“So,” I said, “You are some sort of fire mage?”

“Pyromancer,” he said. I could see his eyes light up as he said it. He explained, “I saw it on the list and it just clicked. They told me I had to pick something powerful for farming, for once the testing phase is over, and just looking at the word on that weird interface I could tell it was all about power. I picked Incinerate as my starting skill, with my starting upgrade going into power. You saw the result.” He grinned.

“Hold on. You get skills?” I asked.

“Yup,” he said, “it’s a little side menu, and it looks like I’ll eventually be able to have eight of them equipped. I got to pick a second one when I hit level 2, near the end of my session. I went with Flashfire, which it said was a defensive skill that pushes things near me away. It also let me pick an upgrade for one of my existing powers. I picked power for incinerate again.” Another grin.

“I’m feeling a little bit robbed here. Is there any way to reroll? I don’t get any of that. I picked the third option and it dumped me directly into the game in a mostly accurate copy of my body.”

“Mostly?” he asked.

“Missing some minor scars. I’m not entirely sure what’s going on there. Maybe it’s using some sort of a genetic projection?”

“Oh, ho!” he said, “Doesn’t that imply that your little companion’s assets are all natural?”

I choked, nearly spitting the coffee I had been sipping.

“Joe! You can’t just say stuff like that, especially about people above us!” I scolded.

He looked sad for a moment. Suitably chastised, it seemed.

“I’m sorry Will. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. Sometimes I… I forget how much things have changed since I was young.”

“Right, anyway, what happened after you picked your skill?” I prompted, trying to get this conversation back on track. I knew older folks were a bit more free with inappropriate comments, so I didn’t hold it against him. His smile returned in full force at my question.

“Right, so after that I got to pick my race. There were a bunch of options, but I just picked the biggest one, which was this awesome lizard person. Then it did this weird thing where it approximated who I would be if I were born as a giant lizardman. The results are sort of uncanny, but not bad. Finally, it let me adjust the details. I made myself as tall and muscular as possible.”

“Great, and everyone gets to do this? Everyone who didn’t pick the third option for powers?” I asked.

“Yeah, mostly. People who picked the second option for powers didn’t get to customize their avatar at the end, only pick a race template.”

I took a moment to look at the various races and powers on the spreadsheet.

“Everything I’ve seen so far seems to be human stuff. It’s all human props and settings, all these powers are stuff I’ve seen in other games, and all these races are either common stuff from our media, or slightly obscure stuff from our media. Where is all the alien stuff?”

“Don’t know,” said Joe.

“Do we need to get deeper into the game to meet them? To see their set pieces? How many species play this game anyway? Is it just us and the Orion Arm whatever it was they called themselves, and are they a collective of species or just one?”

Joe gave me a helpless look.

“Do we know anything at all here?” I asked.

“Nope.” Joe replied with a shrug.

“Well, I guess it makes some sense then why the Europeans are sending people into the game to study culture. Other than the original message, the stones, and the game itself, there might as well not be any aliens at all. Whatever, I’m adding ‘alien stuff’ to the list of stuff to look out for, but at a low priority.”

“Sure,” Joe said, “no complaints here. It will also keep your new friend around, which we might need. You and I are the only ones on tower 11, and no one ran into any way to move between them.”

“So collectively you guys have already explored a bunch of levels for every tower where we had someone start?”

“No, not all of them,” Joe shook his head, “Alice was the only DA employee in her tower, and she got killed by a rat boss on the first level. The game dropped her into peaceful dreams, presumably so she could recover from the experience, and when she woke up it sent her a warning about how repeated deaths risk her key’s integrity. Her login timer was also a lot longer than the rest of us, but still short enough that she’ll be back at it tonight.”

“So this is a semi-hardcore game? Damn, I guess that’s why DA wants so many keys.” I said.

Then it hit me: “So I picked the hardest mode in a game with limited lives? Damn it, I really hope there is a suitable reward down the line, if I survive that long.”

“Hopefully,” Joe nodded, “Plus you’re the only one working for DA to pick that option, so you’ll be an irreplaceable source of info about that option until the second wave of keys comes… whenever that ends up being.”

“Right, so what do the floors look like?” I prompted.

“We have enough reports to get a good solid statistical picture of the first ten floors. The others are still compiling summary reports, but I can give you a broad overview. Every tower has a stairwell leading down, with floors at each landing. All the floors are offices, all with hardware and artifacts from the 1960s, we think. All the monsters are urban pests, with the bosses being larger versions of whatever monster shows up on that floor.”

“Did anyone else find anything magic, like my pants or that folder?” I asked.

“No, just some random useful stuff laying around in the open. We didn’t notice any monsters dropping anything on death other than experience, and none of the others have a perception power like you.”

