The Metaverse is older than the advertising lets on. Since the last webs of cable internet were laid down in the new millennium, high speed internet allowed for people to visit persistent worlds. There they would fight endless wars, find teammates to slay dragons, and in the quiet moments, just relax.

Gunship guys have the worst sleep hygiene. Some days start at 1300. Others start at 0700. The squadron tried its best to be flexible with those demands. If you were flying late the prior night, and if you had nothing on your schedule, you weren’t expected to come in until later—especially if you were a lowly lieutenant with very little responsibility, or judgment. That’s a good recipe for a gaming habit.

0300 Central Standard Time, Summer, 2003.

After coming back from a training flight, I had trouble winding down. The cure: more flying. I settled into my computer room and fired up Planetside—one of the first MMOFPS (Massive Multiplayer Online, First Person Shooter) games. The fans whirred on my computer as the latest world information was being rendered awaiting my arrival back into Auraxis. On my second computer, I fired up Teamspeak. I used a second computer because my first was prone to failure, as quality control on computer parts was lacking in 2003. If I crashed, at least I could still communicate. The only person online in my “outfit” was Francko, the leader. Francko was the antithesis of who parents think their children are talking to online. He was calm, thoughtful, with a steady professionalism and demeanor you would expect at work, not a game. He instilled the one rule of our outfit: respect. I often found him to be a better mentor than the officers appointed over me in real life. I learned a lot from him over the coming years.

I jumped into the channel and exchanged pleasantries. He was West Coast time. It was late in San Francisco too. For a game that hosted thousands of players in a continuous twenty-four hour war, it was quiet. The Chinese and Russians were playing on servers closer to home to reduce the already horrendous network calculations when their bullets landed. All was quiet on this front.

The light and nimble aircraft in Planetside. http://www.planetside-universe.com

“Hey, want to see something I really think is awesome?”, Francko asked in my headphones. The engines roared in our miniature sci-fi aircraft, and we were off through the “warpgate” to Amerish, the deepest part of the Vanu Sovereignty’s territory—the safest place in the worlds. I followed him in our mosquitoes though a valley and between tall trees until we arrived at the foothills of a dormant volcano. We exited our aircraft and walked to the cliff edge where we saw a defense tower beset by forest, and a valley leading to the warpgate where we started. It shimmered in the edge of the draw distance, blending into the hour long day/night cycle that was soon ending.

“When everyone’s offline, sometimes I like to come here and relax a bit.”

Here we were, two people that had never met in the real world, enjoying a sunset on a world we had never really visited. We weren’t playing a game together. We weren’t tallying points. Just two insomniacs sharing a second sunset.

Session 0: An Azure Twilight on Amerish

Daniel D Meeks 2020