Chapter 3: Green Light, Countdown

Maren Kowalski stood on a navy step-and-repeat carpet that had come off the back of a truck that morning and would be rolled up before midnight, the sponsor wordmark printed in step-and-repeat down its length, and tried to look like she belonged. The borrowed haptic suit was a half-size too big through the shoulders. The collar pulled away from her throat every time she moved her head, which she could feel a camera somewhere catching, a slow drift of attention along the gallery rope. The cup in her hand had a little plastic sword in it. Her old fencing ring clicked against the rim each time she lifted it, a small hard sound she couldn't seem to stop making.

The smell was the worst part. Cologne and cotton-candy vape and, under both of those, the metallic ozone tang of capsules running on the platforms: eight of them under hot lights, hero units in matte chrome, a dressed mannequin in haptic gear inside one, a real person in another whose face had gone slack the way faces did when the suit took them down. Sugar and ozone. Her sinuses hated it. She drank a measured swallow of the blue thing and kept her eyebrows where she'd put them.

Thirty minutes, she told herself, and the rent on the studio is paid. Less, if she could get to the slot board before the next cycle of cameras came past.

She moved.

She did it the way she'd learned to move at parties she had no business being at: one shoulder forward, eye contact briefly with a sponsor rep who lit up at her, and then past him before he could finish lifting his hand. She bumped a woman she half-recognized from a lifestyle channel, said sorry without slowing, and the woman said no worries, hon, in the bright voice of a hot mic.

"Maren," said a voice at her elbow. "Maren, hey, two seconds."

The sponsor rep had caught up. He was younger than she was, which was getting to be most of them, and his lanyard said GreyForge and his smile had been practiced in a mirror. He held out a wristband.

"Wear this through your first session," he said, "say the word breakthrough once at character creation and once after the tutorial, just once, organic, doesn't have to be a whole pitch, and we comp the rest of the suit. We can talk longer-term after launch. We love your stuff. Combat-side authenticity, that's the lane."

"Generous," Maren said. She didn't take the wristband.

"It's a soft ask."

"Hard pass." She softened it with the corner of her mouth, the version of a smile she'd learned to use when she still wanted the rep to be there in three months. "Footage goes out clean or it doesn't go out. You know how I run."

"Image rights only on the wristband segment."

"Still a no. I'll buy you a drink another night."

He held the wristband out a beat longer to see if she'd revise. She didn't. He pocketed it the way men pocketed business cards they weren't going to follow up on and said, "Catch you on the floor," and she said yes you will, and they both moved past each other looking at other people.

The PA was on the third repeat of its loop. A woman's voice, brighter than any voice should be at this hour, narrating over what sounded like a cathedral choir put through a pop filter. Aetherfall Online, where skill belongs to you again. The first true full-dive. A world that reads you as you are. Step into the only game where your hands are the controller. Tomorrow at nine, the door opens. She had heard it eight times since coming in. The line about reading you as you are slid past her without lodging, and she rolled her eyes at the ceiling tiles in passing because she couldn't help it.

The slot board was a tall vertical screen behind the sign-up desk, names in alphabetical blocks, time windows in pale columns next to them. She'd been promised the eight-thirty hero-capsule walkthrough on launch morning, which meant a two-camera segment, the photo pull, and the kind of clip-friendly minute that paid for itself in subscriber notifications for a week. She scanned for K, Kowalski, and her eye snagged half a beat before her brain did.

Where her name should have been was a name she knew. Lina Park, lifestyle channel, mostly skincare and travel, currently, Maren glanced left without turning her head, being photographed against the side of the hero capsule on Platform Two with one hand resting on the chrome and the other holding her hair back from her face like she was about to step into a portrait.

Maren held very still. The cup in her hand stayed level. Her jaw stayed where she'd left it. She felt the ring click once against the cup and made it stop.

"Maren — there you are, I'm so sorry." The event coordinator had come around the desk fast, clipboard against her sternum, the wireless in her ear flashing red. She was a small woman in a black blazer with damp half-moons under the arms and the harassed competence of someone who had been apologizing to people in twenty-minute shifts since noon. "I tried to flag you on comms, I don't know if you got it. We had a, there was a sponsor escalation about the eight-thirty and I couldn't, I'm so sorry."

"Lina," Maren said. Even.

"I know."

"Combat walkthrough."

"I know." The coordinator's mouth did the thing mouths did when they were saying I know and meaning I am also angry but I have rent. "I argued. I want you to know I argued. They went over my head. The pull-photo people wanted her by the capsule for the morning press cycle and there wasn't, they wouldn't move her to the ten."

Maren breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth, slowly, the way she used to breathe between touches when the bout was going badly and she needed her hands to stop being hers for a second. The ozone was thicker here, near the platforms. She felt it on the roof of her mouth.

