Noel was packed into the back of a tan-colored Volkswagen SUV by the couple, and as she came to grips with her present circumstances she found her mind was flooded with questions. Her black-haired robotic idol, Linear Azure, slid into the seat adjacent. Then the car was in motion, with the sort of energy one might expect from a getaway or a kidnapping. She didn’t particularly feel in danger from these two, but she would have, had she not known who they were.

Before any of the deeper questions could be answered, though, she suddenly remembered the situation she was in upon her forcible ejection from the game. Flying in a jet on reserve fuel, nearly on empty.

“Wait.” she said, “I need to log back in.”

“What?” the driver said, “Are you nuts? The only thing you need to log in to is a hospital.”

She knew him to be Reginald Markov, Linear’s husband. Any superfan knew this guy, who helmed the prosthetics company that developed Linear’s body. Noel also had a few other theories about who he really was from various internet sources, but those tended to be both mutually contradictory and equally plausible. Likely that was by design, since as everyone knew you couldn’t disappear inconvenient facts on the internet. What you could do was fill the whole channel with credulous junk until no one was sure of anything. Markov would know that better than anyone. Either way, she didn’t buy for a second that the official story was all there was to it. There was a very good reason to distrust the official story, after all, since it indicated he was new money with a custom built trophy wife. Noel had never believed that because they so obviously truly loved each other.

“T-that’s not for you to decide.” Noel said, somewhat more weakly than she would have liked, “U-unless I’m being kidnapped here—“

Linear leaned over to her and furrowed her brow, and placed one of her jointed hands on Noel’s small shoulder. In the darkness of the cabin interior Noel perceived Linear’s eyes to have some faint phosphorescent threads of blue. She’d never seen such a sophisticated machine, personally, nor many more of the other wonders that supposedly existed in the world. Albemerle wasn’t a place one normally saw such things. They barely had self-driving cars. Not trying to be rude about it, she flitted her eyes down to Linear’s hand to get a closer look. Though it was hard to tell in the blue-gray darkness, it was somewhere between a human hand and one of those posable hands for artistic anatomy study. Maybe a lot closer to human.

The woman appeared about to say something, hesitated, and then went forward with it.

“You must be in imminent danger over there.” Linear guessed, correctly, “How about a compromise? We’ll bring you someplace safe and get you the medical attention you need, and I’ll let you log back in right now.”

Noel squinted her eyes. The reason they were here had something to do with the game, else-wise the woman never would have so easily agreed to her stupid wish. Between that and the general fact that it was their only point of connection, she was slowly assembling a tenuous panorama of the real situation. They wanted something from her, or she was in danger here, or possibly both.

There was no time to dwell on it. For now she had to keep her cards close. That’s what No-chan would have done, and she had just made a promise to that woman, or concept, or whatever it was.

“Alright, it’s a deal.” Noel said, “Do you have a laptop or something?”

Noel was under the impression that temporary solutions would probably involve the desktop client. After she had agreed but before she managed to get out her subsequent question, Linear was already in the process of leaning over and pouncing on her like a lion. Noel backed up against the door and gasped, until she noticed that Linear was threading Noel’s progressive harness around her neck like a collar. Moving quickly, the gynoid reached behind her own back with the male end of the progressive harness and clicked it into her body, somewhere out of sight around her lower back. Noel blushed and looked off to the side, out of the window. However one sliced it, being physically collared and connected to someone was weird, for however clinical a reason. Maybe it was like mouth to mouth. Then again, Linear had just done that to her as well.

“Would you like to buy me dinner first?” Linear said, cottoning on to Noel’s embarrassment and seemingly reveling in it. Her husband cleared his throat. Noel silently looked back and gave her a nervous, toothy smile. “No? Then, close your eyes.”

So she did.

—

Before she saw anything on the other side, within the world of Absolute Conviction Online, she heard it. It was the master caution alarm, a rapidly repeating series of distinctive bleeps. The cockpit was flooded with red light and the view from her domed OLED monitors displayed a scene that one might see in mapping software. Which is to say, she was heading almost straight down, into the ground, nose first. There was land there, and an airstrip, at the top of the frame. Both of her turbines were out and she had no fuel.

As for the cockpit lady, she was simply alternating between 'pull up' and 'altitude'. Familiar refrain.

Noel pieced together what had happened. After logging out her plane was put into emergency autopilot mode due to its fuel condition. It had attempted to vector to the nearest airstrip and land there, but had run out of fuel along the way. The resulting loss of power shut down the main CPU and the thing fell back on the dumb autopilot that was on the secondary CPU. Since this thing wasn’t a space shuttle, it had no idea how to glide itself. The ram air turbine had already been deployed and the wings were at minimum sweep, so at least it had done that much.

