Prologue
“You’re all here because you’ve passed a number of hurdles that we’ve stuck in front of you.” Kevin Jax, the CEO of Kazaran Online smiled at us from the stage. I’d never been this close to him before, but it wasn’t like low-level bug testers had much of a reason to hang out with the boss. I wasn’t even sure why I was here now. I’d received an invitation to this event, but it didn’t say what it was about. I guessed it had to do with the application I’d made to test new aspects of the game before release.
“Some of you are majorly into the RPG aspects of Kazaran,” he said. “Some have demonstrated strong abilities to manage tactics and battles in interesting ways. Others of you have ticked the checkbox that shows you’re great at leading.”
I noticed he made eye contact with specific people as he talked. I was busy looking around when I heard him mention something about a character assignment system. I looked up and saw he was staring right at me. Shit. He must have noticed I wasn’t paying attention, but he just smiled a bit wider for a second and moved on.
“Something incredible happened six months ago,” he said, suddenly getting serious. “I connected a cable to the back of my skull and entered the world of Kazaran.”
What.
The.
Fuck.
I thought I’d be testing a new class or feature, maybe getting access to a new expansion at best, but no. Kevin went on to tell us we’d be living in the fucking game, going through it like it was real.
There was a little more, including a look at the pods we’d be living in, but it was all a blur. The next thing I knew, Kevin left the room to a standing ovation.
Olivia Parker, Kevin’s right hand, took the microphone.
“Okay everyone, listen up. Obviously there’s a lot there to digest, so how about you all gossip about it in the next room. We’ve got snacks and booze, so go nuts. Might as well punish your bodies one last time before we send you off to Kazaran.” She held up her lanyard and pointed at her name tag. “One last thing, if you have a star next to your name, hang back for a few minutes.”
Everyone stood up and filed to the exits.
I looked down at my name tag. I’d noticed the star earlier, but hadn’t questioned it at the time. I wondered what that meant. Well, one way to find out. I made my way to the front of the room as most of the people funneled out. Within a few minutes, there were only a handful of us left.
“Great,” Olivia said, clapping her hands. “So, let me explain what’s going on. Those stars on your badge mean you’ve been chosen to lead a team. Congrats. Don’t ask me how it happened, because I can’t tell you. All I can say is Kevin had the final say.” A few people raised their hands, but she motioned for them to put them down. “I know you have questions, but like Kevin said, the best way to find the answers is by playing the game. Every team is getting their own server, which has specific features we want to test, so I can’t really give you any more information anyway.” She pointed to a few people standing off to the side. “Luckily we’ve got people who can help. These people will escort you to get your neural implant installed. After that, you’ll meet with the onboarding technician for your server, who will tell you what you need to know.”
A few people looked confused, but nobody said anything. Olivia looked around and then nodded. “It will all make sense soon enough, so let’s not waste any time. When I call your name, meet up with your escort and we’ll get started. First up, Grant Palaski, team lead of the Cerulean Server.” She looked around until I raised my hand. “Ah, there you are. Such a shy boy. Well, we’ll fix that soon enough. Get out of here and make us proud. ”
Chapter 1
When Olivia sent me to the Cerulean Server team, they informed me I’d get to dig into the Character Alignment Suitability Test, or C.A.S.T. I’d been put through a series of simulations on a special version of the Kazaran Online system to see which class I was most suited for. It was like full-immersion, but just in a very small area. A trailer, in this case.
It hadn’t gone well.
Among the more memorable things I’d accomplished were getting my torso split in half and being torn to pieces by a demonic replica of my mother.
The last simulation ended when I set a werewolf and his girlfriend on fire as I tried to escape a three-way gone wrong in a trailer park. The psychological damage would have been bad enough, but for some reason that girlfriend looked exactly like the person sitting in front of me right now.
Her name was Heather Henderson, and she was one of the executives at Kazaran.
She was smiling.
She smiled a lot.
“Well, you’re looking awfully grumpy for someone who’s about to make history,” she said. “Aren’t you happy to be a tester?” A couple of seconds later, she added, “Hell, you’re not just a tester, you’re a team lead.”
“Uh huh,” I said, still a bit dazed from the testing experience I’d just been through. I flushed and quickly looked back at the desk. “I mean, uh…yeah, it’s great.”
