"And do you find that entertaining too?" I asked, finally locating the commands to turn off notifications, and switching off everything, including emails and messages.
[[I’m easily amused.]]
"And make your own fun, I’ll bet," I said, hunting for my shoes. "How long before you expect the first person to reach Rank Five?"
[[The frontrunners are unlikely to reach it in less than four sessions.]]
I sighed. "I don’t think I’ll be anywhere close to first."
[[I don’t think you will either,]] Dio said agreeably.
During high school, I’d spent a lot of time trying to succeed as a middle-distance runner, and at one school they’d thought it funny to call me Tortoise because my end game was poor. My strong, steady pace brought me home at the head of the pack a lot of the time, but I’d lose to other runners who could produce a last-minute burst of speed. But even though I’d rarely produced what it took to win, I loved the running, which gave me a feeling of being separate yet entirely connected to the world around me.
I still hated being called Tortoise, though.
If nothing else, running had left me with a strong appreciation of choosing my pace, and so I composed a message on my guild’s new in-game forums warning them I was going no-contact.
"I’ve turned my notifications off because I want to avoid hearing any details about what happens after ranking," I told Dio. "I don’t want to experience it second hand."
[[I’ll be sure to hide several spoilers around your Snug, then.]]
I paused in dusting myself free of sand, and found Dio’s glowing mote floating a hand’s span in front of my nose.
"If I squished you between my fingers, would you feel it?"
[[Not in any way that would satisfy your spite. Bios—most physical things—are like mist to us. We hold ourselves in place with, well, call it magnetism. There are not many ways to affect us.]]
"And yet you spend your time simply asking to be swatted."
[[Mocking while untouchable is the best mocking.]]
I had to laugh, and then spent the walk back trying to get methods of swatting Cycogs out of Dio. I didn’t succeed, but it was useful to know they existed.
22
grind
To achieve Rank Five I needed to sustain a Pocket large enough to cover my entire Snug. It felt as achievable as scooping out a swimming pool with a single hand, and the training meant genuine work, the kind of thing MMOs had never expected me to do. Compared to magic schools and giant robots, it was hard to look forward to it as fun.
But then Dio showed me the impossibly cool things you can do with shields. My lan shield was weirdly slippy to touch: the kind of sensation you’d expect trying to put two positive ends of a magnet together. Curved lan shields emphasised the slippiness on the outer curve, and decreased it on the inner curve, and once Dio informed me that this could be used as a hoverboard, my practice sessions became a series of hilarious salt-and-sand pratfalls.
Too busy enjoying myself to think of it as work, I kept at it over one, three, then five sessions of training, so that I was able to manage wondrous glides over sandbars and along beaches, until my concentration or energy ran out, or I accidentally zipped over deep water and dunked myself. But even my tendency to splashdown could be overcome with an increase to the size of the lan shield, until it was more a lan boat than a lan skid. Then I was limited only by my strength, and any significant peaks and troughs in the water.
I was far from the only player focusing on lan development, and my Vessan sandbars became dotted with coverall-clad figures letting out occasional shrieks and gasps as they tilted too far, or forgot to maintain their lan. Collision became a strong probability, and for my sixth session Dio decided to move me to a distant sandbar that required crossing an extended patch of deeper water—a trip made doubly daunting by the pre-dawn gloom turning the area into a sketch of shape and sound.
My lan skid looked like a giant blue rose petal, luminous and mostly transparent. I’d learned to form it from the outer rim inward, and to step upward when it reached my feet, concentrating on my posture, since the thing would start sliding in the opposite direction to any tilt.
Rather than shooting off in a straight line, Dio sent me on a course tracing the shallow water between the sandbars, testing my ability to adjust course through minute shifts of weight, while following the route te projected in the half-light. Nerve-racking! Particularly as I built up a fair clip of speed, so that when I reached the deeper water, I shot forward at a great rate, scudding over the minor swell. In hardly any time at all, I could let my skid dissipate as it rode up onto a broad, humped sandbar, and then I had to take a few steps as momentum tried to drop me flat on my face.
"Whew!" I said, going down on my knees instead. "Any faster and this’d be outright dangerous."
[[There are methods to soften landings,]] Dio said, drifting away from ter perch on my shoulder. [[Too advanced for you, just yet. But enough lolling about—I want to measure the size of the Pocket you can create.]]
"You’ve an odd definition of lolling," I said, but climbed to my feet, and went on to fail to complete the shape Dio projected.
"Why not wait until I’d rested after the skidding?" I panted, after te had given me permission to stop trying.
[[Where’s the fun in making it easy?]]
I deactivated my focus and wiped my face, then plumped down on the sand and lay back, gazing up at the lightening sky. Birds were drifting overhead, high and tranquil, and somehow making me feel even sweatier. Still, I was pleased with myself. Not even a full day had passed since the release of DS, and I was further along than I’d expected. Although logging out after every training session, with its sense that everything had happened yesterday, made it feel like I’d been working on ranking forever—or at least a week.
"Do you think I can take the next trial soon?"
[[I’ll decide next session. Perhaps.]]
"How many people have reached Rank Five?"
[[What happened to avoiding spoilers and pretending you were boldly going where no Bio had gone before?]]
"That Snug wafting lightly into the aether rather spoils the illusion."
[[Yes, if you want to bury your head in the sand, perhaps you should try lying face down. And a little over seven thousand.]]
I sighed. While I was still arguably within reach of the leading edge among a few million players, I would still be heading to well-trammelled ground. Or as well-trammelled as a hundred billion stars could be.
Cheered by the reflection that there were more stars than players, I watched until the Snug lifted to a height that made it indistinguishable from the fading stars, then said: "In The Synergis, have you explored every solar system in the galaxy?"
[['Explored', no. Nor even visited, since the heart of the Galactic Core presents certain difficulties for Bios. We have established an inner boundary where travel is considered unsafe.]]
"Do people still go in?"
[[Some. Flirting with the edges. But most of us are too sensible to let our Bios Skip there, since we are then left with the problem of getting out after they’ve been fried or caught in a gravitational wave or what-have-you. Even if the ship is still active, it takes a tremendously long time to navigate out. Those without a ship…well, that is not a fate I would enjoy.]]
Slower than walking pace, over galactic distances. Would a Cycog, abandoned among the stars, drift forever? I decided not to ask, returning to my initial topic.