by Logan Link
Cyber Harem 2200
Part One: Out Of The Noob Zone
Logan Link
Blazing LitRPG Books
Copyright © 2018 by Logan Link
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
To my soulful beta reader Sam, who likes Fanwood.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Stay logged-in, Plexer…
About the Author
1
One fine Saturday afternoon I did something I hadn’t done in years: I bought a physical boxed game from a physical brick-and-mortar game store.
I can’t remember the last time I even bothered going in a game store. I have a great Internet connection: if I want a game, I buy it on Steam. I’ve bought so many games on Steam, although to be honest I’ve probably only played a tiny fraction of them.
Who cares, right? A good deal’s a good deal. Eventually I’ll get around to playing that critically-acclaimed indie adventure that up-ends what it means to be a point-and-click adventure, or reinstall that old Call of Duty game for a nostalgia zombie mode LAN party with my buddies.
This was why picking up Cyber Squad 2200 was a big deal to me. First, it was boxed edition only. That alone caught my interest. Then I read the articles online about popular gaming vloggers complaining that nobody from Flash Edge Entertainment, the developers and publishers of Cyber Squad 2200, had responded to their offers for playthroughs.
The chatter online mocked the developers: how do you expect to get any good press if you don’t have any Let’s Plays of your game?
Flash Edge’s first game, no less.
And yet what they had was, on paper at least, absolutely revolutionary. They were sure the game stood on its own that they needed practically no marketing. Flash Edge had quietly released Cyber Squad 2200. No fanfare. Just people sucked into the game and blown away by the gameplay.
I was trying to get more hours at work so I wasn’t exactly monitoring gaming sites. IGN said it was quite possibly the most daring experiment in gaming, but none of their articles featured screenshots, just concept art.
“This is gonna be an expensive mistake, right?” I asked Rich, the guy manning the counter at the game store. Around his neck he had his VR headset, a fancy new Olympica Reach X3, one model ahead of my Kickstarter-funded version.
He grinned. “No, man. It’s the real deal. That eighty bucks is gonna be the best you’ve ever spent. You won’t mind dropping another eighty next month.”
“Fuck, that’s way too expensive even for ‘the most daring experiment in gaming’,” I countered. “I remember back when I was hooked on EVE Online. You know, multiboxing, five different accounts running at the same time, scripts and hotkeys and shit. I could do that for less than the price of one account with Cyber Squad.”
“Yawning while mining rocks with a spaceship on a screen is nothing compared to Cyber Squad, Dan,” Rich replied, shaking his head. “You’ll understand when you install it. Hey, you’re using the Reach 2X, right?”
He was bragging. His VR headset had its own auxiliary graphics chip, helping render photo-quality graphics in half the time mine would. And he didn’t go through the Kickstarter gauntlet: he got his model for the same price as I did, with none of the one year wait.
Truth be told, I had bought into virtual reality expecting it to change gaming forever, but the glacial pace of developments bored me.
Hell, VR porn was moving faster than VR games.
So I can grab things and throw things and pretend to swing a sword around. So what? I heard rumors that the Koreans were building fully immersive VR pods. I don’t know what they’d do with that. Play more Starcraft, maybe.
“So why is it boxed-only?” I asked Rich, looking down at the Cyber Squad 2200 box. It did have a futuristic feel to it. Very premium: instead of plastic it felt almost… aluminum. With gold leaf or something they managed to make the title of the game seem to shine in the light like the neon lights of a futuristic city like Tokyo. In the foreground I could see this hot Asian-looking babe, with sleeve tattoos and a katana on her back.
So far, so cyberpunk.
“Comes with a mandatory add-on you need to plug into your Reach,” Rich lazily said, not even paying attention to me now that he’d already rung me up. “I read that otherwise the game would take about half a terabyte.”
“Bullshit,” I replied. “It’s an MMO. Run it off the cloud.”
“You won’t understand until you start playing,” Rich replied cryptically. “By the way, I’m AbleKillerZ there. Level 10. Look me up when you get out of the noob zone.”
“What server?”
“No shards or separate servers, the game is all one big universe,” Rich explained, fidgeting restlessly. “Anyway, if you go home and install it right now, you’ll give me a chance to catch a few extra minutes to quest around while the store’s quiet.”
I took the hint.
I practically ignored every light, driving the twenty minutes it took to get back to my place in fifteen. I was lucky, my roommate was gone — he had a rough few weeks with his girlfriend, and no doubt thought he would try to win her back by bombarding her with attention.
Shuddering at the thought of a relationship that would require so much time and money, and worse of all, attention I couldn’t spare, I was glad that I kept my own love life minimal.
Tinder did the job, and I had accounts on various other dating sites. I lived in a college town. As a result I pulled plenty of girls, more often than not freshmen but also the odd sophomore and junior.
