natural tactile feelings he’d long since replaced with cybernetic transhumanism. He didn’t regret it, not in a long shot, and this experience of virtual reality allowed him to experience life in a body of flesh that’d never have been possible in reality.

With motions that were practically muscle memory, Cal opened the main menu of the HUB, before navigating to his favorite games. Within a collection of games opened up, the number of hours put into each one showed on their banners.

The most played game Cal played was called Blood and Bone. It was an ultra-realistic violence simulator, placing oneself in a body that held peak-human capabilities and allowing the player to face other human and non-human foes in various modes of combat. From defensive waves within an arena, or an offensive attack against a populated dungeon or defensive perimeter. Cal had forty two thousand chronological hours placed into this game, which was possible through the time-dilation technologies that stretched time by a factor of three when playing VR, turning those forty two thousand hours into a realistic fourteen thousand hours.

Cal had downloaded dozens of mods and DLC for the game, turning the originally cold-weapon combat game into a highly militarized first person tactical shooter; although he personally prefers the cold-weapon brutal and savage gameplay, feeding the beast that rested within his body.

When he’d first discovered VR he was around thirteen. His father had purchased him an expensive headset version that allowed children without the developmental criteria to install cybernetics to play. He fell in love with games that challenged him martially, feeling alive when he was playing the games where he felt each stroke of a blade could end with death.

The childish magic of ultra-realism faded quickly, the technology and immersiveness not great enough for that feeling of riding death’s line to truly stick.

When he’d become independent and moved out to the stars, that changed. Games that used Cybernetics to connect the player to the games played were dramatically different. They allowed the usage of a few blacklist mods that incorporated an almost masochistic desire to have a pain threshold included into his fights for added realism and immersion. A threshold that was currently set to a maddening seventy five percent, the highest threshold he could apply without triggering deeply inbuilt safety mechanisms. This was the largest example of how far he’d gone to eke out that extra bit of ‘immersive gameplay’, hoping to create a truly realistic gaming experience that he lost himself into.

His desire and commitment towards the ‘reality’ part of ‘virtual reality’ had also given rise to a taste in certain types of games. An example of this came in the form of realistic survival sims.

His second most-played game was called Deathworld. He had thirty-three thousand hours placed into the game, condensed down to eleven thousand hours of real-time. Deathworld was a port of an ‘illegal’ training simulation that was used by the Colonial Command in its infancy to prepare individuals in hostile environments. Early terraforming and bio-engineering efforts resulted in rapid mutation and evolution of life-forms, creating what were known galaxy-wide as Deathworlds, worlds that took Earth’s already competitive biosphere and turned it into the most cut-throat game of life to ever take place in the galaxy. Of course horrible disease, parasites, deadly predators, and more weren’t going to dissuade humanity from setting up shop inside these hardwon planets, and so survival guides and training simulations of these worlds were needed to educate colonists of the ‘basics’ of survival within them.

Cal’s Deathworld port was one he’d gotten directly from the training programs, having gone through several dozen hoops and stretched his limited connections thin to eventually get in contact with a rare few individuals that had the original port. The more monetized and public version was a reductionist view that removed dozens of features that ruined an otherwise perfectly realistic survival scenario.

Deathworld was a game that Cal had ‘only’ spent ‘thirty-thousand hours’ within, which equated to a total of three and a half years of perspective gameplay. He played in Hardcore mode which meant he couldn’t save scum and currently played within a save that had lasted nearly a year long. An insane amount of time that consolidated down to roughly four to three months of real-time and from what he’d read on the Noosphere -what humanity called the internet after its expansion to galactic scale- was the longest running game outside of a few easy-mode save scumming scrubs who had three to five year long running games. 

While those games were his biggest investments of time, and were his greatest focus, playing at least a half a dozen hours every day, he had other games that he experimented with; although always tended to return to the abject perfection that was Blood and Bone and Deathworld.

