Honestly, it could have been worse.

That wasn’t just me putting on a false sense of bravado, or trying to make light of things. It was a simple fact that, yes, things could have been so much worse than they were. For instance, if I’d been hit just a bit higher up, then I would have bled out before they could get me to the hospital, and then the government wouldn’t be shelling out the money for my experimental treatment. So instead of someone getting their budget slashed because the courts were making them pay to take care of me for the rest of my life, they’d just be down the cost of a casket.

Another casket. There were already three they were paying for, after all. Two were my parents. At least it was quick. Squished flat. Tank rolling across the front of the car like it was at a monster truck rally will do that.

The third casket was for the poor scrub who was just walking down the street, wrong place, wrong time. Another car swerved, the driver making the easy choice between driving on the sidewalk and playing chicken with a tank. That poor girl was the reason I knew it could have been worse. Apparently, she had just gotten engaged, and died in her man’s arms, because life likes irony sometimes.

Of course, that much should have been obvious, since my whole life had been thrown on its fucking head by a damn tank going on a rampage through downtown. On a fucking Tuesday, of all things! Like, couldn’t even be bothered to wait for the weekend before going on a fucking bender?

That was part of the reason the government was shelling out money for my care, actually. Didn’t know all the details, but apparently someone found out they were getting in trouble for something or other, and they decided that if they were going to go down, they’d make it worth it. So, they went and got shitfaced, before stealing a tank from the motor pool down at the National Guard depot, and running the streets like it was a fucking video game.

That kind of shit made all kinds of bad press, obviously. Lots of people real deep in their feelings looking for the easy win of dunking on the military and everyone responsible. Last I heard, the driver of the tank was going away for a long, long time, and even if they got out, their kids would be paying of the debt fifty years from now. If they had kids.

That was the real reason I was getting all the special treatment after all. Dawn of the 2030s, the ‘Y Plague’ hit, worldwide. Officially, no one knew where it came from, but anyone with two brain cells put together knew it was made in a lab somewhere. Some doomsday bioweapon, naturally. Just a bit of deterrence in the global game of superpowers against superpowers. Standard shit, really.

So, like all stories of this sort go, some dumbass got careless, and a lab accident let the bug loose. And it quickly earned its name. See, the Y Plague was a nasty as shit piece of work, modified version of Ebola targeting the Y chromosome in all humans, and ramping the progression of the disease once it ‘triggered’ up to 11. Like a good bioweapon, it had a long latency period, when people were infectious, but didn’t show signs. By the time anyone started getting sick, it was too late. About ninety percent of the human race was already infected, and men were dying as their organs liquified.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Not that women were unaffected. Oh, sure, they didn’t drop dead with their organs leaking through every orifice, but that didn’t mean they were off the hook (even if you ignored the therapy bills). See, the nasty part of the Y Plague wasn’t that it killed, but that anyone who didn’t have a Y chromosome became a carrier. Nasty shit, like I said.

But it wasn’t like the human race was in a death spiral, not yet. Ten percent of the male population either shook off the plague, thanks to getting a shitload of cutting-edge medicines that governments were stockpiling for just this kind of situation, or had a natural immunity. Of those survivors, though, roughly two in ten managed to avoid sterilization. Everyone else was shooting blanks.

So fast forward to 2060, and you would think things would have started getting better once the men who could still put a bun in the oven went and started rutting anything that moved like it was a hentai, right? Wrong. 90% of live births post-Plague were female, but 50% of pregnancies recorded were male. Not hard to figure out what happened. Lot of miscarriages, stillbirths, and so on. The Plague kept fucking us, even after people stopped dying in the streets.

Which brings that whole story back around to me. I was a guy, already a rarity, and my genes were about as healthy as anyone could expect in this fucked up world. Which meant that I was the hottest of hot commodities. And what happened? A fucking tank killed my parents (the news cared more about my father, obviously, but that’s just how it was), and my legs were gone, about mid-thigh. Because that’s what happens when a tank rolls over you.

So, I was the sob story of the week. I played it up, sure. I wasn’t an idiot. The world might have advanced in the twenty-something years since the plague, but prosthetic limbs hadn’t changed at all. Some new materials, maybe, but it wasn’t like we were going full cyberpunk or anything. I’d be spending most of my life in a chair, or struggling to do more than hobble along.

But I had a lot of influential people all really upset for me, wondering if there was anything they could do to help me. Oh, not out of the goodness of their hearts, obviously. World didn’t work like that, and never had. But helping me was a big, easy PR win that even a freshman in ‘Media Relations 101’ would make bank off of, if they were given the proper tools.

So, experimental treatment. No fixing the legs, that shit was still pure scifi, like I said. However, that didn’t mean I was out of options. MetaTech came to me, and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I played guinea pig on the medical prototype version of their Valkyrie Full Immersion Pod. Unlike the normal pod, which wasn’t designed for sessions longer than 48 hours, or 168 for the Deluxe models, the Medical Pod had better systems for monitoring the occupant’s condition, and included more features to prevent muscle atrophy, and larger nutrient tanks, allowing for someone to go under for up to a year at a time.

And what would I be immersing in? Just their gaming division’s newest product, a Virtual Reality Massively Multiplayer Roleplaying Game (VRMMORPG for short) using the game rules from some old tabletop RPG, specifically a version of the tabletop game that had been out of print for decades as new editions came out. So long as they didn’t use any of the lore or named characters, their corporate lawyers said that they’d be totally in the clear. Can’t trademark a city like Seattle, after all.

So, yeah, I was going to live in a video game, where I could actually walk around, like a normal person, and wouldn’t have people looking at me with pity in their eyes. My necessities were being taken care of thanks to the government, and my ‘tester’ pay was added to a trust fund, so people couldn’t fuck with it too easy. All I had to do was play the game.

Wasn’t like I had anything to lose.