*** Patrick ***

  Patrick woke at 2:54 and for the first time since he was here he was in the mood for a coffee. He normally had a cup in the morning. ‘huh, I’m surprised I haven’t had caffeine withdrawal, I guess too much else has been happening.’

  At the table he bought the food upgrade. Sydney had mentioned that basic coffee was available at the first food level. Ordering the coffee he noticed that he was limited to a single serving at the current setting.

  Grabbing the coffee he sat back down to review yesterday’s performance review and to look over the day’s goals. The Strength, Endurance, and Intelligence categories were all rated good. Concentration was at an ‘acceptable’, and Dexterity was highlighted an orange color and labeled ‘needs work’.

  The problem with Dexterity is that he felt stuck. The task was to manipulate augmented reality objects using control gloves, and the gloves were too sensitive. Patrick had been too shy to talk about it with the neighbors and nobody else talked about how they were doing with the tasks.

  Tapping around the table to see if there was anything new that would be useful Patrick’s attention was caught by the ‘education’ upgrade. ‘Maybe it has hints or troubleshooting. I have anything I need to spend coins on.’

  He purchased the upgrade and a collection of how-tos and tutorials was now available. He bought the first Dexterity tutorial and dove into it. The information was weird. Throughout his 48 years Patrick had started exercising many times, trying out different techniques, approaches, and fads. This one was new to him though, it kept talking about micromovements. The technique had a new-age vibe, with the idea of imagining energy being released from different points on the body. The starting techniques focused on the hands, but theoretically the micromovements could be done by any part of the body.

  ‘I don’t understand how this would work physiologically, but when in Rome.’

  Patrick put the control gloves on and started working through the Dexterity exercises. The visualization exercises had some effect, but Patrick was still struggling.

  Thinking that there was a chance the gloves were defective he purchased the glove calibration upgrade. Patrick spent 15 minutes testing the gloves. He didn’t find any problems with the gloves, but the calibration tool was great for learning how to do the micromovements. Switching back to the manipulation task, he was still clumsy at the tasks, but the tutorial’s advice was helping. Using the micromovements he was able to make fine grained adjustments to the objects positions that weren’t possible otherwise. ‘The weird thing is I can’t perceive these micromovements, but the gloves do. Somehow they are able to sense where I am imagining the energy in my hands.’

  Proud that he was finally able to make progress, Patrick buckled down and wrapped up the Dexterity tasks by 4:17. At that point he was ravenous and ordered his breakfast. Even though there were a couple of other options he stuck with his regular mint chocolate shake.

  A couple of notifications appeared on the table: ‘Achievement: Each category completed at least once.’, ‘Leaderboards unlocked’, and ‘Challenge tasks unlocked’. His daily tasks had also been updated to include ‘Complete a Challenge in any category.’

  There were twelve leaderboards, global and neighborhood boards for each category, plus an overall board. Patrick was at or near the top of all of the neighborhood boards. Scott and Fred had him beat in the Intelligence category, and Harvey was in first on the Strength board. Patrick had the top spot on the Endurance, Dexterity, Concentration, and Overall boards.

  The global boards were not as gratifying:

  73% - Strength

  45% - Endurance

  54% - Dexterity

  44% - Intelligence

  34% - Concentration

  52% - Overall

  ‘huh, no way to tell how many people are competing.’

  Flipping back to the neighborhood boards Patrick noticed that some of the low performers were flagged as below the minimum cut-off. Marcel’s name was in red on all of the boards. Sydney and Fred were also in yellow on the Strength, Endurance, and Dexterity boards. Thinking a bit more he was surprised that he was on top of the Dexterity board since today was the first time that he had completed all of its tasks.

  ‘The meeting is in two hours, I’ll work on Concentration now and save Intelligence and Endurance until later.’

  Starting the Concentration task the table displayed 64 boxes with four types of icons: flames, waves, wind, and rocks. The icons were visible for 16 seconds and then blanked out. Patrick was then shown one of the four and needed to find all of those tiles in about a minute. Mistakes imposed a time penalty, so it wasn’t possible to just button-mash the solution. After a success the difficulty would be increased. Today’s goal was to make it through seven levels, yesterday’s goal had been six and he had only achieved five.

