by Rachel Ford
The Great MacGuffin
Beta Tester, Book 1
By Rachel Ford
Chapter One
He grinned ear to ear as the technician strapped him into place. Was it weird to smile as someone covered your head in electrodes and stuffed you into a coffin-shaped box?
To the casual observer, maybe. But Jack Owens knew better. This particular coffin-shaped box was a proprietary Marshfield Studio virtual reality capsule. And the electrodes stuck to his head were all part of the process. So was the oxygen tube they put in his nose, and the sensors they stuck to his fingers and toes.
“Just monitoring oxygen levels, temperature – all that good stuff that keeps you alive,” a young man with bad skin and a nasally voice told him with a nervous laugh. The youth’s name tag read, “Richard,” in a bold, sans-serif font. Just underneath the name was a second line. “Intern.”
That might have scared Jack, if not for the fact that while Richard talked, an austere, gray-haired man whose name tag read, “Dr. Roberts,” did the actual work.
Jack had nothing against nasally, pimply young men. He’d spent his teens and most of his twenties as one of them. He still bore some of the scars of his battle with bad skin. But Richard didn’t look like he was a day older than nineteen. And, even for the experience of a lifetime, Jack might have thought twice about entrusting his life to a nineteen-year-old intern.
But Dr. Roberts had the kind of bland features and seasoned maturity that didn’t raise concerns about competency. He looked like he’d been doing this for two and a half decades. He looked like he could do it in his sleep. “Dr. Roberts, huh?” Jack said. “Like the song?”
The Marshfield Studio man glanced up and stared at him. “No. Not like the song. Like Adrian Roberts, M.D.”
Jack blinked. “Oh. Yeah, I was kidding. You know, the Beatles?”
The other man continued to stare at him, until the silence got almost uncomfortable. “How droll. I’ve never heard that one before.”
Richard the intern shot him a sympathetic glance, and Jack fell silent. Dr. Roberts didn’t have much bedside manner, that was for sure. But he wasn’t going to let it ruin his day. Jack was about to do something he’d spent his entire life dreaming of. Jack was about to go on an adventure that was literally one in billions. Jack had beat out millions for the opportunity. And, hell, he was being paid for it too.
One small leap for man, and all that.
He was thinking about the moon landing and wondering how his particular contribution to history stacked up against Armstrong’s, when he went under. Richard had been standing there grinning, and Dr. Roberts had been wearing his disinterested semi-scowl. The room had been bright and sterile.
Then everything went dark, and a moment later he blinked onto a wild seascape. Music played in his thoughts.
“Good God. I’m here. I’m really here. It worked.”
“Hey,” Richard’s voice entered his thoughts, “alright, we are coming online. Ope, looks like he’s already there. Jack, can you hear me?”
“Loud and clear.”
“Sweet. He can hear us, Doc.”
“I know. I’m not deaf.”
The voices hung in the air, disembodied, like some kind of strange deities in this strange place. The waves crashed against the cliff, and salt and cold water sprayed his face. Jack laughed.
It felt real. It looked real. If he didn’t know better, if he didn’t know this was a simulated world and a virtual reality experience, he would have believed it was real. “Oh my god, this is amazing. What kind of resolution is this? I don’t even see pixels.” He squinted and studied the sky and the stone underneath him. He dropped until his face was an inch away from the rock. “Like, no pixels at all. This is amazing. Unbelievable.”
“How was the transition, Mister Owens?”
“Transition? Dude, seamless doesn’t even begin to cover it. Like, I was awake, and then I wasn’t. And now I’m here.”
“Any pain or discomfort?”
“Not a bit.” Two relieved sighs hung in the air, and Jack frowned. “Why? Is that…unexpected?”
Richard laughed again, the same nervous laugh. Dr. Roberts said, “Of course not. But, as noted in the waivers you signed, a small percentage of test subjects have experienced adverse reactions.”
