Mancini’s breath wasn’t that bad for a cat, but it still wasn’t pleasant to log out to. Sendai wrinkled his nose the second he regained full consciousness, and quit petting the little slate-grey cat.

“No fair exploiting me when I’m checked out,” Sendai croaked.

Mancini blinked yellow eyes at Sendai, then settled back down on his chest and purred determinedly. Like it’d convince Sendai to resume mindlessly petting him.

Being fully logged in, or mining, left Sendai’s body on autopilot. Thankfully he wasn’t a techno-somnambulist who’d need to strap himself to a bed while logged in, but doing anything that redirected the entirety of his conscious mind down the brain-computer interface usually left him murmuring gibberish and gesturing at the air.

Sendai wasn’t a shouter or anything – some folks did yell while they were logged in – but he could still be convinced to unconsciously stroke Mancini’s ears for eight hour stretches.

He scooped the cat off his chest and deposited Mancini onto the floor.

There was a delivery note lying in front of his apartment door. Thankfully he didn’t have to get out of bed to reach it – his apartment was just barely big enough for the bed, a kitchenette, two armchairs, and a coffee table that was ever so slightly smaller than an extra-large pizza box.

We visited you but were unable to deliver. Please pick up your package at…

Sendai rubbed his eyes. He didn’t need chores in reality – he had enough to do back in the Eight Kingdoms. He’d cleaned up Tex’s chambers, swept sacred courtyards with other third rank neophytes, and assisted with the training of inner sect members by running for towels and setting up stands of tiles and branches for them to break with their bare hands.

Bear hands? Like, there was definitely some kind of tiger kung fu, right, so why not bear fist kung fu, too?

He pulled his phone off the charging plate on the wall, and just like he figured there was a message from Arel.

They bounced my care package to you. You never answer the door. Are you under quarantine, or are you just that shy?

Sendai smiled fractionally.

Oh I’m very shy. That’s why I constantly flirt with you, sexy baker-girl.

Arel didn’t respond immediately. She hadn’t responded by the time he’d finished his shower, either. Probably meant Arel was busy with life stuff.

Uchi, on the other hand, responded immediately when he sent her the morning’s first picture of Mancini prowling around the open window.

OMG such a cutie!!! was followed by a half-dozen broken emojis. So she was online and neural interfacing, using a messenger program which sent messages which were ever so slightly incompatible with his phone’s default app.

He’s got fish-breath.

I don’t have to smell him, I just get to look at the fuzzball.

My care package from Arel arrived. I need to go pick it up.

Do it quick! No spoilers but OMG can’t wait.

Sendai smirked. You already opened yours? Cheat.

Shhhhhh. What must I do to buy your silence?

Nothing but a kiss.

Hop into the house, Uchi sent. A few heartbeats later, a fresh avatar selfie loaded.

Uchi’s selfie convinced Sendai to log back on. Just for a minute.

He slumped into an armchair, shut his eyes, and concentrated on using an imaginary pair of hands to pull up a neural-interfacing panel. It was a hazy almost imagined mental image at first, but his neural lace implant flared into life and hijacked the part of his brain responsible for vision – the occipital lobe.

From there all he had to do was look at his login icon and the brain-computer interface took care of the rest.

Up until logging out a quarter of an hour before, the circuits woven through his brain had been pushing cryptographic algorithms through as much of his grey matter as could be used without killing him. Mining Neurocoin. The thirty minute mining session scheduled at the end of his sleep cycle, when his brain was at its freshest, ordinarily ran at just a few dozen BSINOPS. Nothing unpleasant, it was like an alarm clock. But rent was coming due, and he’d dialled in for his comfortable max – one hundred and twenty-five Bulk Synapse-Integrated Neural Operations Per Second.

Or, at least. What had been his comfortable max the last time he’d been mining hardcore.

This time instead of logging in to push crypto-algorithms, his implant brought the sensory reality of the online home he’d built with Arel and Uchi into his neocortex.

He’d been groggy waking up, but logging back in was like wading into sludge. He barely registered the vast missing sections of their space, covered up with plywood coloured surfaces, before Uchi was right on top of him. Kissing him.

Her avatar was almost what it had been before, pale and slender, but she’d been finding replacement parts and clothes from other games and environments for weeks. Even losing what she’d had on BlackStar Galaxy, she still looked like her.

