This is a short story I never finished, started sometime in 2015
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One corrupted class file. That was all it took.
In the world of virtual realities, time was not a meaningful concept on a global scale. That is to say, time is a variable thing, depending upon where you find yourself. Everybody knows that 'time is an illusion' as they say, but practically, one can apply this truism to the way the human brain interprets the flow of time. This is the reason behind why a boring task can seem to last an eternity and something fun can seem to fly by, even if both take the same empirical amount of time. This is also the reason why, as a child, the future seems like a distant, far away thing, but as an adult, the years may seem to slip through your fingers in comparison. The human mind's experience of time is governed by the release of chemicals. This was easily exploited when we began to electronically uplift the humble mind.
Immersion into netspace is intermediated by the Plug. The plug is sort of digital expansion pack to the brain. One of its main functions is regulating the experience of time- first of all, it is important that every individual in the same server are proceeding at the same rate-of-experience. Without that, there would be metal lag, and communication and interaction would be impractical. Second, this is important because, as it turns out, your typical mind processes at a snails pace. Its no fault of its own, of course. Neurons can only function so quickly. In this way, the Plug is a bit like overclocking the brain- and though that sounds dangerous, its actually quite natural. The mind does it all the time when it is dreaming. Diving frees your brain from having to manage an entire body. Allowing the Plug to manage sensory input allows for more efficient information processing, using digital neurons in tandem with flesh.
Anyway, this is important to understand, in order to fully grasp The Queue. Diving into a particular server requires quite a bit of synchronization. This process is completely automated of course, but between having to do several hundred regulatory confirmation requests and agreements, and confirmation reports of those requests, for the sake of redundancy, between the server and the local host, and then the process of syncing, credentials checking, so on and so forth... the process can take years. Subjective years, of course. I know it sounds ridiculous, but you've got to understand, the system all this runs on... its global. there has to be several degrees of communication between varying levels of technological advancement. And then, because your mind technicaly classifies as an uploaded consciousness for legal reasons, when you dive into a server that exists physically in another country, you're effectively crossing a border, so customs has to get involved. And then, remember, you're dealing with human minds here. People, not just packets of data. Redundancy is important. So its a culmination of all these things, technological considerations, politics, bureaucracy.... years. Again, subjective years, but its still years.
So, what does this mean? It means when you lay down in bed, and you plug yourself in, you can expect a wait of ten or twenty minutes before you're dropped into the server you dialed into. And then, if you want to leave, or transfer to a different server, you can expect a wait of ten or twenty years before your exit sequence begins. If the server is particularly busy- or if you're in a particularly high-experience-rate server, the wait can be closer to fifty subjective years. A smart player puts their name in the Queue the moment they drop in.
Understand, there are other options. A local server can have much more reasonable Queue times, but unless you're lucky enough to live in China, the local servers are most likely to either be garbage, or constantly full. At least that's my experience. Understand, this whole "years" thing isn't too daunting when you remember we're only talking about time measured in minutes or hours in the real world. A body could drop in for a decade of adventure after breakfast, and be done and awake in time for lunch. You know, its funny, politicians used to worry that with the advent of immersive virtual realities, society would grind to a halt. Quite the contrary. When you've just finished several decades of living in a fantasy world, waking up and doing some manual labor for twelve hours is no big deal. Also, maintaining connections with other people in the real world is more important than ever. Its important to carefully schedule dive times if you want to play with your friends. Otherwise, you might end up dropped into a server several years ahead of your buddy and have to sit around twiddling your thumbs. Let me tell you, its a pain in the ass.
Anyway, all this stuff is fascinating, but let me get back to the real story. Corrupted class files. Specifically one corrupted class file.
The server was an older one. Not extraordinarily old, but old enough that it still had a fairly simplistic way of handling various base game-play extractions. Really, from the players perspective, this sort of thing is immaterial. The human brain already parses things into categories and hierarchies; many of the older game systems took advantage of this to streamline the way they handle user experience. Anyway, it was old, based somewhere in Ukraine I think. It was odd though, I recall, because it was a pretty big server, several million player slots, and yet, it always had a really low player count. That said two things to me right off the bat. Either there were some odd game rules that didn't interest the majority of players, or it was corrupted somehow. We hear all sorts of ghost stories about corrupted servers- servers run by mind hackers that trick you into half a century of data mining, or something else more perverse, but in reality, there are hundreds of watchdog groups that flag those sorts of things before they even get off the ground. There wasn't a whole lot of info floating arround about it, and I'll be honest. I was curious.
