Massively Multiplayer by P. Aaron Potter

would make sure he’d never do it in the first place.”
    Sara suddenly became enormously interested in the food on her plate, and Andrew realized she was self-conscious. Stylishly jaded Sara, who regularly ran conversational rings around her tongue-tied brother, caught expressing sincere emotion. How unfashionable!
    They ate in silence for a moment. One of the chittering birds darted down from its artificial tree to perch on the edge of their table. Andrew held out a soy chip, and was gratified when it pecked the morsel out of his hand. So, they were real after all. Microchips in their brains, or subtle genetic modifications, must have been used to modify their behavior, keeping them in the restaurant.
    Sara interrupted his thoughts. “All I meant was that I don’t think you’ll end up selling things. That’s all. You’ll find some job where you end up helping people.”
    “Like a doctor?”
    “Yeah. Well, no. More like a lawyer. Or maybe a social worker. Or a teacher. Remember that time I was going to jump down the stairs?”
    “Anybody would have stopped you from doing that.”
    “Maybe. But the time I was going to tell Jenna about how I hated her boyfriend, and you talked me out of it. And it wasn’t just being nosy -- you found a way for me to talk to her that made it ok. And that time you guessed I’d be caught sneaking in late, and you took Mom and Dad out? Or even just that time last week when you knew Dad was coming home from his face-day at work late and you had dinner out? Or my fish. Remember how you saved my fish when I was overfeeding them?”
    “So I provide food to tired face-day workers and first-aid for goldfish. I have a shining future in either catering or as a vet. Wait, I can combine them: sushi chef!”
    Sara flicked a bit of rice at him. “No, idiot. Did I mention you can also be a sarcastic jerk? What I meant was that you just do nice things, all the time, even when people won’t notice. It’s kind of a rare quality. That’s what you do. You stop people from feeling bad, before they even know its going to happen. You should be proud of that.” She graced him with one more quick smile, so sincere that his cheeks burned.
    Then she was wiping her mouth, tossing her plate into the recycler, and ducking away into the glittering cavern of a nearby store selling holographic companions, and he was left alone. Not quite alone, of course, since he carried with him a new light, a small burning sensation between embarrassment and gratitude ...an indefinable sense of grace which fluttered, in his head, like a genetically modified bird.
     
    Updating Crucible essential files. There will be a brief delay.
    Loading...100%.
    Welcome to Crucible v 4.0. Druin the Thief. Circle: 6. Wealth: 1,450.
    Even before he stepped downstairs, the changes were obvious. Damned if he couldn’t actually smell the room!
    It wasn’t just one smell, either. There was a heady cocktail of scents: fresh laundry, baking bread, old beer, leather, and metal. Oddly, focusing on the scents caused them to retreat into vague, flat impressions, memories rather than sensory perceptions. In order to fully enjoy them, he had to maintain a slightly fuzzy half-awareness. Andrew suspected that the bandwidth necessary to generate complex scents through acupressure micro-pulses sent through his computer would be prohibitive. Instead, the Crucible programmers must be firing off tiny, imperceptible bits of visual or auditory data which convinced his semi-lucid brain to access the scents they were aiming for. Yes, there, in the corner of his peripheral vision, he was almost certain a tiny sparkle of light was part of the new data-stream which had been added to the netvironment.
    Even thinking about it made him dizzy with vertigo, and he had to fight for a moment to regain his equilibrium. The only way that immersive netvironments could work was by the suspension of the knowledge that your body was, in fact, lying back on a virtualounge in a