Chapter 42: The Rewards of Being First(ish)

Hugh checked his email and found nine different buyout offers waiting for him. More than half were low-ball offers from people who obviously didn't understand the importance of securing a building. Two offers were from corporations eager to secure their foothold in Thrive and were willing to pay an insane amount of money for his property, but the three that caught his attention weren't corporations at all. One was a middling offer from a privately owned, authentic Texas steakhouse. Another was a respectable offer from a self-taught chef in Hawaii and the last came from a bakery owner in New Orleans.

It would take all three offers to equal the money he could get from a single corporate buyer, but the passion in their emails struck a chord with Hugh, as did their Net sites when he did a search to make sure they were legit. They loved food and they were willing to do nearly anything to secure real estate on the American server. The only thing they couldn't do was log in and get it themselves, because they had families they couldn't leave and their businesses in the real world needed them at the helm for a while longer.

Hugh messaged back, accepting all three on a whim and asking when they could send a representative into Thrive to handle the transfer. He had Dex type out what they needed to know to fast track someone to Nexus from their initial spawn point and attached a picture of his map of Nexus with their designated property circled in red. He also reminded each of them they were only buying out his rental. They'd still need their representative to purchase the building or extend the rental before the initial paid time ran out. Hugh then went to his shop management page in his Book and updated the flyers for each building to say 'Sold. Future home of...' and the name of the new owner.

It wasn't until Hugh finished he realized how much money he'd just made. Altogether, he'd netted several hundred thousand Zettabits in a single day. He might even get free food for life if he spent some time with the representatives as a consultant. But no, he better not. He'd have to be careful not to get so caught up in making money as a consultant he forgot to actually play the game. As long as they watched the playback of the feed he'd just recorded, he thought everyone should know enough to get set up with relative ease.

Hugh ended his time on the Net by sending out a group message to his gaming friends, promising to check back every Friday until he heard from them and giving them a link to his initial feed.

He glanced over to see how Frankie was doing, only to find the Doc's cubicle had turned black with the words 'Privacy Mode' repeating over the surface. Figuring it meant he had a little more time to kill, Hugh reloaded his email to see if there was anything new and busied himself by sending out rejections to the other sales offers. He also set up a vacation auto-reply message to anyone who tried to email him, letting them know he was out exploring Thrive and wouldn't be checking back until Friday. As a post-script, he mentioned his properties were already sold and said he wasn't accepting interviews.

He finished setting it up just in time. Although he meant the last part as a joke, his inbox started to fill with requests from various news channels who managed to track down his Net address and wanted some one-on-one time with a person inside Thrive. Hugh let his vacation message do the dirt work of responding, all except for one message from a LGBT support site he'd visited often in his youth. To them, he asked Dex to craft a letter explaining some of the quality of life advances Thrive offered, starting with the game's Glamour system and ending with how transgender surgery would actually make a person into another gender with a level of perfection real life surgery had yet to achieve.

"Tell them I'm gay," Hugh said as Dex wrote everything out for him. "Let them know I'm thinking of making my NPC society polygamy based so no one will raise an eyebrow at relationships of any size or makeup. What matters is whether there's love and the devotion to making it work through the hard times."

"That's beautiful," Dex replied.

"Yeah, well, tell them I'm also a little shy, so public affection will still be limited to hand holding and maybe kissing. My world will be a respectable place, because there are NPC kids running around. I'll leave the nudist beaches for other players to build. But let them know Thrive is a place where anyone can make their dreams come true and everyone can be King or Queen of their own country. And you don't have to interact with other players to prosper. You just have to explore the World Raids to collect scans to build up your Book. There might not be a lot available in this month's World Raid, but future ones will offer something for everyone."

"You're doing Tryton Corps' marketing for them," Dex accused with a laugh.

"Am I wrong?" Hugh asked.

"Not at all. Everything you said it true, although I won't know what's available in next month's World Raid until Nexus transfers to a new planet. If we assume the moon was chosen for this month so players could explore the scans they brought with them without distraction, I'm sure next month will offer something good to lure out players who weren't quite as prepared."

"Put that in, too. And finish by saying it might still be Launch Day, but I'm already committed to playing Thrive for as long as the servers stay open. I don't care if humanity wakes up—No, better not say that part. Just leave it there with me being committed to play."

"You really don't care if the rest of humanity wakes up? You still want to continue playing?"

"I can't imagine ever getting bored with this game," Hugh replied. "Maybe I'll change my mind in a hundred years, but right now I think this is the closest thing to immortality a human will ever experience. I intend to make the most of it for however long I can. I think a lot of people—the really old, the sick, and the crippled—they'd all agree with me. The real world can suck it."

"I hope you don't mind if I put that in, minus the last part," Dex said. "You raise a good point people should be thinking about. I think it'll go a long way toward convincing more players to log in."

"Okay. When you're done, go ahead and send it, then flip over to the News Feeds. I want to see how people are reacting to the public announcement Tryton Corp sent out."