Walter bent to dust his knees. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out, Evie. Is there a power button we can press?” He looked around at the trees.

“Dad, while we’re in-game, we have no control over our bodies in the real world. It’s like when we dream during sleep—our brains are disconnected from our neuromuscular system so we don’t hurt ourselves out there while we’re in here swinging weapons and running around.”

Walter nodded. “So, we should call IT?”

Reeve turned away from her father. “I believe in my parents and their abilities.” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly then spun on her heels and squatted, her hand sliding down the naginata, her eye level dropping closer to her father’s.

“We can’t do anything out there until we get out of here, and the only way to get out of here is to log out. This is total immersion gameplay. Everything not directly related to living the game happens in the lobby, which you get to by logging out. Logging out is our escape hatch, but it’s not working.”

“That seems like it could be dangerous. And why can’t we log out?”

“I don’t know why we can’t log out! This game is still in early access, but a bug that big should’ve been caught by now.” She drummed her fingers along the shaft of the naginata while she thought. “There must be a problem with our settings that we could fix, or a workaround. I need to think about it. And, yeah, not being able to log out could be dangerous, but there’s a safety feature in the neural interface that will automatically log us out after a certain amount of real time if we haven’t logged ourselves out.”

“How long?”

“I’m not sure. The longest I’ve been able to play so far, real time, has been a little under fifteen minutes. It was almost a full day, sunrise to sunrise, in the VRMMO.” She pursed her lips. “But I think the info on that is probably in all the legal stuff we had to scroll through before clicking ‘I Accept’ when we were entering the lobby.”

“Lobby?”

“Dentist office.”

“Right.”

Reeve looked at her father and wondered if he would be good at wading through that massive liability waiver she’d never bothered to read before clicking ‘Accept.’ She tried to remember what, exactly, it was he did at his job. Her parents talked about their workday-happenings pretty much nightly, and Reeve had developed an almost supernatural ability to tune them out whenever their tone became occupational. She wasn’t even fully aware of the extent of her powers to ignore, which had not been cultivated but instead had come to her quickly when she was in elementary school as though transferred through a radioactive spider bite. Reeve’s brow furrowed as she stared at her halfling father. In real life, he wore bow ties to work, which suggested junior high science teacher or southern lawyer, but she knew it was something in Human Resources. She was pretty sure there was an office involved. Apparently not a lot of computer work. She then considered his in-game performance thus far. She decided to risk it.

“Dad?” She gave him her best persuasive smile, which, when rendered in half-orc, caused him to clear his throat apprehensively. “Could you read through all the warnings to find out how long we’ll have to wait? We need to get out of here. I have a math test to study for.”

Even if the smile wasn’t sufficiently persuasive, the appeal to her schoolwork was. Walter nodded. “Sure, Honey. But, meanwhile, don’t you worry. We’re doing okily dokily here. I’ll get the hang of the goblins and the winged pixels soon enough, the You Eye, the LAN, and the deathy buff, and I’m sure your mother’s doing just fine figuring things out as she goes along—she’s a resourceful lady. Plus,” he placed his hands on his hips and exaggeratedly rotated his torso about his waist, “I haven’t felt this spry in ages, so we’ve got that going for us, and,” he smiled broadly, “you’ll be here to help us along the way if we need anything, right? I know how good you are at showing us how to do these technology thingies. What’re they called? Tetchy things? I mean, technie? Technic? Techie! That’s it! Techie.”

All of the blood had drained from Reeve’s face, and, as she stared at her father in horror, her right eye twitched.

“Right,” Walter said. “Where is this legal document thingy?”

Reeve swallowed dryly. “Go into your UI, just remember—“

Walter staggered backward and fell onto his back. “That really comes at you fast.”

Reeve shook her head. “OK, choose the tiny text to the left of ‘Log Out.’”

Walter began to raise his left hand.

“Mentally. Choose it mentally.”

