There was an old saying, some people called it a curse: “May you live in interesting times.” At twenty-six years old, Vy had felt that if the times got any more interesting, she might just scream.

With a thrum of its engine, the car took off from the curb outside her apartment. The driver, fast asleep in the passenger’s seat, jolted awake at the swing of the vehicle into the flow of traffic. With the look of a person who had just stepped through a wrong door, he glanced bewildered at his surroundings. Vy opened her mouth to speak, but she didn’t get the chance. Within moments, the driver’s chaotic, wide-eyed gaze fell on the small black box in the driver’s seat, a personal EIU wired to the car’s control panel. Seeing it, his memory of reality returned to him, and with a bit of a groan at the inconvenience of waking he nestled his head back into the comfort of his folded arms and fell asleep once more.

It was the best possible outcome, in Vy’s opinion. She had a great passion for avoiding people; with the threat of small talk diminished to zero she could, to the degree that she did so at all, relax. Leaning her head against the window, she sighed and sat pleasantly lonely watching the cars pass through the sunless streets of the City. Inside each, a driver much like her own engaged in various activities: there, a bald, bearded man sorting knickknacks into piles, and over there, a yawning young woman absorbed in a video magazine. Elsewhere, a large, red-faced man belted a painful aria to his car’s rear-view mirror. This was what happened when you freed people from the shackles of gainful employment, gave them universal basic income as part of their becoming neuro-nannies to an EIU: a whole lot of nothing.

But such was the modern era. Though you couldn’t see it in the soaring, crowded heights of the City, up there somewhere was an uplink tower known as a pillar—yes, the same “pillar” that was the namesake of the acting government. This tower linked together all these EIUs under a banner of distributed automation. EIU stood for “emulated intelligence unit,” and it was why, for example, Vy’s driver could both drive and drool from a sleeping mouth at the same time. That black box located in the seat next to him, it carried on it a streamlined imprint of his neural network. That imprint was called a neuro-ROM. While the City’s AI was more than capable of piloting a car, it was a bit like asking a studied artist to watch paint dry. So, instead, such jobs were left to the “lesser” intelligences of the modern world, i.e. humans.

Vy’s own neuro-ROM was employed as a drone controller on the City’s perimeter. As the EIUs were based on read-only memory as opposed to random-access, an operator of a unit still supplied the spark of thought itself. After all, a neuro-ROM was merely a map of possible paths a thought might take; the thoughts themselves came from the operator’s mind and were linked through the pillar to the EIU itself. Far, far in the back of her own mind, Vy could feel her thoughts engaged in this additional task—the drone was currently diving, calculating trajectory and velocity to buzz the tops of busses coming into the city. Now it was scanning the faces of people inside, data which it collated against a vast trove of personal profiles. There—a face that didn’t belong. Better notify the authorities, timestamp the incident, detain each individual and . . .

. . . And so it went. A person could drive herself crazy thinking too hard about it, so Vy didn’t. Instead, she did what everybody else did, she accepted the monthly paychecks without much thought at all as to what purpose those background processes served. Doing so had its upside, too—it paid the rent, for one, or at least it usually did. Second, it allowed the operator to focus his time and foreground brain cycles on tasks that were more—and as evidenced by the drivers’ chosen hobbies, the term was up for debate—mentally stimulating.

For Vy, this spare time was best spent in virtual reality. Unlike the EIUs that bumbled through the basic day-to-day operations of the City, the Incognitas were controlled by an actual artificial intelligence, that aforementioned “studied painter” you’d never ask to watch paint dry. In the case of the City, the Cogs were run by a sub-intelligence of the world’s primary AI, the Auto-Reflective Intuition Agent. ARIA for short. Per an agreement made between the Pillar and ARIA—the so-called articles of SiMBIOSIS—the subsystem AI under ARIA created vast inhabitable worlds that mankind could do with what he wished. A playpen for a child that couldn’t stop getting itself into trouble.

Most virtual worlds Vy couldn’t care less for—a whole lot of walking infinite sunlit beaches or soaring over sweeping vistas or engaging in copious amounts of sex. Playpen stuff, in Vy’s honest opinion; run-of-the-mill, lowest-common-denominator mental fluff.

