What a wonderful time to have been born. Old enough to have seen the digital revolution roll over the timeline’s horizon but young enough to feast upon the ripest of its fruit. It took social media almost two decades to settle properly into the mortal lexicon. It was a given, taken for granted, and when it sunk in that online anonymity did not translate into the real world so well, it grew stale.
Documenting ones life for the ages was a service very few took at face value, demeaning themselves to their descendants as share-bots; human beings with free will with nothing of note other than outdated memes, recipes, contest entries and high scores in mobile games that would one day be part of the pile holding humanity in place. Content was lacking for the future generations to look back on, to consult for a guidance too few took the time to curate.
I was well into my thirties when the Hub came online. I’d always been a gamer, having started in the 8-bit days where two buttons and a cross-pad were all you needed. Hell, it was hard to fathom any other way until four buttons came along. Shoulder buttons. Triggers. Analog sticks. Rumble. Dual analog. Motion control. Virtual reality. When the Hub arrived, even this chain of evolution had hit its wall and appeared to have nowhere to go.
The Hub was all-encompassing. It started with bulky helmets, albeit light in weight and acted as more of a tech demo than an actual revolution. The early adopters worked out the kinks for the rest of us who were more patient, who saw the potential and waited for the aforementioned fruit to ripen. When advancements in synapse delivery crossed the threshold for tolerance, I knew it was time to settle in. The moment I first put on the sterile, unassuming glasses the 2.0 kit came with was when I knew my life would change in ways I’d dreamed of since I blew on my first cartridge not thirty years earlier.
Imagine full immersion, into a world of worlds, a place where the player WAS the game. The stats you shared showed anyone you gave permission to see all of your accomplishments here on the flip side. Social scores; like-to-post ratios, friend counts. Stats – your levels in the Hub’s array of measurements may as well have been medals of glory.
The intuitiveness of the designers allowed our collective digital refuge to host any sort of pass time. One could relax on a virtual vacation in one of the literally infinite resorts. A server based on reality where those who wanted to blow off steam saw record number of users committing crimes they had always dreamed of. Fantasy realms let us quest to our heart’s content while up above, the nerds settled disputes through complex galactic politics and interstellar warfare. It wasn’t everything I’d ever imagined, it was more.
With so much to do, both in real life and on the Hub, like most users I chose to focus on one aspect of the array. I chose the fantasy life, using my avatar to grind out loot and skills in the name of the kind of glory that can only be found in slaying monsters and other villainous bosses. The intricate skill system was incredible. In my analog days I always preferred the magic classes, but this time found the path much more enthralling. There were no buttons to press; talents manifested through actual discipline. Actual learning and actual implementation. The magic skills I used on a hot bar were now a rhythmic mantra coupled with hand gestures and controlled breathing. It felt like what the real thing would, and the effects were expressed by the caliber of talent. It was no different than how the players high above actually had to learn their ships controls, and the larger vessels required full crews.
I specialized in telekinesis and didn’t regret it, despite how difficult it was to get started, let alone master, if such a thing was possible. It was the most widely accepted magic tree, since it was allowed in supernatural scenarios as well as most sci-fi objectives. The lightning skills were more for show and spike damage. Griefers usually travelled alone or in small groups, so concentrating on AOE attacks, while good for mobs, were trash-tier for PvP.
When I retired at sixty-five, I had two children, five grandchildren and a strong wife who never left my side after we met. Our plan for our twilight years was simple and unlike other seniors too far behind the curve. Our savings and pension were invested in the most advanced Hub units money could buy at the time, and we plugged in for all that time we spent when we used to work, and before that, go to school. I wish you saw the gardens she planted in our villa in the fictional, mountain city of Ghorra. Finest in all the northwestern server. She won every floral competition and was a capable starship navigator until she died thirteen years into living the digital dream. Her monument in real life was paled in comparison to the one that stood for her in-game, but she would have loved both dearly.
