Eshan was talking to Penny. His low, calming voice was a stream of syllables and sound she couldn’t quite process.

No. She thought. This wasn’t happening. How was this happening?

“I don’t get how you don’t already know about this,” Eshan said. “It’s been everywhere.”

“I don’t follow Oroborus news,” Penny said, which wasn’t entirely true. She didn’t just not follow it, she had a block on her news apps so any news containing the keywords either Oroborus or Edward Prince just didn’t show up. Did that mean she lived a less informed life? Yes. Absolutely. But she’d had the block since she was a teenager. It’d been the only way to stay sane.

“So you know absolutely nothing about Astrea,” Eshan said.

“Yes.” Penny’s voice sounded far away to her own ears, like she was underwater. “It’s a new game?”

“It’s a new world,” Eshan said. “A fully immersive VRMMORPG.”

Penny felt like she was falling.

Eshan kept talking.

Penny just stared at the logo. You could only know it was a snake if you looked hard. The logo itself was more like a designer had taken a brush in Illustrator and drawn a circle and then given up just as he got to the end. The bits that made it a snake were like clues, the white dot for an eye, the flick of its tail. The longer she stared it, the more nauseous she felt.

The thing was, she couldn’t blame Prince entirely for the impact he’d had on her life. Some of the fault was hers, and that maybe was the worst part of all.

“From the last trailer, it really looks like the NPCS passed the Turing test.” Eshan’s dark hair was wild from the wind, and his pupils dilated.

“I think Chat GPT passed the Turing Test, but it’s still a bunch of non-sentient code.”

Eshan frowned. “What am I missing here? Why aren't you excited? You love this stuff.”

Penny opened her mouth searching for words, but her throat felt like it was closing up.

She couldn’t tell him the truth.

In the six years she’d known Eshan, she’d told him exactly zero about her high school years. They were friends who played Overwatch, and the occasional round of Diplomacy if they could get a big enough group together. They didn't go out for mani-pedis and talk about their traumas, and even if they did Penny probably still wouldn't have told him about the Academy.

She already saw the way he looked at her sometimes, with her mismatched socks and tendency to arrive late, as if she was a walking mess. If he knew how much of her current situation was her own fault he’d lose what little respect he had left for her. Eshan would've never been as stupid as she was.

He would've read the contract.

"I'm just not a huge fan.”

“You’re lying” Eshan said in that same, low, calm tone.

Penny felt a twist in the bottom of her stomach. As Eshan took a step closer, his scent washed over her, laundry detergent and expensive, leathery cologne. He was a good guy. In another world, where his family wouldn't have disowned him for being with a white girl, and she was capable of having functional romantic feelings, maybe they would’ve dated.

“I signed an NDA,” she said finally.

It wasn’t entirely a lie. She had signed an NDA, although that was really more about telling the press than telling a friend.

And even if she did tell the press, what could Prince do, sue her? She had no money left to take.

“You signed an NDA?” Eshan said. “About what?” Eshan ran his big hands through his thick black hair. “What are you talking about?"

“Okay.” Penny gritted her teeth. “Edward Prince is not a good person. He makes great video games, but he ruined my life.”

Eshan's face suddenly went very hard. “Did he do something? Did you meet him personally at a party and he…”

Penny scowled. “No, it’s not like that. He didn’t like sexually assault me."

Eshan relaxed. “Then what?"

“NDA,” Penny said.

Eshan crossed his arms. “Okay. Well, Ms. NDA..."Eshan took out two 3D printed tickets from his pocket, the looked like a boarding pass for an airline only they were made of pure metal. “I’m going to ruin the surprise, now I guess, but I’ve gotten us two tickets to beta test Astrea. Cards on the table, I think this is going to be an amazing new fantasy world that we will have a chance to have first access to. It’s a world our actions as the first beta-testers will help shape. But— ” he held up the tickets. “But…” Eshan trailed off. “You’re looking at me like I just wrote you a death threat in Comic Sans.”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

“Comic Sans really isn't that bad of a font. Did you know people have improved reading comprehension when–”

"Quarters.”

“It’s complicated. Okay –” Penny swallowed, feeling like she sense the snake logo above her, lurking. “I just. I can’t play one of his games.”

Eshan's jaw tightened and she could feel the fabric of their friendship fraying.

“But,” Penny held up hand, “I’ll come with you to watch on two conditions.”

“Which are?”

“One. If there is a contract, you need to make sure you read it really carefully.”

“Who do you think you’re talking to? I did go to law school."

