Loading Blackwoods

The thing about Blackwoods is that it doesn't load all at once.

First comes the smell. Pine and wet earth, that thick green scent that coats the back of your throat. Then temperature drops across your skin, cold enough to raise goosebumps even though you're actually sitting in a desk chair in your bedroom with the radiator ticking. Sound fills in next, layered. Wind through branches. Distant water. Something moving through underbrush that might be another user or might be the environment itself, breathing.

Vision comes last, blooming from the center outward like pupils dilating. Trees resolving themselves from grey static into bark with actual texture, moss growing in the patterns moss actually grows, not some algorithmic approximation. Light filters through the canopy in shafts that move as clouds pass overhead somewhere you can't see.

The immersion rig Vivian wore cost more than her mother could have afforded. Past tense. Could have. But Emilie Petersen had afforded it anyway, three months before she died, and hadn't explained why a high school librarian needed a corporate-grade neural interface.

Vivian stood in a clearing she'd marked as a safe zone. Her avatar looked mostly like her, fifteen and wiry, dark blonde hair in a braid, except here she wore practical climbing gear instead of the school uniform currently draped over her real desk chair. Here she could have six arms or wolf ears or no face at all. Blackwoods didn't care. But she kept herself mostly herself. Felt dishonest otherwise.

Her partner materialised on a low branch. Not loaded in. Materialised. One moment nothing, next moment a small monkey with grey-brown fur and disturbingly human eyes behind vintage wire-frame glasses.

"You're late," Jr. said. His voice had an American accent, West Coast probably, with vocal fry that suggested someone in their twenties. The monkey avatar was deliberately ridiculous. Most serious hackers went ridiculous. Kept people off balance.

"Chemistry homework," Vivian said.

"School is a waste of your time."

"School is legally mandatory until I'm sixteen."

"So is not hacking corporate databases, but here we are." Jr. groomed one arm, elaborate and unconcerned. "You ready?"

"Is the route secure?"

"Secure as anything gets. Kestrel's been running interference on the western quadrants, so Verdant's security is spread thin. We've got maybe a two-hour window before they redistribute."

Verdant Dynamics. The company her mother had worked for in some capacity Vivian still didn't fully understand. Research, the obituary had said. Data analysis. Vague corporate speak that meant everything and nothing.

The company her mother had been afraid of, those last few weeks.

Vivian pulled up her interface with a gesture, fingers moving through air that wasn't there. The heads-up display bloomed across her vision, transparent overlays marking elevation changes, tagged locations, threat zones that pulsed red. Blackwoods was massive, people said bigger than Denmark but that didn't make sense, it wasn't a physical place, except it was, it existed somewhere on servers so robust they functioned like geography.

"Where are we going?" she asked.

Jr. launched himself to a higher branch, disappeared into the canopy. His voice came from above. "There's an old research cache about four kilometers northeast. Your mother's access signatures are all over the metadata."

Vivian's chest tightened. She'd been doing this for three months, since the funeral, since she'd found her mother's private files encrypted behind a password that turned out to be Vivian's birthdate. Files that suggested Emilie hadn't died in a car accident at all. That she'd found something in Blackwoods, something Verdant wanted buried.

Files that included partial coordinates and Jr.'s contact information.

"Lead on," Vivian said.

The forest swallowed them.

Movement in Blackwoods wasn't like walking. Your avatar covered ground faster than physics should allow, more like lucid dreaming where you think yourself forward and your body complies. But the environment resisted sometimes, terrain that didn't want you there, elevation that shifted when you weren't looking directly at it.

Jr. moved through the canopy, branch to branch, occasionally dropping down to scurry along a fallen log before launching upward again. Vivian followed on the ground, climbing over roots that emerged from the earth like gnarled fingers.

"Tell me about the cache," she said.

"Old Verdant project from maybe eight years ago. They abandoned this whole sector after some kind of security incident. Never scrubbed the data though. Probably forgot it was here."

"Corporations don't forget."

"Corporations are run by people, and people forget all the time." Jr. paused on a branch, head cocked. "We've got company. Don't react."

Vivian kept walking but pulled up her threat display. Two red dots, maybe thirty meters west, moving parallel to their path.

"Corporates?" she asked quietly.

"Can't tell yet. Could be scavengers. Lots of free agents work these abandoned sectors."

The dots paced them for maybe ten minutes, then veered away north. Vivian let out a breath she'd been holding in both realities.

"Your mother knew this sector well," Jr. said, conversational. "She had hidden routes marked all through here. Some of them still work."

"You knew her." Not a question. Vivian had asked before, got deflected every time.

"I knew her avatar. Moth, she called herself. White wings, didn't talk much." Jr. swung down to a lower branch, closer to Vivian's eye level. His monkey face wasn't designed for expressions but something in the eyes softened. "She was careful. Paranoid careful. The fact she brought you here at all means she trusted you with something big."

"She didn't bring me anywhere. She died."

"She left you the access codes. Same thing."

Was it? Vivian didn't know anymore. Some days this felt like following breadcrumbs her mother had left intentionally. Other days it felt like violating a privacy her mother had died to protect.

The trees thinned ahead, opening into another clearing. This one wasn't natural. The ground was too flat, the vegetation too uniform, like something had been built here and then removed, leaving only the footprint.

In the center sat a structure.

Not a building exactly. More like a growth, something organic that had been shaped into architectural angles. Walls of twisted wood, windows that might have been knotholes, a door that was just an absence in the matter, darkness leading down.

"That's it," Jr. said.

"It's a dungeon entrance."

"Research cache, dungeon, same mechanical difference. You know how game designers are, everything's got to have atmosphere." Jr. launched himself to Vivian's shoulder, weight that she felt through the haptic feedback, claws that didn't quite break skin. "Stick together down there. These old places get weird."

Vivian approached the entrance. Her HUD flickered, threat assessment cycling through possibilities before settling on UNKNOWN. Helpful.

The doorway loomed. Darkness that felt deliberate, designed, not just absence of light but active shadow. Her mother had been here, walked through this exact entrance, descended into whatever waited below.

Three months ago, Vivian wouldn't have done this. Would have seen the ominous entrance and logged out, gone back to homework and grief and the safe numbness of not knowing.

But three months of digging, three months of Jr.'s careful guidance, three months of questions that nobody would answer had changed her. Made her willing to walk into dark places if it meant understanding why her mother died.

She stepped through.