The sun had long sunk below the mountainous horizon as I carefully guided my mud-mover back down the mountain. I’d half filled the bucket with some of the granite carving chippings and carefully nestled some finished flagstones and nicer bits of quartz into the chips for the ride down.

Today's haul wasn't worth much, but a few trips like this would keep me from starving and fund an eventual expedition out onto the plateau to look for rare bounties. That's what would actually pay rent.

Most of the other workers had cleared out by the time I made it back to the loading dock, I was one of only a handful of people hired in my time zone. A couple of my more ambitious and well funded co-workers were still on the job though, driving shared equipment in shifts as a team. They had approached me with an offer to buy into their scheme after I had worked here for about a month, but had quickly lost interest in me when I balked at the costs and hourly commitment. I preferred the freedom to chase bounties, even if it was riskier.

I cut through the less busy dock area and began unloading my materials into the auto-bay, watching the meager total rise and let out a chime as it rolled the numbers into my personal account balance. Total: Forty-Six-Point-Nine-Eight, The Bank read out as the machine finished sorting the stones.

I sighed, I had hoped to bring in at least 50 Credits but the information panel floating above the bay listed the market price of Holo quartz crystals as having tanked over the day. I parked my mud-mover and walked back to the break area by the dim light of the glowing plants along the trails. I paid 3 Cr. for a meal shake from the vending console and downed half of it before buying my once-a-week food bundle from the company vending machine, another of the perks of working for Rosso.

I pulled the groceries into my inventory, moved to the edge of the park-like break area, and began the process of calling a portal back to the hub. It took a few seconds for the portal to start to appear, like a little whirlpool of warped space and blue tinged light in mid-air, the edges spinning faster and faster as it grew, throwing off showers of sparks and flashes of light that fizzled and popped around the clearing. A moment later, I stepped through.

The walkway was just as crowded as it was in the morning, it never really slowed down in the Hub. I pushed my way into the press, heading for the nearest Link, which was only a few blocks down from the portal I had entered. Humanities Neighborhood was on the outer edges of the ever expanding Hub, so it was mostly humans walking the streets.

The Links all stood out amongst the rest of the buildings in the crowded skyline. They looked exactly the same as the Link ships that the Coreworlds sent out as invitations. Roughly 4 stories tall, with a footprint the size of a basketball court, and a sort of rounded wedge shape. It was made from a dull soot gray material that felt rough, almost powdery, when you touched it.

I continued along with the steady stream of people through the giant open door in the building/ship and joined the quickly moving line waiting for the individual Docks around the edges of the large open lobby to free up. You could, of course, pay for a license to use one of the larger industrial Docks in an entirely different building, but that was so far beyond my reach I hadn't even bothered looking up the price.

While I was waiting, I checked my mobile and the group chat with my roommates. They both had been silent through the day, which meant they probably hadn't left the apartment. I punched in a message and sent it just as I came to the front of the line.

Kaninak: Got food, about to hit the street. You on cams, Rin?

I saw one of the lights over the dozens of booths around the edges of the Dock lobby change from orange to blue, and walked over to it. The basic privacy filter snapped up behind me as I approached the counter, just a simple heavy blur effect. I removed a few things from my inventory and set them on the counter. The bundle of food was the main thing, as well as my plasma knife.

The knife was the first piece of real alien tech that I had saved up for and bought. It looked sort of like a thumb-drive, just a shiny blackened metal handle. When you squeezed a trigger-like mechanism built into it, a hand-span sized loop of superheated plasma would arc out from the top. A disc of force sprang up from the edges as well, a hilt to shield your hand from the heat of it. It was useful for cutting, well, essentially anything. It was a great tool, the charge only lasted a few minutes at best, but you could recharge it just by tossing it into a fire or leaving it in the sun. I kept it on me for self defense.

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I navigated through the menu hovering behind the counter with my eyes as it automatically scanned the items I placed onto it. I accepted the tariffs as they deducted from my account, Nineteen-Point-Seven-One, then indicated my neutral opinion on my experience for the day at the daily review questionnaire. I groaned when it notified me that tomorrow was my payment day, when by my count it shouldn't be for another week or so.

