Stellar Arms

Earth 2071/ SA 1504

Location: Unknown

Where am I? I think as I try to look around me all I see is darkness. It slowly resolved into a room with gray almost concrete walls and a window on the right displaying a woodland scene with a flowing waterfall and creek through the woods. A nice wooden desk and two chairs materialized out of nowhere and then some carpet and lighting. Before I could panic, a woman in her 40s appeared in the chair on the other side of the desk. She seemed just as surprised to see me as I was to see her.

 “Mr. Davenport I wasn’t expecting you to be awake already” she said slightly flustered then quickly collected herself. “My name is doctor Oliva Haloson and I am your primary care provider. Please have a seat” I start to get a bad feeling at the words ``primary care” provider but there isn’t much I can do but follow along and figure out what was going on. So with that in mind I take the seat on my side of the desk “Mr. Davenport I need to ask you a few questions first. What year is it?” I realize this is a cognitive test having some basic first aid training and having done Search and Rescue a decade ago in my teenage years. “It's 2071, the president is Mr. James Tark and '' I pause here looking around “and I don't actually know where I am but due to things randomly appearing I would say a VR environment?”  

Medical VR environments had been around for about a decade allowing injured or dying  to talk with people either far away or friends and family when unable to talk IRL (in Real Life).” Very good Mr. Davenport you appear to have all the basics down” Dr. Haloson said with a small indulgent smile. “now please tell me what is the last thing you remember?” I thought about it for a few minutes then started slowly. “I was at Pax west. They had just brought out Armstrong Industries new emersion pods that are custom built to work with Stellar Arms new life Update allowing players to experience the game world in full detail eat, sleep, fight etc. They had just gotten more pods for the one hour demos because of the demand.

 I got into one of the ones they had brought out of the back. I logged into my account and was just out poking around in my little assault corvette when we got a distress call. It was a player owned transport under attack by a Pirate Frigate, I still had 30 minutes left on my demo timer so I comm’d my willingness to help, now the Assault Corvette isn’t designed to do a straight up fight especially not against a Frigate ship. It's basically a enlarged  dropship with a bunch of Anti fighter lasers and a few anti Corvette torpedo’s and a lot of angry trigger pulling marines, it is normally used in the a fleet battle to secure already damaged enemy vessels with enough firepower to keep fighters off of it, or as a heavy equipment lander. Luckily, The transport freighter had an EMP mine but the Pirate was too close to drop it without knocking his own ship out too. He was debating doing it anyway and hoping he could restart his ship before the Pirates rebooted theirs, so he set it off as my ship was closing but still out of the effect range, I then docked to one of the Frigate airlock and we boarded the Frigate leaving some of the crew to defend the far side of the airlock while we took the ship we had just captured the Frigate’s bridge and Comm’d the Freighter to have a safe journey as it rebooted when …when … something happened?”

 I paused, confused. I remembered everything up to signing off with the other player and being excited about getting a Frigate for a low level casual player like me. It was a huge win then nothing until this room. Dr. Haloson gave me a sympathetic look. “Mr. Davenport there was an accident at the event your machine suffered a power surge that effectively rendered you unable to respond to stimuli and left you in what most would call a comatose state. Due to the fact you were actively in game at the time on a machine set to demo mode it was conducting a full brain scan every five seconds, that combined with the emergency life saving measures the pod took as well as the specially trained medics on site who knew not to remove you from the pod until you could be treated. All combined to being fully mentally functioning but physically unable to survive without medical assistance and in a coma. My court ordered job is to make sure you are mentally capable of making some important decisions about your life.”

 I was floored. I was in a coma? I was pretty much died? Oh god what about my parents and job? How was I going to afford this? What was my life going to be like in this small room for years? I began to panic as all these thoughts raced around in my head. “ Mr. Davenport it's going to be ok, you appear to be fully cognizant and therefore legally of sound mind. There have been some developments in the two weeks we have taken to get this all set up and you stabilized. I will let the Judge and lawyers talk to you about all this but I know at the very least you are medically covered for the rest of your life so you can at least not worry about that.

 Now do you need sometime or do you want me to authorize the legal teams to join your server” my Panic steadied hearing that at the very least I wasn’t going to be a burden on my family and I didn’t have to worry about medical bills now I just wanted to figure out what came next and to talk my family ” can I call my parents first? I’m sure they are worried.”

 Dr. Haloson nodded “ of course, just ask the system to call them your contacts have been uploaded to your pod that runs this environment” I nodded realizing this room was like the landing screen on the home VR pods I had used on occasion “ system call Mom” the phone picked up on the first ring. “ Al, is that you, dear, are you ok?” I could hear her holding back tears. `` yeah mom it's me I’m ok well, as well as I can be” I could hear the relief in her voice when she responded. “ That's great honey, Jim come here dear, Alvin is on the phone.”

 I talked with my parents for a good 20 minutes reassuring them I was still me and still remembered them and loved them and all those other things parents worried about especially when their children were  hurt. I hung up with a promise to call them back once all the legal stuff was worked out. They let me know that they had hired a lawyer for me, a friend from the Church I hadn’t been to Church in a few years because I worked on weekends most weeks. She reminded me to make sure he was at any important legal discussions. 

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I looked over at the doctor and said “ok I’m ready” she nodded “ good luck Mr. Davenport you have a 24 hour medical staff if you need anything just tell the system you need medical assistance and someone will contact you and check on your physical body. And with a handshake the doctor disappeared.

