Erin searched for "people stuck in VR".

The first hit was a sponsored one, naturally. Then there were a large number for forum posts, all of them functionally the same. People concerned about not being able to log out, and the same basic safety info quoted back - the headsets had tons of overrides, lots of monitoring, and there was a 12-hour hard lockout to keep anyone from accidentally starving themselves to death.

She tried several different permutations to no avail. This wasn't the angle she needed - it wasn't that he was stuck in the game - he'd been turned into the game.

What was that phrase from his email? "Gross misuse of biological assets?"

The phrase brought back a legal definition immediately. It was from a controversial bill that had gone through surrounding death row inmates.

There's a formula to determine who's in violation but...There's nothing in here that says you have to be on death row, or prison at all. The score from the number of living relations is multiplied by a value derived from your offenses and weighed against Higsian-Bonet score. It's got a pretty obvious hole in it- even if you have no offenses, if your score is high enough...

Higsian-Bonet was a metric of how well a person's brain interacted with the Silica Dendrites in VR tech. Most people scored in a fairly narrow range of normal, but there were outliers. She'd heard that one of the teams at Superreal entertainment was dedicated just to evening out the play experience between disparate brains. Without proper limitations, some people could warp the simulation in their favor - probably without even realizing it.

She opened a new tab and searched for "Highest Higsian-Bonet score recorded". It belonged to a woman in Indonesia. Erin ran the calculation in her head, and realized the woman could have a family of four, with both parents still alive, and she could still be charged with "gross misuse".

As she was backing out of the first article, she saw another article, stating that this same woman was missing.

There were demands for repeal of the bill, but the VR sector was lobbying hard to keep it in. So far, the legal review of it was scheduled for...

10 years from now.

She watched a video clip of a legislator trying to reassure people about the bill. He mispronounced the name as "Higgan Bosey", and quoted the average as some number that was a quarter of the real number. Ignorant or complicit? she wondered. It didn't even matter.

She sat back on her couch, placing her InfoTab down on her table so she couldn't see it anymore.

Was this really the world she lived in?

Her tablet started ringing. She sighed and picked it back up. Production Control. Right, she was on call for work this week. Her co-worker Gerard had briefed her on what to expect tonight.

Right, she would need to get upgraded access to perform a certain part of the update. A conversation popped in her head from a while back. She'd been out for drinks with some coworkers, and it had stuck in her head.

Dylan's cheeks were red from the whiskey drink he'd had. "I think it's hilarious when you're promoted to do manual shit! They send you that message like," he waved his arms menacingly, " 'Your actions are being monitored! Disallowed actions are subject to review.' Bwah! Very scary!" he laughs uproariously. "But they give you access to the place it's logged at. Read, write, update, delete. You can do whatever the fuck you want with it!"

Her heart rate sped up as she started contemplating a plan. There was nothing she could do about the system generated quest - it was completely internal to the engine. There was certainly nothing she could do to put Jonah back in his body either - she didn't even know if it still existed.

The one thing she could do was guide him through the world she had helped create, be at his side when no one else could. She had a good chunk of vacation saved up, and her boss had been pestering her to use it before she had too much to roll over.

She wasn't even sure she could face the thought of working right now anyway.

A few hours later she spawned into Vortex Reef. She'd created a new character on her own personal account, and assigned it the Race Id she'd gotten off Jonah. She also had recording turned on.

She had no idea what she would do with the footage, but she had to do something, anything.

It felt strange to swim through the ocean so naturally, but she also felt vulnerable. The metadata for editing existing characters was just too complex for her to mess with right now, so she had started at a default level 1.

Character progression was the most scrutinized part of the game, she knew. It would be too easy to get caught trying to power up either one of them, so they'd have to do things as legitimately as anyone else.

She had a plan for that though.