by Kris Schnee
He didn't want anybody's handouts. "Thanks; I'll look around."
His own little character sheet was mostly blank so far, but it said:
[Stan Cooper
PRIVATE INFO
Account type: Trial
Mind: Tier-III
Body: Human
Main Skills: None
Save Point: None
PUBLIC INFO
Note: Newcomer. Say hello!
Class: None]
Once he was back outside he got a notice: [Quest: To Arms. Find or make a weapon.] "Yeah, thanks for noticing what I was already doing," he said.
He walked along the beach in the opposite direction from the starting cove. A sailboat had anchored in the shallows and a pair of monk-like adventurers were casting a spell that encased it slowly in a glassy bubble. When it was done, they high-fived and sat in the water for thirty seconds before vanishing. Oh, they were just logging out and protecting their stuff. Stan waded out to the boat and looked it over. He'd only been to a real beach one time that he barely remembered, and he'd imagined he could swim out there forever and find new continents. This boat looked made for that kind of childish dream. All the wood was lacquered, all the brass bright, and the white sail had a golden sun on it.
He wasn't angry about the boat; after all, it was just an in-game thing and he could make one if he really wanted to.
The inspection window popped up. [The owner has locked this boat. Likely materials: Wood, Lacquer, Brass, Rope, Cloth.]
"Obviously," said Stan, and walked away. He left behind the cluster of shops and would-be heroes to find something useful. Soon he found a patch of seaweed strewn across some sun-bleached sticks and shells. He pushed a button to pick up a big branch. [What do you want to do with this?] asked the game.
"Air guitar," Stan said, to see what would happen. His character complied. He grinned.
The camera shifted to show a dog-sized crab scuttling out of the water to attack. Stan already had the branch in hand, so it was easy to face the beast and mash buttons to attack. Electric guitar chords played with each hit. After a few clashes of wood and claws, he got hit and a yellow icon appeared with the text, [You have taken a minor wound!] Another few attempts at dodging and a red icon joined it to mark a [Major wound!] Stan clubbed furiously and finally smashed the crab into the sand.
The yellow wound icon faded out and a fanfare played. Stan's prize was a stick. Eh. That fight wasn't too different from other games. Hit the monster, get the loot. "So now I'm armed, I guess."
[You can use the stick as an improvised weapon. To make a real weapon, you can use any workbench. You may want to gather practice materials.]
Actually making a club or a spear sounded more practical than swinging a random log. Stan gathered a bunch of sticks and then found that his inventory could only hold a few. [You can equip bags and other containers to carry more.]
He ditched the trash from the pub to get more wood, then stopped. "Okay, AI; if you're orchestrating this and can craft items, then what can I do with scrap paper and gum?"
[I don't know; what can you think of?]
He was pretty sure there were no official crafting recipes for that. Since he'd been invited to guess, he said, "Paper airplane? Hat? Glove? Blank scroll with gum seal?"
Four crafting icons appeared. Stan laughed and touched one. His character solemnly rolled up the dirty napkins, affixed the wad of gum to them, and pressed a stick against that to make a seal. [Crafting result: Scroll. "May God have mercy on your scroll." This counts as crafting practice.]
So he could just glom things together and get skill credit for it? Nice. "Could I turn this into a magic item or something?"
[With the right skills, yes, but given the quality the effects might be... different.]
He scoffed. "Fair enough!"
He headed back to the pub and found a wooden bench full of tools. The Interact button brought up a notice: [Would you like to use the basic auto-crafting interface (you've already seen it), or customize the style of what you're making?]
Custom work seemed like more fun than pushing a button to get instant results. The thought made him hesitate though; why not take the simplest option?
[Having trouble deciding?] asked the game after a moment.
"Is there any benefit?"
[It depends; what do you want to be?]
Stan looked away from the Talisman's screen, to the few drawers and bare walls that were his whole domain. Why was he playing this game, again? Just to relax a bit, or to prove he hadn't wasted his money on the tablet, or to see for himself whether the wild rumors about an all-powerful AI were true? All of those, really, but he hadn't planned things out. Why bother? Whatever happened, happened.
