Play 2 Wage: Linked

Tevin and I had to practically drag Rin with us when we left the next afternoon, and he only relented when I resorted to giving him a direct order. I had slept in super late, finally no longer able to fall back asleep around 1 in the afternoon, and managed to pay off a solid chunk of my sleep debt. Max had commented on tweaking my sleep efficiency after I had woken up a second time, but he was hesitant to do much meddling with my brain chemistry. I liked the idea even less than he did, so I ignored it and rolled over to go back to sleep.

An hour later and I was dressed in the plainest outfit in my closet, the embroidered black-on-black gold trimmed suit that went well with my mag-boots, and all three of us walked in a line from the elevator and down the polished hallway through the scattered well-to-do crowd that littered the recreational floor. I found there were a surprising amount of families wandering the building. I saw parents and children of all ages roaming in packs from store to store, or setting up camp on public tables with gadgets and games to entertain the kids as they gathered around to-go meals purchased from the crowded few restaurants.

The eighteenth floor of the complex was unlike anything I had ever seen, even from the days before the Links fell out of the sky and flooded the market with high-tech mass produced alien goods. Visible from any point in the open and airy public spaces, a full quarter of the floor was occupied by the brightly colored storefront of Scolopetra’s Arcade and Amusements, flanked by wide polished hallways centered on a sunken plaza and fountain. Smaller stores, restaurants, and luxury services like salons, barbers, a plastic surgeon, and coffee shops lined the other edges, and a twined together pair of roller coaster tracks arced in loops and dips overhead.

I paid for all three of our entry fees at the gate to the arcade, insisting through Tevin’s protests that he could pay for himself. I waved my mobile over the clerks scanner and blocked Tevin from waving his own wallet over the scanner. I still had plenty of money, and the fee was only 10 credits.

“I’ll pay for the group. Does the entry price pay for the games and stuff too?”

“Uh, no. You each get a card that you can load with tokens, or can sign up for an account which will get you a discount and just use your mobile.” The skinny and surprisingly sweaty teen who was manning the gate replied.

“We’ll take the cards, and put a hundred credits worth of tokens on each of them too, would ya?” I answered.

Only a few weeks ago I would have spent the time to sign up for the discount, uncaring about another few spam messages it would add to my inbox. Yet after learning I had been doxxed, I realized the threats I was now facing had stepped up from gangs, rival workers, and street drama; to truly powerful bureaucrats, possible assassination or extortion attempts from other nations, and even the direct attention of opposing and spiteful Councilors. If I could keep my personal information out of another database that could possibly be hacked into or sold off, I would choose that every time.

Tevin protested a little more, but after we had made it past the gate and into the actual arcade, he became distracted. He scanned the crowd as we walked past prize counters, a bar, and a number of statues and displays showcasing the characters of a few popular video game series and movie characters. He had an almost lost look on his face, a mix of worry and determination, which cracked into a broad smile when we came across a small group of other people crowded around one of the games.

“Kaylee!” Tevin shouted, which caused one of the women in the group to spin around, her long straight black hair whipping around her smiling face.

“Tev, you made it!” The pair rushed towards each other and the woman leapt up into Tevin’s arms, wrapping her legs around his waist while they kissed.

Rin and I exchanged glances, and he rolled his eyes as we stepped up next to them and the rest of the group turned to face us, other than the reddish haired young man who was busy playing the game they had all been watching. There were four of them, all around our age of mid to late twenties, and after Tevin had set the girl down he rested his arm across her shoulders and started introducing people.

He made an open handed gesture at each of us in turn. “Most of you have met Rin already, we met in the academy dorms, and then this is Nick, who I go waaay back with. Guys, this is my girlfriend Kaylee, and her friends; Raschel, Bree, and Andy.” Kaylee wrapped her arm around his waist as he spoke and stood pressed against him, showing off a whitened toothy smile.

“It’s great to meet you both!” She slipped out from under Tevins arm and crossed over to us with her arms extended, and I had the pleasure of watching Rin’s eyes widen in shock and his body go rigid as she jumped him with an enthusiastic hug. I smiled but managed not to laugh at his ‘deer in the headlights’ reaction, and was prepared when she broke away from him and gave me an equally thorough embrace.

