Mark woke up in the medical bay of his ship again. He opened his eyes and enjoyed the pleasant sensation of being able to see. The migraine headache still pounded on his skull, but at least his vision worked. He went through the now all-too-familiar routine of checking his muscle movements before he sat up.

Dr. Katsuo Pakula worked on a young woman that Mark had never seen before. The Doctor was an elderly Japanese man in his late 50s. The woman looked to be Asian as well, late teens to early twenties by the look on her. She didn’t have any special appearance, which was genuinely a sign that someone was a NPC. Player characters generally spent an obscene time obsessing over their avatars look, a few thrill-seekers deliberately played the most fugly character imaginable and cranked up the charisma so they could inexplicably draw all the ladies. Mark wondered if that explained anything in the real World.

“EVE, patch me through to look at the rest of the ship,” he thought.

Mental visual and auditory images swarmed him. The main one with personnel in it was the dinner facility. In it, PFC Christopher Preuss was holding court.

“No, it was crazy. I’m telling you, Captain Thomas is a beast. First, he walked off with enough electronics gear to require a squadron, but he handled it all. Infrared, ultra sensory, visuals, he had it all under control. Then when first contact occurred, I can’t describe it. You ever watch those old kung-fu movies where the drunken master fights off people? It looks like they’re crazy, but there’s a method to the madness.”

“That’s what he did. Snipers at 200 yards, should have been a turkey shoot. But they always just missed him. Then he ran into the back of the van as I was driving off, picked up a gun, and shot two goons in a moving vehicle before either could pull off a shot. He doesn’t look like much, but the dude is hardcore.”

“Give me Captain Smith any day,” SSG Emily Gułminski said. “Captain Thomas can pull some crazy moves out of his ass when he needs to, but Captain Smith is consistent. She took out an occupying force without suffering any casualties and coordinated all the field troops while in the thick of it. Give me talented over lucky any day.”

The Marines seemed to be lining up over whether they liked Mom or Dad better. Mark’s build favored support over combat, so he’d left the Marines to Captain Smith’s attention, while he worked with the engineers, turret gunners, and laser targeting units. Still, it was important that the Marines saw him as fit to command, because even a nanosecond of hesitation in combat would be a disaster. He decided that he’d be attending more Marine cross-training sessions in the future.

“Hey doc,” he said, sitting up. Dr. Pakula turned around.

“Yes?”

“Who is that woman and what is her condition?”

“Well,” the doctor let out a long sigh, “Her condition physically is fine. She suffered lacerations, skin abrasions, and contusions, but those are repaired easily enough. It’s her mental condition that has us worried.”

“Mental condition?” Mark asked. He didn’t want to imagine why people were being shipped around in unregistered containers, but couldn’t conceive of any reason that wasn’t horrific.

“Yes. Schizophrenia maybe, but clear signs of psychotic delusions. I’m a field and trauma medic, not a psychologist. I’d recommend getting her checked out in the Gebo medical facilities, I’m trained for physical, not psychological injuries.”

“What sort of delusions does she have?” Mark asked. This was the worst case scenario for him. He’d done an entire series of missions hoping that this woman would have the answers he needed, and if she was out of her mind, the whole operation was a colossal failure. He tried to cheer himself up by remembering that the other containers were still out there, and that he now had a full Marine platoon element to back him up. Still, that left a sour taste in his mouth.

He was going to ask about the rest of the containers he’d seen, but EVE quickly supplied him with that information. A boondoggle of an operation then. He’d been out for a full day, which was why he didn’t feel the awful effects that he had the first time.

Dr. Pakula gave a slight shrug. “I’ll let you talk to her after I wake her back up. We’ve given her some sedatives to help her sleep and anti-anxiety medications to take the edge off her stress. I’m hoping that with that in her system, she’ll be coherent. When the Marines placed her aboard the ship, she was speaking in rapid logorrhea.”

Mark was going to ask the doctor what that meant and EVE supplied in the information, “He means that she was babbling incoherently and rapidly.”

“So we scanned her brain for signs of damage in the thalamus,” the doctor continued, “but no signs that she has any brain damage. Which again means it’s an issue I’m not suited for.”

Mark understood the underlying subtext of what the doctor was saying. Essentially, “anything wrong with her isn’t my fault.”

“I got it Doc,” he said, “I’d like a chance to talk to her alone as soon as I get through talking to the crew. She’s our only injury? No casualties?” He already knew the answer, but if he didn’t ask the doctor, he’d seem like a supreme asshole.

