Joel Tristan rolled his shoulders in the newly adapted sim-jacket. The jacket responded in the arms, the chest and the lower back. The new Formgel pouches pulsed, swelled, flattened, and heated and cooled. Sensations of motion and changing environments were going to be much better.

Simulated movement, G-force and shocks were convincing. Heating and cooling simulated wind and water. Sensations of fire and ice were fast and distinct, though he wanted quicker temperature control still for simulations to be even more immersive. They were definitely on Joel’s want list, but he couldn’t see himself getting the kind of juice that would take. Not anytime soon.

Joel was the local go-to guy for gaming, VR, simulation hacks, wearables, hardware and software. Secretly, of course. Still at school, he was so unCert it was close to criminal. In closed circles, among those who knew, his hacks were legendary.

Tinkering with peripherals and wearables was the biggest passion for Joel. He could trick the response time in a motion-tracking glove. Make it so the player could stroke and feel the individual spines of a HyperSonic rodent. So you could swing the handlebars of a Honda 2250 Stratoglide with precision, using only a pinkie finger. The interface between player and machine was what he loved, almost as much as the virtus themselves.

He had a secret source from a discovery he made on a hunch. When the time was right, he was sure that it could be his ticket to riches and fame. Well, a career and some security at any rate but he had no idea when that time might be.

Joel noticed that when he tweaked a noise canceling feature, a space battle he had been working through got a whole lot more immersive and involving. Joel wasn’t sure why, though he had a hunch, but from then on he improved noise canceling every time he got the chance. Silencing outside noise just a little better lifted the experience of realism exponentially.

He found a way to combine two noise algorithms to make faster responses to local sound, canceling noise from the local environment.

From then on, any time he was asked to mod a headset, an interface, a gaming rig, he would slip in his latest version of noise canceling. And he never told anyone. Not about that part. He was close to being able to build custom rigs and headsets, but he wasn’t ready to risk that secret being uncovered.

There was no easy path for him to turn legitimately pro and that riled him. Not for wearables, hardware, or even code. Kids like him, kids in the outlands never got to do that kind of thing. There was no route to certification. It took a certified school and those were all in the enclaves.

Joel’s best shot would be as a gamer. Then maybe he could take his hardware and code skills into a bigger league. Hard as he tried, Joel wasn’t a good enough player to win at the EZone RustMeetRoad or IronShred tournaments, much less the VirtuCon PanNationals. But if he could get into the heats, maybe he could get some of his skills into a better market.

He faked his way into plenty of online gaming events. He’d won heats. Even took a junior championship title once.

But, since he had to enter under an alias, there was no way for him to collect his winnings. More important, he couldn’t put his name to the titles. That meant he couldn’t ever make a string of wins into a career.

Maybe when he was older. Maybe he could get tournament certified. The juice that it took to get even State certification was a serious charge and he worked all that he could to get a stake together.

Outside school time, apart from work on the kite, which everyone in the village had to do, all the chances he had to scrape any juice together were tech and coding gigs. UnCert gigs, naturally, so all of his payments were technically illegal. He had to be careful who he coded for. The juice didn’t exactly gush.

But now, he was ready to try the jacket and his newly modded headband.

From Vulcan: Origins he had a chase. A fast running dogfight through a high, jagged, red canyon. That sequence in Vulcan: Origins was not the most exciting dogfight in the world, or even the best flight sim, but it had fast and detailed haptic, sensory, and neural feedback.

Make a barrel roll or a vertical climb, even wearing the cheapest mesh jacket, the sensation of G-force was phenomenal. The detailed and persuasive sensory output was a big factor in the game’s incredible success. Just don’t ever hit the button for an ejector seat. Those simulations were brutally real.

Punching straight into the chase, the 3D landscape of the rocky canyon blurred by in a whoosh. The ion-pulse kick of his JetHawk fighter made his blood pump hard. He saw the target fighters ahead and banked hard in pursuit. Two fast, evil, heavily armed RussianFed zone violators were alerted to him immediately. The headband tightened to deepen the immersion. Joel’s blood pressure rose.

