Dragon Seed: Chapter One

 The coughing fit kicked me upright before I was awake. Strangling, eyes throbbing from the pressure in my head, I coughed and heaved and flailed around. I couldn't see anything but dancing black and white spots. My lungs were burning by the time I pitched back onto my pillows, exhausted and shaking with lingering terror. Not just terror of the present: terror of the future that awaited me. I was now at Stage Two of the HEX virus – in three days’ time, I’d be dead.

There were no nurses in our quarantine tent. Everyone here was already sicker than me, moaning and rattling in their sleep. Still wheezing, I fumbled across for the box of bleach wipes next to my Army cot and used them to clean up my face and hands. The smell made my throat burn raw, and I shook with unfamiliar weakness. I hurt all over. My joints felt like angry dwarves had been pounding them with hammers while I slept… and it was only my second day of being sick.

My tent bunked eleven other soldiers, all infected, all of us in the prime of our lives. My conscript’s uniform only had three badges on it: my platoon, my rank - Private - and my name badge, which was just my surname, ‘Park’. I was twenty-seven, fit despite a terminal gaming habit, used to bouncing around the world with a MOLLE pack and rifle. When I rolled up a sleeve and looked down at the inside of my arm, the smooth tan skin I was used to seeing was mottled with a spreading red rash.

HEX was like clockwork. The first day hit you like a train, and five days later, you were toast. By tomorrow, I wouldn’t be able to walk. Day Three was the worst day, because you were still aware of everything that was happening to your body. I'd watched people cough until the veins in their eyes ruptured and they began to cry blood. If I did nothing, if I followed orders and stayed in bed to die, that was all I had to look forward to. But as Baldrick from Black Adder would say: “I have a cunning plan.”

Assuming I could find the strength to get my ass out of bed.

My hands were shaking with fever as I pulled up my ration of medications and fumbled them out into my palm, clenching my teeth while I tried not to drop them everywhere. The cocktail of tablets were all anyone had to fight HEX, the common name of the H5N1-X virus: a lab-made super-flu unleashed on the world as a weapon of war. The tablets would take down the fever, keep my lungs from filling up, help the cough, and manage some of the pain. When I stood up, my head began to pound even harder. I pinched the bridge of my nose, willing the pain to stop, and then got dressed. A t-shirt, BDU pants, boots, then my sidearm. Last but not least, I struggled my pack on, took one last look at the other men in the tent, and hobbled outside. I’d packed the most important things I needed, just one small bag for me and my brother. There wasn’t much need for ordinance where we were going.

I forced myself to a clumsy jog outside, moving past ripped and dirty tents full of coughing, moaning people. We had started with a division between soldiers and civilians, but that division had broken down entirely. The only armed patrols on duty were PALADIN sentry robots: each one seven feet tall, loud, clunky, with sensor arrays instead of faces. They prowled the ragged rows of tents and manned the perimeter gates, standing watch or marching in set patrol routes no longer directed by a human controller. The bots’ reflexes were starting to slow as their batteries wound down. When we were healthier, me and the other lepers in quarantine had had fun throwing things onto them in the yard. Hats, scarves… we even uploaded a few videos we called ‘Stuff on Our Robot Overlords’.

Unlike human guards, PALs could stand watch at full attention for forty-eight hours – provided they were at full charge. With no one to top up their juice, the ones that were still moving were sluggish, like humans who hadn’t had any sleep. Sweat poured down my face in the early morning chill as I broke from cover to cover to keep out of their sight. I focused on putting one foot after the other. My heart was pounding, my guts were cold and twisted with fear. Not only fear of dying, either.

I’d received a text on an old civilian cell phone I’d kept, but now only used for morning alarms. It was a message from my brother, Steve. He hadn’t spoken to me in five years. The last time I’d seen him was during the big knockdown, drag-out fight that had ended in me stalking out of his house and out of his life. But three nights ago, Steve had contacted me. He’d sent me only two awful words. “Mom’s dead.”

Then, ten minutes later. “I’m sick. If you’re alive, get to Washington D.C. You’re named in my will. If you’re sick… please come home. PLEASE.”

I didn’t know what was worse: that mom had died and no one had called to tell me, or that Steve had gotten sick caring for her. He hadn’t thought to ask me to come and help. The sad thing was that it was probably an honest oversight, and that only made it worse.

Guilt tore at me as I waited for a PAL to turn around, and then staggered out from cover and through the ramshackle wire perimeter of the quarantine camp. The robot’s rear sensors were covered by a USMC cap that hung at a jaunty angle over the thermal lens. There had been a method to our madness.

My mission was to reach the base’s A-Block garage and reunite with the love of my life, Mona. She was waiting for me in the parking lot in spot A-457, concealed by a large locked tarpaulin.

“Hi, baby. How are you doing under there?” I tried to croon to her, but my voice came out as a harsh croak. I unlocked the tarp and pulled it off, throwing it carelessly to the side. Underneath it was a stripped down, banged up Ducati 996X. Mona’s bare steel frame hadn’t been painted in a while, and her fuel tank had a couple of dents and scratched paint, battle scars from the stunts we did together. Like most motorcycle stuntmen, I’d started on a little 250cc bike, a Ninja, which had enough power to do the job but hadn’t punished me when I’d screwed up. I’d worked my way to stunting and racing the Ducati. If you screwed up on an 996X, it would punish you. It was the closest thing to a dragon I would ever ride outside of a video game.

I normally enjoyed the ritual of putting on my motorcycle gear, my suit of armor. Kevlar jeans, boots, jacket, helmet, gloves, in that order. Today, I only had gloves and goggles, my sweat-soaked uniform, and a bag. I swung a leg over, and took a moment to catch my breath before turning the key. The bike came to life with a deep booming purr, and for a couple of seconds I just sat with it and drank in the way the machine made my body rumble. It would be the second-last time I’d ever ride her.

The first leg was to find my brother. We’d make peace, I hoped, and then I’d take Mona out to the highway and ride as long and as far and as fast as I could. We’d tear up the Big Sur at a hundred and twenty until we were almost out of gas. When the needle touched Empty, the plan was to wheelie jump the bike off a cliff overlooking the Pacific, because screw this whole ‘drowning on your own lungs’ goat fuckery. I was a stuntman. When I died, it was going to be spectacular.

I walked my bike backwards, turning her to line up with the exit ramp, and then threw it into gear. The purr turned into a snarl as the chassis kicked underneath me, the front of the bike briefly lifting as I turned the throttle and screeched off.

The only way in or out of Fort Richard was the main boom gate, but I wasn’t the first to desert and I wasn’t going to be the last. One of my buddies had given me directions to a section of unmanned fence where waves of soldiers and desperate refugees had cut holes in the wire and poured in and out. As I drew up on it, I could see that he’d been correct, in that the hole was there, but it was now manned. Two PALADINs waited on either side of the gap, which was big enough to admit an elephant. The railguns in their hands and heaps of dead – some in uniform – strewn on the ground around them was testament to why no one was no longer going in or out.

“Shitballs.” Resigned to an untimely demise, I threw my bike into third gear, and hunkered down as the Ducati howled. I spun the back wheel, raised a fist, and energetically rasped a battlecry. “PORK CHOP SANDWICHES!”

The robots saw me coming, visored helmets swiveling. They aimed, and I swerved hard and low to the ground. I came out of the zig and zagged as they opened fire where my motorcycle had been only a second before. Any panic I felt in the face of being fired on had been beaten out of me in Indonesia and Syria. I kept my focus and leaned the bike over until the ground tore open the knee of my pants, swooping along the ground and then righting up as I blasted through the hole and sailed out over the embankment below. The robots fired at me during the jump, and several rounds blew by close enough that I felt the sting on my arms, but they were no longer fast enough.

My stomach swooped as the rush hit.

“Sayonara, bitches!” I found myself laughing, giddiness breaking through the cold focus as I rode the heavy machine to the ground, clutching at it with knees and thighs. We hit the dirt, fishtailed, and kept roaring forward.

I nearly ran several civilians down as they stumbled to get out of the way. There were people everywhere out here, a camp much less organized than the one inside of the Fort. Fellow victims of HEX stood around coughing, or staring at me with dead, confused eyes. There were a lot of kids, many without parents. The hard summer ground had somehow been churned to mud, and the air hung heavy with the smells of human misery.

I pulled over to catch breath, which only resulted in a coughing fit that felt like it was going to send my eyeballs shooting out of my head. When I pulled the cloth away from my mouth, it was bloody. I stared at it in impotent rage, and then, with anger burning a hole through my gut, at the huge silhouette in the sky. Looming above us all from the bay was the Golden Gate Shard, a mile-high megastructure that jutted up from the water like a glittering crystal spike. The Generals and Colonels were up in there along with the rest of California’s elite, sealed away from HEX and protected from the war they had started.

“Fuckers.” Aching, my breath rattling in my chest, I started the motorcycle and set the GPS for my family home on Hyde Street.

Despite not being Chinese, our parents had bought a house on the fringes of San Francisco’s Chinatown at a time when housing was still remotely affordable. It was a small rowhouse at the end of a strip of larger rowhouses, with a big parking lot on one side that was always crammed with cars. Now, the lot was abandoned. The chaos and rioting had been and gone, and everyone who’d survived had fled the city to try and escape the spread of HEX. I was shaking with fatigue by the time I pulled up, running on nothing but adrenaline and the cocktail of drugs I’d taken an hour and a half before. It was by will alone that I swung my leg over and stumbled toward the dark green front door. It was the home where Steve and I had grown up. I hadn’t been here in seven years.

I pressed a shaking hand to the palm lock, barely believing it would work after all this time. When the lock flashed green and clicked, my legs nearly went out from me. Mom and Dad hadn’t completely erased me from their lives after all.

“Steve? Steve, you alive?” I called as I opened the door.

The stench that billowed out of the house was like a slap to the face. I recoiled, struggling not to vomit. Breathing in that dead smell on the battlefield was one thing. Breathing it in at your family home was enough to make me want to run away a second time, as far and as fast as I could.