He nodded. After a few seconds of concentration, he said, “There we go! Golly. This is long.” He stared ahead for a few seconds, eyes distant, then sat up and crossed his legs. “Seizures?”

Reeve began to pace the perimeter of the spawn point.

“Do not use while driving or riding in a moving vehicle? Reeve?”

“Some idiot has probably done it, Dad. And someone else probably took a video of it. And one or both of the two are probably now rich. Or dead.”

For a few minutes, they were both nearly silent, she pacing, he mumbling to himself, her sharp ears able to decipher his words only occasionally.

“While operating machinery?”

She thought through their situation, passing her naginata from hand to hand and twirling it between passes, taking pleasure in the sharp whistle of the blade cleaving the air. She’d never played a full twenty-four hours of game time. Maybe the automatic logout happened somewhere around then? That’d be about fifteen minutes of real time for the VRMMO or…her blade floated in the air in front of her, then continued its arc…just a couple minutes of real time for this story mode. That was nothing, she’d have plenty of time to study for her test. She had to do well on the test. If she didn’t do well in algebra, how was she going to do well in all her other math courses, or get into college, or get a Computer Science degree so that she could graduate and get a job at a VR company working on the AIs that were now at the heart of most games?

She stopped pacing, took a deep breath, and gently directed the tip of the naginata through an arc as though she were an orchestra conductor guiding the music to a key point.

It would be OK. She would still have time to study once they got out. They just needed to get out.

She resumed pacing but only made it a few strides before another thought caused her to stop her spinning blade short of a thin branch. The math test was one thing, but could she survive twenty-four hours in here with her parents? The blade continued through the branch, which fell, clinging desperately to its leaves like little parachutes. Twenty-four hours of having to help them not get killed by goblins—or salmon. Not only that, but she’d have to help them understand the game itself, its mechanics, how it worked the way it did, why it worked the way it did, and the stages of whatever quest the story mode would have them follow. She stopped walking.

It would be like helping her parents with a new smartphone.

For

Twenty

Four

Hours

Straight.

She unsteadily began pacing again. VR games had always been her world. Where she felt most at home. Most herself. Complete. They did not belong here. Hopefully, the automatic logout for the story mode would be short, hopefully really, really short.

“They’re not liable if you’re attacked by an animal, domestic or otherwise, while using their product?” Walter looked around him until he spotted Reeve through his UI.

“Maybe that’s why Mom wanted to talk about Mrs. Jacobs’ cat,” she said, trying to lighten her mood.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

Her father stared once more at unseen words, his lips moving silently. “Ah, here it is!”

Reeve dropped to a squat in front of him. “Yes?”

“The default automatic logout for both the, eh, MMO mode and the story mode is twelve, to prevent play sessions of such an extended duration that they could cause negative health effects in real life, but you can change it.”

“Twelve hours?”

“Yes.”

“But I’ve played almost twenty-four hours in the MMO and it didn’t kick me out.”

“No, it’s defined in terms of real time, not game time, just like you thought. Twelve hours of real time.”

“But…,” Reeve’s hands started to shake, and she pushed the naginata away from her so that it fell harmlessly to the ground, “but twelve hours out there would be…,” she looked at the game time and real time readouts in her UI, “that’d be like almost a year in here.” She tipped backward from her squat to land hard on her rear, a thin cloud of dust slowly drifting up around her huge body. She stared at her father. “How do you change the automatic logout?” Her usually booming voice was a sandpaper whisper.

“It looks easy enough,” Walter said. He flinched only slightly this time when he sent the UI away. “You can change that setting while you’re in the lobby. The default automatic logout is based on the slowest supported equipment—you said something about that earlier, right?—so they recommend reducing it substantially if you’re running a high-end neural interface, particularly in story mode.” He gave her a pleased smile. “This interface we got you for your birthday was top-of-the-line, right? Exactly the one you wanted?”

Reeve fell onto her back as the entire forest, the entire world, collapsed onto her.