With no one paying much attention, Robin took the opportunity to observe the crowd and make some estimations. Everyone she could see appeared to be low-level; not that she could view their stats to confirm, but it looked that way from their gear. In The Golden Age, characters started off looking mostly normal — ordinary body types wearing street clothes like her hoodie, with only their masks or similar accessories to designate them as heroes. Over time, they would gradually build up their physical abilities and gear until the high-level players looked like they’d just stepped out of a comic book.
So, glancing around at a crowd full of t-shirts and low-budget cosplays, she felt confident in guessing that most people here were under level 30. Golden Ratio Park was the starting spawn point for new players, and where those characters inevitably returned each time they logged in. The so-called “Disaster” must have called everyone “home” in the process of bringing them here.
It took about twenty minutes but, eventually, things started to calm down. When the people yelling got no response, the crowd began to disperse, some to search for answers from the established channels and others to group up with friends. Though a few — a hundred, at least — stayed where they were, staring up at the statue or the blimp or the empty sky as they began to process their new reality.
The cheerleader girl got the cry out of her system and straightened up, dabbing the last tears from her eyes. “God. I’m sorry, I’m such a mess.”
“It’s fine.” Robin offered what she hoped was an understanding smile. “Anyone would be freaked out.”
“You’re not.”
“I’m freaking out on the inside.”
That wasn’t true. Robin had always been the sort to find focus in chaos and acceptance in sudden change. Once, in high school, a lab partner had accidentally started a trashcan fire while their teacher was out of the room. As their classmates panicked, Robin simply fetched the fire extinguisher. Didn’t even run.
It was like that now: her thoughts silent save for what she needed, her focus narrowing on the task at hand. She was here. She couldn’t change that, yet. So, what could she do?
She took out her phone again. “You should probably find your friends. People aught to stick together at times like this.”
Cheerleader girl gave a bitter chuckle. “What friends? I don’t know anyone who plays this game. I barely got through the tutorial.”
Robin opened an app labeled Messages to find herself in a similar position. She’d done more than the tutorial but her character was still only level 3 and she’d been trying to stay under the radar. So, no parties, no friends. Still, the app’s user interface was familiar. It looked just like the social hub from the game, with space for a friend’s list, party requests and private messaging.
“What’s your name?”
Robin startled, having forgotten that she wasn’t alone. The cheerleader didn’t seem offended.
“I’m Tisha. In real life, I mean. And you?”
“…Robin.”
“Wow. I thought the system didn’t allow users to register with copyrighted names. Did you, like, use a one and a zero or…?”
“No!” Robin sputtered. “It’s not my handle, it’s my real…” She bit her lip, buying a moment to turn the words over in her mind until they sounded more natural. “It’s my name. Robin Sinclair.”
“Oh! Sorry.” Tisha ducked her head in embarrassment. An awkward silence stretched between them. “…are you going to call your friends?”
“I don’t have any.”
“Then maybe we should stick together. That’s bound to be safer than wandering around on our own, right?”
“Maybe…”
Robin considered the offer. She didn’t object to teaming up with other players; hell, it was only to be expected in an online game. She’d been running solo on this character, but that had been Before. The situation Now was very different. Moreover, unlike her, Tisha Madison seemed a genuine newbie. She and people like her would no doubt have the hardest time adjusting in the days to come.
Her mind made up, Robin rolled to her feet and offered Tisha a hand up. “Come on. I’ve got some tests I want to try.”
----------------------------------------
At the southern end of Golden Ratio Park stood the International Assembly Tower, a large building situated dead-center on one equilateral side so that the open green-space seemed to be its front lawn. While its lower stories could have been a museum, complete with a sprawling classical facade and a towering half-dome, its higher levels thinned into a skyscraper that stretched for a hundred floors. Though it couldn’t be seen now, the top of the tower contained two rotating lights, each bright enough to cut through even the stormiest night. When lit, these watchful beams could be seen from any point in the shining Golden City.
Naturally, once you knew to look for it against the skyline, such a monument was visible from anywhere in the park. Robin started a beeline for it, her mind whirring with information to be collected and possibilities to explore, only for to be brought up short when her foot jammed awkwardly into the ground and sent her stumbling. She managed, after a few careening steps, to catch herself before she could face-plant, then stood on the grass and glared down at her own clumsy feet.
