1 Staged assassination

"Inside, now!"

A powerful kick sent me stumbling forward.

The crowd around me dispersed the second a black car with tinted windows barged into the university's yard.

Just like a wave, everyone lunged back to avoid the aggressive maneuvers of the car's driver.

Then, before I even had a chance to get scared, two men in suits appeared behind me…

Only to serve me with just two words and a merciless kick to my ass.

The doors to the black car opened up, right as I leaned to stabilize myself on them. With nothing to stop my fall, I dived face-first into the elegant leather of the car's backseat… only for my nose to smash into a soft thigh.

'Wha…'

I raised my eyes… Only to see the most delicate-looking girl in the world… keeping her machine gun steady, aimed at some point outside the other window.

"Stay down!" One of the two men shouted before jumping forward and falling smack down on me, pinning me down to the leather seat and the girl's thigh by its entire, impressive weight.

"Go, go, go!" the other man called out as he dashed to complete the pile, adding even more to the weight that squashed me into the soft seat.

The car turned with the screeching of its tires before bolting forward. The sound of the electric engine squeezing every last drop out of its conductors was soon matched by the roaring of the trusty diesel.

"Wha… th… hell?!" I managed to utter a small shout of desperation.

As great as it sounded in a novel or movie, suffocating to death with my nose squashed by a young girl's thigh… wasn't something that I looked forward to.

And with the car rapidly gaining speed, the weight of two massive men suddenly became all that harder to bear.

"We are with the Bureau of Information," the girl spoke the first words of explanation while helping the guy on the top to slide into the front seat.

"Aaaah…" I took in a deep breath. Released from half of the weight putting me down, I suddenly could operate my lungs again.

Sadly, the other man didn't seem to have any plans to free me from under his massive body.

"There's a hit on you," the girl explained. The simplicity of her message somehow fitted her tomboyish looks.

Freed from half of the weight pinning me down, I managed to move my face up, freeing my nose from the lovely, sweet smell of the girl's thigh. And as I looked up… I gulped my saliva down.

The girl was a beauty.

Maybe not by a magazine's standards, but a beauty nonetheless.

She had chin-long, brown hair, and intensely green eyes. Despite some semblance of a standard female suit, her outfit was pretty damn bold with her shorts only covering her ass and her shirt exposing half of her waist.

The girl leaned forward, changing the angle at which she observed the city outside.

"It should be fine now," she added as she lowered her gun and visibly relaxed. "Get off him, there is no way he is comfortable under an elephant like you."

Finally, the other hundred kilograms or so finally moved up, freeing me from the last of the chains holding my… well, average self.

"Listen, we had a big breakthrough with that technology of yours," the young woman finally reached out to help me sit up properly. And for the first time, since those government officials jumped me, I managed to take a proper breath.

"But it turned out we had a mole," the girl continued.

I moved my eyes down a little.

The girl lowered her gun and now held it on her knees… but she was clearly ready to raise it back up at a moment's notice!

The radio of the car suddenly exploded in a momentary chatter.

The driver, the girl, and both of the men that scooped me up tensed up at the same instant.

And then, they all breathed out.

"We've got the guy and we brought the hit order down," the man who moved to the front explained. "The crisis averted," he added before sitting back in his seat.

"Okay, first, what the hell?" I finally managed to utter some words. "And secondly…" I hesitated for a second. "What the hell?!"

"Give him the letters," the girl rolled her eyes and waved her hand before turning her attention back outside of the tinted window.

'What letters?!' I nearly cried out.

There was a hit on me.

Sure, that I could understand. The scope of the discovery I was working on was huge enough to warrant that degree of hostility.

But I've already passed all the data to the government, so why would anyone bother with me now? Even if I died, my company and dream would still continue!

"Just take a look at those," the man by my side pulled out three envelopes from the inner pocket in his suit.

I stared at his perfectly chiseled face for a moment.

As expected from the government special operatives, the man showed absolutely nothing on his face, as if he couldn't care less.

I breathed out a long sigh.

"Fine," I nodded my head before taking the envelopes and opening the first one.

'A letter of dismissal of the headmaster of the Trade School of Arts, Crafts, and Creativity,' I read the title. As I moved my eyes down to read the full article, my eyebrows moved up.

'If this is true…' I thought, raising my eyes to look at the man to my side.

"I knew you would be surprised," the girl giggled a little.

Her eyes suddenly latched on some detail outside, before her entire body suddenly slid down her seat as she finally relaxed.

My stare lingered on the new look of the girl before moving back to the envelopes in my hands.

'First one is a dismissal letter for the director of my uni,' I thought, gulping my saliva down. 'Then what are the two others?'

I tore open the top of the next paper package.

'Revision of the approval decisions after an investigation into the former headmaster?!'

My face tensed up.

'So that's why I couldn't see my number on the list?'

Just a few moments ago, I was desperately searching the board, full of confidence in my results.

And yet, regardless of how long I've looked, I couldn't find it.

Then, a certain kick in my ass started a series of events that ended up with me squeezed between a mountain of a man and a cute, playfully smiling girl, riding to the unknown in a government car.