 Note to self make a landing room. A landing room was a designated spot for arrivals to someone’s private server like a front door for a house. While you could leave or arrive through the back door which was disappearing or appearing like the doctor did, it was odd. I was pondering how to design my room to avoid thinking about any of the big stuff. When three men appeared around the desk it morphed after a moment to a table. My end of the table had two chairs now. the far end had one and one split the difference between the two. I recognized two of the three men. I stood and shook the man who appeared next to me.  '' Mr. Jone’s nice to see you again, how is the family.” Mr. Jones was a regular at my parents' church and must be the lawyer they had hired “ good Mr. Davenport, I am glad to see you are… well you” he finished a little awkwardly. “ yes this is a little jarring but I'm glad to be alive” I had calmed down quite a bit after talking to my parents.

I looked around at the other two men in the room, the man in the middle was wearing a classic judges robes “ Mr. Davenport, I am Judge Timothy O'Neil. I am handling your case due to the uniqueness of your situation. We have quasi civil and legal case. As I have handled both in the past I was selected to oversee this case.” Legal and civil that was odd, I could see that I had a civil case against Armstrong but why legal? That was answered shortly by the last man in the room “ hello Mr. Davenport I regret we are meeting under these circumstances my name is Travis Armstrong owner and CEO of Armstrong Industries. On behalf of myself and the Company we apologize for the events leading up to this situation and we take full and complete responsibility for the events that have transpired ". Of course I recognized Mr. Armstrong; he was this era's Gates or Musk.

 A top gamer who used the prize money from tournaments to launch his own game company Graphical Arts the creator of Stellar Arms then he launched the umbrella company Armstrong Industries to make gaming gear to keep up with his games. “What exactly happened?” I asked looking between Mr. Armstrong and the Judge. The Judge cleared his throat and answered “ criminal negligence, this fault in engineering that caused your injuries is a known flaw that happens in about one in a thousand pods off the automatic assembler. Because of this and due to time constraints to keep up with demand Armstrong Industries elected to let the line produce the pods and pull any with the fault. Mr. Armstrong can explain further”.

 Travis nodded to the judge. “We have a simple test that catch’s one hundred percent of faulty pods. Those pods are pulled from the line, the parts manually swapped out for replacements, another test run to verify the fix and then the pods are returned to the assembly line. One of the pods, the one you were in repeatedly failed the fault check test. This means there was a secondary problem. The proper procedure was of course to pull the pod for further study. One of our engineers decided that the indicator must be malfunctioning and was running late getting off so tagged the pod as approved manually and left for the day instead of solving the error or informing the next shift and leaving the pod off the line.” 

The anger at the man's stupidity was clear to see on Travis Armstrong’s face. “ This engineer was trained on the fact that these faults were a serious issue and yet he sent a known defective product out anyway.” The judge took over explaining “ Armstrong Industries worked with investigators to run down how this hazardous situation occurred. The engineer has been arrested and the trial should begin shortly. It is unlikely you will be called as a witness  but it could happen.” The judge checked a privacy blocked screen that probably had his notes. I sat there thinking sure I was mad but none of these people, even Mr. Armstrong was at fault in my opinion. 

Sure Armstrong Industries hired a person who willfully sent out an unsafe product but as I read over the report on a screen in front of me and as the explanations had been given I saw Armstrong was already paying for my ongoing medical and had legally agreed to do so and already transferred to me 10,000 dollars before any settlement could be discussed to cover any fees I may have. before then specifically including if I wanted to use the money to hire a lawyer to sue them! I couldn’t really ask them to have responded in any better way once they figured out what had happened.

 The judge seemed to get his notes in order and began to speak again “ so Armstrong services have offered a few options for settlement including monetary and service based remunerations.” My Lawyer, the judge and Mr. Armstrong went back and forth for a while but it was all mostly clarifying offers which came down to two options, one enough money that when my parents retired they would have enough to take care of them for the rest of their life’s. This money also included enough to have a private medical team look after me and keep me and my pod well taken care of.

 Or option two all of the above but instead of on going payments to cover a medical team Armstrong would bring me in house to join their long term immersion test program it included a generous life insurance policy incase anything happened to me during the trial but instead of living my life in this medical pod I would be transferred to a pod and facility maintained by Armstrong. I would get paid like an employee play tester but I was free to do what I wanted. I would get three months early access to the New Life Update where I would essentially live the game and just need to report any bugs I see so when general players joined in three months or a year in game time. thanks to the 1:4 time ratio in game meaning one day on the outside was four days in the game. 

I thought about it but it didn’t take much time to decide that living in a small room doing random things to fight boredom until someone either found a cure for my brain and bodies trauma or I eventually died was not what I wanted to do. “I will take option number two please” Mr. Armstrong smiled at me. It was an excited schoolboy smile “excellent! Welcome to Armstrong Industries, now when we finish up here you can signal your ready, things should go dark and the next thing you know you should be waking up and ready to be loaded in!”

It went exactly as he said part of the settlement was obviously signing paperwork and a NDA about the accident's cause. I didn’t really mind signing not only did I now work for the company and therefor didn’t want the story out to damage its reputation but Travis had already shown me that the companies new system required two engineers and a facility manager to sign off on any fault bypasses in the future, and any bypassed pods would have to pass an auto check on a separate line before final approval. So they fixed the problem  and were doing the morally and legally right steps, I felt this was enough for me. I signed all the contracts and legal agreements and we all shook hands then I sat down, took a deep breath and hit a big green ready button and my world went dark.