His other interests included Space Farer, an immersive game that placed one within an actualized galaxy with different FTL technology than the ones they had in reality which allowed for more fantastical space-battles, trading simulation, and exploration. In that game he stepped away from his real-life job as a logistics officer and instead leaned hard into the other side of things as a pirate, smuggler, and bounty hunter. It was an online game in which he was a relatively ‘big name’ on the various forms and rumor-mills within the Sol Server.

Despite the grand advancements of FTL Communications, communications weren’t instant. Travel time was given across great boundaries of space which locked most players who had civilian grade access to satcomms within their Star System. Far Home’s satcomms could connect to servers located within the Galaxy. He’d be hard pressed to connect with servers located in places like Andromeda without latency, but nearby Dwarf Galaxies could be connected to with the bleeding edge communications technology. Hell, certain Dwarf Galaxies had better connections due to the lack of interference of celestial bodies in their path, depending on how deep the server one was connecting to within that galaxy was.

This limited servers for online games within solar-systems, with the Sol System being the most populous server for online games.

Cal wasn’t exactly the biggest fan of those types of games, MMOs he meant. They often included far too many game mechanics that his detail oriented mind which got its jollies off on immersiveness inside an interesting world found bland, boring, or contrived. Even something as simple as an inventory or status menu would find him disliking a game, moving him away from a large majority of games that he enjoyed the thought of, but disliked the implementation of various mechanics that otherwise ruined the experience.

Things like Health Bars and detailed equipment with complex bonus status that did little more than raise the amount of health points one had, dealt in damage, or resisted when being dealt damage. That was a simplification of course, as he did enjoy hearing about unique builds and creative displays of ingenuity inside of those types of games, having a few online friends who played them and talked to him about their adventures.

They just weren’t for him, and was why he stuck to Space Farer as his go-to MMO of choice. Everything the game needed to do was handled in ways that were believable through technology and wasn’t just UIs and HUDs shoved into one’s face, but instead helmets, datapads, cybernetics, and layouts of spaceship consoles or cockpits. Inside of that world he could get lost inside the immersiveness of being a citizen of the stars.

Cal was about to log into Blood and Bone to get his adrenaline high going, only to be paused when his inbox pinged.

FailingMedicalStudent: Hey, dude, you’re online right on time. Check this link out. [LINK]. Crazy shit that I just found! It’s rumored to be releasing and opening servers in a few months. Made out in Triangulum of all places! I thought you’d be interested.

Cal raised an eyebrow at the message. Triangulum was a Galaxy that neighbored Andromeda by roughly five-hundred lightyears. It wasn’t as famous as Andromeda was, and thus didn’t get many ships headed out that way. He racked his memory for a moment, remembering that a few decades back there was a split colonization effort that sent humanity to its nearest galaxies in an effort to have as many ‘footholds’ within the Galaxy. Communications were still in effect, but big news from Triangulum and Andromeda weren’t exactly common things; the other galaxies often kept themselves insular from Sol and the Milky Way.

Other efforts of colonization from outside of the galaxy came from the dwarf clusters, things like the Leo Groups, Ursa Minor, Draco, NGC 6822, NGC 3109, NGC 185, and so on. Humanity had spread far and wide with the abilities of their FTL allowing for such great distances being traversed. 

Colonial Command had structured these leaving colonies to the great beyond in an effort to have as many eggs in different baskets as possible, along with the scientific efforts of exploring new galaxies and stars. The Milky Way Galaxy itself was barely explored beyond probes and rapid fire jumping by exploration and science teams. 

However, the rate of exploration would leave the Milky Way Galaxy unexplored for millenia to come. The Galaxy had a hundred billion stars within its grasp, after all, and it only proved Humanity’s greed and whimsy that they’d leave it all for the desire to explore a distant galaxy with much the same.

Ignoring those thoughts, Cal responded to FailingMedicalStudent.

InsaneLogisticsOfficer: I’ll give it a go I guess. Any hints?

It didn’t take long for his friend to respond.

