Somewhere in the System, I sensed the battle between the hawk’s fear aura and my WILL. No contest. I maxed that out for a reason. I bared my teeth in a grim smile. On gasping breath, I snarled, “Fuck you, you’re not getting me today, hawk.”

  I hit the edge of the next street, skidding from dirt to cobblestone.

  Behind me, the big-ass bird swooped down. I felt the pressure of its nearness, the primal sense of it about to strike. Without thinking, I dove, twisting as I went. I rolled hard, striking the stone fountain with enough force to blast the air from my lungs.

  Its talons scored the stone above me. The hawk held onto the fountain’s edge for a moment, just long enough for me to drive a kick at its leg. It wasn’t a strong kick, barely even touching its HP bar. That just pissed me off even more.

  “Keep it up, fucker, I’ll kick you in the cloaca!”

  It faced the wrong way to peck me, or I’d have probably died right then. All it could do was get a drink of water or take off. Its thick black talons released its perch. A rush of air shoved down on me as the bird launched skyward with a clapping of wings. I rolled away and scrambled for the nearest overhang.

  The bistro tea shop had open-air seating. A few people sitting at the tables watched me race towards them as they sat sipping their tea. I had an audience for that. Yay. A woman murmured something in Swiss German, the wry tone universal.

  I brushed off my side and shrugged at her. “Birds are big here.”

  Scanning the sky, I spotted the predator circling high over the hives. I learned valuable information—too close for comfort. The city wasn’t immune from aerial attack, and predators were part of the program.

  Player aggression wasn’t controlled, and the city wasn’t safe. There was some sort of sheriff’s department, so social law existed. My guess: law came from players taking on roles and wasn’t part of the NPC framework. Archive said it didn’t have rules.

  Archive’s rules were baked into the System, dictating the minutiae of interaction—but not the causes, only the effects? I struggled trying to make sense of it.

  When I got back to Bauring Dath, everything was reset to its original design. Tables and benches were back in place. A few orcs drank at the bar. I sat at the far end, like the loner I am. They cast harsh glances my way, so it seemed that as a loner, I would stay.

  Alga gave me a horn cup filled with some funkadelic brew. The moment I drank it, my vision blurred.

  She followed it up with a bowl of potatoes swimming in greasy brown gravy. I thanked her the Orcish way, by telling her I wouldn’t kill her that day. Orcish gratitude had a brutality to it that I wasn’t used to as a boring Earth human, but I appreciated its bluntness.

  But, hey, when in Rome.

  I doubt she washed the spuds before cooking them. I sniffed the gravy. It smelled edible, so I shrugged to myself and ate it without comment, reconciling to always have food on me in case I starved my stamina again.

  Why bother bringing up hygiene to an NPC in a video game? Did it even matter? Wasn’t my blood just part of the System?

  I had to break it and get out. The whole city was pretending to be real but wasn’t. Freedom mattered more than answers. However, I did want to know what started this ‘DNA collection.’ And from a comet? Wild.

  After stuffing my face, I headed back out to start making money. Gems. Whatever. There were no green markers in the bunkhouse, but the district had some dotted around. After the bird shenanigans, I decided to keep it close to my home district for the rest of the day.

  I helped an old orc herd his sheep. A little boy asked me to help him find his dog, which turned out to be a dire wolf that almost ate my hand instead of the meat the boy gave me. A little girl got her kite caught in an enormous baobab tree behind the yurts. Climbing it had been a struggle—the bark was smooth—and the tree was broader than my arm span. By a lot. I spent precious quartz on rope to scale it just to get a cheap little kite.

  Dropping the rope into my inventory, I realized it had been a worthy purchase. Rope was a must-have in many games. I trudged back to Bauring Dath and ate the same food again, this time with a hunk of bread. So fancy.

  Flavors didn’t pop in the System like they had in real life. Even the fried dough had been a letdown, but my twitchy energy bar had made me itching to fix it. Just one more reason to get to the end bosses and finish this.

  My head drooped at the bar, thoughts going fuzzy. I took that as a sign to sleep. I waved at Alga, who came over. “Where sleep I?”

  She waved at me to follow her. I ducked around the hanging skin and through a storeroom. The dimness didn’t hinder my eyes. My darkvision was far better as a half-orc than it had been as a human.

  We were surrounded by shelves loaded with baskets and crates. A stairwell at the end of the room took us upwards to an open bunkroom. Rough beds jutted out from the walls, offering enough space to sleep maybe twenty people.

  The beds were the same slatted wood and pebbly lizard skins as the rest of the place. Each one had woven wool blankets stacked neatly at the foot. Good enough. I passed out as soon as I hit the bunk.

  The next morning, I peeled potatoes again. That wasn’t going to be my life forever. It was good enough to start with, something simple and reliable while I built up my plans to destroy the System and force Archive to return us to our respective homes.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  My sliced-up hand healed after what felt like five minutes in the sun. Was there a way to get my photosynthetic healing to go faster? One HP per minute was hardly impressive. Maybe it scaled with my level. My XP was teetering on the edge of level two, so if I pushed through, I might see a change.

  I decided to do one more task before meeting Jake.

  The nearest level-one task on my list was: Buy Baby. The details read: Greelanch needs help making a purchase. She wants to buy Baby, but can’t get to the market. Go purchase Baby for her.

  I slow-blinked. Buy Baby. What the onesie hell?

  Funny thing—I noticed that when I closed my eyes, I didn’t see the world, but I still saw my HUD. The only time it vanished was when I slept, and my brain was apparently offline or something. Disturbing, how quickly I’d stopped noticing it.

  Oh yeah. And Baby. Is there some sort of slave trade going on, here?