But the Iron . . . oh the Iron was a different beast entirely. This was a reality of clashing steel swords and thunderous magic. Of twinkling mountain empires and dank subterranean strongholds. By the technicians who first set the parameters for the world to be generated by the AI, the Cog was known as the Aera Incognita, Latin for “the unknown era.” For the pay-to-win elite who set up in its virtual lands as kings and nobles, that name was compressed into the Aeryn—pronounced with a roll of the tongue, eyyye-rhin. In the mouths of those whose throats the elites stood on to maintain their lands, that name became simply the Iron.

For those who couldn’t pay-to-win themselves into a lush, forest estate, you came to the Iron with one expectation in mind: to have your ass handed to you. Vy herself had discovered just as much on her first foray into the “unknown era,” this way back when she was still using public VR in the City Centralis. Minutes after envirtualization, she and a hodgepodge of companions set out with nothing but their starter cloth armor and a few rusty swords from the town of Iremouth. Sleepy coastal town. Rows of shoddy, soggy houses draped in fog that stretched inland toward the mysterious hills. With the smell of salt carried on the cool breeze, they made for the interior with a pang of great hope in their hearts—and within ten minutes were all chased, cornered and killed to death by the town’s monster-in-waiting, a lumbering rock golem named Mossjack. In a flash, Vy was dropped back into the real world. There, looking around her in the VR hub, she saw her previous companions tossing their neuro-helmets aside. Some left in a huff, others asked the technicians to switch simulations to a Cog more casual. Oh but not Vy. No, she had an entirely different take on their abysmal failure. . . .

10/10 - Would play again.

Week after week she returned to the beleaguered sea-side town of Iremouth, this time with the goal of eventually taking on Mossjack, instead of immediately so. Rather than march her hubris back into the hills, she took on low-level quests, your standard basements-infested-with-wild-opossums and herbalist-in-need-of-blood-fronds-from-the-Skittering-Cove type stuff. Once she had grinded her way to a high enough level, she took on a few more challenging adventures: delving deep into the shipwreck of the Weathered Morning, for example, or scaling the Moonbreak Cliffs to place a sunstone in the clutches of a wood-rot altar. There may have been no bootstraps in the era of the Iron, but by whatever loops her level-4 Seabird Boots possessed did she pull herself up by them. Six months in, Vy returned to the fog-covered hills to take on Iremouth’s long-standing adversary—and suffice it to say that this time she was quite overpowered for the task. With a shimmer of level-10 steel, she sent that hulking Mossjack to his Mossjack-y grave, and to this day the pile of her victory stood for all envirts to look upon.

It wasn’t long after that Vy decided it was time to build her own system. No more public VR for her, no sir. The cost of the equipment, while beyond the basic income her EIU afforded her, was not insurmountable. With word of her in-Cog exploits having spread throughout the City Centralis, she found easy money in the taking on of menial tasks for other envirts logging in to the Iron. So, the same grind that she had subjected her avatar to she now endured again and again as other players, this a hundred times over.

Oh the number of times that she climbed the sheer walls of Moonbreak Cliffs to place that glowing sunstone; she felt like she knew those crags by heart, that she could recount each handhold in size and shape the way an info merchant could his sundry wares. Though it was grueling, quest by quest by quest she inched closer to her goal, until at last she finally had the funds together. What was more, booting up her own VR unit the very first time, she was in the unique position of having earned it via the rendering of services to evirts in need, which meant that—if she so chose—she could turn her hobby into a career. And thus did Vivian “Thornheart” become a party member for hire.

So, perhaps she did live in those “interesting times” of which the curse spoke: while the Pillar gradually consumed the real world, the people—like her drooling driver here—lazed about in virtual ones. Yet though modern technology had become a kind of numbing agent for human potential, there were some who found their true purpose in it.

For Vy, this purpose was the virtual world. The Aeryn, the Iron, was her home.

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Excited to know more before next week's chapter? Well, be sure to check out the first book in the I, Speedrunner series, The Infinite Lawman, available now on Amazon. While not a part of the series, Party Member for Hire takes place in the same universe--albeit some years before the events of The Infinite Lawman.

Thank you so very much for reading!!! See you next week :)