NOVEL NEXT Chapter 51: Hype
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Vincent: I think I'm sold on Gallant. He's—okay.
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Thursday, November 14th, 2090, about 10:00 am MST, Studio set, Bob and Mik's 'Gameroom'
Gallant spun her around, then placed her on her feet gently, enfolding her in a hug before finally letting her go and stepping back, hands returning to a parade rest, eyes attentively resting on her.
Marie smiled faintly, feeling tears well up. "I know it's not real," she whispered. "But… thank you, Gordon."
The camera panned to Mikayla's face, which was streaming with tears. "There you have it," she whispered, visibly overcome. "True love."
The studio erupted into cheers, the roar of the crowd drowning out everything else. Bright lights swept across the stage, illuminating Mikayla's tear-streaked face as she turned to the cameras.
"They get me every time," she sniffed. "Gallant and his Lady—Marie, Marsgirl—you've seen the clips, the edits, the fan cuts."
She straightened, eyes shining. "And now? It's time. We've got news. Big news. Bob—gorgeous, reliable Bob—tell the people."
Bob Hayday, impassive as ever, gave a small nod. "Thanks to some digging by our interns—credit where it's due—we've confirmed that Marie is preparing for her level 300 delve."
He let the weight of it settle, then continued evenly.
"For those less familiar: when a player hits level 300, Ghostlands generates a unique dungeon—solo only, one attempt, no retries. No one has ever cleared theirs on the first run."
Mikayla leaned toward the camera, eyes wide. "It's custom-designed by the engine to push you to the absolute edge. A personal nightmare, cranked to eleven."
Bob gave a nod. "There are, to date, a few hundred players at level 300. Almost all of them are Belters—isolated workers with the time and mental space to grind for years. Most don't stream. But many upload recordings or written postmortems after the fact. The community's compiled a wiki."
He tapped his tablet once.
"We've identified a pool of about forty known boss types. Each one rolls with mutators—randomized traits, modifiers, environmental effects. It's not procedural, but it is unpredictable."
He glanced up, tone steady.
"We're not going in blind anymore. The community's done the work. We have some idea of the challenges she may face."
A pause. Then, dry as ever:
"And they are considerable."
Bob shifted his gaze to B camera.
"This will be only the second time a level 300 delve has ever been streamed in real time. Marie is one of just two max-level players who stream at all."
"And she's the first woman to reach 300, and the only one with the guts to go live," Mikayla added, practically shouting.
Bob nodded once. "She's a remarkable woman."
"She's remarkable in so many ways, Bob!" Mikayla chirped. "And we're all holding our breaths to see what she does next."
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Karen sat alone in the early morning with her feet up on the desk. The desk lamp cast a warm puddle of light across the surface and onto the floor beyond the holo illuminating Karen's wrist. The glow illuminated her yoga pants, her mock top, and the high, tight braid of her ponytail. Everything else in the scene was in shadow—just the way she liked it.
Machinery hummed, clicked, and occasionally went whumph in the background. The entire assembly line, dedicated to producing microchips—specifically for smoke detectors—basically ran itself. She couldn't even pretend she was really required from a "keep the place from burning down" perspective. The showroom models, which demonstrated how the more advanced alarms could integrate into the phone system and call the fire department for you, were more than capable of doing just that.
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She was, as she'd said before, basically glorified security. She just happened to have the right degree to fix things if they broke in the middle of the night. In theory.
So far, what that usually meant was that a misaligned board would throw off all the sensors. A screaming robot arm would fail to realign it, and she'd have to scrub up, get into her static-free gear, and—with gloved fingers—nudge it back into place with the guide lines on the assembly line. At which point, everything would turn green, chime happily, and resume work. All that effort for a subtle issue in orientation.
Today, though, she had something different on the docket. Sort of. She was still working her normal shift, but Claire had told her that for sponsorship, it was a good idea to go ahead and let people know something about her: what she stood for, what she wanted out of life. Karen had said, half-jokingly, that she probably had a better answer to that than Claire did.
