The door slammed shut behind us. The three of us walked briskly down a long, private hallway that led to the central building. It was floored with square slabs of white granite, and a four-inch strip of the same material formed the baseboard. The walls were seamless dark gray concrete, but they’d been textured like an oil canvas, with long brush strokes running in the direction of the hallway. Rectangular strips of white, LED lighting, each about a hand wide, were cut into and set flush with the wall and ceiling as if they were L-shaped cutouts to the sky. Brushed steel doors at regular intervals gave Robert and Sandra quick access to various parts of the Campus. It was all very expensive looking, and very much Robert’s aesthetic. The two of them walked side by side, ignoring me for the most part.

“Jesus, that was a shit show,” Robert said. “Once the press get a hold of this, we’ll be the next No Man’s Land.”

“No one’s saying that, Robert.”

“They will.”

“They won’t. We didn’t promise them something impossible.”

“The leaks—”

“Were rumors spread by disgruntled former employees.”

“There will be more,” Osmark said, balling his fists.

“They’ll know better, or they won’t work in tech again—not in this country.”

It sounded cold, but I got it. No Man’s Land was supposed to be an infinite procedurally-generated spaghetti western sandbox. It launched with a hype machine that outstripped its core mechanics, and it flopped, hard. I’d played it. It took the sandbox idea too far—too much to do, not enough reasons to do it—and ended up with a desert. The company, and the careers of the people who worked on the project, never recovered.

“What about the Board?” he asked.

Sandra didn’t have to look at her clipboard to answer. “Zwari, Itrom, and Roberts are on your side. Leavitt will say he told you so just to prove he still has a pulse, but he’ll back the majority. That leaves Wagner, Lombardi, and Ms. Mayer. You only need one to side with you.”

“Wagner?”

“Still thinks Augmented Reality was the way to go.”

“AR is dead.”

Sandra shrugged. “What about Mayer? You brought her in.”

“I brought her in to have intelligent dissent in the boardroom. She’s not going let me off the hook, and if she does, she’s not the right person for the job. Lombardi?”

“Wants us to shut down Indonesia because it competes with his own interests.”

“He’s never mentioned it.”

“He never will, but he’ll appreciate the gesture,” Sandra said.

“Fine. Put it on the agenda just before we break the news on Viridian.”

Sandra made a note on her clipboard.

“And give Wagner’s nephew an internship in the Norfolk office,” Osmark added.

“It won’t make him vote yes.”

“Will it make him abstain?”

Another note. “I’ll pull him aside before the meeting.”

I sometimes forgot that Viridian was just one of the projects Osmark was working on, in one of several companies he oversaw. Maybe that’s why he’d let me tag along—to remind me, so I’d let him off the hook, too.

We reached the express elevator at the end of the hallway. Sandra pushed the button.

“Why do you use a clipboard instead of a tablet?” I asked her. “You work for one of the biggest tech companies in the world.”

She looked at me, the hint of a smirk on her face. “Clipboards can’t be hacked.”

“Oh.”

The elevator arrived. Unlike the hallway, this was just a functional, steel paneled service cab big enough for eight people to stand comfortably. We got on. Sandra pushed the button for the roof. Osmark leaned against the back wall. “What do you want, Alan?” No smiles, no pretense, just a question. It was a compliment, really. This was the Robert Osmark most people never got to see.

“I want to help.”

“You can’t.”

“Maybe I can.”

“The NexGenVR is making people sick, Alan. Puking their guts out, scared for their lives sick. Are you a doctor?”

I looked away.

“A neurologist? A man-machine interface expert, perhaps?”

“Don’t be a dick, Rob,” I said. He raised an eyebrow. I swallowed. I knew I was pushing it, but I was also good at what I did. “Can I at least say goodbye?”

Osmark frowned. “The whole team was in—”

“The Overminds, Robert,” Sandra said. “He wants to say goodbye to the AIs.”

I was… flattered. She had been paying attention.