Jack nodded. He’d seen the numbers. They were small. Not quite struck-by-lightning small, but certainly smaller than your chance of getting hit by a bus. To be one of the first humans to ever experience true mind transfer VR? Jack would take those odds.
He had taken those odds. And he’d clearly done alright by it. “Cool. So how do I get this puppy going? Is there a command or something?”
“We just need to verify a few things, then the game starts.”
“Cool. What things?”
“Checking vitals now. Good. Good. Alright, everything looks good.”
Jack was tapping his feet impatiently. “Great. So I can start now?”
Dr. Roberts didn’t answer. Instead, he said, “Demonstrate your mind/avatar synchronization please.”
“What?”
“Take a step to the right.”
Jack did. “Okay.”
“Now to the left. Good. Backward. Forward. Excellent. Now jump.”
Jack sighed but acquiesced. The doctor ran him through crouching and crawling and ducking and dodging. He had him sprint along the cliff face and climb down one of the rock ledges.
And the fact that he didn’t break a sweat, that his lungs didn’t sting with the exertion, his muscles didn’t burn, pushed aside any impatience or annoyance. This wasn’t like real life. This was better. You could exercise with a thought. It didn’t cost you anything.
“Damn. If it was this easy to go to the gym, I’d go every day.”
Richard laughed. “Damn straight.”
Dr. Roberts sighed. “Alright. You’re cleared to proceed.”
“Awesome sauce. How do I do that?”
He didn’t get an answer, though. The cliffside simply vanished. The world went dark, and an epic music track started to play. Burning fields rolled before his eyes – or, through his mind, since he didn’t really have eyes at the moment. Drums beat far away. A disembodied voice spoke.
“A thousand years before the first dragon war, a hundred thousand years before elves and men crossed blades, a sorcerer arose. Not man, not elf, not dragon, but an amalgamation of all three. An abomination.”
Jack shivered with anticipatory delight as a hideous face filled his thoughts, a kind of dragonesque humanoid. He marched against a backdrop of flames. Fleeting images of burning villages and destroyed armies sprang up out of the fire. Children screamed and mothers fell defending them.
“His crimes,” the narrator continued, “were unparalleled in any history before or after. Millions fell, and those who survived wished they hadn’t.”
The scene shifted to demons ransacking villages, and then a procession of barefooted, shackled human and elven prisoners driven over a field of bones by a whip-wielding foreman. Jack grinned, or at least the parts of his brain that controlled his facial muscles activated into what would have been a grin had he had a corporeal form at the moment.
He wasn’t grinning about the plight of the captives, of course. He wasn’t a barbarian. But he liked the scene setting. He’d seen cutscenes like this tens of thousands of times – quite literally. So he approached the matter with a bit of expertise. And in his learned opinion, this was a good cutscene so far. The developers had left no room for ambiguity. This was the Big Bad, and there would be no feely good redemption arcs or reformatio
ns or tragic backstories.
On the contrary, he had a boss fight to look forward to. One hell of a boss fight, to judge by this kind of setup.
The narrator went through a litany of offenses of the demon lord Iaxiabor, and the graphics were so mind-blowing that Jack didn’t even mind that it got a little monotonous near the end.
“He was undefeatable. Everyone who tried, fell.
“But then a band of heroes arose: a mortal man, an elven sorceress, a dwarven smith, and a beguiling bard.”
A tall, heroically posed man in shining armor stepped onto the scene, flanked by an elf woman whose far less substantial armor could barely contain her bust, a squat dwarf who seemed to vanish beneath his hammer and beard, and a mini-skirt clad human woman who carried a lute.
“Together, these heroes devised a plan. They would craft a weapon so strong it could pierce Iaxiabor’s armor; they would enchant it with magic so powerful it could trap his soul; and they would inlay it with the beguilement of the sweetest voice in all the realms.”
