The communal pods probably wouldn't let Caleb enter if he was now locked out of them without paying his tuition. The room was locked and even if he followed someone in, it still required a keycard to enter and start the pods. His keycard was now blacklisted from entering rooms like the communal pod room. If he hadn't called it his home for the past two days he wouldn't have been able to enter The World at all.
He reached for his wallet and pulled out the cards he had in his name. One was his regular bank account where his parents used to send him money. Drained. The other was the one he used for The World. $3,100.
It was better than nothing. He went off campus and walked three blocks to the nearest rent-a-pod facility. The place looked like how textbooks described arcades looked like in the early 2000s. Neon lights that illuminated a layer of smoke. He approached the person attending to the store.
"How much for a session?"
"Six" the young man responded. He hadn't looked up from his phone at all.
"Oh six dollars that's not so bad" Caleb said. He had that much in bills and coins. He began to take them out.
"Hundred." The attendant said in an exasperated voice. If he could show emotion this was it.
Caleb couldn't believe it. "You're not scamming me, are you?"
He tapped the taped piece of paper between them. It looked like it hadn't been changed out, for better or for worse. The price stayed the same.
"Fine." Caleb swiped his card and ate the fee.
"Row T, number fifty-one" the attendant said without acknowledging anything that happened.
He approached the designated pod. It looked older than the ones on campus, the haptic suit had even more tears, but he didn't have time to think about what happened to the person in their last session.
He entered The World.
The structural overlays tore at the edges when he tried to move his viewpoint.
Old stupid hardware.
Not a system flag. Just the gap between what the pod had left in its life, and what The World required. He pulled the angle back to close range and the tearing stopped. The structures past forty meters were flat gray tessellated planes where the mesh detail should have loaded. He could see the outline of his forge station from here. He could not read it at workable distance.
The Hollows at campus pod was a sensory environment he had not thought to appreciate until it was gone.
The forge panel opened at half resolution. The essence-thread display ran at two-thirds granularity. The yield readout was present but soft at the margins. He positioned the bar stock and set his hands.
Swing.
He brought the hammer down, trying to forge from rebar.
Haptic feedback came back partial. Pressure bloom across both palms. Correct resistance on contact. Correct registration through the grip. He held the Temper position and waited.
Nothing happened.
Swing.
He brought the hammer down again.
He felt the same haptic feedback, the same pressure across both palms. It should have started something.
Nothing happened.
He realized it was pointless to try again. Temper and bind might as well be a foreign idea.
He stood at the forge station, his forge sense was reaching through the contact layer and returning degraded data. Not a null. Not an error. Everything at two-thirds fidelity. He had worked at full resolution for six weeks. The numbers he were seeing were something recognizable, but something you couldn't use.
The northeast satellite anchor had been running a compression variance at the edge of his acceptable band for four sessions. He needed the actual forge-sense assessment through the anchor's surface. At one-third granularity he couldn't distinguish between the variance holding steady and the variance running worse.
Reduced resolution was the same as no answer on the question that mattered.
He could confirm everything existed. He could not do anything with that.
He logged out.
The pod ceiling was lower than the campus pod. Older. A water stain in a place that should have been hydrophobic. He pulled the visor off and sat in the pod with his phone. The foam seal peeled away from his temples with a soft wet sound.
His thumbs moved before he decided to move them, and pulled the visor down. Immediately he opened a DM with ta1lorath and sent the specs without context.
[FPS: ~15 / Haptic latency: 280ms / Render: incomplete past 40m / unusable]
He hit send and didn't regret it.
Three seconds, he received a DM
[ta1lorath: 018-491-0111 don't save it. call once u log]
He got out of the pod after receiving the message.
The facility lobby had linoleum floor and a strip light that hummed. A vending machine had four items left. He stood at the end of the pod corridor and looked at his phone.
He already had the number entered in his phone. Despite how long he's messaged Ta1lorath, there were still so many things he didn't know about them.
He dialed, feeling his cold phone pressed against his ear.
