Free Arena by Holly Jennings

my tone serious, but it wavered toward sarcasm by the end. This was so stupid.
    â€œDid you know that the first wave of participants in the VGL were athletes turned gamers? It was—”
    â€œA disaster,” I finished for her. “Athletes don’t understand the virtual world. How could they? A fish can’t swim in honey just because it’s liquid.”
    â€œThat’s”—she paused as she processed my words—“an interesting analogy.”
    â€œMost of them lost their minds. Or, excuse me, were subject to psychological instabilities.” I forced my lips into a smile. Her eyes narrowed slightly. Guess she figured out my sarcasm. She wasn’t wrong, though. When virtual gaming went fully immersive, they’d first pulled in athletes to play the games. In most video games, a character is assigned to you. On occasion, the game allows you to create one of your own, most commonly in RPGs and MMOs. But in pro gaming, you are your avatar, and what you were capable of in reality was parallel to the digital domain.
    Gaming evolves quickly. Every few years, a new system comes out capable of ten times what it did before. In only a few decades, VR went from basic headsets to full immersion. But when it hit, almost no pro gamers were already in top physical condition. So, they pulled in athletes, who had already trained their entire lives to play a pro sport, and tried to teach them gaming.
    But going virtual required something more. Something only gamers understood. As much as skill sets depended on physical ability in reality, they were only valuable if you knew what you were doing inside a game. All their lives, gamers had learned how to manipulate the virtual, how one action or choice could change the outcome of the entire game. We’d learned to read the lines of digital fate. We’d learned how to make the games do what we wanted.
    We’d learned that death was nothing more than a do-over.
    Athletes didn’t. They couldn’t. So once the attempts to turn them into gamers had failed, they started turning gamers into athletes. Required to train in everything from weight lifting to weapons, gamers had become the greatest competitors the world had ever seen.
    â€œGamers are the only ones who can handle fully immersive VR,” I told the doc. “We grow up wrapped in a virtual world. We die every day on the screen in console and arcade games. It’s no different when we plug in and go virtual.”
    â€œIs it?”
    My gut twisted again. I shrugged it off. “Well, sure, the pro level is something else. With the safeguards off, we feel pain. Things seem real, sometimes realer than this place.” I waved a hand at the office. “But it’sjust like a dream. You can feel pain or fear in a dream, but once you wake up, you realize it was no big deal.”
    The doctor scoffed. “People don’t go crazy from dreaming.” She looked down and mumbled the words, as if they weren’t really for me to hear. Silence fell over the room while she made a note in her tablet. “Speaking of dreams, how are you sleeping?”
    â€œFine . . . until today.”
    â€œClarence told me what happened with Nathan. Did you want to talk about that?”
    â€œNo.”
    She rested the tablet against the desk and leaned toward me. “I’m not going to force you on the topic. Not during our first meeting.”
    Our only meeting.
    â€œBut in time,” she continued, “it might be good for you to open up about that. Keep it in mind.”
    I nodded. Yeah, right.
    She stood and walked over to a cabinet on the far side of the room. “Just in case you have trouble sleeping,” she said as she unlocked the door and reached inside, “I’m going to give you some pills to help. Don’t be afraid to take them, but only if you have to. Use discretion.”
    She handed me a small, silver package, like the kind gum