Into the Black

(A virtual room in NERV HQ)

Morgan Elliot whistled as she leaned back in her chair. The team had just finished watching the edited stream that their favorite Beta tester had just sent them. The first few real-world days’ worth of footage had been OK, but nothing outstanding, minus some kinky sex scenes that left more than a couple people squirming.

The last twenty-four hours in game, though, was a revelation. Morgan looked over to one of the project leads, who had a bowl of constantly refilling virtual popcorn. As she stole a handful, she said, “Was this your doing, Isaac?”

Isaac Hayes, the lead programmer laughed, and said, “I wish! I couldn’t have written a plot better than this if I’d tried. No, everything has been his own doing. I had to go back and review the footage from his ‘training montage’ to catch it, but there were clear signs that he was planning his escape since he got in game, once you knew what to look for.”

“And the ship?”

“Pretty sure that was all completely a crime of opportunity. I don’t know what his plan for getting off the moon was, but it was probably something like conning or seducing his way onto a shady merchant ship, getting some distance so he could plan the next step. That he just ran into an idiot calling himself ‘Lord Kickass’ and robbed him blind was pure luck.”

“Ugh. I can’t believe that he posed that player with the Major’s dead body like that. We’re going to be getting complaints about that, you know.”

“Both players were set to allow adult content.”

“And posing a dead body to frame someone for murder doesn’t bother you?”

“Maybe if it was real life, but looking over Lord Kickass’s logs, he seemed to be a jackass, so waking up having been robbed of everything and framed for murder might do him good. I’ve set a script to monitor him, just in case. Though he might be sitting in jail for a while until the whole succession thing is settled.”

“Yeah, what the hell happened there?”

Isaac shrugged. “I’ll have to look over the logs for specifics, but I think what we have there is good, old-fashioned human politics. The plans were already starting to come together, by the looks of it, it just took players getting involved to set things off. By the way, those players who did the attack on the Palace have formed the first guild. They’re called the Smoker’s Club. I checked, and apparently it is a reference to a group in an old tabletop RPG that was a team of assassins.”

“Tabletop RPG? People still play those?”

“Yeah, before Dreams, you could still find more freedom playing alongside a group around a table than you could in any video games out there. Without VR and the AI, other offerings just couldn’t compare to the level of crazy you could get up to in tabletop. Like that trick with dumping the body and framing another player for it. Genius, and not something you could do in pre-VR MMOs.”

“Huh. What was this RPG called? Maybe we’ll be able to lift some ideas for future patches.”

“It was called Shadowrun, I think. Interesting premise. Cyberpunk, but with magic added, so you had elves and dragons alongside AI and a hackable Matrix.”

Morgan got thoughtful for a second, “Dragons, huh?”

Isaac laughed, “I know that look! Just make sure to give me enough time to program things before going off and throwing craziness into the game. The AI controller might complain otherwise.”

“Like you can talk! Don’t think I’ve forgotten your attempt to put Succubus as a playable race!”

“Aww, c’mon, that was just a joke!”

Morgan simply leveled an ‘I don’t think so’ smirk at him. “Sure it was. So, what do you think our boy will do now that he has a ship and a princess to care for?”

“No clue, but I’ll bet we won’t be bored.”

End of Book 1.