At school, Marco had droned on about his full-body sim-suit. How the calf grips made everything ‘so total-immersion. You’re not just there, you’re there in the front line.’ Joel was sure what he said was true, but no point fretting about it, he wasn’t going to be putting sim-pants together anytime soon. Joel’s parents didn’t have juice to sling around like Marco’s. Marco had a chair that span in a 360-360 cage.

Honey didn’t trust Marco and that was good enough for Joel. “If his family has that kind of juice, why do they live here? Why aren’t they in an enclave instead of a village?” Honey was smarter than anyone. Though she always said that he was the smart one.

With perfect timing, Joel’s thumb stroked the red button to fire two plasma missiles. Jarring shakes accompanied the volley of plasma bolts. He felt a burst from his right, along with the explosive shock as the first of the RussianFed fighters exploded. The jacket was working well. Too busy appreciating the warmth on the right side of his arm, chest and head, he almost fluffed the dive into the canyon after the other fighter. Joel stayed as tight to his tail as he could, and fought to remain in position above.

He flipped and turned into the tight, jagged corridor, trying hard to read the canyon and not rely too much on following his target. The press against his chest and the front of his arms combined with the rocking fluid balance as he tilted the JetHawk. Joel felt the shudder as the jet neared its limits.

The RussianFed jet blasted vertically and a canyon wall almost filled the view. The suit squeezed and the JetHawk howled as Joel yanked the stick back and turned as he climbed.

He pulled up too fast. Vibration rattled him and made it impossible to read the instruments. He could see that all the dials and readouts were turning red and flashing. His chest was tight. He couldn’t breathe.

Climbing almost straight up, he couldn’t get a look at the canyon. He fought to turn the fighter over. The headband shrunk around his temples. His chest was tight. Breathing was almost impossible. He needed to level off, and right away. The JetHawk shook.

Loud alarms went off all over the cockpit and the calm female computer voice said, ‘Brace. Brace. Mandatory eject. Commencing immediately.’

“Noooooooooo!” the last of his breath was dragged out in the useless, involuntary shout.

His whole body juddered. The cockpit jolted. His headband tightened savagely as the exploding bolts that held the canopy blew. His jacket snapped tight. Hard. A sensation of freezing air braced him. Everything tightened harder. His chair was blasted out of the cockpit, parallel to the ground.

He span and arced downward. All he could think was, I’m the wrong way up. If the parachute blows out now, I’ll fall straight through it.

It did.

He did.

Joel and his seat ripped through the beautifully rendered silk parachute canopy. It billowed gorgeously as his vision tunneled to a dwindling portal. Breath was still impossible.

He tried to think of a way to quit the game. Or even restart it. Or restart the console. The packs on his arms and chest were too tight for him to move. He couldn’t reach any controls. Even if he still had any.

When I hit the ground or the canyon wall, he thought, I’m going to find out how hard an impact this rig can simulate.

From the jacket pads, the neck brace and the headband alone, the sensation of a slow, rotating fall in a heavy metal chair was persuasive. Unable to move his arms, Joel tried to guess how much pain his own painstakingly built jacket was going to be able to inflict on him.

He’d spent many hours, a lot of effort and all the juice he could scrape together to make it all feel as real as he could.

If his arms weren’t pinned right now, he’d tear the wiring out of it. Rip it to shreds. If he could only move his arms at all, he could just force-quit the game. Better still, peel off the jacket and headband and have fun watching them pump and blow on their own.

Brown canyon walls and pale blue sky tipped and spun below and the horizon rolled sickeningly. The suit buffeted him hard. The impression was utterly convincing. He tumbled helplessly and accelerated. Each time he rolled over, rocks and boulders on the ground were bigger. Sharp edges got clearer.

The suit packs couldn’t do him too much damage, surely. Could they? Drifting out on the edge of consciousness he realized, The headband! He had no idea how hard that might snap. He fought to move his arms, but they were still fixed against the sides of the seat.

He really couldn’t be sure if he was going to get through this to the next life without injury. Or worse. This really could be one of those. ‘Die in the game, die for real’ events.

If I get out of this intact, I definitely need an emergency kill switch. Put it in a glove between the thumb and finger.

The rocky floor of the canyon spun too fast to see detail. His vision blacked out completely. The impact didn’t feel simulated.