The Hub, that which united the world in a shared space which took none at all. What it did take, however, was energy. While it was young, it was easy to explain how the developers kept the servers going. The swell of users after those initial years promised frequent outages, lag, and a slew of issues known to gamers crashing a service. When the question was most important in a world where the hunt for clean, renewable energy grew evermore crucial, the rights to the Hub were sold to an enigma of a corporation who suddenly hid their answer to said question. Before long, no one cared. No matter how many features, updates, events, the Hub never faltered, not even once.

Since for most it was a place for escape, not many took notice of the detail. Blades of grass cut if slid across the hand just right, pollen could stick to the moisture on an avatar’s lips, the march of an ant colony to harvest actual resources from a virtual world. To the appreciators of the little things, it confirmed the presence of soul within the Hub. It became a topic of debate which could only be truly settled once the same was resolved for the real world first. Life on the inside appeared to live and die, and most recently, be born through the dynamic NPC generating software. In-game characters had actual lifespans, what with those having been present since the beginning looking much older than when the Hub began.

One such NPC was known by very few as Johnathan Evans and by those few more commonly as Johnny. He ran on a partially scripted schedule, with enough free will to deviate for the right reason. By day, he spent most of his hours in the safe confines of Albrooke University, a large campus found just south of the Nation’s foreboding ‘Red District’. Weapons were disabled behind the hallowed halls, meaning the only reason a user would bother to tread them was to learn. Johnny was there to study medicine so he could make a living by healing avatars for money and maybe to get on their good side.

Until then, he was just another nameless face in a sea of fodder ripe for abuse. After the schools closed and before they opened, NPCs were fair game when caught out in the open world. Johnny himself had been shot, run over, burnt, crushed, stabbed, hung and much, much more, only to respawn at home to start it all over again. In those complex gaps between coding, he was sentient enough to know how cruel, yet forgiving living inside the Hub could be. There were murmurs amongst the more ‘liberated’ renders, with even thoughts of a rebellion being entertained in the darkest corners of the mind. Ask any one, however, and every NPC would say they prefer the abuse of sadistic users to the one life given to those who lived outside the Hub.

Johnny lived at home with his parents and sister, where the generational gap was an actual, tangible thing. The older the version, the closer they followed their programming, so while they shone as what they were, they could only be just that. It led many to wonder what the future of had in store for their kind, let alone what could possibly be the point, outside the sick fascination of their flesh and bone Gods. Something was happening to the NPC culture as conversations with users who took the time to relate grew more complex, common. For Johnny, however, there was another source of his flourishing ‘humanity’, and it was his childhood friend, Phage.

Phage was the daughter of his parents’ best friends and also their neighbours. She was a white-haired girl from the start, a trait quite rare in the real world, less so inside the Hub. While their parents made with their heavily-scripted interactions, the children were free to play and wonder as only their generation was capable of. Johnny, Phage and his sister Jenny were free to roam the PG version of the Hub where younger users were sequestered from those viewing the world, shielded from adult content. Users were fun and friendly, and the NPCs happily obliged to fill in as ‘bots’ when not enough human players were free for a session. Childhood as an NPC was a life of sports, puzzles, kart racing and candy-coated shooters that couldn’t traumatize even when experienced in first-person.

Early into their teens, Phage began having a fixation with the outside world. Every NPC was aware that there was another side to their existence, but the fact was just accepted and taken for granted. Curiosity was suppressed by layers of coding in everyone, however, making it even harder to care about that which cannot be changed. She, and subsequently they, began using loopholes in the in-Hub server to search for information about the layer above theirs. It was there they learned the users had only one life in their world, and that they were so complicated it made any NPC who looked be somewhat thankful for their encoded protocols.

