Андреа Хёст - The Starfighter Invitation

Core Unit Synchronisation

91%

"That’s going to have to do it," I said—or thought—and immediately my camera view moved back away from my Taia 2.0.

Player Name:

Taia de Haas

Enter Core Unit Name:

"Core Unit Name?"

The Player Name is

not publically accessible.

Core Unit Names are visible

to other players at default settings.

"So people will be able to see my Core Unit Name when I’m playing alts? What are the naming conventions?"

Core Unit Names may

be one to ten words.

The Core Unit Name of

a player is unique to

that player of

Dream Speed .

"Unique? Shit. What about alt names?"

Additional Modal names are not

required to be unique.

Some people never used the same name twice, but just as many had built identities over years of gaming, and it could be quite a race to claim certain popular names on a server. Unique names across all of Dream Speed would produce a lot of pissed-off players.

I hurriedly entered my preferred name, which wasn’t a common one, but I’d hate to see it go to someone else. Mentally hitting [Confirm], I watched the words floating in front of me.

Core Unit Name:

Leveret

Commencing Dream Speed .

Stars, swirling in a vast white disk. The Milky Way, or something like it, and that pale streamer drifting lazily into closer focus was—probably—the Orion Arm, Earth’s location.

[[[Welcome to The Synergis.]]]

The words were spoken, the voice the rich and strangely layered one that had been used by the Concierge Ryzon. As if three or four copies of the same person were speaking in unison.

[[[In The Synergis

you will not hunger.

In The Synergis

you will not want.

By the bounty of the

Cybercognates,

you will not fear

disease, age, or war.]]]

The camera was hurtling toward a single mote of light that became a distant, burning ball.

[[[Your handling has been

assigned to a

fledgling Cybercognate.

You will be

trained

to strengthen your lan.

To push the limit of

interstellar travel.]]]

We passed a planet. Not a blue gem, but dusty red, with one vivid blue-green slash like an enormous wound.

[[[Gain rank.

Gain reputation.

Gain the strength to

surpass the

galactic limit.

Be celebrated as

the first among all Bios.]]]

The wounded world had been left behind, and a watery paradise hurried to replace it. Strings of islands, a touch of ice at either pole, and no sign of continents.

[[[Welcome to the Drowned Earth.]]]

I plummeted. The ocean filled my view and then I was swallowed by brilliant blue. Shoals of fish darted away like silver fireworks, vanishing into fractured light.

As I began to sink, a different voice spoke. Not rich and multi-layered, but a jagged growl.

Competition.

Distraction.

Complacency.

The light of the surface was receding rapidly, and larger shapes seemed to be moving around me.

Yes, the Cycogs allow

Enclaves outside their rule.

Yes, The Synergis will allow anyone to leave.

But they control all passage.

We are the beasts of burden they use,

but they claim that without Them,

humanity cannot touch the stars.

Something vast came so close to me that its wake sent me spinning, but it vanished into the gloom without touching me.

Go.

Join The Synergis.

Strengthen yourself.

Gain your ship.

Then bring it back.

Find a way.

Break their rule.

I sank into total blackness, the surface a memory, both voices silent, leaving me to try to make sense of what I’d heard. A galaxy ruled by non-humans… non-Bios . Enclaves outside their rule. Space travel that involved something called lan . The game’s main plotline.

Then, in the very depths, one final whisper reached me. A faint, shivering quaver, as fleeting at those vanished beams of light. Barely audible.

Who drowned the Earth?

I woke, and let out my breath in disappointment. The game had crashed. No surprise: I’ve never been part of an MMO launch that had run without problems. My very first open beta—_World of Warcraft_—had had a loot bug that had frozen my character every time I tried to pick something up. Entire servers falling over and kicking everyone out of the game was probably even more common.

Thinking over the rather sparse game intro, I scrubbed sleep out of my eyes. So the main plot was espionage? Humans vs AIs. Presuming cybercognate meant AI .

No cowl.

I blinked, and touched my face again. GDG involved wearing a thing like a detached hood. It covered your hair, your eyes, and fastened loosely around your throat: designed to be easy to sleep in but hard to accidentally pull off.

Mine wasn’t anywhere, but by that time I’d looked up, and knew I was still dreaming. Playing. I was in Dream Speed .

The ceiling was a curve of pearly-cream, shot through with a couple of thin grey lines. It was nothing like the ceiling of my bedroom, and not much like the ceiling of any room I’d been in. It looked like ceramic, and seemed shaped like a pizza oven. I was lying on a firm mattress, feeling entirely real and present, not at all like a hazy GDG experience. There was a pillow and a sheet. Nothing but wall behind me, that single arching curve above and to either side of me, and at my feet…

The room before me was an oblong, and I was at one of the ends. The main thing I could see was the opposite end, where a short corridor ended with a hexagonal hatch. My bed-platform thing seemed to be raised up, like a mezzanine floor, so I could only see the top of the hatch, and also a bit of a larger curving ceiling.

I was naked. Or my Core Unit was. It really did feel exceptionally like this was all real. I wasn’t a character avatar, but me, somehow teleported into a strange room somewhere—and I struggled to find differences, to be sure. The small scar on my right big toe was missing. And my legs had the muscle definition they’d lacked since I’d left high school. Possibly they were longer.

There were four flat steps leading down from the bed nook, and I sat with my bare feet on the topmost, staring around at the room. Four or maybe five metres across, and at least three times as long, with a long couch-bench running down the wall to my left and curving around a table. The opposite side featured empty shelves, and high-backed swivel chairs on either side of a little extrusion of the wall that could serve as an occasional table. Everything was built in, giving the space a feel somewhere between futuristic studio apartment and train carriage-sized caravan.

There were no visible windows, but warm sunlight was spilling into the room from down and to the right at my end of the space, where four more flat steps disappeared behind me. A mezzanine and a basement?

Wondering what sort of place had the windows in the basement, I stood. Was I really taller? I felt…springier, moving with a ready energy that I’d missed since my running days. Surely two extra inches would be obvious…but in any case they weren’t enough to significantly change the way I walked as I moved with exaggerated care to the bottom of the stair and looked back.

The bed nook really did look like a pizza oven—fortunately more than large enough not to be claustrophobic. The stairs curved like a fanned deck of cards from bed to basement , and I couldn’t see much of the source of the light, except a slice of vivid blue. That was more than enough to make me forget qualms about controlling my slightly-modified body and trot down and around, only to stop short, jolted by all the out and down .