This wasn’t really among the scenarios she had run through. The short version of landing a Ghost without engine power was that you didn’t do it. It made vertical landings. She was trying to level the plane out and was already pulling back on the stick, but even if she managed to do that she could see that she was going way too fast to land at the airstrip. There just wasn’t a lot of time left, with the way things were going. She could already read the little numbers on the runway.

“Deploy airbrake, put flaps to full.” she said, then suddenly remembered something with a gasp, “Deploy landing gear—!”

No confirmations from her system. These requests might have been accomplished in time if she had not, in her panic, neglected to remember that the loss of main engine power took down the main CPU, which is the one that dealt with her lazy habit of using audio commands. The secondary CPU had no such ability, having approximately the processing power of a peanut.

“Oh shit…” she mumbled.

The Ghost slammed belly-first into the runway as she was in the middle of implementing her three wishes manually. The aircraft slid along the tarmac with a screeching howl and wobbled, then spun itself around like a top until it eventually came to rest a few hundred feet from the end of the runway, which dropped off into the ocean shortly thereafter. Actually at the speed she was going, she definitely would have ended up in the drink if she had deployed the landing gear successfully.

The Citadel seemed to be fine. A little indicator in the center of her screen claimed that the Pulse Drive was now online and main power had been restored. The Ghost wasn’t a total wreck, based on how the damage was being self-reported, but it wasn’t going to be going anywhere soon without some serious TLC. According to the GPS she was on the western side of San Cristobal, one of the islands in the Galapagos chain. She still had a mesh Network Warfare active to her airwing, too, which still seemed to be intact.

All things considered, it could be worse. This thought had only just left her mind when she heard a plink against the hull. Small arms fire.

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“Switch XCAM to…” she said, trailing off.

The HUD had already switched the external camera vision mode to IR before she finished her statement. She blinked a few times in confusion, then tilted her head a few degrees towards the east. The scene displayed on the semicircular dome of monitors pivoted more radically and revealed a squad or so of NPC soldiers who had been stationed at the airport by one faction or another. They were all active on Netwar just like her, so whoever owned them now knew exactly where she was. She picked out one of them and set up an active camouflage defense, which was a little machine-learning algorithm that imagined what her Ghost looked like from their perspective and changed the shell to match it. Then she set up a broad-band jamming to cut off their Netwar, hopefully before a human noticed. Dealing with these softies was a simple matter of deploying the point-defense drone, Option. It would be simple, if the bay door actuator hadn’t failed at some point during the hard landing.

She suddenly heard a voice from nowhere, which made her nearly leap out of her seat.

“You weren’t kidding about being in a pickle. Time for an EVA. There’s a rifle under the seat.” it said, a woman’s voice coming from seemingly nowhere.

“No-chan?” NoCro said.

“No, this is Linear. You’re in me, remember? In my version of the Ultimate Sandbox. I can see you. Who is No-chan?”

“Me…” NoCro said softly, and fished under her seat. Linear made a confused hum but didn’t pursue the point, thankfully.

There was a bag there. Generally speaking, how good she was at this game was a function of how far she was from having to personally fire a rifle. Inside of the bag was something that looked like the back part of a rifle, and another part which looked like the front bit, which NoCro understood was called a barrel. There were also four conveniently loaded magazines and a few other soldiery sundries. She picked the two halves of the rifle up and held them curiously in front of her, spinning them around. The two bits clearly weren’t broken haphazardly and were made to fit together like puzzle pieces, and were stored that way for space reasons. Hesitantly, she snapped them together as best she could.

“Hmm.” Linear said, “A takedown M4 with a holographic sight chambered in .300 AAC Blackout with an integrated targeting razor. Interesting choice. But it doesn’t look like you’ve ever used it. Check the buttstock for a switch.”

That she hadn’t. Customizing the SERE kit (she learned this term a moment ago, since it was written on the bag) must have been the work of the previous owner of this particular Ghost. As Linear had predicted, there was a flush toggle on the stock of the rifle. NoCro clicked it in. A message flashed on her HUD interface claiming to be pairing the weapon, as if it were a set of bluetooth headphones. Now with this thing in her hands, she was struck with a vague sense that her near future was narrowing to a sort of dire strait.

“Miss Azure…” NoCro said, “I’d like to make a deal.”

“Oh ho. What would that be?”

“If I make it off this island, I want you to tell me what’s going on.”

There was a brief pause from the other end, most likely enough for her to confer with her husband at a glance. NoCro wasn’t sure at this moment whether they needed her for something, or whether she was otherwise in danger and they were feeling especially selfless. How much they were willing to humor her would point to one or the other. This agenda was the one she imagined No-chan would advance.

“…alright.” Linear sighed, “Try to get the drone free. You might be able to pry the cover with a knife. It’s physics-based. By the way, I'm married. It's not Miss Azure. I'm Missus Markov."

Noel nodded contritely. The Ultimate systems were actually pretty conservative. They had sort of been designed to be.

