Chapter 1

Michael eagerly tore into the large box that had finally arrived after the longest three months of his life. He knew when he hit the preorder button that it was going to be a long wait, but it was still torturous.

He finally got the stupid hardened cardboard open having sliced through roughly a half mile of packing tape, and beheld his prize. It was the latest immersion helmet from Augmented Reality Corporation. It was pure genius in hardware. Something he could appreciate being into computers himself.

Michael made his living as a web developer, which was a fancy way of saying that he knew enough about Java and flash to make a fancy website. It really wasn’t that hard. Ninety nine percent of all clients wanted the same thing. Smooth graphics, floating buttons, and scalped information.

Email addresses were the currency of the e-Business world, and Michael had developed a “cookie” that upon acceptance allowed the website to scalp the browser for their email address, and any other personal information they had saved.

Then he had developed a paid extension that blocked that information from being accessed via his cookie. Michael was particularly proud of his foresight in the idea. It had taken a few years for the news to get a hold of the story that people’s information was being scalped; but when they came to him for an interview he admitted he shared their concern and told them about the app he had created.

The news station ran with it. Even posted links in their web page to his official app so people could protect themselves from the evil corporations. He went from villain to hero overnight. His bank account didn’t mind either. If he was careful Michael had enough to retire on at a ripe old age of twenty six. Nah. He was going to ride this gravy train for all it was worth.

Of course that meant that he had to take vacation time for the launch of Iona. It was a nightmare to contact and schedule downtime from all his clients. The recent Windows patch was causing glitches in the cookie scalper, making all the emails show up as hotmail accounts. Of course all the websites needed to be updated manually.

It was tedious and boring, but it was a payday that allowed him to splurge on the new bio-integration system. The sparkly white helmet had a huge multi-mode fiberoptic cable coming out of the top. It was supposed to be over 1000x faster than the previous generation.

He hoped so, it had cost almost 1000x as much.

Michael wasn’t taking any chances though. If he had to work to his dying day to afford the helmet he probably still would have bought it.

Michael quickly hooked it up to his custom Harrington Enterprises server rig. The Frankenstein of parts was the work of their mad genius. Inside that ugly stack of black boxes there were custom chipsets and stacks of gpu’s that had all been soldered together into a monstrosity of processing power. The whole thing had then been overclocked and supercooled until it ran fast enough to keep up with the human mind.

Sure it was more power than he needed, but minimum specifications were for chumps.

Michael plugged in the umbilical, inserted the data crystal, and settled into his ergonomic gaming chair. It was cute to think how antiquated the idea’s of the early pioneers of VR had thought about sustained VR dives. There had been a mad rush to develop the latest and greatest in long term human sustainment devices.

Massage chairs, immersion pods, nutritional bars and vitamin packs. An entire industry dedicated to a false premise.

C.P. Harrington was the pioneer, hence the Harrington Frankenstein, who had simply started overclocking computers to advance the speed in which they interacted with the human consciousness. The human brain is still the most amazing computer ever created and is capable of speeds that computers and AI can only dream of.

Soon the paradigm changed. It was no longer about how long can you sustain the human body during a dive. Now it was how fast can the computer run, to try and keep up with the brain.

LinkWorld was the first of its kind. It was the first game ever to run at 1.5x the speed of time. Eight hours in real life became twelve hours in the game. It was revolutionary.

Iona though. Iona was a whole generational leap forward. Hell, it was practically a higher species. The press release had promised a minimum guarantee of 8x and 16x speeds. An entire sixteen hour gaming session completed in just an hour? Gaming implications aside, he couldn’t wait for the VR desktop to have scaled times. He would be able to complete an entire weeks worth of work in a day.

Michael launched the pre-release program, practically vibrating with excitement. He relaxed into the chair as the helmet took over his consciousness. He opened his eyes to the white screen he saw every time he logged into VR, but this time among all the clutter that were his various programs was a new icon. A spreading tree that started black at the roots, was red through the trunk and ended white at the branches.

Without hesitation he smacked the icon. The VR desktop faded from view and he found himself standing on a hilltop overlooking a nearby town. The breeze rustled the grass and cut through his thin cloak causing him to shiver. Birds chirped and splashed in a puddle nearby. It must have rained recently.

“Are you him?” A beautiful lilting voice sang from over his left shoulder.

Michael turned expecting to see a gorgeous woman dressed in regal clothes. He was shocked however to see, that she was beautiful, but her clothes were in rags and she was bleeding from several cuts over her body. A ragged hole was torn in her side and blood seeped out through her fingers.

A thrill of excitement shot through Michael. ‘This is different than the release trailer!’ he thought.

The woman staggered forward and fell at his feet.

“Please, hero, save us.” She clutched at his cloak with bloodied hands and tears in her eyes. “Please!”

Before Michael could even respond, she collapsed. ‘I hope she’s only fainted.’

A white light enveloped him from above, as the gorgeous woman he had seen from the trailer descended from the heavens, complete with wings and white robes. She landed gently on the ball of one foot and looked down at the crumpled girl. She placed a hand on her and a soft green light began to emanate from her hand and envelope her body..

Michael watched as the wounds began to close and the blood on the grass actually flowed backward into her body. Satisfied with her work the angel looked up at him.

“Will you save her?”

He thought the previous girls voice was pretty, but this one made his heart skip a few beats. Her voice carried desperation and hope in a way that tugged the primal parts of his brain. He waited for the scene to continue, heart pounding and mouth dry.

“Please Michael, will you save her?” She whispered again.

Michael started. This wasn’t a cutscene. This program was talking to him! She knew his name, and was waiting for his answer. This wasn’t just an evolution of the concept of VR, this was an entirely different being.

“How do you know my name?”

The angel sighed, seemingly in relief, as his response.

“Your coming has been foretold for years. All of Iona has been waiting for you Michael. We need you, more than you can possibly know. I’ve done all I can for this girl, within the laws I must obey, but she is still very much in danger. So are many, many others in our world. Will you save us?”

The angel held out her hand to Michael, her eyes begging him.

He reached out his hand and slowly grasped hers. Her hand was so soft, it made his callous free hands feel like sandpaper softball mits. He gasped as a tingle of electricity coursed through his hand and down his spine. The sensations were unlike anything he’d experienced in real life or in VR.

She smiled as she gripped his hand. “I’m so glad! Thank you Michael, from the bottom of my heart.”

The scene slowly faded from his vision and he was left standing on his desktop again staring at the Iona icon.

“Holy shit! Oh my god, did just happen?! Did the pre-release calibration really just talk to me? By name?!”

Michael paced in the digital space, his thighs trying to relieve some of his tension but failing because he was digital and there was no haptic feedback in the desktop.

The implications of the programming complexity were mind boggling. He tried to figure out how Montreal Games could have possibly programmed his personal information into the files. He was distracted by a ding and a popup alert that informed him that the helmet and Frankenstein had met the minimum qualifications and was now calibrated to his cerebral map.

Michael began to wave his hand to close out the screen, but stopped when he saw a button at the bottom.

Replay intro?

He smashed the button as fast as he could. His desktop faded out.

He found himself standing on a hilltop overlooking a nearby town. The breeze rustled the grass and cut through his thin cloak causing him to shiver. Birds chirped and splashed in a puddle nearby. It must have rained recently.

“Are you him?” A beautiful lilting voice sang from over his left shoulder.