I glanced out the window as I sat at my desk, enjoying how the city looked in the early morning light. My window faced east, so I could see the sun reflected off the glittering glass of the old skyscrapers, shining through the leaves of the trees planted on the landings of the other nearby arcologies. I had been taught about pollution in school. Horror stories about cities under a permanent blanket of haze. We made less things these days, and with much cleaner technology. There are fewer people around too. These days, if there is anyone polluting in industrial amounts, it would be in the wilds outside the cities, but those areas are so sparsely populated it couldn’t possibly have a major impact.

I had always felt really ambivalent about the major corporations. They are the unquestioned masters of their domain, unchallenged by the likes of us lowly workers. But they keep us safe, they protect their territory and harshly punish criminals. The law applies to everyone equally, even to managers, which was how I ended up where I am. They keep things clean - well, they keep the air clean. Keeping our communities clean is obviously our own responsibility. I couldn’t hate them because they obviously created a pretty good world to live in, but I couldn’t love the panopticon tyrants looming overhead either.

As the sun cleared the city’s skyline, I shook myself out of my increasingly meandering thoughts. I had a report to finish. I leaned forward and gestured to call up my virtual keyboard. As it appeared in my vision, I experienced another flash of pain through my head. I blinked away the spots and narrowed my eyes. That was getting concerning. I had experienced an unusual amount of little aches and pains in the past day or so. Nothing too intense, nothing constant, nothing which would warrant an immediate trip to medical, certainly not at the cost a clinic in the upper arcology would charge. There were, I knew, some medical things on the schedule at some point in the future, to make sure the alien hardware wasn’t causing weird side effects.

I made a note of my experience in my report for the day. That’d almost certainly get things moved up, or at least prompt John to send me to get a checkup on my own. Medical paranoia sated, I typed out the final sections. I went to double check the wording for the last two sections of my magical tutorial document, only to find that it was not among the small list of things I was able to save from destruction. I was able to detect a faint hint of its magical ‘flavor’ lingering somewhere, but I couldn’t find any actual traces of it anywhere I looked. Maybe that was just what happened when magical things got destroyed? They release their magic smoke? Whatever, doesn’t matter. I was certain someone else would find another one sooner or later. I was dismayed at the sorry state of my inventory, still a wreck after my spiritual battle, but it would have to wait until work was finished.

Ten minutes passed as I put my thoughts to paper (figuratively, I wasn’t quite that well paid). I tried to emphasize how useful it was to have a second person who had chosen the same character option, in order to learn more about it. I worried that once we passed the tutorial and everyone could freely meet up, the higher ups (probably not John but maybe Mr. Roberts) would require that we stick exclusively with Digital Arts personnel for our groups. There was literally nothing I could learn from watching someone who was operating on a totally different game system than I was. Well, that probably wasn’t true. But it was almost certainly more helpful to have someone else who had the same lack of guidance I did to throw ideas around with. I wondered, not for the first time, if DA’s blind, aggressive policy for character builds had crippled us. Of course, I didn’t include that in my report.

Still, Joe had to be at the high end for raw power with his chosen archetype, yet even he was totally ineffective against the boss. Maybe mostly the result of a bad elemental matchup? Lindsey had kept it back for a short while through a combination of power, precision, and perception. It was probably meant to be faced with a full group with a mix of abilities. When it came time for the second wave of keys to go out, whenever that was, I would be sure to work with some of the others to design a good team composition to handle the sorts of things this game could throw at us. Maybe two of our existing DPS builds, plus one with a defensive build, one with a utility power, and one who picked the third option, for the magical perception if nothing else. The reports had said that the tenth floor on every tower was Hollow Men, so we would either need to rely on everyone else getting their orb through trickery like we had, or we would eventually need to find a way to actually fight that boss. What did the rest of the game look like to require such a brutal filter?

Report finished, I packaged it up with my footage, and sent it on it’s way. I got up from my desk, and nearly fell. My legs and feet were half numb, not entirely unlike that prickly painful feeling in a limb when you move after having been sitting in an awkward position for too long. I rubbed my legs vigorously to try to dispel the feeling. This was getting ridiculous. After I had seen to my legs, I headed to the kitchen. I cooked up a quick breakfast of eggs with some kind of non-synthetic cheese that I was totally unfamiliar with. Smelled good though.

I was eating my fancy breakfast when a chime sounded, indicating that I had received a priority email.

Hi Will, John here, can you please double check your footage at the attached timestamp? It’s urgent.