She thought, very clearly and very privately, that she could put the cup down on the corner of the desk and walk out, and that doing so would feel exactly as good for the eleven seconds it took to clear the door, and that when she got home she would still owe the studio for August. She thought about the fencing ring and made her thumb stop turning it on her finger.

"Okay," she said.

The coordinator's shoulders came down half an inch. "I have something. I have, listen, I have an alternative, and I want you to hear me out because I think it's actually, for you, I think it might actually be…"

"Hear you out."

"Overflow venue. Zenith pop-up, edge of the warehouse district, smaller footprint, fewer cameras. We're routing eight of you over there for the morning. Lower marquee, I won't lie to you. But." The clipboard came up. "Walk-on interview segment, ten minutes, your questions vetted not theirs. And." She flicked to the second page. "You keep your footage. All of it. No image-rights rider on the pop-up packet. That was in the contract Zenith sent over for the overflow. I read it twice because I didn't believe it the first time."

Maren let two seconds pass that she did not need.

"Time."

"Eight-fifteen call, eight-forty in the pod."

"Pod, not capsule."

"Same hardware. Different room. I checked."

"Send me the address." She said it in the same voice she used to confirm grocery deliveries. The coordinator was already typing. "And the contract. Both."

"Sending. Thank you. I, thank you."

"You're doing your job," Maren said, and then, because the coordinator's eyes had gone a little wet and Maren could not afford to be in a conversation about that, she added, "Buy me a drink another night," which was the second time she'd said it in fifteen minutes and the first time she'd meant it.

She turned away from the desk before her face could do anything she didn't authorize.

The suit room was a curtained corner past the bar. She handed the haptic top to a tech who was on her phone, peeled the leggings off over her own jeans without ceremony, and put them in his other hand. He thanked her without looking up. On the way out she passed a cluster of capsule-party hosts in matching black tees, and one of them, a kid maybe nineteen, hair in a careful disarray that had taken an hour, was wearing a small enamel pin on his collar, an anvil with a little flame above it. Souvenir merch on a tray near him, the same pin in a bowl with a handwritten card she didn't read. Tacky, she thought, the way she thought tacky about most launch merch, and kept walking.

The door to the street was a relief in the literal sense. The air outside was Chicago in early evening, cooler than the room, and it tasted of nothing, which she would take. The sidewalk had its usual texture: a maglev hum from two blocks over running under the soles of her boots, the wet hiss of a passing autocar through a puddle that hadn't been there an hour ago, a man at the corner shouting cheerfully into an earpiece about somebody named Devon. She walked half a block without a destination and stopped under an awning to let her shoulders come down the rest of the way.

She took her phone out.

Three voicemails, all from Tomasz. The most recent timestamped 7:42 this morning, which meant he'd called her on his way to whatever he did with his mornings now, in the city she had not been to since the Christmas in Poznań when he'd told her, in his careful older-brother voice, that she couldn't keep doing this to herself.

She did not listen to any of the three.

She opened the message thread instead. The last thing in it was a photo he'd sent her of their mother's old ceramic pierogi plate, from a shelf in a flat she'd never seen, with the caption found this. No further line. Eight months ago.

She typed two words.

I'm fine.

She held her thumb over send for one breath, then pressed it.

The phone made the small clean sound of a message going out. She watched the read receipt come up under it almost immediately, which meant he had been on the app, and she put the phone face-down against her thigh before he could begin to type back. She did not want to see the three dots. She had said the thing.

She stood under the awning a moment longer, the ring clicking quietly against the back of the case.

The phone buzzed against her thigh. She turned it over with a flicker of resistance that surprised her, and it was not Tomasz. It was the coordinator. Two messages, fast.

Address pinging now. Contract in your inbox. Photo of pod room below for vibe.

She tapped through.

The address dropped a pin on the edge of the warehouse district, a stretch she half-knew from a film shoot two years ago, mostly cold-storage and shuttered fabrication shops with the occasional glass-fronted thing that had moved in recently and put a neon sign in its window. The map's preview tile showed a low-slung building with a Zenith logo on it, unlit at this hour.

The photo loaded under the address.

It was a wide interior shot, taken from the door, of a long room with capsules lined up along both walls. Eight on each side, sixteen in total, evenly spaced, lids up, the soft interior light of each one turned on for the camera. They were laid out the way drawers were laid out in a morgue, which was what her brain said before she could stop it. Above them, on the far wall, a long banner in clean sans-serif white on Zenith blue read ONE WORLD BEGINS TOMORROW.

She saved it to her phone anyway.

Tomorrow, then, she thought, and put the phone in her pocket.