“Hector?” My brother’s voice was a dry rasp, but I could still hear the surprise in it.

Bracing myself, I pushed through the stench and went inside, freezing up for a moment as the old instinct to take my shoes off at the door kicked in. I shook it off and followed Steve’s voice to the den. He was propped up on the sofa, a bloody blanket half-fallen over his lap. I knew by looking at him that he well into Day Three. HEX had made a ruin of my tall, handsome brother. His skin was mottled with bruises, his eyes sunken and his face gray. He already looked like a corpse. I stopped in the doorway, too shocked to move or speak.

“Hec… Hector.” He wheezed on the ‘H’, trying to sit up higher. “You made it. Thank God. You look… so fit.”

“I call it the ‘Forced Conscription Jungle Warfare Diet.” My mouth was moving way ahead of my brain at this point. I checked myself. “And apparently I’m a snarky asshole when I’m sick. Sorry.”

“Hah.” He almost let himself laugh. “You’ve… you’ve changed so much.”

And you probably haven’t. I didn’t say it out loud: just forced a smile. “So have you.”

“How did… how did you… get here? You were in the Army?”

“I deserted,” I said. My voice was cracked, too, and it hurt to speak. But I wasn’t as bad as Steve, not yet. “About fucking time, too.”

Steve was so exhausted he didn’t even notice that I’d sworn. As I came closer, he searched over me in shocked relief. “Deserted? But you… you shouldn’t have deserted. Why didn’t you ask for leave?”

Typical Steve. “From who? There’s hardly anyone left. We were on the front lines for HEX. And I’m dying, Steve - what’s the worst they could do, shoot me?”

His eyes focused on the rash on my arms, and then it seemed to finally click. “Oh no. Not you, too.”

“Of course I’m sick,” I replied. I sat down on the floor. Sweat poured down my face and down my back. “Everyone’s sick. Dead or dying. The city’s deserted. We might be the last ones here, bro.”

He closed his eyes, as if struggling to process the enormity of it.

“Hey. I brought something for you.” I struggled the backpack off and pulled it around.

“What?”

“My RetroConnect,” I said. “And granddad’s library of games. I know you’ve been working on those fancy VR rigs and everything, but we used to play together and I thought, ‘Fuck it: might as well go out making up stupid Latin words for the Sephiroth theme song one last time’. You know how it goes: ‘French frogs, big cherries…”

“Peter Pan, magic cheese. Sephiroth!” He croaked. He couldn’t quite get the dramatic chorus falsetto going, but I busted up laughing and coughing anyway.

Steve and I were chalk and cheese in every significant way, and always had been. Games had been the one thing that had brought us together. The sounds of us hacking and wheezing were obliterated by the roar of a helicopter passing by overhead, low to the ground. By the time I could hear anything else, I was wheezing and gasping for air.

“I figure we can do at least one speedrun of most of these before we croak,” I continued once I got my voice and hand-eye coordination back, taking out the box and the chip with the games, and then the other things I’d brought: candy bars of every shape and size, chips, and energy drinks. “Remember that time we went trick or treating and told dad we were at cram school, and we ate ourselves sick?”

“He nearly killed us,” Steve said hoarsely.

He actually had nearly killed me. Dad hadn’t just been any normal kind of asshole: he had been a whacko-religious dentist who forbade sugar in the house, especially on Halloween. One year, we’d snuck in a bag of candy and gorged on chocolate and taffy until we’d puked. Dad beat me with a folded electrical cord. Even Steve had gotten a few lashes for that one.

“Here.” I passed him some chocolate.

“No,” he said. He shook his head, struggling up a little more. “Hector, listen to me. I asked… asked you to come for a reason. Listen-”

“Hear me out, first,” I said, unwrapping a candy bar for myself. It helped cover up just how much my hands were shaking. “I came to like… apologize. I hate that we spent so much time fighting. I hate that I was jealous of you and I hate that dad used you to make me feel bad. I hate it that you and him trashtalked me all the way through school. I’m sorry I was such a jerk to you. We don’t have much time… and I just want to hear you’re sorry for treating me the way you did, then move on and play Secret of Mana until we croak, okay?”

“Hector. Listen,” he rasped. “I know this. I know it all. You being alive, being here ch-changes everything. Listen to me. They’re coming for me. I’m going to make them take you with me.”

“Who? What?” I frowned, trying not to hold my breath. Even though HEX was working its way through my body, I still felt weird about breathing in the air around the infected. Steve had been bright with health not even a week ago. It seemed like the flu took him faster than the others... or maybe I just noticed more.

“Ryuko.” He fixed me with a fever glare.

Ryuko? Ryuko was the AI systems company he worked for. I sort of nodded and shook my head at the same time, not sure what he was trying to say.

He reached out his hand for mine. “They're late, but they’re coming for me. I’ll tell them when they come that… that... I’ll make them…make them take you. You go with them, Hector.”

“Ryuko? I don't understand.” He was babbling, and it creeped me out. I'd never known Steve to talk like this, but he was serious about whatever he was trying to get across to me. His agitation beat against my skin. I squeezed his hand in both of mine. “It's okay, man. You need to rest.”

“It's secret... it's...” His eyes wandered past me, and I saw something flash at his temple: a small blue light. His Brain-to-Interface link.

“Ryuko,” he whispered, staring at something behind me.

There was a bang on the door, and then another as the wood splintered and then crashed in under the weight of a battering ram. Five years of training and experience kicked in instantly. Coughing, I was up on my feet with my pistol aimed before I’d even had time to think.

“Hector, no!” Steve hissed.

My grip on the pistol sagged at his command, but I was still in firing position as soldiers poured in through the door. Not ordinary soldiers. They were all identical: the same height, the same matte-black bioarmor, the same oversized rifles and terrifying stillness when they came to a stop. The guns were pointed at my face, and I froze in fear and confusion. There were no eyes behind those featureless black visors. They were androids. Machines.

“No fire. No fire!” Steve cringed back into the sofa, lifting his voice until it broke.

“No fire.” A woman’s voice broke through in the sudden silence.

I eased down as the unseen woman rounded the corner and stood in the doorway, and dropped the pistol down as my eyes widened. She was tall, supermodel perfect, like a vision out of Viking myth. Lean, long legs, a sculpted face like an avenging angel, golden blonde hair pinned up behind her head in a twist underneath a clear, HAZMAT-style helmet. The rest of her outfit looked to me like a fancy white spacesuit, and I wasn’t too sick not to notice how the thick leather-like material hugged her curves. I blinked several times, not convinced that I wasn’t tripping balls.

The woman looked between the pair of us. “Mister Park?”

“Park One and Park Two, at your service.” Every breath hurt like hell, but sassiness was just as incurable as HEX. “Bro, is this-”

“You informed the company that you had no living relatives, Mister Park.” She didn’t bat an eye. Angel Lady’s voice was cool, crisp, and matched her elegant face and hair. Now that she was up close, something was pinging at my uncanny valley reflex. There was something not quite right about this lady. “Has the status of your family changed?”

“Yes,” Steve croaked.

“What in the ever-loving fuck is going on?” I asked the room.

Steve shuffled behind me, and I turned to see him sitting upright. He was trembling with the effort, his jaw tense, eyes wild and hot. With a glance at the others, I went to him and helped him to stay up. His hand grasped my forearm, tight and inhumanly strong.

“T-Temperance. This… this is my brother. Little brother.” His breath bubbled on every exhalation. “Do… background check under… Park Jeong-Ho.”

I flinched at the sound of my birth name.

“Sir, Ms. Hashimoto ordered me to bring you-”

“You’re too late.” Steve retorted, and for a moment, he looked more like himself. He’d always had a fire burning deep inside, a fire he’d manifested by powering through achievement after achievement, scholarship after scholarship. He’d won local and state awards for mathematics and linguistics, joined Mensa, and had gone on to work for Ryuko Entertainment as one of the best AI immersion developers on the United States’ side of the Pacific.

“I’m very sorry we weren’t here yesterday as we planned, Mister Park,” Temperance replied. She didn’t sound very sorry. “My transport was delayed by rogue aircraft. If you cannot travel, I am afraid we cannot honor the contract.”

“I can travel, and yes, you will honor the contract. Hector is my next of kin,” he said, straightening his back. “I want to forfeit my place to him.”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible,” Temperance said. “My orders were to bring you…”

“Get Akari on a BCI channel,” Steve said, his voice firm with authority. “Now.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Steve, what the fuck is going on?” I turned on him, suddenly angry.

He glared at me with blood-shot eyes. “Hector. Not now.”

Steve’s BCI flashed, and then Temperance’s. They gazed at each other in silence with faraway expressions for several moments as they exchanged information. Once it was done, Steve sagged back into the sofa, and Temperance stood there like a shop mannequin, inhumanly still. She wasn’t breathing.

A gynoid, I realized. Holy shit. There were only a handful of real androids 'alive' in the world, so to speak. The woman in front of me was the real deal - an artificial life form. A walking supercomputer.

“Thank you, Mister Park. Ms. Hashimoto is revising her orders,” Temperance said. “I will perform the requested background check. Please look directly at me, Mister Park Jeong-Ho.”

“My preferred name is Hector. No ‘mister’,” I grunted. More out of surprise than anything, I looked up and met her eyes. They were as wide and blue as the Caribbean Sea, a perfect crystalline color that seemed to dance with light.

“Thank you, Mister Park. Management has approved your appeal,” she said, after five minutes or so.

Steve shuddered. “Thank God.”

I scowled, glancing between them, and got to my feet. “Would either of you like to tell me what the hell is going on?”

“Hector, I am here to execute your brother's contract with the Ryuko Virtual Reality Corporation,” the gynoid replied. “Your brother was an employee involved with a project that is being repurposed. Mister Steven Park, if I understand your uploaded testimony, do you vouch that this man is qualified for the trial and you wish to include him under the terms of your contract?”

“Hey, wait a second.” I stood, alarmed. “What contract?”

