Chapter Three
“Inmate 81342.” The scrubs-clad OzCo MedTech read the designation from her tablet in a disinterested monotone. The two burly guards stood flanking her in the doorway, arms crossed, casually lethal.
I glanced down at the plastic bracelet around my wrist and read the number under the barcode for the twentieth time. Not me. I didn’t know whether to be relieved or pissed. Just get me jacked in and on with this bullshit. That was the practical side of me talking. Just as loud was the voice screaming, What’s going to happen to me? How do I do this shit? Which world are they going to stick me in? What does it feel like to die?
Of course, generally speaking, everyone knew how the OVR World worked. The net was full of headlines every day with stats on all the new quest launches, clan wars, rankings in virtual sports from baseball to Quidditch, and high-level raid scores. Always the looming possibility to come away with life-changing CC for the real world. But I still had a lot of practical questions. Questions I had never really given much thought to since I had never seen my life going in the direction of having money to gamble with and worlds to conquer. And, I had never really planned on becoming an Inmate Gamer either.
“Inmate 81342. You’re up!” The MedTech sounded annoyed now. Some dazed, middle-aged dude with glasses, sitting on the bench across from me, jolted to awareness after his neighbor gave him a sharp elbow.
“81342, let’s move it!”
Lifting his manacled hands to wave in acknowledgement, the man struggled to his feet. Like the rest of us, he had ankle chains as well. They added to the eeriness of the room as they clanked against the cement floor while he hobbled to follow the impatient MedTech with her guards.
I let out a long sigh through gritted teeth while my stomach gurgled. No solid foods for 24 hours before entering your SimPod. Not that the OzCo cafeteria food at Florence Correctional Institution was anything worth writing home about. Soylent Green is people!
I closed my eyes, and let out another long, frustrated breath, trying to keep my anxiety from eating me from the inside out. At least you qualified for the Gamer Program, I reminded myself. You could be in an Inmate Work Camp, drilling for oil in ANWAR, processing nuclear waste at Rocky Mountain Flats, or mining coal in West Virginia. Any of those would have amounted to a very short lifetime sentence. After spending most of my life with a widget on my forearm, with 24/7 access to the web and entertainment, I found it unsettling to be so alone with my thoughts. When I opened my eyes, a new batch of prisoners was being escorted into the room, the racket of their shackles bouncing about off the cement walls. An apple-shaped girl about my age plopped down on the bench beside me.
“Shit a dick man! You look terrified. First time jacking in?” The girl snickered. “Whatever you do, don’t barf on me. There’s no changing clothes or showering before you get in the pod.”
I let out another deep sigh through my clenched jaw. Surveying my new neighbor, I guessed she was predominantly Native American, with long, straight, black hair pulled back in a ponytail, dark rusty brown skin, a dusting of freckles across her cheeks. At first, I thought she was stoned: her eyes were dull, her round face slack. But her voice was quick and sharp, almost cheerful. “It ain’t so bad inside. This’ll be my fourth jack, and to be honest I like it better than being out there.” She waved her hands around to indicate, I assumed, the outside world.
“R-R-Really?”
“Yeah, man. You can be anything in there! Way better than the shit show outside. Better than walking around in your actual body!” she continued casually, maybe feeling smug about being in the know. “Of course, they don’t take such good care of your body when you’re in these prison pods. They wanna keep your brain firing at full capacity but that’s pretty much all they care about for us ‘cannon-fodder.’ If you buy your own pod it’s a whole different story, but for us, not so much. Spend enough time in one of these pods and eventually, you won’t have much of a body left.”
“Well, that answers one of my questions,” I admitted, anxious to keep her talking. “I mean, I understand that SI will never match the plasticity of human thought, so the Megas farm any brain they can to generate crypts, but even they have to know that a brain without a body isn’t going to live.”
“There are plenty of brains out there. New ones being born every minute. But you think I looked like this when I first jacked in?” She leaned back and ran her hands up and down her plump body, inviting me to follow with my eyes. “I used to be in shape, played soccer and ran track. I was H-O-T-T, hot! Now my knees are shot, I got arthritis in my back and I ain’t winning no beauty contests. I figure I’ve got five, maybe six years before I’m all washed up. Might as well spend’m in a body I can choose!”
She fell silent after her tirade, maybe regretting her blunt honesty. I slumped back against the wall and sourly processed what she had laid out there. What sort of life was I looking to have when I got out? I had to make this time worth it then. Aside from paying off my sentenced debt, I had to make as many extra crypts as I could. Maybe set Mom and Dad up for what time they had left. Not to mention myself. Good luck getting a legitimate job with a record of corporate theft and no skills aside from mopping and dusting. We sat silently through a couple more inmates being picked off by a rotating cast of techs and guards.
“How much you owe?” she asked companionably after seeming to shake off the melancholy that had swept over us both.
“Almost five million in restitution to pay off.” My empty stomach twisted and gurgled.
“Shit a dick! What’d you do, rob a bank?”
“Stole some meds,” I admitted.
“Didn’t take you for a druggy.” She looked me up and down and kinda pulled away a bit. “Didn’t think they let druggies into the Gamer Program. Not enough brain-power left to farm.”
“Not drugs, medicine. Nano-bot therapy for my mom.”
“Shit a dick.” She seemed to use that term a lot. “Where’d you run into that?”
“Right place, right time I guess.” With my raw nerves, I couldn’t bring myself to elaborate further in that moment.
“And your mom? Did you get the stuff to her? Did it work?” This girl was now fully engaged, her eyes sparkling with this conspiratorial information.
“Yeah and yeah, I got them to her and they worked as advertised,” The rapt attention and admiration of this girl I’d just met washed over me and soothed my anxiety somehow. It was the best feeling I’d had since saying goodbye to Mom.
A tech and guards re-entered the room. “Inmate 81348.”
“Fuck. That’s me.”
“Hell yeah. Enjoy it.” It was clear she couldn’t wait to get jacked back in. But I wasn’t ready. There was still so much I didn’t know. I needed to stall for time, but that was not the guards’ plan. They yelled out my number again as one of them started smacking his palm with his stun baton.
The girl reached over and grabbed my wrist as I stood on quaking knees. “You seem like a good kid. Can I give you some advice?”
“Yes. Please.”
“Don’t pick a Defender role. They take the most damage. You won’t have a perception filter in there so damage equals pain. Go for Striker or Healer. But if you go Striker, pick something that uses Dexterity for defense over armor or specializes in ranged attacks,” the girl explained in a rush of words. The guard called my number again.
“O-O-Ok?” I tried desperately to process her words.
She grinned at me, I think she could tell that I was overwhelmed. She rolled her glittering eyes in annoyance as they insistently called my number. She let go of my wrist and I turned to walk away.
“My handle’s Macha,” she called after me. “I’ll see you inside. What’s yours?”
“Inmate 81348, get your ass over here.”
What’s a handle? My name?
“I’m Zack. Zack Jones.” I answered over my shoulder.
“Never mind, noob,” she giggled. “It’ll be your prisoner number until you earn enough crypts to change it. Now go! Don’t want to get a beat-down before you even get started!”
