Rick tossed and turned for an hour before he gave up. He felt the cold, empty side of the bed usually occupied by Kristina-Anne’s sleeping body. When she wasn’t having a night terror or sleepwalking.
He grabbed a beer from the fridge and sat at the AR console. He logged in and drank half the beer in one swig. If he fell asleep on a web page, so be it.
First, he looked up the company from the card Dr. Chavez gave him: Solstice Health Research Corp.
Their nest of pages looked about like what he’d expected. Smiling photos of happy people accompanied the more serious, but no less polished shots of professionals in lab coats looking appropriately determined. There were links to pages with study abstracts, but he couldn’t make heads or tails out of them. By all appearances, they were legitimate, but he didn’t trust he was qualified to notice anything wrong with them in the first place. Not like I went to college.
Next, he surfed for porn, but nothing appealed. The damage to his port had made his new job possible, but it came with some serious negative side effects. It would have been an understatement to say he was frustrated, but more than that, he was guilty for feeling that way. His wife had tried to kill herself again, and she lay in a hospital bed on med psych unit. She was his, and he was hers, but he craved the closeness of physical contact again, even if it made him feel like a monster to acknowledge it aloud. He tried not to think about how far behind the bills would put them. Add it to the back of the line, boys. At least they wouldn’t garnish him for that, and most of his pay was under the table now, anyway. He looked at his beer bottle. It was a better brand than before. He took a sip to savor it. Bitter, but not in such a chemical way as the other stuff.
He stood and dragged the port plug behind him as he got two more from the refrigerator, then sat back at the console.
He tried not to think about it, but he couldn’t resist. He searched for Santino Esposito and checked the first page that came up.
It was a news story from five years back, detailing a string of losses that had turned Sonny’s reputation into one of a has-been. He checked another page. That was a positive story from only two years ago, detailing the VR fighter’s struggles to get clean—from gambling, sex, booze. The end of the article states that Santino relapsed into his gambling addiction shortly after the interview was performed. That’s addiction. You can make the right decision a thousand times, but you choose the wrong one just once, you’re back where you started.
He searched Sonny’s name again along with the current year. It was another positive story. More than an interview, it detailed a long fight from the dark desert of irrelevance, and all the evidence was that Sonny was making a pretty good run at a comeback.
Rick shuddered. He hadn’t been a VR fighting game star, but his own career with the real thing had been going great, before…
Unbidden, the memory overtook him.
He knew the guy was gunning for him from the moment he entered the bar. If he could go back, he’d have just headed right back out and found another place to drink, but Rick had his pride, and his three buddies would have given him no end of shit if he backed down.
He never meant to kill the guy, that’s what he told himself. He almost believed it, too. The jury didn’t.
He shook his head. It’s the past. Let it stay in the past.
Something at the end of the most recent article caught his eye—it mentioned an unverifiable rumor that Sonny was deep into the kind of debt you couldn’t clear with bankruptcy, and that his trainer had connections to a well-known crime family in the city.
Well, fuck.
What would he do? He drank his next beer in one massive series of gulps, then opened the next. He needed numbness more than anything.
*************************************
“I’m telling you—I’m your trainer and I don’t see anything called a ‘permanent trait’ anywhere in your stats.” Alex—or rather her avatar—was visibly annoyed.
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Rick hadn’t been able to sleep much the night before. He was confident the hospital would keep his wife safe, but his nerves were a mess of jangled wires. When he’d visited in the morning, Kristina had only looked him in the eye twice. To see her like that, in pain and ashamed—he wanted nothing more than to hold her, but that only ever seemed to make her pain worse. He’d learned that, when she was ready, she’d come to him. Until then, all he could do was keep the four walls of their world from crumbling in their insignificant corner of the universe.
There wasn’t anything else to do but train. Sonny’s problems were Sonny’s problems.
“You think I’m lying?” he asked.
They’d been arguing for several minutes and hadn’t left the mouth of the cave. Alex had forgotten to halt the constricting ring, and so it had taken them both by surprise once already. She’d immediately paused it the second round so they could have their argument without worrying about being swept up in a lightning storm.
Though he’d been knocked out several times already, that had been his first time getting caught behind the circle, and the sensation had been odd. Like he’d suspected, the lightning ring massively depleted a player’s health, and though there was no life bar in Ruckus Online—at least not outside the weird place he’d met Ditto—it took less than a minute before it knocked them out and dumped them back at a starting area.