“What’s wrong?” asked Tisha, who was easily able to keep up with her longer legs. “You look mad at your shoes.”
“My character’s shorter than me. Or, the real-world me.” Robin rolled up onto the balls of her feet and bounced in place, trying to get a handle on her new center of gravity. “Feels weird.”
“So you’re on the tall side!” Tisha nodded with a confident grin, like she was a private eye unraveling a tricky case. “Only tall people choose to be short in games.”
That didn’t ring entirely true, but Robin wasn’t sure enough to say so. Instead, she let the subject drop and steered them towards the nearest sidewalk. Nice, flat concrete proved much easier to get her bearings on, and soon enough they reached the Assembly Tower Plaza, where a half-dozen sidewalks convened to form a meeting area full of benches and tables.
The Tower doors were wide open, as usual, and already swarmed with players accessing the Assembly databases and demanding answers from some frazzled NPCs. Others had split up into small groups and claimed tables or benches, using the central plaza as a meeting location.
Robin stopped at the plaza’s edge and peered around, searching for a familiar figure in the sea of masked faces. When she didn’t find him, she turned to Tisha. “When this was a game, you’d often see a man in a pinstripe suit around here. He’d be on his hands and knees, searching the sidewalk. Can you see him?”
“Um, let’s see…oh! There he is, over there!”
She pointed. Robin followed the path of her finger to the quiet corner away from the building where she knew the man to appear, but saw nothing. She hummed thoughtfully, then pulled out her phone. “Party up with me.”
“Eh?”
“I can’t see him. I already did his quest, and he never appears to the same character twice. So I can only see him if we’re in the same party.”
“Oh, okay. But how?”
“Check your phone.”
Tisha patted down her outfit in search of pockets until she found a fanny pack hanging off her hip. When she reached inside, her hand went deeper than the bag looked, which confirmed in Robin’s mind that they were magic or some kind of tech that could hold a character’s entire inventory. The phone Tisha drew out was, like Robin’s, already locked in a case, though hers was a dark purple instead of red.
“This isn’t mine,” she muttered, frowning at the home screen.
“It is now. Check the apps. I think they’re here to replace the HUD menus.”
In a game, the “head-up display” or HUD menus would appear overlaid with what the players saw as their characters moved through the world. It provided information on their fellows players, the nearby NPCs, the locations they were traveling through and the quests that were available. It’d been the one-stop shop for a player’s friends list, quests, mini-maps, clocks and all the menus needed to find adventure and fight evil. But try as she might, Robin couldn’t make that familiar display appear outside her mind’s eye.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
Instead, it seemed most of its functions had been reassigned to phone apps with names like Analyzer, Messages and Map. The most important-looking one was labeled IAH ID, with a golden icon featuring the Assembly’s lighthouse-shaped logo; but Tisha ignored that for now and instead opened the messenger. Robin did the same. As expected, she found an option under her friend’s list to add the nearby player Tisha Madison.
“Try adding me to your friend’s list.”
Tisha lit up. “You want to be my friend?”
Robin flushed and shrugged. “People should stick together.”
Tisha beamed, happily scrolling through menus to make her selection. A friend request popped up on Robin’s screen and was approved just as fast, followed by the options to form an official “mission team,” which was the in-universe term for a player party.
Once the invited was accepted, Robin glanced once more into the distant corner. Now, where there had be nothing before, she saw a broad-shouldered man on his hands and knees, searching the sidewalks with his splayed palms. He wore a blue pinstripe business suit witch matching old-fashioned fedora, and didn’t seem to notice his tie getting gradually ruined by contact with the dirt.
“So he really is here,” she muttered, half to herself. She caught Tisha’s curious glance, but opted instead to make a bee-line for the man in the suit. “Excuse me.”
He didn’t react. Didn’t even look up at her. He simply continued his pattern of searching.
Robin closed the distance between them and loudly cleared her throat. “Are you looking for something? I could help you.”
No answer.
“Sir?”
She touched his shoulder. The man paused for only a second, then shook off her hand and kept right on searching.
Robin backed off until she felt Tisha’s presence return to her side. “What’s wrong with him?” the girl in purple asked, sounding concerned.