The doctor shook his head. “No, Captain Smith lead the assault and only very minor injuries in the operation, certainly nothing a Marine would go whining to a doctor about.”

“You’ve done some fine work doc,” Mark said, patting the man on the shoulder, “How long until the sedatives wear off on our guest?”

“Give it an hour,” the doctor replied, “She’ll be awake.”

Mark found Captain Smith in her quarters. He knocked on the door and asked permission to enter. She granted it and slid the door open.

“How are you?” he asked as he walked into the room.

“Confused,” She said, with a weak smile. “On the one hand, we stopped a bunch of bastards from doing… something, I don’t know what. But on the other hand, we also lost all of the people that were in those containers minus one. But, she’s incoherent. Maybe they tortured those people and that’s why she’s so distraught? So the only solace from that thought is maybe we saved those people who died from a worse fate. Still not a comforting thought.”

“I understand it’s rough,” Mark replied, “ But we at least stopped one group of assholes. We still have other trackers out there. We’ll find these sons of bitches and put them on trial.”

“You didn’t see them,” she said, “but I highly doubt that any of them are going out alive. Whatever they’re up to, they are clearly under strict orders not to be captured alive, and to take any cargo out with them. It’s… fanatical. Maybe this is some new cult set up on one of the planets? But that’s not all that’s bugging me. Permission to speak freely?”

He shrugged. “It’s just us Captain, say what you want to say.”

“Well,” she began, “You didn’t come up the ranks like the rest of us. Normally, you get start off with low level ship details, like flying perimeter in a small craft, supply drops, or drop and evac missions with Marines. It’s all planetary work for your first few years before they let you go off into space. If you’re not doing ship runs, you’re on the ground doing investigation work. You don’t really get much flight experience except for once a month training really. Makes it hard to move up the ranks when you are only doing maybe two dozen flights total a year.”

“Anyway, I started off on Earth. On one investigation, we found a dead woman, brain smashed in with an iron. Recently made a three hundred credit transfer, the maximum limit, to someone she had no record of meeting with before that transfer. So we find him, and he’s some eye candy tweaker that’s busy getting high as soon as we make the raid. He goes for a weapon, the same bloody iron cudgel he’d beaten that poor girl to death with, and I light him up. Three-round burst right through the centerline, but he kept moving. So I popped him in the head, and that put him down.”

“Guys a basic piss stain of a human being, he’d beaten the girl and forced her to give him money. He’d apparently gone berserk when he realized that three hundred credits was all she was able to give him. It’s a righteous kill, but his Mom raised a big fuss about it. ‘He was such a good boy’, and ‘There was no need to use a gun to take out a man with a piece of iron’. So we have to show the helm footage, the dead body, and the whole nine yards. Every operation is like that. If there’s any violence at all, anti-police violence groups scrutinize it, the media gets involved, and the whole thing is a circus.”

“Now we just killed sixteen people back there. No one is claiming the bodies. No one is screaming about abuse of IIO power. No media circus. Everything is just off.”

Mark thought about it. Could all of those people been players? The game didn’t give players a huge extended family, the average size of an extended family on Earth is about a hundred and fifty people. Because if they did that, then even a few thousand players in a Proxima World would necessitate millions of NPCs by family relation, or else the Proxima Galaxy’s would need to make PCs and NPCs related to each other, so you’d have a constant family reunion every time you went to a marketplace.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

“In space,” she continued, “You avoid the circus show because no one really knows what happens out there. But on a planet, it’s normally a shit show in an hour. These weren’t tweakers or drug addicts, that was a well-planned, well-manned operation. Someone should know who those people are. Yet all we have is silence.”

“Well,” Mark said, thinking about it, “If it’s a cult, that could make sense. Part of most cults involve cutting off communications with family members, being reborn or taking on a new name and other such practices. Their family members might have assumed they were dead for a long time.”

“Maybe,” she said thinking about it, “but the bodies were identified with DNA, so even under those conditions, someone still should have come forward. Everything feels off. I’ve sent all the DNA off to get matches in our database, but everything is coming up blank. It’s like these people just arrived from some other galaxy that’s completely off our radar and that Earth has no idea about.”

“You think maybe that’s what we stumbled upon?” he asked. “What if the outer federations have started setting up planets we don’t know about? They could gather a larger force than Earth would expect, possibly setting up a rebellion. That might be why they killed everyone and look like fanatics, they might think of themselves as patriots.”