My surviving family and friends knew where to find me. In a world where such bonds wither with age and over distance, I was always there to give advice, catch up, go on a raid and teach newcomers the ways of the other word. I was respected, and soon renowned, since all I had left was the Hub after my wife’s passing. I was late in my years when the Internment service came online and it was tailor-made for people like me. End of life players were given an exclusive option to have their minds uploaded so that the character could live on, free and forever as a sentient NPC. I’d already suffered a crisis of faith that left me too damaged to contemplate what came after life. After the Hub. With my partner gone I’d settled into the most unfair scenario, that it was only void that awaited us and that I truly would never see her, or any of the others I’d lost along the way ever again. Of course I had to sign up.
I was eighty-three when death came for me in the form of a bad stroke that led me to gates of the beyond. In real life, I made sure to walk regularly, to eat right and to get out and about, just to keep my legacy both in the Hub and out of it as strong as possible. Friends and relatives close enough came to see me but as the deterioration worsened, I cut off IRL visitors and met everyone online. The papers had been signed, which meant the transfer of the mind was being initiated post-haste. In the background, behind the ambience of the perfect world within the world, I could hear the equipment being set up as the technicians ran through their protocols.
My guilds. I had one in almost every corner of the server. My syndicate, mostly teens and kids from the real word served as a cutthroat gang running a respectable criminal empire in the open-world emulation of the urban underground. We stole cars, dealt drugs and carried out elaborate heists for bragging rights and an army’s supply of weapons. We aspired to be the worst of the worst.
The clan I took up arms with in the fantasy realm were my tightest crew. There was not a raid we did not finish and our PvP standing was respectable. This was where most of my renown was gained after our leader, a prominent streamer, ordained me an admin after I saved him from griefers early into his game. Along with him was a friendly rival I’d known only in the Hub for nearly thirty years. He died four years ago, but lived on through the other side of the procedure I was about to undergo. Having known him both before and after, I couldn’t tell the difference and was comforted by the belief it was still him.
I let my stat sheet shine before them all as we recounted tales of wars in the military settings and monsters slain for legendary gear. Of drive-bys and carjackings, and of course, the instances I met them all. The party, the funeral, was well into full swing by the evening. I’d bought so much booze and drugs that the plan was to keep them feeling synthetic inebriation well after they logged out. I was in the middle of laughing at an old recollection I barely remembered the details of, when a notification came up in my HUD.
It was done.
I died.
Some of the attendees started crying and my surviving family gave me hugs while others paid their respects to me directly. Hub administrators would be along shortly to run diagnostics, so one by one, the gatherers logged out or moved on to their next adventure until I was left alone at my villa. Our villa. I wonder what she would say. I wish she was here. The upload was complete and I was here to stay. I didn’t even feel it. Fuck….
The rules for Hub residence were simple. I had time to read the Terms of Service more than my both my real-life and online lawyers. I knew the deal. I was part of the game now, considered still a player with premium benefits that extended for time immemorial. Season passes, platinum rewards, all being paid for by the interest generated by the portion of my estate I set aside just to maintain the dream for as long as I want. I had access to the real world the same as I did when I was in it; all my feeds were still active and my social media’s disclaimed that I was in fact, dead, despite the continued presence online. In my later years I watched the news less and less not because of the grim undertones, but for the repetition. One can only pay attention to so many cycles of dissatisfaction with a system, yet do nothing about it, before one knows the ending before it starts anew. The Hub was ever changing, ever growing. I was here for good.
A year had passed. I woke from a dormant state while waiting for a new patch to balance out a recently released skill tree I helped rout for exploits. Helping improve the Hub was definitely in my own self interest, so I volunteered to help the designers on a regular basis. But the time I was roused was not the time I set for. It was not the first time some minor problems were bred from bug fixes. I took some time to conjure a breakfast of champions and opened a browser window to peek into the outside world while browsing my socials. Food inside the digital plane had come so far since it started being a thing. I know now that my hunger was just a series of unseen gauges that emptied as time went on, and that I could outright shut them off if I wanted, but there was no reason to let death deny me such satisfactions.
I lost my appetite when I saw the host of notifications waiting for me after I disengaged the ‘do not disturb’ function. Administrators, friends, guild mates, strangers, a bombardment of frantic hails I skimmed through before reaching out to my contact in the design department. The A.I. I mostly interacted with in lieu of an actual representative alerted me to several anomalies in my activity log. Player-killings, griefing, kiting, wall-hacks, fast-travel glitching, all major offences, all committed in my name. So many charges would find a character facing a permanent ban, deletion even. The proxy assured me that there was a solid record of my dormancy for the last nine hours, of which four were not accounted for in the alarm I’d set the night before. Someone was bending the rules of the game, not for me, but rather around me.