FailingMedicalStudent: Fantasy.

He raised an eyebrow, a frown falling on his face as he did so. Fantasy held problems of being exceptionally RPG-like, and he’d yet to find a Fantasy World that offered a level of immersion that wasn’t broken with game mechanics designed to make the game easier and more inviting for players.

He clicked on the link and a video player opened. He waved his hand and a comfy lounge chair was created from nothingness, before he sat back and widened the video player which expanded itself to a full screen.

He waved his hand once more and the screen played.

It led with a shot of a forest, one that looked fantastical by how vibrant and saturated it was with odd colors and creating a mystical sense of whimsy in the woods. Rustling sounded out, before a horn was sounded, followed by a blood chilling howl, joined by dozens of others.

Wolves dived out of the forest, the screen shaking as gray blurs flashed by the screen, before following one. On the back of a nasty looking monstrous wolf, garbed in quality and grim looking leather and chain armor rested a grinning goblin who cackled with glee. They dove, the camera floating up and flying over what revealed itself to be a battlefield.

The camera flew to the perspective of a stunning, but somewhat uncanny woman dancing her way through throngs of giant Orcish warriors, her spear ripping through jugulars and guts with smooth precision and fluidity. Joining her was an imposing masked elven man robed and armored with a glowing skull held inside his hands; the skull’s eye sockets flashed with fel light, and with his free hand he summoned and controlled a foul looking black and green flame, that with a gesture washed over a horde of monsters.

The battlefield expanded, before the screen shifted to another. This one shows human warriors by the thousands in full plate armor warring against an unending field of demonic armies.

The screen flashed once more, this time a siege of undead marching on a high walled city with guttural cannons and artillery blasting down at the disgusting march of ultra-realistic corpses. A dwarf roared in a powerful voice, and yet another blast followed, joined by a gleeful and mad gnome or halfling who summoned forth a great blast of arcane energies, annihilating thousands in a multicolored bloom of deadly energies.

The images flashed faster, battlefield after battlefield, war after war, before the images faded out and revealed the title for the IP.

Ascendancy Online

Cal watched with unimpressed eyes, not truly feeling much in response to the trailer. He opened his chat.

InsaneLogisticsOfficer: The trailer looks good, I won’t lie, but it’s just another Fantasy RPG; what’s the hype?

FailingMedicalStudent: You didn’t read the description! The developers gave a rundown of the game; it’s practically made for you.

InsaneLogisticsOfficer: Fine, fine.

Cal went back to the link and scrolled past the video down to the rest of the webpage that gave a summary and more in depth guide to what to expect about the game. The more he read, the more his eyebrow raised.

‘Ultra-Realistic World with BCB Intelligence, Artificial Organic Intelligence?’ Cal’s jaw dropped slightly. Bio-Cloned-Brains; also known as Artificial Organic Intelligences were outlawed basically everywhere. 

He read further. 

The company was known as Transcendent Realities, based in Triangulum, but they’d expanded outside the galaxy to get business, having branch stations floating around Triangulum-2.

He read into the servers they were going to have active along with their connection requirements and noted that they had servers based in Triangulum-2, a relatively ‘close’ dwarf galaxy near the Milky Way Galaxy. He pulled up a few calculations and specs of his station’s satcomms, and concluded that he’d have a good connection with the servers over there. The server population wouldn’t be great, as Triangulum-2 wasn’t close to many large population centers, although if anyone with an advanced enough space station or listening post had the satcom and interest, they’d be capable of connecting. 

Ultimately, he figured the Triangulum-2 server would be relatively dead compared to other online games due to factors of the game itself having a distant and hard to reach server without bleeding edge satcom technologies that could reach the distant dwarf galaxy. However, ‘relatively dead’ didn’t account for the sheer size of humanity, as even a ‘relatively dead’ server within the modern era could hold tens of thousands, if not millions of active players connecting from star systems, galaxies, moons, and planets.

He continued to read on, getting sucked up into the described game mechanics.