“Yes.” Steve choked. “Take him. Please.”

Intellectually, I knew Steve was doing something to try and save my ass. What, exactly, I wasn’t sure – but I was starting to get pissed off. I’d never had control of my life because of our parents, and now he was trying to control me, too. “Wait! Take me where? To do what?”

“I am the Executive Assistant of Akari Hashimoto, the CEO of Ryuko Corporation,” Temperance replied. “I have been ordered to make you an offer as requested by your brother, Ryuko's Senior Virtual Intelligence Developer, Steven Park. The offer must be made in a secure facility, and you are under no obligation to accept the terms and conditions… but it may very well save your life. Would you like to accompany me to discuss your future?”

Dragon Seed: Chapter Two

This had to be some kind of sick joke. “I've got HEX. I don't have a future.”

Temperance tilted her head on her long neck. “Ms. Hashimoto did not send us out here for a prank, Mister Park.”

While I boggled, she turned to my brother, who was fighting to not throw up from coughing. “Mister Steven Park, please hold while the medivac assembles.” She looked back to me. “Hector, your brother will be removed from this building regardless of your decision. Do you wish to accompany us?”

I looked over at the black-clad troopers. None of them had moved since they’d come into the room and taken position, frozen like statues with perfect trigger discipline. “Why? Are you guys working on a cure, or…?”

“We’re working on a lateral solution that may save millions of lives in as soon as ten days’ time,” Temperance said calmly. “Your brother was part of the project, and has volunteered to help us test it. He has extended his invitation to you.”

Millions of lives? What the hell had my brother been working on? It took longer than usual to process everything through the headache and fever, barely controlled by the fistful of meds I'd taken. “If Steve goes, I’ll go. But what-”

“I’m not at liberty to discuss anything more outside of company property.”

Three more uniformed androids filtered in with what looked like clear glass coffins on rolling trays.

“You are fortunate. Another trial subject passed during the delay we suffered last night.” Temperance nodded, her arms loosely folded underneath her breasts. “Because of this, we had a spare containment pod when we received Steven’s request.”

Whatever it was we were supposed to be doing, I didn't feel fortunate: not when it was at the expense of someone else’s death. “Jesus, lady. Did they forget to slot your emotion chip in this morning or something? People are dying. My brother is dying. I don't feel 'fortunate'. I feel like an asshole.”

“Hector,” my brother said warningly.

The gynoid regarded me coolly, her eyes half lidded, lips parted. “My controller disabled my emotional responses for the purposes of this mission. He was concerned that I would not be able to function if I was fully capable of empathy and affect. It would be too distressing to be surrounded by the dead and dying, knowing that you can do nothing to help them, and our mission relies on the speedy and effective recovery of very sick people.”

“Oh.” Suddenly, I felt even more like a shithead. “Sorry.”

“No apology is required. I am also currently incapable of feeling offended.” She motioned to the containment pod. “Please stand aside. We will see to your brother first.”

The androids clustered around Steve while I waited anxiously on the sidelines. They got a respirator on him, took out his IV, and inserted a new needle into his elbow that was attached to a small portable tank. Then they lifted him, blankets and all, into one of the pods. When he was inside, it began to hum, and the inside frosted over. The last thing I saw were his eyes looking out at me before they disappeared behind a wall of frost.

“Sir, please hand over all weapons and other gear.”

I startled up, looking into the impassive black mask of one of the troopers. No, definitely not human. In a battlefield, he would have passed for human until you’d had a chance to stop and look. I’d never seen robots this advanced before.

Coughing, I removed all of my kit and handed it over, left in nothing but my dirty fatigues. I was given a respirator, a portable IV, and was then guided into the empty pod.

Small spaces have never been my deal. I get claustrophobic in cars, let alone in a glass box roughly the size and shape of a casket. My heart was thundering in my ears as I lay down, beating faster and faster as they shut the lid and a cool cloud of gas puffed out around me. It smelled like disinfectant. There was a click, and then a sudden cold sensation... my head spun and I relaxed. The pain in my joints and skin receded, and as the mask pumped oxygen into my inflamed lungs, I could think again.

Ryuko. I knew who they were, but not why they were here - or where they were taking me and Steve. They were a Japanese-American zaibatsu, the biggest developer of virtual reality technology in the world. The company had ascended with the First Total War during the 2030s. That War had been a drone war, and the pilots with the best tech had been the winners: Us, fortunately.

Like other World Wars through history, the years after the First Total War resulted in a technology boom. The VR games I liked to play - adventure games, RPGs, shooting and racing - were all based on the tech developed during that time. And that’s what I thought of, when I thought of Ryuko: wargames, drone systems, and RPGs. I’d known Steve had been working his way through the ranks, but not that he’d ascended to the level where he was on first-name terms with the CEO.

We were wheeled out of the house and onto the street, where more super troopers waited to escort us. They fell in around us as we bumped our way down the road, and I twisted to see my motorcycle one last time before we turned the corner of Hyde Street. The helicopter I had heard earlier was sitting right in the middle of the street, and it was a beauty – a sleek black bio-drone with a giant faceted eye in place of a windshield, like a dragonfly's eye. It was already idling, and the blades sped as we were carried into the bright, clinical cabin and taken to the rear of the ship. There was a bank of autosurgery pods back there, the bases ready to receive our glass-fronted Snow White coffins. Another half dozen men and women were laid out there already. All of them were sedated. My brother’s coworkers? I didn’t recognize any of them.

I watched anxiously as Steve was lowered onto his bed. Almost immediately, the surgical machine got to work. The glass rippled as tools came out to tap his new IV and feed him a cocktail of drugs I could only guess at. Mine did the same: I lay back and tried to relax as whirs and soft clicks echoed around me.

Temperance sat down next to my pod with her legs crossed, her back straight and chest lifted. It was easy to imagine her in a secretary’s blouse, pumps and pencil skirt. She seemed to know how to effortlessly position her body for maximum attractiveness, like something out of a movie – or a hentai. Too perfect to be real.

“Hector.” Her lips moved, but her voice came from a hidden speaker near my ear. “Given the abrupt change in plans, I regret that we could not give you a more detailed explanation of why we are airlifting you, but I assure you that all will be explained.”

“Can you...” I trailed off to swallow, not entirely convinced I wasn't tripping balls after being dosed up with who-knows-what drugs straight into the vein. “Ma'am, can you give me, like, the summary version?”

Temperance turned to watch me with dulcet blue eyes. “When we are in the air.”

That wasn't going to be far off. I lay back and focused on my breathing while the doors to the chopper racked shut. It began to hum like a hive of angry hornets. Within ten minutes, we were clear for takeoff, and my stomach lurched as we picked up off the ground, swaying, then angled as the chopper headed for the sky.

“If it's an experimental treatment, my answer is yes.” Soldiers developed a high tolerance for getting jabbed and pumped full of strange shots. “I'll do it. I don't care if it kills me.”

“We are not offering drug treatments,” Temperance said. She blinked, lowering her chin toward her chest. “As you may know, Ryuko is the world's leading manufacturer of virtual reality solutions, both for entertainment and utility purposes. This helicopter, the autosurgery units, and my protection team are all being remotely guided by AIs. I myself am in constant contact with my Controller, who was evacuated to the Meridian Shard. Like everyone else, we have committed our resources to saving as many people as we can. It is obvious that we face a bottleneck extinction event.”

I coughed, hacking up phlegm that was delicately suctioned up by a soft tube. “No shit.”

“The Shard arcologies are completely full. The European-Near East Union has evacuated the maximum number of citizens to the Yetzirah space station, but artificial biospheres are unstable and have a very limited capacity. It’s simply not possible to evacuate everyone still healthy, which means that we must find a cure, or think spatially about ways to preserve life.”

Ugh, Shards. I hated the Shards and everything they symbolized. They were super-skyscrapers, huge crystal and carbon spires that towered above cloud height. Each one could support about a hundred thousand people, give or take. Politicians, corporate executives, and military officers, the elites who'd never shed blood on the battlefield, got the first pickings at salvation. A lot of them were guys my age, rich draft dodgers. The rest of us were left to cough our lungs out, literally. In chunks. “No way-” I paused to do just that for a second. “N-No way will they find a cure in time.”

Temperance nodded. “No. That is the consensus.”

“Then what are we doing up here?”

“The information you are about to receive is top secret.” Temperance folded her hands in her lap, her head turned toward me. Traceries of azure light flickered through her eyes as she processed and thought about whatever it was she was going to say. “Ryuko has two divisions: a civilian division, and a contracted military division. The divisions exchange technological innovations, repackaging military applications for civilian use, and vice-versa. Our military division works on a number of systems for the Air Force and the 101st Powered Armor Division, and over the course of the Second Total War, we developed the technologies that turned the tide against the Pacific Alliance… true brain-to-interface hardware, and software capable of managing full-contact, full-immersion connections… and systems that are capable of storing the information transmitted by the brain to a network.”

I swallowed, grimacing at the dry, itchy discomfort. “You can copy things from people’s minds?”

“And to people’s minds.” Temperance smiled. “And even more than that: we have been able to replicate consciousness. A copy of a person’s mind can become a self-functioning ‘AI’ within a network. Or a virtual reality scenario. We call this technology GNOSIS, and the supervisory AI system OUROS. With these systems, we have been able to create functioning ‘copies’ of our best drone pilots. So rather than one flying ace, we have ten – all of whom can remotely pilot a machine in formation, while communicating instantly with each other.”

THAT’S what Steve had been working on? I listened on in rapt silence as Temperance continued.

 “Besides the military applications, we also had a side project: a ‘lite’ version of OUROS and its accompanying systems were being repurposed for the world’s first full-immersion videogame engine,” she said. “Entertainment is still important during war-time, after all. The first game using this engine was scheduled for release early next year. A full sensory immersion VR-RPG, with the working title of ‘Archemi Online’.”

My chest rattled as I breathed in. Even the strong mix of pain meds and anti-inflammatories I was getting wasn't taking the fluid out of my lungs. And by tomorrow... I really didn't want to think about it. “An MMO?”

