Of Family Homes and VR Games

Chapter V: Of Family Homes and VR Games

The day my Neural Sphere arrived, my mom got a call from her brother and I didn't get the chance to enjoy it. My mother wasn't a native Parisian, even if she was French. She was born in the village of Oreaux in the south of France. It was a region of France that grew wine, as far as I could tell. At least my mother's family did.

And my family, I guess. I was my mother's son, so that made them every bit my family. Instinctively, I didn't consider them my family. My dad was a man who died in the late eighties, he had raised me by himself and he made scarifies for me. My mom was a French pop star of a huge girl group. I never met the woman who died giving birth to me in my first life and I never met the man who knocked my mother up. Neither of them had ever been in the picture.

Neither had this far-flung family in the French countryside. When my mother graduated from high school and went to attend university, my grandfather had been against it. His family had tended that vineyard since the French revolution. As far as he was concerned, that's what my mother and her brother should do.

My uncle Rene was happy to stay at the family home and make wine. My mother wanted something more, so she went off to study in Paris. She became an entertainer. Since my birth, she hadn't said one word to be about my grandparents.

It seemed the old man had kicked the bucket. My grandmother died when my mother was sixteen, and my grandfather stubbornly held on. He lived well into his eighties before he died and we were going to attend his funeral.

Uncle Rene had taken up running the vineyard for years, with my grandfather staying on just to make sure he didn't screw up. My grandfather had been a harsh man it would seem. Since Rene stayed, everything had been left to him, which I think was a scummy move, but my mother didn't seem to mind. She didn't want to live here and she had a good relationship with her brother, so it worked out.

Uncle Rene had a wife and three kids, two boys and a girl. They were my cousins and the four of us didn't get along. We weren't hostile to each other, but none of us knew how we should act. By the end of the week-long trip, I had gotten to know my uncle and his family, but it was awkward in those first few days.

Uncle Rene was a kind man and so was his wife. They made sure to make us feel right at home, which wasn't hard. Their house was built shortly after the family obtained the lands during the French revolution, but it was built like an aristocratic villa. It was made of handsome wood, it was beautiful, and had I been reincarnated as Rene Lescheres's son, I wouldn't have minded living here.

Jean-Luc Lescheres was the man who started the family. He was the one who acquired the land and started the family dynasty. We can trace our family history to Jean-Luc and his wife, and all their descendants. We had a nice family tree going, but everyone before Jean-Luc was a mystery. There were stories about our family fighting for France or living in cities across the country, but nothing concrete.

We even had a family crest that was designed by Jean-Luc's son. The founder of my family wanted to be an aristocrat. I couldn't blame the man. For centuries, being an aristocrat in France was the best a man could do to provide for himself and his family. He had been born before the French revolution and even after it had been quelled, he had stuck to that desire.

It wasn't just the house that impressed me, but the vineyard itself. The land was cultivated for grapes, and there were a few facilities to turn those grapes into wine. The estate might be controlled by the family, but it employed a fair number of villagers. My family wasn't rich, but we were firmly middle class, and our wine was considered very high quality.

It was a very beautiful villa, Chateau Cornelia. The estate was named after Jean-Luc's wife, the woman who inspired him so much. It wasn't just her name that graced the property, but her likeness was carved in metal that hung above the gate. As well as in paintings.

The Village of Oreaux was a quaint little French town. Everyone spoke French and all the buildings were hundreds of years old, but that was part of its charm. I loved Mayfield, I was a small-town kind of guy, so I wouldn't mind living here. If I didn't love Paris so much, if I didn't want to see the world so bad, if I wasn't considering living in Tokyo, I might have come back here in the future.

As it stood, I was sad to leave. I wanted to stay for a little longer, but the funeral was over and the record label wanted her back so she could record a music video for her newest hit single.

My mother promised me we would come back and I hoped we would. When we got home, I had a lot of work to catch up on with Daliah and my Japanese tutor came by to drill me for a few hours. I say drill, but we spoke about our lives, just in Japanese.

By the time Daliah and my tutor were gone, it was nearing ten. I took my Neural Sphere out of the box and examined the helmet in person. It looked sleeker than the NerveGear from Sword Art Online, but it still looked uncomfortably close. Athena didn't say anything about me ending up in a virtual death game, and her predictions had been pretty spot on so far, so I hoped I wasn't going to end up like Kirito.

The Neural Sphere X connected to the internet via a wireless connection, so there was no hard port. The only physical cable was the charger. The helmet couldn't be activated while it was charging, so I set it up and grabbed the manual.