“Damn right it is, Grant,” she affirmed. “You were picked by the CEO personally.” She shuffled through the pages. “Having Kevin Jax on your side should be a hell of a confidence booster.”
What? I was picked personally by the CEO? Maybe that was the real reason the dude smiled at me in the presentation?
I wanted to ask like thirty questions right then, but the only thing that came out was, “Huh?”
She glanced up and then gave me a double-take. “You mean, you didn’t know?”
“I…huh?”
Heather laughed. “Yes, Grant, you were selected personally by the head honcho. Don’t get too big of a head on this, though. There were a few others.” She tapped her pen on the desk. “Still, you’re only one of five. Out of the batch of people going into the worlds, that’s saying something.”
“But…huh?”
“Each tester individually selected brings something to the table that other testers don’t. Each of them will be team leads. We only have a handful of test servers, which means that you, Grant, are special.”
“Oh.” I wanted to say “Huh?” again, but I just looked at her with a face that conveyed the same message.
“You’re special because you're a pain in the ass.”
My “huh?” face turned to a “what the fuck?” face.
"You're not highly technical,” she explained, “which means that you can't really pinpoint what a problem is when the developers come calling. At the same time, you have a tendency of stumbling into situations that no other testers find." She crossed her arms. "You find a lot of issues, Grant."
"Right," I replied, knowing that what she was saying was true.
I tended to report a lot more issues than most. Even won an award for it a couple years ago. She was also right that I wasn't technical. They'd tried to give me some training with a debugging system that would allow me to pinpoint character and object identifiers...or something. I don't know. I failed horribly at it. Thought it was going to cost me my job, in fact, but my manager had said that they couldn't afford to lose a tester like me.
"So, he picked me personally?"
"Yep," she replied with a shrug. "That means that it's my job to make sure you get going with a bang."
I looked up again, but focused on her short, strawberry blonde hair, rather than making eye contact.
It wasn’t her fault, but I was a little uncomfortable being around her. I put it down to the fact that I’d seen her burn to death in a mobile home less than an hour ago.
I thought I’d be ready for whatever Kazaran could throw at me. I was wrong. I mean, I should have been ready. I wasn’t a casual player, after all. Hell, I never had time to play for fun. That would get in the way of my job. I worked as a tester, going into the game and making reports when we got complaints that something wasn’t working right.
It was okay, as far as jobs went, but it was potentially about to be awesome. I was just having some issues with all of it.
Believe it or not, this would be my first time playing from scratch and experiencing the game as a player. Usually I was put in as a character in specific situations to test problems. And now, rather than sitting at a keyboard, or even using VR goggles, I’d get to play the game in a full immersion rig, living the game as if it was my own life.
“You should be thrilled, but you’re not,” she said, stating the obvious. “Instead you’re sitting here, moping like someone spilled a wine cooler on your prom dress.” She tapped her fingers on the desk as she thought. “Ah, I think I know what’s going on. You’re suffering some major reintegration trauma, aren’t you?”
She had to bring it up.
Up until now, I could at least pretend she hadn’t been observing my testing.
“I guess you could say that,” I said with some reluctance. I scratched at the table and added, “You’re taking this pretty calmly, considering I just murdered you.”
“I knew it,” she laughed. “You do know it wasn’t really me in the simulation, right?”
Well, at least she was aware of what was going on with me.
“Yeah, I know,” I grunted, meeting her eyes before refocusing back on the desk.
There was a stack of forms for me to fill out, which gave me an excuse to stop paying attention to her. I scribbled away for a few minutes, but when I looked up to grab another document she was still there.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
I really didn’t.
She didn’t move, though, so I guessed I didn’t have a choice.
It was just my luck I’d been forced into a conversation about feelings with a girl I wasn’t even dating.
“I get it,” I finally admitted. “On an intellectual level, I mean. It’s still weird, though.”
I knew the woman in the simulation and the one sitting in front of me were different. They had nothing in common, other than their looks, but it was still jarring to be talking to the doppelgänger of someone I’d accidentally murdered. It should have helped to know none of it was real, but it didn’t.
At least, not much.
I snuck a glance at Heather.
Judging by her business-casual blouse and skirt, whoever’d put her into the system did a hell of a job recreating her body in the simulation.
I tried to be quick about my visual study, but she raised one eyebrow at me and smirked.
“See something interesting?”
I blushed and turned back to the forms.