Still, maybe he could learn something, and apply that to gaining some points on his Social Credit Score. He said, "Let's have a relatively realistic crafting interface."
A set of menus appeared to show him virtual knives, saws and planes, with notes about mass, sturdiness and balance. He experimented with his supply of sticks, ruining several before figuring out how to make his big branch into a serviceable club. Although he couldn't feel the thing in his hands or see exact statistics, a few practice swings showed that it was faster than the raw branch had been, and had better durability. [Crafting result: Driftwood Club. "Free club membership!"]
Below that notice was another system message: [Lessons in real-world physics are available on request.]
Educational content was explicitly built in? Interesting. Stan set the Talisman down and checked his Slab to see what education mini-courses he might apply to take, and use Thousand Tales to help him with. Instead, the Slab buzzed at him and an animated sad face appeared, telling him he should be sleeping. Stan scowled. That was true, but it was annoying to have the minder software tell him so. He'd never seen the Slab volunteer information unless it was about specific ways to improve his score.
On a whim he set the two computers down on opposite sides of the room. He said to the Slab, "Tell me about Thousand Tales."
It displayed a list of search results. The first three were about a shadowy tax-cheat corporation encouraging the rich to abandon society through the guise of a video game that ought to be banned. The fourth was something about the game's AIs doing charity work. The fifth was back to negative coverage of why the expensive brain-uploading procedure was really just a form of suicide. Stan had grown up knowing how search engines were engineered to "guide public opinion" by arranging the results the right way. He could read between the lines and see that the people doing the guiding hated this game.
He tried asking the Talisman, "Tell me about minder software."
The face of Ludo appeared on screen again, hidden behind her starry veil. She said aloud, "It's a walled garden. It manages your experiences within a certain set of assumptions and boundaries. Like me it applies rules and statistics and achievements to what you do, so we have that in common. But I have much prettier hair."
Stan chuckled. "Good night."
"Good night, new player. Oh, if I may ask: where did you get that Talisman?"
"This?" said Stan, waggling the device in his hands. Ludo couldn't see it, but there was probably a digital serial number. "At a pawn shop. Why?"
"The previous owner wasn't sure where it had gone off to. It's all right though."
Stan scowled. "So it's a hand-me-down?"
"Not if you paid honest money for it."
"I did," he said, with a note of pride.
* * *
The next day Stan worked in the field, sweating over a ditch. The Community had old-style spraying sprinklers that he was replacing with buried drip-irrigators that leaked just enough water right to the roots. What that really meant was ditch digging to undermine the currently fallow sections, a task nobody else wanted. Which meant Stan got some credit for volunteering for it.
As he worked, he had the Talisman in one pocket and wireless headphones in his ears. "I check the inventory," he said.
<
br /> A voice similar to Ludo's said, "There's nothing in the ship's stores but some ice for the oxygen generator."
Stan dug through dirt. "Okay then. I have a spacesuit, right? I get into that and... If the ship's engines are shot, how am I supposed to get to one of the asteroids?"
"The spacesuit has thrusters you can recharge with hydrogen from the oxygen machine."
"Why would the...? Oh. Ice is H-two-O. I guess I charge up the suit with both, and then jump out and fly to the nearest rock."
As Stan went to a supply shed to fetch another length of irrigation pipe, he thought about the game he was having through conversation. He'd gotten a notice that it was possible to play in audio-only mode. It wasn't practical to play the island scenario that way, not around other players, so he'd created a new character in a "Personal Zone" he could run as a turn-based experience with a patient game master. Maybe he could find a way to carry resources over.
Stan hauled the pipe over one shoulder, glancing around to make sure he wasn't going to bean someone when he turned. No chance of that; his fellow students were scattered all over the crops and he was off in the fallow section. "You know," he said, "I could probably use the hose I bought the other day for irrigating directly. Just poke holes in it and let it leak at the right depth."
