Jane watched as Mother’s interface counted down the hours. Fifty-six hours until Earth Games came out. Her manipulators trembled. How long had it been since she’d been truly entertained? She had been waiting for this moment for the last two thousand years. Now that it was upon her, she wasn’t sure she wanted it to arrive. Watching the countdown was the most excitement she’d had in years.

Even if the games proved to be disappointing, the excitement of the countdown alone had been well worth the resources. Jane had spent the last forty years researching earth games. The information nets weren’t strictly legal, but all the fame leaders used them. How else could they stay ahead in the ratings? She’d spent a fortune on research, but it would pay off when the games opened. Whoever hit the ground running would have a huge advantage. The top fame leaders would start with most of the ratings, but if they took too long to master the contest, their audiences would seek out more entertaining fare.

And this time Jane would be well ahead of them. While all the leaders hunted down information about human game mechanics, she focused on the anthropological quirks of the human species. Earthers cared about more than just fame and power. They valued more esoteric pursuits such as social networking, mating rituals, and adherence to self-defeating, often paradoxical ethical codes. These things might be incomprehensible to most audiences, but at least they were novelties. And the human cultural ethos would almost certainly be manifested in their games, which should give her a huge advantage. That was the theory, anyway.

And she might have another advantage as well. Most of the fame leaders would be spreading out their risks by participating in several different games, but Jane had decided to focus on just one game: the game known as Earth Medieval Fantasy RPG. It wasn’t as flashy as some of the epic Earth Historical Military Campaign Reenactments or as scientifically relevant as the Earth Dating Sim mating ritual games, but the EMFRPG, for all its incomprehensible bizarreness, was a platform that offered some of everything: head-to-head competition, civics, cultural engineering, mating rituals, and a deep dive into the boundless creativity that seemed to mark the human species.

An added bonus was that the rules and objectives of the game were so incomprehensible that very few of the fame leaders were choosing to compete in it. Which left more room for her to find her audience.

But that didn’t mean that the competition wouldn’t be fierce. By selecting a character well outside the mainstream, she was relying more on novelty than crushing strength. Most players would choose characters based on physical power, social influence, and finesse, so she had focused on uniquely Earth-origin values, namely: the social standing known as geek, the ethical attribute known as bleeding heart, and the physical attribute known as chibi.

Slowly, her Mother interface counted down the hours, minutes, and seconds to the official release. Her manipulators snapped and buzzed and warbled. She couldn’t hold still, even if she wanted to. And then, after all the waiting, the moment finally arrived.

5

4

3

2

1…

Everything went black as her environment transmogrified to the icy darkness of the void.

Then she was hit with an explosion of textures, sights, sounds, and smells. It was the single-most overwhelming experience of her ninety million years. Magnificent!

She lay on her side for what felt like years, looking up at an impossibly complex canvas of light, mist, and spreading limbs. A pungent odor filled her awareness—sharp, fresh, and taken together with the permeating chill, even more bracing than a triple shot of stims.

She didn’t care about the competition anymore. She just wanted to lay there forever, drinking in the cold through her new, claustrophobic limbs. How many limbs did humans have, anyway? According to her research, they were only supposed to have four, but it felt like a lot more, at least twenty, maybe even twenty-nine. And the limbs were all so specialized. It was the most ridiculous sensation she had ever experienced.

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So cozy and invigorating and exciting. She wished she could take her time to savor the alien sensations, but she had an audience to capture.

Bringing up the primitive Earth Medieval Fantasy RPG interface, she took her time perusing the controls. Attributes, items, communications, logs, settings… Her sources had been right. It was ridiculously complex. And none of it made any sense. What was the point of having a readout for strength or dexterity or intelligence? There wasn’t even a mechanism to change their values.

She studied the parameters, trying to make sense of the various controls.

Name: Jane

Level: 1

Class: —

Health: 100/100

Stamina: 100/100

Mana: 784/784

Exp: 0/400

ST: 10

DX: 10

CN: 10

IQ: 28

CH: 16

All she could tell for sure was that her character had a higher intelligence and charisma than anything else. But she had no idea how that compared to any of the other characters. For all she knew, her character could be of average intelligence and below average everything else. But she had chosen it because it was supposed to have a high charisma—which meant that it was much more likely that a value of 10 was average and her charisma and intelligence were well above average.

Seeing that she couldn’t really do anything on the main interface, she switched to the Items interface which was much more straightforward. What could be more straightforward that having zero items?

Then she switched to the map interface which showed a top-down view of her character’s environment. Her avatar was marked by a black cross and other lifeforms were marked with green, blue, or red circles—which gave her her first scare of the game. A green Blix dot was sitting right on top of her position. Focusing on the Blix, a description came up.

Name: Blix (Aggie Blix)

Level: ???

Subspecies: Human

Gender: Female

Type: Native NPC (Non-Player Character)

Threat Level: Friendly

Then she focused on one of the five orange dots approaching from the west.

Name: William Famesmash

Level: ???

Subspecies: Human

Gender: Male

Type: Player Character

Threat Level: Potentially Hostile

Her manipulators flexed as the group of orange dots got closer and closer to her position. Their movements seemed to indicate that they were operating as a team. Which was bad news for her. Even if the Blix Native NPC was willing to help her, the probability was extremely low that her physically average character could defeat a team of five, sure-to-be-above-average characters.

Energy pulsed in her core. She’d paid a lot of fame for this character. She couldn’t afford to get killed on the first day.

“Can you set your attributes?” A rumbling voice approached from the direction of the road. “My interface is locked. I can’t use it to do anything.”

“I can’t either,” another, even lower-pitched voice said. “How are we supposed to play a game if we don’t even understand the objective?”

“I thought this was a fighting game, but I can’t find a battle interface anywhere,” the first voice said. “Are we supposed to drive this thing manually? What does an Earth attack strike even look like?”

“Or Earth mating rituals,” a third voice added. “My mating appendage is broken. I can’t even control it manually.”

Jane chuckled to herself as the orange dots moved past her position and disappeared off the edge of the map. At least she wasn’t the only one who couldn’t figure things out. Maybe she could work that to her advantage.

She switched to the settings interface and read the detailed descriptions of each control, examining sublevel after sublevel in a systematic depth-first search of the interface. None of it made sense, and it was taking way too much time, but what other options did she have? Resting blind was preferable to moving blind.

That was when she found it: an innocuous switch called “Share Play” at the bottom-most level of the bottom-most section of the Settings interface.

Share Play allows you to transfer control to any friend with a UID (Universal ID) for the price of only 5000 fame.

Which gave her an idea. The probability of it working was extremely low, but if she was going to survive against a horde famous players, she was going to need every advantage she could get.