No—that wasn't quite fair. Claire wanted Harry. Claire wanted her family's company to run well.
But Karen had chosen one of humanity's oldest and biggest enemies to take as her own: pain.
She'd had this argument so many times it had stopped being an argument and started being the through-line of late-night conversations—with friends, coworkers, or just herself. Not drunk. Just late. And especially with Gordon. He'd probably heard it often enough to recite it from memory.
It went like this:
"The biggest hurdle we have left in medicine and cybernetics is our squeamishness. Just like Galen before us, there are vast frontiers of knowledge we've barely picked up the tools to explore. And yet, moving forward seems horribly unethical.
Our current standoff? It stems from the adage: 'do no harm.' Why risk a patient's health for something not necessary?
Unless, of course, it's about sex. Obviously. If it's about sex, we definitely need to do it. The cosmetics industry proves that particular hypocrisy."
In general, there was a strong disinclination to upgrade the human body. It was just an assumption, baked into how medicine was practiced. And she argued it was getting past time to do away with that idea.
First came wearable electronics. The various disasters caused by high-temperature lithium batteries had long been a bottleneck. The makers of the Portable had decided to ditch straps and clasps entirely. They mounted magnets subcutaneously over the radius and ulna, letting users snap the device on and off. Oh, you're afraid it'll catch fire? Take it off. No strap to catch. No clasp to jam. No scenario where a burning magnesium core meant amputating your arm.
It was minor surgery. Augmentation. Not medically necessary, but not much different from earrings. Building on that, the zeitgeist had eventually accepted that, due to the limitations of helmets, a new kind of display was needed—particularly for space tug captains and their navigators. Ocular implants had originally been designed for the military and deep-space industry. But once the tech existed, the elite found them irresistible.
Claire could take notes in real-time, run a productivity AI, and throw up a dozen screens only she could see. Karen had always envied her that ability.
And then came Ghostlands—and with it, the neural link implant. Originally an offshoot of assistive tech for paralysis, it opened the door to full-immersion VR. The market was too big to leave untapped. The first mass-market implant had arrived. One in eight now had one. Brain surgery or not, the market had simply adjusted. Hospitals started using large-scale AI to assist with implantation.
And as far as Karen could tell, the zeitgeist was content with that.
But that wasn't enough. Not nearly.
Once you broke the taboo that surgery had to be only for "serious" intervention, other upgrades became imaginable. Implants for extreme environments. Oxygenation aids. Integrated stressors to prevent bone loss in low gravity. Deep-tissue muscle activators to stave off sarcopenia—whether from aging or space travel. She'd spent a lot of time thinking about low gravity lately. Gordon was moving to Mars.
But what she'd thought of first—was pain.
Pain: one of the simplest, most universal, and most difficult problems in medicine.
"I can tell you're hurting," she often said, "but I can't tell how much. Or why."
Partly, it was a data problem. We didn't have good datasets to train large models. Partly, it was physiological. Nerves don't exist in isolation—they're shaped by hormones, sugar levels, salt levels, temperature, pressure. Context matters.
But context can be measured. Every one of those variables is quantifiable. It just requires hardware.
Once measured, each one could be normalized, compensated for. That, in turn, just required models. So she designed and built an integrated sensor. Gordon wrote the firmware.
She wouldn't be allowed to test it until after she got her degree. But the attempt—to normalize a measurement for pain, even if it required an implant—was just one of many low-hanging fruits still hanging on the vine. The moment had come. The zeitgeist was shifting. All she had to do now was communicate that to her viewers.
Without losing their attention.
She was well aware that most of the reason people would come to—and stay on—her stream wasn't because they anticipated a medical revelation. It probably had more to do with her crop top turtleneck and her toned abs.
She'd set the lighting to compensate.
And as the streaming icon blinked green, she threw on a performative smile, adjusted her posture just enough to subtly frame her midriff, and greeted her audience.