“Archemi is, in every way, a true virtual world.” Temperance’s lips quirked. “It’s not really a MMORPG… it’s orientated toward single-player or small-group play, much like real life. We had hoped to give people a release from all the horror in the world. There were going to be limitations on log-in time and many other failsafes, but after HEX began to spread, President Hashimoto decided to repurpose the Archemi project to something more beneficial. We have now integrated the system with our BigBrain Cloud AI and have established near unlimited storage. The goal was to create a limitless population of human minds, experience, and personalities.”

Well… shit. “That’s a lot to digest. What does Steve have to do with it?”

“Your brother was a senior project developer on the civilian OUROS project,” she replied. “All of the people working on these projects were given the opportunity to sign a contract with us that would allow them to participate in innovative research. Essentially, the employee had the option to be uploaded to BigBrain if they ever developed a terminal condition, to see if their consciousness would persist if the body ceased to work. The problem with GNOSIS is that the upload process is still unreliable. OUROS needs at least a thousand uploads before it really learns how to do it flawlessly. We were willing to work that out over the next century with willing volunteers, but…”

“HEX happened,” I finished.

“HEX, and the ongoing nuclear threat to Japan and the USA,” Temperance replied. “Everyone has scrambled to finish Archemi and refine the upload process, but we still need that first thousand or so, the vanguard of volunteers. Without them, we can’t make GNOSIS stable enough to reliably upload the unique brain patterns of millions of people as fast as we need to. And that, Hector, is the basis of the agreement we made with your brother and will hopefully make with yourself.”

I licked my lips and frowned up at the frosty surface of my capsule. “What kind of setting is Archemi?”

“Open world fantasy with steampunk and ‘dark fantasy’ elements. Archemi is part of a paracosm. Do you know what that means?”

“Nope.”

“A paracosm is a complete, self-contained reality which encompasses its own physics, mythos, characters, cultures, and environs beyond a planetary scale. Famous examples of paracosms include Discworld, Middle Earth, the Forgotten Realms and Elder Scrolls. Are you familiar with them?”

Now, that was a list of names that brought back good memories – the time I spent with my grandparents before they died. Dad’s parents had grown up reading and playing all those games, along with Korean and American MMOs. They only had memories of those MMORPGs – but their collections of single-player games were something they’d shared with me and Steve. My Halbi and Halmon had cared about me in a way dad never had.

“Yeah. I had... have a thing for old games. My grandad used to play Elder Scrolls.” I had to pause to catch my breath. “Steve volunteered for this? To be uploaded to Archemi?”

“Yes. Along with many others involved with the project. As I’ve said, Archemi is in early beta. There are bugs and in-game issues we must resolve before we risk giving false hope to the public.”

And I was lucky enough to be one of the guinea pigs. “What's the catch, ma'am?”

She sighed. “At present, we cannot upload people who are in advanced stages of illness. However, with every successful upload, the GNOSIS-OUROS system learns and we increase our odds by percentage. Once we have processed another two hundred uploads, the system should be stable enough to attempt the first mass immigration.”

“Okay. By failure, you mean death, right?”

Temperance nodded.

“What are the odds?”

“For people at your stage of infection, one in eight.”

I swallowed hard, shuddering. One in eight wasn’t great odds, but that was a… what? 87.5 percent chance to survive? Not bad. I was currently running at 100 percent toward an early mass grave.

My brow broke out in a sheen of sweat that had nothing to do with the flu. I rubbed some more fog off so I could see Temperance’s face. “What's it like? Archemi? What… options do I have there?”

To my surprise, Temperance smiled. Maybe they'd re-enabled her empathy features now we were off base. “The world has both original and familiar features common to medieval fantasy and steampunk. The world itself is beautiful. Stunning. The best artists in the world have been laboring on it for more than five years. The game itself is quite open-ended. For the purposes of the refugee program, many of the major threats and challenges players expect will not be present, but there will still be some conflict available for more martial players.”

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Beautiful, huh? I had no idea what kind of life I could expect as a virtual avatar in a virtual paracosm - if you could consider it a life - but it had to be better than this shit. The process might kill me, maybe, but my brother was willing to do it. And he'd included me at the end. No matter what he thought of my chocolate-binging, motorcycle riding worthless ass... he'd wanted to help me. He’d probably been sitting on this for months.

I closed my eyes, drew as deep a breath as I was able to, and sighed it out with a wheeze that made my chest ache. “Okay. Count me in. For science.”

Dragon Seed: Chapter Three

By the time we reached the facility, I knew I was dying. I was consumed by the horrible, powerless sensation of my body tearing itself apart while an army of millions of viruses replicated explosively through my cells. The pod had been managing me so well that I'd almost forgotten how sick I was for a couple of hours, until I went to sleep... and woke up strangling and panicked, coughing blood as I heaved for air and found only pain.

The helicopter landed on a helipad that then sunk down into a building with a deep underground basement. Or sub-basement. I couldn't tell where we were, exactly - east of the Cascades, that was for sure. My pod was carried out by the men in black, Temperance following behind as we were loaded onto a transport truck. It rumbled off down a dark corridor of rough stone. I lost track then, fading in and out of consciousness.

When I woke up again, I was sitting upright and everything around me was white - blinding white. The room hummed with voices speaking softly at a distance, and it smelled like clean, new plastic. I was in a chair I could only describe as a throne. It was huge. I felt like Alice in fucking Wonderland.

The chair was connected to a tower pulsing with blue light. 'Ryuko Industries BigBrain' was emblazoned across the side. It took me a little while longer to realize that I'd been pulled out of my clothes and put into plain white pajamas, and that I was inside of an inflatable bubble that sealed me off from the rest of the room. The people outside of the bubble were all in the same slinky HAZMAT that Temperance wore.

My chest was rattling and I was barely able to sit, but I wasn't in pain any more. More curiously, I had a HUD. The holographic display hovered in front of me, a round blue portal roughly the size of a door. It was monitoring my vitals, all of which were shit. On instinct, I reached back, and touched something metallic behind my head. A cold, rounded surface with a thin edge, floating. Like a halo, but rotating behind my skull instead over it. What in the shit...?

I jumped as I caught movement out of the corner of my eye, flinching with a soldier's instincts. It was Temperance. She’d changed into a different frogsuit. IT was jet black, a startling contrast to the rest of the room.

“Good afternoon, Hector,” she said. “And thank you for volunteering. I'll be here to walk you through everything.”

“Where’s Steve? Where’s my brother?” I gripped the arms of the BigBrain Throne, glancing back and forth between her and the HUD. I was used to them - every game with a headset used a floating menu just like this one, as did a lot of military tech - but I wasn't wearing a headset. That was the weird part.

“Mister Steven Park has agreed to attempt upload despite his advanced illness and low odds of success. He is in a separate laboratory doing this very same exercise. Are you ready to be walked through what will happen?”

“Hit me,” I said.

“You have been fitted with an upgraded Brain-to-Computer interface: a Ryuko PRISM Corona which is capable of utilizing the experimental GNOSIS system. I explained GNOSIS to you earlier,” she said, walking over to stand in front of me. She had a corona of her own, completing her angelic beauty. “Coronae greatly improve GNOSIS outcomes. They are the absolute peak of our technology, Hector – computers comprised entirely of nanorobots engaged in constant exchange.”

“Right.” I nodded, exhaling heavily on every shallow breath. As far as I was concerned, nanotech was sorcery. I preferred machines you could see.

“We require you to sign the same waivers and other documents as your brother,” Temperance said. “I will assist you to call them to your heads-up display. You may sign simply by uploading the document, and then thinking of your name when the document has been digested and you are prompted to do so.”

Nervously, I sat back and rested my hands on my knees to keep them from trembling. I'd never had anything uploaded via BCI before. “Go ahead.”

My head pulsed, and suddenly, I knew all the details of Ryuko's waivers and liability policies. Just like that.

“SHIT!” If I’d had any strength left, I’d have leapt out of my chair. Because I didn’t, I sort of flailed around like an angry jellyfish and then slumped back, wheezing with effort. “Dude! Fuck!”

“Do you hereby agree to remove all liability of damages from Ryuko Virtual Solutions, its corporate affiliates, subsidiaries, and partners?” Temperance asked... Inside my head. She didn't speak out loud. Too weird.

“Yes…?” I spoke aloud out of habit. That seemed to work, because a word suddenly popped into my head. 'Signature'. I thought of my name in reply, and that was that. Other than a warm sensation behind my eyes, I was no worse for wear after the info-dump.

Temperance flashed me a sympathetic smile. It reached her brilliant eyes this time – someone had their empathy chip back in. “Alright. When you’re ready, we’ll begin the upload. You will be put into twilight anesthesia for this step, and then full anesthesia to induce a coma. Are you ready to begin?”

Was I? I couldn't shake the feeling that I was missing something thanks to the virus... that everything was going too fast, that I was setting myself up for something. I felt like I’d only just walked through my family’s front door, and the stench of death was still in my nostrils. I searched back through the waiver, but the information seemed to be getting tangled up with my fear. What was going to happen to my body? I'd always been a physical guy... motorcycles, parkour, martial arts, stuff that engaged the senses. The thought of losing all of that was suddenly terrifying.

“Hector?”

I closed my eyes, struggling for a moment. At least I knew what was going to happen with HEX. “Before I say anything... tell me what's going to happen to my body when I die. And my brother's.”

“When you have successfully uploaded, we will induce your body into a coma and support you for the duration of your natural life. After you have passed, your remains will be cryogenically preserved for research by Ryuko and its affiliated companies. One of our first partnerships involves developing a cure for the H5N1-X virus.”

Body. Remains. Numbly, I checked through the tangle of information uploaded by the waiver, and sighed. It was there, right in the contract. “Alright. Do it.”

“Please confirm again: you are ready to begin?”

My heart hurt, spasming painfully in my chest. It was inflamed already, but now it was rattling along at high speed. At this rate, I was going to have a heart attack before I, or my virtual clone, reached Archemi.

