[Can’t Opt Out]

Emilia plopped into the chair at her assigned terminal, the soft seat swinging gently with her movements. Technically, it had been decades since people needed designated terminals for accessing the Virtuosi System, but Professor A was old and slow to adapt. Didn’t keep him from sticking his dick in any pretty student or TA who would let him, but other things? Total stick in the mud who refused to grow with the times, which was why…

“I swear, Professor!” Blaze Williams, one of Elijah’s annoying, but overall tolerable. friends, whined. “I didn’t go over my weekly limit! There’s obviously something wrong with the count!”

Their professor did not look convinced. “The system does not over-inflate numbers,” he said darkly, eyes narrowing as he stroked his short, greying beard. “Records show you spent over two thousand hours inside the system over the weekend. I assume you did so on a hacked system and did not realize that it would still show up on the official count. Do you realize how dangerous that level of usage is?”

Pria snickered beside her, obviously hoping that with their classmate being chewed out for overuse of the Virtuosi System—probably playing video games—her own galaxy dust situation would go unnoticed. Perhaps, if her roommate’s “quiet” laughter weren’t earsplitting, it would have.

“Pria Braybun!”

Pria squeaked as she dropped her headset and scrambled to get up. “Y-yes, Professor A?” she stammered, giving him a sweet, wobbly smile. Apparently the drugs were still messing with more than just her hearing, if she couldn’t even attempt to charm their teacher better than that.

“Paper duty.”

Emilia’s roommate huffed and complained, but gathered up her drink—still untouched—and marched off towards the room where the paper was kept.

“Good luck~” Emilia called after her friend, laughing when the other girl flipped her off.

“Did she really think she would be allowed to use mu equipment in that state?” her teacher asked, appearing by her side.

Blaze had also been sent off to paper duty—a much more deserved punishment in his case. Instances of overload from the Virtuosi System were rare these days—unless they were hacked or turned off, Censors could easily detect their owners approaching overload long before it became a serious issue—but schools were still required to adhere to government mandated limits, which were set lower for students than the general population. Something about past misuse of students.

[Top Universities Found to be Forcing Their Students to Designate All Virtuosi Hours to Research, Without Pay]

Emilia glanced disinterestedly over the ancient article her Censor had supplied her with before swiping it away. How was lowering the total limit, not just giving a limit for school related activities, the solution they’d come up with? That could still be the policy, could—

The thought hadn’t even completed when her Censor supplied her with another article telling her that yes, those were still the rules all Baalphorian universities were forced to follow. The limit, of course, had risen as technological and genetic changes made prolonged use of the system safer.

It was an open secret, however, that neither students nor the general population generally followed those limits, which were notoriously low to begin with. Hacked game systems had been common as long as the limits had existed. Even the most standard of Censors would ignore smaller blips, though—they weren’t meant to be tattletales, after all—but they wouldn’t risk their owner’s mental stability either. Usually, people were just sensible enough to not overdo it to the point their Censors would be forced to note the discrepancy, which would subsequently lock them out of all but the most impressively hacked systems.

“Hoped, I think,” Emilia said, fiddling with her own headset. Her eyes slid over to Beth, who appeared to be trying to nap at her terminal. “Not gonna stick her on paper duty?”

The old man hummed, leaning back against Emilia’s desk and crossing his legs. He might have been on the older side, probably edging close to 200, if not already a few years over it, but he had aged well. He was still fit, his muscles noticeable even through the dark suits he generally wore, he had very few wrinkles and the salt-and-pepper look suited him—and when he smiled? Well, it was no wonder he had a constant line of students hoping to fill his bed.

“No,” he finally said, turning and giving Emilia that too beautiful smile.

Sometimes, she regretted that she hadn’t fucked him at least once before hooking up with Elijah—their relationship might officially be open, but she didn’t think he would appreciate her fucking their teacher. He was just so unfairly handsome, though, was the thing. And she’d heard enough stories to know he was absolutely mind-blowing in bed. Service-top, she’d once heard someone call him.

“I believe her general state of existence is punishment enough.” He gave Emilia a look, and she knew there was something else he wanted to say—some reason he had made himself comfortable on her terminal—but before he could do more than open his mouth a crash came from the direction of the paper room, followed by a long stream of profanities.

Professor A sighed and pushed off the desk, already calling out, asking what had happened and how big the mess was, and leaving Emilia to slip her headset on.

The cool metal of the headset slid smoothly against her cheeks and forehead. The cold neck rest pressed against the base of her skull—just in case her Censor overheated—and her Censor whirled to life.