The anime girl cat ears were gone, in favour of a wild tangle of short-cropped hair so thick it snarled Sendai’s fingers when he held her, trying to survive the kiss he’d been foolish enough to request. Her black lipstick smeared across his mouth, her tongue hot and alive.

Uchiganata broke away from the kiss, grinning fiercely and displaying the only two remnants of her former kitty-girl look. Her slit pupils, eating him up just by looking at him, and a prominent pair of canines hanging over her lower lip.

The selfie had been up-to-the-second accurate. Uchi wasn’t wearing anything underneath the flowing and open kimono draped off her shoulders. Her pale body was barely covered, except for a two-inch wide strip down her sternum, belly… At second look, he’d mistaken the black silk of her panties for utter nudity, but the selfie hadn’t been quite that low.

“You like?” she asked, panting hot breaths over his chin.

“Yeah,” Sendai huffed back. “You look great.”

Uchi grinned all the more. “You’re gonna be mad at me.”

“Mad at you?” Sendai asked, blinking. “And why would I be mad at you?”

Those canines pinned down her lip, and she blinked oh so soulfully back at him. “Kiiiinda didn’t buy all this myself…”

Sendai did his best to look stern. “What, did Arel buy you those teeth?”

Uchi shook her head, swaying her hips under his hands – which he hadn’t remembered putting there, but somehow he had. “I been a bad girl, Sen. I went dancing.”

“Yeah?” he asked, bracing his hip against her belly, just under her navel. “Where’d you go dancing?”

“Starlight Plaza. And I had my wishlist open on my profile, so a couple guys just kinda… came up and bought me all kindsa stuff.” She fluttered her eyelids at him.

Sendai bit his lip. “And this is where I get all jealous and growly and possessive and take you to bed?”

Uchi nodded, sweetly. “And take your mind way, way off the shutdown. You just worry about me, and Arel when she gets back.”

By mutual agreement, Sendai, Uchi and Arel’s triad relationship was an open one. In practice, Uchi teased Sen and Arel into claiming her by exploiting her freedom to flirt. Ordinarily, Uchi in a mood like this would’ve thrown Sendai’s plans for his morning out the window, but…

He bit his lip, harder. “I, uh.”

Uchi stroked his chin, carefully. Painted fingernails tracing his skin, smooth, lacking even the suggestion of his usual stubble. “You’re so down lately. Let me cheer you up?”

Sendai grit his teeth, and shoved the front of his system default grey slacks down.

Uchi dropped her gaze, and blinked. “Oh. Oh, it’s not a problem. You’re fine, it’s fine, we can get you one off the Plaza marketplace.”

He blushed so hard it felt as though he was burning up.

His avatar, his personal cosmetics, his custom tweaks, had all been loaded on and running on BlackStar Galaxy’s servers. He’d held out hope to the very last second that by some miracle he’d be able to afford to transfer it off, and hadn’t been able to bear abandoning his main avatar for a new one. But time had run out, and even though he’d done his best with the default Eight Kingdoms avatar customizer…

He looked down at himself. He was a frigging Ken doll, down there. Nothing between his legs at all. The default Wind of the Eight Kingdoms avatar settings leaned heavily towards the PG.

“I, uh. I… don’t think I want to buy a premade penis,” Sendai said, awkwardly. “They never really feel right.”

Uchi carefully ran her palm down his belly, cupping over his navel gently. “You sure? I’ll buy you one. It can be, like. As a housewarming gift for the new digs.” She gestured around them.

Where up until yesterday morning there had been a palace of brushed steel and twinkling lights, windows showing views of dozens of worlds, his trophy collection, Uchi’s war mementos, a one to one copy of Arel’s chemistry workshop… Blank plywood blocked off the missing gaps where their lives together had been torn out.

There was a new couch, and a video screen floating on a pair of repulsor-lift hover stands that looked very BlackStar. Arel had salvaged their wall of photo-captures, three years of memories made together. But even if the girls had been hard at work patching over the losses, almost everything else was missing.

Including his stubble. And his dick.

“It’s okay,” he said, hugging Uchi tight. “I’ve got you and Arel. That’s all I need.”

“Yeah,” she said, holding him close. “That and your care package from Arel.”

“And maybe a custom body-scan for my new avatar.”

She shook with a supressed giggle. “Yeah. And that.”

“Don’t get me wrong, Tex,” Sendai said, leaning on the staff of the large sun parasol he was carrying. “I love menial labour. I absolutely do. But you’re mentoring me as your apprentice, right?”