I read through it a few times until I was sure I knew how the thing worked. You had to charge it, then disconnect it from the power. It had an internal battery that was supposed to last for ten hours of continuous use. The Neural Sphere wouldn't start without a game being installed. Once you had the game in and a connection to the internet, you had to put on the helmet and pull down the visor. Then your consciousness was pulled into virtual reality. And you had to close your eyes or the system wouldn't work.

The last items in the box were two games. My mother bought me all the launch titles, but they were coming in a different boxes. This was only the tutorial on how to use the Neural Sphere and a game called Top Speed. It was a racing game, and I had played more than my fair share of racing games in my time.

The games weren't disks that I had become used to. This technology was so new, the Neural Sphere didn't support digital games, everything was physical. Which was nice, maybe this would help the physical market resurge. The games were bulky cartridges that had to be inserted into a port on the side. The cartridges came in cardboard packaging that reminded me of the Gameboy packaging. It felt like a blast from the past.

Above the game port was a card reader slot, but I had no idea what that was sure.

I spend half an hour in the VR tutorial before I put in Top Speed. The game was pretty simplistic, just a race car on the track, but I would be racing against real people. Other players. I had hoped for something more, like street racing or fantastical traps, but this was the very first VR racing game ever, so I would hold out my judgment.

It was fun. It was so much fun. Playing a game with a controller on a screen couldn't hold a candle to this game. I was there, in the thick of things. I didn't win a race until my fourth game, but I rolled over and crashed the race car dozens of times.

One of the games was a real-life driving simulator, and when the games came two days later, I tried out the driving simulator. I set it for Paris and drove around my city in a car and on a motorcycle. In the future, I had no doubts that these kinds of simulators would replace real teachers.

The game itself was teaching me the French rules of the road and I even got pulled over a fair number of times. It wasn't long before I was confident that I could pass a real driving test.

There were five launch titles, not including the tutorial game that was there just to get you used to VR. Or the driving simulator that was just there to simulate driving in real places. There was one city for every country, but you could never leave your car.

There was Top Speed, my favorite racing game despite its simplicity. I loved going in and racing. Even the crashing was fun. I rolled into two incoming racers once and took us all out. That was fun.

There was Traveler, which could only be called a tourist game. It took place in a fictional city called Nightsong, a vast modern metropolis that took inspiration from the greatest cities around the world. It was in the middle of a vast desert with Egyptian pyramids around it.

It captured the sights and sounds of the city. You could stay in hotels, see the sights, and eat various foods from around the world. Either in a restaurant or via street vendors. If you tried to leave the city by the desert, you would just come back at it from a different direction. On the bright side, your character was seemingly rich, so you could shop to your heart's content. Along with other players who were in Nightsong.

Speaking for only the French and American foods, it didn't taste as good as it did in real life, but it was a pretty good simulation. The food was good enough and it made you feel full. I imagined World Traveler was going to be a popular weight loss tool.

The next game was Fantastic Quest. In the middle of a giant valley, there was a medieval fantasy city called Urbus. It was smack in the middle of a forest, with mountains forming the walls of the valley. On the other side of the mountains were beaches, since this game seemingly took place on an island. The ocean was sparkling. It was pretty basic for a fantasy game, but it let you go take quests and kill monsters. If you tried to swim away from the island, you'd only find yourself coming at it from the opposite direction. It was limited but very fun.

The Western Front was a World War I shooting game that had you take the place of a soldier from America, Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, or the Ottoman Empire. It had the mechanics of a First Person Shooter and there was only one battlefield, so again it felt limited. This was new technology, so I imagined the maps had to be scaled.

This conflict took place in the fictional Battle of Trestellon, where American, British, French, and Russian forces fought German, Austria-Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Ottoman forces in a huge winner-take-all. The map was restricted to the battlefield, but there was a vast trench system that could be navigated.

You could even take a plane and fight in aerial combat above the battlefield.

World Cup was a soccer game, so I wasn't into it. I don't care if the French loved soccer, I wasn't a sports guy. I might watch Basketball and Volleyball, but that wasn't what I was going to be getting. I never even opened the cardboard package and instead put the game on sale for half price.

The Last Lighthouse was a survival horror game about a family that took up residence at a lighthouse in the early nineteenth century. The lighthouse was haunted by monsters and spirits and you had to survive for a week until the ship came back. You had period weapons against the forces of hell.

I spent hours playing everything but World Cup and for the first time since I was reborn, I felt like my old self. I didn't want to become him again, but a little gaming never hurt anyone.

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