Outside

By R.A. Bissmire

There is only one law.
Don’t go outside.

 

Until now, Claudia has been the faithful daughter of the King, living safely in the virtual Forest region of Paradise. Though her online life isn’t everything she’s promised, and she thirsts for adventure in real life.

 

Her father forbids it, and parliament will do anything to keep the secrets they have hidden behind fear. If she is to succeed, she must make her explorations in secret, or her family’s life could be ruined.

 

Certainly, hardships and a brutal death wait for a girl alone in a world of post-war destruction and decay.

 

Armed with courage and hope, Claudia risks her and her family’s safety and lives; and faces the ultimate unknown of going outside.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Sep 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781398407008

R.A. Bissmire

R.A. Bissmire, author of Sunrise, is a freelance writer and Personal Care Worker from Brisbane, Australia. She has degrees in screen and stage acting, nursing, and began a Bachelors in Creative Writing, in 2020. She began writing thirteen years ago, at the age of 13. She wrote for the love and fun of it, and as a way to escape reality. In 2017, 2018, and 2019, she took part in the international annual event, The National Novelist Writers Month, and has won every year. Bissmire’s first novel Sunrise, was self-published in 2018. Outside is her second novel and is the first of a trilogy.

Book preview

About the Author

R.A. Bissmire, author of Sunrise, is a freelance writer and Personal Care Worker from Brisbane, Australia. She has degrees in screen and stage acting, nursing, and began a Bachelors in Creative Writing, in 2020.

She began writing thirteen years ago, at the age of 13. She wrote for the love and fun of it, and as a way to escape reality.

In 2017, 2018, and 2019, she took part in the international annual event, The National Novelist Writers Month, and has won every year.

Bissmire’s first novel Sunrise, was self-published in 2018. Outside is her second novel and is the first of a trilogy.

Dedication

To my beautiful baby sisters; Abigail, Emilee, and Imogen. May this story remind you that even as technology grows, you can still find beauty and magic in the real world around you.

Copyright Information ©

R.A. Bissmire 2022

The right of R.A. Bissmire to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781398406902 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781398406919 (Hardback)

ISBN 9781398407008 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2022

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

Acknowledgement

Thank you to the beautiful people and team at Austin Macauley Publishers for their patience with me, for your understanding, and for making this possible.

Cover designed by MiblArt©

Prologue

Ten-years of VR, going to a school online. For one of those, in History region of VR, with all the other kids from other regions: Ocean, Town, Big City, Small City, Dark, Mine, Desert, River, the war regions, White Mountain and Mountain Plains, History themselves, and my home, Forest region, and then every year after that until graduation, in my home region… things got boring, real fast.

Sure, being the youngest of five kids, and the only princess of Forest region in Virtual Reality, has its perks. The free things, the parties, the first choice of study equipment at school.

I was ten when I discovered the downside to my life. I was travelling with my mother, Queen Cliantr14. She was explaining to me the Avatar upgrades, and as her only daughter, she was going to gift me one on my nineteenth birthday. She was explaining to me the differences in the Avatar upgrades. Physical changes made to the VR player’s Avatar, that cost money, otherwise all the Avatar’s just look human.

There are a lot of different upgrades, my mother had explained to me as we walked across a bridge between our home town, Capitol, and Amazon, the next main town over. Some of them won’t be available, like vampires, zombies, or shadows, of the sorts, because the upgrades available to you are decided by which Region you originally resided in. Like for your dad, he’d have the choice of being a cyclops, dwarf, golem, giant, or a troll, because he’s a Miner. But us Forest folk, the one we have in common with them are trolls, but ours are different.

What other upgrades will I be able to choose from, mother? I had asked, just as a Forest upgraded Avatar began approaching us from the bridge. A centaur woman with long, flowing, sunset orange hair, and a pure white horse body.

I thought she was beautiful.

The centaur bowed to us as she walked past. I saw the bags on her horse back. She was an Adventurer.

You would be able to choose to be a centaur, mother stated, as I watched the centaur pass. A faun, and no, not a fawn, a faun. Or you could be an elf, a troll, as I said earlier, one of the jins, or… Mum looks behind her shoulders to her own silver, sparkling, giant wings behind her and winked at me. Or one of the fae.

One of the jins? I repeated to her.

