CHAPTER 2

Although, hold on a second, I thought, maybe "reputation" wasn't the right word. From then on, I'd talk about the "experience" or "XP" I got from beating quests, killing monsters, or going through whatever else there was to do in the game.

I'm a gamer now. Phew boy! Although, maybe you have a reputation in the game, too? That doesn't matter now. Time to collect information.

On my way home, my mind wandered back to the RPGs and MMORPGs I'd played umpteen years before. I hadn't been hardcore or anything. I had been a normal kid growing up in the age of computers, so I spent plenty of time browsing social networks, paging through forums, and sometimes even looking up porn. (And don't give me that "only perverts look up porn" nonsense—everyone does...it's just that not everyone admits it.) And, of course, I played games. Shooters had taken up most of my time, though I played enough RPGs to know my way around them. Everything was different now: capsules and virtual reality that felt, well, real.

Incidentally, let me take a moment to introduce myself. I haven't told you anything, which isn't right, though there isn't much to tell... I'm 36 years old from Moscow. I'm divorced and don't have any kids. I live alone, and I've spent my 36 years much as anyone else my age has. I'm a typical big-city guy, who grew up in a typical home, and I have a typical life ahead of me. I was born, went to school, went to col-lege, and enlisted in the army. (Okay, so it's a little out of the ordinary to enroll in the army after getting a degree...) I served out my contract, found a job, got married, got divorced, and here we are.

I joined the army because I had nothing better to do.

You know, sometimes that's how it goes. You're living a full, satisfying life, and then one day, something happens, and you're left with nothing. That's how it was for me. I had a degree, a girl, KVN[3], a sweet ride (it may not have been new, but at least it was a Chrysler), and a best friend. Then I graduated, my KVN fell apart, the chassis broke on the Chrysler, and it would have been cheaper just to buy a new car. Then I caught my girlfriend with the guy I thought was my best friend. So that's how it went, almost like in a movie—one minute I was on top of the world, and the next I had nothing.

Then I did something I'd never done before. I unloaded the whole mess to my dad, who downed a shot of rum and said, "Go join the army. That'll clear your head. When you spend all your time hungry, people yell at you all day long, and you wonder if you'll be given a rag or your toothbrush when it comes time to clean the toilet, you stop caring about everything else. It's just in the movies that soldiers think about their girlfriend back home. There, you just care about finding more food and getting out of extra work. Well, and you try to get hit as little as possible. Or you could join the navy—they'll make your life look like a fairytale. It's brutal."

So, I headed over to our local recruiting office, where the shocked blockhead of a recruiter almost signed me up for the psychology division. From Moscow? With a degree? Wants to join the army? Came and volunteered because he wanted to learn something useful? The poor guy's head almost exploded.

Off I went for a year and a half. Marines? Paratroopers? Nope. I went for the military engineers. And wouldn't you know, my old man was right. When you're always hungry, your most valued possession is a roll of toilet paper (newspapers make your butt itch), and your ribs are sore from the punch Sergeant Poletaev gave you the day before (those hillbillies sure do love city people, and especially Muscovites...they love them straight into the hospital sometimes), everything else takes on a different perspective. My KVN fell apart—no problem, we were never all that close to begin with. The car broke down—no worries, the subway was built to weather a nuclear war, so it would be there until the end of days. Your girl ran off with your ex-friend—is that really that big a loss? Ah, though a helping of mom's borscht and a few of her tiny cupcakes…

Still, six months in, it got a lot easier, and nothing lasts forever; everyone's contract is up sooner or later. Eventually, I was back home, bedecked in ribbons, commendations, and a shiny service record. My dad took one look at me, told me I was a man now and handed me the key to the apartment he had gotten from my grandfather. I celebrated with a healthy helping of vodka, made the night better for a healthy helping of girls, and heard the good news that my ex-friend had already had time to both marry and divorce my ex-girlfriend three months after the wedding when he caught her under a neighbor.