Tex’s jade rings clicked over each other as he wriggled his fingers in delight, plucking a peach from a tree beside the village path he’d led Sendai down. “That’s right,” he said, munching on the fruit in his guise of Master Lio.

“So can you teach me something that’s going to benefit me?” Sendai rubbed his fingers together. “Monetarily?”

“Come here,” Tex said, gesturing Sendai over.

Hoisting up the parasol, Sendai lugged it over and inspected the fruit Tex was nibbling. “Yeah?”

“Great. That’s perfect, now keep me in the shade,” Tex said, taking another bite.

Sendai laughed, but it was a begrudging, grimacy kind of laugh. “Jerk.”

Tex grinned through his long moustache, and gestured at the tree, the orchard. “See all this?”

“Yeah?”

“Sect property. All belongs to the Mountain Mantis Sect. Inner sect members are responsible for managing lands like these, outer sect members, like you, do the work. Right?”

“Right,” Sendai said, nodding. He understood that much already.

“Some peaches are valuable. This one just tastes good, but once in awhile, we get miracle peaches that provide long life and health,” Tex said, sucking the juice off his fingertips. “Plenty of qi.”

“Sounds valuable.”

“Extremely,” Tex agreed. “Now you remember what happened in BlackStar. What do you think would happen to the economy around here if trees randomly drop fruit worth a few thousand N-bux?”

It was scenic, here. Sendai hadn’t been paying attention to the size of the orchards, but him and Tex had been walking a good while. The trees were beautiful. Long slender branches, a few parallel trunks growing out of one point to stretch their branches out to the sides and provide shade much better than Sendai could with his giant parasol.

There were a lot of trees. Twenty, maybe thirty in the row facing the path. He lost count at twenty rows, stretching up the hillside.

“If someone cashes out all that fruit,” Sendai said, “Either the fruit loses value fast, or that’s a lot of money getting sucked out of the game’s transfer accounts.”

“Nothing grows here for free,” Tex said. “At least, nothing valuable. See that village, down the valley?”

Sendai could make out red tile rooves, with black and gold paint. It didn’t look like your typical dirty little medieval peasant village, like in most fantasy games he’d heard of. It looked nice. Luxurious, almost.

“Yeah?”

Tex tossed away the pit of the last one, then pulled down another peach. “Out here in the border kingdoms, by local custom, things don’t get violent. Everything stays relatively peaceable. So neurominers who want a taste of that good country life, relax a little? They live here as farmers. The more processing power they contribute to the system, the better their crops grow.”

Sendai leaned on the parasol’s staff, gazing down on the rice paddies around the village. It was all so green, and clean. Beautiful. “How many BSINOPs they gotta push for that?”

“Not many. Ten SINOs full-timing, maybe,” Tex said, using an even shorter slang term.

“You can run ten while conscious. They’re living their lives in here while mining?” Sendai asked.

“Oh sure. Real world these folks are on IVs and stacking themselves up in capsules, turning themselves into battery-farmed processing power.” Tex shrugged.

Plenty of neurominers did it for drug money. They mined, shot up, mined, got even higher, died. A long, slow, happy suicide. This? This was like going to heaven for free and getting paid for it. No wonder people signed up to be crypto-cattle if they could live like this.

“Do they, like. Play?” Sendai gestured at the green robes he was wearing. “Do the kung fu thing?”

“Nah,” Tex said. “Generally don’t have the skill. Mostly they watch flix. Theatre’s popular, too. You’ll meet plenty of them betting on tournaments. A lot of them don’t even farm, just lie around all day smoking digital opium.”

“What happens to their crops?”

“Nothing. They’re the source of raw elemental qi.”

Sendai squinted. “Qi comes from doped up neurominers?”

Tex laughed. “Mythologically it’s like the vital force animating all life. And yeah. Everything valuable out here – anything that grows, NPC mobs and monsters, anything that drops some legendary artifact you can cash out for big bucks?” He pointed down into the valley. “It’s all distilled from the sweat of crypto-cattle.”

A breeze shook the trees around them. Smelled fresh, clean. A butterfly flitted by overhead. It was all so idyllic.

“BlackStar, like. Ran donation drives and just skimmed money out of the casinos,” Sendai said, weakly. “Seems a little better than this.”

