Author's Note:
This is intended to be a story-driven tale with sexual aspects, rather than a sex-driven tale connected by pieces of story. Some chapters may not have sex scenes at all.
All aspects of the story are fictional. All characters that participate in sexual activity are over the age of 18.
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There were seven days left in the summer preceding Jackson Vedalt's final year of high school.
Jackson hated high school.
But today, he wasn't worried about that. Today, he wasn't worried about anything. Nothing could go wrong today.
He sat in his room, alone. It was dark. It was 4am. The sun wasn't up yet.
He lived a Spartan existence. His bed was done in white sheets. The walls, pale tan. The floor was plain hardwood. His bookshelf was packed tight and arranged alphabetically by the last names of the authors, and divided by section into fiction and non-fiction.
The shelf represented only a fraction of his library; the vast majority was digital. He liked having hard copies of his favorite books. Something to hold on to, something to feel. The sensation of pages flipping through fingers-that was something computers couldn't do.
Well, not until recently, anyway.
There was almost no dust in the room. Jackson hated dust almost as much as he hated high school. His only true companion was a bottle of Windex, which he kept in a drawer in his nightstand.
His desk was a break from the strict conservatism. It ran the length of one entire wall, turned the corner, and kept going for another half of the room. The majority was made of wood. The shorter segment was plastic and steel.
On the countertop, five optical hard drives had been opened up and were soldered onto a custom-built stack. A series of carbon-circuit graphics cards, an exposed router, and a green-and-silver motherboard connected various ports and terminals. The stalk of a microphone protruded from the mess, and a fat set of headphones hung from it like a drunk hanging off a friend on the way home. Somehow, three computer monitors were jacked into the tangle, glowing with the same black-and-white screensaver that flashed across the room in a hypnotic strobe.
It looked like the aftermath of a wrestling match between a mad scientist and his computer. That was not far from the truth.
Jackson wasn't sure how luck worked, but he figured that for some people, it was on a low burn all the time, and for others, it came in big spurts. He was the second type. While other kids had been getting their first kisses, he'd gotten into vitcoins early-very early. He had over twenty thousand dollars in a slow-growth investment fund, and his checking account wasn't doing bad, either.
Vitcoin was short for virtual coin. It was yet another spinoff of the Bitcoin, the infamous monetary device that had spawned a wave of cryptocurrencies. Their popularity initially spiked, then fell over time. 40 years later, as the virtual world became more and more integrated with reality, vitcoins formed the peak of the second wave-but it was less like a wave and more like a flood.
Mining for vitcoins had been Jackon's first big learning experience with computers. He'd always escaped to his computer to get away from life-but that was when he stopped simply using his computer and started manipulating it. 'Mining' was the action of contributing computing power to the vitcoin public exchange system, which constantly logged all vitcoin transactions the world over. In exchange, the user of the computer was given vitcoins based on the amount of work they'd contributed. Jackson lost himself in a sea of customized hardware and optimized code, all to mine vitcoins faster. It was like a game-but one with real rewards.
His mother didn't know about his stash, but then, his mother didn't know about a lot of things. He didn't think she'd care much about anything other than spending it.
But that was years ago. For the past four nights, Jackson had been preparing for something else. He'd been hard-modding his Dream Drive well past legal limits, connecting it directly to his rig so as to optimally distribute the processing load. He wanted to experience Isis on full settings without so much as a hitch. The chaos on his desk was, in fact, his rebuilt computer-just dismantled and spread out. A lot. He hadn't had time to build a new case.
And before him, finally finished, was his upgraded Dream Drive. A serial bus linked the polished red helmet to the nest of electronics. He didn't plan on taking it anywhere, but he didn't want to sacrifice mobility, so the port was detachable. Just in case.
He hefted the object in his hands. The black visor made it look like a motorcycle helmet. Even six years after the technology had been invented, it was still something to wonder at. It was the machine that could transport a human being into a virtual world.
The Dream Drive intercepted normal nervous system impulses at the base of the spinal cord, and was capable of imitating the body's normal sensory input back into the brain. Vision, hearing, smell, touch, and even taste could all be replicated with fine-tuned precision. The more esoteric sensory items weren't left out-heat and cold, balance, pain, pleasure. The end result was that you had direct control over your virtual self. More importantly, you felt as though everything going on in the virtual world was real. Meanwhile, your actual body relaxed peacefully in a chair or bed.
Perception is reality. In taking advantage of their own nature, humans had engineered a device that, for all intents and purposes, could let them do whatever they wanted in virtual space. They had created their own Matrix, and they could completely control what it looked like and how it worked. And they'd done it all without those nasty plugs in the back of your neck.
He held his Drive in his hands. He'd pulled in all-nighter in a bid to finish on time. His mind was still spinning, coming off the satisfying high of constant, intense work finally completed. The room smelled acrid from all the soldering he'd done.
His vision unfocused-a product of the exhaustion. Too many hours hunched over his desk in concentration. His eyes wanted to not look at things.
He could have bought a Drive earlier, but in order to get payouts from virtual games to a real-life account-or even participate in them-he had to be over 18. Hacking the Drive's company-side servers wasn't unheard of, but they were some of the most secure mainframes in the world. They subcontracted to the US military cyberdefense department. Jackson knew where he would have started, but he figured he wouldn't get very far if he tried.
So, he'd waited.
His memory started sliding around. Dream Drive. He remembered when he first got his helmet, just after his 18th birthday-a gift to himself.
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The first thing he did was explore the Dream's default world, the Dream Hub. Everyone and everything intersected in the Hub. It was a virtual New York City-meets-Shanghai, the world's showcase of virtual reality, bigger and better than anything in actual reality. It was a massive global fair that never ended, set in a metropolis that was always expanding.
He'd been swept up in a gaming competition. They were constant throughout the virtual world. Physical limitations were obsolete, because virtual sports meant little when you could will yourself to run faster than a world champion sprinter with the easy flick of a neuron. The only thing that mattered in cyberspace was brainpower.
