Lilli scored three clipboards—one for each of us and one for Starr. We started filling them out. Simple things at first: name, address, all that good stuff. The second page, however, was a little more detailed. It wasn’t part of the NDA, but rather a questionnaire about our gaming experience. What were our favorite games, how many hours a week did we game, did we game online or off? Did we prefer to play with friends or strangers? Had we ever played a fully immersive VR game before?
Hm. How to answer that one?
Lilli poked me. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “You look worried.”
“It’s just…” I dropped my voice so our new friend couldn’t overhear. “You know what Starr said—about us being famous on the Dark Carnival?”
“Yeah, so?”
I glanced up at the high, imposing walls of the Appleby Games compound. The ones we were about to enter. “What if they know about us, too?”
“Oh.” Lilli pursed her lips. “I hadn’t thought about that.”
“If they know who we are, they’re going to be super suspicious about why we want to join the beta test. Like, they’ll think we’re spies or something, working for Hiro.”
“Um, we nearly got murdered in Hiro’s game. I doubt they’re going to assume we’re superfans.”
I hadn’t thought of it that way. “But still…”
“Look, if they don’t want us, they won’t pick us. We’ll go home with a ruby power-up—whatever that is. End of story.”
“If they let us go home…” My mind flashed back to Uncle Jack discussing Hiro’s disappearance. As far as we knew, the game maker was still missing. What if he, too, had tried to go into Mech Ops to find his daughter? What if he, like Ikumi, was now trapped in the game?
What if we were about to be next?
Lilli looked at me with concern. “What do you want to do?” she asked in a whisper. “Do you want to call it?”
I thought about it for a moment, then I shook my head. “No,” I said. “We can’t wimp out now. Ikumi needs us. We can’t just abandon her in the game. No matter what the risks.”
“Agreed. Besides, it’s not like we didn’t know this was going to be dangerous. We just need to be extra careful is all.”
“Careful of what?” Starr rolled back over to us, her paperwork all filled out. She peered at us curiously.
“Oh, nothing!” Lilli said quickly. “Just VR sickness. Ian gets it super easy. I told him that he needed to go in slow the first time.”
“Actually he doesn’t,” Starr said. “The new tech they’ve got on this game? You supposedly don’t feel sick. That’s its major selling point. Most people can’t take normal VR for more than, like, twenty minutes ’cause it messes with their equilibrium. This game? You could play for days and not get the least bit dizzy.”
“Days?” I repeated. “What, do you wear a diaper? How do you eat?”
Starr laughed. “Not real days. The game has time compression built in. You must have experienced that in Dragon Ops, right?”
We had in fact. The game had felt as if it were days long, but in the end, we’d only been in it for hours. It was the weirdest feeling, and I wasn’t exactly thrilled to experience it again. I hated that disconnected-from-real-life sensation. But I supposed every VR game would start using that now. You couldn’t very well live in another world if you had to pee in real life all the time.
“If we played Dragon Ops,” I reminded her.
She snorted. “Right. If.”
The woman at the front clapped her hands. “All right, everyone,” she called out. “Are you ready to go inside?”
Everyone cheered and rushed the gates. I thought for a moment Starr might get left behind in her wheelchair, but then I realized she was already ahead of us. I grinned at Lilli, and we joined the mob, a thrill of excitement mixed with fear rushing through me.
This was it. We were in.
But what we were walking into? We had no idea.
“Whoa.”
My jaw dropped as we passed through the gates, entering the Mech Ops compound. “No way!” I cried. “Lilli are you seeing this?”
You gotta understand. I’d expected this part to be boring. A corporate courtyard leading to various nondescript office buildings. Instead, it was as if we’d stepped into another world entirely. A futuristic city packed with life-size models of robots and spaceships. Some looked really cool and new—like something out of a video game. While others had this sort of dorky retro look. As if they had come from an imagined future that never came to pass a long time ago.
But that wasn’t the coolest part. Not by far. Instead it was the giant robot standing in the center of the courtyard that had me gaping. He had to be at least forty feet tall and was dressed in huge plates of purple and silver armor, so brilliant it was almost blinding to look at it.
“Rocky the Robot,” I whispered, recognizing him from my earlier research. The mascot for the Mech Ops game. I had to admit, he was supercool-looking. Like, tough and futuristic, but almost medieval at the same time. I wondered if there was a way to play him in the game. Or fight with him. Or maybe he was the bad guy? Blazing across the robot’s body was the Mech Ops logo, complete with its catchphrase: Gear up, Mech Heads! And welcome to tomorrow. I felt a chill of excitement flow through me. Wow.
I reached instinctively for my cell phone, wanting to take a picture, before remembering they had taken our phones at the front gate when we walked in. Which wasn’t surprising. Appleby HQ was notorious for keeping its corporate secrets, from what I’d read online. Even Admiral Appleby himself was known to be a bit of a recluse, hardly ever appearing out in public. In fact, this was the first time in years that they’d let anyone who wasn’t an employee through
