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C10 - Don't touch

Back on Uzar, Zadia walked into the white room with the clothing bag, “we have three rules for you to follow, do you need me to go over them?”

“Yes, please do,” James says, looking at her emotionless face.

“Don’t touch our Avatars, that included trying to approach an Avatar. Don’t touch the invaders. Leave the battlefield immediately once your time is over and lastly, don’t talk about Uzar to anyone, not even fellow gamers.”

“Understood,” James says.

Zadia leaves so that he can get dressed.

Relieved to still have a job, James gets dressed. After putting on his VR glasses he grabs his remote and enters the elevator.

As soon as the elevator opened, he walked quickly over to the half-broken down, futuristic sky bridge to join Emce and Emily.

The AI informs him like usual that he is connected to an Avatar. “Same one as yesterday,” James says out loud.

His VR glasses go half screen, and he looks at his Avatar's surroundings. A bunch of Avatars run past him and give or take fifty meters after them, humans. ‘Where are they going?’ James wonders and wants to follow them but at the same time, he wants to join Emily and Emce.

James sees a swarm of medium drones’ through the eyes of his Avatar and starts to shoot while he ducks into what appears to be an abandoned building. Oval-shaped with and white on the outside, no bigger than the average earth house, partly broken down.

Once out of sight and safe he focuses on his Avatar and he sees that his Avatar has been joined by a few more Avatars, forming a line and shooting at the drone creatures. James does not miss a shot. James is so focused on his Avatar that he does not realize that there is a young boy peeking at him from behind a broken-down wall in the building that he is hiding in. It is only once the swarm of drones is lying dead on the ground that his VR screen goes half, and he thinks he sees movement.

‘I must be losing my mind,’ he says as he walks out of the building. James almost walked straight into a medium-size drone creature and froze just in time. The creature flies past him and into the building that once used to be a home.

‘What is it up to?’ James wonders and turns around slowly to look.

James sees the kid and knows he had to act. ‘What do I do?’ he thinks, knowing he can not touch the drone or the kid. ‘Is the kid human?’ He wonders but then he sees the kid has the same features as Zadia and Zack.

James looks at his black suit that has shoes attached to it, ‘the AI asked if I touched the thing with the covered part of my suit.’ Without further hesitation, James kicks the nearest object at the drone but misses. He kicks another object and this time he does not miss. The drone turns its focus in James’s direction but does not move away from the boy, it does not even turn its body. It only focuses its camera-looking eyes on James while having a set of eyes on the kid.