Thinking over the rather sparse game intro, I scrubbed sleep out of my eyes. So the main plot was espionage? Humans vs AIs. Presuming cybercognate meant AI.
No cowl.
I blinked, and touched my face again. GDG involved wearing a thing like a detached hood. It covered your hair, your eyes, and fastened loosely around your throat: designed to be easy to sleep in but hard to accidentally pull off.
Mine wasn’t anywhere, but by that time I’d looked up, and knew I was still dreaming. Playing. I was in Dream Speed.
The ceiling was a curve of pearly-cream, shot through with a couple of thin grey lines. It was nothing like the ceiling of my bedroom, and not much like the ceiling of any room I’d been in. It looked like ceramic, and seemed shaped like a pizza oven. I was lying on a firm mattress, feeling entirely real and present, not at all like a hazy GDG experience. There was a pillow and a sheet. Nothing but wall behind me, that single arching curve above and to either side of me, and at my feet…
The room before me was an oblong, and I was at one of the ends. The main thing I could see was the opposite end, where a short corridor ended with a hexagonal hatch. My bed-platform thing seemed to be raised up, like a mezzanine floor, so I could only see the top of the hatch, and also a bit of a larger curving ceiling.
I was naked. Or my Core Unit was. It really did feel exceptionally like this was all real. I wasn’t a character avatar, but me, somehow teleported into a strange room somewhere—and I struggled to find differences, to be sure. The small scar on my right big toe was missing. And my legs had the muscle definition they’d lacked since I’d left high school. Possibly they were longer.
There were four flat steps leading down from the bed nook, and I sat with my bare feet on the topmost, staring around at the room. Four or maybe five metres across, and at least three times as long, with a long couch-bench running down the wall to my left and curving around a table. The opposite side featured empty shelves, and high-backed swivel chairs on either side of a little extrusion of the wall that could serve as an occasional table. Everything was built in, giving the space a feel somewhere between futuristic studio apartment and train carriage-sized caravan.
There were no visible windows, but warm sunlight was spilling into the room from down and to the right at my end of the space, where four more flat steps disappeared behind me. A mezzanine and a basement?
Wondering what sort of place had the windows in the basement, I stood. Was I really taller? I felt…springier, moving with a ready energy that I’d missed since my running days. Surely two extra inches would be obvious…but in any case they weren’t enough to significantly change the way I walked as I moved with exaggerated care to the bottom of the stair and looked back.
The bed nook really did look like a pizza oven—fortunately more than large enough not to be claustrophobic. The stairs curved like a fanned deck of cards from bed to basement, and I couldn’t see much of the source of the light, except a slice of vivid blue. That was more than enough to make me forget qualms about controlling my slightly-modified body and trot down and around, only to stop short, jolted by all the out and down.
The Drowned Earth. The previews had made clear that there were no land masses larger than the UK, and so I’d expected islands. This…it was a chain of islands stretching as far as I could see. Most green, but a few of a dark, jutting rock. Otherwise sandbars, seashores, and a tiny scattering of buildings and boats.
The city, however—Vessa, the starting city my guild had chosen—was nothing like what I’d expected. If, that is, this…string was the city.
A rollercoaster track. That’s the best description I could come up with. A pearly flattened rail of metal or stone, looping lazily beneath a vivid sky, touching down on the larger islands, disappearing beneath the surface of the butterfly-blue water, and rising to circle one of the craggier isles, before spooling off into the distance.
All along it were beads. Pods. Train-carriages like mine, jutting horizontally out from either side of the rail. That put the size of the rail into perspective, since a stack of three pods on top of each other was still not as tall as the rail.
The pods themselves were all identical—a little paler than the rail, and almost featureless, barring their sole window protruding like a gunnery cockpit from the bottom of the outer end of each bead. Glass—or some other crystal clear substance—it offered incomparable views.
An overlarge chair was positioned on a little jetty sticking out into the glass bubble, but there were no controls in sight. My possibly-longer legs had developed a wobble, so I plopped down, and a small configuration menu popped up. Chair options to change the tilt or raise leg support.
The menu disappeared when I simply gaped past it. Was this really a city? Or—or the world’s oddest car park? Seeing all the other pods definitely made mine feel more like a caravan. And even as that occurred to me, movement outside drew my eye, and I watched a flat disk, glowing blue, rising to settle beneath one of the pods. The pod moved, slowly at first, and then with increasing speed, shooting into the distance.
"So we start with a ship?"
I peered along the seemingly endless line of pods, and then remembered I was naked. But since I couldn’t see into the nearest cockpits, not even the one that belonged to the pod directly above mine—jutting slightly further out thanks to the curve of the rail—I figured my glass must be one-way too, and just sat, reverentially staring. I had never seen anything so beautiful, so alien and yet…Earth.
Tutoriaclass="underline"
Heads-up Display
[Activate]?
The words, like the chair menu, had appeared directly in front of me, not projected onto the glass. A built-in HUD. That was a huge thing in itself. A computer in my head, and my head in a computer.
And it responded to mental commands! Thinking activate produced an immediate response: a tiny star appeared, spun briefly and settled into the lower right of my view.
Use commands
[Hide Display]
and
[Show Display]
to toggle HUD
"Hide Display," I murmured, and the star obediently vanished. I tried thinking [Show Display] without saying it out loud, and that was equally effective. The star then returned to the centre of the screen, and expanded with explanations:
[Game]
[Activity]
[Location]
[Status]
[Players]
The [Game] menu was a light green, while the other four options were greyed out, so I wasn’t surprised when Game expanded to give me new selections.
[Begin]
[Capture]
[Logout]
I had no intention of using [Capture] until I had some clothes on, while [Logout] informed me that it would be necessary to return to a home location (or Storage, as the game termed it) before logging out, which was relatively unusual.
Glancing at the first option produced a long chunk of text.
Selecting [Begin] will formally begin your
experience in Dream Speed.
You will be awarded to a Cybercognate,
who will direct your participation in the