Usually with these sorts of items like extra mags or knives one could simply snap them to a place on the body to which they would magically adhere. When NoCro attempted to do just that with the knife that was in the kit, it simply fell down in accordance with the normal rules of gravity. When she leaned down to pick it up, a series of feelings which had heretofore been pushed to the back of her mind by stress suddenly slammed into her. Everything in ACO was different. It had been for a while in retrospect, even slightly before her heart attack. She had chalked this hyperreality it up to adrenaline and disorientation.

The black nylon sheath of the knife under her fingers, the rip-stop cloth of the SERE bag, the cold metal of the rifle’s receiver. These textures weren’t part of ACO. She had only accepted them temporarily because they were part of the real world and her mind had been elsewhere. She brought up her hand and slapped it gently against her face. Yes, there was a little sting. Frantically she set about feeling every available surface, as though she was a blind woman quickly trying to ascertain her environment. Metal, plastic, glass, moisture.

She would have, here, reflexively opened up her eyes and simply returned to reality. This was unfortunately one of those times where they felt heavy.

“Don’t panic.” Linear leapt in to reassure her, “You’re still here with me. You’re safe. I’ll answer all your questions later.”

“Is this a death game or something?” NoCro said, feeling that one should be answered immediately.

“No! No, no, no.” Linear huffed.

“Okay then. But if I get shot, will it hurt?”

“N… yes, probably.”

Points for honesty. NoCro clumsily fitted the magazine into the rifle and looked at it quizzically.

“The charging handle.” Linear said, “Do you really play this game?”

“It’s changed a lot!” NoCro blushed profusely and yanked back on the handle, chambering the first round. She flicked the selector to semiautomatic, which was the only way she would ever hit anything. The plinking against her Ghost had started back up again in the interim, with even the idiotic NPCs realizing what had happened upon moving forward. She called them idiots, and they were, but the bots were also pretty good at hitting targets. “This is never going to work…”

No-chan would never stand for that kind of loser talk, though the opposite, blind optimism, seemed to her to be foolish. Simply getting out of the Citadel while under fire was so stupid. Oh. Of course.

“Deploy smokescreen!” she said, “Ah, No-chan, you’re a genius…”

It was a standard tactic for egress, however. Practically de rigeur.

With a little chirp of recognition her Ghost flooded the area with opaque white clouds. The nose of the aircraft pitched down and a semicircular hatch above her popped open. The dull plinking sounds she was hearing from inside the Citadel were now a threatening sort of metallic ping, loud enough that the first one nearly caused her to lose her grip on the frame as she tried to extricate herself. There were other whipping sounds that must have represented rounds that were missing her and the airframe. She’d heard all of this stuff before in other terrifying instances of infantry combat within this nightmarish game, and had previously imagined that they were accurate representations of how awful it was.

That was regrettably untrue. It was so much worse than she could have imagined, both the sights and sounds and the knowledge that if one of these caught her she would be in such a world of hurt. It was so bad that she started laughing to herself.

“Shh…” she heard Linear’s voice again, “Don’t worry, you’re safe.”

The woman was probably trying to calm her down, not wanting to see her go through another heart attack. It worked, anyway. She crawled rearward until she came across the armored cover behind her Citadel that concealed the Ghost’s drone, Option. This device was located in a sort of manhole behind the citadel, in the same location that the lift fan would be on the much smaller F-35B, and it was covered with the same kind of panel. She fitted the knife into the edge farthest from the hinge and pulled back on it, hoping it would simply snap open upon being reminded to do so. That was too much to hope. As she was setting up for another round with the knife, she heard the proximity warning sound from the cockpit.

That made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. It also made her stand up, personally, and level the rifle vaguely eastward, into her smokescreen. That didn’t seem quite right, so she swept the rifle southward. Into the formless darkness she aimed up, down, and sideways, making minute adjustments in a matter of moments, until it felt exactly right. Then she waited a split second, and another. Tension built quickly inside her, and her finger snapped down on the trigger when it suddenly broke like a wave. She heard and just barely saw a body fall at the edge of her vision, towards the rear of the Ghost. Her entire body relaxed and she let the gun fall to her side.

She saw the knife sticking upwards out of the panel at her feet and stomped down on the hilt, which released the Option drone. The ring-shaped craft had a pair of counter-rotating blades in the middle and lifted out of its cradle. It tilted forwards at her side and sought after hostile contacts.

—

Linear’s husband Rej watched his wife settle back into the middle seat and gaze off downward in silent contemplation. She was obviously back here in the Light World, considering what she had seen.

“What’s up?” he said, “She okay?”

“Yes, it’s just… well, we know she has a condition, but it’s more than that. I suddenly felt like something might be controlling her. Something not human.”

“In that case.” Rej said, tightening his grip on the wheel and speaking through his teeth, “Let’s keep her close.”