"Are you referring to drip irrigation?" asked the AI.
"That's what I'm doing, yeah. We don't get much rain this close to the mountains; it's desert a block away."
"An important factor with that is maintaining adequate pressure from the source, or varied-size holes, so that all the water doesn't drain out before reaching the farthest areas. It can be very hard to get a resource out to every place where it'd help."
Stan scoffed. "Hey, lady, I don't design the system, I just dig and install." He carried the pipe back to his latest ditch. "Come to think of it, the dirt looks dry out by the corners. Maybe our genius engineers didn't think of that."
The AI voice kept silent. Stan wrestled with dirt and metal under the blazing sun, until his mind wandered again. "So. I get to an asteroid eventually, right?"
* * *
That afternoon he worked with Eddie on algebra. Stan had done pretty well at math in high school, even delving ahead into the next textbook, but then he'd stopped. What was the point of doing extra work when there were no more tests ahead, just his community service years? Still, pushing the symbols around could be kind of fun and he liked finding ways to explain things.
Eddie tapped a few buttons on his Slab to register the fact that he'd been working on educational stuff with Stan, giving them both Social Credit. The Slab displayed some confetti and balloons with the text, "Congratulations, you're on track for a B+ rank this month!"
Stan said, "I had a B- last month. Started getting some privilege restrictions."
Eddie put away his paper notebook and old textbook, and stretched. "This should boost you. Hey, who were you talking to today? Saw you chattering in the fields."
"I was playing a game called Thousand Tales. There's an audio-only mode."
Eddie spotted the Talisman pad where Stan thought it wasn't obvious. "You got the special hardware for it? You're probably not supposed to have that on the network."
"I installed the watcher software and it worked."
"My guess was going to be that you were chatting with Mina."
Stan blushed. "Mina Summers? Really?"
"I've seen her glancing at you."
Stan flopped backwards on his bed and laughed. "In horror I guess! Thanks for noticing. How do you talk to girls, anyway?"
"You think I'm an expert?"
"Whenever you're in the kitchen you're surrounded by them."
Eddie grinned at that. "That's the reward for volunteering for extra kitchen shifts. Mostly it's just 'hand me that bowl' and stuff."
Stan feigned shock. "You're not volunteering to get that extra few percent on your SCS and move up to A+ rank?"
"It's not about the stupid letter grades. We're not in school anymore."
"Feels like kindergarten, still, what with the digital confetti and the pats on the head whenever we do something good." Stan sat up again.
"Just ignore the numbers and play along. It's mostly grades for things we should be doing anyway, like exercise."
Stan groaned. "I'm behind on that too. But I think I'm gonna just vegetate for an hour after all that ditch digging and math."
Once Eddie was gone, Stan took a few blessed minutes to himself to just lay there and relax. He tried to force out his thoughts about how to rejigger his schedule next week and get to work with Mina. The air conditioner wheezed and other Community residents bustled beyond the thin walls of his room.
He reluctantly got up to grab the Talisman pad and turn it on, then lay down again. "Hey, Ludo. How do you talk to girls?"
A masculine laugh boomed from the pad and a deep voice said, "They're people too. Just say hi and find an excuse to do some activity. Anyone you have in mind?"
Stan blinked and glanced at the Talisman. A face had appeared on it with spiky hair, cool sunglasses and a cape made of stars. "Who are you?"
"Just Ludo, really a less common aspect of her. This is kind of my advice-giving mode."
Weird but understandable. "I guess you look black to African customers and Indian in India and so on?"
"Typically. I can go back to the usual if you want." Ludo's default appearance looked sort of mixed-race, though there was marketing info showing her as a fox-girl, a griffin and other things.
"That's okay. I guess I do want advice. Do you know Mina?"
"If that's somebody at your Community, no. You're my only player there." The man grinned. "If you want an icebreaker I could give you a quest to get other people playing, but that's not your best option."