Weird. Very direct and no uncomfortably friendly tone. Must actually be important. I accessed the link, and it showed my encounter with the hologram of the tutorial NPC, who spoke to us outside the barrier. There was something off about her image in the video, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it might be. More obviously, she was speaking but her words were incomprehensible and distorted. Didn’t the game deliver her speech using the game interface? That recording might actually be of the alien’s language! I would need to remember to send Lindsey that footage, if she didn’t record it herself. I typed up a quick reply to John, summarizing what I saw and assuring him that I included a summary of her translated dialog in my written report. I got a reply moments later:

No, look:

The first was… security camera footage? It was a view from a security camera in the office, pointing toward the large communal area. The timestamp placed it a few minutes before John’s first email. A few people had already arrived for the day and were gathered around one of the larger smartscreen displays above a circular table. It looked like they were watching my footage around the same timestamp John had asked me to review, except that the NPC’s hologram was extremely faint. After a second of playback, her outline on the screen flared, making it difficult to make out what was going on. When the light died down, there was a flaming hole in the screen where her outline had been, my fellow testers had scattered, and the fire suppression system was dropping foam onto the damaged screen and its immediate surroundings. The second link was to a video clip, but in an older format designed for old style displays instead of the more common neural video format, used whenever a video was recorded from or intended to be played back on someone’s augs. It was my footage again, the part with the barrier and the hologram again, only the hologram and her voice were conspicuously absent. While I had been watching videos, John had sent a follow up email.

Will,

Sorry for being so short. The first was what happened when we played that part of your footage on an external display. The second link is what happens if we try to convert out of the neural format. Also we can only store and process the files on wearables and implanted hardware. On a related note, our central report server is down for the moment. It happens with both your and Joe’s footage, and the footage from the other team that managed to trigger that encounter last night. The conversion thing, I mean. We didn’t test on any other external displays. Viewing the video on internal hardware hasn’t caused any strange effects yet, but we are trying to be careful. Do you have any idea what is happening here?

Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

John

Well, someone else had managed to get the NPC speech at the barrier. I’d need to sort out what triggered it, once things were no longer literally burning down. And what was happening here? We had already decided that we couldn’t record purely magical things. I brought up the footage of me finding the tutorial folder, and it was definitely not glowing on the recording.

Hmm… Maybe it had to do with the fact that this magic was being used directly to produce something visible outside the game’s magical perceptions? Maybe calling this all magic was prejudicing me. Maybe this was related to how their technology functions. Clearly our biology allowed us to see and interact with the display, but maybe our technology was not up to the task, unless major portions of the work were handled by biological parts? But that didn’t track either. Our storage tech was the same whether you were wearing it, had it implanted, or it was sitting on a server rack somewhere. Maybe our tech was just close enough to work correctly, but only under very specific conditions? That was the best I could come up with for now, so I wrote a quick supplemental report, with that as the conclusion. I would need to think more about this later, preferably when I was in a better position to actually test things. I sent the report along and started cleaning up after breakfast. It was much too nice a kitchen to not take care of. I was just about finished when I got a reply from John:

Will,

This is brilliant work! If you’re right, if this is a clue we can pass on to R&D, then this will justify our entire project! Even if we don’t meet our subscription farming goal, I’m certain that little clues like this will potentially even justify expanding our scope! I’ll be putting you in for a bonus at the end of the fiscal year, you can be sure of that, buddy!

And go get yourself checked out, I don’t like the sound of those symptoms. I went ahead and moved up your scheduled project checkup. Everyone’s got one in the queue, but it looks like Mr. Roberts hasn’t gotten around to putting them on the calendar yet. Let me know if you need anything else.

Feel better soon!

John

I didn’t see how my conclusion was special, but then maybe I had gained some extra insight from having the magical perception that went along with my power choice. Whatever. I was pulling my weight and proving my value, so I guess this was a solid step forward for potential future plans.

I hoped John didn’t end up getting in trouble for that checkup, though I was glad that particular plan had worked out. I didn’t see how much could have changed in just two days of having the key, but I certainly wasn’t going to turn down free medical care. I dressed in my ever classy arcology outfit, and set off toward the clinic on my floor. As I moved through the pristine halls, brightly lit and adorned with the occasional smartscreen playing ads or news, I considered what was just unleashed on the world.

Sooner or later, someone, somewhere, would be paring down that video from the game. They would test the edges until they found the exact parts that were actually dangerous to our hardware. They would experiment until they found out how much they needed in order to dramatically destroy hardware... and how much they needed to subtly ruin something instead. And then the world would face an epidemic of this new breed of cyber attack, totally undetectable, probably untraceable, and immune to all existing countermeasures. I was pulled from my musings by a nearby smartscreen.

“Unexpected aggression, or hints of diplomacy to come? Are the Chinese lifting their Steel Curtain? Here to discuss these recent events we have...” The commentator said. I was turning the final corner to the local clinic, so I didn’t catch any more.

