CD chapter Six (Patreon)

When Ava got home, she fell into bed; smelly clothes, dirty shoes, and all. The relief of knowing that she could pay her bills - and even had a little extra for once - was enormous, and she passed out for a solid six hours. Her alarm woke her, letting her know it was time to go back to the Buy Fresh, and she sat up, rubbing grit from her eyes.

Glancing in the small mirror above the bathroom sink, she grimaced. She’d removed her makeup before leaving VaVa’s, but there were still smudges around her eyes, and a faint red smear around her mouth from where it had been overlined. Dropping her clothes on the floor, she jumped into the shower, running the water just long enough to get wet, then turning it off. She scrubbed the gel from her hair and washed quickly, then turned on the water to rinse off, before hopping back out. She absolutely couldn’t afford a big water bill. Pulling on her second set of Buy Fresh khakis and Henley, she stuffed her toes back into her once-white sneakers and grabbed her screen. Twelve minutes after waking, she was out the door and headed to the bus stop.

Her apartment wasn’t terribly far from the Buy Fresh, and in fact that was the closest grocery store to home. Still, as run down as the area around the store was, it was much better than her own neighborhood. All the shops on 3rd had steel shutters, and only a single convenience store stayed open during the darkest hours of the night, and according to rumor, it was run by a former SWAT team member.

Fortunately, Ava was too big and too obviously poor to attract much attention, and she’d only had to pepper spray three men since moving in. One was obviously a kid attempting his first mugging, one guy had a gun, but wasn’t willing to use it on someone who could turn out her pockets to show she literally had nothing on her, and the third guy… Well, he wasn’t looking to rob her, but she’d gotten enough pepper spray in his eyes, nose, and mouth that hopefully he never tried that on another woman.

It was just starting to get dark as Ava made it to her bus stop, and she sidled close to the huddle of women, who tended to cluster in a group away from any men waiting for the bus. She kept her hands loose and free, and her eyes looking for any signs of trouble until the bus pulled up, and then she climbed on, taking the first available seat near the front of the bus.

Once the bus pulled away, she finally felt safe enough to relax and pull her screen from where she kept it hidden in her shirt when she was walking anywhere near her apartment. If - when - someone did try to rob her, she couldn’t afford to replace it, and having empty pockets had worked once already. She’d been told that having nothing on her could also infuriate some attackers, but she’d just have to deal with that if it happened.

There were two notifications on the screen. The first one informed her that her rent had been deducted from her account two days early. Again. Thanks to Mandy and her generosity, Ava would be able to continue living in her mildly illegal apartment for another month.

The second notification was from Veritas Corp, and told her she had two messages waiting for her in her account. A cold shiver ran down her spine, but she pulled up the app and checked the messages anyway. The first one was time-stamped just after she’d left for work the day before.

Player GardnerAva@AlphaOmegadon

This message is to inform you that Player MasseyEric@R3dLit3 has filed complaint #AKJ9876SJ76-b claiming that you violated a contract. Your account has been suspended until further notice, and a GM will be reviewing recorded images and logs from the alleged incident.  Please contact us as soon as possible regarding this matter.

She swore under her breath. She’d known that group was bad news. She should have followed her instincts and found some other way to come up with the money. At the bottom of the message was a button, which would no doubt take her to some form where she could give her side of the story, and attach her own logs.

Though, really, she shouldn’t have to. Veritas’ EULA was very clear that anything that happened in-game could and would be accessed by their game masters and developers in case of problems. There was no such thing as true privacy, though so far as she knew, no one had ever proven that Veritas used the data for anything except improving the game and protecting the players.

Still, she didn’t have access to anything that would help her right now, nor did she have the time. She only had fine stops before she got off, and it would certainly take too long to try to explain… anything. Sighing in defeat, she slid her thumb up, revealing the next message.

Player GardnerAva@AlphaOmegadon

This message is to inform you that complaint #AKJ9876SJ76-b has been conditionally denied. Review of your records by GM@Amythyst has determined that you are not at fault, though you are required to return the items covered by the contract signed by both you and Player MasseyEric@R3dLit3.

Transfer of the items has been completed via direct account transfer by GM@Amythyst, and you need take no further action, so long as you do not wish to file a counter complaint for harassment or abuse. Please contact GM@Amythyst directly with any further questions.

Your account is no longer suspended. Veritas Corporation appreciates your patience and understanding. Your character AlphaOmegadon has been granted an experience boon which will activate the next time you log in.

What. The. Hell?