Lots of old servers handle weapon types as abstractions to help it calculate the way NPCs use weaponry, and to predict typical usage patterns for players. Physics calculations have to be pretty complicated to be believable, and immersion is important in these kinds of worlds- in case I didn't mention, this was a medieval class server. Typical ren-faire shit. Castles, dragons, killing ogres, etc. etc. Its a popular trope. I was like, why not right? I hadn't done any good old swordplay in a long time. I'd spent a couple centuries in a combat world last weekend, and it was still pretty fresh in my mind, using a sword. Ah, I love swords. That ring of steel on steel, the finesse of combat. Kiddie servers hold your hand and make you a master swordsman automatically, but the hardcore servers, those put you in direct control. I lived for it, for awhile.
So I drop. It was immediately obvious that this was gonna be a long haul. Dropping in alone took a solid hour. I decided to to spend the time fooling around in the server's physics sim sandbox, which I downloaded. A nice little empty white space to dip into this particular world nice and easy. It had an odd feel to it. Older worlds usually do, especially when you've been playing somewhere more modern for awhile, but it wasn't really noteworthy. The directory had some items to spawn in to play around with- naturally I went to drop in a sword to practice with. Strange, I thought, as I flicked through the folder labeled weapons. Axes, hammers, a bow with arrows, a flail, a whip... notice anything missing? No swords. Not even a dagger. I was so confused. What a weird oversight. Was it some sort of joke? I decided the sim must have simply been slapped together. I spent the rest of the wait playing solitaire.
I've been here for twenty years. I'll still be here in another twenty, though I queued the very moment the drop went through. I spent the first fifteen with a boy I met on my third day in, Yatcha. Beautiful Romanian boy.... likely young enough to be my son, but he never told me and I never asked- I just have a bit of a sense for it. At any rate, it makes very little difference here. I could have been a ninety-year-old man, and it wouldn't have mattered to him. In netspace, you are the person you present yourself as. Why would flesh matter in a place where minds meet? In meatspace, I'm a forty-year-old advertising illustrator. I have dark wiry hair, my breasts have never had a shape that you might describe as perky and my stomach has been battling for the last twenty years with my bottom for which could sport the most unattractive species of curvature. But I'm in good enough shape, so I rarely give my appearance much thought. In here- the server is called aлекссвіт23, but the world is called Archicoria by the locals- in here, I'm short, slight, sharp featured, but not serious in the eyes, fair haired and slim fingered. I'd have been an elf, if the world allowed it, but this place was human only.
By Yatcha's estimation, this server had hosted a kind of peaceful game at one point. There was only one large city, with several little shires around the countryside, but beyond that was seemingly endless woods and mountains. Perhaps it was a frontier game- in other words, survival based, not combat based. As a result, aside from tools like axes and hammers, and hunting utilities like bows and arrows, there was no combat weaponry built into the game engine initially. Combat related classes would have been put into secondary engine components- as even if you wouldn't encounter a sword in typical game play, a thoroughly fleshed out physics system would still let you forge one if you were so inclined- but none of the engines main routines were tied into those combat weapon classes....
And so, one little corrupted class file- namely the one for swords, and sword type weapons- left the server otherwise intact. Typically, a file like that would be much more integral, and tied to several other routines. For instance, a typical hack-n-slash style game might spawn hordes of enemies for a player to encounter, decked out in armor and weaponry. And if one of those needed to spawn in with sword-in-hand, if the sword-class file was shot, the whole system could come to a screeching halt. But the only enemies here are mindless monsters. And there are no crypts or dungeons to loot that might hold swords in their proceduraly generated chests. It was all a very peculiar situation. Some kid, presumably named Alex- or Aлекс I suppose- must have cobbled together a standard class combat server from a survival template- and then apparently abandoned it.
I've never really understood the appeal of those sorts of 'frontier' style worlds. There's only so many times you can build a cabin, raise a barn, grow a farm.... Its listless. Yatcha and I did all that- his company made it much more pleasant. Fun even, in the beginning, but that may have been more about the sex than the cabin building. Anyway since he dropped out I haven't let anyone else get quite so close to me. I work better on my own anyway.
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I never wrote more past this point. This was meant as a sort of prologue/re-write. I'd previously written a bit more in this world, which follows below.
Prior to this point, the setting wasn't a virtual reality, but some sort of fantasy world with either a political or magical reasoning for the lack of swords.