Part people, part animal, like the Nekojin, cat people, Tokagejin, lizard people, and Kitsunejin, fox people. They’re the jins you can become in Forest.

I remember smiling at my mother, excited at the potentials, but disappointed I’d have to wait nine-years for it. Then we were attacked. The Rangers came out of the canopy, surrounding us almost completely. Rangers, the only profession in Paradise VR that means you can legally kill a royal and not be punished for it. Every region has them. That had been my first time encountering them. The black beady eyes, the red stripe tattooed on every Rangers’ eyes like a mask. There had been five of them.

My mother signalled her SOS, I know because I got the message. The Royal SOS sends a message to both all members of the family, and the closest members of the royal guard.

Avatars with the fae upgrade have magic. I learnt that by watching my mother kneel in front of me and produce a shield with hers as the Rangers began trying to attack us. I remember watching my mother’s health go down. If you die in VR, rumour has it, you get killed in reality as well. My mother’s energy was dwindling, her health was deteriorating.

The centaur stepped in to help. She managed to knock two of the Avatars off the bridge and into the floor below before she too, was dragged down there with the third. Nobody who’d fallen off a bridge, ever came back. But the centaur gave my father enough time with my eldest brothers, FedRex.8 and RedLaz59, and some members of the royal guard, to protect us.

Get your sister! Father had yelled at Red, who grabbed me by my arm while Fed helped him and the guard fight off the remaining two Rangers.

Being the princess of Forest, means you’re the region jewel; for some reason, it makes you the beacon of hope to those of Forest, which never made sense to me as there is nothing to hope for. There is nothing but peace in paradise. Unless a royal comes across a Ranger, or you find yourself part of the War regions, two regions that are constantly in battle with each other. It’s been going on so long that people have forgotten why it started in the first place. But thanks to my being the princess of Forest, after that Ranger attack, both my mother and father practically locked me in the castle. Unless it was for school I wasn’t allowed to leave until the Ranger problem was ‘dealt with’, which got boring very quickly. I wasn’t even allowed to travel to and from school without two of my four brothers with me.

Kevin, or FedRex.8, tried his absolute hardest to keep me entertained. The youngest of my brothers, Mark, or ParliPlier9, would join him, but one, being the eldest, was constantly pulled away by our parents’ mid-game to continue his training, being first in line for the throne, and Parli followed him around like a shadow.

So yeah, I became bored, very quickly. I even started logging out of VR and watch the holovision just for something different to do, but once again, after a while, even that became a bore.

It was after a lecture at school about the one rule we all must follow for our own safety, stay inside, lest we be burnt to ash within ten seconds by the sun, or get a major fine from the parliament. Except everyone knows that by ‘fine’ it means that the Outside Protection and Police Action robots, or OPPA, will kill you. Gotta love those lovely robots that the parliament made to protect our living blocks, and apparently to keep everyone inside. It was after that lecture, that my boredom got me out of our little house. There were three other doors on our long corridor, one on our side, two on the other and on each end of the corridor were staircases, one down, one up, no windows.

I remember making a game of going down the many staircases, from sliding down on my bum, to seeing how many I could jump down without hurting myself, and then seeing how fast I could run from one staircase, along the corridor, to the next. Eventually, one staircase led to a room that was different. The dust of the room had built a visible layer over everything, the tables, the chairs. There was a long counter on the opposite side of the large room to where I was and that had what I then assumed was a statue, now I know to be bottles, behind it, and different looking chairs in front of it. There was also a table on my right that had a very ancient computer on it and yet another different looking chair in front of that computer. The teleporter that was in every single living block, as we were told, sat unused, also covered in dust, near the long counter on the opposite side.

I only looked at this all very briefly before the large, silently humming, archway, filled with some thick-looking grey… something, that was as tall as the room, which was the tallest I’d ever seen. The grey was moving, almost like waves, but I had never seen waves before. I had never been to Ocean region, or River region, and I never got to see any of the water features during my year of learning in History region.

I was ten when I broke the law.

I was ten when I stepped outside.

I walked through the archway, the substance making the entrance was thick and tickled as I walked through it. But stepping out onto a solid, grey path leading forward to a thicker path that had trees and rusted statues on it, on the other side of the tree, I could see another living block. Actually, I could see a lot of them, which made sense. There were twenty-six of them, one Event Block on one end, and a Work Block, that hasn’t been used in centuries, on the other.

