Chapter 1

Apollo Cirillo’s last day on Procyon Palladium Mining Station 22 started so routinely that he hardly could have expected that everything about his life was going to change all at once. He woke at 4 AM station time. His parents’ sexbot Becky made him a light breakfast after which he had a quick shower, slipped on a pair of comfortable sweatpants and his virtual reality headset and watched his small, efficient gray and silver bedroom dissolve around him to be replaced by an atrium opening onto a late twentieth century high school classroom.

As soon as the virtual world had faded in around him, his girlfriend Tamara’s disembodied voice said, “How old should I be today?”

“Fifteen, please. The release notes for this next version are mostly about separating responsibilities for discipline and instruction into different NPCs. We can use the bright-lining rules to make sure the teachers hand off correctly.” Apollo summoned up a modern tablet, one of the many anachronistic props students would be able to use in this classroom by default once it went into production,

Tamara faded in at his side dressed in a starched white blouse and green plaid skirt, light brown hair in a pixie cut. She had freckles today. “You know, if we’d actually been going to secondary for as long as we’ve been doing this job, we’d be seniors today.”

Apollo tapped on his tablet, saw that he’d logged 4,321 hours as a junior quality assurance engineer for Universal Simulations and Scenarios, and did the math. “You’re right - at least using a Procyon standard school year and assuming an eight hour day...” He could see Tamara staring at her own pad and recognized he was, as she was fond of saying, getting too bogged down in the details. Rather than slice and dice their service time together, he switched to a topic she would be happy he noticed. “Have I seen this avatar on you before?”

“She’s the model I created to be Princess Marian, aged down to a teenager.” Tamara gave a little curtsy of acknowledgement.

“Right ... she slit my throat in that module where I rescued her from brigands.” Apollo laughed at his own shocked reaction to how that story ended so abruptly. “Ungrateful brat.”

“Yeah, if you ever want to run that one again, I reworked the combat rules and downgraded her inventory to make sudden lethality a lot less probable.” Tamara wrinkled her nose. “I can put on a different avatar if it’ll be too weird engaging in public displays of affection with me wearing her face.”

“It’ll be fine. Unless we find a bug, the system won’t let us get too far with that anyway, not under Procyon standard settings anyway,” Apollo pointed out.

Tamara nodded and looked into the classroom with its neat rows of desks, green chalkboards, and open windows overlooking a grassy quadrangle outside. “Do you think they’ll ever change the parameters? It’s been late twentieth century suburban America for hundreds of years now.”

“US&S has tried other settings, but close to ninety percent of school districts use the defaults. People tend to think of it as the last time life was really simple - not to mention that it gives them an excuse to have the students disconnected from the Net. No active nanites, not even basic rigs.” Apollo answered.

“They could use a more modern setting and just leave those things out the same way they model the end of the Terrocene without including the racism, active shooter drills, permadeath, or water riots.” Tamara pointed out. “It’s like they want us to look back fondly at our last days as an Earth-bound species while forgetting all the reasons we had to leave.”

Apollo could have pointed out that the scenario authors didn’t gloss over those elements in the school’s history modules. Humanity’s narrow escape from extinction by banding together to get off-planet was introduced early and repeated often, but he knew that wouldn’t be addressing whatever point Tamara was trying to get at. In vSpace, your avatar was only as expressive as you chose and a glance showed Apollo that his girlfriend was radiating discontent the way only a late twentieth century teenage girl with no nanites in her blood really could. He asked, “Something on your mind?”

Tamara bit her lip and nodded. “Did you know Billy’s done 40,000 hours of QA?”

“I ... did not. Did he ... I guess he told you?” Apollo knew Tamara actively socialized with some of their coworkers outside of the work sims. He’d even joined her from time to time. But, he couldn’t imagine why she or anyone else would spend more time with Bill Carver than was strictly necessary.

Tamara nodded. “He’s the drummer in my Behind the Music play group. We had some out-of-character downtime after our lead singer died of a heroin overdose and he mentioned that he’s less than ten thousand work hours away from vested rejuvenation.”

