Out of the Black - Lee Doty [109]
"You did get to do the big corpse-sprint back from town." Smack said.
"Workout my butt!" Angel laughed, "Rygar, everyone knows you're a cutout."
"Your butt?" Lo Pan asked, giving the object of discussion a glance. "What's that supposed to mean?"
A gossamer list of their current possessions appeared in the air near each Avatar.
"I was about done anyway." Angel verified her list and sat down to await the end of this world.
Smack looked through his semitransparent list at Angel, pretending to check his inventory before the save-point. Here she was tall with smooth ebony skin and snow-white shoulder-length hair. What will he see when he sees her with his own eyes? He could have looked at her ID photo when he'd hacked the server's database. He'd only harvested her name and the name of her gym. He wanted the rest to be a surprise.
He was still looking at her when the world ended.
Shivering sparks, static he feels and tastes- blackness.
Water surrounded him. His strained and twitching arms and legs were held immobile by the resist-net that went into lockdown when their server went down. His eyes were open, but they might as well have been closed. The darkness was absolute.
He heard the lock release tone and closed his eyes. After a moment of increasing light coming red through his closed eyelids, he tried to open them. The low light still seemed too bright, but with a lite blinking, it soon became bearable.
The resist-net disengaged with a clunk, followed by a muted hydraulic hiss. Slow currents in the water caressed his skin. In the increasing blue light, he saw the resist-net clamshell move back from his body, freeing his sore limbs. He'd never been able to shake the image of the resist-net as a huge gray mouth. Its inner surface looked like a large plastic tongue, studded with taste bud sensors and servos.
After a long and quite painful initial stretch, he disengaged the connectors that linked his helmet with the gym's network and spent the next minute reeling in the vertigo of the disconnect. Finally, he floated up half a meter, pushed the lid of the tank open, and struggled from his workout and out into the real world.
He stood shakily on the heated metal grate near the tank, dripping wet and dizzy. He took his helmet off, staggering slightly as the sense-tape separated from its place on the back of his neck. He stowed the helmet on a shelf and grabbed a towel from the rack above the shelf.
Two tanks away, she was emerging. She was short, but not compared to him; her skin was the rich color of cocoa. Her body was muscular on a thin frame. She leaned against the tank and pulled her helmet off. Her eyes were closed as she collected herself. Her acne scars added a weathered character to her face; her ample lips seemed still to smile. Maybe she's thinking about him?
Angel.
So, that's what she looks like. Beautiful. Now for the hard part- easy conversation.
He moved to the stretching benches and began the painful work of insuring he retained his current range of motion after the intense workout. Essentially, the VR experience was candy coating around a full-body workout. He didn't understand how people used to work out before VR Gyms... people like him probably didn't.
He was into his second circuit of leg stretches when she sat down on the bench two meters to his right. She wasn't looking at him, but of course he was used to that. Even though he had played his way to perfect physical fitness, he still wasn't the kind of guy girls stole glances at.
What was he doing? Fear made a final plea to control his actions, but foolishness won out in the end. "You at the Pain Foundry, too?" He tested the conversational waters, feeling stupid before he'd gotten out the first syllable.
She glanced at him, then quickly away. "Yeah. How'd you...?"
"You got out with me... I figured it was the scheduled maintenance."
Her eyes darted back to him then back away. "Yeah. Though I don't usually admit I go in for that wands and dragons stuff."
"Your secret's safe with me." He said with a nod. "You play