“Yes. I’m ready.” I replied firmly.

The white suits outside of our bubble flew into motion, working at virtual terminals and doing things that made the blue-glowing tower thrum and surge to life. All the scientists had coronas too.

Temperance crouched in front of me, visible through the glowing blue HUD. Her expression was one of calm compassion, but no breath fogged the inside of her helmet. “Look at me, Mister Park, and watch my lips. I'm going to count down from ten, and when I reach one, you will be sent on your way.”

I licked the sweat off my lip, and tried to compose myself. The Norse had this old myth about warriors being carried off the battlefield by beautiful Valkyries. I was a warrior, and my Valkyrie was Temperance: six feet in heels, long legs, porcelain pale skin. She had a full mouth… it looked surprisingly soft.

“Ten.” Her lips framed the word like a blessing.

Beautiful as she was, I closed my eyes. This was the best thing I could do for myself and everyone else. My family was gone. My parents were dead, my brother, too... maybe.

“Nine.”

At least one of my family could live on. Me or Steve, maybe both of us. I was sure that I wasn't going to be that one of guys that died doing this. I wasn’t going to be afraid.

“Eight.”

… But I wasn't ready. A whine built in my ears, and my stomach tensed horribly, a sensation I'd only felt once before: the gut twist of terror when I’d first been set out to the front lines. The IV was pushing something warm into the vein in my elbow now, and it was spreading through me in a wave, turning my limbs to jelly. Was I dying? Distantly, I realized that I couldn't move any more.

“Seven.”

I was bracing for six, but it never came. The reddish darkness of my eyelids inverted into roaring white. I was pulled up toward something with crushing speed. My heartbeat was there one moment, and then it was gone. A roar built in my ears, thunderous and terrifying.

This is what I imagined being the passenger in a plane crash felt like. For all I knew, I was clutching the arms of my chair and pushing back into it while the corona and GNOSIS did their work, ripping a duplicate of my brain like a bootlegged movie. I might have been in pain - there was no way to tell. Same with time. As it ticked on without even a heartbeat to count by, I was more and more convinced that something had gone wrong, that I hadn't made it. I was about to die or… was I already dead? What if this was it? Maybe the end was just this. Nothing.

Then the white turned to green, and the howling pressure stopped and rushed away. My consciousness spread out like a web through my nerves. I could feel again, though I couldn't see any limbs. There was nothing but a green field when I tried to look down and around.

“Hey... can any of you hear me out there?” There was no sound when I spoke, which was bizarre, because I felt the words come out. My throat worked, my lungs drew air, but there was no body I could see. I'd just made up my mind to start screaming until someone paid attention to their monitor when the blank environment turned black, and then opened up onto the biggest battlefield I'd ever seen.

Chaos. That was the only way to describe it. The stench, the screams, the whine of magical bolts impacting against shields and barriers that flashed and crackled when struck, the roar of warriors surging in formation against one another. My breathing sped, mostly out of surprise that I could feel the wind, smell the reek of medieval warfare, and I still didn't have a body. But I sure as hell had ears, because when a huge black dragon tore through the sky over my 'head', bugling a harsh, hateful cry, I flinched down out of pure reflex.

The thing was the size of an airliner, with a blunt, T-Rex-like head, long horns, and hard black scales covered in spines. I gaped after it as a V-formation of armored dragoons followed on its tail, ruffling my skin with the wind as their griffin-like mounts screeched above and around me. The dragoons split as the dragon wheeled and backwinged in mid-air, barking gouts of blue fire as they surrounded it. One of the fireballs caught a dragoon full on, incinerating mount and rider. My nose seared with the smell of ozone and cooked flesh as the convulsing, charred beast began a lazy death spiral toward the ground, the skeletonized rider still tied into their saddle.

“The shores of the Terenthal continent, on a world whose name has long been forgotten.” A clear female voice heavy with grief spoke from right beside me, and when I looked across, I saw the flickering outline of something that looked like a ghost without distinct features or form. “Just over a hundred years ago, the Vrath'kha Drachan - the Void Dragons - opened a portal to this place and began their conquest. The Terenthali were the last to fall. This was their final stand, the stragglers who had managed to escape the Drachan and their servant-children, the Rostori. I wish I could say it ended in victory. It did not.”

The scene shifted. We hung over a massive volcano, the edge of which was ringed by screeching, snapping black and red Drachan who carried riders: The Rostori. They were tall, proud, vaguely reptilian horned people in ebony and steel plate armor. The core of the volcano was blue with magic, not orange with lava. It was a brilliant white-blue, burning and surging like the core of a star. The Rostori were throwing captives off the backs of their mounts into the caldera. My stomach turned at the callousness of it... then clenched tightly as a rumbling growl bent the sky around us, shaking the ground. I looked back and forth for the source of the sound, not seeing anything until the heads of the dragons all turned in the same direction and bowed in prostration to the monster that flew in overhead like a rotting jumbo jet.

This dragon was dead. It was a skeleton, the tattered rags of its wing membranes and skin turned to leather that trailed behind it like banners. A flexing field of dark light crawled and spat through its bones, an effect which left me feeling queasy as it circled the volcano in eerie silence. The wind tore over it... it was huge, and its riders were tiny by comparison. I saw them when the beast glided down to land gracefully in the space that had been cleared for it by the other dragons. The tallest man wore a suit of fluted death’s head armor and a crimson cloak, his face masked. The other two had their helmets off. One was a woman with swept back horns and vivid red markings on her skin. The other was a man with the same horns, but no birthmarks. They both had scarlet-red hair of the same deep wine color.

“The Rostori triumphed over this world as they had many others, draining the land dry for their magic. For magic is not endless... it is drawn from the earth itself, and when unnatural creatures like this dracolich drain it to sustain their undeath, the earth is dead within five hundred years.”

“Damn,” I said, more to myself than anything. “You'd think you'd learn after the first time.”

“You presume they have the desire,” the Narrator replied.

I nearly jumped out of my skin. I had not been expecting a reply.

“The Drachan and Rostori destroyed their home planet long ago, and are never satisfied by what they have. They do not learn from their mistakes. That is the nature of greed and narcissism. The greatest of the Elder Drachan sustain themselves by pillaging planets of their magic. They teach that mercy is weakness, and cruelty is strength.”

Just as I opened my mouth to speak, the undead dragon reared up and raised its foreclaws, posing them in a series of arcane gestures as it began a rumbling chant. It’s voice was like boulders tumbling down a dry mountain. The Rostori continued the sacrifices, and soon, the thunderous volcano drowned out the victim’s screams.

“To move from one world to the next, the Drachan use the Dragon Gates, vast wells of mana, the stuff of magic,” the narrator continued on calmly. “They gathered the last of the magic of this world and used it to travel to the next. Our world... the world of Archemi.”

The volcano erupted with a column of white fire, and I nearly wrenched my neck following it as it shot into the sky, illuminating the massive dark army I hadn't seen in the valley below. The light drowned out sound and vision, throwing me around like a leaf. The indistinct sensation of floating was replaced by the swooping, giddy momentum of flight.

I broke out of the blinding light into a sweep of massive forested mountains. My stomach dropped out as the ground sped beneath me. I could feel everything. The wind, the hot sun on my back, the turbulence of the air. It was the freshest air I'd ever smelled. We'd long ago trashed Earth, even before the Total Wars and HEX and everything, and I'd ever only seen places like this in History class. It was brilliant and bright, tainted only by the knowledge of what I'd just seen before. It was almost too bright, like they'd turned the saturation up on the blue of the sky and the green of the forest. I crested a ridge, and came up over a huge walled city that faded off into farmland as the valley wound off between the mountain peaks.

“Archemi, however, is different to the worlds that the Drachan and their slaves conquered in the past for two powerful reasons,” my narrator said. “Archemi has dragons of its own, a wise and sophisticated race wholly different to the greedy Drachan. Not only does it have dragons, it has you, and people like you.”

“Because every world needs more angry, dyslexic Korean washouts,” I joked.

“Do not be so quick to disparage yourself, Hector. You are Starborn, one of the immortal Souls of Fate incarnated on Archemi in times of crisis. An age ago, when the ocean split and the Drachan entered our world, they brought monsters with them. The Starborn appeared, and with the help of the native dragons of our world, the invaders suffered their first defeat – but at great cost. The first races of Archemi were all but destroyed. Huge swathes of land were Stranged with magic, becoming twisted wastelands crawling with monsters where there were none before - but we did win. The Drachan were forced into an unquiet sleep, the Rostori bound to the frigid wastes of the far North. They are trapped there by the Caul of Ancestors, a powerful magical barrier called into beings by the sages of all Archemi's races. Archemi has known peace ever since... but the Rostori have not forgotten their mission, and they know that greed is infectious. It is only a matter of time before they find their way free. As that risk increases, more Starborn will appear… but it is up to them whether they help or hinder the threat to Archemi. Which brings us back to the now. You, Hector, are a Starborn: a soul waiting for a body. And you have a unique and difficult choice ahead of you.”

I startled from the story trance and turned to the narrator-ghost, who looked back at me with a face like liquid light.

“Hector, it is time for you to choose your place here. Will you remain a soldier, fighting for a king or nation? Will you give into your rebellious nature and become a criminal, or an assassin? Will you become a priest of your people, worshipping and working with the local gods? Will you become a dragon knight and fly the skies, or a hedge knight who wanders the land?”

My heart skipped. …A dragon knight? As in, a knight on an actual dragon?

I thought I saw the narrator smile. “Your destiny is in your own hands, Hector, and you have complete freedom to decide your path... but choose wisely, because your decisions may not just affect you, but the course of history.”

