James didn’t sleep that night, despite how tired he was. He was turning the game over in his mind, not just the mechanics and how realistic it felt even in comparison to other games, but the amount of weird stuff that happened in it. Something was very wrong with this game, but he had no idea how he was supposed to deal with it. Maybe he should just file a bug report? Maybe he should search the forums for anything about zombie dragons that wiped people's memory? Search the Wiki for bizarre dreams that gave you useless stats?

  James nearly leapt out of his skin as his alarm blared. He swung his arm around to switch it off, carelessly knocking a few books off his bedside table. The alarm clock picked up his movements and brought up the holographic time display. It was 8:45, a mere 15 minutes before he had to go to school.

  He swore profusely as he leapt out of bed and searched for his clothes amongst the debris of his bedroom. He ran downstairs and grabbed his bag, which he had luckily not unpacked since Friday. He left the house, which automatically locked behind him. The houses in the city were designed to lock automatically if nobody was in them. His mother was already out by this point, preparing for a job interview which she refused to talk about with him, and his father hadn’t been home from the fighting in months .

  He sprinted out of the house into the streets, glancing up at the city’s skyscrapers as he rushed through the quaint residential district. The city of Avalon was said to be Kabletech’s pride and joy until the next marketing scheme came into existence. Built in the middle of Dakota, the city was designed to be warm and welcoming, full of green spaces where kids could play, and houses that were designed to be homely first and foremost.

  At least, the residential districts were designed that way. When James left them and entered the commercial district, he was met with the most modern, soulless architecture possible, using technology that was probably already outdated. The layout was radial, the suburbs and roads a perfect circle around the commercial district which contained the school he was rushing towards.

  At the centre stood Kabletech Tower, the headquarters of America’s biggest conglomerate, where the executives ran the city, which made its presence known wherever you were in Avalon. It was a huge skyscraper covered in a tinted glass that almost made the structure look like marble. Several smaller towers for Kabletech’s subsidiaries surrounded the tower, jagged like shards of glass.

  Somewhere in those towers, he assumed, were the servers and developers for Sable Online, and the developers for the headsets that had revolutionised the gaming industry. Most people in the city worked for Kabletech: even a lot of the fast food joints and supermarkets had to lease the land directly from them. It sounded like a corporate nightmare, on the surface was a very welcoming and functional town, and underneath was likely a corporate nightmare

  As he ducked and dived through the sea of business people, taking every backstreet and shortcut he knew, he eventually came to the school: a campus with several small buildings and green fields which stuck out like a sore thumb in comparison to the skyscrapers that surrounded it. He checked his HoloBracer to see that he was only five minutes late: he’d be fine.

  Several hallways and a flight of stairs later, he walked into his maths class. The teacher stared at him.

  “Late as usual, Marlow,” She said. “You’re lucky I’ve only just started taking the register. Sit down.”

  James took his usual seat, sitting behind Grey. They weren’t anywhere near as lithe as their game avatar was. The headset’s interface always chose an idealised version of yourself when generating an avatar, and as such the changes ranged from slight differences in hair colour to not looking remotely like they did in real life. At the very least, Grey’s hair was pretty close to the game’s interpretation. They turned around and gave him a curt nod before returning to taking notes.

  “Nice to see you too,” James whispered back.

  Lectures had never felt so long for James. The final year of high school, the accumulation of all his time in education, really meant nothing to him right now. Unlike Grey, he’d never been especially academic, never bothering with more than a passing grade, and he would be very glad to see the back of high school. He sat at his desk, ignoring the torrent of words that flew his way and looked longingly out the window. Unfortunately, all he could stare longingly at was the building site next door, so that didn’t help much.

  Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

  “Would you like to answer the question, James?” The teacher asked, pointing at the holographic whiteboard. James turned around slowly, squinting at the equation. Grey mouthed “33” to him, and James repeated the answer. The teacher glared at him for a second before giving a curt “correct” and resuming the lesson, which was otherwise uneventful.

  The bell rang, and the two left the room, filing through the crowds to get to their next lesson.

  “Sorry I didn’t say hi,” Grey said. “I wanted to focus on work.”

  “You needed to focus?” James replied.

  “It happens from time to time.”

  “How are you, anyway?”

  “I’m good. I’m guessing you didn’t sleep well.”

  James shook his head.

  “I had a lot to think about last night. The game is…weird.”

  “I knew those VR headsets did something to you,” Patrick said, managing to walk alongside the group despite the large crowds. He was much scrawnier than he was in the game, had a few spots of acne from a particularly bad stint of it as a teenager, and his hair was black instead of white.

  “Glad to see they haven’t changed you at all,” James responded. “Is Amelia not with you?”

  “Nah, I think she skipped. That or she’s still asleep. Hasn’t replied to my texts.”

  The group reached a corner and climbed a flight of stairs, taking a detour down one of the lesser used English department corridors on the second floor. Several exemplary pieces of student work were stapled on the wall under bright cutout letters, not that anyone bothered to read them when they mostly came here just to move around the school.

  “I really hope she’s ok,” Grey said. “She’s skipped a few times recently.”

  “Maybe she just doesn’t trust an education system founded by a corrupt, all encompassing megacorporation?” Patrick asked, only half sarcastically.

  “If you genuinely believed that, you wouldn’t be here,” James said, “and she’s sure as hell doesn’t. Anyway, before she logged out, she said something that made me think she wouldn’t be around today. She’s probably spending the whole day in VR or gone to the gym or something. She’ll be fine.”

  “We’ll chat with her when we get back in the game,” Grey suggested. “No matter her reasons for vanishing, she’s certain to log on at our normal time.”

  The others nodded as they zigzagged into a much more fully packed corridor, squeezing through students that had completely ignored whatever traffic systems the faculty had put in place to make the corridors vaguely traversable.

  “What did you guys think of it, anyway?” James asked. “Especially Mr. Old School over here.”

  “I actually quite liked it,” Patrick admitted. “No better than any game released 20 years ago, but good.”

  “Come on, Patrick. You have to admit it at least looked incredible. Everything was so real!”

  “Every game focused on looking real stops looking real after 5 years. You think they would have learnt that by now.”

  “But the gameplay was fun?”

  Patrick nodded and smiled. “Yeah, it was fun. Mostly because I was spending time with you three, but the game helped a little. And casting fireballs is fun.”

  “I’m enjoying playing Cleric,” Grey added. “It’s not just a healbot. My favourite part of the class might be sucking the life out of people.”

  “That’s good to hear.” James smiled. “Amelia and I met some players with the DLC classes. Looked cool as hell. They even had your favourite kind of magic, Patrick.”

  Patrick looked surprised. “Necromancers?”

  James nodded. “Guy we met had a big scythe and could summon a bunch of skeletons. Looked like it took some organisation he didn’t have, though. I bet you’d love it.”

  Patrick thought for a second, and then replied, “I am not buying the DLC.”

  James sighed. “Suit yourself.”

  “Patrick, our turning’s here,” Grey shouted at him over the heads of every teenagers.

  “I thought we were going to English,” Patrick shouted back.

  “This is a shortcut. How do you not know that by now?”

  Grey and Patrick broke off from James to turn down another side corridor.

  “See you at break,” Grey shouted back, while Patrick just waved. James kept filtering through the crowds, alone in a wave of people as he prepared to walk to the science classrooms, onward to another dull and uneventful day.