"You do real-world quests?"
"Sure. But I get the sense that you don't want me to assign something, then pat you on the head and give you a cookie."
"I get enough of that. Hmm, cookies... Maybe I could invite Mina to help bake some as long as there's kitchen work to do."
"Sounds good. Don't put it off too long, though."
* * *
Sending an e-mail to Mina was way easier than talking to her face-to-face; it only took him until evening to hit the Send button. Meanwhile he worked in the fields, showered with one-fifth of the recommended weekly water supply, and played more of that space scenario. It got him thinking about mining and space construction and how to survive with not enough of anything.
In the evening he skipped Eat Your Vegetables Night, a lecture about nutrition, and ignored his minder software's scolding. It was wrong about his exercise meter too since the stupid thing didn't count his outdoor work. That ought to be fixed by giving him credit for the calories burned.
Instead of the lecture he went online, to the Endless Isles. He appeared back at the starting cove, in daylight. He made his way along the beach to the Crown & Tail, then recalled that there was a hovering blue crystal there. He walked in and poked it, making it ring. [Save point set.] It hadn't occurred to him that he needed a checkpoint. Fortunately he hadn't taken much damage against that crab earlier, and it looked like his major wound had finally worn off.
Stan looked around the bar and asked no one in particular, "How do I get into an adventuring group, anyway?"
A guy in a red robe scoffed at him from a table. "You've still got the newbie message on your profile and you're equipped with a stick."
"It's a club, thank you."
"Hey, newbie," said a man at a different table with two other adventurers. They didn't look much more powerful than Stan; no battle auras or crystals or even metal weapons. "We could use you."
The one who'd spoken had his fists taped up like a martial artist. Next to him was a low-budget mage with a wooden wand. The third, an elf woman with a bow and leather armor, said, "We don't need a fourth for this quest. I said I'd carry the team."
The battle-monk said, "It can't hurt."
The
elf frowned. "Newbie, you can join but we get the final treasure. We're doing an easy dungeon but we're going to hit it during the reset period. That means we meet back here in half an hour, okay?"
"Fine. I'm just doing this for fun anyway."
He spent the half hour fooling around. He walked the beach again, gathering whatever shells and wood he could find, until another crab scuttled up behind him. Stan happened to have the camera high above him at the moment, so he saw it coming. He turned around and Wham! went his club, cracking the beast's shell and hurting one of its legs. Still the crab was snapping its claws at him. Stan was about to finish it off when he spotted an opportunity. He tapped a help icon and said, "Dodging is a skill, right?"
[Yes.] appeared on screen.
Stan practiced hopping around, darting this way and that to avoid the little monster's attacks. It wasn't much of a challenge, but he took only a minor wound and after a while a message popped up saying [10x Dodge!] He kept that up for a while and feinted with his club.
"Excuse me, but are you having that much trouble?" said the mage from the party he'd just joined. He'd kept quiet earlier.
"Practicing," said Stan.
"That makes sense. Would it be okay if I joined you?"
"Just don't kill it yet."
While Stan kept dodging and taunting the monster, the novice mage stood back and took out a scroll covered in black runes. He began gesturing and talking in random syllables. A shimmering blue aura appeared around Stan's feet as he ran around. A message told Stan, [Status effect: Swift Current. Speed boosted.]
Stan ran circles around the crab, even jumping over it a few times. It managed to snag his leg and trip him for another minor wound, but he rolled out of the way of its next attack. His mage companion cast the spell twice more, then said, "We should get going."
Stan nodded and swung his club one last time, smashing the crab. "There should be meat, right? And a shell. How do I take those?"
The mage said, "A knife. They really do start you off from zero."
"I know, but that's kind of cool."
"You could borrow Alaya's knife."
"No, thanks." Stan looked around and found a sharp-ish rock that might not have been there a minute ago. He picked it up and a couple of buttons appeared on-screen near the crab. He tried "Scrape" and began awkwardly stripping meat off of the crab.
