'Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!
We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.'
- from poem 'The Next War' by Wilfred Owen
He decided it was time for a break. Releasing his head - and mind - from the virtual testing console in the Division, Dr. Benjamin Fielding let his eyes adjust to the mellow light, taking a sip of dark, totally cold coffee. He couldn't resist tapping some keys and bringing up an info-site on a nearby terminal. Rubbing tired eyes and forehead he just needed to check the noise in the Nattersphere...
@spiratimes: The Tower Rising: report on the latest Game Worlds arriving in The Spiral Tower #spiralworlds
@spiraltimes: Users still acclimatizing well to the new Interface #spiralinterface
@spiraltimes : Rumours of a nature game world buried within The Spiral... follow for more...! @superworldnotes
@spiraltimes : a mystical nature game world takes Spiral users back to their roots... and changes their games?...rumours here @spiraltimes
Good news, Ben figured. He was excited at this stage. A little. It's starting. And that meant something else too, now that all the doors had been locked; the keys scattered and 'sown'. It meant it was at last time for him to go. To disappear. Finally... to disconnect. As far as this was possible in a super-connected age.
He let his mind wander further as he gazed towards the nearest, non-intensive source of light. Would it be possible? To die is no easy thing, after all. But then, he wasn't... dying. But... changing. And one can only change when one has finished something, or if one must escape something, in order to alter the immediate environment and see clearly again, to continue again... even begin something - brand new...
He started his long, routine walk out of the complex, to the place where - only he - was permitted to smoke.
It might be possible to change environment in the virtual, to see many things; many perspectives. But even there you couldn't feel a new environment. The real breath of the Source. The breath and the legacy of death in everything, despite how hard they had worked to simulate even that...
Oh, but death was 'in there' alright, but it was... very different... old chum...
The fabric of Fountellion still illuminated this, starkly... even to him...
And it would so to others, he was sure.
When he arrived he took a deep drag and closed his eyes in the warm light, mostly unaware that at this moment another man - quite some distance away - was also smoking a cigarette and looking forwards and... outwards. A much younger man named Dan Harvester, tired gamer seeking a new world that just might change his game...
[FRAGMENT COMPLETED! +7 XP : PROJECT ITEM - see more under XP + Ranking]
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In THE SPIRAL: Connected Stories & Fragments from the Virtual Future
Science FictionVIRTUAL INSPIRATION: TEST OUT the SPIRAL INTERFACE and ENTER the brave new SUPER-WORLDS... For there are no limitations, only imagination and ideas manifested in these initial projections and snapshots - voices from the ashes of the Neuroceans as t...