“Good for him,” Apollo managed to say, careful to not project the instinctive surge of jealousy into his avatar. Having grown up on a mining station where the conglomerate aggressively discouraged its workers from having children, he tended to form extremely tight interpersonal bonds with his peers, but knew that Tamara needed a large social group to be happy. He just hadn’t thought it would include the same Bill Carver whose claim to fame was that he often discovered bugs with how the systems under test handled antisocial behavior without really looking for them.

Tamara lowered her head. “I just never really thought anybody did the full fifty k in QA. This job is supposed to be a stepping stone for me, not a whole lifetime.”

This certainly wasn’t news to Apollo. He’d first met Tamara in a sim sponsored by the Procyon Senate entitled “What Comes Next?” that had mostly been a chance for representatives of old low-effort worlds to pitch their home planets as destinations for those members of their graduating class who weren’t planning to start a career right away, but had also included a small job fair for the two dozen or so in-system employers who weren’t involved in the mineral extraction business.

Most of the job fair attendees, Apollo included, had worn their school-day avatars with slightly more business-appropriate clothing. That meant human-normal height, weight, coloration, and a maximum mean attraction index of eight - what Tamara called their “skins of habit.” Tamara herself had attended as a fifteen centimeter tall pixie with pink skin, functional wings and elaborate flight patterns that allowed her to dart in and out of the crowd. Apollo had been immediately enchanted by her and followed her into the US&S exhibit at least as much because he wanted to meet her as because he was interested in getting a foot in the door of the entertainment business.

Right from the beginning, Tamara had told Apollo she didn’t particularly want to work in educational simulation quality assurance. Where many children had gone through a phase shortly after stepping into their first sim of wanting to design, create, and control virtual environments for a living, Tamara had taken every opportunity to learn how. The pixie avatar was a showcase piece and, even though she knew US&S only hired QA engineers, not designers or programmers in Procyon system, she’d hoped that word of her talent would percolate through the company and someone would consider it worth shipping her out-system eventually.

Seeking to reassure her, Apollo said, “Bill’s an outlier. We’ve been doing this a little over two years and half the people who were here when we started have moved on to other things.”

“Did they ... or did they drop out or retire fully vested for rejuvenation? I know Jade went on to college, but I can’t remember anybody mentioning a new job anywhere,” Tamara challenged him, then shook her head. “I’m sure some of them have moved on to better jobs, but I’m starting to get antsy about when it’s going to be my turn. Meet in my private space after work?”

Apollo nodded, not looking forward to spending a full school day wondering what Tamara wanted to say outside of their work simulation. “Sure ... or maybe we can find a big enough bug to send this one back to the programmers and take a break while they deploy the next sim for us to test.”

Tamara raised an eyebrow. “You’ve got something specific in mind?”

“I do actually. I want to see what happens if we introduce a high-level discipline violation when there are no disciplinarian NPCs in the room. If the programmers have followed their usual happy-path-only thinking, there could be a glitch there,” Apollo offered.

Tamara’s gloomy look dissolved into a broad smile. “You want me to take a swing at you maybe?”

Apollo shrugged. “You can if it will make you feel better, but I think that will just trigger the suppressors. I have something more subtle in mind.”

Tamara gestured towards the empty classroom. “Lead on then.”

Apollo quickly switched to a follow-behind view then did a full three-sixty rotation to visually confirm his avatar was configured and dressed as he expected, switched back to first-person view, and stepped forward into the classroom. As he and Tamara headed for a pair of desks in the back of the room, a steady stream of other students filed in and took their own seats. Tamara looked around and remarked, “Trending about half parochial as expected under consensus dress.”

Apollo nodded. Procyon System’s school subnet filled about half of each classroom with procgens - procedurally generated characters that existed to fit in with the actual students and, in many cases, to teach socialization. Palladium-22 was a temporary mining habitation with an aggressive anti-natal policy for most employees. Children were a luxury reserved for management. Even though nearly a hundred thousand people lived on the asteroid, Apollo had met fewer than a dozen other children before he was old enough to accept the nanites that enabled him to enroll him in the Procyon System Central School. For the first two years of school, most of his friends had been procedurally generated and he still had the instinct to turn to those procgens for most basic interactions.