She thought about that for a minute. “Possible, but that’s hard to swallow. We have IIO offices set up all over the place. We also perform census, track material shipments, and more. Even the policy of letting fleets make money on the side for personal projects is part of that calculation. They look at what shipments are being made, what prices their sold at, and extrapolate population size and sustainability based on that. All of the pencil necks at the War College run these scenarios. They’d basically need a way to create a bunch of new humans instantly and then gather up an immense amount of supplies.”

The last part of her sentence hit him. Normally, you were assigned to Earth when you created a new avatar to get you used to the life and rules of the new World. But you didn’t have to pick Earth. If a large group of players chose one of the other planets, they could simply respawn with a new avatar and start right back where they left off.

“Thanks for the AAR Captain,” he said, “I need to check on our guest and make sure everything is ok. I’m adding this event to everyone’s combat records, but holding off on the official ceremony until we have something more concrete. Celebrating this feels wrong, but I think we’ve made major progress.”

He left the Captain’s room and went into his chamber. He set up all the white noise and obfuscation equipment in his room, then called for the Doctor to bring in the escapee.

She came into his chambers and sat down on his Captain’s chair. She looked around at his computer, holodeck, medals and certificates, trying to get herself in a calm state of mind. He didn’t press her since he knew that getting her comfortable to talk is the first step towards opening up.

“Hello Ma’am,” he said, in a placating manner. “My name is Captain Mark Thomas. You are on the unfortunately named Void Terror, and I’m the commander of this ship. You met Captain Luciana Smith as well, she’s the commander of another ship, the Calrusian. May I get you anything to drink or eat?”

She shook her head no. She didn’t make eye contact with him.

“Can you tell me what happened that lead to the situation we found you in?” he asked.

She shook her head. “You won’t believe me,” she said, sounding both sad and resigned, “No one did.”

“Well, that’s because I have a feeling you are a player character. Are you?”

She looked at him. “You know?”

He nodded. “Yes, but so far as I can tell, I’m the only PC aboard this ship. This game doesn’t clearly mark whether you’re dealing with a player or a NPC, so you have to kind of guess. Usually, the rule is that the more customized a person is in their facial appearance, the more likely they’re a PC. But you have what looks like a standard build.”

“Yes,” she replies, “We don’t get to pick our builds or where we arrive at. It’s all preprogrammed whenever we log in.”

“How’d you get into this? And can you guess how many other people are involved?”

She shrugged at the last question. “I met a recruiter in our village in Korea. There’s not a lot of jobs, but the recruiter told my Mom and I that I could get a job working as a ‘gold farmer’ in a virtual game. We didn’t really understand it much, but he said they would provide the gear, and so long as I played the game, they would deduct a portion for expenses and send the rest to me. Everything seemed fine.”

“But then, they had us board a plane that they didn’t disclose the location of. I had no passport for that flight. The plane was full, so maybe four hundred of us were on that flight, men, women, and children. They put us in a big building full of these chambers with liquid gel in it, and that logged us into the game. We are all miners, they send us out to the asteroid belts or other dangerous regions to do the mining. If we die, we just get a new character and go back to doing the same thing.”

Mark thought about it. This meant the worst case scenario was true, there was a coordinated effort by a group in-game to lead a rebellion against Earth. More important, there was a group on Earth that had to have the same plan. The cryptocurrency angle made the most sense. Players could be anything, including miners. But since that character would probably die quickly, it wasn’t worth it for most people looking to have fun. And you couldn’t transfer money between your player accounts. But it did make earning cryptos a lot easier, since your crypto currency was matched by your value produced in game. If someone could capture that, they’d be earning a fortune off the game, even if the individual sums may not add up to much.

“Okay,” he decided, “You can’t tell this to anyone here because unless they’re a PC, they’re going to think you’re crazy. Your cover story, which you shouldn’t volunteer unless there’s a very compelling reason, is that the group that kidnapped you is grabbing people from planets and using them to perform dangerous mining operations against their will. They copy those people’s DNA and memories into a rebirth facility, and when you die, bring you back to life and restart the process. That clear?”

She nodded.