Ascendancy Online wasn’t a traditional RPG at all. Instead, it created a world with translated Game Mechanics that functioned inside of the world itself.

It was a perma-death, no respawn, hardcore restarting RPG with an emphasis on cross-faction PVP and PVE. One that advertised itself as a Dark Fantasy World with endgame content being exceptionally difficult to access, but once one did unlock it…dear lord was it a power fantasy.

Everyone started as a Level Zero, which included NPCs who could also level up. Which meant the world itself would be evolving in response to players. To Level Up, one needed to slay a fixed amount of same level entities. Doing so would increase one’s level and they’d ascend into the Path of Power. 

Killing level zeroes as a level one did nothing, save anger factions and rewarded a player with little. Consequences regarding death were the big-stick to fall on players if they went on a power-trip, as there were always bigger fish ready to stop them into the ground. It was in this way that the game naturally filtered players upwards, forcing them to engage in PVP or PVE scenarios of relatively equal advantages. 

Combat was described as ‘realistic superhumanism’ with a focus on developing and training oneself to act as a realized combatant. The addition of a superhuman physique meant that the developers also expected players to play with high-end neural-links, as lower-quality ones failed to allow players to adapt to truly insane levels of play.

Cal was wondering how this game was planning on attracting a casual audience, but theorized that maybe it wasn’t? Maybe it was developed to focus entirely on creating a Hardcore experience? He wasn’t sure if there was that big of a market for games like this.

He continued to read but sadly the details started to run dry. There was just enough information to get a good picture of what the game was offering, but little in the way of specifics. Magic was touched on as an in-universe skill that one would need to learn through native channels, with a hint at ‘unlimited possibilities’ with the skills that altered reality.

There were also mystic professions within the world that were needed to craft gear, with loot drops being rare, unfitted for players, and any piece of good magical gear would attract anyone with a lick of greed in their blood; players and NPCs alike. To get good gear was to make it yourself, or find someone to make it. Thus, he expected the player economy would be bloodthirsty to say the very least; which was good in his mind as a competitive marketplace was a healthy one.

His final conclusion was that the game was a Hardcore Dark Fantasy Game with aspects of Low and High fantasy, melding the genres together into a horrific collage.

He continued browsing the game’s website and took in a few other notable features. One of which alarmed and concerned him, although little detail was added. It was a remark that mentioned ‘romantic and sexual actions are possible’, before immediately linking to a foreign website that listed various laws and allowances regarding the fair-use and proper licensing of advanced neural technologies. Licenses that wouldn’t be worth a damn in Sol Space, but in Triangulum they likely had weight.

Cal debated to himself for a few moments before registering onto the website and preordering the datafile. He ran it through the Electric Ram’s protection systems, the high-quality electronic security measures scanning the file and finding it safe for use. 

It cost a disgusting thirty DSC, highway robbery for the average person, but he figured it would be worth the money. He had plenty of cash in his accounts anyway, and he was a frugal man when it came to anything but Cybernetics and Virtual Reality. Honestly, he wasn’t sure why he was getting worked up over the cost, he spent hundreds of thousands of DSC on cybernetics, paid for by his investments and crypto ventures and never blinked.

The game wasn’t set to release for quite a while, but he’d have it on lock to see if he enjoyed it.

He then contacted FailingMedicalStudent.

InsaneLogisticsOfficer: Bought it and downloading it now. You going to play it?

FailingMedicalStudent: Can’t at the moment; server is too far for local satcomms. But, in two weeks I’m getting my license.

InsaneLogisticsOfficer: You? Getting your medical license? Impossible. 

FailingMedicalStudent: Hehe. Nothing a few weeks of cram inside VR can’t fix, my friend! Anyway, with that license I’m thinking of moving off Earth. I want to get into the cyberdoc industry, and try to find an apprenticeship for myself and my sister.

InsaneLogisticsOfficer: Where you headed?