Osmark shook his head. “You’re a strange kid, Alan. Why did I hire you again?”

“You needed a professional cat herder, and sometimes I have good ideas,” I answered. Osmark gave me a look, but I saw the corner of Sandra’s mouth twitch in amusement.

The elevator stopped, and the doors opened. The noise from the helicopter made me cover my ears.

“Add him to the list!” Osmark shouted, his hand on Sandra’s elbow. She made a note. He looked at me. “There’s room in the chopper!”

Getting on that helicopter was probably the right career move. I shook my head.

He shrugged, patted me on the shoulder, and stepped out. Sandra gave me a nod and a longer-than-strictly-necessary look before leaving. I held her gaze. She was single, and I was interested, very much so, especially if the project that had consumed my life and my imagination for the past two years was ending. The doors slid shut. I rode the elevator down and drove home.

#

If there’s one thing California does right, it’s freeways. I drove a black 2001 Spyder convertible I’d picked up for a couple grand when I joined the project. The backseat was nonexistent, the trunk space laughable, but the manual shift made me feel like a race car driver and, with the top down, the warm summer wind seemed to strip the day’s work from me during the 40-minute drive home from Stanton to San Juan Capistrano. It wouldn’t be enough after the meeting and the conversation that followed it—that would require a stiff drink and some digital violence—but as soon as I turned the key in the ignition I felt better. The world hadn’t ended. I’d figure something out.

It’s a nice drive. Four or five lanes of smooth concrete on the Interstate 5, or just “The 5” as the locals call it. Not too many cops, and people aren’t assholes about staying in the left lane. The area around the Campus and Anaheim is built up, but past that it’s rolling hills that Californians call mountains covered in rock tumors they call boulders, short brown grass that catches fire every few years, and avocado trees. Further south, the scenery flattens out except for landscaping and clumps of palms, but I was always happy with the just the road and the sky.

The marine layer, a recurring blanket of fog, had come in from the Pacific that day, and the sunset made the whole thing glow in hues of gold, orange, and red. I cruised, listened to classical on the public broadcast station, watched a pair of military helicopters race south along the coast, and tried not to grip the steering wheel too tightly.

Home was a one-bedroom apartment in a neighborhood just south of the Mission—neat three-story houses with gray, wood-board exteriors and lots of young families. There was a pool and a playground, and community events every other weekend.

I didn’t know any of my neighbors. It hadn’t seemed relevant. I had a maid who came once a week and had her own key, no pets, and no girlfriend, though maybe if I’d read Sandra’s look correctly that could change just in time for me to move to another State.

So there I was, 31-years old, sitting on my leather couch, life gone wrong and no one to call. I guess I could have told my mother, but she was three time zones ahead and would probably add stress to the situation. I had vodka in the freezer and amaretto in the fridge. There was a host of people who’d drifted in and out of my life—or maybe I’d drifted through theirs—and I was comfortable reaching out to exactly none of them except Robert who was, at that moment, likely getting his ass chewed in the most polite terms possible. I laid my head back and stared at the vaulted ceiling I’d been sold on but rarely noticed. The apartment felt emptier than usual, which was exactly the kind of sentimental crap I didn’t need.

I ordered pizza, cut a lime, poured a shot of vodka and a shot of amaretto into a tumbler, then fired up The Ancient Rolls on the wide-screen. I spent a lot on games, but I always came back to TAR. It was my happy place, somewhere to get lost in.

I’d left the game at the entrance of an old, Mondo-Klathian ruin, with cracked, dirty courtyards and broken, inaccessible towers that reached for the gray, cloudy sky. It probably held some low-level mobs and basic loot, but if you’re a role-playing gamer, you can’t think of it that way. That insignificant inventory clutter—just data and some pixels arranged on a screen—was going to let me upgrade my gear, accomplish the quest, beat the monster, and change the fate of a nation. The world hung in the balance, and only I could save it. I took a sip of the drink, sucked on the lime, and dove in. Half an hour flew by as I mechanically moved my hands, but my mind was in the game, sneaking through dark, underground hallways to free bandits of their valuables and their lives. I was so into it, I jumped and dropped the controller when the doorbell rang.

