Full Summary:

Maxine was not having a good day.

Her period hit her like a goddamn truck, her ADHD made nothing make sense, and everyone at her apartment was so freaking loud and annoying it's a wonder she didn't scream at them.

One day she found a mysterious VR machine that looked like an eye patch, and put it on before going to sleep.

Only to wake up the next morning as a game character.

With the Justice League knocking on her door and talking to her like they've known her for years.

Here's to hoping Maxine doesn't screw this up!

From the creators of The Bugbears and Sandswept:
Injustice:Yellow Lanternz Rule!

I was jolted awake by the sound of gunfire in one of the neighboring stacks. The shots were followed by a few minutes of muffled shouting and screaming, then silence.

Gunfire wasn't uncommon in the stacks, but it still shook me up. A lot of people owned guns around here, claiming 'personal safety'—a valid concern, but more often than not the guns just ended up being used to shoot anyone who you thought was looking at you the wrong way. Such is life in the stacks.

I knew I should try to go back to sleep, but that wasn't an easy task. I was curled up in an old sleeping bag in the corner of the trailer's tiny laundry room, wedged into the gap between the wall and the dryer. I wasn't welcome in my aunt's room across the hall, which was fine by me. I preferred to crash in the laundry room anyway. It was warm, it afforded me a limited amount of privacy, and the wireless reception wasn't too bad. And, as an added bonus, the room smelled like liquid detergent and fabric softener. The rest of the trailer reeked of cat pee-pee and abject poverty.

Most of the time I slept in my hideout. But the temperature had dropped below zero the past few nights, and as much as I hated staying at my aunt's place, it still beat freezing to death.

A total of fifteen people lived in my aunt's trailer. She slept in the smallest of its three bedrooms. The Depperts lived in the bedroom adjacent to hers, and the Millers occupied the large master bedroom at the end of the hall. There were six of them, and they paid the largest share of the rent. Our trailer wasn't as crowded as some of the other units in the stacks. It was a double-wide. Plenty of room for everybody.

I pulled out my laptop and powered it on. It was a bulky, heavy beast, almost ten years old. I'd found it in a trash bin behind the abandoned strip mall across the highway. I'd been able to coax it back to life by replacing its system memory and reloading the stone-age operating system. The processor was slower than a sloth by current standards, but it was fine for my needs. The laptop served as my portable research library, video arcade, and home theater system. It's hard drive was filled with old books, movies, TV show episodes, song files, and nearly every video game made in the twentieth century.

Normally when I couldn't sleep, which was more often than not, I'd try to play one of the old games stored on my computer.

Tonight, however, I was feeling in a bit of a maudlin mood, so I pulled up something special.

Ursa Major's Invitation opens with the sound of trumpets, the intro to a song called 'Dead Man's Party.' Slightly arrogant and self-important, but also somehow fitting. That was Callisto Underwood to a T.

The song plays over a dark screen for the first few seconds, until the trumpets are joined by a guitar, and that's when Underwood appears. She looks just as she did on the cover of Time magazine back in 2014, a tall, thin, healthy woman in her early forties, with unkempt hair and her trademark horn-rimmed eyeglasses. She's also wearing the same clothing she wore in the Time cover photo:faded jeans and a vintage Space Invaders T-shirt.

I always pause the video here. Underwood fills the screen, dancing—something no one ever saw her do in real life. When I was younger, I loved to look at this image because she just looked so happy.

Around here, happiness has always very much been in short supply. I was the only child of two teenagers, both refugees who'd met in the stacks where I'd grown up. I don't remember my father. When I was just a few months old, he was shot dead while looting a grocery store during a power blackout. The only thing I really knew about him was that he loved comic books. My mom once told me that my dad had given me an alliterative name, Maxine Morris, because he thought it made me sound like I had the secret identity of a superhero.

I thought it made me sound like an idiot.

My mother, Loretta, had raised me on her own. We'd lived in a small RV in another part of the stacks. She had two full-time 4D jobs, one as a telemarketer, the other as an escort in an online brothel. She used to make me wear earplugs at night so I wouldn't hear her in the next room, talking dirty to tricks in other time zones. But the earplugs didn't work very well, so I would watch old movies instead, with the volume turned way up.

For me, growing up as a human being on the planet Earth in the twenty-first century was a real kick in the teeth. Existentially speaking.

