Chapter 2. Ember Disappears
Platon burst into his apartment, tossed his jacket into a corner, and made a beeline for his computer, which had been running since yesterday. On the screen, a small fish with a lush, flowing tail swam lazily across a vibrant blue-and-yellow background—a screensaver Platon adored and had deliberately set as his desktop wallpaper.
Once, he and his friends had played a game centered around an underwater kingdom. It was a simple game, but it came with a valuable global gaming prize at the end. If you cleared all the levels, you’d earn this cute little fish that could grant wishes—not just in that game, but across the entire virtual space. Among gamers, there was a superstition that you absolutely had to complete “Underwater King,” as the game was called, because the fish became a lucky charm for tougher games in the same series. Platon, along with Ember and Fox, had battled their way to the throne of the giant high-level boss, Neptune, defeated him, and claimed their slice of luck. Platon had the best result—his fish ranked second in value on the leaderboards. He was pretty sure his username, “Bartosh-Shark,” was still up there.
The fish could grant one of three wishes that extended beyond the local game and applied to the entire VR world. In a rash moment, Platon had picked what he later thought was a dumb skill: understanding all languages in VR. What was the point of that? His friends had teased him about it since tons of built-in translators in VR headsets instantly handled any language barrier when they played non-localized games or wandered through private servers looking for virtual adventures and stumbled upon foreign interfaces. But that was before they encountered some weird anomalies. In unfamiliar corners of the virtual space, where the trio sometimes ended up, they’d hear languages no translator could crack. And, oddly enough, Platon could understand those strange words. It had even helped them navigate back from the deep recesses of the network once. After that, they tried not to stray too far from their server hubs, but Platon came to appreciate the VR skill his prize fish had granted him. And his friends stopped ribbing him about it.
For a while now, rumors had been circulating among virt-addicts about a separate, mysterious virtual location—a system within a system. People loved cooking up conspiracy theories about secret societies, global VR overseers, and even alien influences on their lives...
This was no different. Legends about a higher intelligence, born in the depths of virtual reality and controlling not just VR but the real world too, popped up regularly in news feeds, on esoteric websites, and sketchy virtual forums. And this supposed supreme VR power wasn’t artificial intelligence, which was heavily restricted and kept in check by long-established rules for global network usage. No, it was believed to be something more fantastical, more mysterious.
This strange system within a system, like a VR inside VR, naturally grew shrouded in myths: some claimed they’d stumbled into it and barely escaped, others said they’d gone insane after entering the bizarre space, and a few even boasted they controlled the system because they’d created and introduced it to the global network themselves...
Platon and his friends laughed off these fakes and roamed VR carefree, though they avoided venturing too far unless someone in the real world was nearby to yank off their headsets and pull them out of the network. There had been rare cases of people getting so caught up in their virtual wanderings that they couldn’t return. Sometimes, the safety mechanism in the headset, which strictly calculated and limited time spent in VR, would malfunction.
Platon plugged his “cap” into the computer, quickly slipped into his specialized VR suit, and logged in. For the past week, he, Ember, and Fox had been hooked on a new game that was all the rage in gaming circles: “Dark Magic.” They were currently stuck somewhere in the middle of it.
Platon respawned in a field of tall grass that reached up to his waist. He immediately checked his stats. Everything was in order, just as he’d left it yesterday when his headset glitched out and forced him to log off. He glanced at the map: Fox was nearby, but there was no sign of Ember. He started going through his inventory to make sure everything was good—weapons, healing items, scrolls, mana, accumulated in-game gold...
Suddenly, Fox, probably noticing that Platon had logged in, activated the video chat and, without even a hello, shouted in a panicked voice:
“Platon, where’ve you been? Ember’s gone!”