From: Crown Law Firm

Mister Wilson,

On behalf of Lirium Dream Soft, we would like to welcome you to the Beta test of their latest release. We are happy to have you on the team.

Your agent has been notified that you won’t be available for new contracts for the next month and your apartment rent has been paid for the next month which is also the extent of the beta test. The actual beta test online periods will be conducted on-site. A private room has been prepared for you and you will have access to all necessities.

The test will be two-fold. Lirium Dreamsoft expects participants to test both the actual game as well as the VR hardware which will include long immersion tests. Details will be discussed with you during the on-site presentation. There you will also be briefed on and receive your new neural-link.

Transport to the Lirium Dreamsoft offices has been arranged and you can find all details in the attachments to this message.

Please be advised that the test is scheduled to start in 2 days. If the travel arrangements do not fit your schedule please contact me directly and I will make new arrangements.

Sincerely,

Daniel Vargas - VIP coordinator

Crown Law

This was the second time in as many days that my lower jaw hit the floor. They just contacted a bunch of people on my behalf, paid for my apartment and told me to show up at their office for the test. Although I finally knew how long the test period would be, I was not sure how I felt about it. Of course, I understand that they might be concerned about the security and protection against data leaks. The best way to make sure that didn’t happen was to have everybody crammed together in a testing facility.

But then there was also the bit about long immersion testing and that was something I had only ever heard about as a kind of science fiction. Technically it was somewhat possible but at the same time it was simply too expensive in reality. Several companies had tried to figure out ways to do this but so far none had really made this stick even though there would be a lot of applications for the technology. 

Just imagine, coma patients could be online and possibly recover faster, schools and universities could be moved online, prisons would need a lot less space to operate and the cost per prisoner could severely drop. More so because most online worlds offered some kind of currency exchange. Some governments had already started VR prisoner programs. Officially they were for faster reintegration into society. In reality they had prisoners farm a part of the financial strain they put on the system. 

If they could pull off cost effective long term immersion the world as we know it might change once more. I was equally curious to see what they had developed as I was terrified of the implications this could have.

Shaking my head to clear these thoughts I checked the attachments.

There was a number for a driver service that was already paid and a boarding pass for a national flight from Seatac at 6pm today. Curiously the boarding pass did not have any airline information nor seat assignments or any other information that you would normally find on commercial flights. Interesting. 

To be honest this whole thing actually got me excited. I have always been someone to roll with the punches and stay curious about what life offers me next. Sometimes it offered shit and sometimes amazing opportunities. But you had to keep an open mind to actually notice them.

A mentor of mine told me at some point that “ambivalence is bliss, vacillation is hell”. When he said that, I, like most people, did not understand what he tried to express. The problem was that both words are often wrongly used interchangeably. But over time I started understanding. 

If you stand at a crossroad, you can vacillate and consider and think about every way. And when you take the first step down one road, you worry and come back to the intersection because you might miss something or because another road looks better or looks easier or seems more interesting. Or you can be ambivalent and know that each one of the roads is just a road and will lead you somewhere. And then you make your decision and roll with it. Because in the end, it is just a road.

When I started understanding this concept my life became… different. A whole lot happier. And less complicated. Living like this cuts through a lot of the bullshit.

And the understanding came at the right time for me. Not 6 months later the PNW PD was privatized and I found myself at odds with the new direction of the now business of Police. So I looked at the crossroads and decided to walk down the path of professional gaming and never looked back. Because with ambivalence there is also no room for regrets. And I really had none. 

And now I stood at the crossroads of throwing a fit about long term immersion and on-site testing and canceling the whole thing because of previously undisclosed information or rolling down the road I was offered. I took a moment to consider this and check if there were any other options. But in the end excitement about something new won out.

So I planned my day, contacted the driving service and asked them to pick me up at 3:00, read some gaming news, took a shower, packed a bag and generally got myself ready for a month long trip.

I also ended up looking up information about Lirium Dreamsoft. But while this side of the web had some information, I would have to log in and go to the Hub to get the juicy bits of information which I avoided to maintain a neutral impression.

According to Wikipedia the company was created in a 2028 merger of Lirium Online Technologies and Dreamsoft. At the time both were researching virtual reality solutions. They had their first big break only 2 years later when they received a big military contract developing helmets and training scenarios for their drone pilots. And from there it had spiraled. Backed by military money they developed various versions of both helmet and software, dabbled in full immersion capsules before shelving the project due to high costs and the release of the first version of the neural link. Since then they had pioneered the last 3 iterations of the N-Link.

All of their developments so far were first delivered to the military and then opened to the public. Their current annual revenue was somewhere in the double digit trillions of credits and much higher than many countries GDP. I wasn’t surprised considering they had the VR immersion market cornered and were the only ones manufacturing the neural link. 

That was actually something that threw me for a bit because I have used both 3rd and 4th gen N-Link but I wasn’t aware that they came from this company. Further research showed that they had a distribution company name BrainCore which did all marketing and distribution. And which was very familiar to me.