“It’s nice to meet you too, all of you.” I said, covering for Rin who was glaring at Tevin, clearly blaming him for his girlfriend's invasion of his personal space. I gave Kaylee a light hug in return before we parted and she returned to Tevin’s side, slipping back under his arm.

“So you’re the group that’s adopted our friendly giant. It’s nice to meet some other people our age, and this place seems really cool. How are the games?” I nodded at the game that the guy, presumably Andy, had been playing when we walked up.

The blonde girl in the middle, Bree, replied with a big smile. “They’re good! The prizes are fun too. They import a lot of gear and your tickets carry over from visit to visit, so you can save up and get some pretty cool stuff!” She used the term ‘gear’, which was a common word for ‘imported alien gadgets’ used by people who did not regularly Link-up themselves. In the early days of the Links, a fair amount of legacy gamer lingo was quickly appropriated by society and bent to fit shapes that almost held true to their original intent.

Max startled me by appearing at the edge of the group, standing next to and looking at the smiling couple, he scratched his round chin with his nubby arm. “You wanted me to be more helpful and speak up, right? This is kind of small potatoes for my enormous capabilities, but check your back pocket. She totally slipped you some kind of card. Want me to look into it?”

I tried to suppress my reaction to Max’s appearance, but still reached a hand behind my back and felt for the card. Sure enough, there was a thin plastic-feeling rectangle in my back pocket, similar to the expired and obsolete debit card that used to be connected to my neglected real-world bank account. I had no idea what to do with that information, and it must have left me looking either confused or unimpressed.

Despite the sketchy delivery of the card, I was hesitant to allow Max to run rampant with whatever his idea of “looking into it” would be. I thought we should wait to look into it further and give her the benefit of the doubt for now. Who knows, Tevin had a pretty relaxed view of relationships, maybe he told her to slip me the card in some hairbrained attempt to set me up with her. To my surprise, Max picked up on my thoughts and replied directly as if I had spoken them aloud to him.

“Alright, gracious host. I’ll hold off on it, but I’m totally going to snoop through her social media and public accounts.”

After a beat, Bree continued with an apologetic look, probably mistaking my distraction for a reaction to her. “Oh, I guess all that stuff wouldn’t be impressive to pros like you. I bet you see cooler tech all the time!”

I shook my head and gave her my own apologetic smile. “No, no… I mean, I have seen some pretty cool things, but shopping is shopping, you know? There are so many cool things, I can’t have seen them all.” I offered her a smile, hoping to come off as less awkward than I felt.

The guy, Andy, broke into the conversation with an easy smile. “What’s the coolest thing you’ve seen in Factions? I follow a few of the raid teams like the LockOns and LiquidID, and their VODs show off some pretty epic stuff. Last month the Locks posted a pov shot of some skirmish with a Borealia PMC, and there were drones blasting into walkers and guys in power armor with those big autocannons just blasting away at each other in this mossy dead-looking forest.”

For whatever reason, the group's focus turned to me for a reply, so I chuckled a little at his enthusiasm, and shrugged. “I’m sure Tevin has the better stories of stuff like that, I haven't seen much fighting myself, but I did get to take a short ride on a True spaceship once. We blasted out into orbit in like 3 minutes and traveled clear across the continent up there in less than an hour.”

By habit, I kept the details out of my retelling even after they latched on to my talk of starships and orbit-hoppers and the differences between them. I caved under their pressure to tell more stories eventually and told them a little bit about the underhome, even sharing a few screenshots of the city I had taken and uploaded to my comm.

We wandered as a group to a buffet as we talked, and I eventually managed to divert the newcomers' attention back over to Tevin, who happily launched into vivid descriptions of some of the skirmishes he had fought in the name of the Council.

With the group distracted, it gave me a moment to think over the whole card thing. I watched Kaylee instead of Tevin as he gestured and acted out the more bombastic moments of his story, and wondered about the way she looked up at the big man as he spoke. When she noticed me watching her I looked away and turned to Rin, but not before she flashed me what felt like a conspiratorial smile.

