Daniel Pierce [Pierce - Circuit World

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Circuit World Copyright 2019 by Daniel Pierce

Book design and layout copyright 2019 by Daniel Pierce

This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the authors imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author.

Daniel Pierce

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1

I cracked my neck, and then I bent back, feeling every bone in my body snap with resistance as I sat down in my custom chair, surrounded by the gear of a professional gamer.

Im 24 years old, and for the past three years I have been living the dream of just about every young guy my ageevery young guy living in the first world, I mean. My screen name is Si1ence, and with the usual blend of luck, skill, and quick fingers, Ive built a resume good enough that I live a life in the digital wilds.

I am, in every sense of the world, a killer. Just not in this world.

As I adjusted my chair, medals clinked with deep tonesawards from tournaments across the world. I prefer cash, caffeine, or crowds, but in a pinch, carrying away and award is acceptable, especially if its put around my neck by a beautiful girl.

I know Im notwell, normal it too strong a word. Lets say standard. My life isnt typical, and no one was more pissed than my parents when I chose to live a life doing battle on servers, instead of a college classroom like my other friends.

My parents were not happy at first, but after seeing a few monthly statements from my bank, they changed their tune. Shortly after leaving college, I left my competitive team as well, but that didnt stop the checks from coming in. I had already built a strong foundation for my brand.

Fans didnt just follow my team, they followed me. I started a YouTube channel where I would play and review games. More sponsorships flowed in just to get a mention on my videos. Fans donated simply because they wanted to see more. I got tons of free shit from everywhereproducts from my sponsors to test out, presents from my fans, stuff like that. As viewership increased, so did the paychecks from the streaming sites I worked with. From that, I got even more sponsors and was able to sell more merchandise. People just could not get enough silence.

For the next year or so, I followed a simple algorithm for success in my line of work: pick a popular game, play it, record it, review it. Among my friends and fellow gamers, I refer to it as PPRR, for pick, play, record, reviewsometimes, PR-squared. It was that simple. I actually had enough clout in the gaming community to call up a company and request my gamertag be made available if it was taken by another player, which, often times, it was.

Si1ence is a fairly generic gamertag, but like most veteran gamers, I stuck with my childhood character name as an homage to a simpler time. I thought it was a cool name when I was five, so I was determined to make it my gamertag for the rest of my life. The companies I called up would often honor my request and change the name of the previous account owner, usually just adding numbers to the end of their tag, like Si1ence156 or something like that.

After leaving my competitive team, I stuck mostly to the games I was passionate about: massively multiplayer online gamescalled MMOs for short. If youre not familiar, these games are like good ole World of Warcraft or Everquest Online. Theyre usually based in either science-fiction or fantasy worlds, or, sometimes, a combination of the two. Character types, known as classes, are a common element in most of these games. Silencealways dual-classes as a thief/mage. If a game does not have that class combination as an option, I just dont play it. This is also a throwback to my childhood, but it has an even more personal significance to me than the origin of my gamertag.

I grew up playing Dungeons and Dragons with my dad, my late uncle Jim, and some of their friends, and I always gravitated towards the magic-using rogues. To me, those classes just make sense. Sure, a pure thief is decent enough, but think about a thief that can literally make himself invisible. Or one who can cast a spell to impersonate someone else. The possibilities are endless there. Even in the sci-fi games where literal magic doesnt exist, theres always an equivalent class I can use, often based around psychic abilities or some kind of extra-dimensional manipulation.

It all adds up to the same thing. But all that aside, when I play these games with that kind of character, I often find myself drowned in nostalgia, reliving my childhood, hanging out with my cool uncle Jim and feeling like one of the guys. Im always chasing that feeling; theres nothing that brings me more satisfaction in life. There is no greater high.

So thats what Ive been doing for the past few yearsplaying games, making money, and graciously accepting payment and gifts from my adoring fans and sponsors. My fans went from numbering in the thousands to hundreds of thousands to a couple million in that short time. Freshman year, I would have thought someone was crazy if they told me what my life would turn into.

So, on this day-- a day like any other, I was back at my workstation after having just finished up editing on a video. I began uploading it, which always takes longer than I would like, and cracked open a can of Hwangso Gong, my favorite energy drinka gift from a Korean sponsor of mine.

With my multi-hundred-dollar headphonesanother sponsored giftresting snugly back around my ears, I turned on some Toolanother nostalgic tip of the hat to my childhoodand began skimming my emails, as was my preferred way of passing the time while I waited for my uploads to finish.

Each day brought at least 200 new emails for me to wade througha combination of promotional offers, sponsor communications, and fan mail. I could have reduced a lot of these with my spam filter settings, but I had taken a pretty relaxed approach to that after having previously almost overlooked a very appealing offer from about a year prior. No matter how specific I got, my filter always seemed to have a hard time distinguishing between useless junk ads and business proposals, so I just decided to forgo the thing almost entirely, save for classifying a handful of repeat-spammers for what they were.