“Nothing. At least, I don’t think so. He’s not a full NPC. More like an easter egg.”
Still, Robin didn’t take her eyes off the quest-giver. Had the news broadcast and Beacon’s announcement been a scripted event, too? Or was there more to the people in this world than just lines of code?
She gestured Tisha forward. “You try. He’s waiting for you.”
Tisha hesitated, uncertain, but only for a moment. Then she approached the searching man with bouncy steps and another of those blinding grins.
“Ahem. Excuse me, sir. Can I help you?”
At that, the man stopped his searching and turned a small, relieved smile Tisha’s way. “Kind of you to stop. I’m afraid I’ve lost my glasses. They must be somewhere around here. Could you help me look?”
“Yes!” said Tisha, too loud and too eager. Her posture stiffened and her eyes darted around as she scrambled to cover up her gaffe. “Sure, I mean, of course I will. I’d be happy to—”
Her phone pinged. Over her shoulder, Robin caught a glimpse of the push notification from an app called Help Wanted, announcing that Tisha had accepted the mission called Blind Without ‘Em.
For his part, the searching man didn’t react at all to Tisha’s awkwardness. His next lines were right on cue. “They fell off when I slipped. They can’t have gone far.”
He went back to searching. Tisha’s eyes darted from him to her phone and back before settling on Robin with a confused shrug. “So, I just find his glasses?”
“Yup. Though it’s not going to be that simple.” In spite of herself, Robin smirked. She pointed to a clump of nearby trees. “Look over there.”
In the shade of the tiny copse, a dozen bright-eyed and bushy-tailed squirrels darted about, tossing a pair of horn-rimmed glasses back and forth like a game. The spectacles barely had time to hit the grass before another of the furry beasts snatching them in their sharp teeth and darted in leaping bounds, only to get tired or caught by a playmate and toss them away to be picked up by the next player.
“You’re joking.”
“Nope.” Robin backed off, waving Tisha towards the animals in question. “Have fun.”
She fell back, giving Tisha the space to steel her nerves, smooth out her skirt, and charge the squirrels, who scattered at her approach. She turned on a dime — good reflexes — and darted after the one with the glasses, who dodged her grasping hands and darted up a nearby tree. It climbed a branch right over Tisha’s head, taunting her with the dangling glasses, before throwing its head and tossing the object to its playmate, who likewise ran.
Robin settled on a nearby bench to watch with undisguised amusement. It was always fun to see newbies tackle Blind Without ‘Em. It was a purely optional quest, a reward for new players who curious about their surroundings, but it also served as an extra tutorial, of sorts, for how The Golden Age was played.
Sure, you could chase the squirrels down and snatch the glasses from their tiny maws. Or you could buy or steal food from the nearby nut vendor and use that to befriend the squirrels or lure them into a trap. Or you could patiently follow the primary culprit to its tree, wait for it to leave without the glasses in hand, and climb the tree to take them back. There were dozens of possibilities, and some veteran players on their fourth or fifth character made a game out of finding the most unusual ways to do it.
In short, the mission was a low-key introduction to one of the game’s most iconic features: the Personality system.
While playing the game, every action a character took, every quest they accepted and every choice they made along the way was recorded by the system. Said system then drew on that data every time a character leveled up, automatically distributing Skill and Attribute points in a way that suited the character’s methods. So, a character who solved all their problems with skill and speed would be given a build that prioritized Agility, while one who relied on guile and gadgets tended to develop high Intellect and a Hacking skill. And since characters’ Skills and Attributes were tied to the generation of Powers, the distribution of points was the single most important factor in determining what kind of hero the player character would be.
Of course, the system could be manipulated. A player who knew what they were doing could commit to a certain kind of role-play, thus increasing their chances of generating a particular suite of superpowers. But for the vast majority of players who weren’t hard-core gamers or dedicated role-players, the Personality system was a delightful novelty. Like an online quiz with tangible rewards.
So, watching a new player interact with the one quest designed to place that game aspect as front-and-center as possible could grant a lot insight into their personal character; but that wasn’t the only data point to be gathered here. As Tisha stumbled her third attempted snatch and tumbled head-over-heels into the grass, Robin took out her phone and selected the app labeled Analyzer.