I remember looking at the tree and thinking how different it looked from the trees I used to see in Paradise VR. It was taller, it moved so fluidly. The texture was… I was hesitant to touch it at first, but I slowly approached it and got to smell it! The smells! I would always remember the smells, so fresh and new and not stale or murky! Real air!

The tree was rough under my hand, and I could grip on to some of its bark. It was hot and I had begun to really sweat for the first time in my life, but it wasn’t uncomfortable, just hot. The air was thin. It was a thousand times easier to breathe than it was inside the living blocks.

I had ripped off a bit of the tree because I had wanted to keep real tree bark, something I could never do in VR, tear bark off a tree, and underneath were some small and some large creatures that scuttered away quickly. I remember screaming and backing away, tripping and falling to the warm ground behind me. I watched the real-life bugs, squirm away to hide.

I turned around and saw the large, glowing ‘C’ above the entrance I had just left. My living block, like the others, was one very large, very tall, very plain grey building, with nothing but three pillars sticking up from the top, one very tall entrance and the letter showing which living block was which.

I couldn’t see a single OPPA, anywhere.

Holding tightly onto my bark, I remember walking to the edge of my living block and looked down the aisle between mine and A-Block. There were two large grey boxes, one on our side, one on theirs, and they were visibly vibrating, but not making a single noise. It was what was behind the living blocks, that drew me forward.

I walked down the aisle, feeling my jaw drop, and just, staring, at the beauty of it. Green. It was all just so, green! Trees as tall as I could see, bushes that were as wide as the boxes on the side of the living blocks, and the sky! The sky was the strangest shade of blue with tuffs of white clouds. In Paradise VR, in everywhere but Forest, the trees only grew as tall as a two-story house. In Forest, they grew as tall as a living block. But these… they were somewhere in the middle. They all moved at different times but in the same direction… the grass. The grass was as tall as I was, and felt prickly, but soft to touch. I snapped off a blade of grass and held it with my bark.

I remember my heart racing at the sight and the smells of it all. I remember thinking that this was nothing like we had been told it would be. We all had been told that there would be no forms of life. Trees would be dead twigs in the ground, bushes wouldn’t exist, the land around the living blocks would be nothing but ash, rocks and nothingness. A wasteland.

Oh, how wrong they had been.

I stood, at ten-years old, at the edge of my parliaments’ lies, closed my eyes, and breathed in the beautiful scents of reality. I listened to how the wind, real wind, whistled like music as it moved through the trees. Singing, that’s what I had thought it as, real nature was singing. And it was the most beautiful song I had ever heard.

Something had rustled the leaves and branches, startling my eyes open, heightening my curiosity, but scaring me. What was out there, after all? I watched, waited wide-eyed, as the rustling continued. What came out scared ten-year old me half to death. The bird was ginormous. Its feathers were dark and its beak short but pointy. It was huge and it flew low enough for me to see the red and browns of its feather patterns.

I didn’t really see any of that at first, I could remember it though. Back then, I was so frightened by the bird that I had screamed and ran back down the aisle between C-Block and A-Block and ran straight back through the arch-entrance and into my living block again. Its loud ‘caw’ still echoing in my head.

Then I began to smile and laugh. The bird’s wing-span had been around three times my ten-year old height. I hadn’t seen its eyes, but the creature was absolutely beautiful. I had run back outside again, to try and see it, and managed to catch a glimpse of it disappearing above the living blocks. The real-life bird was so much bigger than the ones we had in VR, and louder, too. It sparked my curiosity even more and I walked back to the aisle to looked once more at the nature that surrounded our homes. What else was different? What else was the parliament lying to us about?

Eight-years ago, at ten-years-old, I made it my mission to find out.

Chapter One

I sat on the dusty desk, behind me, an ancient computer and a dusty, old, rotatable chair. I sat looking out across the foyer of my living block, C-Block. Like every time I stopped in this room, I wondered exactly what used to happen in this room. How many people met their soulmates here? Or had their heart broken with bad news? How many people died in this room? Did the real world used to have windows?

All questions for another time, I sighed.

I reached back to grab my bag from beneath the desk, then left out the giant gel-goo arch that marked the entrance to every living block.

