Frontier Online

Launch Part 1

Ryan eased gingerly into his chair, leaning the polished dark wood of his cane against the minimalist style desk. The cane's head caught on one of the metal handles so that it wouldn't fall out of reach. 

He was exhausted from work, and his back barely held up on the way home. As odd as it may have seemed for a near-paraplegic to roam the city by foot, he had little say in the matter. To put it charmingly, he was pretty broke.

Still...it pays nearly double what my old job did. Ryan admitted that his old convenience store job down in the Second Agricultural Level wasn't worth the commute at minimum wage.

As worn out as structural analysis made him, he would happily dance to the tune of forty-thousand credits a year to meet his goals. His lanky frame flinched away from the chair as his back flared, complaining about all the stairs he forced himself to climb for work that day.

Besides his regular salary, Ryan was ecstatic as he stroked the manilla envelope in his coat pocket. He'd hidden it deep in the inner pocket so that Scavs wouldn't try to bully him into transferring his bonus to them.

A massive sigh escaped his body. Ryan ruefully recalled when he was backed into a corner on the way back to the mag-lev trains. Over a dozen; Scavs pinned him down and beat him until he was forced to give them his day's bonus. 

Since then, Ryan dispensed with the daily bonuses and lived frugally, surviving until he knew he could get the paycheck home safely.

Ryan's body still showed bruises from that beating, not out of place from his normal, so he shrugged through the pain. His fingers trembled as he carefully pulled out the envelope and broke the seal. Excitement seized his chest and stole his breath as the paycheck slipped out and drifted onto his desk.

Twenty-thousand credits. Eight months of hard work, saving bonuses from discovered structural damage and poor quality, finally paid off. 

Ryan quickly leaned forward, ignoring the burst of pain in his back as his hands flew across the keyboard in front of him. He accessed his banking information, and within a minute, he had the check scanned into his computer terminal. 

He felt the vibration from his Com-Ring on his right hand as the balance registered in his bank account.

Ryan took quick, baited breaths as he waved his hands through the virtual controls over his keyboard and navigated to the most visited page in his search history. With a practiced flip, he checked his Com-Ring, the AR display filling his hand, curved like he was holding an antique Twenty-First Century smartphone. 

He verified the balance of thirty-five-thousand credits in his account with a sigh of relief.

[FRONTIER ONLINE] blazed across the top of his computer screen, a lively, emerald green. By far the brightest light in his room, Ryan squinted against the green tint. Underneath the logo, videos started to play themselves, advertizing the beta-"divers" highlighting game features. 

Since the game was a "Full-Dive" type, the term for divers became 'divers' for Full-Dive-VRMMO or FDVRMMO. Ryan probably spent a few hundred hours in front of his computer over the last year, watching those videos over and over again as he day-dreamed.

He might have stopped to watch them again, but his excitement started to vanish as icy fear gripped his lungs. Ryan nervously swept his mop of hair out of his eyes and waved his hands a few more times before he stopped at the order screen. 

[Frontier Online] required a unique gaming capsule that couldn't be purchased anywhere else.

With a dozen different capsules on the market, the unique unit sparked outrage in the gaming and VR communities as a greedy money grab, but MONTECH stuck to its marketing decision.