The van arrived at 8:52, eight minutes early, which Lia would later describe as "a data point."
It was white and unmarked except for a small gray logo on the door, two interlocking arcs like the first half of an eye. Two people climbed out of it, a woman in her thirties with a tablet under one arm and a short, practical ponytail, and a young man who looked about twenty-two and was carrying a toolbox as if it might explode.
"Mr. Souza?" the woman said to Samuel's father, who had been standing on the front step since half past seven. "Renata Alves, New Virtual. This is Davi. We're here for the installation."
"Come in," said his father, and then, because he did not know what else a man said in this situation: "Did you eat?"
"We did, thank you."
"There's cake."
"Maybe afterward," said Renata Alves, with the faintly startled smile of a person who had visited many houses and had not often been offered cake in them.
They brought the pod in pieces.
Samuel had pictured something enormous and cold, a machine out of a hospital ward, all steel and humming. It came instead in three long, padded cases, and when Davi opened the first one on the floor of his bedroom, the thing inside was pale and curved and strangely soft, the color of the inside of a shell.
"It looks like an egg," said Gabriel, from the doorway.
"Please don't say that in front of the legal department," said Renata, and Davi snorted.
Gabriel and Lia had arrived at 8:30, to sit on the sofa and be useful. Samuel's mother had arrived at 8:31, which was to say that she had never left the doorway. Camila was not there. Camila had gone to the track at six, and the house was full of the careful, slightly too-loud silence of a place where someone had decided to be elsewhere.
It took Davi forty minutes to assemble the pod in the corner where the old desk had stood, and another ten to test the new outlet with a small meter, which he held to the wall with an expression of reverent suspicion.
"Who did the wiring?" he asked.
"My cousin," said Samuel's father.
"It's very good."
"He'll be glad to hear it."
Samuel's father said it with the quiet pride of a man who had paid for something with his own weekends, and Samuel, sitting on the edge of the bed with his hands pressed between his knees, found that he could not look at him.
The scan came first.
"Here's how it works," said Renata, pulling a chair up to face him. She had set her tablet on her knee and her voice had changed, softened by a notch, the way a good nurse's did. "The pod builds your avatar from a full-body scan. It takes about fifteen minutes. Nothing touches you, nothing hurts, and you can stop at any time. There's also a short questionnaire, and a few reaction tests so we can set your baseline. Do you want your parents in the room?"
Samuel glanced at the doorway. His mother pressed both hands to her mouth. His father said nothing, but his knuckles had gone white on the doorframe.
"No," Samuel said. And then, quickly: "They can stay in the hallway."
"With the door open," said his father.
"With the door open," agreed Renata, as if it were the most sensible condition she had ever heard.
The questionnaire was long. She read it out loud and typed his answers, and for most of it he spoke without thinking, because he had answered every one of these questions a hundred times at a hundred clinics. Diagnosis. Medications. Surgeries. Allergies. Episodes of fatigue. But when she came to the report from the hospital, the thick one, the one with the official stamp and eleven pages of other people's handwriting, she stopped talking, and for a while the only sound in the room was her scrolling.
"I'm sorry," she said finally. "I'm required to ask whether any of this is incorrect."
"Is there something wrong with it?"
"No." She looked up. "I think it's very thorough. I just… it's a lot to carry around, isn't it?"
It was such an ordinary thing to say. Nobody had ever said it to him before.
"It gets lighter," said Samuel, which was a lie, and a kind one, and he thought she knew it.
The scanner was an arch of pale light on a thin silver rail, and it passed over him slowly, from the crown of his head to his feet, like a wave sliding over sand. "Stand if you can," Renata said. "Sit if you can't." He stood. He held the rail. He felt nothing at all, and for fifteen minutes he stared at a small gray spot on the wall, and tried to remember what the weather report had said that morning, and could not.
The reaction tests came last.
"This is just a pad," Renata said, and put a flat square of glass in his right hand. "When a light flashes, touch it. Don't anticipate. We'll do forty rounds."
"How fast is normal?" Gabriel called from the hallway.
"About a quarter of a second. Trained athletes, a little under two-tenths."
"And a perfect score?"
"There isn't one," said Renata. "Now, quiet, please."
The light flashed.
Samuel did not feel himself move. That was the odd part. There was never a decision, never a gap. The light came, and his thumb was already there, as if the two things had happened in the same instant, and he had only noticed afterward.
Flash. Touch. Flash. Touch.
Around the twelfth round, Renata made a small sound. It was not quite a word.
He pretended not to notice. He did not dare look at her. He was thinking of a tangerine, falling in a kitchen, and a hand that had been somewhere before it should have been able to get there.
After the fortieth round, she was silent for a moment. Then she turned the tablet away, so smoothly that it looked like a habit, and tapped at it twice.
"Sensor's a little off," she said. "These new units drift. Let me recalibrate and run you again."
She ran him again. Forty rounds. Flash, touch. When it was done, she looked at the screen for rather longer than she had the first time, and her face did something very small and very controlled.
"What does it say?" Samuel asked.
"That you have fast hands," said Renata, and smiled. It was a good smile. It almost reached her eyes. "Calibration drift, probably. I'll flag it for the team. Don't worry about it."
From the hallway, very softly, Samuel heard Lia's pen start to move.
The pod was warm inside.