Walking through the arch always made me feel exactly the same as the very first time I walked through it eight-years ago. Weird, tickly, and gross.

And the fresh scents of the air never ceased to surprise me. The salt, the cleanliness, the smell of the wind blowing through the trees, picking up dirt and the occasional stick if the wind was strong enough. Today the wind was amazingly powerful. I even had to pull my hair-tie out of my bag so my hair would stop blowing into my face, but then I got going. I didn’t have a plan, or a destination in mind, all I had was the bag on my back and excitement in my chest as I walked away from the living blocks between C and A, and out towards the unknown.

Eight-years and I still hadn’t seen everything, there was no way!

However, while walking, I realised that there was somewhere I wanted to go. An old house that was more nature overgrowth than building, but still held a stable interior.

It was in that building that I knew I’d find him, where I’d always find him. My only true friend in the real world.

Orlando.

As I climbed through the giant wall of green that surrounded the house, I remembered when Orlando and I first met. It was in a row of houses just like the one we meet at now, except those houses didn’t have the green wall separating them. It was only two-years ago I found him hungry, afraid, and alone.

I had tried to give him some of the food I had brought with me, but he hadn’t taken it then. Fear making him sceptical to new things. So at the time, I left the food there and walked away into what I hadn’t known to be a dangerous place.

I could still remember the sensation fear gave me. The tingling all over my skin, the tightening of my every muscle, propelling me forward, to know more, see more, no matter how the atmosphere was making me feel.

Then I was attacked.

The huge, beautiful creature came from nowhere, and after knocking me to the ground, disappeared back into the canopy. My heart had begun to pound so hard I could hear it, feel it in my throat and chest as if it was trying to break through my ribs with every beat. Run-run. Run-run. Run-run. But I couldn’t, I hadn’t been able to stand up, not even able to think of holding my bag as a weapon in case it came back.

It did.

All I had done, all I was able to do, was stare as its huge, red-brown feathered wings, bright yellow eyes and that long, twisted, sharp beak coming racing down towards me.

It wasn’t until it threw its giant talons out towards me that I thought about defending myself. But even that was a pathetic attempt. All I did was throw my arm out in front of me as if a simple arm could shield me from talons that were the size of my head.

I could still remember the burning, searing pain as those talons latched onto me and began dragging me away. I had tried to plant my feet, put all my weight down, just like I had been taught to do in Paradise VR if anyone tried to drag me somewhere I didn’t want to go.

The only time I had ever felt real fear, was when that bird lifted me off the ground and began flying me up, and up.

We hadn’t even passed the first branches when Orlando had jumped onto the bird, knocking it, and me, back to the ground. I remember cradling my heavily bleeding arm while I watched Orlando fight the bird until the bird laid still. Dead. Orlando had won.

He approached me, in his bloody, dirty, feather covered glory, obvious pride making his big eyes sparkle.

I remembered laughing, and that laughter causing me pain. I remembered how he whimpered to my crying, how he buried his muzzle under my good arm before he pushed against my back until I stood. Orlando stood right beside me and walked me back to the living blocks, even all the way back to C-Block.

My CHB, Claudia Healing Bot, a specialised robot built and gifted from the parliament from my birth for my health and wellbeing, healed my arm but for some reason, it wasn’t able to heal the scar the bird left me because it didn’t know how. Nowhere in its data or the database it had access to in not only history but across every other Healing Bot created, was how to heal a scar.

I had worn a jacket or long-sleeve shirt inside my family house every day since.

But as I walked into the nature-ridden house, my jacket now tightly tied around my waist, I kept an eye out for the friend who saved my life. Once I got there, the moment he saw me, he knocked me on the ground as he jumped on me, licking and panting all over my face. His slobber and drool covering me from neck to hairline.

Laughing, I pushed him off me, and pulled out some of the food I always carried with me through reality and tried to see if Orlando wanted anything. He took my sandwich but that was it. He took it, walked a little bit away, then put it on the ground and returned to me.

Well, I definitely wasn’t eating that. If Orlando didn’t want it, some other animal would, so I left it.

Come on, you silly dog, let’s go on an adventure.

I went back to walking, the opposite direction this time.

Dogs in reality were, no surprise, different to the dogs in VR. The ones in Paradise were based off 21st century animals but they had evolved since then, they’d adapted to a land without human kind around every