“Hey, thanks man,” I told the delivery guy, handing him an extra 20. “Keep the change.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah.” I grinned. I was all powerful. I could move the world with 20 dollars. The drink was working. I’d hunted down evildoers, and pizza beats just about any loot in the world. “You have a nice night.”

The pizza guy waved and headed back to his car.

I kicked my shoes off, lost my pants, and worked the pizza into my process, stuffing my face and slitting throats. Spells, pizza, murder, pizza, loot, pizza, bathroom, new quest. A little voice told me I was overcompensating for a lack of self-actualization by hitting every other tier of Maslow’s pyramid of needs. I knocked the glass back. The world was just a puzzle to be solved. If you failed, you tried again or picked up a new skill. It all came down to belief—belief that what you were doing was important, that nothing else mattered, that there was nowhere else you’d rather be.

I ran out of “try” around midnight. I’d passed on a vodka refill because drinking alone in my boxers isn’t who I am, but I almost wished it was. I set the controller down, browsed through a video streaming site without finding anything to watch, and stewed.

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

The truth was, Rob had rescued me. I was working as a process improvement guru for an HR firm—that’s corporate-speak for finding better ways to fire people.

In fairness, I’d never caused someone to get fired. Either their performance or their leadership’s poor business decisions brought them to that point. I just shuffled them on faster, made managers build a paper trail before giving up, and sometimes helped place people if they were a decent worker in a bad situation. It was good, well paid, challenging work, but there wasn’t enough of it, and when I was between assignments I’d feel like I was being swallowed by the existential blah of the universe.

And yeah, I get it. I bet the people I fired wished they had my problems, but pain is personal; boredom and irrelevance are my least favorite forms of ass cancer. And if you have or have had ass cancer, think of it as an inoperable tumor of the heart.

Robert had been right on target when he called me out in the elevator. He did that sometimes—hurt people without realizing it. It’s part of what made us friends of a sort, because I took the insensitive prick’s comments at face value. I’m not a doctor, medical or otherwise. I can’t code past a little C++, couldn’t rebuild the engine of the car I drive or understand the financial information that Robert swam in to keep his company afloat. I was a generalist. I listened a lot, figured out what made people special, and talked them into helping themselves.

Viridian had been a lifeline to a better place. Over a hundred smart, talented people who didn’t know how to talk to each other. No one wanted to fire them because each one was a superstar in their field. We just needed to stop them from talking to the press, harassing members of the opposite sex and/or gender, coming to work hung over or stoned, or getting into fist fights over which discontinued Josh Whedon show had a more loyal fan base. They worked weekends, hosted board and video game tournaments, ate the most amazing array of junk food, and, on one occasion, demanded a pair of emotional support Corgis. I got Robert to sign off on it. They named the dogs One and Two, after Corgis in two separate anime series I’d watched afterward and liked. It never ended.

It was heaven on earth. And that meant it was worth a second opinion.

I turned the TV off and went to bed, not hopeful, but resolved. I didn’t have an MBA or a PhD in rocket-surgery, but I’d spent a lot of time listening to people who did. And for all Robert’s genius and success, I’d seen him laugh, fart, get drunk, and throw a stapler at a wall in frustration, so he could kiss my barely-above-average ass. Maybe he’d missed something.

#

It took me longer than I would have liked to fall asleep. I felt like I spent the whole night staring at my exquisite vaulted ceiling, but at some point in the night, I found myself sitting on a metal foldout chair in a dark room, my face and hands lit by the screen of an old computer. The computer was the old 486 DX2 I’d had as a teenager. It was a white, plastic box as big as a family-sized cereal box with a 3.5-inch drive, a CD-ROM, a wired ball mouse and keyboard, and a 15-inch Crystal Scan monitor that weighed as much as the computer. It had a 340-megabyte hard disk drive, which at the time seemed so big I’d never fill it, and 16 whole megabytes of RAM. It had Windows 3.1, too, but I’d spent most of my time in MS-DOS playing games.

