The High Five

Archipelia

Before going to space, Bobby had never been fifty miles from home. If it wasn't for trips to the hospital, he would have barely left home at all. He had an extreme case of brittle bone disease, osteogenesis imperfecta. His body didn't produce enough collagen. He had come out of the womb with arm and leg bones as thin and brittle as dry linguini. His early childhood was marked by a series of painful reconstructive surgeries. His skeleton was fixed in place by a semi-rigid mesh that expanded as his bones grew. With the aid of a lightweight exo-frame, he could walk independently. Yet his bones remained thin, crooked, and fragile.

Bobby's condition wasn't helped by his unwillingness to stick to strengthening exercises, which was mostly owed to his early discovery of immersive video games. At first, he was encouraged to play. What else was he supposed to do while aching and immobilized? His fingers got a good workout at least. While slender and slightly misshapen, they were dexterous and quick, honed through countless hours of operating keyboards and controllers. It seemed that all Bobby needed to make it through life were quick fingers and an even quicker mind.

When Bobby entered Archipelia, it was love at first sight. He had been playing video games for as long as he could remember, but they were mostly puzzle or plot driven. Archipelia was different. For one, it was next-gen virtual reality with dream-like visuals. A d-realm. For another, it was open-ended. There was a storyline you played to level up, but once you maxed out at level 100, you were free to roam wherever you pleased. At that point, your survival depended on your skill, your allies, and your ability to collect rare items that conferred special powers like invisibility or wolf-speak. What set Archipelia apart from other d-realms was its scale and variety. Each island was governed by a different set of magical laws set by the whims of a local goddess. Powers and skills that dominated on one island would be diminished or completely ineffective on another, requiring a whole new character build. The game started with a cluster of seven islands but, within a few years, had expanded to over thirty.

Bobby's Archipelia journey progressed through three stages that spanned his adolescence into early adulthood.

The first stage was the play-through stage. Bobby leveled up and developed his skills and reflexes in battle. In team quests, he took the role of boss slayer, conserving his relics and magic-fueling mana to take down the toughest baddies at the end. As a solo player, he played a bounty hunter, tracking down beasts, abominations, and bandits. The game was designed to be fair and reward hard-won skills that came with countless hours of gameplay. Still, there were ways to gain an edge. Little tricks. Like casting a spell while making it look like you were drawing a sword, or peeking through solid walls by fast-panning viewing angles. It wasn't cheating. Bugs were a part of any d-realm. But you had to be on your toes. Once a trick became known to all, it no longer conferred an advantage, and updates were always plugging old bugs while creating new ones.

Bobby's real edge was his quick wits and relentless drive. He played longer and harder than his friends, only sleeping a few hours a night. Aside from eating and schoolwork, which he quickly breezed through online, he spent every waking moment in the game. On weekends, he would binge for thirty or forty hours straight before crashing. His parents didn't object. They were busy people, and it kept him occupied. His test scores were good enough, and he was making friends—so why interfere? His old friends, who were also gamers, gradually drifted away. They had real world lives. Bobby had become hard-core.

The second stage was the profit stage. At some point, Bobby started to notice a lot of max-level characters that had zero skills and no sense of the game. Zombies. Characters with no brains. Sometimes they traveled in zombie packs.

When Bobby complained about them, another hard-core twixted him privately. The selling of characters and loot outside the in-game market was discouraged if not illegal. It violated the game's rules of fairness. Furthermore, it cut the gamemaker out of the transaction. If caught, both the seller and buyer would get a lifetime ban from Archipelia. But some of the hard-cores were doing it anyway. They would max out characters and sell them to the highest bidder in the d-arkring. A skilled player could create a max character in about four days. Bobby could do it in two-and-a-half. A basic max-character could sell for fifty invisicoin—about four thousand dollars—as much as Bobby's dad made in two weeks at his warehouse job. But throw in some rare loot and a castle and it could go for much higher. Bobby's biggest take was over a hundred and twenty thousand dollars in a single month.