Ava’s mind spun, digging through everything she remembered about the battle with the Ghoul Master. Anyone who looked through her logs would see that she had spoken to a stranger while the ForceWorn team was down fighting Ghoul and his minions. After that, pulling logs for the stranger would show that she had picked up the dagger and stabbed Ava. Which would mean that Ava being unable to fulfill her contract was Ava’s fault, through omission, if not intention. There was no way Ava had earned that hundred dollars!

Reading back through the messages, Ava’s eye snagged on the name of the GM who had handled the complaint. Amythyst. Why did that sound so familiar?

She blinked, suddenly sitting up straight in her seat. The man next to her threw her some angry side-eye as Ava lunged for the bell cord, letting the driver know she needed to get off at the next stop. Which was about ten feet ahead of them. The bus, which had been rolling along almost bumper to bumper with an e-car driving ahead of them, jerked, then slowed and stopped, door squealing loudly as it swung open.

Ava pushed her way past three people who were standing in the aisle, ignoring their scowls and a few muttered insults thrown her way.

Mind whirling, she jumped down out of the bus, waving off the driver’s instructions to take each step carefully in the future. It wasn’t like the driver even really did anything any more. He kept his hands on the wheel, and his eyes on the road, but he was separated from the passengers in a bulletproof cube, and everything the bus did was controlled by an AI system. He was literally only there to make people feel better, and theoretically take over if the system failed or was hacked.

So. Amythyst.

Amy.

Was it a coincidence that the name of the player who’d killed Alpha was so similar to the name of the GM who’d handled her case? Was it too much of a coincidence? Or was it no coincidence at all, but completely logical if the player and the GM were the same person? But why would a GM be there in the first place, especially acting like a regular player?

If the dagger was bugged, or some hacked item that wasn’t supposed to exist in the game, maybe Amy really was there to get it back, and R3dLit3 and his buddies just had bad timing. It would explain how much Amy seemed to know; not only about Ghoul Master’s stats, but also Killer’s. But if Amy was a GM, she should have been able to use some kind of God Mode to either take the dagger back in game, or just change his code to edit the thing out.

Why, why, why?

Ava thought her head would explode. She hadn’t thought this hard since she’d watched the light fade from her mother’s eyes. It seemed like a fog had been hanging over her  from that moment to this one. For the first time in over a year, she wanted to know. Something actually mattered to her, and it almost hurt.

It did hurt.

She turned her gaze toward the setting sun and stared until her eyes stopped burning. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. If nothing mattered, nothing could hurt, and that was just the way she liked it.

The doors to the Buy Fresh slid open with their usual reluctant grinding sound, and she went inside. Maybe she’d try logging onto VO when she got home. Her thirty-six hours wouldn’t be up yet, but maybe she’d try. Just to see. Just in case. Just because she wanted to know.

❦ ❦ ❦

Mandy wasn’t working at VaVa’s the next morning. Instead, it was a short, round queen named Sue Preem, who had just started a few weeks before. As the more experienced worker, Ava had to take the lead, which wasn’t her favorite, though at least it meant she got to choose her own clothes and look. While Sue wore a corseted goth loli outfit, and VaVa sported her usual Marilyn Monroe homage, Ava wore a high-neck sequined gown that was surprisingly comfortable except for the 6-inch heels with a 2-inch glass platform.

It was raining, so Sue and Ava both stayed in to eat and take their breaks, and Sue spent the entire time pestering Ava about her favorite brands of makeup (Ava just wore whatever VaVa had available), her favorite perfume (soap), and what kind of music she listened to (none). The questions mainly seemed to be an excuse to answer the questions herself, so by the end of the day Ava knew more about Sue than she had ever wanted to know about anybody, possibly ever.

All of which meant that Ava had exactly zero chance to look at her screen until she was on the bus again, heading away from Vava’s and back toward her smelly, roach-infested apartment. She spent the bus ride searching for any combination of Amy, Amythyst, Veritas, GM, and anything else she could come up with that might help her find a face to go with the name. After all, Veritas Online based characters on the player’s actual appearance, so if someone named Amy who worked at Veritas looked like Amy the player, well, that would clear a few things up.

But no. Amy wasn’t an uncommon name at all, so there were several whose networking pages listed them as working at Veritas Corporation, but the few who had pictures were probably not Ava’s Amy. Why did ‘Amy’ have to be so similar to ‘Ava’ anyway? Her autocorrect kept forcing the word back to ‘Ava’, and it was amazingly frustrating.

As the bus drew up to the 3rd Street stop, Ava’s finger hovered over one last link. It led to the obituary of a young woman who had died in a car crash over a year and a half ago, so obviously that wasn’t the right one, either.

Huffing out a frustrated breath, Ava got up and made her way off the bus. It was still before five, so there were a fair number of people still out and about, and Ava found herself swimming upstream in a sea of humanity on her way home. She’d bought groceries at the Buy Fresh last night, too, so even when she did reach the apartment, she had to put them away. The fresh fruits and vegetables were already bruised and old, so getting them into refrigeration as soon as possible was important.