Why the lengths between payment days fluctuate was a hotly debated topic amongst everyone. Only the Suk knew why or how, and their species as a whole had only ever made a total of 9 public appearances in the two millennia the Faction server had been live. They knew everyone would keep playing. The Coreworlds didn't have the only game in town, they had the only game in the whole damned galaxy.

With a final intent on the big red Unlink button, I winked out of virtual existence and snapped back to reality.

The smell of reality is always the first thing that hits you, at least that's my experience at my local Link. A mix of stale human body odor and breath, a waft of exhaust fumes, with a dash of weird food or an occasional haze of recreational smoke or vapor. All tinted by the sounds of the densely packed cityscape that had grown up around the Link since it landed here nearly 3 years ago.

I opened my actual eyes and stretched as I pushed the helmet up, feeling a little sore. I was not entirely sure how they managed to make it work, but your body still felt like it moved around and was active in real space while you were Linked. I climbed off of the body rig, and stood up to cross the small booth.

The Link booths looked identical from either side of reality, other than the body rig hanging from the back wall of the booth on the real world side. I could hear the harsh noises of the crowd outside, the shouts and megaphones of the protesters and preachers cut through the murmur of conversation within the Link itself. A door opened in the wall and my imported items rode a conveyor belt out onto the identical counter. I grabbed my bag of rations and the plasma cutter, before walking over to the locker near the privacy screened entrance. From the locker I retrieved a beat up old backpack for the bundle of food, and pulled on a faded red reversible ballcap from the hook on the inside of the door. I faced the door and took a moment to prepare for the journey home.

I did a quick pocket check, patting myself to make sure I still had everything on me, then took a few deep breaths, dropped the privacy screen, and walked out of the booth.

I kept my eyes low as I walked past the armored soldiers standing in a number of small groups around the sectioned off interior lobby, using the brim of my hat to hide my face from the watching and hungry faces in the crowded line of people waiting in the maze of concrete and wire fence lanes.

One of the best parts of my contract with Rosso was that it guaranteed me a timeslot in a Link booth on the Gov side of the Link. As long as I showed up on time at the side entrance, I could skip the public line and get into a booth pretty quickly. It was nearly impossible to get in otherwise, the average wait in localtime for a public booth was posted in bold digital letters near the open doorway to the streets outside,1:16:46.

It would take more than a day and a half of waiting in the slowly moving maze of barriers to get a chance to enter the Hub. Unable to leave your spot and forced to keep moving every few minutes as the line inched forward. It was a grinding, terrible, experience that everyone went through, if not for the chance to find work in the Links, for the free and effective healthcare that Payment days brought about.

I hustled down the nearly empty outbound lane, passed a couple more armed and armored soldiers. I ignored the megaphoned preaching blasting over the crowd, the screamed insults from angry faces pressed up against the wire links of the fence, and the envious looks over my clothing and backpack. After following a few sharp corners, the fenced lane angled around to the other side of the ship, and led into the Travellers’ Station through a large curtained doorway. A massive building the government had built to scale up trade with other factions within the Linked worlds.

I gratefully pushed through the heavy overlapping flaps that formed the curtain, and into the echoing halls of the massive open station, the sound of the protestors quickly fading behind me. Inside, I quickly ducked into the press of humanity that poured through the massive space in competing directions. People flowed in waves as trains, planes, buses, trucks, and trams all arrived and departed, picked up and deposited, in a never ending shuffling of goods and people.

Once into the crowd and without breaking stride, I pulled my cap off and flipped it inside out to show the faded black side before putting it back on. Then slung the backpack from my shoulder and pulled out a ragged jacket as well as an old canvas bag.

I was interrupted by a loud single honk of a claxon, most of the people in the room stopped in their tracks, some looking annoyed, while a few people bumped into the person ahead of them and mumbled curses. As the buzzer finished, all of the lights in the room went dark, throwing the whole lobby into pitch black darkness.

Seizing the opportunity, I donned the jacket quickly in the dark, stuffed the backpack into the canvas bag and swung it over my shoulder. Just as the lights came back on, engaging in rows with loud mechanical clicks, I was pulling on a filter mask from the jacket's pocket. Finally switched into my street camouflage, I lifted my chin as I broke free from the other side of the crowded hall and hit the streets of Nubranagin.