The cutscene showed the dwarf forging an ornate silver dagger, the human woman singing in high, haunting tones, and the elven woman weaving magic in a great shower of sparks and swirling, magical curlicues.
Jack yawned. This was the point where he’d normally skip the cutscene. He got it: bad guy, magic dagger, assassination.
But there was no skip cutscene button. First suggestion.
The narrator droned on. “Posing as a humble merchant, Sir Kirill approached Iaxiabor’s procession.”
Now the scene showed the knight dressed as a peasant, approaching the skeptical demon with a pack full of wares. “Only the rarest treasures for you, my lord: an enchanted blade that sings with the voice of a thousand angels.”
Jack sighed as Iaxiabor heard the sound and fell under its spell. If his avatar had fingers, he’d have been drumming them as Kirill inched his way forward, closer and closer, until he finally plunged the dagger into the demon’s heart. The silver of the blade turned black, and Iaxiabor’s body crumbled into dust.
“The blade trapped his dark soul, and Iaxiabor’s reign of terror ended.”
The same, alas, could not be said for the clip. It droned on for an agonizing two more minutes. Jack paid enough attention to catch the highlights. Lost dagger, evil wizard, plans to resurrect Iaxiabor, end of human life as we know it if he succeeds. Blablabla.
Finally, the cutscene ended. The title loomed large in his mind, in a dark, foreboding font. Just in case anyone had missed the import of the dagger in the ghastly three-and-a-half-minute long clip, Marshfield Studio had thoughtfully named the series, “Dagger of Doom.” This was the first installment, Iaxiabor’s Revenge.
Jack was too excited to be annoyed, though. Right up until, instead of plopping him into the game, he got a damned character build screen. Here, at least, he had a little bit of control. He didn’t waste time trying to design the perfect character. He didn’t give a damn about the height of his cheekbones or the thickness of his eyebrows or the set of his eyes. He wanted to play.
So, with a thought, he selected the default character. He flattered himself that the avatar looked a little like him – dark hair, light eyes, and rakishly handsome, if he didn’t say so himself. Sure, the shoulders were a little broader, the height a little taller, the muscle mass a little more – well, there. But it was close enough. So he glanced at the name field and thought Jack. It updated immediately to reflect his input. Then he glanced expectantly at the “accept” button.
A thought popped into his mind. Are you sure you want to accept this character build?
“Yes.”
The character screen vanished, and he found himself staring at…another goddamned cutscene. Yes, he was definitely going to have to mention this in his feedback.
This time, he saw his character on a hangman’s platform with a noose around his neck, surrounded by half a dozen other condemned criminals in similar straits. An executioner was reading their sentence. “For crimes against the realm: larceny, sedition, indecent exposure; these present have been condemned to death.”
Another hooded executioner stood by a lever, and a well-dressed man on a white horse watched from afar. He nodded, and the executioner pulled the lever.
The prisoners dropped and choked. Then, the perspective widened, until the scaffold was but one small point in a large, medieval town. Raiders on horseback appeared, cutting down the city guards and stampeding into town.
One of the raiders fired an arrow toward Jack’s rope.
And then the cutscene ended, and Jack found himself swinging from the end of a rope, wheezing and uncomfortable. He didn’t feel actual pain, but for a brief second, he felt like he couldn’t breathe.
He glanced up, which he supposed probably didn’t mirror actual physics. But as lifelike as this all was – too lifelike, in the particular – it was still a videogame. So he still had a full range of motion, despite being in a noose, choking to death.
He saw the arrow hit, and his rope splinter. He clattered to the ground, and a moment later other bodies hit the cobbles all around him. The NPC’s – non-playable characters – groaned and wheezed, as if the fall had battered their knees, and the rope had really cut off their oxygen.
That was a point of realism the studio had been wise enough to omit for the player. Jack felt the rush of adrenaline from his simulated danger, but none of the pain of almost choking to death. He was only thirty seconds into the game, and he’d almost forgiven Marshfield Studio’s artistic overindulgence with the cutscenes.