“I haven’t got a perception power,” I objected.

“How’d you find that hidden compartment in the file cabinet? It looked like you just reached directly for it and pulled the back away. It looked like you just knew that the compartment was there.”

“I saw the folder glowing behind it, that’s the only reason I found it at all.”

“Right,” Joe said, and sent me a link to a portion of my own video. I watched again as I searched the filing cabinet, reaching directly towards the back of the drawer which was not glowing, and pulled out a perfectly normal file folder which also was not glowing. The box I pulled out of the other cabinet a moment later was also markedly less shiny in the replay. I guess the glow was coming from some extra sense. I wondered if it was a result of my personal power set, or if this was a feature of people who picked the third option. Fortunately, that would be an easy mystery to solve tonight.

“OK, well that goes on the list of stuff to figure out. You said you had the first ten floors figured out. What comes after that?” I asked.

“No idea. The way is barred, and the gate, chains, and lock are made of this black metal that just drank in everything that I threw at it. Some of the others have destructive powers too and tried theirs, with nothing to show for it. Our best guess is we need to clear the tenth floor.”

“It’s not like the others?”

“No, it is the same for every tower, as far as we can tell. All the furniture is made of this semi-solid darkness. And there are people moving around in there. They’re also made out of utter darkness, but if you see them in your peripheral vision, they look like normal humans. The game identifies them as ‘hollow men’. They seem to move in slow motion, carrying out some sort of parody of work. They ignore you so long as you don’t touch them or any of the furniture, but if you do… well…”

He sent me a few video references. I took a look at the first. The point of view was moving among them, and they were exactly as Joe described. Creepy as hell humanoid shadow people. Then the person brushed too close to a shadow desk and a sheet of blackness on it fluttered at the touch. All at once, every hollow man stopped and slowly turned his head to look directly at me, and for a short while no one moved. Then the perspective shifted a little bit backwards, and all of the shadows were in motion. They moved with a jerky gait, but were neither clumsy nor slow. Sometimes they would flicker and appear somewhere else. An arm entered my view and a feminine voice shouted “Frostwave”, launching a wave of ice and snow out to intercept the shadows. It seemed to flow over them, barely touching them at all.

“Ice Blast!” She tried next. The massive icicles impaled the hollow men, but it only slowed them down. It was at this point that she tried to run, scrambling away from the flickering silent mob rushing toward her. She just barely reached the entrance to the floor ahead of them, and turned around as she made it out, audibly gasping for breath. The shadows had stopped just exactly at the border between the stairwell and the floor, and stood there motionless. I got the impression that they were staring, and the woman in the video clearly did too, as the point of view shuddered for a moment. The door to the floor slowly closed on the hollow men. I was about to move to the next clip when there came a SLAM at the door and the point of view jumped at the same time I did.

“Those things are creepy as fuck,” I said, Joe just nodded.

The next video was more of the same, and the last one was Joe fighting them, his fire beam doing very little but his claws tearing chunks of blackness out. He was eventually forced to retreat to avoid being totally swarmed.

“The consensus is that each previous floor has only had a miniboss, and that the real boss is the one on the tenth, and we need to beat him to open the way.”

“Alright, we’ll meet up tonight and see if we can do some sequence breaking. I do not want to go near those things if at all possible. Failing that, we can see how we fare against them, and if we can’t push through we’ll grind your level up and Lindsey and I will… practice? I guess? Using my power seemed to expand it, maybe I will figure out a way to be useful in combat.”

“Sounds like a plan,” agreed Joe.

“Right, I told John already and I’m sticking to it. I don’t have any office time in my contract, so I’m going home and taking a nap. I slept like hell after I logged out.”

Joe looked confused.

“Everyone else, even Alice, slept really well after logging out. I don’t think I’ve been so well rested in years.”

“Weird. I think I dreamt I was a pigeon. Or I was talking to a pigeon. Whatever, if it happens again I’ll add it to the list of stuff to check out. In any case I’m not going to hang around any longer. Shoot me an email if anything comes up before game time.”

He nodded to me, and I made my way out, mindful not to disturb those working and careful not to draw manager aggro.

I worked my way through the wide, bright halls of the arcology to get back to my apartment, and collapsed into bed shortly after I got there. I was exhausted, despite the full night of sleep.

I fell, once more, into a fitful sleep. I dreamt of a growing uneasiness at not having an office, confined to an endless black abyss. Struggling, I dug around for anything to ease the disquiet. Somewhere in the black, I found that strange keyboard, and it felt sufficiently like something that would go in an office. I pulled it through the void until it was where the office should be. I imagined walls, windows, a desk, but those things were beyond me. The ache subsided a little bit in the presence of a suitable object. It would have to do. I slept fitfully until the afternoon, and remembered nothing of my dreams.