"galleria"

Chapter 1 - Friday Night

//You’ve done this before, right?// Leif commed to Rhiannon as he sat in the pearly bright Stemlink parlor. He scrolled through the menu of simulations on his phone as the lights in the ceiling glowed violet, blue, pink, green. Leif’s stomach rumbled, and he put his hand on his trim abdomen. You weren’t supposed to eat before a Stemlink so you didn’t throw up in the booth, but he felt like he was more nauseous on an empty stomach. Maybe he was just nervous about meeting Rhiannon for the first time.

//No not really. I mean no. It’s new here. I’ve done VR before. With glasses.// The com flashed on the corner of Leif’s screen as he tried to choose between two sims. He’d done “Avalon” before with a couple of friends, and it was cancer. They were all dropped down into Arthur’s court, not Knights of the Round Table, but going on quests with them. They fought a dragon as big as the turbine building near the underground expressway. Straight cancer. Maybe not the sim for a first date, though. Leif wasn’t sure what the more social aspects of the sim were like.

He looked at “Galleria.” It was new and seemed social-focused, from the trailer. Sometimes it was hard to tell. One of the most popular sims for date nights was “Copacabana,” which looks like a straight-up kill-your-neighbor mafia game from the trailer but has a lot of options for social once you start playing. Leif might have picked that one tonight, but it was offline.

//I’m ready did you pick the sim?//

Leif looked up and saw the door to Room 3 open, a teenager with a nametag, a rag and a bottle of degreaser in his hand. He stood and walked into the booth, comming, //Ready, just sitting down now// to Rhiannon.

The booth was much darker than the waiting lounge. No gently sweeping colors, no glossy bevels, no lighter-than-air beanbags to sit on. Just that blue-jean-blue glow at the edges of a small dark room and the smell of antiseptic. He selected “Galleria” before pocketing his phone and sitting in the vinyl-wrapped chair, probably something a dentist’s office was going to throw out. As the thick Stem needle punched into his brainstem, Leif had a moment to meditate on the violence of it all, the juices he could hear splash in the mop bucket on the floor, mixing with the blood and fluids of some other Friday night Stem buddy. He heard a loud click in his temples.

And then he was in.