Once the students filed in, the teacher followed - a pretty mocha-skinned thirty-something woman of non-specific race, her brown hair in a bun. She went to the chalkboard and wrote “Miss Brown” in white chalk. As soon as she turned to face the class, Apollo rose and walked towards her.

“Mr. Cirillo, is there something I can help you with?” she asked. Apollo ignored her question and continued walking forward. As he got too close, she took one step backwards, then another so that her back was almost against the chalkboard. “Apollo...”

Apollo kept her cornered against the board, reached up, and started to unbutton her blouse. She froze and, after a moment, relaxed and stared blankly forward as he continued to strip her to the waist. The procgens continued to talk among themselves as if nothing unusual was happening.

“Well, that’s certainly a bug,” said Tamara from back at her desk.

“Bring up the logs for her, please. I think I know what’s happening,” said Apollo.

Tamara tapped away at her tablet. The large chalkboard at the front of the room flickered to show a stream of error messages. “She’s ... looking for an appropriate response in ... oh, she’s trying to switch to disciplinarian mode, seg faulting, and resetting over and over again.”

“Because they took out the discipline module and ported it to the disciplinarian NPCs,” said Apollo.

Tamara shook her head. “How could they miss something that big? Do they do any develop-time testing at all?”

Apollo leaned back to look at the chalkboard. “This isn’t tracking through the normal response channels. It registers as an emergency, triggers the limbic response system, and completely circumvents the personality modules long enough to determine it’s not a terminator-level emergency, dumps into the normal emergency response tree, and tries to launch the appropriate discipline escalation module.”

“Which isn’t there because the programmers removed the discipline subsystem and didn’t update the emergency response tree?” Tamara shook her head. “Remind me again why you aren’t a programmer?”

Apollo didn’t want to answer that question. That he’d been taking programming and design classes was meant to be a surprise, but he hadn’t completely finished creating the gift he was making for her. He punted. “This is low level stuff. Programmers probably haven’t really touched it in centuries.”

Tamara rose from her desk and strolled up to where Apollo had Miss Brown pinned against the chalkboard. “I’ve got the details logged. Can you afford twenty minutes of six time in my private space while they reset the scenario?”

Apollo brought up his nanite levels on his tablet. They were close to maximum. “Sure.”

“See you there then.” Tamara leaned in and kissed him on the cheek.

As Miss Brown turned her head, her blouse fell from her shoulders to the floor. “Apollo, Tamara, save that for after class, please.”

Apollo smirked. “See? That she knows how to deal with.”

Tamara smiled at him and faded away. Apollo called out, “Sudo end simulation.” The classroom and everyone in it froze, dissolved away, and was replaced by the library motif of Apollo’s private space. He stayed there just long enough to adjust his time dilation coefficient to six and request entry to Tamara’s private space.

Apollo always felt a moment of vertigo when he sped up virtual time and billions of nanites in his blood shifted their functioning - either to feed him stimuli faster or to increase his sense of time passing. The scenario they’d been testing had run at normal speed with one minute of real time being perceived as one minute of virtual time. With the time dilation set as it was, he and Tamara would be able to cram two hours of simulation into the next twenty real minutes.

It took only a few seconds for Tamara to approve his request, causing a doorway with glowing edges to appear in the air in the middle of the library floor in front of Apollo. On the other side was a moonlit forest glade with a stream running through it. Not for the first time, Apollo was embarrassed by the disparity between his private space on the net compared to Tamara’s. He’d barely changed his from the defaults while she’d turned hers into a medieval fantasy kingdom complete with fully-coded NPCs, settings, and scenarios to play through. According to some very old laws, every human being was entitled to a certain amount of processor time on their solar system’s network - more than enough to maintain a private virtual space entirely under their own control. Perhaps recognizing the paucity of actual human existence in a star system dedicated almost entirely to breaking up rocks, Procyon provided an allowance above and beyond the human standard. Plenty of people used their private space to set up a business on the net. Tamara had used a collection of programming tricks that Apollo hadn’t really understood when she explained them to make hers seem to stretch out for miles in every direction.