  On level two the tiles slowly shifted around and level three had even more movement. Levels four and five added distractions, with some visual clutter on four and talking and other sounds projected at level five.

  Patrick completed the first two levels ok, and on his third failure on level three decided to see if the hints would be useful. Patrick purchased the tutorial and a reference guide. The main insight the tutorial provided is that the different icons each had an associated vibe, and the vibe could be used to identify the icons. Pulling up the reference guide Patrick tried “feeling the vibe” that each icon had. He wasn’t sure if it was his imagination or not, but after 20 minutes he thought he could distinguish the icons by vibe. The reference guide had hundreds of variations of the icons, the four elemental icons were just representatives of some of the larger groups.

  Restarting the Concentration task from level one Patrick was able to complete the first two levels without any trouble. He was then able to get level three on his second attempt, and level four after five attempts, much better than the 18 attempts it had taken yesterday. Patrick dropped his level five time from 26 minutes yesterday to four minutes. On level six the tiles randomly disappeared for two seconds at a time and level seven combined the visual distractions and disappearances.

  If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Although not physically demanding, Patrick felt more drained than he had from his Strength exercises. Grabbing a few cookies as a reward, he freshened up and changed clothes for the meeting.

  – 5:43 –

  Waiting for the meeting Patrick reflected on the past couple of days. He wasn’t happy being abducted, putting that aside ( which was a big ask ), the past few days had been interesting and engaging. On one hand he felt powerless compared to whoever had taken him, on the other hand he had been well taken care of and the tasks had been kind of fun. Pondering all of this he waited hoping to catch a hint about how the door worked.

  He didn’t, the door again instantly changed from solid to translucent at six sharp.

  Marcel had finished first yesterday and had chosen today’s group activity as a chess tournament. Patrick liked chess, but he had never taken it too seriously. He liked to play chess using his instincts. Studying openings and other situational techniques never appealed to him. He liked to win of course, but winning was less important than the challenge. Growing up none of Patrick’s friends wanted to play, and when his kids wanted to play it was more important to enjoy spending time with them.

  Small talk was getting easier now and the group chatted amicably. After 10 minutes they decided on the tournament matchups: Scott vs Sydney, Caleb vs Erin, Patrick vs Fred, and Harvey had a bye since Marcel was a no-show. There was only one chess set out, so while each game was being played everyone else watched and quietly talked.

  Patrick looked at Harvey and said, “I was thinking about your reality tv theory of what’s happening.”

  “.. and .. “

  “I don’t think there is enough drama for reality tv. No offense “, Patrick said looking around at everyone, “but I think watching us would be dreadfully boring.”

  Erin smiled and said, “Maybe we are meant to be boring, like a fireplace show.”

  Fred said, “I agree with Patrick we are too boring, I think a fireplace would be better tv. There is something mesmerizing about fire.”

  Working to salvage his theory Harvey replied, “You are forgetting about editing. What is actually shown is just the highlights. Speaking of drama, did anyone else see the leaderboards?”

  Everyone had seen them, although no one knew why they unlocked during the middle of the day. Patrick suspected it was because he had completed the Dexterity category, but didn’t want the attention. Comparing notes for the first time about the tasks, it seemed like everyone was having similar experiences. Meanwhile Scott won against Sydney, leveraging an early knight advantage to dominate the game.

  As Caleb and Erin went to start their match Scott asked, “Pat, how did you get to the top on Dexterity?”

  “heh, top is a bit of an exaggeration, I’m still below average globally. Anyways, I was really struggling with it so I bought the tutorial for it and that really helped.”

  No one else had bought the education upgrade so there was some interest as Patrick shared what he found there. Patrick offered to let others read the tutorial off his table after the chess tournament.

  Erin won his match, mostly due to Caleb trying to use his queen without any of his other pieces supporting it. Fred drew white, so Patrick had black in his match. The game was evenly matched until Patrick was able to crash his queen into Fred’s back row and cause a checkmate.

