My return to my own VR space was a bit nostalgic. Everything was how I had left it, the never-ending shelves of books and the walls to my apartment were still there. One thing that was different was Tutor’s expression on her face. The moment that I appeared back I swear she had a worried look on her face. That was wiped away in the next moment as her eyes glowed and an array of colors seemed to spread from me to her. This spurt of color and ever glowing white eyes lasted all of three seconds. When it was done Tutor’s eyes changed back to normal and she tilted her head to the side while giving me a puzzled look.

“What? What is wrong Tutor?” I asked as I stepped off of the disk that I had started to refer to as a “travel disk” in my head. I walked over to stand in front of her and to look into her eyes. No more sign of the Goa'uld glow was showing up in her eyes which made me a little bit nervous.

“Everything ok in there? Your eyes glowed and there were lights around us there for a second.” I said as I looked around. Maybe I should start learning how to look up all my own settings rather than asking someone else to do it for me.

“Yes, everything is perfectly fine. My worry was because, while you were gone, our connection was severed multiple times. While it was happening I looked up what could have occurred and it said that in instances like that… law enforcement was usually involved. Only they have the keys to cut off access to the Core and Home VR. I was afraid that you had been put into prison or something horrible like that.” She said before pausing for a second. “The lights as you put it were you upgrading your home VR’s security settings from the changes you made. I must say Kevin that your understanding and expertise of security are flawless. Your home VR is now running some very interesting protocols.” She said as she waved her hand to show three screens that had seemingly random dots moving in various patterns across each of them. The more I looked and studied the dots the more details stood out. They each seemed to be doing something different. The left screen was intercepting other color dots and tearing them apart chunk by chunk. The second screen would take those chunks and merge with them, seemingly absorbing and testing them, the last screen would assemble the individual dots, having already removed any color from the dots.

As I watched an interesting thing occurred, a dot entered the left-most screen that was almost the same color as my dots. This caused a flare of colors across all of my dots and they started to change and gain patterns before they all converged on the imposter and tore it to shreds.

“Is this my security?” I asked as I watched, dumbfounded by the rapid activity going on in front of me. “And were we almost just hacked?”

“Yes to both questions Kevin. It seems that with your rise in fame some Citizens are trying to access your data and to find you.” Tutor replied as she moved the screens over next to my library browsing computer setup so I could watch them whenever I wanted.

“What? What rise in fame?” I asked, breaking my gaze away from the screens as her words made their way through to me. I willed my notifications to display in front of me and was gifted with a flood of information in front of me. “Ehhh… is this spam mail?” I asked as I tried to start to sort through some of what I was seeing. “Yes, you have received and continue to receive these sendings from departments of the Core. It seems that since you are still a Guest that you don’t yet have a mailbox so in order to attempt to find you there are some corporations that are flooding the system with offers and ads in an attempt to get you to respond.” She said as she gazed away from me for a second with a thoughtful look. “The protocols that Hxerdinand the 9th left for me have filters and could help in this situation if you would like to create another AI like we spoke of before.”

“Ooh, I like that idea! Like having an Alfred for my Batcave.” I said as I thought of all the cool inventions that I could fill my cave with if I had one, then I looked around and chuckled at my current setup. There was plenty of room to improve here. “Ok Tutor, let's put these notifications on the back burner until we get some things sorted out. While I find myself a nice candidate, can you tell me what fame you were referring to?” I said as I turned to a direction that was pretty much devoid of anything and summoned up a window that made it look like I was looking down on the planet Earth from space. I had a specific image in my mind of who I wanted to have fill the spot of my intelligence man so I started to imagine the space in front of me filled with profile photos of a certain type of older gentleman. The Simulation Access that Xa bought for me did not disappoint. In an instant, I had way too many selections to choose from. This didn’t bother me since studying faces was a fun pastime of mine. I did it all the time as a child after I had that run-in with Xa. I willed all the faces away that were harsh and with angry expressions. I willed away all profiles without children and instead focused on elder family men who were hard workers and who were loyal. My massive screen was still stuffed full of profiles to scroll through so I decided to create a comfortable seat and to imagine up some drinks to enjoy while I searched. I looked over at Tutor and willed her to begin before going back to my searching.