Dragon Seed: Chapter Four

The valley and city faded out, and I found myself standing in a neutrally lit room surrounded by a ring of enormous, fancy mirrors. My reflection looked like me. I was medium-height, with a stocky build that had leaned towards fat before the Army and was now mostly muscle. I had a crewcut, a hard jaw, wide cheekbones, dark eyes that blinked when I blinked. They'd even included my acne scars, but fortunately, not the deathly, rashy skin or hollow cheeks caused by HEX. I looked down at myself, and saw I had all five appendages intact. Curious, I reached out and touched the glass in front of me. It was cold, smooth... whatever the hell tech they were using to generate this level of neural feedback, I was seriously impressed.

“As you've guessed already, this is the character creation room,” the ghostly narrator said. She sounded happier now. “First things first. Due to the emergency repurposing of the game, you have the option of creating an adventure-ready player character suitable for combat quest roles, or defaulting to a simplified creation process which draws on your natural strengths and experience. We recommend that people who wish to participate in civilian Life Skill paths - such as craftsmen, farmers, merchants or other non-combative occupations - select the simplified character creation stream.”

“No thanks,” I said. “I want adventurer creation.”

A detailed HUD scrawled into view. It was ornate, in a subtle, elegant way, but otherwise a pretty standard UI... all the meaty RPG stats, inventories, skill trees, and suchlike.

“Archemi’s menu system is underpinned by an encyclopedic archive. Navigate the menus and archives by thought. It doesn't matter if you decide to use voice or gesture at first - as time goes on, you'll train the menu to react with your intentions and needs,” the narrator said. “The first thing you’ll want to do it to choose your race and sub-race. Archemi is large and diverse, with civilizations and nations with distinct cultures. Try thinking 'show race menu'.”

Open race menu. I changed her words in my head, interested to see how it responded.

A tab popped up, spooling into a short list of playable races, each one with a sub-menu:

+Artanese

+Meewfolk

+Mercurion

+Dauntan

Only four races? That was a bit of a letdown. Frowning, I opened the +Artanese sub-category, and suddenly faced another list of options:

++Dakhari

++Vlachian

++Sharet

++Sathbari Plainsman

++Hercynian

++Khago

++Okinevan

++Jeunan

Artanese humans - they were humans - were tall and vaguely elf-like. They didn’t have pointed ears, but they had large, expressive eyes, no matter their skin color or other features. The Dakhari were dark-skinned, the warm ochre-brown you saw in India and the Middle East; the Sathbari were even darker. The sample Hercynian characters looked mostly Caucasian or Mediterranean, and the Jeun were the most elf-like: tall, lithe, elegant, and Asiatic.

When I thought 'Dakhari', a much longer list and a short description opened:

Dakhari (Artanese, Race)

“The Dakhari are the dominant human people in Dakhdir, a large nation in The Shalid, a region in the South of Artana, which is the largest continent of Archemi. They have a caste-based culture divided into nobility, merchants, warriors, and peasantry (or the townsman ancestors of peasantry). In addition, there are two 'outcaste' groups: sorcerers and untouchables, who are both known as ‘Shallatu’, or Fireblooded.”

Huh. I whistled as the complexity of the character creation really began to dawn on me. If I went Dakhari, I could choose my general social starting position, whether or not I was urban or rural, and a bunch of other variables. Each one had their pros and cons, stacking into a complete character picture. If you played a higher caste, you didn’t get any special physical perks, but you got the perks of that caste. Shallatu started off with fantastic physical stats, but steep social and economic impediments. There was a lot of reading to do, but I wanted to get a general idea of the main race options before I started drilling down too far. The Fireblooded had me curious, though. My curiosity was obviously enough of a prompt, because I got an explanation:

Fireblooded (Dakhari)

Dakhari Fireblooded are so called because of their coloration and unique relationship to magic. They are universally tall, strong and good-looking, with vivid red or orange hair and gold or red eyes. Fireblood always runs true – every child who has one Fireblooded parent will themselves be Fireblooded. However, rates of fertility are very low, with only one in every ten adults able to have children. Men and women are of equal height and near-equal strength.

Believed to be the descendants of demons, they are pariahs within their country and culture - though not necessarily outside of it. They start with a -10 social penalty (-15 with Caste-loyal Dakhari) and severely reduced resources, but they are immune to Stranging and take reduced damage from all magic.

“What’s Stranging?” I'd barely formed the question when a tooltip opened.

Stranging

When living creatures are exposed to raw mana, the toxic effects of liquid magic will mutate and/or harm them. Stranging is a phenomenon which ranges from radiation burns to dementia, infertility, sickness, and in extreme cases, mutation and division into monsters. All Starborn (player characters) have limited resistance to Stranging, but not complete immunity.

Infertility? That implied fertility as well, which meant… I could father babies here? Jeez. Hopefully they had condoms as well. Stranging definitely sounded like something I wanted to avoid... it made me wonder how mages didn't curl up and die with their first spells. And dementia? Given this was a beta, who the hell knew what would happen if you got dementia in a video game?

The Sathbari were basically dino-riding plains warriors, proud Afro-Asian people who dressed in buckskins, furs, and hard leather armor tanned from hookwings, dinosaurs that looked pretty much like oviraptors with feathers. The Hercynians were European-esque, divided into nationals who ranged from swarthy Grecian people to moon-cheese-marshmallow white. As my tooltips helpfully informed me, Hercynia comprised a region of six unique, economically powerful nations on a peninsula on the far West point of Artana.

I found I was able to bookmark things of interest while I waded through the database and learned more about the world and its cultures. The Jeun Empire was cool - kind of like ancient Korea plus magitech as far as I could tell - but mostly orientated toward magic users and artificers. Not really my bag. I respected magic classes, but I wasn’t any good with them.

“Show me the Dauntans.” I spoke aloud before remembering I was supposed to be thinking my way around the menu.

The menu faithfully appeared. There were only two sub-races of Dauntan: Tungaant and Lysidian. The Lysidian WERE elves: gracile, urbane, orientated towards ranged combat and magic, with long pointed ears and a skin color palette that ranged from coal black (in the equatorial nations) to an interesting pale blue-gray. Judging by what I read, the city I'd seen in the intro was one of theirs. Elves weren’t really my schtick - I preferred races that were a bit rougher around the edges, and that’s what I got with the Tuun.

The Tuun were basically Tibetan Vikings. They were craggy humans who wore dark colors and crossover jackets, heavy fleece, leather, and cleated boots. They had a Eurasian look about them, with the tanned skin and the rosy cheeks of people constantly exposed to the wind and sun. They were tall and strong featured, with clear, piercing eyes and unusual square pupils.

Tuun (Daun, Race)

The Tuun are the rugged, independent people of the Nima Plateau, from the north of Daun. Tough, resourceful and stoic, they live a semi-nomadic lifestyle with their dinosaur herds and circulate through several ancient mountain cities. The nation is loosely ruled by a council of three abbots, the Chitahbach (Songmaster or 'Disciple of the Tongue'), the Dragahbach (Skymaster, 'Disciple of Sky') and Kanachba (Stonemaster, 'Disciple of the Ground'). They each head one of the three main orders within the Tuun religious tradition, which is known as Ruhebah (The Way, literally 'Path-finding'). As one of the oldest contiguous civilizations in Archemi, they have a unique relationship with dragonkind, and dragons were once an important bridge between their far-flung communities.

Dragons? Hell yes. As I read through the options, I began to feel that stirring excitement you get when you've hit on the right character. Tuun were tough, a bit anti-social, and they basically grew up on horseback - well, dino-back. They had some heavy resistances to disease and bonuses to mobility and riding, but no protection from magic. They had some features that would make a good dragon knight character, if that was a real class. I bookmarked them as well.

The Meewfolk – that was their ‘common’ name, not the name they called themselves - were pretty much walking, talking Siamese cats. They weren't particularly anthropomorphized, looking more like cats than people, with elegant long digitigrade legs and long fingers with toe-bean pads. I was surprised to find that Meewfolk probably made for the best fast combat builds in the game. Female Meewfolk, anyway - they were intensely sex-segregated, with females taking on the warrior and lore-keeping duty in cities, and males leaning towards rogue and bard classes in nomadic gangs. If I wanted to play a Swordsman or Monk/Striker class, they’d be the one I’d go for.

Then it was time for the Mercurions. I opened them up, and my breath caught. I'd seen images of two of each race: male and female. There were six example Mercurions. They ranged from a short, muscular, very masculine guy through to a very tall androgynous person who was clearly neither male or female. But they were gorgeous. The Mercurions had smooth silver skin and swept back wings made of crystal in place of ears. Their hair looked like spun glass: translucent, but flexible. Their faces were exquisitely beautiful, the kind of heavy, sweet beauty I associated with angels and renaissance paintings.

Mercurions (Zaunt, Race)

Strange living constructs created to fight dragons, Mercurions painstakingly craft each new generation of their kind. The foundation of Mercurion society is the family. Their clans are called Tlaxican ('Lineages') which vary extensively in size and power. Tlaxican measure their wealth in the number of children they have, the quality of those children, and the reserves of mana they have to create them.

To reproduce, Mercurions sculpt their children with a mana-treated elastomer, glass, silicon-carbonite (which is relatively common in Zaunt, their island homeland) and specially treated metals. Their techniques are derived from the technological processes used by the Aesari and Drachan nearly 4000 years ago, and are one of the closest-kept secrets in Archemi. They are known for their haunting music, their expertise as Artificers and Assassins, and their level-headedness. Mercurions live in subterranean cities which are deadly to living beings due to the poison gases and raw mana in the air.

As constructs, Mercurions are sexless and genderless. Instead, there are six types of Mercurions made to fulfill certain social roles, such as combat, music or magic. They are also painfully short-lived, though this is not so much of a concern for the rare Starborn among them.

Their pages were pretty detailed: just as well, given how alien they were. I queried 'Aesari' out of curiosity, but nothing came up. A mystery, then.

I was really tempted by the Joh build Mercurion - described as tall, muscular and masculine - but I wanted to play someone who was on good terms with dragonkind, not purpose-made to kill them. My eyes were drawn back to the Tuun. When I thought about the male avatar, he appeared in the mirror in front. I liked the compact, tough, confident look about him. He looked like someone who could build something for himself, make his own way in the world. He looked free.

