A Man and his Virtual Dragon, Against All the Malicious Code in the World

Being a non-player character in someone else's virtual world can be a pain — especially when some of the monsters won't stay dead. Tobias Buckell's story "A Game of Rats and Dragon," published in Lightspeed Magazine, takes a lot of the cliches of augmented reality and virtual gaming, and adds a really neat spin — what if people became attached to their virtual sidekicks, in a kind of owner/pet relationship? And who's to say that a virtual creature can't be a better friend and companion than most people?

Overton is an NPC who hunts "rats," or leftover bits of malicious code, inside a steampunk MMARG — and it turns out that the rats are getting smarter and tougher to kill. Here's the beginning of "A Game of Rats and Dragon," based on Cordwainer Smith's classic story "A Game of Rat and Dragon":

A Man and his Virtual Dragon, Against All the Malicious Code in the WorldS

Moonlighting as a non-player character was a hell of a way to earn a living. Never made much sense to spend all that time garbing up in a virtual uniform that matched gamespace, but Overton took pride in the details. So getting punched in the stomach by someone so caught up in an augmented reality fantasy they couldn't tell real from script, that left him in a foul mood. All the man had to do was ask the right questions, get Overton's responses, and move on.




Read the rest over at Lightspeed, or in Buckell's new book Mitigated Futures.