The transition was a thermal shock. From the cold, stagnant air of her new apartment—if that could even be called an apartment—to the dry heat of Port Kepler. The universe, in its infinite irony, had not exiled her to a black hole or a forgotten moon. The asset seizure and reputation reset came with a "reintegration package." The final insult: the game treated her like a beginner, dumping her into the same tutorial zone to which she had once sent anonymous donations.
The air tasted of recycled oxygen and ochre dust. The sky wasn't black, scattered with stars, but a sickly veil the color of rust. Around her, sound. The incessant ping of achievements from players who had just learned how to walk. The whoosh of basic ships lifting off. Sounds she hadn't heard in years.
Her reflection in a puddle of stagnant oil was that of a stranger. There was no black, angular exo-suit optimized for silent combat. There was only an orange recovery jumpsuit, one-size-fits-all, more like a prison uniform. The fabric scratched against her skin. The game hadn't even left her underwear.
Seventy-two hours until the rent was due. That was the only mission that mattered.
She ignored the "Welcome to Odyssey Online!" terminal and moved away from the bustle of the starport. Her instincts—the muscle memory of a queen—guided her toward the dusty ravines on the outskirts. Away from the eyes, away from the pings.
Without a ship, she was an insect. Without a pickaxe, she was less than that. She wasn't a player. She was a scavenger.
Ishtar knelt in the red earth. Her eyes, once trained to decipher the signatures of entire fleets, now searched for a different glint: the tiny fragments of low-grade iron ore that the port's atmospheric drilling rigs spat out as waste.
She reached down and picked up a piece of metal the size of a fingernail. It was warm from the ochre sun. On her HUD, a notification blinked: [Ferric Fragment x1 collected.]
Each fragment was a humiliation.
Her mind, however, didn't stop. It was the one tool they couldn't take. She observed. The flight patterns of the small metallic beetles that passed for local fauna. The routes other orange-suited novices took, all following the path laid out by the tutorial. She moved in the opposite direction.
A louder ping sounded nearby. A young player celebrating his first pickaxe. The sound hit Ishtar like a physical blow. She remembered Alexandre—the day he'd finally scraped together the resources for his first exploration ship. The pure, childlike joy on his face. A memory that now felt like poison.
She closed her eyes for a second, anger a cold ember in her gut. Sally had offered escape. Where Ishtar demanded growth, she offered comfort. The memory of Sally's voice in her home was acid.
Focus.
She opened her eyes. The work was slow, torturous. Her back ached. Her fingers, accustomed to the tactile response of a command console, were scraped raw and filthy. Hour after hour, she collected the system's trash.
When the light of the twin suns began to fade, she finally had enough to fill the small cargo pocket of her jumpsuit. She stood, brushing dust from her legs, and opened her system interface, the blue, translucent hologram hovering before her eyes.
The inventory window showed the pathetic reward for her day's labor: [Ferric Fragment x42]. She dragged the icon to the quick-market terminal. The system calculated the value. [Estimated Value: 12 CR.]
Twelve credits. Not even enough for a synthetic drink in the port cantina.
Frustration and despair nearly choked her. Her gaze drifted across the system interface, unfocused, until it landed on a small line of text in the lower-left corner of her character window. A statistic most players never looked at after the first day. An irrelevant datum.
[Total Accumulated Play Time]
There, in clean white text, was a number. A number that made no sense for someone in an orange jumpsuit. A number that looked like an error, a ghost in the code.
32,768 hours.
For a "new player" in an orange jumpsuit in the tutorial zone, the number was impossible. It was the equivalent of playing twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for nearly three years and nine months. It looked like a bug. A scar in the system.
Or a silent testament to who she had once been.