Ibrahim woke up the next day around noon. The last two days were very tense and exhausting. His body badly needed that sleep. Once he got out of bed, he had instinctively started a series of physical training. His life in the game was full of risks, so his physical fitness was essential to his survival. Although he was not in imminent danger now, his old habits were hard to get rid of. After half an hour of severe training, he found out to his astonishment that he could not keep up with the training he was used to, so he sat down to take his breath, realizing that he was not the 30 athletic man he was used to, but was still 18 years old lazy youth. Although he has tall muscular body with some muscles appearing under his shirt but that was nothing to his body after five years in Rioneed. Despite that, he decided to continue his training regularly until he regain his fitness as he used to be in the game. Then he moved to do a huge search for a safe place to hide from everyone. The conditions he set for this place were simple but very difficult to achieve. He needed a place where a stranger like him living there wouldn’t raise suspicion. He also needed a place where it would be difficult for anyone to reach easily and spy on whoever lived there without being discovered. This place must be near a big city so if things got bad he could escape easily/ always plan for your escape route, that was a fundamental rule of Rioneed.. His search which took all the day did not yield any good result. All the places he found did not meet all of his requirements. At the end of the day he felt despair and decided to change the search for a safe place. If he failed to find a safe haven, he would not be able to do any of the steps of his plan. He was so nervous so he started looking for a giant car to transport the seven capsules. Although the size of each capsule was no more than 2.5 meters wide and 1.5 meters high, seven of them occupy a huge area. This time his search yielded a good result. He found a giant car suitable to transport capsules between cities. He looked at its huge size, which was over 50 meters long, and it was able to transport tens of capsules, not just seven. After he bought them, he then looked again for a shelter. But as usual, his search did not yield any results until dawn to fall asleep on his small table.
He was not fortunate at the next day as it followed the same pattern, and unfortunately the result was like the previous one. At the end of the day, because of his tension and extreme fear, he ended the search and ordered a large amount of nutrient fluid. Using capsules in the VR games was not a new invention or an exclusive feature of Rioneed. All the current VR games depended on the presence of a capsule for each player. Because the capsule allowed the player to stay in the game for long periods of time that might reach weeks, the need for the nutritional fluid tubes emerged and it was very normal fo find many Egyptian companies who supplied these tubes to many players. At the beginning of the emergence of these liquids, there were rumors that they were strengthening the player's body and developing his muscular abilities. Ibrahim knew that these rumors are true, especially when he used high quality nutrient liquids. This was the reason why he had reserved a large amount of nutritious liquid of the finest available type in the Egyptian market. He did not fear that this might attract attention, as the market for the online games in Egypt was very large. Now that he had finished buying the fluids, he did not begin looking again for a safe place, but he threw his body on his bed trying to relax. Now it seemed to him finding a place to hide was very difficult. New technologies, such as new ultra artificial intelligence computers, flying cars, road surveillance cameras and other modern technology made every place the back yard to anyone with the right authority to spy. If he wanted to run away, he might eventually go to a place where no one lived at with no technology, no modern aspects of life. But if he went to a place like this, he couldn’t guarantee his privacy either. Huge satellites in space monitored everybody everywhere even in the deserted places. If he really wanted to escape, he had to go to a place where modern technology and satellites couldn’t reach, and also had very little human beings, so should he go to Mars?
He didn't remember when he slept, but when he woke up in the morning he heard a loud phone alert. He just got a message. He opened the message and found a note from the company that carried the capsules saying that they would be transporting the capsules from a giant Mediterranean cruise directly to his home. The message contained the date of arrival of the shipment with a request to confirm his address. He easily confirmed his address. Then he requested breakfast from the surrounding restaurants. After he finished his breakfast, he contacted the company which he bought the giant truck from and asked them to deliver it in the evening. The easiest way to transport all these capsules was moving them directly from the shipping company to his new giant car, but he was afraid that someone would notice that these capsules would be transported to another place. That's why he decided to put them in his apartment, then broke them apart and move their parts to his car at night, then transport them to the homes of his studio members.
