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NOTE: synqing is me experimenting with this kind of serialized writing (something I haven’t done online since I was writing Gundam Wing fan fiction in middle school!). This is RAW, friends, like reading someone’s first draft. If you’re not into that and would rather wait for the polished version, no hard feelings. For those of you who decide to take the plunge with me, I appreciate your bravery! 

1 - New Game

I wipe sweat off my palms before putting the president in my crosshairs again. A single shot, a bespoke bullet, two million dits on the line. 

As I track the wisps of white hair on the pale scalp, my HUD lets me know how to adjust my aim so that I can get the ear-canal landing for the bullet that I’m looking for. With this rifle’s upgrades, hitting a defunct cybernetic finger sitting on a rooftop from half a mile away is no problem. A human skull from a quarter mile? Cake.  

Squeezing the trigger offers a jarring vibration and a powerful bang as I hold my breath, waiting to see how well I’ve done. My stomach is starting to hurt from lying on it like this, but also from the lack of a recent meal, and the sheer anxiety regarding how the biggest job of my career is going to end. I take my eyes off the screen, take a deep breath, and then look back up. 

His body drops. I launch myself up from the floor and pump my fists in the air. 

I must have been stamping my feet, too, because the next second I hear thumpthumpthump, which can’t be anything other than the furious beating of Sassy’s broom from downstairs. 

“Goddamn it, Faun, it’s 3:00 a.m.!” her aggressive whisper floats up from the ductless vent between our rooms. I imagine her in her Snoopy or maybe Spongebob pajama set, eyes barely open, broken sleep making her normally cheerful face sag. Crouching down over the grate so she can hear me better, I rasp back, “Sorry, Sassy! I’m going to bed right now, I swear!” 

She grunts and then I hear her walking back to her bed. Sassy and her daughter were here before I moved in just over five years ago. She’s been kind to me since then. Sharing food when she has extra, giving me clothes her daughter has grown out of. Even at twenty years old, it seems like I’m barely hanging on in life between bills and work. I was escaping the house I grew up in at fifteen, but Sassy was already the mother of an infant by that age. I couldn’t imagine being a parent at that point and trying to make it work in a boarding house like this. I admire her for persevering. 

For not being a coward and actually bringing her daughter with her. 

I wait for the autosave animation on my monitor to finish before I exit Trop 99, feeling my heart practically wilt as I do so. I wipe down my sweat-slicked controller before putting it in the cabinet under my CPU. I’m admittedly exhausted, and starving, but those things can’t keep the completion of that contract from boosting my energy. Everything about playing Trop 99 does that. From earning my first few dits by working as a patty vendor in the Trop’s business district to retrieving museum artifacts and returning them to their rightful owners to getting paid to assassinate the leader of the free world, Trop 99 gives me an entirely digital life that feels like the only real home I’ve ever known. 

I pull off the tank top and panties I’m wearing and look around my room for where something relatively clean may be. My pancake of a mattress sports a tangle of hunter green flat sheets and a dog blanket I found on sale at Walmart one day last year. The small sink and sliver of counter space that just barely supports my tiny microwave does have a T-shirt hanging on the faucet, but I remember that was used as a dish rag yesterday. Shaking out the sheets and blanket yields a sleep shirt with a smell bearable enough for sleeping. I slide it under my arm and then pop some ramen into the microwave and go shower while it cooks. The timer chime doesn’t work, so it just shuts off when it’s done without waking anyone else at this hour. 

Cleaner and with something in my stomach, I set the alarm on my phone and tuck into bed. Without a car, and too poor to afford drone rides, my feet and TARC are all I’ve got to get me around town. The price is right, but that does mean waking up extra early to make it to the train station a few blocks away to leave plenty of time for delays or, as happens increasingly these days, someone jumping onto the tracks and stopping train operations completely. 

Four hours later, I’m up and barely feeling like I’ve rested at all. This is especially true since I dreamt briefly of my in-game fiancé and our upcoming nuptials. Being pulled away from that kind of pleasantness to come back to reality is never good. I stare at my gaming setup longingly as I put on my uniform. They’re a set of black coveralls with the UrgiKleen logo—the company name in block letters made to look like gold bars with a sparkle glinting on the top of the “K”—emblazoned on the back. There’s also a smaller logo on the front left breast where a pocket might go on a more casual shirt. Not the most stylish thing in the world, but it’s loose and comfortable, and surprisingly good at keeping odors off of my clothes. While I heat up a quesadilla, I wonder if I could play for a few more minutes before leaving. Maybe just to see what the newstreams are saying about my successful presidential assassination? 

Granted, it's not like the reports would be wildly different from any other time I’d killed the man, but the developers do keep things interesting by varying the tone of the reports slightly and including any notable stats, such as an instant kill versus a death while in a Recoverer™. 

“No, just go to work,” I mumble to myself as I tear my eyes away from the dark monitor so I can wrap my breakfast in a paper towel, leave my room, and lock my door. Rushing down the stairs helps, speeding me away from my console as quickly as possible, the temptation pulling on me like a leash that doesn’t snap until I’m on the front porch. Fantasies of being independently wealthy so that I could spend every waking hour in-game sustain me through a 45-minute, 2-train trek to the job site. 

I’ve been working for UrgiKlean for three years, forging emancipation files so that I could get hired on. The wages are decent enough, and getting cash at the end of every job makes paying bills and managing money a lot easier for me. The work isn’t usually all that difficult since clients have to pay extra for biohazard-level stuff that may take place in their restrooms, and I’m usually only spending a few hours cleaning before I can head back to my room and boot my system up again. It’s a fair sacrifice of time to be able to keep playing. 

