Once a year, Jacob and his friends gather for their annual Week o' Gaming to kick back, role play, kill monsters, and reconnect. Sure, their weekly online game scratches the itch, but this is their one opportunity for them all to gather around a table with familiar faces and roll some dice. Only this time, a time not too far from now, the Week o' Gaming culminated in a party wipe, the characters reduced to dragon food. The players return home disappointed, and their GM Jacob devastated. To make it up to them, he borrows an experimental program from the secretive tech development lab where he works and presents them not merely with a new campaign, but a whole new game.
The Near Future is unlike anything they've ever seen. By uploading his gaming app to the players' cybernetic implants, Jacob provides them a virtual reality gaming experience set in a world that looks, sounds and feels as real as their own. Suddenly they can not merely imagine being heroes, but actually inhabit their characters' larger-than-life personas for themselves. The group, consisting of a snarky streamer, a frustrated coach, a down-on-her-luck secretary, a meek paralegal, and the paralegal's boss fraught with nostalgia for his heyday, can leave those lives behind. Guided in the creation of their characters by a mysterious but sexy artificial intelligence, for a few hours on Wednesday nights, the players can become so much more: powerful, cunning, desirable, and empowered to take their fate into their own hands.
The game seems to cover everything. It immerses them in a futuristic version of the real world. Character knowledge like disabling security systems, wielding deadly weapons, or even channeling magical spells becomes player knowledge through seamless uploads to their implants. The app even inflicts and processes the characters' perceived pain - and their pleasure.
But as inexplicable occurrences, suspicious behaviors and bizarre coincidences mount up, the players begin to wonder if there is more to this game than their GM led them to believe. What are they really playing, and who are they playing against?
