The cozy vibe of the virtual lounge curdled faster than milk left in the New Tex sun. My easygoing smile didn't slip, but behind my avatar's eyes, the gears were turning. A MeTube suit. Of course. The vultures couldn't get to the meat directly, so they were trying to peck at the plate.
Millie gave a tight, nervous little nod towards the smiling businessman. The avatar, moving with a stiffness that screamed 'default settings,' stepped forward. Each footfall was a perfect, metronome-like tap on the digital floor, utterly devoid of the subtle shifts in weight a real person would have.
"A pleasure to make your acquaintance," the avatar said, its voice a smooth, gender-neutral baritone filtered through a cheap vocal modulator. It extended a hand. The motion was too precise, too practiced. "I am Mr. King. A representative from the MeTube Marketing Partnerships division."
I took the offered hand. The haptic feedback was a generic, medium-firm grip. It felt like shaking hands with a department store mannequin.
"Sael VT," I replied, my tone neutral, giving nothing away. "Guess the word's getting around."
"Indeed, it is," Mr. King said, the smile never flickering. It was starting to get creepy. "The interest in your upcoming collaboration with Miss Kyleish is... unprecedented. Our analytics servers are quite literally buzzing."
He paused, as if waiting for me to be impressed. I just stared, letting the silence hang.
"Given the scale of this event," he continued, the smile somehow widening, "MeTube would like to formally offer our premium services…. We wish to elevate this from a simple stream to a premier live event."
A flick of his wrist. A holographic schematic materialized in the air between us with a soft shimmer. It showed a breathtakingly elaborate virtual concert hall, all sweeping digital arches and cascading light. Avatars—thousands of them—filled seats that spiraled towards a distant, starry ceiling.
"We are prepared to grant you exclusive access to our 'Grand Stage' environment. A persistent virtual venue capable of hosting one thousand live attendees. They wouldn't just watch the stream; they would attend it. Their avatars would be present in the space, reacting in real-time. The atmosphere would be... electric."
It was a hell of a pitch. The tech was undeniably impressive. But all I could think was: This is a trap dressed as a gift.
A new avatar flickered into existence beside me with a sound like rustling silk. "Whoa…. What's all this?"
Emily. She looked refreshed, her avatar glowing with a healthy vibrancy that probably mirrored her post-coital nap in the real world. Her eyes, however, were immediately sharp, scanning Mr. King and the schematic with a streamer's practiced suspicion.
"Em! Thank God," Millie breathed out, latching onto her friend's arrival like a life raft. She quickly summarized the offer, her words tumbling over each other. "...and he says we can have a thousand people in here, live, like a real concert! Isn't that insane?"
Emily listened, her head tilted. She didn't look at Millie or Mr. King. She looked at me. "Sael? What's the play?"
All eyes were on me. Mr. King's plastic smile. Millie's hopeful anxiety. Amora's curious, amused gaze. Emily's trust.
I shrugged, the motion translated perfectly by the haptic suit. "It's your stream, Millie. Your call." I kept my voice casual, relaxed. But inside, my mind was a fortress. 'Sunday, run a full isolation diagnostic on this connection. Are we leak-proof?'
"[Connection is secure,]" Sunday's voice murmured, a cool certainty in my mind. "[All outgoing data from your end is scrubbed and encrypted with a quantum-level algorithm this platform cannot decipher. They are receiving a curated feed... Your real IP, biometrics, and identity are behind a million layers of obfuscation… They cannot touch you.]"
The confidence was absolute. In anything digital, I was untouchable. A ghost. A god. They could throw their biggest, fanciest venue at me, and it wouldn't matter. They couldn't get a single byte of me they weren't explicitly given.
"If you want the big stage, take it," I said to Millie, giving her a reassuring nod.
"Sounds like fun. And hey," I added with a slight grin, "it's not like they can do anything to us in here."
Millie's shoulders relaxed. The fear was replaced by giddy excitement. "Okay! Okay, yes! Let's do it!"
A digital contract appeared before her, glowing softly. She barely scanned it before pressing her virtual thumb to the signature line. A chime echoed through the space. Ding.
Mr. King's smile didn't change, but his head turned towards me. "And for you, sir? A co-signature, for our records?"
"Nope," I said, popping the 'p'. My tone was friendly but final. "I'm just a guest performer… I don't sign anything. That's all on her."
The smile on the businessman's face held for a fraction of a second too long. A tiny, almost imperceptible glitch in the expression. I'd just refused to get in their cage.
"Very well," Mr. King said, the modulated voice straining to maintain its pleasantness. He waved a hand.
The world didn't change so much as it blended. The cozy lounge dissolved at the edges, replaced by the vast, awe-inspiring architecture of the virtual concert hall. It was like we were on a stage nestled in the center of a glittering galaxy. The sense of scale was dizzying.
But the genius of it was the perspective. From where we stood, our immediate surroundings—the couches, the mixing console Millie used, the fake window—were still intact. It was just our personal bubble on an immense stage. We could see out into the vast, currently empty auditorium, but the thousands of attendee avatars, when they arrived, wouldn't be visible to us as individuals. They'd be a roaring, faceless crowd of light and sound. We could perform for them without the paralyzing pressure of a thousand pairs of eyes staring back.
"Holy shit," Millie whispered, her avatar spinning around to take it all in. "This is... this is unbelievable."
"Fuck yeah, it is!" Amora whooped, striking a pose on the edge of the stage. "We're gonna blow the roof off this digital motherfucker!"
Emily walked over to me, her avatar bumping against mine companionably. The haptics registered it as a soft nudge. "You sure about this?" she asked quietly, for my ears only.
"Completely," I murmured back, watching Mr. King observe us from a few paces away. "It's just a bigger screen… Doesn't change what's behind it. And they still have no idea who or what that is."
I could feel the corporate avatar's attention on me, a silent, hungry pressure. They'd gotten their foot in the door with the venue, but I'd refused to give them my name. The game was on. They just didn't realize I was the only one who knew all the rules.