When he awoke he was here. Inside OmniWorld. Or a janky hotel room. He wasn’t sure which yet.
A knock on the door interrupted his thoughts. Without thinking, Justin swung his legs out of the bed and got up.
Then he realized that he was standing in the simulation. For the first time. He also noticed that he was wearing soft cotton shorts and a blank t-shirt. Beneath his feet he felt the low-pile carpet, and he scrunched his toes up, taking in all the sensations.
This was pretty incredible.
Another polite knock.
Maybe it was room service.
He walked to the door and noticed that, unlike old school hotel doors, there was no peephole or video screen. And no lock.
So he pulled the door open.
Standing in the hallway was a guy about his own age. He had a pleasant face and was dressed in jeans and an untucked button-down shirt.
“What’s up?” The guy smiled at him. “You acclimated yet?”
“I just woke up,” Justin said.
“Cool. Well, my name is Wyatt and I’m supposed to take you down to the testing lounge.”
“Wait, we’re inside OmniWorld, right?”
“We are.”
“And are you, like, an NPC?”
Wyatt made a face. “Rule #1. Don’t refer to anyone as an NPC. I work here.”
“But you’re an NPC?”
“I’m an intern.”
“Are you human? A player?”
“You’re getting kind of personal, aren’t you?”
Justin felt a flush of anger. “I command you to answer me!”
Wyatt laughed. “Take it easy. It doesn’t work like that. Remember your briefing sessions?”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t worry about it. That’s what the testing lounge is for.”
Wyatt led him down the corridor and into an elevator. Then he told it to take them to the lobby.
“Are we the only ones in this hotel?” Justin asked.
“It’s not really a hotel, although everyone calls it that. Its official name is the ‘transition zone.’ It’s supposed to make you feel like you’re in a familiar environment. We didn’t want you waking up in a starship or a saloon or in a foxhole. Too jarring.”
“I’m going to Greystrand,” Justin said.
He had the choice to spend his first OmniWorld life in one of several game worlds: Star Rim Empire, Spurshot, Eagle’s Bridge, Highland Moor, Mosaica, and a few others he couldn’t remember. Each one was a different milieu, from sci-fi to superhero to western. There was even an old school cyberpunk world and a 18th century Scottish world. But he would choose Greystrand, the medieval fantasy world.
“Yeah, that’s the one most people go for,” Wyatt said. “But I heard that Spurshot’s pretty cool. Old West. Gunfights. They’ve been doing a lot of work on the story lines there and they’re putting in an old steam train.”
“I’m not really into cowboys and Indians.”
“You’re more of a knights and dragons type, huh? That’s cool.”
Justin had read that Loneskum-Alexander bought the IP for the old Caves & Beasts pen and paper role-playing game from the 1980s and based Greystrand on that.
His dad had played C&B in high school and at various times when Justin was growing up, his dad had tried to get Justin into it, but the game seemed way too complex and boring.
Now he kind of wished that he had given C&B a try. Might have given him a leg up here.
The elevator arrived at its destination and they walked out into another corridor which looked similar to the one where Justin’s room was.
“Slight detour,” Wyatt said. “I didn’t have breakfast this morning.”
He led Justin through a pair of double doors into a small lounge set up with tables and chairs and a counter with breakfast stuff.
“Continental breakfast is included?” Justin smirked.
“Don’t laugh. The cinnamon buns are awesome. And this might just be the last decent food you get for a while. I hope you like gruel.”
Wyatt got himself a coffee and a cinnamon bun, but Justin chose a banana instead.
“So we have a sense of taste here?” Justin asked. “I was wondering about that.”
“Give it a try.”
Justin peeled the banana part way and held it up to his nose. It certainly smelled real. He broke off a bit and popped it into his mouth. It tasted just like a normal banana although one that was perfectly ripe.
“Amazing,” he said.
“You like?”
“How does it simulate all those thousands of taste buds?”
Wyatt shook his head. “You forget. This is all you.”
He was right, of course. Justin had forgotten for a second. The breakthrough Loneskum-Alexander had made was being able to stimulate the brain’s sensory areas and then orchestrate those sensations between different players. That’s what the quantum computers were for. And the stim-pods: brain-to-computer interfaces. So really, it was Justin’s own brain that was interpreting the taste of the banana.
“Mind blown,” he said.
Wyatt laughed. “Yeah, don’t try to think about it too much. The good news is that we’re almost done with the testing.”
“What? I thought we were supposed to be going to some ‘testing lounge,’ right?”
“I kind of lied. This whole thing has been the testing lounge. And calibration of all your senses. We just did taste, so there’s only two more tests.”
Justin thought about it. Since he woke up, he had seen, heard, felt, smelled, and now tasted. He wasn’t exactly sure what the other tests might be.
“This one is actually another mind blower,” Wyatt said. “So in the paracosm there’s one more sense. They told you about this, right?”
“Game sense?”
“Yeah, we call it ‘the data overlay’ or just ‘overlay’ for short. It’s the additional sense that enables the gaming aspect of OmniWorld. Ready to check it out?”
“Yeah, let’s do this.”
“So what you want to do is focus on something—like the banana…”
“Just stare at it?”
“Yeah, you can stare but you can also say the name of the thing to yourself. That kind of helps when you’re learning how to overlay.”
“Ok, I’m staring