I wish someone had just told me the truth right up front, as soon as I was old enough to understand it. I wish someone had just said:

Here's the deal, Max. You're something called a 'human being.' That's a really smart kind of animal. Like every other animal on this planet, we're descended from a single-celled organism that lived millions of years ago. This happened by a process called evolution, and you'll learn more about it later. You're probably wondering what happened before you got here. An awful lot of stuff, actually. Once we evolved into humans, things got pretty interesting. We figured out how to grow food and domesticate animals so we didn't have to spend all of our time hunting. Our tribes got much bigger, and we spread across the entire planet like an unstoppable virus. Then, after fighting a bunch of wars with each other over land, resources, and our made-up gods, we eventually got all of our tribes organized into a 'global civilization.' But, honestly, it wasn't all that organized, or civilized, and we continued to fight a lot of wars with each other. But we also figured out how to do science, which helped us develop technology. For a bunch of hairless apes, we've actually managed to invent some pretty incredible things. Computers. Medicine. Lasers. Microwave ovens. Artificial hearts. Atomic bombs. We even sent a few guys to the moon and brought them back. We also created a global communications network that lets us all talk to each other, all around the world, all the time. Pretty impressive, right?

But that's where the bad news comes in. Our global civilization came at a huge cost. We needed a whole buncha energy to build it, and we got that energy by burning fossil fuels, which came from dead plants and animals buried deep in the ground. We used up most of this fuel before you got here, and now it's pretty much all gone. This means that we no longer have enough energy to keep our civilization running like it was before. So we've had to cut back. Big-time. We call this the Global Energy Crisis, and it's been going on for a while now.

Also, it turns out that burning all of those fossil fuels had some nasty side effects, like raising the temperature of our planet and screwing up the environment. So now the polar ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, and the weather is all messed up. Plants and animals are dying off in record numbers, and lots of people are starving and homeless. And we're still fighting wars with each other, mostly over the few resources we have left.

Basically, what this all means is that life is a lot tougher than it used to be, in the Good Old Days, back before you were born. To be honest, the future doesn't look too bright. You were born at a pretty crappy time in history. And it looks like things are only gonna get worse from here on out. Human civilization is in 'decline.' Some people even say it's 'collapsing.'

You're probably wondering what's going to happen to you. That's easy. The same thing is going to happen to you that has happened to every other human being who has ever lived. You're going to die. We all die. That's just how it is.

What happens when you die? Well, we're not completely sure. But the evidence seems to suggest that nothing happens. You're just dead, your brain stops working, and then you're not around to ask annoying questions anymore. So now you have to live the rest of your life knowing you're going to die someday and disappear forever.

Sorry.

When I would finally work up the guts to press play on Ursa Major's Invitation again, I was always jarred when the lyrics of the song finally kicked in. After staring at a still image for a while and being only alone with my thoughts, the sudden advent of another person's voice always seemed too loud. Eventually, Underwood begins to lip-sync along, still gyrating:All dressed up with nowhere to go. Walking with a dead man over my shoulder. Don't run away, it's only me...

She abruptly stops dancing and makes a cutting motion with her right hand, silencing the music. Underwood now stands at the front of a funeral parlor, next to an open casket. A second Underwood lies inside the casket, her body emaciated and ravaged by cancer. Shiny quarters cover each of her eyelids. The other Underwood gazes down at the corpse of her slightly older self with mock sadness, then turns to address the assembled mourners. She snaps her fingers and a scroll appears in her right hand. Opening it with a flourish, it unfurls to the floor, unraveling down the aisle in front of her. She breaks the fourth wall, addressing the viewer, and begins to read.

"I, Callisto Donovan Underwood, being of sound mind and disposing memory, do hereby make, publish, and declare this instrument to be my last will and testament, hereby revoking any and all wills and codicils by me at any time heretofore made..." She continues reading, faster and faster, plowing through several more paragraphs of legalese, until she's speaking so rapidly that the words are unintelligible. Then she stops abruptly.

"Forget it", she says. "Even at that speed, it would take me a month to read the whole thing. Sad to say, I don't have that kind of time." She drops the scroll and it vanishes in a shower of gold dust.

