The Starfighter Invitation

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For the third time in the same day I woke feeling rested. The hours of design work felt like yesterday, not something just completed. But, standing up, I was again keenly aware of my unfitness. Maybe tomorrow—actual tomorrow—I’d go for a short run.

Right now, though, I needed to get those designs online.

Suddenly convinced my exports wouldn’t be waiting for me, I hurried to my PC, and checked them through. All there. No loss of DPI. Crisp and effective.

I split the screen and began working on multiple uploads at once. Some would release immediately, but most had an approval process that could take hours to days. I searched the competition, and saw a couple of new designs, but I was definitely ahead of the pack. My pieces would eventually be lost among the tide, of course—and no doubt copies with my signature cropped off would end up on storefronts not related to me—but for the moment I was hopeful that Dream Speed had brought my design business a little good fortune.

Turning on the small TV in my room, I found normal programming. Somehow, I’d expected there would be the same kind of wall-to-wall coverage that came with a major disaster. The world had changed forever, but so far only the gaming world was melting down.

Online I found the screaming I’d expected: all over social media, on every gaming site, and the majority of newspapers. Stories of hopes fulfilled. Of transformation. Of a game where you could truly be yourself—or someone else altogether.

All the joy was balanced by questions. How deep were Ryzonart’s links to the primary manufacturer of cowls? How did it work—or how it couldn’t work—and whether we’d just given a game company direct access to our thoughts and memories. One article reflected my own particular horror. The 80 Hour Day. How long before businesses that dealt in intangibles thought it a good idea to send their employees into DS to maximise working hours?

There was more than I could ever begin to read. We’d passed five hours since release and the first wave of players had reached their login limit and come back to themselves, rested and burning to discuss a full day lived in The Synergis. The news that DS wasn’t a hoax had sent already brisk sales of cowls into overdrive, and most vendors were reporting that they were waiting on new stock.

Remembering Dio’s suggestion, I followed a link to the official Ryzonart site, and found that while there were still no official forums, there was a new page called Breaking Down The Synergis.

So Ryzonart had made at least 9 million pre-release sales, and were already blowing concurrency records out of the water. Of course, there had been hundreds of millions of cowls in circulation before the announcement of _DS_—they’d always been wildly popular among difficult sleepers—but for a game that had seemed so unlikely, and had had such a run of doubting press, these were formidably impressive figures. What the numbers would be like in a week or two, and whether Ryzonart’s servers could hold up under the barrage, was another question altogether.

I was willing to bet Nina Stella was among those seven, and found some leader boards to confirm just that.

No announcements had popped up during my design session, and I started to ask Dio if they only did system-wide announcements for the first to rank, then remembered that Dio wasn’t wafting about this particular reality. I’d grown very quickly used to my own trollish overlord.

Whoever this Nina Stella person was, they were now DS's most famous player, and perhaps always would be. Part of it was clearly luck—she’d obviously been one of the first to log in, had passed a Trial in each training session, and must have been logging in and out as I had been, to maximise the time she could spend on lan training.

But even without the luck of the login, DS was absolutely not a game that was balanced so that all players were on an even level. The strength of your self-image, your synchronisation with your Core Unit, your ability to move blue mist: they were all individual. For all I knew even the amount of lan you started with differed from person to person.

I looked to see if I could find a player search function, to see details about myself, but all the statistics seemed limited to top ten lists.

One list showed the most common names people had given their Cycogs: a mass of HALs, EDIs, Datas, Doraemons, Bishops, Benders, Marvins, Ultrons, GLaDOSes, and Cortanas. No way for me to see how many were called Dio.

This was all very interesting, but I had to wonder why Dio had suggested I check the site out. Top ten lists hardly seemed worth taking the time to mention.

I began looking through the website pages again, and found it: a new tab on the [Contact Us] page. [Pattern Submission].

"Dio, if you were here, and not a floating mote of whatever, I’d totally think about hugging you."

Submitted patterns would be reviewed, and if accepted, players would be able to select them when acquiring in-game clothing, buttons and patches, internal and external Snug decals and entire Snug skins. I hadn’t designed anything suitable to use on the entire outer shell of a Snug, but I definitely would be—mainly so I could use it myself. As it was, my designs would work fine for buttons, patches, and decals.

I read rapidly through the terms and conditions, to make sure there were no rights grab involved. Ryzonart was offering actual royalties: minute, but not limited to in-game currency, even though players would be buying the patterns with in-game credits. I submitted everything I thought would work, and was just sitting back to take a quick break when an email notification popped up. From the Ryzonart Pattern Approval Team.

I stared at a list of acceptances. That had been quick enough to be automatic, but surely Ryzonart would have some kind of vetting process. Did they already have a Synergis office set up, with their staff working at five times the pace? Or was it Dio?

That felt very weird. Dio was fiction. But Dio was definitely aware of the real world, and had directed me to Ryzonart’s site. Could te have been waiting to approve my designs? My own personal advocate, pulling strings on my behalf?

Outside the game?

I frowned all the way through uploading designs to the last of the major sites, and then logged right back in. Once I walked out of the Soup, however, I couldn’t decide on any questions to ask, so I just headed to my cockpit chair, to gaze out at my view. Late afternoon again. My internal clock was never going to recover from this virtual life.

A mote of light drifted into view. Cycogs didn’t exactly have a lot of readable body language, and te wasn’t changing colour, but I decided that Dio was curious.

"Thank you for the tip about the website," I said.

[[You’re welcome. And pensive?]]

"What’s the price of all this, Dio? Will you tell me?"

[[The best things in life are free. Or come at the cost of a modest monthly subscription.]]

"That’s a no, isn’t it?"

Dio didn’t answer, drifting down to rest on the toe of my left boot. I sighed, then looked at my internal clock.

"Still another couple of hours until my next lan training. I guess I’ll see if I can make any progress on this Prestige Challenge."