FailingMedicalStudent: I want to stay inside Sol so I can keep up with my family, so likely Jupiter or Saturn. Saturn most likely.

InsaneLogisticsOfficer: Saturn. Do Saturn.

FailingMedicalStudent: Oh? That where you’re located, Logi?

InsaneLogisticsOfficer: I live in Far Home Station, over Titan.

FailingMedicalStudent: Far Home, huh.

InsaneLogisticsOfficer: I can put a good word in with the station’s Lead Cyberdoc, me and him are good friends.

FailingMedicalStudent: Really? \[0.0]/

InsaneLogisticsOfficer: I’m eighty-eight percent borg at this point and he’s serviced ninety-nine percent of me. We have a business relationship, and me introducing the old badger to an Earth raised doc like you would raise his interest at the very least.

There was a brief silence.

FailingMedicalStudent: Do you know what I’d need to do? Like do I need to bring my own supplies? Where’d we live? I don’t think I’d do well within a cryopod, not to mention my sister…

InsaneLogisticsOfficer: Medical Personnel of Far Home gets treated real well. Here, let me do some math and research real quick…

InsaneLogisticsOfficer: Aight, you’ll be making around twelve to eighteen DSC while shadowing Jacob, Jacob is the cyberdoc I’m talking about. You’ll have several premium benefits with pre-paid lodging by being medical staff, and I’ll need to talk with Jacob about getting you pre diem or a student’s visa; I don’t usually handle immigration, but my experiences were relatively easy so-long as you know whose hands to grease. Luckily, you have me to do the heavy lifting, so I’ll get you in my hab-block. Nine-hundred square-feet, sink, shower, fridge; shit food, but that’s what cybernetics are for, and you’ll need to take some spacer-classes Earthside to even be accepted for a void-born service job. 

FailingMedicalStudent: Shit man, that took you like, a second to get all of that?

InsaneLogisticsOfficer: I have a Quasi-Morph NL. Makes this kind of stuff easy.

FailingMedicalStudent: /OoO\ Bruh. That shits restricted blacktech. No wonder you fucking smurf in Counter Terrorist Galactic Offense. ‘Built Different’ my ass!

Cal snorted with amusement at the response.

FailingMedicalStudent: Hey, uhm, so I mentioned my sister; do you think she’d be able to get a job on Far Home as well?

InsaneLogisticsOfficer: Bringing dependents gets you taxed hell and back on Far Home, but if she’s a medical professional as well, I don’t see why Jacob would turn you two away. What did she study?

FailingMedicalStudent: Haven’t graduated yet! But we both study chrome. I’m better at the mechanical and applied nature of the work, active surgery is my jam, but she’s better at the planning and doing the background bio-work than I am. I can hack it, she can stitch it back together better than before when I fuck up. Honestly, that biofuckery doesn’t make a lick of sense sometimes.

InsaneLogisticsOfficer: Don’t even get me started…

Failing Medical Student: You know the field?

InsaneLogisticsOfficer: I’m a product of the field.

FailingMedicalStudent: …That checks, actually.

InsaneLogisticsOfficer: Anyway, you stay in contact if you decide you want to book up onto Far Home. I don’t recommend Jupiter, Venus, or Mars; those places are looking at a corporate war in the next decade or two.

FailingMedicalStudent: A corpo-war? Hmm. It scares me that I can see that happening. Easily. Well, I better study up for the exams coming to haunt me; see ya’ man. Thanks for your help… I’ll keep it in mind.

Cal logged off the chat room. He thought about what he wanted to play today, before deciding he could do with polishing his skills in Blood and Bone. 

Selecting the game, he loaded into the preset Arena he’d logged off last time he played, and walked over to the weapon rack. Picking up an arming sword and warhammer, he raised his weapon in the air, and the gates blocking the shadowy barracks of the arena opened.

Warcries echoed and Cal grinned, his heart racing, his fingers tensing around worn leather wrapped wood, before with his heart beating out of his chest; he dove forward, ready to spill blood.