My whole life had been spent in a cage of other people’s needs. My parents had pushed me and Steve both to the limit at school. He’d done well, while I had my first breakdown in late elementary school. My dad said I got bad grades were because I was a lazy sinner who played videogames instead of working. In reality, I just couldn’t read. My eyes would skip over the words, and I couldn’t concentrate on them unless I was moving. Neither of my parents believed me, because their son couldn’t have a learning disability. I was just supposed to pray more.

I got into VR games as an escape from the pressure and batshit religion, because games had text-to-speech options and the freedom of swinging a sword, riding a horse, owning a house. And I was good at it, just like I was good at riding. In the months before the war, I’d found freedom in motorcycles and had started auditioning for stunt work in Los Angeles. I rode Mona in stunt competitions, and had just made a friend in the racing business when the Second Total War broke out and they called the draft. Steve hadn’t had to serve, because he was working for Ryuko and the corp filed a petition for him.

I didn’t have anyone on my side with that kind of money. I was a dyslexic revhead who was good with bikes and games and not much else. It was the rank and file for me… and the brief taste of freedom I’d had vanished forever.

The reflection in the mirror shifted, and suddenly, I was looking at a cleverly blended composite of my face and body meshed with that of a Tuun. The AI had even selected my preferred hairstyle. Tuun men had varying hairstyles with a common theme: two thin braids that started from the back of the neck, wrapped in red cloth and bound with metal rings. They could be worn down the back or front. The one I liked had them at the front, while the rest of my hair was shaved along the sides and braided along the top like a mohawk. I chose that one, and my hair changed to match.

Overall, my character looked... well, pretty damn awesome. Ripped in a natural warrior-fit kind of way; masculine, energetic. I changed my eye color to a dark storm blue, made myself a bit taller - around five eleven - and that was that. But I hesitated to confirm my selection. Character creation was usually the fun lull before the challenges of the game, but this felt serious. Like, really serious. What if I'd picked wrong? Tuun didn't start out with much money. Just how 'real' was this going to be? For all I knew, I'd just signed up for Oregon Trail: The Next Generation, and if I died here... what then? My body was gone, probably. It's not like I could take off the headset, get out of my cryofreeze tank, and head back home to Base.

No. I wouldn't hesitate. Maybe it was life or death, but it was still just a game. They wouldn't go to all the trouble to bring me here just to knock me off.

The Narrator lady’s voice came back online as my resolve to play the Tuun cemented.

“Now that you have chosen your race, it’s time to choose your starting class. New adventurers can choose from four basic starting classes: Warrior, Specialist, Artificer and Mage. Each Class has multiple Paths, which become available at Level 5. You can explore Paths in your Paths menu. At Level 15, you may acquire a second Class and a second Path: but remember, you only have so much EXP!

There are special Advanced Path (AP) skill trees which can be unlocked through certain Class and Path combinations. For example, if you take Warrior at Level 1 and Specialist at Level 15, you gain access to the Ninja Advanced Path. You can explore the Paths menu to discover some Advanced Paths and their requirements. Others might come as a surprise!

The Class starter packs all seemed pretty balanced, and the Paths were quite diverse. Warrior covered all your essential non-ranged combat Paths, while Specialist led to Rogue, Scout, Ranger, Gunslinger, and other squishy and ranged DPS Paths. Artificers used magic to build attack and defense units and artifacts. Mages had a variety of Paths, nearly all of them related to elemental specialization.

I normally played Warrior/Fighter types mixed up with the occasional Rogue, but the former was more appealing. I skimmed the Warrior Paths that would be available to me later on, which was fairly extensive: Swordsman, Barbarian, Dualist, Monk, Lancer, Knight, and a number of others. I played around with combinations, looking at the advanced paths. There were some specialized Racial Advanced Paths for Tuun, which included the Baru class - a kind of assassin-healer monk with some badass stamina-based abilities. There well as more general APs, too: Mounted Archer, Assassin, Lancer… Dragon Knight.

Dragon Knight? I could actually be a freaking Dragon Knight? Hopefully they meant actual dragons, and not just some cheesy dragon-themed character. My mouth actually went dry as I brought up the description of the Path:

Dragon Knight (Advanced Path)

The undisputed masters of Archemi’s skies, Dragon Knights are warriors who have undergone and survived the grueling rites required both by the Orders who train these warriors in the arts of honorable combat, chivalry and skycraft, and by the dragons themselves. To gain levels in this Path, you must choose the Knight Path and undergo the ordeals to bond with the dragon who will serve as your life companion and mount. When your dragon reaches the Young Adult stage, this AP becomes available. But be warned: only the chosen few can become true Dragon Knights.

My heart hammered. “Hey, lady - where do I sign up for dragon school?”

I waited in hopeful anticipation for a couple of seconds, but there was no reply from the Narrator, so I selected Warrior and had a look over my sheet. I got a couple of starting Combat Abilities by default - Basic Weapons Training and Armor Mobility - plus a free selection, plus my native Racial Abilities.

I went straight to Combat Abilities and had a look through. The ones you could start with were fairly basic: Power Attack, Charge Weapon, blah blah… my own fighting style was based on a philosophy of ‘hit it as few times as possible as hard as possible until it’s dead’, so I selected the scalable extra-damage ability, Doubletap. It wasn’t going to be awesome at low levels - it allowed you to five of your Adrenaline points to do double damage on a single strike - but at higher levels and stacked with other bonuses…? 19,998-point damage strikes, here I come.

At the end of it all, I got to review my sheet and get a good look at my new avatar:

Hector - Level 1 Dauntan (Tuun)

Level 1 Warrior

==Stats==

Strength: 12

Dexterity: 14

Stamina: 12

Will: 8

Wisdom: 11

Intelligence: 12 

HP: 140

XP: 0

Adrenaline Points: 100

==Abilities==

=Racial=

Blessing of Burna: +10% bonus to resist disease; +5% Stamina bonus to recover from illnesses. Immune to Pox and Lockjaw. +10% cold resistance. All physical needs accrue 2% slower.

Plateau Native: No Stamina penalties in thin air, -2 Stamina penalty at sea level.

Saddle Born: All Riding skills increase 5% faster.

Sun-sight: No vision penalties in bright or very bright light, -5% penalty in dark environments.

Blessing of Tarn: +15% movement speed.

Blessing of Hrrun: No airsickness, reduced inertia at high altitudes, no vertigo.

=Traits=

Curiosity: The player is an open-minded and engaged person, willing to question their modes of thinking and doing and readily accept new ideas. Combat, craft and class skills gain 5% more quickly.

Introvert: With a preference for their own company or small groups of loyal friends, the player gains a 5% bonus to accumulate skills in solitude provided they are not disturbed. Fatigue accumulates 10% faster in large groups and crowds outside of combat situations.

Dyslexic: The written word is something of a mystery to the player. Books take longer to read, and all language-related skills gain -%5 slower.

=Combat Abilities=

Basic Weapons Training

You are trained in the arts of war, and fight unarmed and use all simple and martial hand-to-hand weapons without penalty. Does not include exotic weapons. Train with specific weapons to develop specializations.

Armor Mobility

You are used to wearing armor and bearing heavy loads. +10 Defense in armor (L,M or H), no penalty to Inventory weight.

Doubletap

Required Level: Warrior 1

Required AP: 5

150 x 2 Damage

Cooldown: 2s

Increases Accuracy +10% for 5s

Adreniline Recovery +10 every good hit

Pushes Enemy

Flow combinations possible

=Path Abilities=

None.

==Skills==

=Combat Skills=

Martial Arts 1

Polearms 1

Swords 1

Daggers 1

Clubs 1

=General Skills=

Riding 1

Navigation 1

=Crafting Skills (Common)=

Foraging 1

=Crafting Skills (Advanced)=

None.

There was no mention was made of starting equipment, but that was fine. I’d sort that out once I spawned in whatever starting town they dumped noobs into. I breathed in, and my chest lifted. My hands balled into fists, and so did the work-worn hands of the character in front of me.

“Confirm character.”

Dragon Seed: Chapter Five

There was a sound like a set of massive studio lights turning off, and the room went dark. For several seconds there was nothing… but then a haunting song sung by several voices broke through the darkness, a hypnotic multilayered chant in a language I didn't understand... until I did. They were singing in Tuunhar, the native language of my character. And with the song came memories: the taste of thin soured milk flavored with a sweet floral syrup, like smooth yogurt; the feel of the wind on my face, the sight of a million birds migrating through a mountain pass, and weirdly, a memory of hiking along a trial and coming up over a bare bluff of stone that was covered in giant metallic red flies the size of small dogs. They weren't monsters: they were something important to the Tuun, something I still didn't know the full significance of. They weren’t my memories. But they could have been.

I was still wondering how the fuck I knew this stuff when I woke up to the stench of human filth.

My wrists hurt. Everything hurt. My teeth, knees, muscles. I felt like I'd run a marathon... or that I was, well, deathly ill, and had just come out of a very bad fever. The room was smoky, the air tinted with a deep brownish haze, and it stunk like hell. My head was pounding and hot, my guts cramped with real hunger and real thirst.

There was a thump beneath me, and creaking, and then my stomach dropped out from under me with a very familiar sensation: Air pockets. The wall I was slumped against began to rumble and shudder, jostling me back and forth in the nest of heavy iron chains that were snapped around my limbs. People around me began to moan: some in fear, some in pain. Worse, some of them began to cough, and my head began to pound for another reason. Pure animal terror.

I was in the hold of a flying ship, sitting on the floor among a crowd of other people. It was too dark for me to make out much in the way of features, but we all looked pretty miserable. I was dressed in what looked like torn buckskin rags. I was cold, and people were sick. I'd agreed to this to get away from dying of some horrible illness, and I'd ended up stuck with a bunch of sick people. What the actual fuck, Steve?!