It rang twice.
A woman's voice picked up. "Hello?"
"I think I have the wrong number" Caleb said without thinking. His thumb slammed the red hang up button before the rest of his brain caught up.
He stared at the ended call screen.
His mental model had been built from two hundred messages. Someone who knew proxy routing and didn't explain what else they knew.
Whatever profile he had built on ta1lorath was not on the voice that answered.
Meanwhile, he heard one word and his thumb had killed the call like swatting a fly. All because the voice didn't match the ta1lorath in his head.
He crawled back into the pod and re-read the message.
[ta1lorath: 018-491-0111 don't save it. call once u log]
It was the same number he had dialed.
He had hung up on her. Caleb crawled back out of the pod and kicked his feet up against the vending machine.
He dialed the same number.
It rang once.
"Hello?"
Same voice. Same single word. No irritation in it. There was no confusion to it.
The call had already lasted two seconds, longer than the first call.
"It's me," was all Caleb could say.
He could hear her take a deep breath. "Lena." She said with no further weight to it. Direct. No warmup. The same way she messaged. He just hadn't heard it before.
"I have a spare pod in my apartment, but I'd like to see you in person first. Can you meet at Desielara's?"
He put the phone down and looked the name up. It was a high end coffee spot on the other side of the country.
"Yeah. It'll take me two hours." He finally said.
"You're that far away?" Her voice carried curiosity to it. "Isn't it two in the morning for you? Go to bed. It can wait."
It couldn't, but ta1lorath, or rather, Lena, didn't know his circumstances.
"Okay, I'll be there in eight hours. Is that fine?"
"Great! It's a..." she began to say something but swallowed her words. "I'll see you in eight hours." she said professionally.
He heard the phone chirp as she ended the call.
The nearest transit hub was just two blocks south. Express departures ran at the top of every hour without fail. Transit was a solved issue in this world unlike in game. He could go from one side of the world to the other before coffee went cold.
Getting to the other side of the country was barely something that registered as a problem to anyone, even a broke student like him.
He stood in the facility lobby, unaware his phone was still pressed to his ear.
Caleb turned to his internal picture of ta1lorath, at least the one he had unconsciously made of her.
He hadn't realized he had made one until now. He didn't realize it was wrong until now either.
Two hundred DMs. Six weeks of intimate operations. The picture had been built from everything she sent and nothing she said about herself. He'd been using it like a fixture. The same way he'd been using the northeast anchor read. And he never bothered to check it directly. Never thought to.
He had used their DMs as a tool.
He was wrong.
Lena was her name. Ta1lorath was just a handle.
She had known his name from the beginning of the operation. Not his handle. His actual name. She'd understood the Covenant structure before he had. What it was. What it meant about the kind of player he was. She traced two layers into a cartel proxy wall and delivered the result in two sentences. Meanwhile he filed it inconclusive and moved on.
The whole time there had been a person watching the full operation from a position he had never looked at.
He recalled their very first DMs. The words now carried a different voice and meaning behind them. The voice that had told him fifty thousand was embarrassing for the Cartel and don't let it be embarrassing for you. The voice that had sent the proxy wall result without dressing it up. The voice that had given him the trace data in two sentences and closed the thread and waited.
He had been treating that voice like a data source.
She had been watching the operation like someone who already knew what kind of thing it was, before Caleb realized what he was building.
He never wondered what she was getting out of this besides the percentage she asked for.
Caleb went back to the pod he rented out. His footsteps echoed in the corridor. The session timer showed eighteen minutes on the rented session.
He picked up his bag, he wasn't going to use the rest of the time he paid for. His footsteps echoed throughout the pod rows.
"Thank you for coming" the attendant said without looking up. It felt like a part of the job rather than something coming from the shell sitting in a chair.
He walked out of the facility.
The glass door swung shut behind him. Through it, the pod was already dark. Just an oblong chair in a sealed compartment. Just the faint glow of the standby light on the control panel.
He did not stop. He had to go see Lena.