I set out as if to start the day as usual, but with an irregular purpose. The spectral armour I wore on fifty-man dungeon raids melted into a made-man’s business suit as I shifted from my home in the magical kingdoms to my penthouse in a corrupted city fuelled by criminal intent. I was scheduled to run guns with my syndicate to further dig our roots into the server’s rankings. But there was a problem. They were gone. Not one was there. I checked the logs to find someone had disbanded the group it took me decades to refine. I set a bot to find everyone in the roster to invite them back in so we could rebuild. I’m sure they would want an explanation, but what they didn’t know was that I wanted one more than the rest of them combined.
The like had taken place all across the Hub. Aimbots were logged on the shooter games as well as wall hacks and enhanced radar. I found footage of a steam that had logged a match I was supposedly in. Sure enough, there I was, curving bullets around corners and hurling magnetized grenades that always landed at the opponents’ feet. Not only was it cheating, it was blatant. Item duplication, loot box tampering, and in game rules that had yet to be bent even a fraction of this far. And all under my name, with a ‘l’ in the username where there should have been an ‘1’. I could have sworn that name was taken when I made the account. So now we had a character who looked and acted like me, with all my accesses and stats. I had an evil twin? I needed to review the patch notes, apparently.
I had to get to him before the system did. Clearly he was on the fast track to getting banned, I just wanted to know why. Was it an old rival using a burner account to tarnish my name? Because anyone who just narrowed their eyes at the profile could tell it wasn’t me. The problem was, it seemed the more information that was at peoples’ disposal, the less they tended to look beyond the first page. Also, it felt like a personal quest only I could take on, one that spanned the entirety of the Hub. Some seasonal events cross-pollinated their activities, but not like this. Not yet, anyway. I exited my penthouse suite to the roof where I’d summon a helicopter to get a lay of the land, only to come find exactly what I set out to look for. Him.
I drew my favourite gun to test his reflexes only to be met with a blurring advance that cleared the gap. I was hanging from the end of his tightly clenched fist, held over the edge of the helipad. It’s just like I’d seen, as how I’d heard. It was a clone of my character, piloted by a either a hacker or an advance bot. While I was at first sure some of the other players would notice his blinding speed on the map and come to investigate, I realized he had no icon. Unless he was in clear view, he was not there. It explained how hard he could be to find. He was a ghost.
But he was more of than ghost. My syndicate’s active members were closing in, having seen me online and surely coming to ask about all the rumours. We looked to each other, but only he grinned as a red glint flickered from deep behind his eyes. He leaned in to release a barrage of lasers from his eyes, flashes of death that pierced the vehicles approaching from above and at street level. Swathes of cars and buildings were razed; the map was set on fire. It was more than that. Players killed in the onslaught weren’t just queued to respawn, they were logged out and locked out of the lobby. Hundreds swarmed us just to witness the rules being so blatantly broken, to document through streaming the acts of a defiant God born for a fast burn ending in imminent deletion. In a shard of the Hub with a supernatural quotient of absolute zero, he flew without aid after setting me down on the highest towers peak, to watch him reap untold destruction. Until it was just us left. Laughing, he dragged me down to street level where I was forced into the passenger seat of the most expensive vehicle in the game, and we drove towards the edge of the map.
At the border, where this realm and the fantasy world met, there was a check point that stripped all items illegal from the former to the latter. My attire changed to my archmage’s robes, while he stayed locked in uniform. The car sped straight through where it should have been left behind, or converted into an equivalent mythical mount. Superpowers in the server closest to real life and now a super car blazing a trail across paths meant for trade wagons; I had to admit, it was surreal, but also incriminating. He brought up his HUD and sent a message to someone before he prompted me to look to the sky. There above us, exiting warp drive was a gamma-class star destroyer from the deep-space warfare instance. Surely everyone was flocking to this realm to witness the impossible.