Penny grabbed at Eshan's coat, not sure of any other way to let out the desperation that was clawing inside her rib cage like a feral cat. "I mean really carefully, Eshan."

"I've read it already," he said gently. "It's okay. t’s all boilerplate, and actually if anything goes wrong with this tech, it leaves them super vulnerable to a lawsuit. Either they have a terrible legal team or Prince is the most arrogant man on the planet.”

“He is the most arrogant man on the planet.”

“And two?”

“If you get a bad feeling, if anything seems weird or off to you, you have to promise you won’t play.”

Eshan frowned. “You really can’t tell me what happened.”

Penny could. In some ways it would be easy. She had told the story to herself so many times, it was each word had been carved onto her heart.

Seven years ago, Edward Prince made nearly a billion dollars from Oroborus’s first game, Inkarus. He’d used that money to fund The Academy, a private school that admitted only the best and the brightest, tuition free, in hopes of turning out the leaders of tomorrow.

For two years, Penny had been one of those students. She’d studied voice with a Broadway star, Math with the man who had cracked Fermat’s Last Theorem, English with a best-selling fantasy novelist, Social Studies, from a retired member of Congress, military strategy from a four star General.

And she’d been good. Top of the class in English, History, and Languages, where she’d mastered French, Italian and German, along with Japanese. (She had steadfastly refused to learn Mandarin as the tonal element seemed too difficult. Spanish was also another weak point.)

Math and Science had given her some challenge, but she’d grinded hard on the books until she got solid B’s in even her weakest areas.

All that work was supposed to pay off when she graduated, at which point Prince promised free full-rides to whichever college accepted the students, (which for all graduates of the Academy was pretty much anywhere), along with a fifty thousand dollar bursary for living expenses, and choice of internships and connections with any fortune five-hundred company in the world.

Penny had all of that in the palm of her hand.

Then she’d gotten expelled, cut, along with the rest of the bottom of the quarter of the class.

The problem had been a class called Intersocial Dynamics.

That class had no homework or tests, just a series of team building challenges at the end of which everyone voted anonymously to distribute a set number of Leadership Points, based on who they thought had contributed the most to the team.

The funny thing was Penny had, objectively, contributed a lot to the team.

One time, they’d been split up into four groups and told to ferry a volleyball across a river. The other teams spent hours building bridges, all very proud of themselves for the structural soundness of their buildings. Penny, however, suggested that they simply swim the ball across – since there was no stipulation about the ball having to remain dry.

As a result her team won the challenge.

But since Penny hadn’t been the one to actually do the swimming – that had been a brawny boy named Akira, who everyone liked – she hadn’t gotten as much credit. In fact, later, everyone said it had been Akira’s idea. But Penny knew she had said it first. She knew.

Didn't she?

On another challenge, they’d been given a story by Ursula Le Guinn, that they were told had a twist ending, and as a team, they had to look at the clues and guess what it was. Every other team guessed that the twist was that the main character was a werewolf, but Penny, had known that would be much too obvious.

She’d told her team that the answer was obviously that the character was a wolf who turned into a human, a werehuman.

She’d been right, but it hadn’t mattered her team went with another girl’s answer, and did well enough. Later, everyone assumed that Penny must have cheated to have guessed the twist. Since her own suggestion had not just gotten the twist right, but the other little details correct too.

In in the end, it didn’t matter. In Intersocial Dynamics that she received a solid C-, and that, plus not receiving As in Math and Science had been just enough to put her percentile rank in the bottom quarter.

So when Prince did his culling, she was gone.

However, the worst part though was what happened after.

A clause had triggered in the contract (a contract she and her parents had not read nearly carefully enough) that stipulated she was now on the hook for two years worth of back tuition. It had been an amount of money she and her family couldn’t afford to pay, not without wiping out their savings, so they’d ended up doing just that.

Then her father had gotten cancer, and all those experimental treatments they’d been hoping to pay for?

Yeah, they couldn’t afford those.

So had Prince killed her father?

Not technically. But sometimes it felt close.

Other times, times she didn’t like to think about, it didn’t feel like Prince had killed her father at all, it felt like she had.

She should’ve known herself. She should’ve stayed where she belonged. She was not a Type A leaderlike person. She was a weirdo, an outsider. Hell, even after the Academy she still had only one friend.

"I can't," Penny said. "I just can't. But if those two rules work for you, I’ll come with you and support you however I can.”

Eshan looked at her through narrowed eyes for a moment, and then nodded. “Fine.”

Then together, they headed to the glass doors, which slid open silently. As they did, Penny swore she could feel the eye of the snake, boring a whole into her back.