2. Hard-Light Hero, part 2

  Pocket Dimensions were a relatively new addition. Using local storage rather than server space, a player could customize a digital reality however they wanted using the engines of EternalRealms . A lot of them were pretty cool, like a full-dive Minecraft. Some people use it to build some really cool stuff, like recreations of Hogwarts, or Minas Tirith, or Deep Space 9, or a thousand other things.

  My personal Pocket was just an apartment, though. Like something that a twenty-year-old bachelor would live in. I didn’t have anywhere else to go, after all. If I wanted to ‘log out’ for a while, this was the closest I could come. I could have ‘awesome’ anytime I wanted, including by signing on to other people’s [Pocket Dimensions] as a guest, but my own dimension was the only way I could get a dose of normalcy. I would ‘show’ offline, but I could never actually ‘be offline.’ I’d even asked them to take away the logout button because nothing happened when I clicked it. For some reason my family was really upset when they learned I’d tried to do that more than a few times after we’d figured out what had happened. I mean, I hadn’t known at the time , so it wasn’t like they were suicide attempts, right?

  My rooms were pretty cool actually, if I do say so myself. One entire wall was a movie screen, and the couches were those huge leather things that you could just sink into. Because it was all digital, when you wanted to watch or read something, you could just call out the title and the movie would start, or the book would appear in your hand, or whatever. The same if you felt like eating, which is why I called out “Pepperoni Pizza, Pizza hut, large, extra cheese.” When I got to my stove and opened it, a fresh baked pizza was already inside, sitting in a box.

  I took the box with me to the couch, where I sat and began chewing on my first piece. That was when my uncle called me.

  “Oh my god, Jamie called you? It’s no big deal, I just gave her some resist gear sets, that’s all!” I protested. “It was less than five hundred gold for everything. I’m allowed to hand out one thousand to guild members if I want to.”

  “And two weeks ago you gave out seven hundred gold worth of potions,” he reminded me. “Which puts you over your quota for the month. Because it’s up to one thousand to the guild per month, not one thousand per guild member . Even if you like them, Luke.”

  “Oh my god, she’s a friend! I do not like, like her or anything, okay? And since I knew she was getting stuck kiting with that bullshit strat I wanted to help her. That’s it!”

  “It’s okay if you like people in the game, Luke. Nobody -”

  “Can we not talk about this? Please? I know you’re trying to develop my brain as though it was normal, but it’s not. I’m a ghost. I died when I was twelve and somehow never got logged out. I’m a freak and I’m okay with that. But I do not like-like Susie , okay?”

  “Okay, if you insist,” Uncle Thomas said with a knowing smile that was completely off the mark. “But you should know, we’re really only making changes to the digital emulation based upon how a brain normally develops. And normally, a seventeen year old boy who likes a girl has brain activity that looks a lot like yours does when we talk ab--”

  “Will you shut up!” I shouted, throwing a slice of Pizza at the screen. Because everything was digital, it slid down for a moment dramatically, and then simply disappeared, grease and all. If I wanted another piece to replace it, I would just have to ask the simulation. “So am I actually in trouble for going over quota or are you just here to tease me?”

  “The guild is reimbursing you, and the admins only care if you affect the larger economy. It really did cause a lot of problems when you started showing off with your crafting abilities, Luke. Especially because they had changed hands a dozen times by the time the admins realized what was going on. A lot of money, real world and game currency, had been changing hands because of it.”

  “And I totally didn’t mean for any of that to happen and I’m totally sorry about it,” I reminded him. “And I still think it’s unfair that I can’t give stuff away anymore. I like giving people stuff! It makes both of us happy, so why is it wrong?”

  This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

  “It’s not wrong. It gives the players who meet you an unfair advantage against the players who’ve never even heard of you. And it’s not that you can’t give stuff to your friends, you just have to report it and document it.”

  “Whatever. This is lame. You used to be cool, Uncle Tommy. Whatever happened to my cool Uncle who thought of cool shit for me to do when the [parental settings] were on [strictest] and I could change the context of an entire city block just by running through ?”

  “You were never supposed to figure that out, you know?” Uncle Thomas said with a wry smile. “There were a lot of people who were relieved when we had to stop letting the younger kids play because of the effects it was having on their development. Speaking of which, your little sister is talking about taking up the helmet after her birthday.”

  “Is she serious?” I asked, dropping a slice of pizza on my shirt. Annoyed, I flicked it away, and because it was digital, the mess vanished like it had never been. “I thought that me being stuck in here totally freaked her out.”

  “That was five years ago, when we first explained what was happening,” he reminded me. “She has … she has come to terms with the fact that there are two Lukes, one who died, and his digital reflection. Not his soul, because we’re not calling you that. You’re ultimately a very advanced simulation of Luke’s brain, a result of the buffer-data that gets built as part of the time-dilation mechanisms.”

  “Yeah, I mean, I think I get it. I’m a ghost in a machine thing, right?”

  “Advanced simulation that developed autonomy upon the death of the original subject. Not a ghost.”

  “Not a ghost, just something you can’t adequately explain and have never been able to duplicate,” I reminded him.

  “Right, exactly,” he agreed. “Look, Luke, part of the reason I called, and it really wasn’t to chew you out like you seem to think it was, the reason I called is because Paula wants you at her party this Friday. I know the first time we tried that she freaked out and--”

  “Sure,” I said. “You know I don’t really like hanging out in the TV for too long, but if it’s for my little sister I’ll do it. Mom and Dad can call me like you do if they want to talk to me though. Besides, she was like ten when that happened, and her brother had just died, so it’s totally understandable.”

  “That’s the thing, Luke. If you want to ‘hang out in the TV,’ that’s fine too. But we’re working on something, and we’d like you to test it out. Have you ever heard of ‘Hard Light Holograms?’”

  It turns out Hard Light was something that’s been around for a while, but nobody’s ever had any use for. Or rather, the company that could make the emitters wanted too much money, while the company who could provide the power supply also wanted too much money, while the company that could make the software to --

  You get the idea. It was a cool thing that nobody could use because corporations were greedy. The one that owned the patent for the emitter decided to sell their patent because it wasn’t making them any money, and the billionaire who bought it simply made it public, allowing anyone who had the technical capability of producing the things to do so.

  Turns out, EternalRealms is one of those companies with the technological know-how to make them, they just didn’t know it until the patent was public. That was where they wanted me to help them test out their new product.

  I do a lot of beta-testing for them, it’s one of the nice things about being trapped in their servers. I get to see all the cool stuff before it goes live. The idea behind this product was to allow people to connect remotely using hard light holograms sort of like stand-ins. You use your deep-dive headset, and then five hundred miles away or whatever your avatar attends a meeting or a concert or whatever. Pretty cool, right? Especially for someone like me, who hadn’t interacted directly with the real world for five years.

  I was really looking forward to it after Uncle Thomas finished explaining what was being offered. It’s a real shame that things turned out the way they did, because I wish I would have been able to just hang out at my sister’s birthday party.

  But then, if I hadn’t been there, things would have been terrible. And maybe a lot of people would have died.

  ?