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It was unlike any axe I'd ever seen. Long in the blades, the handle growing thin between them, but short and sturdy at the grip. As I hefted the weapon, I then understood the purpose of the iron cross bar right above the grip; thin as the blades were, this 'guard' would protect your fingers when fighting. Most peculiar, but surely quite functional. At the top, the corners of the two blades curved inwards slightly. Only, slightly of course. Truly this tool flirted with the forbidden. If they had curved inwards any further, one might be deceived into imagining a a singular point present at the tool's top. The thought unsettled me. I have never laid eyes on a 'sword', Lords forbid, but the thought did cross my mind that this axe was designed to resemble one.
Scandalous, yes, but the letter of the law was met. The axe's owner examined his shoes closely the whole time that I held his blades in my hands. As I returned it to him, he nodded calmly, but I could see the sweat running down over his temples. There was no doubt in my mind that he knew precisely what it was he carried.
The traveler slipped the peculiar axe into a specially designed sleeve hanging from his belt, and then pulled his cloak tight around him to conceal it once more. We shared a glance.
"I've never seen another axe quite like that one, stranger" I said to him, quietly.
"Neither had I, to be honest" He shifted uncomfortably "It is not mine. I'm delivering it for my master to a man here in town" His eyes shifted uncomfortably from side to side, and his voice lowered slightly more- I leaned in slightly to listen as he spoke, glancing down again at his waist, the long form of the blades in their pouch forming an odd shape under his cloak, as though he were carrying a baton "This man... the instructions were so strange, if it had not been for such a large sum that he paid, ah..." The man cleared his throat.
"And he asked it to be delivered?" I questioned him gently- the more we spoke, the more uncomfortable the man seemed to become, fidgeting as he was. I scarcely doubt I could be blamed for my curiosity, though.
"Ah, y-yes, he uhm... he, my master's client, uh, he ordered it by courier, you see. Very odd! A hefty sum, and very precise instructions y-you see" His hand fell down to his side, resting on that short handle "He also requested it to be delivered at night, ah... to avoid attention, I would imagine" The man- I should rather say the lad, for, recalling him now, I remember him being very slight in build, and soft in the face, though I had not noticed at first, with his hood and the flickering light- anyway, he gave me a very nervous look. I looked back at him plainly.
"Yes" I spoke, clearing the slight pause "I imagine a thing like that would have the town talking." He gulped slightly, and then his brow raised, and he reached into his cloak, as if remembering something. The boy produced a single gold coin. He awkwardly pressed it into my hand, and then looked back up to meet my gaze. I could only raise an eyebrow and accept it- I'm not one to gossip, but if I were, I scarcely doubt a single coin would buy me off. At any rate, he nodded, seeming further relaxed.
I sighed, and took a step back "Alright then. I'd advise you to keep that thing hidden. And stay out of trouble." He nodded and scurried off into the city. I stretched a bit, and sat back down at my guard post beside the gate.
I could only shake my head. If Teorick had been on duty that night, the boy might have found himself in a cell tonight. That axe was... suspicious. But I don't like to cause a fuss, you see. So what if the blades were long and thin? An axe can only chop, and with no true point, that tool certainly couldn't stab. I can only imagine that delivery of his was to a very wealthy eccentric.
***
For a moment there, I seriously thought I was going to soil my self. Dreams of skinning that idiot Yarden alive spun through my head. He'd specifically said there'd be no one watching that gate on Feastday night! If that blessed bastard of a guard hadn't been half drunk, I'm certain I'd have greeted the dawn from the hangman's noose. That isn't to say that I don't think the little tale I wove wasn't adequate- it is simply that there aren't a great many situations where a good look at my weapon wouldn't raise quite a many suspicions.
After darting around the corner, I took a deep sigh of relief- a quiet one though, of course. I pulled my hood back, and un-stuffed my hair out from the back of my cloak. You know, its funny, I used to hate being mistaken for a boy. Lords bless my lack of curves. I sat down, and pulled out my map to review my game plan- and to calm my nerves. After all, I'd just flirted with the first of many a myriad way in which this scheme of mine could come crashing down on top of me. I slipped my hair back into my cloak, and donned my hood again, after catching my breath- I couldn't dally too much. Long night ahead of me then. I could feel Wyrmtongue shifting a bit under my cloak as I slipped through the empty alleyway- I'd need to adjust it's sheath, it still didn't sit quite right, though I'd adjusted the straps several times that night already. Still, better for it to loose easily than risk it catching.
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