[Connecting…]

[…]

[Connection to Astrapan Data-Lab: Established]

[Configuring: Preferred Setup]

She leaned back, her Censor arranging her chair just the way she liked it, so a couple hours sitting there wouldn’t cause back problems. Some people preferred lying down, but this class was just so obscenely early. She’d already spent all night laying down! She didn’t need to spend any more time on her back!

Well, okay, maybe she hadn’t spent all night laying down, but the hours between Elijah dumping her at home and her alarm screaming at her to get the fuck up had still been substantial.

[Sleep: 5 Hours], her Censor offered before the world blurred and blended, her Censor linking together with the Virtuosi System and allowing it access to her brain and core. Her senses burned and bled and melted, and then she was sitting at a desk within the system, an ancient looking computer system waiting in front of her.

No one really knew who had designed the Virtuosi System, although, there were some people who suspected both the Virtuosi and OIC Systems knew more than they let on about the history of themselves and the planet. Officially, information about their creators had been lost several thousand years ago, during the Colonial Wars. The prearranged environments within the Virtuosi System told of someone old, though. Someone who at least knew more about the planet’s ancient past than they did today, even their oldest relics, computers dating back almost five thousand years, looked more high-tech than the bulky thing sitting in front of her.

Unfortunately, if information about the creators or the ancient technology they based their environments on had every existed, it didn’t anymore—not in Baalphoria, anyways. A lot of information had been lost to their country during the Colonial Wars. Traitors had wiped out entire databases and hightailed it out of the country, heading to the west and the south to join existing Free Colonies or start their own. Some of that information had been recoverable, through personal records, offaether and untouched by the hackers who had burned the aether of more information than anyone would ever know. Other information had been recovered from memories via Censors, but memories were fragile—untrustworthy—and the information that had come out of them was treated cautiously.

Stars, there were memory records that said the creator of the Virtuosi System lived inside the OIC and had been born long before people walked on Baalphorian soil. People might live to be 300, occasionally even 400, years old these days, but even after all they had lost, the oldest records of Baalphoria still went back over five millennia. Even if it were some poetic way to say, “Before Baalphoria was called Baalphoria,” the consensus was that simply wasn’t possible.

More of the records had been recovered since the Colonial Wars, in information exchanges with the Free Colonies, especially in the last decade, since the war had ended. Many of the Free Colonies were still apprehensive of cooperating with Baalphoria—one war of cooperation couldn’t erase thousands of years of animosity, after all—but even the ones that were willing to cooperate and share information more freely than before the war…

Not only was the stuff they sent of questionable quality—not particularly surprising given how dated the technology many of the Free Colonies used was—but the entire world had been flamed during the war. More data—thousands of years of new and recovered data—gone, just like that, and not just from Baalphoria, but from the Free Colonies as well. Burned to ashes by a large-scale electrical surge. Ashes that blew like wind through the aether. Even the OIC had been unable to keep the pieces safe, the system itself saved by the fact that it and Baalphoria’s most valuable data had been moved to a secure location near the start of the war. It had still tried, though, gathering up whatever it could find and storing it away, hoping—as much as an ancient and powerful neural-network could—that one day it could be pieced back together. That some sense could be made of the mess.

That’s what this place was for. The Data-Recovery Lab, the place where information was sorted through. Scraps of data puzzled back together by students and teachers, hoping that some of the history and knowledge that had been lost during the war, during the Colonial War thousands of years before that, could be found anew.

At least, that’s what it was in theory. Realistically, most of the students fell into three camps: those who actually cared about recovering data, those who had no idea what they wanted to do in life yet and were just wasting time, and those who were poor. The program’s paydrop was particularly good, compared to other programs—both those at Astrapan and other universities—and while the work could be slow and tedious, it was also significantly easier than other programs that had similar paydrops.

Plus, the program accepted almost anyone. There was so much data, and no one was so inept they couldn’t contribute at least a bit to the project. Some parts of data-recovery required time and thought: analyzing what was known about people at the time information was created to think through thought processes and figure out what the fuck the creators had been thinking. Other parts were just poking around, sorting what you could into different piles for different experts to look at. Anyone could do that.

Originally, Emilia had been part of the latter group. Poke and prod at enough stuff, and eventually, you’d find some hints about what it was, where it belonged. Then off it went! Off to be someone else's problem! The program had been good and mindless, and paid enough that she didn’t feel totally deprived of the joys of modern living—most of the time, anyways.

Unfortunately, her teacher was just too fucking observant. Professor A might not have ever outright asked why she was hiding how smart she actually was—that she was perfectly capable of being one of those so-called experts, piecing the puzzle together with the obsession and focus such things often called for—but he had figured it out.