Someone seized his arm. He could feel their fingers, and the sense of being pulled to his feet. He laughed out loud. “God, this is amazing.” Jack had played every type of virtual reality game he could get his hands on. He’d worn headsets, and he’d spent time in VR booths. He’d bought home entertainment setups, and he’d rented rooms at the arcade for an obscene fee per minute.
They’d been cool. They’d been amazing even. But they were always videogames. You could always tell.
This – this was real. Those had been external devices. They’d go beyond sight and try to engage the other senses too – touch, hearing and smell.
What made Marshfield Studio’s project so unique, so mind-blowing, was that it wasn’t some complicated contraption trying to trick the senses. The body and its millions of nerves were just a middleman.
Marshfield Studio had cut out the middleman and gone straight to the supplier of all sensation: the brain. They didn’t need a fan to simulate wind. They sent electric signals to the brain, the same signals that skin cells and hair follicles would send when brushed by a breeze. They didn’t need to apply pressure to his arm to simulate someone grabbing him. They sent the same electrical impulse that the real nerves would have sent if someone had actually done it.
Jack stood there in the town square as riders stampeded by him, as his rescuer was talking to him, and took it all in. Jack Owens the programmer would never be able to afford one of Marshfield Studio’s VR units. Not with the price still in the billionaire range.
But he, Jack Owens, had landed a job testing the VR mode of Marshfield Studio’s latest game. He, a mild-mannered programmer, a regular Joe, was actually here, actually using tech that only the Bill Gates’s and Jeff Bezos’s of the world could afford. He’d beat out millions of other applicants. He’d emerged victorious. One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
“You alright, man?” a voice asked.
He almost jumped out of his skin at the sound of it. It seemed everywhere and nowhere, one of those disembodied voices. “Son-of-a…Richard?”
“Yeah. You okay?”
“Of course.”
“You sure? You’re kind of just standing there, dude.”
“I’m fine. Just…taking it all in.”
“Cool. Okay, well, you’re going to want to pay attention though, because that guy who is talking to you is kind of important. You know, for the quest and all that.”
Jac
k glanced at the old man who was holding onto his arm. He’d been prattling away for a good thirty seconds now. “How important?”
“I’m not really supposed to say. The beta test team wants to get your raw, authentic reactions and all that.”
The old man at his elbow said, “Well? Are you out of your senses? Let’s go.”
“Uh…well, if he was saying anything important, I missed it.”
“Dang. Yeah – spoiler alert – you definitely want to hear what he’s saying. Hold on one second. I’m going to restart the level.”
“Can you skip the cutscene?”
“Sure thing.”
“Good.”
“Just…pay attention, okay?”
Jack was midway through saying he would when the world vanished and reappeared in the blink of an eye. He was swinging from the rope again. He glanced up, and saw the arrow cut through, just like it had done before.
Then, he collapsed into a painless heap. His companions fell, one after the other. They wheezed and whimpered and cried in simulated agony. One of them pushed to his feet and took off running, his hands still bound behind his back.
Someone seized his arm and pulled him to his feet. It was an old man – the same old man as last time. But this time, Jack listened. “Good sir, I know who thou art. Come, you must come with me now if ye wish to live through the day.”
Living through the day sounded like a good plan. Of course, he didn’t actually know this man. Maybe he was some kind of quest giver – a good guy who would send his character off on whatever adventures awaited. Then again, maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he was a bad guy. Maybe this was a trap.
Jack looked the old man over. He was wearing a rough spun tunic with a hood, and woolen trousers that – if they were real – would have itched like a son-of-a-bitch; a fact Jack knew from his own LARP’ing experience. He found himself thinking of inappropriate itching and the importance of good linen under-trousers.
He cleared his throat. Four possible dialogue options appeared in his thoughts:
Let’s go!
Who are you, noble sir?