  Didn’t matter. I didn’t need to know, just needed to do the job. I had to pay Mr. Kim for a weapon and my class training. I’d already decided from the start—I wouldn’t be stuck running errands forever. Not when I could escape this place.

  I followed the marker to a woman beside a pen with the gawdawfulest-smelling dinosaurs. I didn’t have much basis for comparison, but they reeked like elephants with terminal athlete’s foot. The creatures looked a little like triceratops but cow-sized. Six of the stank-monsters milled around in the pen.

  Greelanch had one chained to a thick post outside the fence. She sat on a stool, scraping something from between its toes with a knife. Gross.

  I grunted at her, tipping my chin up as I’d seen others in this district do. She did the same. After seeing her beasts, I really hoped I was just picking up a little one of these things and not an infant of some kind.

  “Use strength mine. Give reward me,” I said in standard orcish.

  “Ugh,” she scoffed, looking me over. “Acceptable.”

  She flicked her knife, flinging toe goop in my general direction. I sidestepped and shoved down my lunch as it tried to rise. If any of that had landed on me, I probably would have puked.

  “Go Grand Market you. Take these,” she threw me a pouch. I caught it and stowed it in my inventory. “Get Baby. Baby only. Other, no.”

  I had to buy Baby. Simple enough. I had hours before I had to meet Jake. Plenty of time to go a few blocks down to whatever Grand Market was and pick up the mysterious Baby.

  The marker for Grand Market led me close to the Colosseum. The Market dwarfed the little bazaar beside the starting zone, sprawled multiple city blocks, existing as its own district. Arts, crafts, and bizarre wares represented every race I’d seen so far, and more. I paused at a sprite’s gauzy awning to watch heart-shaped bubbles float past me. The flasks on display promised romance. Funny, I hadn’t imagined romance as a thing, here.

  My single-minded focus was on the Gateway when I jumped into Convergent City. Dating had always been a thing I stumbled into, and not something I chased, anyway. Romance seemed like a waste of time when there were more important things to do.

  I shook my head and wandered on, trying to figure out where I might find Baby. Greelanch hadn’t been specific. The marker hovered over a fairly large arena.

  Humanoid bees buzzed at me, flailing feelers at jars of golden honeycomb for sale. I figured they were just trying to sell their sweet spit and wax, but the high hum of their wings gave my nerves a jangling.

  The next kiosk had clockworks. A twiggish elf girl with white hair sat at a craftsman’s bench, hunched over a tiny brass bird in her hand. Her tweezers poised over it, delicately holding the tiny red gem that she eased into place. Her goggles sported an array of lenses that could flip up or down, likely to improve magnification.

  Buying a clockwork pet sounded awesome. A clockwork helper would—no. I swiftly moved past before I could get sucked into what she was doing, and what wares she had.

  Baby, I reminded myself, so my squirrel brain didn’t wander off.

  Tech tents offered things close enough to cell phones that I had the urge to stop again. I pursed my lips around my tusks, sucking on them hard enough for the pressure to be uncomfortable. Stay focused.

  Gems led to class. Class led to Gateway. Gateway led to freedom.

  I struggled my way through the fantastic bazaar with my mental blinders on until I got to the auction house. Tilting my head up, I looked at the tattered banners with trepidation. People thronged within.

  “Ugh, people,” I sighed, stepping through the wide entrance.

  I flinched away from iridescent wings and sidled towards the back. My aspect screen opened up when I looked at the auctioneers. Their voices clashed together, rising and falling at supersonic speed as people bid and bought.

  The aspect screen’s menu showed me the item types for sale and broke it all down into categories. Those menus branched into more specific types. Baby was an animal, probably, so I checked SUPPORT: ANIMAL, first.

  The support menu had an array of minions, followers, pack and mount animals, and even portable dwellings. The menus also taught me about the currency. The gem grades were different from Earth. Diamond occurred commonly in the Virtual System, and was counted as one of the lower values. It triggered a memory—something about some planets raining gems instead of water.

  The menu had a search option, so I tapped on it. The lists spilled out, and an instantaneous frustration burned up from my stomach. Where do I even start? Where is Baby?!

  The words WHERE IS BABY instantly filled themselves in.

  Was the System reading my mind?

  The words were all in caps, as if I’d screamed at the menu. I guess I kind of did. But that led me to the obvious question. Why wouldn’t it read my mind? All of it was just a fake manual interface. I was a mind and soul without a real body in this place, functioning in a virtual space like some kind of quasi-organic, autonomous AI program. My real hand probably wasn’t doing any of this work. Without raising my hand to the aspect screen, I willed it to search my query. Baby popped up on the menu, and the bids were rolling in.

  There was a timer for the bid. Shit. I checked my inventory for Greelanch’s pouch. She’d given me three diamonds, and Baby was already three.

  “Skaama,” I muttered in Orcish. What else did I have? I posted up three diamonds and sixteen quartz, with four seconds to spare.

  I just spent all my money on that stupid quest.

  The worst part was that I won. Every gem in my inventory disappeared. A cage with a cat-sized buffalo lizard appeared at the front, humming with a blue aura. By the auctioneer stage, a flower with prehensile leaves tapped the cage and snapped back, making a high-pitched thrum. I stalked up to the front and snatched the cage, shooting the flower a dirty look.

  “Mine,” I growled possessively.

  Nobody touched my baby buffalo lizard, least of all a stupid sentient flower. I had stock in that little punk. The cage crackled in my hands—then started to dissolve. My purchase dropped to the floor, and the tiny buffalo lizard squeaked, hit the floor, and bolted.

  “No!” I shouted, lunging after Baby.

  Fuck my whole digital life.

  -ARCHIVE-