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Release Day

Rian’s character ascended the last step of the tower and stood before the final boss of Shadow Spirits. A massive raven descended from the top of the stone ruins and landed, kicking up snow with each stroke of her wings. Spanning the width of the screen, a health bar appeared below her name. Neve—Harbinger of the Dark.

As the cutscene unfolded, Rian glanced at his time: twenty seconds ahead of his personal best—and more importantly, four seconds ahead of the world record. His hands were slick with sweat, his heartbeat loud in his ears. He made the mistake of looking at his livestream’s chat as the cutscene neared its end. His viewers were going absolutely crazy, cheering him on, and spamming emotes.

Everything had gone well until now, through the final tower climb section of the game, to his new strategy against the mini-boss on the floor below rewarding him with a hefty chunk of saved time. For it all to pay off, all he had to do was nail this fight.

Almost shaking, he pressed up on the control stick, and his character walked forward. Neve, shrieking, greeted him with her wings spread.

He had played this game thousands of times. He had seen this boss, defeated it, thousands of times. And yet he was nervous. It wasn’t just a matter of beating the game anymore. There was another rule in place, a time constraint. It was simple: complete the game as fast as possible. But that was all it took to make the final boss encounter more stressful than almost anything he’d ever been through. Even if it was just a game, everything in his body was screaming at him that this was life or death.

The world record was within reach.

With perfect timing, his character rolled out the way of Neve’s wing-stroke dividing the area like a black curtain. Wind followed, sweeping across the floor and clearing it of snow and dead soldiers, skeletons in rusted armor ragdolling across the bricks until they disappeared off the tower’s edge, nothing but sky beyond it.

Rian’s character was scrawny, emaciated, but he ran around wielding a massive two-handed sword like it was nothing. He wound up, swung down onto Neve’s exposed wing. She staggered, nearly a fourth of her health disappearing in a single blow.

Ducking, weaving, Rian evaded and counterattacked until the next phase began. Neve’s wings split in half as if her bones were dividing and growing. Spindly protrusions gained feathers, black and gleaming.

Rian resumed his fatal dance with her, reading her movements, anticipating her attacks. He’d min-maxed his stats completely into strength and speed, of course: the only stats needed for the job. No armor to slow himself down and hardly any health—because there wasn’t a need for it when a single hit meant a failed speedrun. The real problem was time. He had optimized his route through the game so much that even a single hit meant an irrecoverable time loss, and then he would have to start over. And again. Until he got it right.

Neve’s second form went down.

She roared, refusing to die. Her body stretched, elongating like a snake as yet another pair of wings sprouted from her back. Her beak straightened, sharpening into obsidian blades. She scraped the floor with them as she thrashed her head in fury. Sparks crowded the air.

Breathe, Rian reminded himself, waiting for the opening. He was still on pace for the record. All he had to do was not screw it up. Make no mistakes.

Play perfectly.

When he dived into the fight again, he could feel it: the rhythm of their battle dictating each other’s decisions. Neve was just a computer-controlled boss, but it was smart. The developers of Shadow Spirits had programmed her attack patterns to be vicious and unforgiving. But Rian knew how to manipulate her, force her into certain patterns with adept timing and clever placement of attacks. It was all choreographed at this point, a routine burned into his mind by months of practice, but even one mistake in that routine would end everything.

Rian could feel his heart squeezing in his chest as the third form of Neve perished.

Her fourth and final form saw her become even more hellish—black eyes opening all over her body, legs splitting into multi-jointed claws. Her feathers seared whatever they touched, burning the floor and the stone pillars of the tower to charred black. Her cry was otherworldly, monstrous.

Rian approached. Hit, retreat, then dodge and roll, wait for the opening, read the subtle cues of her movement, and attack with timed precision. His hands nearly slipped from the controller as he maneuvered around her with a fraction of a second to spare. Another hit of his sword landed, and another, whittling her health bar down.

He nearly stood from his chair when he saw it: the cue, the beginning of her final pattern of attack.

Just as his character drew back to deliver the winning blow, out of nowhere Neve broke her pattern, but Rian had already committed. Neve’s claws lunged for him as his blade came down, each of their attacks careening toward the other.

His landed first.

Neve fell to the floor, lifeless.

Rian pumped his fist as the words DARKNESS HAS RECEDED appeared across the screen. “Yes!” he shouted. “Let’s go!” He wanted to stand up and run with all the energy he had, but his apartment was hardly big enough, so he just awkwardly paced around instead. He didn’t even care.

The timer was still going, but he didn’t need to stop it. He already knew, by the way the fight had gone, that he’d done it.

Sub-four hours. A new world record, the fastest anyone had ever beaten the game.

On his secondary monitor, the chatroom of his livestream had exploded. It was scrolling by almost too fast to read anything, but he caught some of it:

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

Wildfire808: Was that it??? NEW WR???

eNorbus: grats, Cob!

noved62: I was here!!

articSonata: @Wildfire808 yes that was it, he actually did it what a madman

Rian leaned back in his chair and savored the afterglow of victory, his heart racing. On the screen, Neve’s corpse lay upon the burnt and marred floor, her feathers withering, body decaying to rotten bones. Snow gently fell, and the bittersweet ending cinematic began to play as Rian’s character knelt and bowed his head.

A dozen alerts popped up on the other screen, notifying him of new subscriptions to his streaming channel, CobaltGaming. The money wasn’t great, but it was enough for him to keep going, and today it had all paid off.

