Page 50 of Wicked Deeds

Once we were home, she crashed until dinner when she emerged to eat, still looking half asleep. We watched a vidlink of an old movie she liked for an hour or so, before she fell asleep on the couch. I shook her awake gently and shooed her back to bed.

The next morning she slept late. I’d been up and working for most of the morning before I smelled coffee coming from the kitchen. Coffee seemed like the perfect excuse to see how she was doing.

“Good morning,” she said, stifling a yawn.

“Hey.” I poured coffee, not pushing for a conversation. I drank half a mug and found a cookie, eating it before I spoke again. “Got any plans today? We could do some sightseeing, if you’d like.”

“I’m still kind of tired,” she said, shrugging. “There’ll be plenty of time for sightseeing.”

“Alright,” I said. “Anything you would like to do?”

“Do you have any games?” she asked eagerly.

I stifled a snort. “You’re in Damon’s Riley’s house. Yes, we have games. You want to play something?”

“That would be awesome.”

Games, I could do. Especially if it would build some trust with her. “Let’s go.”

“Sweet setup,” Gwen said when I showed her the gaming room.

“It’s one of the perks,” I said, with a grin. I pulled a couple of headsets out of the cabinet where we kept spare gear and handed one to Gwen.

She took it, then hesitated. “You have a chip.”

“Yeah, but it always feels uneven if one person is playing with a headset and the other has a chip.”

“Does a chip give you that much of an advantage?”

“It makes the sensory sensations more realistic and a tiny bit faster. I think it helps your reaction time, though Damon says they adjust for that when the players are using mixed access modes,” I said. “But you know how it is sometimes. Half a second in making a decision can be the difference between success and, you know, dying in some embarrassing way.”

“Thanks, that’s nice of you.”

“Pick a chair. The system is set up to go to a foyer, the usual kind of thing. We can choose from there.” I said. “Hang on, I need to set you up first. Madge, can I have a holoscreen?”

“Of course,” Madge said.

A screen appeared in front of me, and I swiped my hand down to summon a keyboard as well while Gwen settled into one of the game chairs. “I’m going to set you up an account.” I typed in the commands. Damon had set up an account for Gwen on the house comp so she could check email and calls and have accessto our general link feeds, but I knew he’d locked everything else down.

I didn’t know if he’d done the same with the game collection. We had Riley betas and even pre-beta concept games loaded on our servers. I locked those off Gwen’s menu, making sure she would only have access to released games.

There were more than enough to choose from. Damon collected games as well as making them. His game library was vast. Name a game and he probably had it. He certainly had hundreds I’d never even heard of. He got some kind of weird geek kick out of converting old games to run on new tech.

So it didn’t matter if Gwen hadn’t gamed for four years. She could probably find anything she liked from her teenage years and far earlier.

“There,” I said when the system confirmed the account. “Come over here and let Madge scan you again so you can use facial recognition to log in.”

“Brilliant,” she said. “No passwords to remember.”

I laughed. “Most things tend to use biometrics now.”

“If you’re fancy,” she said. “If you’re playing with an old deck at boarding school, then passwords are definitely still a thing. Even at university. Some people in halls had ancient systems.”

“Halls?”

“Halls of residence. A dorm I think you’d call it?”

“Right,” I said. Of course she would have lived on campus, though she presumably could afford not to, but maybe it was a rule over there like it was here for most first years to live on campus

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