My first instinct was to test the strength of the manacles on my wrists, ankles and neck. They were looped onto long chains that ran through stout eyelets on the hull behind me, connecting me to the other people in my row. To my left, another Tuun man slept an unquiet sleep, frowning even as he snored. To my right was an elf woman with brilliant platinum hair. Her restraints were even more severe than mine: a leather mask that only left her nose bare and that laced tightly around her jaw. Her hands were encased in cages that followed the shape of her fingers and didn't allow her to move them. Her clothes were torn and dirty, like mine, the collar of her tunic ripped down to her chest. Only the collar and mask stopped her shirt from falling down around her waist. A captured spellcaster?

Magic, right. This sensory hell is a game.

Normally, you spawned somewhere kind of neutral in an MMO. The bunny slopes, or a tutorial garden… some kind of cutesy village or the Altar of Recombobulation or something - not a crowded slave ship. It felt so real that it was actually weird to call up the menu, but sure enough, my HUD came up on prompt.

“Do you want to set up auto-alerts?” A message appeared over the HUD display.

“Sure.” I agreed aloud before I thought about what I was doing. The bound mage's head turned toward me for a moment, but then she fell back and curled against the wall as best she could.

“Auto alerts enabled.” The message cleared, showing me my main tabs: Inventory, Character, Crafting, Quests, Options, Artificing, and World Map. The Path menu was greyed out.

If nothing else, my predicament gave me time to have a look through everything. The UI was gorgeous: light on dark, clear layout. Seeing my blank inventory and being able to remind myself that this was, in fact, meant to be fun made me feel a little calmer. No matter how much everything stank and how realistically my stomach lurched, this world was a game. There was a way out of this situation - somehow.

I thought across through the tabs. Nothing happened. Annoyed, I tried to manually select something by thinking the name. Still nothing. I couldn’t interact with the menu at all.

Before the panic really had time to set in, an alert pushed its way into my vision:

New Quest!0021FETCHNUMBER?

Escape the Slave Ship… or Die Trying

The Arabella, an airship contracted to carry slaves, is headed for the dangerous mana mines of the frozen North! Slaves live out their brief, miserable lives digging mana from the earth before their mutated bodies are cast into the crushing waves of the Sea of Blades. You must escape before the ship makes landfall. Look around for tools to Difficulty: ??72m4q24fphttttodsl-0021FETCHNUMBER?

Reward: myj3thkoark120kslz—0021FETCHNUMBER?

“What in the holy fuck…?” I muttered to myself. I tried closing the Quest Journal, but it was frozen. So was the HUD.

Shitballs.

Calm down, Hector. Calmity calm calm. As my limbs thrummed with fear, I took a deep breath of stinking humid air and took stock of my manacles, shaking and pulling at them. The iron cuffs weren't budging. I could use my hands and move my feet, though I wouldn't be able to stand. The cuffs had crude padlocks holding them closed, but I wasn't getting them off without tools.

Well, fine. Okay. I looked around the floor for anything I could use to try and pick a lock, squinting through the frozen HUD, and came up short. No tools. The guy beside me had turned over, so he was no help, but the elf woman was now sitting up stiffly. She looked... undefeated, somehow, despite the hood. Now THAT was something I could work with.

“Hey, miss,” I said. My voice came out as a heavily-accented gravelly rasp that threw me off for just a moment. “Uh... can you hear me?”

Her head and shoulders turned toward me, but she couldn't really nod or properly shake her head. The hood was tied onto what looked like some kind of posture collar. Kinky.

“Want me to try and get that mask off?” I asked. “Just, uh... wiggle your nose once for yes, twice for no?”

The way her cheeks bunched, she might have smiled. She twitched her nose once.

“Alright. Hang on.” I struggled up as the hull continued to jolt up and down with turbulence, and yanked my chains in to give me a bit of room to move my arms. They pulled on the limbs of the guy beside me, but he just rolled with it and continued snoring away.

The mask was laced to the collar with tight knots, but my fingers were callused, nails thick and strong. I sawed and picked at them until they came away, zoning in on the work until I was able to get a look at the collar. It had a bolt instead of a padlock. When I touched it, the metal and the ends of my fingers both turned ice-cold. Some kind of magic. We weren't getting that off in here.

I pulled the mask from her eyes first, and then her mouth. The mouth part had a gag attached to the inside, and she had to work it past her teeth to spit it out. This woman was very pale. Her beautiful silver hair was snarled, but glossy and bright with health. Her mouth was full and sensuous, her violet eyes fierce in the dimness of the hold. Her lower lip was split and puffy, flaked with dried blood.

“Thank you.” Her voice sounded as dry as mine, parched but sweet. She had a British accent, the kind that made me think of Pride and Prejudice and strict boarding schools. “That was a kindness you didn't have to offer.”

“Can't agree with that,” I said. “That looked seriously uncomfortable.”

She smiled faintly, but it was pained. “Not all men are so honorable. Not that it will go far... the bastards will lock me up in it again as soon as we reach land.”

“You know where we are?” I felt a stir of hope, something clearly not reflected in my companion.

She sighed, and rolled her shoulders with a grimace of pain. “No, but I have a terrible feeling we're headed north toward Zaunt.”

“Zaunt? Where the fuck is Zaunt? Why?”

 “As slaves,” the woman said matter-of-factly. “Zaunt is the homeland of the Mercurions. Strange people. You, they will work to death in some bluecrystal mine or another. Me… well, take one guess what will become of me.”

Ahh, yes. Beautiful, charming, escapist Archemi. I wanted to log out and punch Temperance in her plastic face, but I was stuck here, so I forced a smile instead. “I don’t remember how I got here.”

Rutha’s expression was grave. “I don’t remember much, either. I was searching for someone, and I activated the Star…”

She trailed off, and her brow furrowed.

“The Star?” I cocked an eyebrow.

“Never mind.” She shook her head, and winced a little. “Ah, godsblood. There’s no way out of this.”

“Look, I don't know how I ended up here, but I'm not spending the rest of my lives digging for rocks,” I said. “We have to get off this ship somehow.”

“Impossible.” The woman shook her head. “We're over the ocean. Can't you hear it? Feel it?”

I'd assumed the rumbling in the background was engines powering whatever flying craft we were on, but now that she mentioned it, it did sound an awful lot like the ocean. But... deeper? Louder?

“We’ll be fortunate if this blasted hulk doesn't wreck.” She swallowed, and glanced down at her bound hands. “If I had my magic...”

“No point wishing for what we don't have.” I shrugged. “What's your name?”

“I am Rutha of Vasteau,” she replied. “And you?”

“Hector. Dragozin Hector. Of... Tuungant.”

Rutha smiled a wan, bitter smile. “Well, Hector, I suggest you sleep. I doubt very much that we will be relieved of our fate by the time we reach land. You’ll need all your strength.”

Frustrated, I tried to banish my quest journal to the HUD again, but the window was still firmly locked in place. Fucking piece of crap game. Fuming silently, I tried to pick out objects from the background, searching for ways out of the bind. The devs had to have given this situation some kind of resolution that didn't involve me getting worked to death or getting sick. But it was a beta… and there was something wrong with the quest. The Journal entry told me to search for tools, but there were no tools to be seen.

What if something had gone wrong, and the items I’d supposed to be able to find hadn’t spawned? And now that I’d been spawned here… what would happen if I died? Would I spawn back on this ship? Or would the bug extend into a faulty reincarnation as well? What if my file got corrupted, or I was deleted? I remembered Temperance's calm warning about people who were too far gone with HEX not making it. What if it was that they reached the start of the game, bugged, then died when the game crashed?

I felt lightheaded as I sat back, stomach churning. I swallowed nervously. “Yeah... sleep, I guess.”

“Thank you for at least making my journey more comfortable, Hector.” Rutha glanced over me. Her eyelashes were the same brilliant white as her hair. “Rest well, as much as one can in this circumstance.”

She might have been tired, but I wasn't. I was worried - and pissed. As Rutha turned away, I wrapped my arms around my knees and frowned. I didn't need sleep – I needed a way out of these chains and off this ship. I needed to find Steve and check that he’d made it, and I needed to learn what the hell I was supposed to do here.

I closed my eyes, listening to the ship creak and the ocean roar, a relentless drone of sound that went on, and on… and that didn’t vary or change. The ship was creaking over and over again at the exact same pitch, too quickly. Ree-ree-ree-ree-ree, like an alarm.

My gut tightened, and I sat bolt upright, looking around as realization dawned. Everyone around me had frozen. All the sounds that had been going on in that moment were either skipping, or had blurred into the one constant roar. Sweat beaded on my forehead as I shifted in my chains, looking around. Rutha had frozen, her eyes only half-closed, lips slightly parted, her head not quite touching her shoulder.

“Oh fuck.” It WAS a bug.

There was a strange tugging sensation inside my head, like something was pulling at the inside of my skull, and my heartbeat stuttered as fresh terror flooded my chest. My hands and nose began to buzz.

Then I heard footsteps.

My head whipped around so fast I nearly wrenched my neck. A tall, shadowy figure was picking its way through the crowd of human cargo, effortlessly avoiding legs, out-flung hands, and crates. It was heading straight for me.

“Greetings, Hector.” The shadows resolved into a man with a light, even-toned voice. It carried through the hold in a way that felt unnatural, and the hairs on the back of my neck crawled. “It seems the Architects have cast you a cruel lot yet again.”

“Who are you?” My eyes narrowed, but I couldn't really do much. The chains on my wrists weren't making the right noises any more, but they sure as hell felt real.

““You may call me Matir.” The man stopped six feet or so from where I sat. He was dressed in all black: black breeches, black boots, a hooded half-cape, a black tunic, all of which shifted and bled sparkling static into the air. His face... he didn't have a face. All I saw was a pit of darkness underneath the hood, with one point of light burning like a star in the center. “I thought that perhaps you could use a helping hand."

BOOK LINKS

Book #1: Dragon Seed (Amazon - Global Link)

Book #2 Trial by Fire (Amazon Pre-order link)

Mark of Matir [http://jamesosiris.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Mark_of_Matir.png]