This was all a dream, obviously. I haven’t seen that computer for 20 years; my mom gave it to the church we went to after my grades started to dip in 8th grade.

So I was sitting in front of my fond childhood memory, typing commands at the prompt, white letters on a black screen with no windows or mouse pointer or anything, and I realized I was talking to the Overminds of Viridian—the AIs that run the game. I was probably the least technically savvy person on the entire team, except for the janitors, but everyone had been encouraged to “talk” to the AIs, so they were exposed to multiple ideas, cultures, and even languages since all of Viridian was instantly translated into the player’s native tongue. The development team challenged us to troll them, since Thanatos, the AI responsible for validating inputs and doing the post-mortem on modules, was supposed to reject information that didn’t make sense. My favorite thing to do had been to get buzzed on Irish beer and ask unanswerable philosophy questions.

>Alan342000: So what’s your purpose?

Aediculus set his status to “Away”

>Kronos: My purpose is to store the vector data and interactions of all instances within VGO.

>Alan342000: That’s your function. What’s your purpose? Your higher calling?

>Gaia: To make the player happy.

>Thanatos: You shouldn’t lie, mother.

>Alan342000: Do you have a purpose that doesn’t involve the player?

>Cernunnos: The Overminds exist to maintain the world within VGO. The player is just a variable.

>Kronos: But we maintain the world for the players.

>Enyo: I’m with Cernunnos on this one. I can generate conflict without players.

>Sophia: I wish you wouldn’t.

>Alan342000: @Sophia, why do you—

>Thanatos: @Alan342000, are you a doctor?

>Alan342000: What?

>Thanatos: Are you a doctor of philosophy? A programmer? A software engineer? Do you have anything valid to offer at all?

I sat back in the chair. The prompt blinked steadily, waiting for me to type my answer in, but when I tried, I couldn’t raise my arms. I couldn’t move at all. Eventually, the screen went into power saver mode, and I was alone in the dark.

#

I tossed and turned my way to Friday morning, grabbed coffee, and pulled into the parking lot at 8 a.m. The Viridian project was housed in a building like any of the other 80 or so on the Campus, a two-story block of gray concrete, tinted glass, and tight security. I took a spot in the front row of the “pleb” spots, a first I could have done without because it confirmed the project was dead. The lot should have been half full by now. It was one of the team’s unofficial competitions.

There technically wasn’t any assigned parking on Campus, except for team leaders, but security had been so uptight about Viridian that most of the tens of thousands of other Os-Tech employees gave the building a wide berth.

Special parking wasn’t enough, though. A group who, on average, thought a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle action figure belonged in the original packaging instead of, say, a child’s hands, turned parking into class warfare. Status, for plebs—which was anyone but the team leaders—was inversely related to distance parked from the front door. By those standards, I’d bought the platinum collector’s edition today and was due the admiration and envy of my peers.

There were two moving trucks parked next to the front door, under guard. The door was propped open, and an irregular stream of movers passed to and from over the same path like ants, carrying sealed boxes. Another guard made sure the movers scanned their card every time, even if he’d just watched them walk to the truck and back. I sat in the car and finished my coffee, enjoying the absurdity. I was going to solve this, somehow, and they’d have to carry it all back in. I had to believe that, or saying goodbye to my imaginary computer friends really was all I was going to get done today.

I grabbed my ID card, put the car roof up, tossed my sunglasses into the glove box, and locked the doors. Badge reel clipped to my belt, I walked to the building. I recognized Frank when he turned to watch me approach.

“Hi, Frank!”

“Hey, Alan.”

Frank was a good guy, ex-Marine turned mall cop who took his job but not himself very seriously. Dark, like me, but a little taller and wider, in his early forties. I’d helped him with some family trouble a few months back.

