Play 2 Wage: Linked

I approached the garage door sized mirror-like entrance portal to the real game, Factions Freemarket. The edges flashing green in recognition as I stopped in front of it. I paused for a moment to finish my breakfast, cramming it down as quickly as possible, mostly unnoticed by the stream of people who flowed around me. Finally stuffing the last bite into my mouth, I opened the portals menu in my Hud and selected the Recall option rather than Home, even if it cost a half a credit. I always made sure to save at least that much in my daily account so I didn't have to keep making the in-game commute.

The edges of the portal changed from green to orange and I walked through, landing on the fresh and crunchy pea-gravel lot outside of my in-game job.

The portal closed behind me with a sharp snapping noise, and I found myself standing at what looked like a rural trail head. A dirt road wound through tall trees and rocky ground to dead end in the wide puddle of gravel I’d spawned on, the virtual Sun shining high in the sky and casting the forest and undergrowth to either side in shadows. I faced a ranch gate reading “Rosso’s Reserve” with a neat river-stone path leading into the shadowy forest.

Rosso’s Grove was surrounded by tall broad-leaved trees, nestled into an extremely remote and almost unreachable mountain foothill valley on some island I’d immediately forgotten the name of.

I jogged under the gate and down the cobblestone path, passing a group of my co-workers as they came out from the break area that Rosso had built, tucked away down a side path. I jogged past them, exchanging waves as I continued down the trail.

A few moments later, I crossed into the atrium, a small manicured clearing in the forest filled with all sorts of native and imported wildlife. The smooth cut stone path curved through it, passing near the edge of a ridgeline in the hill where you could stand and talk to Rosso down below in his Grove.

I grabbed the vine covered handrail and looked over the edge, waving down at Rosso on his rocky mound, three or four stories below. Rosso was always looking up at this spot in the mornings, his broad and craggy face slowly pulling into an attempt at a smile in acknowledgement. I heard his voice from one of his runner roots that had grown into a bulbous and flowery mouth-like plant that clung to one side of the handrail.

“Welcome Nicholas, always rushing. Remember I pay for result, not time?” he said, following our normal morning routine.

Rosso is a Kaldamori, I’d say was, but he’s probably still alive even if you're reading this long long after I’ve died. The Kaldamori are essentially immortal and quite difficult to even intentionally kill. More of a colony of symbiotic creatures than a singular organism, his main body looked like a big gnarled tree and I’d heard rumors that the face on the trunk was not natural to his species, but something that he chose to grow for the comfort of the humans he hired.

Under the trunk of the tree was a carefully stacked and locked together mound of boulders that he rose from, unraveling out from under the pile, you could see the faint outlines of the dozens of thick runner roots that snaked underground and away from him in every direction. What I couldn't see from here were his workers, ant-like creatures too small to make out from this distance.

“I’m still on a public Link, I’ve got Government Mandated times!” I called down to him, already letting go of the railing and continuing down the path as our morning ritual was completed.

His runner replied, mostly to himself, as I walked away, “Still, he run like a blur, no chitter-chat, barely a howdy-do. Mountains are not moved in a day! Such busy workers, humans.” Shaking my head and waving again in parting, I left with a grin and took the path that led uphill and started my hike up the mountain.

Rosso had hired me, dozens of people actually, to remove the aptly named Mount Goodbye on the northern end of his valley. All of the actual mining and quarrying companies, allegedly, had told him he was stupid, it made no sense to quarry a mountain peak when you could much more safely and cheaply dig stone from a pit. Not using explosives made no sense either, it was the most efficient way. Plus on top of all of that, it was not True stone, only Holo goods.

Only items marked with the True tag in their name could be moved from the Hub to actual reality, if you could pay the tariffs. Rosso didn't care, he would rather wait a few hundred years for the work to be completed, than be annoyed by all of the explosions ringing through his valley for one.

Rossos’ eventual goal, eventual being the key word, was the removal of the mountain. The longer periods of shade it created were a boon while he was still young and freshly self-planted, allowing him to spread his runner roots much quicker than under more direct sunlight. Yet in a decade or two, he would be tough enough to no longer need the protection, and more sunlight for his matured forest would become desirable.

Not wanting to waste the stone, and to remove it from his island, he paid us for the stone we cut and hauled out. It was mostly granite, weathered and reddish-gray on the surface. He paid different rates depending on what we harvested and could safely transport to the out-going loading docks he had set up. The larger and cleaner the stone, the more it would generally earn in sales and the longer you would have to wait to see your cut of the payout. He always would buy gravel and a few of the common flagstone shapes though, and you could increase the value of each stone even further if you finish-cut it yourself. His payment system was more fair than most jobs in the Factions server, and vastly superior to any of the mindless and humiliating work available in the Hub.

After a few minutes of hiking through the trees, the path merged into a huge cleared and leveled area, scattered with people and industrial equipment of all sizes moving in a well oiled dance. The loading dock had a few pads, currently empty, for transport ships to land and haul off material, but most of the stone was packed into containers and thrown into orbit by a massive snail shaped magnetic cannon that squatted at the far side of the space.

Rosso leased the launch system from one of the major factions and I was always amazed by the thing. I couldn't fathom how expensive even transporting it might be, let alone renting or buying it outright.

I followed the brightly marked foot traffic lanes that cut down the side of the shipping floor, and into the parking lot to retrieve my own cheap hauler. A cheap walk-behind grav-bucket that functioned like a powered wheelbarrow minus the wheel, called a Mudmover-K. I leased it from the Lels Faction for just over a hundred credits a month.

The Lels, a stout bear-like species that acted more like beavers than bears, actually seemed pretty decent as far as aliens went. They manufactured and sold all sorts of rugged mid-tech industrial equipment at reasonable prices, and their faction had some aid programs for newly-joined species that Rosso helped his workers apply to.

The cart’s info box popped up on my UI as I approached and grabbed the handle, prodding it into life with the thumb throttle before pulling it in a tight circle and walking it out into the flow of hovering and rolling equipment. I followed the current of the traffic until I made it to the other side, taking one of the smaller roads up hill.

Weaving up the switch back and winding trail on my way up the mountain, I passed by an occasional worksite where people like myself had already stripped out pockets of ore and other more valuable resources. One such site caused me to have to skirt around a huge slice of the still steepening slope and traverse a sketchy ramp made from the tailings of whatever huge excavation had occurred there before.

I picked my way higher, the angle of the ground causing the path to transition from simple packed earth and occasional cut-and-fill, to deeper ledge-cut paths. The forest grew thin and opened the view to the foothills below. Farther down the mountain and closer to the coast, I could see the different shades of green that I knew to be a treacherous jungle.

The equipment-grade roads eventually ceased before I branched off onto a rocky path I had cut myself. I followed it up to an isolated cliff face on the far side of the main ridgeline where I had discovered a hard to spot quartz vein cutting through the granite on the far side of the mountain a few days ago. I parked my lift on one side of the trail and stepped off the other, edging my way around a ledge only a few feet wide that curved against a sheer cliff face.

On the far side, out of view from the path and anyone higher above, the ledge widened out and sloped upwards leading to the vein of quartz I had been working on. I scrambled up the stones I had stacked into a manageable stairway and got to work.