Because he was afraid to be more nervous he decided not to look again for his escape place. Instead he used the code to track his shipment, trying to waste time. The signal coming from the carrier's website was showing that the crew arrived somewhere in the sea. He imagined a giant ship floating 20 meters above sea level and moving at enormous speeds from Europe's capsule factories. After half an hour the signal started moving slowly towards the north coast of Egypt. The boat was closer to Libya than to Egypt, which made him speculate that there would be a number of players in Libya who would participate in the game as well. He thought for a moment about communicating with the famous players in the Arab countries around him, but he then backed down, as a move like this will put the spotlight over him. His mind moved away from this idea and went back to track the shipment. The flashlight dot like signal moved across the Egyptian-Libyan border and ended up on a direct route to Modern Alexandria. Although he never went beyond West Alexandria, he knew there were more than one city on the road, the most famous one was the ancient city of Dabaa and the Modern city of Alamein. Tracking the flight seemed quite boring.
“I hate monotony!”
He moved from his position to do some muscle training, trying to distract his mind so he didn't go back to the research. But during his training, his eyes were always attracted to that bright dot. He didn’t know why he watched that dot so closely, but he seemed to get excited as the day to start the game was getting closer and closer. He knew he couldn’t start playing once he got the capsule, but wouldn't that be considered a step?
“What happened?”
He immediately stopped training and his eyes was fixed on his big phone screen. He had his mind distracted for just a moment as he was thinking about what he would do when he entered the game, but in the meantime, the red flashing small dot of his shipment disappeared. He moved from his position immediately to take control of his phone, focused on the map, everything else was normal, except that the red dot disappeared. He went out of the site and re-opened it, and used the same code as he had gotten before from the shipping company. The map appeared again empty in front of him. He observed the map closely. The screen was full of a general map of the northern coast of Egypt. He found a very thin line starting from the point of movement of the cargo from the sea to its destination in Alexandria. He noticed that next to this tiny line was information written in very small writings, so he zoomed up the map to find out those were numbers. He zoomed till he could see those numbers. Those numbers were the remaining distance and the remaining time needed for the shipment to reach him. That showed that the transporting aircar was still on its way with no problem in the journey. So why did the point disappear?
Suddenly, his body trembled. If his conclusion was correct, he had found a great solution to his big problem. He didn't want to celebrate too early before he became sure of his guess. This time he followed the flight line with great anticipation. After minutes of anticipation the red dot reappeared on the map on the same route that was drawn before. That was a sign supporting his guess, but to make sure he had to wait until the capsules came to his house, then he would try to know the details of what had happened during the transport journey. Time was so slow to the point where he felt like it was a whole year. Almost an hour passed after the red dot had reappeared on the screen, he heard a sharp alarm from his phone as a message arrived to him telling him about the arrival of the shipment and asking him to get down of his apartment. He pressed the confirmation button at this message quickly and then he moved quickly downstairs. He tried to control his excitement and his emotions when he arrived in front of the big aircar which was many times bigger than his aircar. He pointed out to them to begin the process of transferring capsules. The process went very smoothly and did not take more than one hour. These workers were so skilled at their job. During the transfer of capsules, Ibrahim knew during his short talk with the workers the details of their trip, which was free of any obstacle. They told him that if he wanted to follow the flight path again, he could do so on the company's site using the private code that was sent to him by the phone. He could follow the flight route and restart the journey to monitor everything, and if he wanted to delete the record from the company, he could do so too. After they finished installing the capsules, the workers came up automatically. Although Ibrahim was afraid of raising suspicion among them from his many questions but he felt as if they were used to such questions. The way they responded to his questions reassured him. He suppressed the urge to make them leave his apartment so he could revise the flight rout carefully especially he didn’t need them to install the capsules as he was very experienced in doing so. But if he did so these technicians from Europe would suspect him. He didn’t want to raise any flags on him. Even when he talked to the workers about their journey, he asked these questions under the disguise of a complaint about how long he was waiting for them and that made him be late to work. So he wasn't worried if anyone was monitoring his behavior. After a whole hour of transferring capsules, the technicians finished assembling the capsules. For him it was a long, unnatural time as it usually didn’t take five minutes for a person to assemble a capsule, and there was three technicians who were supposed to have finished the installation a long time ago, but he didn’t complain. He didn't forget to mention in his talk that these capsules were for his studio so he could remove any doubt about owning all this number of capsules. Now, officially, he had entered the circle of conspiracy against Egypt and many other countries. He decided to do all his best so he could turn the table over the G8. If they had enormous technologies and advanced weapons in the real world, he would become the horror they feared in the game.
