Андреа Хёст - The Starfighter Invitation

It was tempting to just start jogging—away from the crowd and along the curve of the crescent. I felt springy, full of energy, in a way that I hadn’t since the last track meet of high school. Jogging five k’s up a slope would handily get me away from this press, while nicely putting off the guild get-together a little longer.

I’d had a couple of months to decide whether or not to attend any meet-ups, and had been okay with the idea, but Core Units had added an unexpected twist to the decision. Corpse Light was a long-standing guild, with some players who had known each other for decades. People I had spoken with daily or at least weekly for years, but had never met in person. To them I was Kaz , who graduated last year from a course never fully described, but something to do with computers.

The crowd ahead thinned a little, and I took the chance to follow my arrow to a ramp downward, and then a transport pod which was a little over half-full. Getting away from the glut at the entrance would make this easier.

But if anything, the upper reaches of the island were even more crowded than the rollercoaster exit. Half the server seemed to have decided to meet here.

The sensible thing to do would be turn around. The guild meeting wasn’t necessary, was a thing I’d decided to go to out of courtesy and a general affection for the guild leaders. Could I do this? The terraces would help, surely, preventing the experience from the endless press you’d get in the middle of a concert crowd, or anything totally impossible like that.

Determinedly, I kept my focus on the guiding arrow as I threaded my way through the crowd toward the terraced drop-off of the inner curve of the crescent, where I again found a balustrade to clutch while staring at vast blue ocean, a sky edging toward sunset, the pearly ribbon of the rollercoaster twisting over sandbars, and a whole lot of Down.

The lighthouse was still perhaps a hundred feet above, but Amelia’s meet-up point was somewhere below, among countless tiers of tropical garden. A thousand picnic spots blurred before me, all vivid greens and splashes of bright flowers, with grey and brown notes for handy rocks for sitting, and lighter notes for table and benches, with ramps leading down and up. All dotted with flitting birds, and simply seething with coverall-clad people.

And that was only the surface of Vessa Major. I didn’t even notice the doors, at first. Only when a cry of "Beer and wings!" rose up behind me, and I turned to see a group of people emerging from a door that led into the tiered cliff. Laden with trays of food and drink, they offered snacks to everyone in their path.

Curious, and looking for some breathing room, I headed for the door, and found a mostly-empty indoor atrium, with just a group around a line of hatches that must lead to a vast vat of Soup. The group swelled and ebbed as people carried off plates handed over by a pair of boys repeatedly requesting what I guessed they’d selected as a consumables reward.

" Is there any limit to how much they can ask for, Dio? "

[[Technically, yes. It’s rare any Bio reaches it with this kind of small-serving outlet.]]

" So any reward you get, you can just make endless copies of it? "

[[Patterns usually come with instance restrictions. No limit to how many times you can create them, but a limit to how many you personally can have in existence at the same time. There’s no real reason to limit Tier 1 food rewards. Prestige items will allow you only one copy at a time. Very rarely, you will encounter single-use patterns.]]

The map in my HUD had changed to a floor level diagram, showing all sorts of rooms inside the island, and for a while I ignored the arrow pointing back the way I’d come, and wandered around the much emptier interior, all the way to the outer curve of the crescent, which was dotted not with tiers, but with countless garden balconies. These, Dio informed me, connected to private suites that could only be accessed as Challenge rewards.

I’d found a way to view the different layers of the island’s internal levels, and little icons for wet rooms and Soup outlets and Challenge entrances. The place was massive. Not quite beyond belief, but definitely impressive. And this was just the starter level. Earth.

" Are there alien megastructures, Dio? Dyson Spheres? Ring worlds? Death Stars? "

[[Yes.]]

I looked up at my personal alien overlord. " Yes to which? Is this going to be one of those reach Rank Ten before I stop taunting you with ambiguities things? "

[[Yes,]] Dio said, and laughed.

Reassured by the knowledge that the inside of the island was easily accessible and much emptier, I concentrated on reaching my guild, pursuing my guiding arrow into an ocean of conversation, auto-translations of languages I didn’t understand mixing through the handful I commanded.

Most of it seemed to be discussions between people, rather than the only half-audible dialogue with Cycogs. At first it just came to me as gabble, while I worked through the crowd of people near the pod station, but then I found a ramp down, past a terrace crammed with, from the sound of it, a guild of English and Irish players.

"Ranker already? Way to go, brother!"

"How’d you get so far ahead? You only started half an hour ahead of me."

"He passed in his first session, too, the mutt. I’ve done two training dints, and still can barely shift that blue shite."

"Seemed pretty easy to me. What was your sync rating?"

"Seventy-five."

"I’m in the nineties."

"Fuck that."

"What I don’t understand is why we didn’t start with a hundred percent sync. It’s one thing to give us the option of sacrificing some advantage for cosmetic options, but I started out at, like, sixty. All that bollocks about having a strong self-image or not—why start tons of players out at a big disadvantage?"

"In a game like this, see, we bring our advantages and disadvantages with us. Gav’s got a black belt, right? So how do you feel about a bit of PVP with Gav around?"

" Why don’t we start at a hundred percent, Dio? " I asked, as I moved out of easy hearing.

[[Synchronisation brings together a conscious and unconscious perception of self, adds a strong measure of preening vanity, and sits in the shadow of anxiety. Lan functions best when a Bio is both familiar with and accepting of the self they see, and that is not something that can be automatically generated.]]

"Hm," I said aloud, forgetting to use the private tell function. The game’s central mechanics seemed like a recipe for gripes and frustration, but I didn’t see any point arguing with Dio about it, and walked on past several small terraces, catching a series of conversation fragments all jumbled together.

" This is Bijou and Hax, streaming non-stop from Dream Speed , which is already officially our Game of the Century—and probably yours as well. "

"No, I’m not a fan of the categories. Custom ? It conflates too much."

"I like the idea myself—I’ve never liked picking Other . What word would you have preferred? Non-standard? I know—Bespoke! I’m definitely Bespoke today."

"I’d hate to really be living in The Synergis."

"Oh, bullshit. A civilisation where you never have to worry about having a place to sleep or enough to eat? Where you can spend all your time playing games, farting about, or just kick back and watch the entertainment?"

"Where’s there’s nothing real to strive for, and humanity is on one giant hamster wheel? We’re pets in this game!"

"Just wish it wasn’t trying to force some stupid enviro-weepy Drowned Earth propaganda down our throats. Goddamn message fic."