Colors unexplode from billions of particles and suck back together from across the universe with me along for the ride. A bloop-blip sound chimes from somewhere inside my chest as I rematerialize on the island as if nothing ever happened. I slap my chest, then my face, making sure I’m not dead. I’m not.

  Not yet, anyway.

  My body feels weird. My hands seem like mine, but the months of fluorescent lighting and the ravages of the chemo are gone. I’m shirtless, tan as a walnut, and toned with muscle. I’m not bald anymore, my hair is long and gray, and I’ve got a beard that goes down to my navel. I’m also buck naked except for a loincloth tied with a belt that has a leather pouch attached. I can feel the ocean breeze tickling my naked undercarriage. In my head, I hear Molly chide me about not wearing sunscreen, but what does it matter? I’ve already got cancer, I might as well enjoy the sun.

  There’s something wrong with my eyes. No matter where I look, I see the Respawn 001 text in the upper right portion of my vision like it’s typed on my eyeballs. As the words fade out, I see the dragon ship has moved on and is now firing cannons at a pelican. The bird explodes into a ball of feathers, and I see a notification where it blew up: +1XP. I turn to see a fading number where I just died. +10XP.

  Guess I’m worth ten pelicans.

  Suck it, pelicans.

  The text flashes again, this time with a countdown clock.

  

  Welcome to RiftBorn?

  The World's Greatest VVMMORPG!

  24 hours, 21 minutes until Game Begins

  I see a flicker as an old-school coin-op arcade game appears on the beach.

  Finally, something familiar. I check the screen, which says: Enter Name, and I can almost smell that greaseball pizza they served at Aladdin's Castle when I was a kid.

  Am I seriously going to pay for chemotherapy by playing Frogger on a tropical beach? If I can avoid getting blown up again and get some pi?a coladas, maybe this won’t be so bad.

  I flick the joystick through the letters, deeply tempted to type ASS, but go for my old handle, which sat atop the Gauntlet rankings for almost all of 7th grade: DDD.

  Done, I realize there are a lot more spaces remaining for my name. Weird. Most old-school coin-op games were limited to only three characters for High Scores. Maybe this is a modern game with an old-school interface. I guess I should type in a real name.

  “Fire me hearties!” comes a cracking teenage voice from the ocean. I spin to see another ship, this one in the shape of a giant cartoon lobster with sails stretched between its claws. It's manned by a motley crew of idiots that look like they came straight out of a Fortnite ad, cyber-raiders, skull troopers, and weird steampunk goggle-dudes. The crab-ship fires at me. As cannonballs whistle toward my little island, I stumble back against the arcade game and hear a bloop.

  

  Name Registered: [DDD] This cannot be changed.

  “Wait... dammit!”

  The world blows up again and I blow up with it. I see my decapitated leg fly past my head.

  

  

  Bloop-blip.

  “F§cking stop it!” I yell at the lobster ship, then grab my throat. Something in my neck made a weird sound like a digital vurp. “What the f§ck?”

  I hear a chime and a singsong voice that sounds like an overly pleasant receptionist.

  

  EmpathyEngine?: Oopsie-doodles!

  Hi there! We noticed a strong emotional outburst! While we understand frustration, this expression has been sanitized to maintain a positive gameplay environment.

  Language Compliance Protocol §15.7.6: Rated T for Teen.

  Remember: Words hurt. Except when they’re filtered. ??

  “Are you f§cking kidding me?” I shout at the air. “I can’t even curse? Eat a bag of d§cks you motherf§cking c§ntfaced sh§tbags, this is f§cking bullsh§t!!”

  I’m GenX, we invented profanity. Getting stripped of that little freedom reminds me exactly how much HumanAsset has taken: my money, my house, my baseball cards, and now my own mouth. “G§ddamn A§sholes! Cancer-hawking d§ck-merchants!”

  “Hey, that old c§cksucker is back!” I hear a pirate yell. “Nuke that f§cker!”

  I get blown up again.

  

  

  Bloop-blip.