This morning, the building we’re working on is five floors of gunmetal concrete and glistening black windows. The kind of place that would never have folks working on a Saturday. Swanky. 

“Well, look who decided to be on time today. Gotta search the sky for swine,” Chapman, founder and owner of UrgiKlean, says as I walk up to him and he checks me in on his tablet. His grey eyes track data on the screen as he scratches his dark scalp. I’ve tried to imagine him with hair many times, but the shaved head suits his plump, 6’8” frame too well for some reason. He’s dressed in the same UrgiKlean overalls I am. There are two beagle-sized helper drones at his feet, silver cubes with four wheels on the bottom, dark lines visible where the edges of the compartments holding their various appendages are. 

I roll my eyes and sigh, which only makes him grin. “You’ve got the fourth floor. Just sent your checklist. Get a move on it. I’m trying to get home for lunch, and you’ll owe me a meal if we don’t make it.” 

“I wasn’t late,” I remind him, bending down to touch my fingerprint to the top of one of the drones. It recognizes my signature and hums to life, rolling up to about a foot behind my heel. 

“So? You were still the last one here. I say that makes you liable.” He gives me his patented ‘What the fuck are you gonna do about it?’ shrug and shoos me into the building after placing a supply-laden blue bucket in my hand. 

I move on without any further argument, and the drudgery begins. I’ve saved listening to the latest episode of Game Gab until now to distract me while I work. This time, the Gabbers are interviewing none other than Mega: the mastermind and senior developer of Trop 99. I don’t have any propensity for coding, but I view her as an idol because she brought to life the kind of world I’d much rather live in than this one. And with an average of 1.2 million players concurrently online at any given time, and more than 4 million registered users, there are a lot of people in the world who feel the same way. 

As I clear blood from toilet seats, soak cum stains out of carpets under desks, and clear trash bins, I listen to Mega discuss the new projects that she’s looking forward to seeing from other publishers, how she feels about the runaway success that Trop 99 has become, what we can expect from the next Trop 99 update, and a new hush-hush project she’s working on for GramOnyx. 

After opening the lid on one of the dumpsters behind the building, I stop in my tracks at this part of the interview, whipping out my phone to see the video of it. The helper drone rolls up beside my left foot like a small dog as I freeze, setting a giant bag of light trash down. Mega is trying to hold back some of her grin, but she’s exuberant about this. She’s wearing a black sweater with Claudia Grant from Robotech embroidered on the front and loose black jeans. Her hair is in two braids, one trailing over the front of each shoulder, stopping just under her armpits, the ends wrapped in golden tassels that match the light brown of her eyes. 

“We’re waiting on details, in case you weren’t aware,” the host stage whispers. Other members of the production team can be heard laughing in the background, but the focus is still on Mega’s smiling face. 

“And, unfortunately, you will continue to wait, my friends,” now Mega chuckles over the sound of disappointed groans. “The only reason I even said anything is to let you know that I’ll be stepping away from helping with Trop 99 day to day. But that I’ll also be working on something for GramOnyx that, once it’s finished, will absolutely revolutionize gaming and let you immerse yourself even deeper into the world you love so much. Patience!” 

The episode closes out with no further hints about what this new project could be. Damn these publishers and developers for always teasing us. Hell, I’d rather they just spring new content or hardware on us as a surprise. The waiting and not knowing are the worst parts. Mega probably wouldn’t even mind telling us everything, or just not saying anything at all. GramOnyx put her up to this stupid marketing ploy. 

Infuritatingly curious and putting on the next in a series of LitRPG audiobooks I’ve borrowed from the library, I launch the trash bag in, close the lid, and trudge back inside. 

Three hours later, I’m back home. We barely finished the building in time for Chapman to be satisfied that we didn’t need a chewing out, or worse, a docking. He handed us our cash and let us go with only a few bad puns to suffer through. He did tell me he caught me throwing the trash in the dumpster manually and reminded me that this was the kind of labor the helper drones were for (“Don’t come trying to sue me when you throw your back out!”). 

I used the ATM on the train to deposit the cash into my bank account. I used my phone to pay bills on the ride home since I wouldn’t be good for much once I sat down in front of my console. Setting an alarm for when I should be going to bed helps a bit, but it still takes immense willpower to actually tear myself away from the game. Who wants to slog through bill payments and work and cleaning when they could be laid out on a beach next to their latest lover, splashing around in water that looks like melted sapphires? Or saving trafficked children from a local gang’s corral? Or performing surgery to replace a grandmother’s withering organs so she can gain an extra decade or two of life with the family that loves her so much? 

It honestly baffles me that there are still so many people who don’t game. Especially living in the United States. Everywhere you turn, there are people having to choose between eating and getting life-sustaining medication. Parents abandoning and abusing their children, or trusting them with people who hurt them. Jobs that exploit workers for higher profits without giving any of the extra value the workers have produced back to them. What the hell is so wonderful about the real world? 

My heart rate kicks up as I get off the train and spot the top of the house, and my own bedroom window, as I take a right coming out of the River Road TARC station. I’m speedwalking as I approach, but slow down when I’m about a block away. There’s a large, black moving truck with the rear doors open planted right in front of the path up to the porch, letting me know I’m about to get a new housemate. 

I’d enjoyed being the only person on the second floor for the past couple of months. I could almost pretend that I lived alone in my own apartment instead of renting a little room in a house full of other people. Maintaining my slower pace, I continue toward the truck, figuring I might as well do introductions now versus having them try to disturb me mid-play later on. 

But as I wait for the human in the dark top and jeans to back out of the truck, careful not to run into the humanoid helper drones carrying other expensive-looking items into the house, I stop and my mouth goes dry. I recognize the twin braids and the golden eyes.