Rick woke feeling ill. He groaned. “I only had three beers. Right?”
He rose and counted cans. “What the hell?” Seven beer cans lay in various places around the chair at the AR array. The pill. Memory loss. It was one of the side effects he’d read on the bottle.
His head throbbed as he drank a glass of water, then poured another while getting a headache pill from the cabinet.
Should I eat? Though the simulated fights were intense, he didn’t have to worry about sluggishness from eating, but eating during a hangover sometimes made things worse. He pulled an apple from the fridge. How old is this? He squeezed it. Still solid. He ate it, tossing the core into the trash and reaching for an overripe banana from a bunch on the counter. The fruit they bought was mostly for Kristina-Anne. He frowned. Did he have enough time to call her before the big fight?
Once he got out the door, the city buzzed around him, flashing advertisements into an area in the left corner of his vision he’d allocated for advertising. He’d made the area as small as his implant allowed, but it sent constant messages to him whenever he was in a public space. He and Kristina-Anne had once been homeless for a month, and the constant bombardment had nearly driven them both mad, nearly destroying their marriage in the process. As long as he was on the clock, in an official government building, actively purchasing or shopping for something, or at home, his head belonged to himself. If he ever made it big, the first thing he wanted to do was buy him and his wife out from under the advertising obligation every Californian was born into. Big companies had made temporary advertising buy-out a benefit of employment, meaning that as long as you were employed by a company offering the benefit, you were free of the messages—though you could still voluntarily agree to watch them at your discretion and get paid for it. Rick had heard of folks who did it to get ahead, but after years of surrendering literal mind share to advertising, he abhorred the idea.
The extra money Hector allotted him meant he could take the train instead of walking, which had felt odd at first, since running packages back and forth across the city had been his job. A week into riding the train and he never wanted to walk the entire distance anywhere ever again if he didn’t have to.
An ad came on for Ruckus Online after he found his seat next to a compact Asian woman dressed in business clothes.
Are you cunning enough, smart enough, or just plain bad-ass enough to prevail in Ruckus Online? Capture your dream and discover your power!
That ad had played at least once per day since he’d started training. To say the game was popular would be an act of criminal understatement. The frequency of the commercial had to be due to some algo tracking his training, but why advertise an activity he was clearly so frequently enjoying already?
Retention. Rick had never worked for one of the big companies, but all the job ads were laser-focused on one thing: customer retention. Spend your life with us. Spend your life on us. Aside from the occasional retro game, he’d avoided the seductive pull of a second life in a VR world. He’d had enough of that in prison.
Another benefit of the trains was that the volume of the ad-channel was lower to allow passengers to hear the AR announcement system call out the stops. When Rick’s stop came up, he approached the door and sighed, readying himself for the onslaught of full-volume re-emergence.
He still hadn’t come to a solution about Sonny Esposito.
*******************************************************
He got to the laundry basement simulation room an hour early. Hector, Manuel, and Jerry were all there to greet him. Manuel and Jerry had smiles on their faces, but Hector looked nervous.
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“You got this, right?” Hector asked.
Rick sighed. “We’ll find out.”
That did nothing to help with his boss’s anxiety, judging by the frown Hector displayed.
“You eat? Drink?” Manuel asked. “You ain’t getting knocked out like a bitch before you get to the center, are ya?” The words were gruff, but the man’s smile and the clap on the back meant the remarks were friendly.
“Where’s Alex?” Rick asked.
“Up here—still remote, I’m afraid,” she said.
“I’m starting to think I’m never gonna meet you in person,” he said.
“You ain’t missing that much.” Hector threw the remark out as if too distracted for manners.”
“Ouch,” Alex said, but her tone was weirdly playful.
“I’m missing something, and I don’t appreciate that.”
Jerry gave him a light punch on the arm. “That’s the attitude we wanna see! Rip his head off, man.”
“No, I mean—”
“You’ll be fine.” Hector winked, and it looked strange on him.
Rick was so weirded out by the awkward wink that he forgot about Alex. “Should I… maybe do some practice?”
“It’ll just wear you out,” Alex said. “Did you sleep?”
He shook his hands out, like he was getting ready for batting practice or a public speaking performance. “Yeah. Kinda nervous. Used to always—” He cut himself off, but Hector gave him a knowing smile, then raised his eyebrows, as if expecting more.
“Kinda like a first date.” Rick shrugged.
Hector raised his left hand and pointed at his wedding ring, then winked—less awkwardly this time. “I dunno. Been a while.”
“Heh. Yeah.” He smiled. Manuel led him to the chair and Rick sat.
He clapped his hands. “Ready!”
Hector nodded and touched an earpiece tucked into his right ear. “Sonny ready?” He narrowed his eyes as he listened, then nodded again. “Sonny’s ready when you are. You wanna start early?”
Best to get it over with. “Yeah.”
Manuel grabbed the cable for the implant and struggled to get it to fit the port at the back of Rick’s skull.
“It’s tricky. Lemme get it.” Rick reached for the cable.
“You gotta get that fixed, homie,” Manuel said.
“I’m kinda ‘bout to be in the middle of something.” Rick plugged in the implant. “See you ladies and gents on the other side?”
His view went black.
When the lights came up, he called out. “Am I allowed to talk to you?”
There was no response.
“Guess not.” The stone beneath his feet made him laugh. The cave. “Who would have guessed?”
He accessed his inventory of cosmetic changes. The tattoos were still there. Maybe when I win a real fight. He chose the beginner’s gi and boxing shorts beneath it, just in case. Back to basics, but I’m wearing undies this time. He shuddered at the thought of pulling the Grunge passive skill and having the real Sonny Esposito rip his pants off. I’m getting paid, but I ain’t getting paid that much.
He stepped out of the cave and had to shade his eyes from the glare. Why the hell did I drink seven beers before a fight?He shook his head and took a deep breath…
And nearly had his head taken off by an AI bot camping his spawn point. He ducked at the last moment and came up with hard right uppercut, knocking the skinny black man tumbling to the ground. He came down after the bot and, in ten seconds, he’d scored his first win.
Victory!
Two orange boxes and a blue box appeared. The orange boxes turned into icons.
Boost Points +2
Surprise Attack Defeated!
Bonus Boost Points +1
Rick quickly put two points into stamina and dithered about where to put the final point. “Fuck it.” He dropped it into strength.
Strength: 2
Speed: 1
Stamina: 3
The blue box turned into a blue icon.
Passive Skill Acquired!
Badger: This passive skill allows you to ignore any two hit combo. Even direct hits will turn to glancing blows, as long as you don’t flinch. Note: 5 minute cooldown.
Holy shit! The passive skill had to be rare. Though he wasn’t getting any permanent skills from this limited tournament scenario, Rick already coveted the Badger skill as something he’d want to take with him to any next level if he ever got it again. If he’d had his own SR rig, he could have tried to climb rank and acquire a few permanents before the fight with Sonny, but Hector wasn’t paying him that much, and he’d needed most of his time in Hector’s rig practicing with Alex.
More than satisfied with his first loot grab, he examined the paths before him. The first was the obvious path. Wide and with a long, straight line of sight, he’d be able to see most ambushes coming. Next to it, a small path that looked like an animal trail wound crookedly through the forest.
He’d had to make a choice like this countless times already, and though the less obvious path often had big rewards, some of the times he was knocked out most quickly had come from following them.
The thunder crackled behind him.
A quote from a book came to him, as it had every other time he’d made this choice. “The obvious road is almost always the fool’s road.” But Burroughs had been wrong, at least as it applied to Ruckus Online.
He sighed as he started down the crooked path. Hope I’m not wrong about this.