He had expected cold. Instead there was a soft, faintly sweet heat, like a blanket left near a radiator, and the mattress molded itself to the long, aching curve of his spine so exactly that he almost laughed. For the first time in years, nothing pressed against anything sore. He lay there with his hands at his sides and looked up at the pale curved ceiling, and listened to Renata explain the safety systems in a voice he was only half hearing.
"…the lid cannot lock from the outside, and it never locks from the inside either. If your vitals leave a safe range, the system pauses the dive and opens the pod on its own. And this—"
"This?" said his father, from the doorway.
"There's a manual release on the side. A red button. Anyone can press it, any time."
His father crossed the room in three strides and, without a word, pressed it.
The lid rose with a long, soft hiss. Samuel, blinking, looked up into his father's face, a very large face, very close, with deep lines around the eyes.
"Works," said his father, to nobody in particular.
"It does," agreed Renata, gravely.
"Again," said his father, and pressed it again, and the lid sighed down and then up. He nodded, satisfied. He patted the side of the pod twice, the way he patted the flank of his motorcycle when it started on the first try, and stepped back.
The lid came down for the last time.
"Everything's ready," said Renata's voice, muffled now, from somewhere far away. "When you're ready, say Dive. Or just breathe out slowly, and think about it."
Samuel lay in the warm shell-colored dark.
Head: foggy. Hands: shaking. Heart: a small, furious animal, trying to climb out through his ribs.
"Dive," he whispered.
The first thing he noticed was the absence.
It happened so fast that it frightened him. There was a brief, dizzy lurch, a falling that was not quite a fall, and then every ache in his body simply stopped. Not faded. Stopped, as though someone had reached into a dark room and switched off a machine he had been listening to every second of his life, so constantly he had forgotten it was a sound.
He held his breath. He was waiting for the pain to come back.
It did not come back.
He was standing. He realized it slowly, the way you notice the sun has come out. He was standing on something smooth and pale, a floor like still water, and the light around him was soft, white, and without source, and when he looked down he saw feet. His feet. Bare. Solid. Flat on the ground.
Weather report, he thought, out of habit.
Head: clear. No fog. Hands: warm. Left knee…
He stopped. He tried again.
Left knee: nothing. Back: nothing. Everything: quiet.
He could not remember the last time that had happened. He could not remember if it had ever happened.
Welcome to Legendary Era Online, said a voice, kind and unhurried, from everywhere and nowhere. Your body scan is complete. Would you like to see your avatar?
"Yes," said Samuel, and his voice sounded strange in his own ears, steady and low.
A mirror unfolded out of the light.
It was him. That was what undid him. Not some tall, golden stranger out of an advertisement. It was his face, his own dark curls, the same slightly crooked nose his grandfather had given him. But the boy in the mirror was standing straight. His shoulders were level. His hands hung at his sides, loose and ready, and he looked, Samuel thought, with a sudden painful tenderness, exactly like someone who had never once been told to sit down.
Your avatar has been normalized to the platform baseline, said the voice. All participants begin at the same level of physical capability.
"The same," Samuel repeated.
The same.
He took a step.
Then another. Then, very carefully, as though the floor might change its mind, a third. There was no cane. There was no wall to catch. There was no weight in the leg, no grinding, no flinch waiting at the bottom of each stride. There was only the easy, ordinary motion of a person walking across a room.
He walked in a circle. He lifted his arms above his head and held them there, and nothing shook. He crouched, and stood again, and the world did not tilt. Somewhere in the middle of it he began to laugh, and then he realized his face was wet, and he did not stop for a long time.
The voice waited. It was very good at waiting.
Please enter a name for your character.
A small glowing field appeared in the air. He typed Samuel, out of reflex, and the field shivered and turned a polite shade of red. That name is unavailable.
Of course it was.
He thought about it for a moment. He thought about the weather report, the long, patient habit of eight years, the way he had spent his whole life listening to the sky inside his own body. Weather meant wind. And wind was the one thing he had never really felt. Not on his skin, not without a flinch, not without the dull dread that even a breeze might hurt.
And then, unbidden, another memory rose beside it.
He was nine years old, and lying in a hospital bed, with an IV in his arm and a small television bolted to the wall. It was the middle of the night. The Olympics were on, and no one else was awake. A woman in a white uniform stood on a green field, perfectly still. She raised her bow, drew it, and held. The whole world seemed to hold with her. Her breath, her shoulders, the arrow, the air. Nothing moved at all.
It was the only sport he had ever been able to watch without feeling that his own body had been left behind. Because the archer did not run, or jump, or strain. She only stood, and was still, and was exactly where she needed to be.
He had never told anyone about that night. Not Gabriel. Not Lia. Not even his mother.
He typed slowly, one letter at a time.
Windbow.
The field glowed, thought, and turned a soft, approving gold.
Name available. Welcome, Windbow.
Something in his chest, tight for eight years, let go with an almost audible click.
Please choose the class under which you wish to apprentice. Your choice is a statement of intent, not a commitment. You will have the opportunity to earn your formal class at level ten.
The white around him rippled. Out of the pale light, one by one, doors began to rise, each as tall as a man, each glowing with a different color. A sword. A staff. A shield. A pair of daggers crossed over a mask. A book, a lantern, a cluster of herbs.
Samuel stood very still, with his arms loose at his sides and the wind he could not yet feel already pulling at the edges of his sleeves.
And at the far end of the row, small and silver and almost hidden between the others, he saw a door marked with a bow.