A whole new set of graphics tools weren’t ideal for quickly finishing a job, but with some help from Dio I was soon familiar enough with the tablet to start work on the designs. The first thing I did was crop the image of the Snug down to the cockpit window. Then I tightened it up, making the glimpse of starter coverall more recognisable while placing a stripe of reflection to hide any distinguishing features. The biggest moment of the game for me was still the first time I’d sat in my cockpit and looked out at the Drowned Earth. Everyone would start in their own Snug, and go to the only window, and look out at different views of this world.
The layout options took hours, but I was more than pleased with the end result. I’d included variants for my primary languages, but my favourite was the least text-focused, and I thought perhaps I’d order myself a t-shirt. First, though, I’d have to get it all uploaded, which I couldn’t do from inside the game.
"I’m going to log again to submit these to the major sites. You’ve been a big help today, Dio. Thank you. Not that it hasn’t been all the same day, but it feels like tomorrow. That is—you know what I mean."
[[Possibly. Good luck with your sales efforts.]]
"Thanks. Uh—fanworks aren’t against Ryzonart’s rules or anything, are they? Tell me now, because I really don’t want to be banned."
[[Those will cause no issues.]]
"What about goldfarmers?" I asked, curiously. Most MMOs were plagued by players who sold in-game currency for real money. "Is there even anything goldfarmers could sell in DS?"
[[Not that I’m aware of. But Bios can be so ingenious. It will be entertaining to see if they come up with anything effective.]]
"Glad we’re not boring you," I said, shaking my head.
[[I’m rarely bored. And I suggest you take a look at the official site, back in your world. There are some new options that will have become available with the game’s release.]]
I nodded, waved at the glowing mote drifting toward the floor of the Snug, and stepped into Soup.
19
stats
For the third time in the same day I woke feeling rested. The hours of design work felt like yesterday, not something just completed. But, standing up, I was again keenly aware of my unfitness. Maybe tomorrow—actual tomorrow—I’d go for a short run.
Right now, though, I needed to get those designs online.
Suddenly convinced my exports wouldn’t be waiting for me, I hurried to my PC, and checked them through. All there. No loss of DPI. Crisp and effective.
I split the screen and began working on multiple uploads at once. Some would release immediately, but most had an approval process that could take hours to days. I searched the competition, and saw a couple of new designs, but I was definitely ahead of the pack. My pieces would eventually be lost among the tide, of course—and no doubt copies with my signature cropped off would end up on storefronts not related to me—but for the moment I was hopeful that Dream Speed had brought my design business a little good fortune.
Turning on the small TV in my room, I found normal programming. Somehow, I’d expected there would be the same kind of wall-to-wall coverage that came with a major disaster. The world had changed forever, but so far only the gaming world was melting down.
Online I found the screaming I’d expected: all over social media, on every gaming site, and the majority of newspapers. Stories of hopes fulfilled. Of transformation. Of a game where you could truly be yourself—or someone else altogether.
All the joy was balanced by questions. How deep were Ryzonart’s links to the primary manufacturer of cowls? How did it work—or how it couldn’t work—and whether we’d just given a game company direct access to our thoughts and memories. One article reflected my own particular horror. The 80 Hour Day. How long before businesses that dealt in intangibles thought it a good idea to send their employees into DS to maximise working hours?
There was more than I could ever begin to read. We’d passed five hours since release and the first wave of players had reached their login limit and come back to themselves, rested and burning to discuss a full day lived in The Synergis. The news that DS wasn’t a hoax had sent already brisk sales of cowls into overdrive, and most vendors were reporting that they were waiting on new stock.
Remembering Dio’s suggestion, I followed a link to the official Ryzonart site, and found that while there were still no official forums, there was a new page called Breaking Down The Synergis.
Number of Registered Players:
9,103,320
Players Currently Active:
4,132,034
Max Concurrent Players:
7,582,983
So Ryzonart had made at least 9 million pre-release sales, and were already blowing concurrency records out of the water. Of course, there had been hundreds of millions of cowls in circulation before the announcement of _DS_—they’d always been wildly popular among difficult sleepers—but for a game that had seemed so unlikely, and had had such a run of doubting press, these were formidably impressive figures. What the numbers would be like in a week or two, and whether Ryzonart’s servers could hold up under the barrage, was another question altogether.
Rank One Achieved
1,023,321
Rank Two Achieved
283,249
Rank Three Achieved
7
I was willing to bet Nina Stella was among those seven, and found some leader boards to confirm just that.
First Ten to Rank One:
Nina Stella
Yang Tuo
Major Jaeger
Ashers
Tarrant
Shuijing
Hitome
Ramírez
Amaberoo
Bienvenida Magic
First Ten to Rank Two
Nina Stella
AV
Yang Tuo
Ashers
Loose Piestalker
Shuijing
Marrick
Amaberoo
Major Jaeger
Bienvenida Magic
First Ten to Rank Three:
Nina Stella
Ashers
AV
Yang Tuo
Shuijing
Marrick
Skylight
No announcements had popped up during my design session, and I started to ask Dio if they only did system-wide announcements for the first to rank, then remembered that Dio wasn’t wafting about this particular reality. I’d grown very quickly used to my own trollish overlord.
Whoever this Nina Stella person was, they were now DS's most famous player, and perhaps always would be. Part of it was clearly luck—she’d obviously been one of the first to log in, had passed a Trial in each training session, and must have been logging in and out as I had been, to maximise the time she could spend on lan training.
But even without the luck of the login, DS was absolutely not a game that was balanced so that all players were on an even level. The strength of your self-image, your synchronisation with your Core Unit, your ability to move blue mist: they were all individual. For all I knew even the amount of lan you started with differed from person to person.
I looked to see if I could find a player search function, to see details about myself, but all the statistics seemed limited to top ten lists.