“The fame that you generated has to do with several of these increases in your cr count.” She said as she came closer and opened a smaller screen off in the corner of my vision.

I glanced at it while in the middle of taking a big gulp of my drink and immediately regretted it.

I spewed Mountain Dew out of my nose and choked, coughing as my brain burned from the pain. Liquid fire seemed to spew from my nose, my eyes ran with tears, and I had one of the worst coughing fits in history. It took me a bit of turning red with coughing and snorting before I realized that I didn’t really need to be going through that. I willed my body to fix itself and instantly felt relief in my sinuses and throat. “Whew, that is so much better,” I said as I set the drink down far from me and turned to really inspect what Tutor held for me to see. I reread each line before getting to the lines that made me choke on my drink moments before, just to make sure I wasn’t seeing things.

+1000 cr gained for research on survey location.

+500 cr gained from J J the 300th

+500 cr gained from Meh the 20th

+500 cr gained from Awawan the 21st

I smiled when I read those first lines. The first 1000 cr I remembered because it pinged at the beginning of my surveying job. The other three lines were what Elaya made her team each pay me for arriving naked. That made me chuckle a little. The next lines each made the hair on the back of my arms and head stand on end. They made me feel like I had robbed a bank… no, a planet. Some of the gained cr had notes next to them from the payees.

+349,227,915 cr gained for solving the mystery of stationary asteroids.

-Well done Guest! You have solved a linked mystery and helped further the discoveries of the Core. The science and engineering departments thank you for your work!

+11,000,000 cr gained for discovering a new species of space-living creature.

-As sole discoverer please provide a name of the species for the Animal and Species Catalog department.

+15,000,000 cr gained for finding the first living possible inter-dimensional creature.

-As sole discoverer please provide a name for the creature with the newly created Exotic Inter-dimensional Creature department.

+30,000,000,000 cr gained for saving research pod from destruction.

-Dear Guest Kevin,

As head and family leader of the Helle’s Family Space Exploration Company I would like to personally thank you for your attempts and actions that kept our pod safe on location.

We have looked over the data and have found that your actions saved one of our remote pods. To this end we are sending you a 30% cut of the research gained from the pod’s life. You earned it and it will allow us to continue to further on in that sector of space without lost time or cost replacing the pod.

Best regards,

Helle

I stared at the amount of zeros for a long while. A company just paid me 30 billion cr for saving their pod from the maw of that creature. My mind was blown.

The next line nuked my mind.

+1,000,000,000,000 cr gained for revealing vulnerability to cr defense.

What followed this line was a massive legal document library of text that made my eyes water as I tried to read it. Maybe it was from my mind being blown by the sheer crazy numbers I was seeing or maybe it was because the text wasn’t written in any way that I could read it. It seemed to make sense… like the software was trying to give me the words but was unable to because of something that I was missing. I was just too spaced out at the moment to fully look over it so I simply moved on to the next line.

+5,000,000 cr gained for revealing that there is life beyond the wall of reality.

-A gift from the newly founded Inter-spacial Life Research Team of Jterg Science Family.

I was beginning to get the feeling that people were already scrambling to make money off of the things that I discovered out there. All these newly founded such and such companies made me suspicious.

There were just two lines left and they didn’t make as big an impression on me as the other ones.

+1,000,000 cr gained for breaking a mystery age record.

-Congrats from the Dead Research Team! Finally! Another one off the shelf. Good job Guest Kevin.

+100 cr gained for completing a surveying job.

-Well done Guest Kevin! It was instructional working with you! ZV-1

Total cr: 1,030,381,230,915

“BOOOOOYAAAAAAH BABY! I AM RICH!!!!!”