Except that her refrigerator was warm. She sniffed the quart of milk that was already in there and wrinkled her nose. She hadn’t had time for breakfast when she woke up, so she hadn’t noticed, but apparently the fridge had been broken for a while.

“Damn it,” she muttered, slamming the door of the worthless device. She shot off a blistering message to her landlord, already knowing it wouldn’t do any good. This wasn’t the first time something had broken in her apartment, and she had had to go without showers for a month once. Thank goodness for the bath wipes at VaVa’s, and the deep sinks in the warehouse of the Buy Fresh, or she probably would have gotten fired just because she smelled so bad no one else could stand to be around her.

Sitting down at the fold-out TV tray that served as her table, she forced herself to eat everything that would go bad by the next day. Bruised but under-ripe avocados, slightly moldy cheese, and another pint of milk mingled unhappily in her stomach, and she put the rest of the groceries in a sealed plastic tub on her counter so the bugs couldn’t get into it.

Checking her screen, she saw that there was no response from the landlord, so she sent another message. From experience, she knew that harassing the man until he got annoyed enough to do something about it was the only way to go. Thankfully, he’d just pulled her rent, so at least he couldn’t tell her that if she thought it was so bad, maybe she needed to move so he could ‘renovate’.

As if he would. It was bad enough that he’d divided a twenty-seven unit building into fifty-four by building shoddy walls dividing each of the original two-bedroom apartments in half. As long as there was someone willing to pay him to live here, he wouldn’t do anything to make it better, and anyone who complained suddenly found themselves without a roof over their heads.

Leaning back in her folding chair, she closed her eyes, finding herself nearly overtaken by sleep. Sleep was good. Sleep was what she should do, since she had the last of her double-shift days tomorrow. After that, she only had to work at either Buy Fresh or VaVa’s, but not both. Sometimes she’d manage to pick up a one-shift gig as a server at a party or grunt labor. Once, she’d even been paid to wait in line for a concert, which was the best gig ever, and though it didn’t pay particularly well, it was done as a money transfer between friends, so no tax.

Still. Maybe this week she didn’t need to hustle quite as hard. Maybe she could just… play? A little? Only working one job for four whole days was practically a vacation. Which meant that if she logged in now, she could always catch up on sleep tomorrow.

She opened her eyes, gaze caught on the hulking pod in the middle of the small space. Funny how it hadn’t seemed so big when it was in her mom’s home office. At home. Her real home. Where other people lived now, happily enjoying the life that had once been Ava’s.

Decisively, she stood, snapping shut the folding table and chair with quick movements and tucking them against the wall on the far side of the pod. She stripped off her work clothes and laid them out across her bed, spritzing them lightly with an antibacterial spray she got for half price at Buy Fresh. It smelled a little like pine trees and a lot like chemicals, but it was still better than body odor, and her laundry day was tomorrow.

She pulled the worn bodysuit from its receptacle at the end of the pod, and the flashing red light reminded her that she still needed to buy more cleaning fluid. Expensive cleaning fluid. Well, thanks to GMAmythyst allowing her to keep R3dLit3’s hundred dollars, and Amanda’s kindness, she could actually afford it, and there was a C-mazon outlet right next to the laundromat. The outlets didn’t actually carry much stock, since they were primarily there to allow the customer to ‘see’ a product they were interested in before ordering it to be shipped to their house the next day, but they did have some basics, including VR suit washing fluid.

Taking a deep breath, Ava carefully tugged on the suit, wincing at the places where the fabric was worn so thin it showed skin and miniscule filaments between the weave. When one of those delicate strands of wire finally broke, that would be the end of Ava’s time with a pod. She would never be able to afford a new suit, so she’d have to sell the pod.

The good news was that if she did, she should be able to make enough to get a mask and gloves, so at least she could still play, and it would basically be like the space in her apartment had doubled. Still, after using a pod, she wasn’t sure she could switch to the much clunkier and less interactive gloves, so she’d probably just stop playing altogether.

Shaking her head to chase away thoughts of the many ways her crappy life could get even worse, she climbed into the pod, pulled on her mask, and laid back, tugging the door closed. The seals weren’t quite as tight as they used to be, and she could still faintly smell pot smoke and hear discordant electric guitar, but once the headset linked to her brainwaves, even those lingering traces of reality would be gone. What would she do if she had to give up this last refuge of normalcy? Her heart stuttered, and she knew what would probably come next, but for now, for today, she just opened her mouth.

“Emily,” she said, “start Veritas Online.”