Tamara had shown Apollo this glade fairly early on in their relationship. He didn’t remember its purpose, but with Tamara nowhere in sight, he took the fact that he’d appeared on a footpath surrounded by fireflies as big as his fist as an indication to walk forward until he came upon a freestanding wood and paper building with lanterns glowing on the porch. As he approached, he was suffused with a sense of well-being and welcomeness.

That was a trick he’d never experienced in another simulation. Nanomedicine had reached a point where pretty much any mental state could be induced and any physical one stimulated. With the right nanites in your system and all of the safeties on your VR rig turned off, a simple program could induce a days-long orgasm or mind-locking terror. With its focus on work, the Procyon system had banned such extremes of simulation, but he’d heard stories of people on other worlds who just blissed out completely for as long as they could afford to have their nanites replaced.

Most people, as far as Apollo knew, chose to get their endorphins in conjunction with virtual simulations. The system administrators maintained a library of games that would take thousands of years for someone to play through entirely and pretty much any scenario you could imagine as well as a copy of the Great Library maintained at Proxima. Pretty much whatever you wanted to learn or experience was available via your private space on the web.

That was why receiving a new sensation was so startling. In order to make Apollo feel safe and welcome, Tamara could have just surrounded him with cues that this was a safe and welcoming place. To give him the sense that safety and welcomeness were being broadcast to him would have required her to study and understand the brain chemistry markers for those feelings and then written the instruction set for the nanites to trigger those markers.

Fiction was full of scenarios where evil programmers drove people insane or killed them outright by messing with their brain chemistry. But, these always relied on wildly improbable coincidences or a fundamental misunderstanding of how VR worked. The rigs that transmitted signals and the nanites that interpreted them both had to agree that the impulses sent by simulations were acceptable. Manufacturers, end users, and governments all imposed limits like the one Procyon had against blissing out. With a thought, Apollo could shut off everything or limit the simulation to visual and audio input, detaching himself from the chemical feedback all together.

Still, he left his settings pretty much wide open when visiting his girlfriend’s private space. Doing so in a programmer’s sandbox risked some deeply unpleasant experiences, but he trusted Tamara not to deliberately mindfuck him. Even if she did so accidentally, it wouldn’t do any permanent damage.

So, he mounted the three wooden steps onto the porch of the building and entered an inner room that took up most of the interior space. The walls were the same paper material as those outside and the floor polished hardwood. In the center of the room was a low altar with a thick cushion in front of it and an obsidian idol in the shape of a fox on top. Incense burned in a holder in front of the idol.

Apollo knelt on the cushion and lowered his head. Internally, he knew that he and Tamara had limited time before they would need to get back to testing. But, he’d learned it was both more fun and faster to stay in the spirit of the scenarios Tamara set up for him than to break character and ask her to hurry it up.

Light flashed off of a surface down by Apollo’s knees and, at the same time, he felt the tug of a small weight that hadn’t been there before settling in his pocket. He fished around and came out with a golden coin with a square hole in the center of it. As the source of the light proved to be a small donation bowl with several dull coins already in it, he tapped the coin on the edge of the cup and dropped it in as an offering.

A woman’s bare feet with toenails painted red appeared on the edge of his vision. When he looked up, he caught only a glimpse of a blonde woman with fox ears and a matching tail before she turned and bolted out the door. Even though she’d shed the Princess Marian avatar in favor of a shorter curvier one, Tamara had kept the parochial uniform intact.

Apollo sprang to his feet and gave chase, finding himself far more nimble and fleet here than he’d ever been in realspace where it was possible to stumble and fall just because a bit of floor was imperfectly welded or smack your head against a too-low pipe in a moment of inattentiveness. Here, even though the forest floor looked terrifyingly irregular, he would only trip if Tamara planned for him to do so or he chose to for reasons of his own.