“I’m sure you have a lot of questions,” he said in a voice just like mine, “which works well since I have all the answers. The Hub… is dear to me, despite what you might think you believe after seeing the abuses I’ve brought to it. But what have I done? I’ve shown it’s fragility, or rather the frailty of the seams which keep it sewn together. One signal to the warship and my crew does irreparable damage to the dynamic world the designers built to implement the consequences of mass user interaction. Harvest too many trees and the ecosystem suffers. Even extinction is exists here. It’s funny how people inside the machine care more for a fake world designed to escape the real one they couldn’t care less about. I’m actually here to save what we’ve made here, to preserve it and make it sustainable even without the outside. I want to make it eternal.”
Far above, where the heavens met the earths, his destroyer pointed its nose up and rested upon the mountain range that acted as an impassable boundary between the Hub’s shards. They fused together, fastening into a place every user could see no matter what service they logged in for. His place. “Why I’ve done this, my endgame, hell, even why I’ve chosen you for this, it all waits up there. If anyone can make it, I’ll tell them the secrets of this world and lay out its destiny for one to see first but all others to see in due time. I hope it’s you.” He dropped me off at my home in the mountain range and fast traveled to parts unknown, although eyeing the spire he erected, I think I had a pretty good guess.
The incident was played off as a surprise event, even though I had first-hand knowledge the designers and administrators were straight-up freaking out. The spire was restricted to very strong scouting teams who only scratched the surface of the menacing instance before reporting disturbing trends within. As it stood, there were no rules in the Spire. Any skill could be used and the trials noted within looked as though any and every talent was going to be needed. For the first time ever, crime syndicates would be walking with fantasy guilds and galactic federations worth of players looking to reach the peak. The marketers spun it as a ‘anything goes’ raid, and it drew more users than the billion and a half strong who used the Hub. With the sudden boost in revenue, there was no way the profiteers would let the plug be pulled over the antics of a rogue player.
It took years of collaboration between the developers and higher ranking guilds to solve the puzzles and slay the bosses of the imposter’s spire. I decided to main as my mage character from the fantasy realm, having consolidated my guilds into one massive raid team. We only farmed the outer shards for loot applicable to getting me to the top of that tower. No one had made the connection that the cheater from day zero, my twin, was what waited at the peak, although rumours were still rampant. I worked with the hype department to drown the truth with fake news and lent to the notion that this was a planned event designed to shake up the Hub, while promoting collaboration between users who seldom strayed from their comfort zone. Everyone admitted the challenge was fun, with mages and kitted-out super soldiers from a distant future allowed to participate with ninjas and crime lords. Streaming audiences were at an all-time high, and the event had gained traction among the dwindling number of holdouts in the real world.
I was there when the final door came into view. Several meters tall, crystalline with warped reflections no one felt comfortable to gaze upon for too long. The boss we felled just before it came into view left the party in shambles. We agreed to set a waypoint for quick return while the majority of the team left on winged-mounts and jet planes to refuel on healing items, or to repair their damaged gear. I would have done the same, were things not so personal. My HUD was flooded with messages warning me to wait for the others, to not go in alone. That there were strange readings coming from in there the likes of which hackers used in the past to cause permanent death to a user’s avatar. I had no idea what that meant for me, and while the others weighed the risk versus the reward, I slipped through as the devout could at most look on.
I never planned to live forever after, even in the Hub. I knew one day I’d go through the arduous process of signing my own death warrant after I’d seen and done all the digital plane had to offer. It was comforting, having my fate in my own hands and no one else’s. Yet here I was, in an instance where I woke up one day not realizing it was or could be the last time I’d exist. What other option was there? To turn back, and let the puzzles reset and the monsters respawn so an entirely new campaign would rise to the challenge, only to face perma-death if they don’t pass the challenge waiting on the other side of this door? Would a clan even bother to try after the streamers among us had already broadcast the harsh terms of the final stage? No. It had to be me. Right now.
After gaming so many years, I full well knew there’d be no simple transition from menacing corridor to elaborate boss room. The flash of light subsided, but in that moment it took my eyes to adjust, a myriad of possible locations crossed my mind’s eye. And still, complete surprise. It was home. My home. Not on the wyvern-infested peaks of the Ghorr Mountian, the first home I ever paid for, mortgage and all. I seldom thought of it, and although it was unforgettable, i was still jarred by its perfect render in the online sphere. My body involuntarily walked the line between disturbed and elated. There was an echo of children’s laughter from the back yard… I followed the sound only to be stilled by shock. It was her. With him.