Now, the work she got was a mix of things. Stuff to sort. Stuff to solve. They’d never really discussed it. Her teacher was old and observant and seemed to know she didn’t want to talk about it. He was also nice, so she kinda assumed the sorting stuff he sent her was just so she’d have something to talk to her classmates about. Some way to continue pretending she was just a regular, average-dev person.

In plenty of ways, she was average. She wasn’t the person she had once been—she’d made sure of that. She wasn’t so far removed from that person, however, that she couldn’t at least try to do the puzzling together—wasn’t so far removed that some part of her didn’t want to do it, either.

The ancient computer in front of her buzzed to life, the simulated environment of the Virtuosi System way too immersive. It was meant to be immersive, but the extra noises and steps of this particular environment had always annoyed her, especially since they were pointless decoration.

“Nostalgia, for times long gone,” someone had once told her, decades ago now.

“Nonsense,” she’d laughed back, sticking her tongue out at them before she hacked the system they’d been using and changed it into a sleek, modern one. No sounds, no artificial lag. Perfect.

Luckily, she’d been able to hack part of this system, too. The system wouldn’t let her completely rewrite the environment, but it at least let her switch the interface fully over to her Censor, a distorted, pink and purple image flashing across the computer’s fat, low-resolution monitor. Regardless of stories about long dead, near mythic creators of the Virtuosi System, whoever had designed this environment had been a cruel bastard.

Over her vision, various information flashed.

✮ ✮ ✮

[World Level]

[Temperature: 41°]

[Announcement: Please avoid the ocean and mountains until the pink tide has cleared]

[Time Skew: 1s/0.2s]

✮ ✮ ✮

[Lab 806]

[Assignments for the Day: {BeforeAR.sc}, {BeforeAR.scs}]

[BeforeAR.sc Count: 217]

[BeforeAR.scs Count: 57]

[A’s Announcements: Good luck!]

[Time Remaining: 9 hours 58 minutes]

✮ ✮ ✮

Aside from the pink tide, a pretty standard class. Professor A had had them working on some information that appeared to be from the days before the most deadly attack during the war for a while now. She was slowly working through her assigned work—which was helpfully sorted into two piles, one for each of her jobs.

Plus, the countdown. Two real-world hours. Nearly ten simulation hours. The system could run harder, longer, but the department frowned on that. Longer work hours meant a reduction in the quality of work. More than a few of her classmates logged off after just an hour, or took long breaks in the middle, using the system to play and rest—even if naps within the system weren’t quite as relaxing as ones outside it were. The department didn’t care. They wanted good quality work, and as long as the system reported that you seemed to have worked hard, they didn’t say anything about not working long enough.

The irony, that traditional Baalphorian universities had been so happy to abuse their student’s that the government had been forced to step in—to legally require those universities let their students rest.

Emilia never rested, though. Never logged out early—if anything, the system had to knock on her brain a few times to get her to clue in that it was time to leave. Obsessive and focused. She’d knotted those traits up a bit, too, just as she had her Physical D-Levels, but she wouldn’t—couldn’t—knot them up entirely.

Not without destroying herself. Not without completely erasing the person she was.

“I love your obsession. It’s so fucking sexy—intoxicating, even,” a voice called through her memory, blurry and a decade removed from reality, and she shoved it away. This was no time for ghosts.

[Loading: {BeforeAR.scs}]

[…]

She was obsessive, even through all her knotwork. This place—this program and the work that came along with it—was a nice, productive outlet for that obsession that she had once revelled in, even if she’d spent her first few years of study doing grunt work. Now, she relaxed into the seat, plushy under her. Mellow music began to float around her, the environment shifting into a warm summer day. Waves from the ocean lapped at the sand in the distance, just far enough across the pale green grass that the smell of if was only a faint taste across her senses.

A little piece of the home she hadn’t been back to in nearly a decade. That’s what this place gave her, and she loved it all the more for it.

The greatest thing about this place—about Astrapan University and its Virtuosi System—though? No raids. Raids were forbidden within most of campus, except inside dedicated gaming systems and during special events. Even then, the raids were limited to the real world. Annoying, but since such events were advertised long before they occurred… well, she’d hightailed it off campus or hidden herself away in the Data-Recovery Lab’s system more than a few times, during campus raid events.

Escape, at its finest. At least, it was until the ghosts came calling.

[…]

[Loaded: {BeforeAR.scs}]

[File Select: Random]

[Loading: {52.sn}]

[Loaded: {52.sn}]

[Re— Kou: —.///t awa- -ro- bas—. A—c. im’\\+t]

Emilia’s mouth twitched. Unfortunately, today was apparently a day for ghosts.