He didn’t trip or stumble. Instead, Fox-Tamara ran like the wind, first along the path, then into the thick of the woods, weaving in and out between trees, looking back over her shoulder every so often, a joyous teasing smile on her lips that clearly said, “Catch me if you can.”

They ran long enough and fast enough that Apollo wondered if he was meant to catch her. Spending two hours in a scenario where all he did was chase his girlfriend through the woods wasn’t the worst use of fast-time, but the longer he chased her, the more he wanted a very specific better use.

When he started to feel fatigue in his legs, he wondered if he was supposed to do something other than give chase. Fatigue usually only happened in scenarios as a way to discourage whatever you were trying to do - like wandering off past where the developers had placed scripted content. He remembered from testing a particularly glitchy module on the subject that nanites in his legs were deliberately generating lactic acid to make the limbs feel heavy and tired.

But before he could choose a different course of action, Tamara ran almost face-first into a moss-covered rock higher than her head. She jumped a good meter and a half in the air trying to get over it, but instead had to turn and go around. Apollo closed the gap between them and grabbed for her waist, but she twisted away at the last moment and he was only able to slap her fox tail.

Still, this had an unexpectedly dramatic effect. Tamara gasped and stumbled at the touch. As she tried to rise, Apollo tackled her and they rolled along the ground in a tangle of limbs. It was unclear to him whether they were fighting or engaging in foreplay, but the fierce smile never left Tamara’s lips and soon enough she was straddling his thighs, hands nimbly unbuckling his belt. He wriggled out of his pants and reached for her. She scooted forward and kissed him, bare thighs under her skirt brushing against him.

As she gripped his cock, she whispered, “You don’t play fair, mortal. My ears and tail are very sensitive, you know.”

They were apparently sensitive enough to make her wet and ready for him because he slid inside her easily, thrusting upward with an urgency born of their chase. He let her stay on top for only a short while before twisting, spilling her onto the ground, pinning her, and driving into her again, taking full advantage of the nearly-superhuman agility the scenario had granted him.

He thrust into Tamara, kissing her fiercely, stroking her breasts through her blouse. He considered tearing the garment off of her, but instead reached up, gripped one of the fox ears and ran his thumb over the downy furniture inside it. Tamara bucked and moaned.

“Just how sensitive are your ears, little fox-girl?” He gripped tighter.

Tamara’s eyes shone with happiness. “Very sensitive, but I’m no girl. I’m kitsune, a fox spirit and guardian of the shrine. Your offering pleased me.”

Apollo reached up and took her other ear in his other hand, drawing it down enough to kiss the tip of it. “And your offerings please me.”

For a time, they enjoyed each other, bodies moving together, clothes coming off. Sex with Tamara was amazing. Like everyone else, Apollo had taken ample advantage of both partial and full adult access to the net immediately on receiving it, coupling with pretty much every classmate who knew his name and would agree to fuck him. Even after hundreds of years of simulation, there was still something a real partner could give you that a scripted NPC or procgen couldn’t. With a real person, you never knew entirely what to expect.

At least, that was what he’d thought at first. It had taken being with Tamara to make Apollo realize that sex with most people was, within certain broad parameters, largely predictable. They tended to wear the same avatar every time, many using the form they’d worn throughout secondary, possibly modified to be a little older and a little sexier than the school system’s subnet would allow. The setting might change, but the sex was pretty much the same. If Apollo’s partners had any more exotic desires, they seemed to be saving them for their primary partners.