As excited as he was to submit his recorded speedrun to the global leaderboards for review, there was something else coming up today that would entirely fill his schedule. After calming down from all the exhilaration, he searched around on his desk. Glancing at his livestream camera, he said, “So as if this day wasn’t awesome enough already, you guys wanna see something really cool?”

***

Rian slowly lifted the laminated postcard into view of the camera until it was in focus. It was the receipt sent by Reflect Systems, informing him that he had secured his pre-order of the new, MIRROR-XF4 headset.

“That’s right. My headset,” he said to his viewers, “for Project Mirage Online, is on the way right now. And you guys get front-row seats. This has been something I’ve been looking forward to for years. Years, you guys.” He took a wistful look at the card before looking at chat again. Nearly five hundred viewers—the most he’d ever had. He was actually tearing up a little. “It really wouldn’t have been possible without your support. If you’ve just started watching or if you’ve been here since the beginning, thank you. I really mean it.”

Already his chat was making tired jokes about Project Mirage Online being the “Shadow Spirits” of virtual reality MMOs. Rian sighed, shaking his head at chat. Mirage was a game that was sure to be revolutionary, but that was only because of the technology involved. He doubted the game would be as brutal in difficulty, especially for an MMORPG, where all kinds of players would come together.

Mirage wasn’t the first of its kind—and it wasn’t Rian’s first VRMMORPG, either—but the moment it was unveiled was when everyone had collectively known: this was it. The first game to solve the issue that had plagued the genre since its creation. Like most new mediums, the first few games of any genre always had shortcomings: buggy programming, lackluster AI. But most of all, what kept multi-player VR games from attaining the heights that everyone expected of them was simply one thing.

Lag.

Since the debut of VRMMORPGs back in 2032, nothing had managed to—convincingly—create the feeling of being in another world. As virtual reality games had become more realistic and in-depth, they required faster Internet connections and tremendous amounts of computing power. Simulating a universe wasn’t cheap, and keeping the virtual world consistent and low latency between players was impossible with standard tech. Even the slightest bit of delay meant ruined immersion for players and, at worst, transformed the game into an unplayable mess, with players de-syncing and lagging and generally blaming each other for attempting to play the game on their toaster.

When it came down to it, the speed of light simply wasn’t fast enough.

And then the breakthrough happened. Quantum computing had come to the mainstream. Despite rumors to the contrary, it was true: at the heart of the servers running Project Mirage Online was a fully operational quantum computer. Working in tandem with Reflect System’s proprietary software, the Multi-Instance Reality Alternation Game Engine, it was sure to change the landscape of gaming forever.

Full-body immersion via headsets. Nearly perfect 1:1 control of a character, solely with the player’s mind. Zero lag, regardless of where the players were located. It was every online gamer’s dream come true.

Rian checked the time on his phone. The headset delivery was scheduled for noon. In about ten minutes, the drone and its package would be on his doorstep.

He nearly jumped as his phone started ringing in his hand. He quickly silenced it, then thanked his viewers and started to run some ads for his channel, switching off his camera and microphone.

Mom was calling.

When he picked up, a slightly gravelly voice answered, “Rian?”

“Yeah, mom?”

“Congrats on the run! I was cheering you on and everything.”

He chuckled, thankful that she couldn’t see him blush. “Thanks. Hey, I think I’m making enough to cover the rent now. I should be breaking even thanks to that run.”

“Oh, don’t worry about it. You deserve it, Rian. I can keep paying it, no problem. You keep doing your thing.” In the background he could hear one of the nurses talking. “You’ve come such a long way,” his mom continued. “I never thought you’d be the kind of person to put yourself out there like that.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Better, for now,” she said. “Isn’t that new game coming out today?”

“Yeah, I just—” His voice cracked, and another notification buzzed his phone point-blank at his ear, startling him again. He swiped to unlock and read.

ATTN: Rian Karasawa, your MIRROR-XF4 delivery has failed. Please stand by for drop-off.

What the hell? The delivery had failed? He opened up the message, expecting it to be some kind of prank. There was nothing else in the notification, nothing specifying what had happened. But it was signed by Reflect Systems and everything.

“Is something wrong?” his mom said.

“No, it’s—let me call you back. Delivery’s being wonky.”

“Oh, all right. Love you, Rian.”

“Love you too.”

He ended the call and stared at the notification.

And his luck had been going so well today, too. Whatever. The drone carrying the headset was probably stuck on a tree or something. He was supposed to wait now for the delivery team to send someone out to recover the drone. That person would then deliver the package on foot, the old-fashioned way.

Screw that. He wasn’t gonna sit around and wait all day. Mirage’s servers went live in four hours, and there was no telling how long it would take for the recovery team to get the headset to him. He was going to be among the first inside the game, to get an early start against everyone else as they discovered the game’s unique mechanics and raced for the level cap. And he was going to stream himself doing it, pulling potentially tens of thousands of viewers as they flooded in to get a look at Mirage.

He opened the third-party tracking app on his phone, which displayed a map of the streets zoomed out from his apartment until a faint, pinging dot appeared: the delivery drone’s location, pre-loaded from the last time he’d checked. The app he was using wasn’t technically legal, but neither was it technically illegal—the danger of stolen packages and all that. For a thousand-dollar headset, he’d taken as many precautions as he could, just in case. And now one of those cases had come true.

The drone and its headset package had crashed only a short trip away. If he was lucky with the bus schedule, it was an hour, tops. He’d have plenty of time.

Standing up, he typed BRB into his channel’s chatroom. He slipped on his shoes and jacket and headed outside into the gently falling snow.