She winced and held the bridge of her nose. “No, I don’t think you’re lying, but I can’t see anything—”
“I can see it. Right there. Says “Mark of Ditto” in dark lavender script.”
She sighed and shook her head. “There’s no lavender loot in Ruckus Online, Rick. Perms are denoted in gold.”
“Okay, forget the damned trait—what about the arena and Shidō, and the old-fashioned fighting game moves?”
She frowned. “You’re really not pranking me? Come on, Rick. I know I got you good a few times early on, but this is a long way to go just to get me back. Enough, alright?”
He gritted his teeth. She wouldn’t budge or give an inch. She’d determined that what he’d described to her was nothing but bullshit, and nothing he said got through. “You said you lost me for about half an hour, right? That’s about how long I was—”
“That’s what I’m saying—we lost you from the simulation.” She waved him away and frowned. “You were dreaming solo for about a half an hour. We tried to get you back into the sim, but… Hector’s equipment is high end, but it’s not always stable. We just couldn’t get you back. I was going to give it another try when the call came in about your wife.”
Rick sighed. “So I just dreamt it up? Why can I see it in my stats?”
She shrugged, but her expression was more one of frustration than dismissal. “I can’t explain it. Usually when a de-sync happens, it’s brief, and getting someone back isn’t”—she shook her head—“it was like something was preventing it, but that’s… That makes no sense. Security doesn’t show a breach, so it was just you, me, and the machine.”
Rick winced. “Let’s just… let’s just train, okay? I didn’t sleep at all last night.”
She sighed. “Me either. You okay?”
Okay? No, of course he wasn’t okay. “I’m fine,” he said. His mind turned toward something he’d read about while he was up cruising the AR net. He’d figured that if he couldn’t sleep, and he couldn’t masturbate—whatever glitch affected his implant and allowed him to fight still made AR pornography acutely dissatisfying—he’d learn more about Ruckus Online. “Why do we always start at this cave? There are at least ten different starting points, and the game usually just plops you somewhere random, so why have you locked us to this one?”
She opened her eyes wide and made a strange facial expression, like she was stretching her face, trying to fight off sleepiness. “It’s the least beneficial starting point. I figured if you progressed from the weakest point, the rest—”
“That’s a flawed strategy”—he yawned—“considering I’d be just as badly prepared if I get a lucky start and don’t know what to do with it.”
She nodded. “I was gonna switch us today, but then last night happened, and I’m tired as fuck, and why the hell do you have to question every damned decision I make?” she complained.
That was rich. “You’re right,” he deadpanned. “I can’t possibly know what that’s like.”
She conceded his point with a tired chuckle. “We can start somewhere else. Hold up.”
He experienced the disorienting downward-falling, backward-dragging sensation as the world went black and flashed back into existence around him again. Now, they stood on a beach. The constricting ring lay far out over the water, its lightning flashing angrily, approaching like a nightmarish cross between a hurricane and a galvanic apocalypse.
“This is one of the more forgiving starting areas,” she said. She pointed along the beach where crabs and seagulls intermittently dawdled along the water. “You can kill a few crabs and you might get lucky. It’s usually just cosmetics, but sometimes…”
He nodded and approached a crab, then crushed it with a brutal heel strike, but it gave him nothing. He ran to another and repeated himself. This time, an orange box appeared, and the floating icon followed shortly after.
“Oh wow—a skill boost right off the bat. That’s what I’m talking about!
Strength: 1
Speed: 1
Stamina: 1
He placed his predictable stamina point, and his stat card reflected the change:
Strength: 1
Speed: 1
Stamina: 2
“Goddamn, man—you don’t always have to choose stamina,” she said.
“How many days I got till Sonny?” he asked.
“Seven.”
“So don’t micromanage me, yeah?” he said.
He smashed two more crabs, which gave him nothing, then shot an anxious look at the constricting ring. It had definitely gotten closer. “We should probably… y’know.” He started down a sand path that threaded away from the beach through dry grass toward dunes and what appeared to be hillier terrain farther out. “Are you gonna…”
But she was gone. “Are you at the middle again?”
“Bingo.” Her voice came from the sky itself again. “Good luck.” The sound of her yawn came through whatever dream-PA system she was using.