After the black, Rick’s reality faded back in, but instead of sending him back to a starting location, the game dumped him in what he’d later learn was the game’s lobby.
A few involuntary giggles later, he stood on the invisible floor in the pitch-black space. “Alex, what the fuck was that?”
Nothing. He took a few deep breaths to steady his nerves. He’d gone from a triumphant certainty, to the overwhelming sensations of stabs and slashes, to uncontrollable laughter, only to arrive in a disorientingly black room. “Alex?”
Again, nothing. Light jazz played faintly in the background, though it seemed sourceless. He took a couple steps in one direction, then jogged a few paces in another. The sound of the music got neither louder nor softer.
He jumped as light poured through a crack in the air that appeared four feet before him. He started breathing again when it widen into the recognizable pattern of opening doors. A massive scrolling list of servers appeared, lending light to the room. The floor wasn’t invisible, it was merely black. The lack of light had made it seem invisible.
“Rick, you there?” Alex’s voice was in his head.
“Yeah, where the hell am I?”
“Did that panther-guy beat you?” she asked. “I thought I’d lost you. How the fuck did you lose in the first fight of the—” she interrupted herself without finishing the sentence—“it was a bot, for fuck’s sake. Where’s your head at?”
“I thought I had him—it—whatever. Then I tried to get it on the ground and it tore me apart.”
“Okay, I’m in a lobby now. I need to find you,” she said. “But you gotta tell me something.”
“Yeah?”
“Is your head in this today? Can you do this?”
He grunted. “Yeah—”
“Because,” she said, “we’re both going to have to put money on this fight, and if you can’t handle it…”
“I can handle it. Kris coming back from the hospital, the blow up with Hector.” He shook his head. “I’ve gone from thinking my wife and I had a future to thinking all was lost, and then back again. It’s hard to find a center.”
She sighed. “That makes sense. Chalk it up to it being your first public practice match, but goddamn, man—you have to get better. I know you’re better than this.”
He nodded. “It always takes me longer to adjust to a new situation than it does for most people, but I’ll adjust.” His thoughts went back to the fight he’d just lost. “What happened with…” He sighed and started over. “The Wild One started clawing me and the sensation went from me receiving the normalized weak pain signals to tickling me so much I couldn’t move.”
She materialized in his lobby, causing him to startle.
“Chillax, man. Players materialize and fade away in SR all the time.” She frowned. “If you take a lot of damage from a Wild One or something much more powerful than a player character or human-like bot—anything with claws or teeth—the game can’t ethically cause you that much pain, but it has to simulate how incapacitating that would be. It does it via tickling.”
“How is that legal, and how the hell is this the first time I’ve experienced it?”
She nodded again. “It’s in the EULA you clicked through the first time you played. We disabled it for the Esposito fight and lead-up because he despises the feature. It’s possible to get a waiver that gets rid of it, but for that—”
“You need money for a doctor and a diagnosis…”
“Right.”
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
“Alex?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m not normally ticklish. At all. How the hell am I ticklish in here?”
“It’s a simulated dream world coordinated by an AI.” She shrugged. “Anything can happen here. You know how many people who have sexual problems go to SR simply because it eliminates any physical barriers to sex or orgasm?”
Rick raised his eyebrows. “I’m guessing it’s a lot.”
She smiled. “It’s like you’ve been under a rock for the last ten years.”
He nodded. It was about that long ago when he finished probation. He’d gotten so used to the restrictions on VR, and SR had always been so financially out of reach, he never bothered looking up any of the new tech. Simply keeping him and Kristina in food and housing had been struggle enough.
He gave Alex a thoughtful look. “Why don’t we pretend I have been under a rock for ten years?”
She looked away, then back at him. “What makes you think I’m old enough to know what was happening ten years ago?”
Oh shit. “How old are—”
“Don’t ask that.” She crossed her arms. “C’mon, man.”