As for me, I had dropped out of college because I realized studying game design was a scam — they didn’t teach any code, and made the wondrously naive prediction that anybody who wanted to get into games didn’t need to know code. I knew better. I should have gone into programming and picked up free online game design fundamentals instead, maybe do a graded MOOC sometime down the line.
This was why I was so skeptical about Cyber Squad 2200, even though I knew I could trust someone like Rich Berzowski, a guy who literally did nothing other than live and breathe gaming. Say what you will about him and his Cheeto dust-covered fingers, the guy knows games.
But so did I. Of course it goes without saying that gaming was at the core of my life — I wanted to make it my profession. But I wasn’t the kind of gaming geek who was under some false impression that it would be easy, that I could just snap my fingers and make a game that would dominate the next year’s E3.
No, games are hard. And I was extremely skeptical about anyone claiming they could reinvent the wheel.
The best game of all time? The first Half-Life. Not exactly the most beautiful game, and it probably doesn’t hold up today. But fuck me, if you knew anything about telling a story with limited resources and soaking your player with atmosphere while singlehandedly inspiring half the conventions of your genre that the kids these days take for granted, you’d recognize that Half-Life was a work of art.
I’ll take a classic with truly great gameplay and story like Half-Life or Planescape: Torment over whatever the fuck it is most kids are playing today, Minecraft or Fortnite or whatever.
(Just kidding. Fortnite’s alright — if you want a mindless round of Battle Royale… which I often did.)
I thought about making an unboxing video of the Cyber Squad 2200 box in my hands, now that I was at hom
e. I couldn’t find one on YouTube. Some people had started whispering that there was some secret copyright takedown campaign by Flash Edge, but I doubted it. You’d be able to tell that sort of thing, plus it made for a shitty marketing practice.
Snapping the box open, I found a little peripheral that resembled a USB stick. It wasn’t USB, though, and definitely not a port I was familiar with.
I had to go digging for my Olympica Reach X2, running a fingertip along the curve of the headset, trying to find the right port for it to connect to.
“Huh,” I murmured as I found it. I’d never noticed it before. Never heard of a game making use of it either.
Inspecting the game device, I found the word: [CARTRIDGE] on it. Stylized cyberpunk font, monospaced. That was all. No copyright label, no instructions. Then again, even the biggest dumbass could tell it was meant to go into the Reach’s port.
Part of me felt unusually excited to plug it in. My computer was on, the desktop showing. I like my minimalist desktops: a wallpaper that changed daily, showing either supermodels or actresses. Sometimes even both, in the case of Emily Ratajkowski. Today it was Emma Watson.
If this game really could do anything the way it promised, I was definitely going to have to see about making an Emma Watson lookalike character — or better yet, find one for me to, ahem, explore further.
A dialog popup showed up on my desktop, asking if I wanted to install. Duh. Clicking through the terms of service and selecting the install directory, I sat back, staring at the concept art background of a giant futuristic city square, with flying vehicles overhead, crowds of people crossing a multi-directional walkway.
Yeah. Cyberpunk everything. I get it. Now let me game!
The peripheral must have really sped things up, or stored most of the game contents there without needing to be installed on my desktop — I had never seen a game this big finish installing so quickly.
I exhaled. This was it. Time to enter the game.
Two icons showed up on the launch menu: a red pill and a blue pill. I smiled at the Matrix reference.
There was no way in hell I was going to back out now. Checking to make sure my Reach was fully charged, I pulled the headset over my head, the sensors detecting my usage and immediately transferring the screen to my eyes.
Red pill it was, motherfuckers.
*
LOADING…
FLASH EDGE ENTERTAINMENT PRESENTS
CYBER SQUAD 2200…
…
……
………
WELCOME TO THE FUTURE, PLEXER.
…
……
………
UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS DETECTED
The green cathode ray tube style command line text rapidly faded away to leave me with black, just as techno music started to fade in.
My heart was pounding. I was already getting serious Deus Ex vibes. This was going to be good.
UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS DETECTED
PLEX v1.06107
There was no account login screen. No settings. No exit button, even. It must have known that I was a first-timer, because I was thrown right into the game.
The optimistic techno music simmered, eventually blurring into a new track, ominous and dark. I could hear ambient sounds: traffic, I think.
All I could see was black, still, but the pitch-black screen was starting to fade, not that I could make anything out. If this was a cock-tease to the photorealistic graphics everyone was hyping, they were really taking their time.
More traffic noises. Skidding cars. A door opening and then slamming shut. I even heard dialogue, but in Japanese.
I squinted down to see if any subtitles were going to pop up. None. I made a note to myself to go through the settings when the opening cutscene was over, to make sure subtitles showed. I fucking hated it when games just assumed I could make out everything being said.
Then a chaotic mess of colors flashed, settling rapidly as I finally managed to see clearly.
One fat, ugly, mean-looking fucker was seated across from me in a dirty-looking car. A limo, from the looks of it. This wasn’t a new model, this was worn. Blade Runner worn.
