Logan Byrne didn’t want to play Reternity Online, but he didn’t have a choice. Logan hated full-immersion virtual reality MMORPGs like Reternity Online. He’d watched his younger brother Jason and countless friends throw away their lives because of their addiction to playing RO. He vowed he would never put on a NeuraLink headset and waste his life like they had. Then he received an anonymous email from kidnappers demanding a real world ransom payment of $150,000 USD to release his sister Emily, who they held in an undisclosed location. To keep her compliant, the kidnappers used a NeuraLink headset to log her permanently into RO. In-game, Emily’s character was locked away where no one would ever find her. They called it mind-locked. Emily wasn’t the first person to fall prey to mind-lockers and she wouldn’t be the last. If Logan didn’t pay up, the kidnappers would sell her real body on the black market for organ harvesting. If he had any idea where Emily was, Logan could do something to save her. But he didn’t. Nobody did. And he didn’t have $150,000 to pay off the kidnappers. He only had one choice. Go inside Reternity Online himself, level up, and try to find his sister in-game to gather clues to her whereabouts before they murdered her in the real world.