“I know what it is,” she said. “I saw the same thing you did. I guess we should clear the air a bit. I saw they used me in the simulation, in a rather undignified role.”
“That’s an understatement,” I said. “You didn’t have a shirt on. Neither of us did.”
“I’m aware.” She sighed. “I don’t know what happened there. I mean, most of us old timers at Kazaran went through body scanning for early models, as well as hundreds of other people we paid to come in and strip. We needed authentic human bodies for the game, not just programmer’s wet dreams. I’m glad we do things differently for body models now, but those profiles are all still available on the system.”
She thought it was a coincidence. I wasn’t so sure.
“So it wasn’t supposed to be you?” I asked. I was interested, despite myself. “I figured they wanted to gauge my reaction to seeing you in person after the test.”
“Fuck,” she swore. “I didn’t think about that. The AI is supposed to pull a human form at random, so it’s pretty damn weird I was the one it picked. I was told it was out of circulation.” Heather put her hand to her hair. “They even updated my look since I was scanned.” She glanced over at the two-way mirror that wasn’t fooling anyone. “I think I may need to have some very strong words with whoever was responsible.”
Her voice turned to ice as she addressed the observers behind the glass, but when she turned back to me her smile hadn’t budged.
It was scary how quickly she shifted gears. Scary, and maybe a little hot.
Whoa, bad idea. My life was going to be in her hands soon. I didn’t want to inspire any mixed emotions when that happened.
I bit the inside of my lip in hopes that the pain would snap me out of whatever was going on. Why was I acting like a teenager who just got high-speed internet? Sure, Heather was hot, but she wasn’t a super-model or anything.
Maybe that wasn’t fair.
I’d looked better a few years ago, too. There was no denying I’d put on a few pounds since I’d started working at Kazaran. I’d also lost any hint of a tan by spending so much time inside. My fashion sense also wasn’t the greatest. My budget didn’t allow much in the way of clothes shopping. Aside from an occasional trip to Walmart, my wardrobe was limited to a mix of all the clothes my ex-girlfriends had picked out for me. The ones that still fit, I mean. Today I had on cowboy boots, khakis, and a t-shirt from a band I’d never listened to.
The grinning skull belt buckle, in particular, made me wonder how I ever got laid.
Maybe that was it. I needed to get laid. Bad timing, considering I was about to get my brain hooked up to a computer.
Whatever it was, I needed to move past it and focus.
“You still with me here, Grant?” Heather looked at me with furrowed eyebrows.
I realized I’d been staring at her for at least a minute while my attention wandered. So much for being focused.
“No,” I said, scrambling for something to say. “Not really, but I’ll get over it. I was just thinking about what you said. I should feel lucky, shouldn’t I? Somehow I managed to pass the tests and now I get to live in Kazaran.”
As I turned back to my papers, I thought again about how I’d been chosen.
Sure, it helped that I already worked for the company. Nobody got to do the early testing who wasn’t already vetted and had background checks from here to the moon. Since everyone working for Kazaran already had them, it put employees near the top of the list. The military was the only organization that examined people in as much detail, and that only applied to those with top-secret clearance and above.
God knew I’d put in enough time testing things. Regardless of what my mother said during my formative years, being a “pain in the ass” was apparently useful in some arenas.
I had patience for testing. Finding issues was fun, especially when the shit hit the fan from out of the blue. Those selected to be special testers had to be ready for anything.
The last group that was selected, for example, was given virtual reality glasses and tested to see if dipping their hands in virtual water still made people piss themselves.
It did, until they patched it, anyway.
But, then, there were the other times. The breakthrough groups. The first people to be hooked up to the VR goggles. They got to play for a week, nonstop.
I’d envied them. We all had, once their tests had become declassified.
And now I’d be the one everyone would be jealous of.
I risked a glance up as I shook the pain out of my wrist between stacks of papers. Heather was still there, still smiling.
“Am I really that interesting to watch?” I asked.
“I’ve had worse assignments,” she said with a laugh. “Your health is one of my priorities, you know. Physical and mental. All of the groups will have a monitor for their tests. I’ll be watching everyone, but as the team lead you get most of my attention.” Her smile dropped, and for once she was all business. “I’m not going anywhere, Grant. For as long as you’re in Kazaran, I’ll be so close that you’ll think I’m walking beside you. You better get used to the idea.”
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