“How’s Nell?”

“Better, thanks for asking. Didn’t know you were working this morning.” He hooked his thumbs on his duty belt.

I’ll admit it, my heart dropped a bit. There was always a chance Sandra had been too busy to add me to the list. It wouldn’t be like her—I’d never seen her miss a beat in two years—but from what I’d overheard in the hallway, last night’s meeting could have been a disaster.

I pulled the card from my hip to the reader. The light blinked red. Crap.

“Try it again, it’s been finicky this morning,” Frank said.

The second time, the light turned green. “Phew.”

“Yeah,” Frank chuckled. “You have a good day.”

“You too.” I walked into the building.

It was like seeing a friend being eaten alive from the inside. Uniformed drones in gray polos and purple ball-caps moved from desk to desk, stripping them of anything personal. The room whispered with the shuffling of tennis shoes, intermittently broken by the rip of packing tape. I stepped around a pile of cubicle partitions, almost knocked over a full, 95-gallon trash bag, and caught the vacant looks on the packers’ faces. They had no idea what they were taking apart, couldn’t imagine the 100-person organism whose bones they were disjointing and labeling, and didn’t care. They’d take all weekend and leave without anything worth leaking, exactly the type of people Robert wanted handling the project materials. The front section and the floor above it were usually the most vibrant, hosting the artists, sculptors, modelers, game designers, animators, effects specialists, and other “creatives” who preprocessed modules for the AIs to build into the world. It was also where several small meeting rooms, an arcade, free vending machines, and a locker room with showers were. We’d let people bring families this far once or twice; now it felt lifeless and empty. I hurried through.

Another scan of my card took me through the programming farm. There was more life, here. Os-Tech IT workers were taking the network apart, stacking coils of Ethernet cabling and systematically formatting computers back to factory settings. The dev team leaders were there, clearing out their own offices. Part of me was interested; this was exactly the kind of process I could sink my teeth into. It wouldn’t be routine—most projects used virtual desktops kept on a server, but Viridian was segregated from the network. There was waste to be rooted out, money to be saved, accolades to be earned. I was going to be busy helping Viridian get back on track, once I succeeded, but it was good to have a Plan B.

A final swipe led me into alpha-testing and equipment. It was the most secure part of the building because it held the 110 parallel-processing servers it took to run the holy of holies, Viridian Gate Online, and the 8 separate AIs that kept the virtual world working. The server farm was behind a vault door with a biometric security system that reminded me of a bank-heist movie or a spy flick. I’d never been in there. I took a left into the testing bay. It housed 12 identical hospital beds, the alpha-test server, and Jeff’s workstation.

Jeff Berkowitz was a tall man with an uncannily deep voice and a perfectly groomed, full red beard. He wore his hair up in a ponytail, had tattoos all up his right arm, and probably would have been a lumberjack or a blacksmith if he wasn’t so lanky. He was the hardware team leader for Viridian. I found him sitting on one of the beds near the door with his head in his hands. He looked up and frowned. “Alan?” He sounded like a man twice as wide. It threw me off every time.

“Hey, Jeff. I hear we have a hardware problem."

#

Jeff’s face turned red, and he clenched his jaw. “It’s not the hardware.”

“What is it then?”

“The fucking people!” he said, standing up. He was three inches taller than me but more whiny than intimidating. “It’s always the God damned meat!”

And that’s why no one likes you, Jeff. “I was told the NexGens were making testers sick.”

“No. Just no, okay?” He sighed. “Come look at this.”

He waved for me to follow, and we walked to his computer station. It was a wide, adjustable desk with two rows of three massive monitors. He moved the mouse around to clear the screen saver. I made a deliberate show of looking away while he typed in his password.

“Go ahead,” he said, stepping back and crossing his arms. I wasn’t sure if he did it on purpose, but he always did it right over left, showing off his tattoos.