  This time, I respawn to find a shimmering blue cube sitting in a space between the palm trees. It flashes yellow text: Training Module V.228.4

  I push against the wall of the cube and my hand passes through. I glance behind me and see another weird pirate ship approaching from the sea. Hoping the cube is some kind of saferoom that will keep me from getting bombed to Kingdom Come, I step inside. The receptionist’s voice comes back like artificial sweetener.

  

  EmpathyEngine?: Welcome to RiftBorn?!

  You are a LivingLegend?! Congratulations! You have entered Intro Mode. First off, please check your stats so you can familiarize yourself with your character!

  A picture of me as a shirtless, weathered old man with a long beard pops up in my eyeball-writing dashboard thingy. I stare at the old man; is that what I look like? To his side is something titled Character Profile.

  

  Name: DDD

  Class: Hermit

  Level: 0

  Race: Formerly Human

  Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

  HP: 100%

  (Avg. Human Start Stat: 3/25)

  Stamina: 10/25

  Agility: 3/25

  Psyche: 1/25

  Strength: 1/25

  Charisma: 0/25

  Mana: 0 | Psi: 0 | Ki: 0

  ––––––––––––––

  VSC HypeScore: ?0

  Reputation: None

  Lives: ∞

  I spend a few seconds processing that. I played D&D a few times over Christmas break when I was a kid, and this looks a little like those old character sheets. If the average human stat is 3, a 10 Stamina makes me hardy as hell. The rest looks like a bad puzzle but at least I’ve got infinite lives to figure it out.

  And I will figure it out.

  Gen X was the first generation to grow up with video games. In the ’80s, everyone had Nintendo. Mario, Zelda, Metroid, the whole world played those. Sega…do you even know what Sega is? Sega showed up and suddenly it was Pepsi versus Coke. You couldn’t afford both, so you picked a side and defended it like a religion. When PlayStation hit in the mid-’90s, I was already drifting, and by the time Xbox rolled around after the millennium, I was out. Molly was more fun than mashing buttons. I don’t get this modern junk, it looks exhausting.

  I do understand Class, though. In D&D, I played a Thief and a Wizard, but I have never even heard of a Hermit. I raise my hand to tap the Class button, but as soon as I think to press it, the button illuminates. Huh, that’s interesting. I fiddle around with the other buttons in my dashboard thingy, and they’re all the same: I can select them with a thought. This game is so intuitive that a three-year-old could play it. Probably so HumanAsset can sell it to 3-year-olds.

  I tap Class.

  

  Class: Hermit

  Outsmart the wilderness with your own handy-dandy Robinson Crusoe! From scrounging & foraging bonuses to increased healing speed, no RiftElite adventure party is complete without a Hermit! Just don’t expect him to cook you dinner or sing you songs around the campfire; he’s kind of a grump.

  Hermit Class Bonuses

  Party Healing While Alone +50%

  Silencio: Mute any one creature (1 min. | 15 min.Cooldown)

  Camouflage While Idle +10

  Foraging/Scrounging +5

  Immunity: Starvation

  Immmunity to starvation? Foraging and scrounging? What am I, a hobo?

  

  LivingLegend Perks

  Walk It Off: +15% Party Healing & Vitality regeneration

  Drama Dial: Adjustable Aggro (Tank?Sneak)

  Chosen-ish One: Increased chance to attract and identify quests

  All Access Pass: Restricted areas + Elite zones

  I have to admit I glaze over a bit by the end. This seems like a lot of junk that might matter later, but it’s not important right now. I make a decision about all this game info: if it doesn’t stop me from dying in the next five minutes, it goes on the mental shelf marked ‘Future Dave’s Problem.’

  Instead, I look for a way to make it less boring. I search for music in the dashboard thingy, because this tutorial could really use some Katy Perry ‘California Gurls’. I find a button that looks strikingly similar to Spotify, labeled RiftBeatz, but it’s grey and inactive. Damn.

  My dashboard flashes and the bubblegum receptionist comes again.

  

  EmpathyEngine?: What a Great Start!

  You have 60 seconds until training begins. Please take that time to choose any 3 skills from the Carousel Tree!

  Something pops up in front of my face labeled Skill Tree :60.