“And some asshole scammed BlackStar Galaxy’s entire bankroll right into his pockets.” Tex started walking again. “Meanwhile one sixth of the population of South-East Asia has maintained an active Eight Kingdoms account for more than a year. You do the math, Senny boy.”

Sendai stared after his mentor. “And people can use qi – money ­– to beat the shit out of each other?”

“All the time,” Tex said, his sandals clacking on the path’s cobbles. “Turning qi into something you can cash out ain’t easy, mind you. Now hurry up and keep me in the shade, outer sect neophyte.”

Sendai grimaced and hoisted up the parasol, running after Tex. A job was a job.

Someone had already built bootleg BlackStar memorabilia. Didn’t take long if they were working from detailed photo-captures, could even be automated if you were okay with a lifeless sculpture, but somebody had rebuilt the New Idaho Capitol-City Skyline for an environment window. It had everything – sky-traffic, the auroras, dust storms, a day/night and weather cycle that exactly matched the game.

Sendai couldn’t afford it. But it would have been an absolutely perfect thing to contribute to the house, maybe run it in a window next to Arel’s photo wall.

He’d need money. He could get money – he could mine. He needed a live server account that the house could load the window from – his W8K inventory was invitingly empty, even if windows onto other planets would hardly fit the Wind of the Eight Kingdoms’ aesthetic.

But even if Sendai could do miner-math in the back of his head and knew the peak demand times like he knew Arel and Uchi’s schedules, he’d still gotten stupid.

Very stupid.

He’d run fifteen BSINOPS while conscious, leaving him woozy and disconnected while picking up his care package from the depot. And he’d fallen over his own feet and smacked his head hard enough the pain still cut through into the NeuroWeb two hours later, when Arel was getting ready for bed and Uchi had just gotten up.

“Poor baby,” Arel crooned, softly rubbing his scalp as they curled up together on the couch. His avatar looked unwounded, but he’d allowed the girls to stick band-aids on him anyway.

“At least we’ve got cookies,” Sendai pointed out. “They’re really good this batch, Arel.”

She smiled, her long, almost elfin features gentle and unchanged. Arel’s social avatar had been untouched by BlackStar’s shutdown, just as blonde and tall as she’d ever been. Most of Arel’s avatar had been running on the same fantasy world for about eight years, since long before she met Uchi and Sendai.

“Good,” she said.

“Cookies for breakfast is the best thing ever,” Uchi said, before her avatar went milky – losing colour as she dipped back out into the real world for another bite.

“I should make you wait for dinner like the rest of us,” Arel murmured, dreamily.

“Sendai’s having a late lunch!”

“Early dinner,” he protested, before dipping back out. His turn for his avatar to lose its colour, while reality came fuzzily into view. He took a sip of milk, bit into one of Arel’s cookies – shipped halfway around the world, just for him – and slipped back down into their house, keeping his tastebuds in the real world while he chewed.

“Early dinner,” Arel agreed. “You okay, Sen?”

“Yeah, head hardly hurts anymore,” he lied.

“Not that,” she said, resting her cheek on her palm and stretching out like a cat, her toes prodding Uchi’s feet. “You’re mad you couldn’t afford that ornament, aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” Sendai said, after a minute. Arel was a little older than him, and a lot wiser. “I just want to contribute to the house, and I can’t.”

Uchi straightened up. “Sen! You contribute by being in the house with us.”

“That doesn’t really count…”

“Of course it does,” Arel said, sharply. “The whole point of care packages isn’t that I’m giving you guys stuff. It’s that I love you and want to be with you, and this way we’re all a little closer.”

Sendai smiled, despite his headache. Arel really was much, much wiser than him. “Thanks.”

Arel kissed his cheek, and not to be outdone, Uchi did too on the other side.

“Okay. Still got time for another episode?” Uchi asked Arel. “Or do you need to get to bed?”

“I can do another episode.” Arel yawned. “Just one, though.”

While they watched another episode of the historical drama they were working through, Sendai pulled up a private interface window. Grimaced at it, while the girls’ attention was on the screen’s projection of 18th century England.

Yeah. Even if Sendai could do all the miner-math in his head to figure out profit ratios, he’d gotten stupid.

His morning session of thirty minutes of mining at a hundred and twenty five SINOs had dropped his Neural-Affinity score for Eight Kingdoms by three percent.

He’d be three percent slower in a fight, now.

Three percent closer to becoming crypto-cattle.