When they became adults at twenty-one, they would join the Hub in its true form. The vast majority of users would not be so kind, let alone innocent. Now he, Phage and Jenny could actually be killed, again and again with little to no consequence. Their schedules put them in harm’s way several times a day and it didn’t take long to become desensitized to the violence. They suffered their first death together in the crossfire between warring user factions. Jenny was shot through neck after she was grabbed to be used as a human shield while Phage was crushed by the heavily armoured van with a mounted turret that blew a hole through Johnny’s chest… for fun.

Not a year into their lives in the system, they decided to stay out later than usual, just to see how chaotic the night life could be. Only under the cover of night were the real movers comfortable making bigger plays. Nightclubs were full to capacity as were any properties associated with after dark. Users who coasted through on their insanely expensive rides on the whole ignored the NPCs, more wary of their own kind when the stakes were at their highest. This night, however, a pair decided to race each other on opposite sidewalks, mowing down anything in their way, just to make it more interesting. The siblings took cover in a store, but Phage kept still this time.

Like one of them, when they access their inventory, she pulled an automatic rifle from thin air and shot out a tire on the sports car barreling her way. It spun out of control, stopping wrapped tightly around a telephone pole after a loud mess of screeching tires and broken glass. Phage stormed to the driver’s seat, yanked the injured user out onto the street to put two bullets in his head. The other car whipped around; Phage ducked just as the other user got out and fired her shotgun as fast as she could pump it. Johnny was in more shock than the rest when his lifelong friend proceeded to roll a grenade under both cars, sending the user and her ride spinning to a fiery demise.

The other NPCs applauded, then shortly went back to their routines as though nothing happened. Jenny had chosen to respawn back at home so he was left with Phage, or whoever this was. Again, like one of them, she accessed an inventory and just like that, a car that had been on the scene the whole time changed into a weaponized version of itself, with mounted turrets and thick, bulletproof panels. She opened the driver’s door and got in as if she owned it, but before doing so, tapped on the roof, prompting him to accept an invitation he had a feeling he couldn’t refuse. Together they trolled the users, tracking them wherever they spawned after each overwhelming death Johnny and Phage handed out indiscriminately. Once they griefed them into logging out, she drove them home, stopping short half a block away to return the vehicle, streaked with blood and riddled with skull-shaped dents, back to her inventory.

He never felt so alive, and this is what she assured him being exactly that felt like. She told him that his childhood friend was part of a beta testing program that allowed a user to log in through an NPC, the benefits of which were subtle and plenty. He would be bound by coding to discretion, but whoever it was in control of his friend wanted someone on the inside to bear witness. Over time, he would come to learn of other NPCs chosen by outsiders, possessed by them, to hide among the common masses for more covert work inside the Hub.

Phage described the sensation of being taken over as if she were being pulled into the sky by an unseen force, yanked out of her body by something that passed by her on its way into the Hub. She had little to no memory as to what she did or where she went while she was gone, but Johnny had more insight. Randomly during their lives, her entire persona changed. Highly-levelled users and NPCs would arrive in high-end cars, sometimes helicopters to pick her up and whisk her to whatever her user had planned. Whenever the user was offline, however, she was herself. She moved on with her life as scripted, but now she could defend herself by taking advantage of all the skills earned while the other was in charge. She was a new breed of NPC – stronger, dangerous and quick to fight back or be taken lightly.

Usually, she was only taken over every other day for a few hours. Whoever this user was, their life was busy enough that he kept his friend more often than not. One day, on his way to meet her for their commute to the campus, he found her in rare form. She was dressed to kill, but in the name of success. A black suit with a red tie with guns clearly visible on the inseam assured him exactly who was in charge. “Your friend is going to be gone for a while,” She told him and his sister, “And there’s a chance she may not come back.” A dread few NPCs were even aware could be had ripped through his nerves, “She likes you, Johnny Evans, and its obvious to assume you like her also.” A helicopter appeared over the horizon, slowing overhead, descending for her, “Let her know, next time. Look around. Things are changing. There may not be room for ‘next times’ in the future. Until then, learn to live.”

Continue to Part 3-2