  What the hell is this thing?

  It doesn’t look like a tree; it looks like a slot machine. Three slots in a vertical carousel with a whole bunch of options. Thousands of them. I spin the carousels to discover none of them make any sense. Slicer-Dicer, Ratatouille, ICE Agent, Little Miss Muffin, Lawnmower Blower. Tomb Raider didn’t have all this junk.

  I check the top of the list, where my timer is already at :45. How am I supposed to choose three of these things when I don’t even know what they are?

  I accidentally trigger a button, and the whole list reorganizes according to Themes. Bonzo Buffs, Hacker Skills, Seduction Traits... then I spot a Theme called Radical 80’s.

  Finally, something I know.

  It’s a list of TV shows and movies like Pretty in Pink, Red Dawn, Terminator, Bosom Buddies, Three’s Company, Wonder Woman, Sanford & Son… hey, there’s The A-Team! I loved that show when I was little, I wanted to be Mr. T. I’ve only got 18 seconds left, so I click that one, and it fills one carousel slot.

  I stop trying to understand the options and switch tactics: pick the stuff that sounds familiar and hope I don’t die because of it. I scroll through a few more and see The Goonies. Heh. Truffle Shuffle. I punch that into my second slot, then cycle through some more, looking for Knight Rider or The Dukes of Hazzard, but don’t find them. With 2 seconds left, I pick MacGyver.

  The Tree section chimes and disappears.

  

  EmpathyEngine?: Great Choices, DDD!

  You’re so awesome! Now let’s begin the LivingLegend Tutorial!

  Section 1: Empathy

  Player satisfaction is the most important thing for LivingLegends, and we at RiftBorn pride ourselves on excellent experiences. Let’s begin with a scenario!

  The cube flashes and suddenly I’m in a child’s room. It’s got puffy clouds on the wallpaper like something out of Toy Story. A little kid sits on the racecar bed. He’s crying, holding a little plush teddy bear stitched with a HumanAsset logo. A tag over his head reads Little Jimmy.

  The kid looks up at me with tears in his eyes. “Mister,” he sniffles. “Those other players were mean to me. They called me names, and I’m so triggered. Can you help me?”

  I wave my hand through the kid’s face and confirm that he’s just a hologram. Jimmy shimmers and glitches briefly. “Can you help me?” he repeats in a slightly robotic voice.

  Ugh. This feels like those mandated HR sessions back when I was teaching high school. I spent 20 years dealing with teenage students and their weird nervous breakdowns—I’ve wasted too much of my life doing this touchy-feely crap. I’m not doing Good Touch/Bad Touch training again. I glance up at my dashboard thingy.

  

  LivingLegend Tutorial:

  Time Remaining: 19 hours, 58 minutes

  “Nineteen hours? F§ck that.”

  I walk out of the cube.

  

   Tutorial Incomplete

  I learned from my dad that real men never read the manual. Besides, what does it matter? It’s not like I can die; I have infinite lives. All I need to know is how to get off this island. I’ll figure the rest out as I go.

  I walk the beach, looking for something to get me out of here. Maybe there’s a Johnny Quest speedboat around here somewhere.

  

   Return to Training Module

  I ignore the red flash in my display and keep walking. I’m not spending 19 hours with Little Jimmy.

  The cube makes a grinding noise and suddenly reappears right in front of me, trying to force me inside.

  

   Tutorial Timeout in 5... 4... 3…

  I walk around it.

  Isla Soledad glitches out and the whole game goes dark. Fzzt.

  Suddenly, the beach is gone, the sea is gone, the world is gone. I’m standing on nothing, just a bearded beach hermit in a universe of black. Dot-matrix text flashes in green.

  

   LL007: You Have Skipped the Tutorial!

  This cannot be undone. HumanAsset takes no responsibility for loss of life or limb due to your failure to comply.

  

  LivingLegend status: UNDER REVIEW. You now have 20 days from Game Start to meet ?VSC performance target. Failure will result in termination.

  Termination…does that mean what I think it does? And what the hell is a ?VSC?

  Uh-oh.