They also had offices and research divisions along with manufacturing facilities and company owned arcologies all over the world. In some countries their properties even enjoyed extraterritorial privileges. They were basically considered their own country. I hadn’t even known something like that was possible. 

The last thing that caught my attention was that they apparently hadn’t done any game development since the merger but 7 years ago, they started a cooperation with the Google AI conglomerate and  had announced that they were working on a game that would redefine VR gaming forever. After that, no mention about this ever again in any media sources. 

The pickup from my apartment and the drive to SeaTac was pretty uneventful. However, showing the boarding pass to security and being immediately ushered into a VIP lounge was less so. And with me in the lounge were around 250 other gamers. It looked like this was the testing group from the PNW. Or at least one of them. 

Some of them stood together chatting showing off team colors if they were part of Clans, Guilds or Gaming Teams. There were 20 people from New Gaming Collective who had made a huge splash in the VR FPS genre when the team formed. There was Rising Storm with a group of 8, WolfsClan with a group of 8, some VRRTS clans that I couldn’t peg because that has never been a genre I was particularly good at. There were groups from Dust and Iron Eagles, specialists, high level players and media personalities from a VRMMO called “Aventuria”. 

I was surprised to see the amount of players that had gathered here. The PNW had a whole bunch of pro gamers but was one of the smallest groups worldwide. Lirium must have gone and recruited anybody that had any claim to fame. The really big gaming groups and workshops came out of China and Russia, followed by the Eurozone Megaplexes and Brazilian ArchCities. I wondered how many of the 500k players would come from there.

I looked around and saw many groups in animated discussion while others were using smart optics to access the Hub and yet others sitting by themselves. I stopped and smiled when my eyes landed on a late twenties player in a cowboy outfit complete with hat and boots. He was reading an honest to the gods book. Like, not just old-school e-readers but ancient-school actual paper and ink. I made my way over to him.

“Damian, how are things?”

He looked up from the book with a smile of his own. “Kade, nice to see you. Happy to know that you are in this circus with us.”

I smirked at him, “Not liking the rest of the people here?” 

“Pff, as if you would have to ask that. Look at all the kids. And this is the hope for the VR pro gaming future.”

“Haha, yeah. I heard that they called you the father of PNW VR racing in that ESPN interview the other day” I chuckled. “Starting to feel old?”

“If they call me the father of something they should call you the grandfather. You have what, 6 years on me?”

Before I could respond to his barb we were interrupted by a commotion from the door. The cause was a 28 year old woman, dressed in a Rockabilly outfit and combat boots, had screaming pink hair and a pair of steampunk goggles on her forehead. She was followed by 2 holo wolves. 

I sighed and looked at Damian. “Pink Death?”

“Don’t even.” he replied and then lifted his hat into the air and waved it around. Which led the pink haired girl to focus on us. A bright smile lit up her face as she made her way over to us. 

“Save the comment Kade” she started, “It wasn’t funny when I had green, violet or blue hair. Pink is no difference.”

“Oh come on, give me a chance to make a bad joke at least” I mockingly pouted.

“Pff, just because you play a character named Red Death when you have red hair.”

“You forgot to mention the guy that tried to assault you outside a nightclub and ended up exactly like the latest murder victim in your VRR where you played a red haired assassin.” 

She shrugged. “Whatever, still not funny. Besides what should I call you? Ass-kicked-Wilson? Like what-the-actual-fuck? I had money riding on that game. You should have been disqualified and banned from ever touching any VR program ever again after that fight.”

Damian raised his hands to stave off the argument he knew was coming. “Guys…”

Oh, oh. I knew that this was the exactly wrong thing to do and the moment the words left his mouth I saw the look of his face when he realized the same thing.

“Seriously grandfather of racing? What the hell did you think about that fight? I know you are still watching everything Kade that is high profile enough. How much did you lose?”

I actually hadn’t known that Damian actively watched my games. Nor that he was betting. The more you learn…

“Eh, nothing I can’t recuperate by placing one race” he turned to me, “But I have to admit, that the way that went down seemed very strange. Was your security compromised or something?”

“Honestly, I have no idea,” I replied. But I have people looking into it. On that note, let's share all the info we have on our future employer. Have you heard anything beyond basic info?”

For the next few minutes we discussed the upcoming beta test but it turned out that we all had pretty much the same info. Not even Nicola who had the best contacts of all of us had really heard anything more than we had.

Fortunately, or sadly, depending how you look at it our conversation was cut short when the computer generated voice called boarding for our flight and we went into the plane. Damian, Nicola - or rather Nico as she wanted to be called (don’t ever call her Nicola unless you want to find something sharp and pointy in your kidneys) and me grabbed a row of seats for ourselves. Here we continued our discussion and speculations and shared what had been going on in our life for the last 3 months that we hadn't seen each other.