I kept my voice low, trusting it would not carry to the others through the noisy arcade atmosphere filled with chiming games, music from overhead speakers, and groups of screaming children in the middle distance. “Have you spent much time with these guys?”

Rin replied without looking over at me, in his normal flat manner. “As a group, twenty eight hours in total. Tevin has had them over for multiple game nights the last two weeks. Kaylee has stayed at our place for the last 9 nights in a row.”

I suppressed a smile at Rin’s interpretation of my question. “Good, I’m glad you guys are making some new friends.” My urge to smile faded as I thought back to my own experience with making friends, namely the still recent awkward conversation with Kikkelin. Rin declined to reply and our attention returned to the conversation between Tevin and the group.

“There's really not a lot of difference between the raiders and what I was doing before I was assigned here,” Tevin was explaining. “Who’s funding and who gives the orders are the only things that really matter. In some other countries the lines get even blurrier though. I follow this Artanesean brigade fighting in the Centro war, right? Get this, they’re a government force fighting a real-world war, who have nearly 2 million followers from posting footage of their operations, and draw funding both from a fan or donor base as well as the government. It’s pretty wild, I tried to convince my C.O. to run that idea up the chain so we could start our own account to fund some extracurriculars, but they shot that down hard and fast. If you like watching the raid teams and want to see some real madness, you should check them out.”

The group gave a mix of oohh's and aahh's, and both Andy and Raschel pulled out their mobile comms to search for links to the channel he was talking about. I let my attention stray entirely away from the group, and decided to wander over to some of the nearby games and start using some of the tokens I’d loaded up on the sturdy plastic chit-card.

It had been ages since I did more than mess around in a local multiplayer game with Tevin and Rin, and I quickly discovered that the modest skills I had honed in my teenage years had rusted through disuse. I tried out a seemingly simple rail-shooter game, and fed it 10 credits worth of tokens just trying to get through the first level. Then I moved on to a physical game, sort of a cross between pachinko and skeeball where you rolled balls down a ramp and past obstacles in an attempt to get it to land in the more valuable spots at the bottom of the machine.

The rest of the group stayed pretty close, and from time to time we all moved as a herd to a new area of the arcade to try out new games. The shovel game was probably the most fun I had, dropping chips down in front of a bulldozer that moved back and forth and pushed little prizes, ticket vouchers, and various effect items towards a trough on either side and to the front. It felt less reliant on twitchy reflexes and more about strategy and timing. Once I found that bank of machines, I stayed there for the rest of the afternoon until we all gathered together again for a game of lazer tag, which Tevin absolutely dominated.

I had fun. I had fun for the first time in a long time, and soon forgot about the awkward encounter with Kikkelin, the looming trials I would face the next day, and even the mystery card that Kaylee had given me for whatever reason. The conversation stayed light, and we steered clear of politics and work, instead focusing on funny stories and the small dramas that played out amongst the people living in the isolated tower.

At the end of the evening, our two mixed groups had ridden the elevator together and the others departed floor by floor. Andy and Raschel lived on the 38th floor, while Bree and Kaylee lived on the 61st. Tevin filled the silence of the rest of the ride with questions about what I thought of his new friends, and the arcade and general amenities of the tower. He was so clearly excited about everything that I felt too guilty to bring up the card his girl had slipped me, so I decided to forgo saying anything for now. I could bring it up with him after the trials and get it all sorted out. The whole situation was probably harmless anyways, no need to ruin a great night with yet another small drama.

Once I returned to the semi-solitude of my own apartment and got a door between myself and my staff, I finally pulled the card out from my pocket and looked it over. It was sort of like a business card, with her name and a professional looking picture of her in a fancy dress taking up a whole side of it, while the flip side had a scan-code, an embedded chip of some kind, and a list of various social media links. On my way to my spa, which was easily my favorite part of my new apartment, I tossed it onto the top of my dresser next to the empty weapon-rack and went to enjoy my soak.