An awkward silence hung in the air before he asked, “How do we join a server, then? I assume you’ve taken care of it until now, but don’t I need to know that?”
She frowned. “Wow. Yeah, I suppose. It’s easy enough.” She walked to the wall of scrolling servers and placed her hand against it. It stopped scrolling. She pushed upward with a quick movement, sending the screen scrolling upward. “This aspect is a lot like a muni AR array. You select by tapping the server twice.”
He approached her at the wall and she tapped him on the shoulder, then tapped herself. A blue aura circled them both. “Now we’re a party again, but it doesn’t mean much unless we decide to cooperate in game. It just ensures we’re in the same match.”
“Can I try?”
She nodded. “Go nuts—wait, not that!”
Rick groaned before everything faded to black again.
**********************************************
He inhaled as the black lifted and he found himself in a cabin he’d never seen in the game before.
Alex materialized to his left and slightly behind, creating a displaced-air, wind-type effect he’d never been close enough to a materializing player to experience before. He frowned. Kinda cool.
“God-fucking-damn it, Rick!”
“What? I didn’t think it mattered.”
Alex strode toward the center of three paths. “You chose a fuckin’ beta map, Einstein.”
He grabbed her arm and forced her to face him. “When you don’t tell me things, you don’t get to be upset when I make a mistake.”
She tried to pull her wrist away, but he gripped it firmly. “You wanna be a good trainer? Let me tell you something about good and bad trainers.”
She pulled away forcefully, but he held on. “Every step of the way, you’ve been pushing me harder than any trainer I’ve ever had. You’ve boosted the difficulty, not told me about the tickle effect, and you’ve thrown me through one high-pressure situation after another. A good trainer doesn’t do that.”
She wrenched her hand free, then turned and began to walk away, but stopped.
He spoke to her back. “What are you not telling me?”
Her head drooped. “I need you to win. You don’t need to know why.”
He clenched his jaw. The woman was infuriating. “Don’t you think it’ll help if—”
“No,” she said. “You’re the ground I have to win. Good job. You’ve figured it out.”
“Since when?”
She turned back to him. “Since you obliterated the training dummy.”
Rick considered it. “And when I didn’t beat Esposito—”
She nodded and looked down. “I’m behind, yeah.”
The sound of rustling leaves drifted in through the cabin’s open window. An old, cast-iron stove stood in the corner of the room, but it lacked a fire. A small sink sat in the other corner next to a circa 1950s refrigerator and a modest countertop. It appeared the sink had a faucet for running water. He approached it and opened the tap. To his wonderment, the water flowed, beginning as a rusty brown color before clearing. He placed his cupped hands under the spout and quickly sipped.
Alex frowned, but then took a few steps closer. “What are you doing?”
“Tastes good.” He looked up and held her gaze. “You don’t want to tell me why you need me?”
Alex scrunched her face as if what he’d asked had caused her pain.
“You know what I owe Hector for?”
She shook her head slowly. “I know it’s expensive and elicit.”
Rick’s wry laughter filled the small room before fading. “It’s my—”
“You don’t have to tell—”
“I want to tell you,” he said. The sound of the rustling leaves got louder. The lightning ring.
“This conversation isn’t safe here, Rick.” Alex’s face was deadly serious as she pointed up and waved her hand, indicating the sky, generally.
“The lightning’s coming.” He looked around the cabin again. “This is a beta map? What’s wrong with that? If I’ll be doing this long-term…”
She swallowed. “Every match in a non-tournament map is a waste of time we don’t—”
“Stop.” He raised his hand. “I get it, but I’m gonna be out there on my own with my ass hanging out, and every painful pimple is something you didn’t tell me.”
She smirked. “We’ll jump in the elimination ring and exit the map.”
“Is the lobby a good place to talk?”
She shook her head and put her finger to her mouth in the universal “shhh” sign.
Three minutes later, Rick followed her through the lightning into the void. They initiated the SR disengage from the lobby before the wall of servers appeared.