  During Patrick’s game the discussion had moved on to whether the food was laced with steroids. Everyone had noticed that their strength and endurance tasks were much easier than expected.

  While Harvey and Erin started their match Patrick commented, “I wonder about sedatives in the food too. I feel more detached and not as agitated as I would expect from being kidnapped.” The discussion wandered off in various tangents about being drugged. There was general agreement that it was probably happening, but no one was concerned. Nor was anyone able to suggest anything that could be done about it. Harvey won against Erin. Erin had been trying to force a draw, but Harvey was able to corner him for the win.

  Patrick drew white and set up his pieces across from Scott who had black. Patrick hadn’t noticed it earlier, but during the game Scott continuously talked to try to psych Patrick out. Patrick was slightly amused since he wasn’t someone who did deep analysis of the game board. Patrick’s style was to control the center when possible and make opportunistically strikes. Scott ended up distracting himself into sacrificing a bishop, after which he steadily lost ground.

  Patrick drew black for the final match with Harvey. Harvey was a careful thinker, usually taking four times longer than Patrick for each move. They traded pieces until they were both down to a knight, two bishops, a rook, and a handful of pawns. Patrick over extended his position and lost his rook. At that point it was clear that Harvey would win so he conceded.

  Harvey took a poll regarding drinks and the consensus was an imperial pilsner. After the round of drinks and some more small talk Patrick invited anyone who wanted to review the tutorials to his apartment. Everyone decided to have a look, so they went back. Harvey was the first one behind him and was blocked when he tried to follow. The group spent several minutes trying to figure out why Patrick could go through but no one else could. The other doors were then tried with the same result, the owner of the apartment could freely enter and leave, but no one else could enter. The previous chill mood soured with no one having any credible theories about how the doors worked.

  — 7:33 —

  Patrick took a couple of minutes to switch gears, there was a lot to think about from the meeting, but nothing actionable. He went back to the table to start working on the Intelligence tasks. There were tutorial options for the Intelligence and Endurance tasks he planned tonight, but he was out of coins, and the tasks were relatively straightforward.

  There were two types of Intelligence tasks. The first was a foreign language that he had never seen before. He had been working through the vocabulary, grammar, and common phrases. The tasks had him working on both the written and spoken aspects. It was time consuming, but better than his experience learning French in college.

  The other half of the tasks consisted of learning some abstract rules that dictated how a geometric pattern would change over time. It was like learning how to predict how a chemical reaction would occur. The rules also depended on the color of the shapes. Patrick was getting through these with brute force memorization. He decided that he would go ahead and get the tutorial package for the shapes tomorrow. He was doing ok on completing them, but he didn’t feel like he really understood them.

  After supper Patrick felt ready to tackle the Endurance challenge. He wasn’t sure what it entailed yet, but Endurance had been the easiest category so far. Upon selecting the challenge through the table his Endurance task was flagged with ‘Challenge Level 1.’ Starting on the treadmill he didn’t notice a difference. After a half mile, of the now 8 mile goal, Patrick felt a little bit of a chill. It soon became apparent that the challenge part was that the temperature was dropping the further he progressed. At a mile and a half Patrick got off the treadmill and the temperature was instantly back to normal. He walked around the apartment a bit and then continued on. His best estimate was that it was dropping five degrees every half mile. The first few miles the reduced temperature made the jog more pleasant. After the half-way mark though it was getting uncomfortable. Deciding that the best approach would be to speed through the end Patrick took a quick break at the five mile mark and then ran as fast as he could the last three.

  He thought back to the discussion about steroids and other additives. Just a few days ago he couldn’t run 500 yards, yet now he was good for a couple of miles. Patrick liked being in the best shape of his life, but the sudden change was disconcerting.

  Afterwards he went back to the table and ordered another full size shake. He drank half of it and then went back to the global leaderboard. The challenge had helped propel him up to 38%. ‘It looks like the Challenges are necessary if I want to improve my standings.’ He finished up and was ready for sleep by 11:48.