“I don’t.”

“And you managed to sit here and talk to me instead of refreshing over and over again?”

“I guess I did.”

“That’s pretty impressive, actually.” She pushed the bucket behind the counter.

“How would you feel if I checked the rank now?” I said when she got back, my phone already on the table.

“I mean, I’m interested.”

I opened up a third-party website that lagged just a bit behind the ranks in the Altus store. It was 10:30. The top fifty would be chosen in ninety minutes. I was in fifty-seventh place.

“Fuck,” I said.

“Not good news?”

“Fifty-seven.”

“Is there anything else you can do?”

“I could tweet that I made Breezy Spring Day and that I need people to go buy it and I’d be in the top fifty in like ten minutes.”

“Is it worth not having the cred?”

I just shrugged and then put my head in my hands. Who knew how things would look a week from now? I could keep dropping. This could be my only chance.

I was literally opening Twitter when I got a DM from One.

Don’t worry, I got it.

Bex was done at the Subway, so we went back to my apartment to sit with Jason and refresh the page.

Jason didn’t seem super invested in the whole thing. It felt like he was hoping I’d get pushed way back and give it up and go back to what he probably saw as a better lifestyle for me. A lifestyle where I did things besides get up to pee and eat a Clif Bar for ten minutes every five hours. My body really did feel like shit.

I’d gone from a pretty meaningful life to one where I mostly did not get out of bed all day very fast.

But Bex was on my side, and that was nice.

At eleven, I was sixty-fourth.

But then at 11:15 I was fifty-ninth and it seemed like I was climbing pretty fast.

“Holy shit,” Jason said.

“What?”

“Well, I was just trolling Twitter to see if people are talking about your object at all, and I think I figured out why you’re rising in the ranks again.” He turned his phone to me and showed me the following tweet.

Justin Bieber

@JustinBieber

Hanging out in the Altus Space. Breezy Spring Day is amazing. Go check it out.

937 replies 8.4K retweets 29K likes

“What the fuck,” Bex said.

I texted One, Are you friends with Justin Bieber?

They texted back, No comment.

Wait, I replied. Are *you* Justin Bieber?

A very fast reply: No comment.

At 11:30 I was in the top fifty again, and by midnight I wasn’t even worryingly close to fifty. Justin Bieber had pushed me through the finish. The power of #influencers!

Jason poured everyone a round of the only bottle of wine we had in the house, and we drank for fifteen minutes.

“OK, you boys have a nice night. I’m going to go home,” Bex announced.

“Why?” Jason asked. “You said you don’t have to work in the morning anyway. We should play a game or something.”

“Jason, look at him.” She gestured at me. “He’s torturing himself not going back in the Altus Space right now. I’m shocked he’s lasted this long.”

“No,” I said. “I can wait.”

I did not want to wait. My body was literally itchy with the desire to go in and see whether I had access to the Premium Space and, if so, what on earth it was. But also, maybe Bex was going to stay the night. And if there was anything better than the Altus Premium Space … Ugh, I hate this sentence, I apologize.

So we played some games, and drank White Claw, and smoked a little to celebrate my success. And then Jason and Bex talked while I went into my room and cleaned up what had become the worst possible room to bring a girl into.

I went back into the living room and, immediately, Jason stood up and stretched comically. “WELP IT’S TIME FOR ME TO GO TO BED GOODBYE.” And then he slipped into his room.

“Hey, you want to come … see …” I had no idea how I planned to finish that sentence.

Bex moved over to me, and we were kissing and falling toward my room. She was so soft and real and smooth. Her lip balm tasted like raspberries and her hair smelled like … the way girl hair smells. Look, it was awesome, OK?

I woke up a couple hours later hanging off the side of my double bed. I looked down at my watch and saw that I’d had a DM come in from One.

Have you been in yet? We’re all waiting! Report!

It was the first time Bex and I had been together. That was something that was really important to me. I knew that lying down on the floor in just my boxers and going into a full-immersion virtual space while she slept alone in my bed would be the opposite of respect.

I lay down on the floor, put the headset on, and went to the Altus Premium Space.

Ashe

@marsupialpudding

I’M IN! Just had my first @AltusLabs Premium Space experience and, like, I’m going right back in. GOODBYE! THIS WORLD HAS NOTHING LEFT FOR ME!

110 replies 894 retweets 6K likes

ANDY

“Hello, congratulations on having access to the Premium Altus Space,” Alta’s voice said to me as I entered. It looked exactly the same so far, just my breezy day filled with a few other objects people had made and I had purchased. Trees, a small home with some furniture and paintings. I hadn’t spent much time decking it out; I was more interested in making the Breezy Spring Day nice and selling as many as I could.

But then something very new suddenly blinked into existence: Alta. She was short, dark-eyed, dark-haired, pale skin. She was not April, but she looked enough like April that a stab of anger went through me. What the fuck were these people thinking? Why would they pick a model for their digital assistant who looked like the former nemesis of the company’s founder?

She didn’t pay any attention to my emotional state and just kept moving with the script.

“You may be thinking that, with the exception of my appearance, this doesn’t look so different actually.

“But if you’ll open the Altus Space Store, you’ll find that you have access to many Premium objects constructed by Altus, available to you at no cost. And you will also see two new categories …” As she said this, the Altus Space Store automatically opened. “The first are our sandboxes. These are professionally constructed environments for you to enjoy and be yourself.”

The Open Access Space was lacking significantly in things to actually do specifically because creating detailed, enjoyable environments was pretty hard.

“And second we have experiences …” The Sandboxes menu closed and the Experiences menu opened. Here I saw a listing of categories:

Adventure

Education

Discussion

Music

Books

Relaxation

Adult

“Before you select any of these things, understand that this will not work how you expect. The Altus Space is not designed to be a primarily recreational platform; it is designed for self-improvement. Humans spend a third of their lives unconscious. When we at Altus lost access to the Dream, we realized that the great loss was that we would once again be unproductive during that time. With the Open Access Space, we have reactivated the ability to work while we dream. But here in the Premium Space, this ability turned out to be greater than we had imagined.