"If there's one thing we can never have enough of," Underwood continues, brushing gold dust off her sleeves, "it's time. There is never the time to do everything or see everything or experience everything we want. That, of course, is one of the main goals behind the creation of the Extraordinary VR Machine:to let one experience with their senses an experience that previously was only limited to the imagination. With this thingy," she says, pausing for effect, "all is possible." Callisto steps to the side and the scene changes, this time to reveal a huge vault door, emblazoned with the logo of her company, Gregarious Simulation Systems.

"In my life, I have done a great many things," Underwood says. "And as you are probably well aware, these things have made me a great deal of money. But," he comments with a sly grin, "there are some things you can't take with you, right?" She taps on the door and it swings open, revealing huge stacks of gold bars, piled all the way to the ceiling. Underwood smirks and leans back against the nearest stack, the camera pulling in close on her face in a zoom that I always found jarring.

"So," she says, clapping her hands together, "I bet all you folks are wondering what all this is, and if you can get your hands on any of this sweet, sweet dough. Well, hold up there, because I'm getting to that."

The world tilts and the vault disappears, morphing into a messy living room with burnt orange carpeting, wood-paneled walls, and kitschy late-'70s decor; the room packed with old magazines strewn about and random knick-knacks cluttering most of the available surfaces. The only area of the room that's remotely clear is the space directly in front of the television, an ancient 21-inch model. Hooked up to the television is a dusty but clearly beloved gaming console, and sitting cross-legged on the floor holding the joystick is a small girl, dressed neatly in corduroys and a faded t-shirt but with hair that looks like she's just walked through a windstorm.

"The Atari 2600," Underwood's voice says from behind the viewer, as she walked into frame. "This was the first video game system I ever owned," she remarks fondly. "This is me, just after I got it for Christmas in 1979. It was love at first sight."

She walks over and sits down next to the small girl, who is still engrossed in her game.

"My favorite game was this one," she says, nodding at the TV screen, where a small square is traveling through a series of simple mazes. "It was called Adventure. Like many early video games, Adventure was designed and programmed by just one person. But back then, Atari refused to give its programmers credit for their work, so the name of a game's creator didn't actually appear anywhere on the packaging." On the screen, young Underwood slays a red dragon, although with the low-res graphics it's hard to actually tell what anything is supposed to be.

"So the guy who created Adventure, a man named Warren Robinett, decided to hide his name inside the game itself," Underwood continues to explain. "He hid a key in one of the game's labyrinths. If you found this key, a small pixel-sized gray dot, you could use it to enter a secret room where Robinett had hidden his name." Young Underwood guides her square protagonist into the game's secret room, where the words CREATED BY WARREN ROBINETT appear in the center of the screen.

"This", the adult Underwood says, pointing to the screen with genuine reverence, "was the very first video game Easter egg. Robinett hid it in his game's code without telling a soul, and Atari manufactured and shipped Adventure all over the world without knowing about the secret room. They didn't find out about the Easter egg's existence until a few months later, when kids all over the world began to discover it. I was one of those kids, and finding Robinett's Easter egg for the first time was one of the coolest video gaming experiences of my life."

Underwood stands, and the living room faded away, transitioning into a dimly lit cavern, complete with the sounds of bats flying overhead and water dripping distantly. At the same time, Underwood's appearance changes, morphing into her more iconic self, Ursa Major—a tall, robed sorceress with a slightly more handsome version of the adult Underwood's face. Ursa Major was dressed in her trademark colorful robes, with her emblem(the Big Dipper) embroidered on each sleeve.

"When the doctors gave me my diagnosis," Ursa Major says, speaking in a much deeper voice, "I knew I had finally run out of time, and that I was no longer going to be able to do everything I dreamed about. But I didn't want my hopes and goals to die with me. My own Easter Egg is the first and only model of the Extraordinary VR machine I created."

She grins and the cavern lights up, a holographic overlay showing a map of the Four-Dimensional World, the internet world harboring the entire fictional omniverse, flickering to life.

"The first person to find my VR Machine will inherit a controlling share of stock in my company and my entire fortune, currently valued in excess of two hundred and forty billion dollars."

She pauses for effect, although after that bombshell, it isn't really necessary.

"But be warned, the thingy is well hidden. Perhaps even too well hidden. Part of me even worries that it may never be found. I never got to play-test this particular game," she chuckles, although humorlessly.