A system window appeared in the periphery of my eyes. I pulled it in front of my view.
“Request to Form a Party” sent by Celestina. “Will you [Accept] or [Decline]?”
—
A few weeks passed, and the playerbase now stood at over forty thousand citizens. The first five thousand players who entered the game formed powerful parties and guilds and restricted access to the best boss farming spots. There were only four months until the by-election, and the public reaction to the creation of a virtual administrative region of Britain was, on the whole, positive, although many did not care one way or the other.
A small group of the usual moaners: teachers, journalists, parents’ and women’s associations, lawyers, back-bench politicians, American NGOs, “public intellectuals” (read: talking heads), already started to complain about how this technology replicated the inequalities of British society in virtual form. Whilst they may be right, in my view they only complained about it because it was their job to complain, or among the more astute of them, because they could feel their control over others slip, their whip pass from their hands to someone else’s hand, of course they didn’t know that it was my hand, or should it be the hands of those who were pulling my strings? In any case, the 10% of GDP growth in a single month silenced most critics. It turns out most people didn’t give a damn about their minds being invaded by government-made software. I expected a bit more genuine resistance; the people never failed to disappoint me, but on the other hand, this was what my survival depended on: whether it was the PM’s hand or my hand to which the whip was passed, I was now complicit in his crime.
While most ordinary people were only interested in joining the ranks of the citizenry due to the promise of being able to exchange in-game gold for real money since the Bank of England had given the Castle Academy the right to issue their own sterling pound notes, it was also becoming apparent that they could get a better deal for anything within the game itself due to the scarcity in the game been only there because the system decreed it be there.
“Man, I wish I could just live in the game,” remarked a high-ranking member of my guild as we headed to battle the seventh level boss in the Jerusalem Dungeons. “But with you and your lovely partner. Ouch don’t pinch me Laila… Raphael I am sure we can break the world’s egg and start the world’s only real revolution!”
This was Peter Keaton, a failed architect in real life, who was my second in command. The one pinching him for calling Celestina lovely was none other than his system-chosen partner, Laila Francoise, a florist. They were also married in real life, and he was living off of her.
While the players were rapidly eating up content and selling the information in and out the game (the info ultimately ended up on online guides which despite Chamberlain’s requests to take down kept popping back up), the student AIs at Castle Academy were busy organising the second phase of the National Virtual Expansion Act, the Great Cultural Festival Event, which will enable Augmented Reality capabilities in the real world.
There was a dungeon underneath the city with eight floors, and whoever was first to beat the boss of each level would earn a position in the Senate. Bosses were killed in raids by players, and usually the one to get the kill was whoever dealt the most damage to the boss, if it had been the one who dealt the last blow that would have led to too many useless people rising to the top because you could just delegate the task of beating the boss to a pulp to others and just deliver the last blow. Already, the richer players tried hiring poorer players with real cash to fight their battles, but of course, this meant that the players who actually did the fighting became stronger than their masters. The truth is that most people wouldn’t want to play a truly balanced system, so I didn’t even really try to design one.
So far, seven levels had been cleared, three by me, one by Celestina, and two by an actual pair of players, Eilis Grangewood, the prodigal daughter of a prominent Anglo-Irish Pharmaceutical Company founder, who ran the biggest guild within the game, and her boyfriend, Nanashi, a mysterious Japanese solo player who moved to Britain when he heard about Jerusalem. I say mysterious because Arthur was unable to find anything on him in the government’s archives or through his own investigation. I would bet that he is some sort of plant sent by the Japanese government or some other shady entity. He was practically a recluse, living in a studio flat in South London, only coming out to collect deliveries. For the time being, we decided that it was better to leave him alone. As long as he was a UK resident and wasn’t arrested for some kind of crime we couldn’t really kick him out without causing a fuss since he was one of the best players.
As the one with the highest tally of bosses, I was elected as the First Consul. Of course, I appointed Eilis as the Second Consul as a sign of goodwill to the Elite faction which she controlled. I, in turn, led the Populares faction which represented the majority of the players on the server. Well, it was a part I could play well enough since I wasn’t a member of the upper class before coming here.
The Senate was not in charge of new content creation, or of world building, it was merely an organ which managed the player base through the Guilds and the AI City Guards and other NPCs. The world building and systems were in the hands of Castle Academy, to which the players had no access to.
The final boss to the Jerusalem Dungeon was a five-headed White Dragon about thirty metres tall. The other members of the expedition didn’t know this but of course I knew it. The dragon was guarding the World’s Egg which once when broken would signal to Castle Academy that the network of Neural Processing Units in the players was advanced enough to deploy the UK-wide Augmented Reality Network, forever shrouding Britain in a world of images that don’t exist anywhere else except the minds of the British people. It was important for this reason that I held back as much as possible to ensure that this “win” belonged as much as possible to the British people. I had already “died” to the White Dragon fourteen times, but I could see the guilds improving, and the compatibility between couples rising, which means I was doing my job, which meant that I got to “live” another day.