The Chinese had keys. The Europeans too. And the encounter with that hologram in such a central location, right at the barrier between the tutorial and the rest of the game, there was no way other groups would miss this. We didn’t know anything about their security practices, either. Literally anyone could get their hands on this corrupted data, before someone realizes that it needs to be under lock and key. Well, those ethicists did warn us. Hopefully what we got out of it would justify the destruction in the meantime. Damn it! I just wanted to play a cool alien game! Why did this have to keep spinning further and further out of control?

I passed the glass door to the clinic, digitally signing in as I glanced around. There was a common waiting area, filled with people in various styles of arcology wear, some looking rather ill. The carpeting was a deep blue, and the majority of the smartscreens around were playing ocean footage. In the corner there was a pile of toys. I marvelled that they got enough kids coming in that they needed such a thing, but I guess people here tended to have larger salaries, so it made sense that there would be more kids running around. A short nurse with curly brown hair approached me as I was considering where to sit, and directed me to a private waiting room. Ah, the perks of being someone important, cast onto me temporarily because of my association to something important. The nurse let me know that they would be with me as soon as they were ready and, with a kind smile, left me alone in my very well appointed private waiting room. It was a small space, but there was an extremely comfortable looking chair, and a small table with a number of snacks laid out (all individually packaged), a humidifier/dehumidifier, and several machines which were likely for disinfecting this space between patients. The walls were covered by displays showing tropical scenes, but a quick check with my augs informed me that they were all allocated to me to use as I saw fit.

I took this moment of solitude to look into my inventory and assess any ‘harm’ that may have come to my power, as my death message had implied. There was definitely a sense of dimness that hadn’t been there before, like a display who’s brightness has been turned down just a touch too far. Everything I had collected up to this point, other than my pigeon and his office, everything outside the glow of my magical bottle, was gone. Thankfully, this included any traces of the boss monster. The background void felt a bit thin, all except the area where I had pulled things in to keep out the entropy. The small region I had fortified, my minion’s little zone, felt distinct in some way that I couldn’t quite pick out. I tried to push the denser void back out, to repair whatever was wrong with the rest, but it didn’t seem to be working. There was resistance, and that straining feeling that came when I was trying something difficult or new with my power. I could feel something start to give, but I couldn’t tell if I was making any progress in dispersing the denser spot. Then, all at once, the little area I was focusing on was shoved up above (or down below?) the rest of my inventory. Where the rest of my inventory had always felt somewhat spatially abstract - I could intentionally place things relative to other things, but if I didn’t they just ended up in there somewhere - this new bubble had clear and distinct geometry.

Maybe I had defined that bubble of space as an object, and now I stored that new object in my inventory? That didn’t feel right. The new bubble of space wasn’t in my inventory, which was now totally empty. It was more like I had two inventories now, though they felt different from one another. It was probably fine.

I picked a paper from the stack in my minion’s office, and moved it out into my inventory. It seemed effortless, and worked perfectly. Hmm, most of my manipulations of objects needed me to store or retrieve them from my inventory… I wonder…

I moved half of the paper back into the office. Half remained behind. Perfect. I could play with the trapped light from the bottle, and even if I messed something up, it was totally recoverable, since everything would remain within my area of control.

I moved the bottle into my empty inventory. How did I want to do this? Ideally I would just move the bottle and liquid back to the office, but leave the energy behind. I gave it a try and found that I could get a hold of the bottle itself, and the whole object, but nothing in between. Fine. I pulled the bottle back into the office. The liquid light left behind started to spread out, but I clamped down, much like I had when the boss was invading. My control felt a bit weaker now, but it halted its spread all the same, seeming to solidify somewhat. I pushed the mass of fluid together, and tried to get a grip on either it or the energy inside. I found that, while it felt possible to hold and move the energy itself, it was much easier to handle the liquid. I worked my metaphysical fingers into the mass, until I was confident that I had a hold on all of it, and transferred it into the bottle in the office. It was a struggle, either to move the liquid or to put something directly into the bottle, I wasn’t sure which, but I could feel it working, so I pushed until I felt that I was reaching my limit, and just before I gave up and stopped, the liquid (now empty of energy) splashed back into the sealed bottle. I felt a sudden drain, like my energy was being siphoned away. I opened my eyes with a gasp, and sat up. My chest felt hollowed out, like there was a sucking vacuum inside it still pulling at the edges. Then, all at once, heat bloomed. I still felt strangely hollow, but now I also felt like something was being pushed back into me. Vitality, life, something hard to qualify. I looked inward.

In the endless, abstract void of my inventory, another sun had risen.