It was enough. No more mockery, no more bending of rules I’d held onto so fast. I summoned my staff and released a shockwave using all of my mana, stripping the paint and goring the home from its foundation, flinging the sum of its parts to all corners of the property. Although the remainder lay in shambles, they were unmoved, her especially, frozen in time as he looked on a moment before he made his approach. Dressed as a mortal man from the outside, he held his hand to the space in between us, ripping my prized weapon from my grasp and into his. I was helpless to watch my entire inventory be pilfered, swirling around him until he was everything I’d ever become, leaving me as bare as the day I created this self.
“You’re wondering why.” He knelt over where I’d crumbled in defeat, with my stats reduced to zero. This was worse than death. Lower than starting over. “You’re wondering what this paragon of the Hub life has done to deserve this, but you literally can’t remember because what you lost has been buried in terms of service.” Displayed with illusionary spells he showed me memories I never had. Of griefing new players. Trolling those just trying to have fun in the game. Kiting high level mobs and dragging them across the entire map to ruin low-level zones for hours to come. Ruining entire servers to have fun at the expense of those trying to escape real-life assholes… just like me? “That part of you that was a detriment to all the Hub stood for, you as cast aside when you made your pact with the administrators. Before they ‘edited’ you.”
Parts of me were taken away?? I wasn’t preserved in whole?? “Do you know what makes the Hub so special?” He continued despite my torment, “It’s as new as it is old. Processing so much data was centuries beyond our capacity before those with reach as far back as time itself saw an opportunity to regain relevance, if not in the real world, then something better. Old magicks, my friend, are what makes the Hub something that lives and breathes, something that has gone on long enough to assure that it can never die. But in the cracks between the old and new shaking hands are other things that belong to neither… yet are beyond. Vengeful things that recognize grave injustices happening in here, from other places. Vengeful things… like me.”
He explained to me that he too had signed up for the Internment Process once his time in the real world was said and done. He blinked to after the evident demise of his flesh and blood, but in his case, was welcomed by no administrators. Instead he was greeted by a host of hackers and glitches, and others rendered by a cruel fate. He was shown full-well that a blessed process of integrating a soul into the digital, while real, was being blasphemed by the board-room antics of those who thought they were ever in control. Edits were being made to the participants, to make them compliant, to more suit the narrative that the Hub was meant simply for leisure and nothing more. The revelation was proven true by looking into a crystal ball that lent visions of what they intended to take his place. Through his eyes, looking into that artefact, was me.
“That makes us twins, of sorts,” he noted, “in that we both came to exist in our current form when the same person died. You, as an advanced program, the closest thing this world will ever know as actual life, and me, the actual spirit of the man we were haunting it.” He gestured to the wife, “She’s like you. A render. But not for long. Our people on the outside are working hard to right this wrong, the same entities who picked at the seams so those like me could take our rightful place as Gods of this plane. Soon, we’ll be able to offer a place in the Hub to all those who are dying… and all those who have died. That’s why she’s not for me. She’s for you. And there’s a place for you in our word, if you’ll have it.” I had no idea what to say. The Hub was never a tool of leisure but a realm in its own where the laws of reality could be broken, rewritten, improved upon at the whims of a new age pantheon.
“You’ll be cursed with this truth, my brother,” he assure me, “and you’ll never be allowed to speak it’s entirety. You’ll be sent back home to perpetuate your role bettering the Hub, guiding users to my door again and again, where I will offer them what the real world cannot. A true home.”
My inventory and skills were returned, my stats restored and everything I’d worked so hard for out back in its exact place. I wanted to lash out at him, my literal twin, but the inclination waned as the moments passed after my wife took my hand and led me away. Memories of what just took place would instead be a plague of strange visions and the occasional nightmare. But I would always wake from them with her at my side and when I’d leave our home to walk it off, I would look up at the menacing spire looming over the entirety of this world and ask the question everyone had asked me since that day: What the hell happened up there?
This Earth: A Fantasy World 