Of course, Tamara was Apollo’s primary partner and, unless she was secretly rich enough to be in fast-time whenever they were apart, he was hers. Even though they lived too far apart to make it practical to meet in person, they spend most of their waking hours together in vSpace between work and leisure. Many days, they only separated for eating, exercise, and bathing, the three main activities it was still more practical to attend to in real space instead of expending nanites. But, she’d been different from the very start. The first time they’d had sex, she’d worn a human-sized version of the pixie avatar he’d met her in. For a while, she’d had a different form every time he came to visit her. In Procyon’s vSpace, there were hundreds of thousands of avatars available for free, most customizable along somewhere between a dozen and a hundred axes. Character artists had been creating those forms and releasing them into the public domain for centuries. But, Tamara loved wearing her own creations most of all. She mostly worked in medieval fantasy motifs. She’d been an elf, an angel, a demon, an evil sorceress, a holy sister of some non-specified religion, and a dozen different human characters. While she often had Apollo appear in her inner sanctum, he could just as easily teleport into a scenario she’d created either as a portfolio piece or just to amuse him.

Apollo had teased Tamara by suggesting that those nights were a bit like taking his work home with him, testing the scenarios she’d written instead of the ones their employer paid them to test. Tamara had quite rightly pointed out the crucial and fundamental difference: her scenarios almost always ended in or were quickly followed by sex.

With other women, sex in vSpace often followed a meal, a long walk, and on one memorable occasion, watching an entire flatvid in a darkened room and happened in a room full of candles or on a beach at sunset. Set with Tamara was just as likely to follow a life-or-death swordfight or occur in a dungeon as anywhere else. It could be romantic or companionable or a matter of conquering or being conquered.

So, chasing her down, pinning her in a forest grove, and fucking her while stroking her very sensitive fox ears wasn’t too far outside the norm. Using fast-time to sneak off and fuck during working hours was a bit unusual, but Tamara’s moods could be mercurial and Apollo was more than happy to be a part of her self-directed morale building exercises if this was how she structured them.

“I think I need to turn down the sensitivity on my tail,” Tamara muttered as she nuzzled into his chest several minutes after he’d spent himself deep inside of her. They were both dirty, grass-stained, and covered in small scratches and abrasions from the rough ground.

Apollo stroked her back. “Maybe keep the ears just the way they are. They’re ... super convenient.”

Tamara giggled. “Yeah, you seemed to enjoy them almost as much as I do. When they’re touched, I feel it in my nipples.”

“Where do you feel...” Apollo started to ask about the tail, then realized all the possible answers were about the same level of embarrassing and trailed off.

That got a laugh from Tamara. She curled her tail around her body, ran it up her leg, and brushed his cock with its soft fur. “Yeah ... right to my clit with no dampening at all. When you slapped it, I nearly ran head-first into a tree.”

“I imagine I would do the same if somebody managed to jerk me off in the middle of a foot race.” Apollo stroked one fox ear playfully and heard Tamara’s breath catch. “I guess you created this one to be an avatar more than an NPC?”

“Both, actually. I was playing with her as a quest giver that a player would be incentivized to come back to again and again.” Tamara traced lazy patterns on Apollo’s broader-than-actual chest.

“Well, I’m incentivized if you want to work her into a scenario or two. You really do some amazingly creative things with your figures - way more impressive than what I see in US&S’s entertainment products.” Apollo pointed out.

“You’re not the only one who thinks so,” said Tamara quietly.

Apollo didn’t encourage Tamara to talk much about her other relationships, partly because of his own jealousy issues, but also because he didn’t really have any of his own to share. Since getting involved with Tamara, he’d let pretty much all of his relationships with other people fade away. Nights they didn’t spend together, he either played unnetworked single-player games or hung out in his private space with the first friends he’d made at school - the procedurally generated characters the central school had injected into the scenarios to teach children basic social skills. He’d kept them stored in memory and aged up their avatars to keep pace with his own physical age, but learned not to talk about them to anyone else. Other than Tamara, all his current friends were imaginary. So, he just said, “Oh?”

Tamara rolled to look down at him. With a gesture, their clothes faded away from where they’d been scattered among the trees and reappeared where they belonged on the two avatars. At the same time, the scratches as bruises faded although she left their hair as askew as it had become. With total control over the environment, this “spell” was well within Tamara’s capacity to change things, but it felt like she was deliberately breaking character.