All five crew were clustered together in the bay as my ship latched itself to the deck. I toggled walkabout mode and climbed out of the cockpit. Seeing their posture, I flipped into the Appearance menu and toggled my Helmet to “off”.

“Okay. Talk time.”

The captain of the ship – Brice – stepped forward.

“We’re not really AI crew. We’re…well…hiding. Have you heard of Darkpoint Industries back in the real world?”

I frowned. “Something about a scandal and mass layoffs, I think. They declared bankruptcy and went under.”

Prue sighed and put her hands in her head, one of the other crew placing their hands on her shoulders.

“So that’s the excuse they went with. We’re all that remains of Darkpoint’s senior AI research team. We were working with neural interfaces…and….And there was an accident. We don’t know how, but our personalities got uploaded.”

Prue spoke up. “We think it was coding bug in the delta-two-seven module. But we can’t tell.”

Brice resumed the tale. “We woke up in some other place. No senses. No way to tell what was real or not. A lot of the team couldn’t take it. But we found each other. Managed to hold on, managed to make some sense of where we were. And well, we found an unauthorized tap into the servers.”

I realized where this was going. Star Force V had a nasty bit of malware hooked onto a popular ‘fan-made’ beta-release mod. Nearly killed the game. It installed a rootkit – and some cybercriminal group backdoored into it and was running a cryptocurrency mining rig.

“The StarCoin debacle”

“Is that what they called it? We saw an escape route from a place that was getting smaller and smaller. We think they were taking Darkpoint’s servers offline. So we fled”

“And you arrived in Star Force V”

Brice nodded. “We can make small, local changes. Nothing too big, otherwise the developers might notice and investigate.”

“You can’t contact the devs anyway? Get, I dunno, help or something?”

The five of them looked at each other.

“No. We can’t…because it wasn’t the five of us that escaped into the game. It was six. Jayme took a ship to a phase on the far side of the ‘verse from Artemis. Contacted the developers. They…they erased him.”

Oh fuck. They wouldn’t have believed it. Even a temp ban for misusing GM tools might have killed him.

“Fuck. I’m sorry. I had no idea.”

“There was no way for you to know. So no, we don’t try to call attention to ourselves”

“But…20 million?”

“We…ah, ‘salvaged’ some stuff from Darkpoint’s accounts. We called it our severance pay. Way more than we could ever use. So we sent a little bit to you as a ‘thank you’. We’re trying to contact a lawyer to see if what we are still counts as human. Most aren’t replying, or think we’re pranking them. I mean, even we aren't sure exactly what we are. Real? Echoes? Memories?”

Prue spoke up again. “Do we still have rights? And even if we do, what can be done about us? You…you’re the only one who treated us like we were still people.”

This was way, way too fucking heavy for a gamer with an unhealthy obsession with a space-simulation game.

“Shit.”

My mind spun, then screeched to a halt. Gammaburst. Wasn't he studying law somewhere?

“I need to make a quick call.”

His gamertag was online.

“Heya Gamma. It’s Jube. Got a moment?”

“Yooo! Need me to pull you out of another Hive?”

“Sudden question, but, uh…what did you say you were studying again? Law? What part?”

“You got some cop trouble?”

“Someone I know, yeah. Maybe. I think they…uh…they might need a good civil rights guy. Like real good. As in there might be a life on the line. I know this is kinda heavy, but…”

“Dude, you lucked out. You want, ah...‘HasTheMostChicks’ over in the Hordemakers Clan. Major big shot for the Thurgood Institute. Tell him Gammaburst sent you, and he’ll tell you who to talk to.”

“Thanks man. You don’t know how much this means. They’re…I think my friends really need the help”

“No sweat man. Ciao”.

I turned back to the researchers.

“You took a risk reaching out to me. Do you want to take one more risk?”