“Holy crap!” Neville hissed. She turned to Marcus. “We’re in Unobtainium 6!”

“Ghezuntight!” Abbot called over.

“...and is that supposed to mean something to us? What is Unobtainium 6, and why does it have anything to do with us?” Marcus asked.

“Unobtainium 6 was supposed to be the next-next-gen VR system for MMO gaming. Then it suddenly disappeared and half the development team went to work on some project that never saw the light of day. Development hell was the rumour. Stuck in committee. Now I’m guessing that was never true and they’ve all been working a few steps ahead of what we’ve been seeing in The Sandbox.” Neville shook her head. “So much makes sense now.”

“Maybe to you, but beyond using English, none of that made sense.”

Look, the army has been running video games as recruiting and training tools for decades, so it only makes sense that they would have people on the VR side of the house.”

“Still waiting for how this is relevant to us...” Marcus cocked an eyebrow at her.

“Don’t you get it? This isn’t some clunky government sim program, this is the most advanced VR interface developed so far. Have any of you played the army sim ‘Spec Ops Force Multiplier’?”

Several nods answered her question.

“The public side of that game that you play in uses Unobtainium 4 as its AR/VR engine, and we’re using...or at least we thought we were using, Unobtainium 5 for The Sandbox and The Sim to keep developing the next levels of interactivity for military training. Elite public players get special invitations into The Sandbox to help develop the interface and as a reward for putting in the hours. It’s all very hush-hush and they seem to take it seriously.”

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

“But it looks like The Sim is really a dumbed down skin over Unob *6*. It looks like The Sandbox, and it runs like Unob 5, but it’s really the interface that is filtering what we see and can do. That’s why the Umpire Gear is so capable...and I bet even that is only scratching the surface of what we can do in here.”

“So, can you get us big stompy robots?” Abbott piped up.

“With this gear, I doubt it.” Marcus waved at her rig. “But if I can link to the system properly...likely from outside, I can do a heck of a lot more than what I’m limited to in here.”

“Sweet!” Abbott flashed a wicked smile.

“But what can you do for us in here? Now.” Marcus asked.

“It’ll need some baselines to get you some real improvements, but for now...check your HUDs.”

They all flipped down their HUD units.

“Whoa! What the hell?”

It was like switching from the old Standard Resolution to 4k. Everything was clear and sharp. New information started popping up over everything they looked at. Names, weapons stats, unit affiliations.

“That’s hi-res. That’s just a taste of what Unob 6 is capable of. I can’t get the entire display to shift for large groups, but I can get, I’m guessing here, up to twenty photorealistic displays. If it’s too much, I can start filtering, but it already knew our fire-teams, and recognises our weapon load-outs.”

“No, no, this is good for now. More information is usually better. There’s an overload point, but I don’t think we’re there yet.” Marcus answered.