“They can’t forcefully eject you from a Proxima World, thankfully, so they’ll have to kill you in game. I could drop you off at one of our facilities for protection, but we don’t know how deep this rabbit hole goes. We’re just getting the outline of the problem. If you choose to stay, we’ll assign you a bunk and you’ll start training with us. Did you assign your points? They can’t do that on the load out screen, you have to do it in game. Also, what’s your name? Don’t use your real name as that will make it too easy to find you,” Mark inwardly winced at that last part, since he was using his real name. Rookie move ace, rookie move.

“My name will be Chon Seo-Hee. And I don’t know how to allocate points.”

He walked her through the process of allocating points. She didn’t want to be a space Marine or a combat pilot, but she did seem interested in learning finance. Unfortunately, only the person could assign points and there was no way to verify that that everything went through, as the game kept those details under wraps to prevent cheating.

“Your build,” he said, “Will maximize build assets towards finance and trade, but you won’t have any combat skills. This will make you an asset to us, but if anything gets hairy, run to cover or find the Marines, don’t try to be a hero. Got it?”

She nodded. He told her to put her disadvantages into chummy, code of honor (professional), duty (to employer), honesty, pacifism (reluctant killer), post-combat shakes, stubbornness, and workaholic. She objected that some of those disadvantages really seemed to favor Mark over her, so he told her to take stubbornness and code of honor as a way to get out of some of the loyalty based disadvantages if she didn’t agree with one of his orders. That seemed to pacify her.

He could have gone hardcore with making her completely unable to kill, but he didn’t want to do that if it came down a last resort. Getting those disadvantages would make her noxious if she had to kill, but if she took something like sight of blood phobia, she might have a hard time functioning on the ship. Likewise if she took full pacifism, the game wouldn’t let her kill anyone. She’d be sick if she had to kill someone, but she could do it.

Her advantages were all based towards finance and good manners. Business acumen, courtesy, cultural adaptability, lightning calculator, serendipity, high-status professional, and versatile. Her primary skills were level 1 administration, level 4 accounting, level 4 current affairs in business, level 4 in finance, level 4 in trade law, level 3 in market analysis, and level 8 merchant.

Her secondary skills were level 2 in leadership, level 2 in space procedures, level 1 in operations, and level 4 in forgery. Mark thought the last was important as the more they dealt with disreputable people, the more likely they would get fake goods.

She took a second to get readjusted, the after-effects of getting a large dose of back history added your character as you pick skills, and Mark called in Sergeant Fabrizio Bamburak, one of his engineers.

The middle aged man appeared in his room a few minutes later and gave a quick salute, which Mark returned.

“Sergeant,” Mark said, “Escort this lady across the ship, explain procedures for what to do if we’re boarded, emergency evacuations, the full drill. I’ll relay this order down the chain, but she’s to be considered a high priority asset. Get an honor guard of Marines to follow her, a single battle-buddy system on rotation should be fine. She’ll be cross-training with you and the engineering department, except when we do demo drills. Are your orders understood?”

“Yes sir,” the Sergeant responded, snapping another quick salute that Mark returned.

“Dismissed,” Mark said, as he dropped his own salute, the Sergeant soon following.

After they left, he locked his doors and set up security protocols, then made another call to Colonel Christopher Grohall.

In a few moments, the man’s stern visage looked at Mark. Mark saluted and went through the normal military routine, then outlined all of his findings and the concocted story that he’d given Chon.

“That’s impossible,” the Colonel interjected, “You can’t easily rebuild bodies from rebirther facilities. Everyone knows that.”

“Yes sir,” Mark replied, “Except they’re smart about it. Normally, people try to birth themselves into super bodies, big muscles and tall, or busty and beautiful. But it doesn’t match their neural programming, so they have to relearn everything from scratch. But imagine instead you had a very basic template. Each person receives that same template, and when they die, they just modify it slightly. So you can still move around, but can’t quite wink or wiggle your eyebrows.”

The Colonel thought about it before slowly nodding.

“I’m upgrading your status to official black ops. You’ll have access to funds appropriated for this mission. Do not get too spend-happy,” he said, an edge of warning in his tone, “Because you’ll have to account for every credit when this mission ends. Understood?”

“Understood sir. Out.” He saluted as the Colonel returned his salute, and then the video feed ended.

His quest notification displayed a new alert.

Sanctioned Mission: Quest update

You have found a witness to a possible interplanetary revolt against the ruling body of Earth. You managed to save one hostage and no one on your team died. Unfortunately, you did not preserve the rest of the hostages. 10 points awarded for performance. You now have 29 points to allocate.