I spent some time wondering if she was then passed on to the neighbor like just another hand-me-down. Then, I dug up my old journalism diploma, blew the dust off it, looked for a job, and found one at a newspaper called the Capital Herald. And so, there I was, waiting for the capsule. Actually, I did more than just sit there; I also collected information. The day before, after I left work, I had decided to just grab some food and hit the sack, but today, I dove into the game forums.

So there it was: Elysium. It had a ton of players, swords, magic, and a bunch of races, specialisations, and crafting. There were four enormous—absolutely gigantic—player zones with lots of locations on a single-player continent. A newly discovered second continent was being developed and wasn't as densely populated. There were extensive quests, a fully nonlinear process, and myriad NPCs (non-player charac-ters) built into the game to give players quests, help them, hurt them, or simply create a fully immersive atmosphere and ambiance. The main thing that had changed since my gaming days was that, instead of a monitor (and later a neuro-helmet) and third-person view (or sometimes first-person), the game featured 100 percent immersion. In other words, the only difference between it and the real world was that it wasn't real.

I glanced at the clock and shook my head. Already three o'clock, and still nobody. Maybe they won't come? I thought. What then? Maybe everything had changed, the certificate had been canceled, and I was off the hook? And, of course, just when I started to hope for the best, the doorbell rang. I opened the door, and two glowering, uniformed men tramped into my apartment, one older than the other.

"Is something wrong?" I asked gloomily. They didn't cheer me up.

"Of course there is," answered the older one. "You live on the seventh floor, and your elevator doesn't work. We had to carry this monster up here our-selves, and it's a beast."

And with that, they carried in a box about five feet tall in which, it appeared, a fairy-tale steed waited to rush me off into a magical world of swords, magic, fatal beauties, and daring adventure. My only comfort was that it wouldn't be for long.

An hour later, the furniture had been moved around (it turns out that the capsule had to be set up just so in a certain area), swear words had flowed freely, and the capsule was in place. My new friends left, and I circled the novel object that had taken over my apartment.

A few turns, and I had a grasp of what, from the out-side, looked something like a bathtub and something like a small boat with wires and other attachments sticking out of it.

"Well, waiting won't change anything. Let's see what this guy can do."

And I sat down at my computer.

Before the installers left, they explained what I needed to do and press. According to them, during the first launch, the machine read your subcortex, aligning the equipment to maximise player comfort. I asked them if it was possible to get overly engrossed in the game, and they told me it had a feature that disabled player activity when the system detected that the player's brain was at its limit. The player was forced into a dream state where his vision was blurry and he lacked coordination. Basically, it made it impossible to play the game. I thought that was a smart way to do things. I remembered friends back when I used to play games that would get so involved that they went for 12 to 16 hours without eating or drinking. I've m seen junkies who looked better…

The whole monstrosity (the installers called it a "neural bath," though I stuck with "capsule") was hooked up to my computer, where I first registered and created an account. My first surprise was that I could only play one character. Back in the good old days, I could have five accounts per server, and many more characters, and there were almost unlimited servers.

But not here. Pick something and play. Level-up; develop skills; and accumulate things, friends, and enemies. And if I didn't like the result or got tired of it, I could delete it—with everything I had accumulated and my entire backstory—and get a new one.

Those were my only choices.

Here we go.

The first thing the program asked was if I wanted to select a name. I could either pick one from the list or think up a new one myself, though I was too lazy for the latter.

I knew finding a good name was important. It's something I needed to be smart about. And what was funny was that, while you could take all the time you needed for the game, when you were born, you had no choice but to accept what you were given. Sometimes, as in my case, that left you with a less than ideal moniker. I have no idea if it was alcohol, atmospheric pressure, shock and happiness that I was born, or what, but my father named me Harston. He named me and never gave it a second thought; I was the one who had to live with it. All through school, college, and especially the army, I was just happy when people called me Harsh (which means ugly enforcer in Russian). The alternatives were much worse.

I entered the first letter of my real name, and the program pulled up a list of prepared usernames. One, in particular, caught my eye: Leyton. There was something about it that I liked, and as someone who tends to trust his intuition, I decided to go with it. Much better than my real name, anyway.

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