He sat next to the hot babe from the game box cover, the Asian girl with jet black hair reaching her shoulders, a tight PVC dress that showcased a slender waist but impressive breasts — large enough to instantly attract my eyes, but not as large as the bust sizes of some other comically bodacious game characters in the past.
She smirked at me. Like she could tell I was looking right at her low-cut PVC dress, stretched to the max.
I swung around to look at the bald tough guy whose tattoos matched the Asian girl’s, but only because he was leaning forward imposingly.
“Hey, look at me,” he growled.
I did as he said, looking at him. I wasn’t going to say anything. This wasn’t a cutscene, this was fully interactive.
I could still look around, even move a little. I even tested to see if I could scoot over from the passenger’s side door to the driver’s side.
Except when I tried that, the fat fuck grabbed me by the face.
I was rooted in place. I felt that. I blurted out an impressed, “holy fuck,” unable to even process how a physics engine could make a game character really feel like he was grabbing me by my face.
“Baby Plexer thinks he can just walk around in my territory,” the man growled as the hot babe sitting next to him kept smirking, massaging his massive shoulders. “You must be new here, because you don’t seem to know the basics. Kobayashi owns every Plexer there is, and you’re not one of ours, so either you’re running away from one of our outfits somewhere else in the world — or you’ve been hiding all your life. Either way, you’re dead.”
I didn’t know what he meant by Plexer. I wanted to speak, just to test how the dialog system in the game worked. But instead of opening my mouth, I looked to the periphery of my vision, and saw a little tag of text in the lower right corner, saying: (C) PLEX CORPORATION 2189-2200
PLEX had to be my HUD. I guessed player-characters were Plexers, kinda like how people playing Fallout had their wrist Pip-Boy devices.
“Alright, you got me,” I grunted, pulling away from his grip. Yep, everything felt real. Hell, I was even feeling scared. The fat fuck really was grabbing me.
Barely two minutes into the game and I was already feeling threatened.
I hadn’t been expecting the game to look and feel this real. The way my back pressed against the cheap suede of the limo seat, even the way I spread my legs as I sat, all of it felt real.
Wait, spreading my legs wide open was a bad idea. Wouldn’t want to leave myself open to being kicked in the nuts. There was a line between sampling immersion and doubling over in pain.
“Plexers don’t know that the Kobayashi Yakuza can detect all stock versions of the software,” the woman said, her voice smooth and accent-free. There was something seductive about her, even given the less-than-welcome situation I was thrust into.
So far, so good. I was keen to get into the game, but I did like that the game either skipped character creation altogether or delayed it until I was at least somewhat exposed to the world-building. Pretty solid choice by the developers.
“Jackson…” the woman said, turning to face the fat fuck. “We can put him to work, you know. There’s no need to execute him just because he showed up on our radar.”
“Oh, Kanako,” the mob enforcer laughed. The laugh had a mechanical echo to it — given how big he was, it didn’t surprise me that he was cybernetically-enhanced. No doubt I would be able to get many of those enhancements too, when I got the cash… and met the level requirements. “All these years with us and you’re still a naive little bitch. Boss Kobayashi wouldn’t approve. Plus I should report you for even saying that.”
“What? Why!?”
“Because it shows that even with you working for us, you’re still a Plexer, and you’re still sympathetic to the other Plexers. No, this little fucker
’s getting a Desert Eagle lobotomy… and the doctor’s in.”
I winced. Now I noticed the massive handgun hanging from a belt holster. Of course I knew the game wouldn’t just end before it even had really started, but I wasn’t looking forward to finding out what a shot to the head would feel like in a game that somehow was already perfectly able to immerse all my senses so intensely.
He drew the gun.
My PLEX heads up display told me:
0.56% chance to disarm with Hand To Hand skill of (0).
Half a percent? I wanted to laugh.
A second later I was staring down the barrel of Jackson’s gun. Fat gun for a fat fuck. I closed my eyes, reopening them.
The game did this intense HDR graphical effect, making the scene look extra vivid whenever I opened my eyes again, or whenever it detected me focusing my gaze on anything in particular.
Like Kanako’s tits — hey, I couldn’t help myself. If I was going to be shot in the head for the game to really start, I might as well enjoy it.
My extensive experience with role-playing games allowed me to guess how this would unfold. I would get shot and left for dead. The game would black out, maybe play some credits, maybe run me some more exposition as it loaded the next map.
Then I’d probably be woken up by some freaky street cyber-doctor who’d fix me up, tell me I’m lucky to be alive, and then we’d go through the actual process of character creation.
I noted to myself that I was definitely not okay with having Hand To Hand (0).
So I gulped, and stared unflinching at Jackson. “Do your worst,” I said, playing the badass, ready to see if the game was intelligent enough to be able to parse actual spoken dialog.
To my surprise, he did a damn good job of looking like he heard me. “Yeah?” he grinned, triggering the safety. “So… any last words?”