The I.A.H. logo briefly flashed across the screen before giving way to a camera view. Robin centered Tisha in the middle of the frame and could barely adjust the focus before information started to pop up, layered over the camera’s view the way the U.I. displays had been in the game.
Because they were on one another’s Friends list, pointing the app at Tisha brought up the name Tisha Madison alongside her character level (2), the green bar indicating her health and, in smaller font, the letters TM45. The latter would be Tisha’s screen-name, the original account handle under which she’d registered her game. The former was her character’s name, input at character creation. Naming and modeling your first character after yourself was commonplace here, especially among those looking to play with the Personality system.
Meanwhile, turning the app on the surrounding crowd listed almost every character as “Level 6 Hero,” “Level 8 Hero,” “Level 5 Hero,” and so on.
In this world, a character’s name represented their civilian identity, while heroic code-names were tied to a separate system that only came into play after Level 10. In other words, the Analyzer was providing all of the information about her fellow players that otherwise would have been part of the head’s-up display in the game.
Robin panned the camera through the crowd, contemplating how much this was bound to increase the value of techno-visors and eye-mounted scanners, when the light sound of singing suddenly reached her ears. It seemed so out-of-place among the doom and gloom of downtrodden players that it took a moment for her to place the voice as Tisha’s.
“Gray squirrel, gray squirrel,
Swish your bushy tail.
Gray squirrel, gray squirrel,
Swish your bushy tail…”
Back in the grass, Tisha had settled onto her knees and into a childish little dance that involved curling her hands under her chin and wiggling her rear-end. And the squirrels were responding. The leader, a big brown fellow the size of a small cat, was now wearing the glasses like a cheeky cartoon character but was nonetheless poised in front of Tisha, mimicking her movements and dancing along with the song.
As other nearby players began to take notice, his fellow squirrels likewise lined up behind him and joined in, performing an amusing, choreographed routine to Tisha’s simple acapella tune. Though a few players started snickering, Tisha just sang louder.
“Wrinkle up your funny nose,
Put it down between your toes!
Gray squirrel, gray squirrel,
Swish your bushy tail.”
She repeated the chorus and verse all the way through a second time, with all thirteen squirrels following her every move. When she finished, the back-up line threw up their tiny hands with chittering cheers. The leader ran to Tisha and offered up the glasses, which she took.
“Thank you.”
The squirrels chattered back and dispersed, disappearing into their holes and whatever digital existence they occupied. Tisha trotted back to Robin’s bench with glasses in hand and a huge grin on her face. Robin pocketed her phone and rose to meet her.
“How did you know that would work?”
Tisha ducked her head. Her skin was too dark to flush, but Robin could tell that she was blushing.
“I didn’t,” she admitted with a small laugh. “I, ah, was only singing to get into the squirrels’ heads. ‘Cause see, I thought, if I could think like a squirrel, then I’d be able to predict where they’d go next. But then they all lined up so I kept singing and…”
She shrugged adorably. Affection swelled in Robin’s chest, before her common sense kicked in and checked the feeling hard. She barely knew the girl. And Tisha knew nothing about her.
They returned to the man in the suit, who stopped looking and straighted to his full height as Tisha approached. Robin’s tiny character model had to crane her neck to look him in the eye.
“Thank you, miss,” he said, as Tisha held the glasses out to him. “You did very well. I see a bright future ahead for you.”
It was the standard scripted response. The warm words only changed if a player hurt the squirrels or stole from the nut vendor, to which the man in blue would give a warning about great power and greater responsibility.
Instead of taking the glasses, he folded Tisha’s fingers back over them and pushed them towards her chest. “Keep them. You’ll need it more than I do.” He winked. “Up, up and away.”
He disappeared. His movement blur shot straight up, faster than the eye could blink. Then, a red and blue streak cut across the clearing sky.
Tisha gawked at it, then whirled on Robin. “Wait. Was that…?”
“Yeeee-up.” Hands in her pockets, Robin grinned up at the fading color. “Or, that’s what they’re implying. Like I said: he’s an Easter egg.”
“Wow.”
They fell to silence, standing side by side, and watched the red streak until it finally faded away.