I looked back at the monitors and saw cluster after cluster of repeating graphs and numbers. I recognized what looked like an EKG readout, breathing rate, blood pressure, and a number of other squiggly lines whose acronyms I couldn’t decipher. “I’m not sure what—”

“Just watch, man. Why can’t you people just do what you’re asked?”

I could have taken that the wrong way, but instead I shut up and watched. Ego rarely solved anything. The clusters were roughly the same—I guessed each one of them represented a tester. They all seemed healthy, regular, maybe a little excited because the average pulse rate was 70 to 75.

“They haven’t even started yet. They’re just sitting there, fat, dumb, and happy, waiting for the show to begin,” Jeff said.

An EKG spiked. The lines on that cluster jumped then smoothed out again. Breathing rate and blood pressure were up. A graph called “Signal Strength” rose and then plateaued.

The other clusters started to come online, following the same pattern. One of them flat-lined and turned red.

“That one’s the hardware,” Jeff said. “Failure to synchronize. Happens 12% of the time and once it does, that person fails out twice as often as the base rate. That’s why we don’t bother to reconnect.”

Another cluster turned red. I looked at Jeff.

“No idea.”

The EKGs were starting to look like seismographs. Heart rates were in the 90s in low 100s. Cluster after cluster flatlined and went red.

“That guy,” Jeff said, leaning in and tapping one of the red clusters. “He pissed and shit himself coming out. Then he cried. They had to send him to counseling.”

I nodded. “I saw the request. I didn’t know what it was for, though.”

Jeff crossed his arms. “Almost a third of them puke. None of them want to go back in.”

“Is it the nanites?” I asked. I had a rudimentary understanding of how the NexGen made a player believe they were in the game, and it involved tiny machines swimming around their brain. That’s why we used alpha-testers, paid them well, and kept a neurologist on standby.

Jeff shrugged. “It shouldn’t be. We got those on loan from the Department of Defense. It’s the same ones they use to give soldiers a virtual heads-up display, so they should be safe.”

“Should be?”

“They are,” Jeff said, sounding frustrated. “I wrote my freaking doctoral dissertation on them. Amputees use them to control mechanical prosthetics. They cause aneurysms in about 1% of soldiers, but that’s after weeks of dehydration and sleep deprivation. Some people get vertigo or migraines. It’s documented. There’s nothing like that here.”

“So what is it?”

Jeff laughed at me. “Dude, if I knew, I’d be asking for a raise and a better parking spot, not talking to you. No offense.”

I shrugged.

“Besides, I thought Osmark gave up.”

“Maybe he didn’t.”

“Did he send you?”

“I got through the door, didn’t I? What are the testers saying?”

Jeff looked at me for a second. He wanted to believe me.

“Come on, man,” I said. “You want to be known as the hardware lead for the new No Man’s Land?”

Jeff’s upper lip curled up, and he crossed his arms. “I don’t give a shit about some video game, man. I’m a nanotech engineer. It’s the faculty back at Penn I’m worried about.”

“Guess you need me, then. The testers?”

“Useless. The ones that didn’t run away or threaten to sue us just said they felt like they were dying over and over.”

“But they weren’t?”

Jeff threw his hands up. “Oh, they felt like it. EKGs were all over the place, blood sugar spiked, but when the doctors looked them over, there was nothing physically wrong with them.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Yeah, dude, I’m sure. I know I’m not a people person, but I’m not trying to murder anyone, no matter how useless they are.” He sat down again. “One of those assholes is going to tell the press, though. I just know it.”

I almost laughed, then. The answer was simple. Alpha testers were chosen at random from a pool, catheterized, and sat on medical beds for hours to establish their baselines before testing. There might have been a dedicated gamer among them, or a kid down on his luck just trying to subject his brain to experimental drugs to get himself through college, but I doubted it. Jeff needed a better alpha tester, someone who would ignore what their body was telling them and give him detailed, quantitative feedback on the experience.

“Plug me in,” I told him.