I took a deep breath and opened the third envelope. Then, I took some time to carefully read through its content.

If the first two letters were like bombs, then the third one was a damn nuke.

For a second, I felt tempted.

The terms of cooperation proposed in the letter were unheard of.

A fixed income that on its own would put me in the first percent of the nation's wealth? A fixed seat in the newly created Ministry of Artificial Intelligence? A sizeable grant to kickstart my passion project of using the AI I discovered to create the world's first full-dive simulation?

I took an even bigger breath than before.

Just the grant money for my project would easily solve all the problems my company had when developing my beloved Full-Dive MMO.

And with just two days away from the first test of the simulation…

I took a deep breath for the third time, this time squeezing my entire face as I faced a damn challenging decision.

Then, I slowly breathed out.

"I'm sorry, but I will have to refuse," I said while folding the letters back into their respective envelopes. "There is no way I will miss the first live test of the simulation. That's literally my…"

"Your dream?" the female officer laughed. She then pulled out her phone and tapped into it a few times.

She then proceeded to list out every secret that I thought I had, from when I stopped soiling my sheets as a kid to the darkest secrets of my search history.

"Kiddo, I know you better than you know yourself," she giggled while putting her phone down. She then jerked her chin forward to point out at the building we were heading for. "And trust me, while it might be your soft, our shit dwarfs whatever you managed to organize in that tiny lab of yours."

That… I didn't really doubt it.

The few quantum units I used to research my discovery were nothing when compared to what the government could get its hands on.

"Still, the live test…"

I wasn't going to give up, though. How could I, when I was about to be the first nerd in history to play a full-dive MMO, even if it was a mere alpha version in constant development?

"Listen, it goes back to the breakthrough I mentioned before," the young woman moved up on her chair and started to disassemble her gun. "We managed to stabilize the simulation."

I opened my mouth… but no word came out.

My throat tightened, stopping me from uttering even a single sound.

"How…"

Stabilizing the simulation… was one of the last few, big problems that my project had to solve. A feat of making a program in a quantum space so complex… that its own internal laws would suffice to power its existence.

"We have a stable and independent world. But we need your help to access it," the girl said only to pull the doors open the second the car came to a sudden stop. "So, will you take a look or…?"

My vision faltered a little.

Before I knew it, I was already standing outside of the car. By the time I shook my head, I was already riding the elevator down some pretty damn long shaft.

I only regained my sense of self when I stood up in the middle of a massive, underground hall filled with complex machinery and quantum units.

A single square of this space had more precious technology than my entire damn lab!

"Wait, what do you even need me for?"

I came back to my senses.

Sure, the government had the same technology that I did. I was the one to give it to them in the first place, after all.

But that didn't really explain any reason for me to get involved with their own project!

"The world we created is much more complex than anything we've dealt with before," the girl explained while tapping a few commands on her tablet that magically appeared in her hands.

Next thing I knew, all of the screens in the lab displayed several complex charts.

"The level of connection required to properly enter this new world…" The girl, for the first time since I met her, hesitated. "Well, it's insanely high. But while that proves that your AI really works…"

For the second time, the young woman hesitated.

"The testers get rejected?" I suggested.

There were two types of full-dive technology.

The first, more primitive one was about forcing entry into the virtual world by ripping a hole in it from the outside and injecting foreign data of the user into the flow of information within that world.

If the flow of information of the user was too different from the flow of the virtual world, the dive would fail.

Then, there was the modern method of two-way connection that… still heavily utilized its simplistic alternative. By forcefully injecting a tester into a world and then making them use the laws of that virtual world to open a connection back to reality, one could allow everyone to ignore the need for attunement.

Or, in simpler terms, allow everyone else to freely enter the digital world at will.

"That's right," the young woman admitted. She then turned away from the screens and left her tablet on one of the tables. She crossed her arms on her chest and looked right in my face. "We can't afford to lose in this race. Whoever gets this tech out first will secure the prosperity for the entire nation for at least a hundred years into the future."

I gulped my saliva down.

Yeah, I was aware of the magnitude of what I've discovered by a total accident. That's why it hardly surprised me that there were people out for my blood somewhere.

"And you are the author of the novels that lead to the creation of your AI," the girl pointed out while taking a step forward and pushing her forefinger to the middle of my chest.

"So I'm the most likely to be accepted by that world of yours," I muttered. "Still, don't tell me two days would make…"

"I'm sorry, but at this point, we are not asking for your cooperation, sir," the girl said, the last semblance of playfulness disappearing from her face. She then nodded her head toward her two massive thugs. "Strap him in."

Before I could as much scream, the two officers grabbed me by my arms and dragged me towards a strange chair, that looked like some prompt from a horror movie.

I tried to struggle my way out of their hold, only to have them decisively pull my joints out.

They didn't cause me any pain out of malice but held nothing back when executing their techniques to keep me restrained.

A moment later, I was strapped to a full-metal chair, with nearly every part of my body that could bend secured to the seat by a strong strap.

A single breath later, they forced my head down and rolled another strap across my jaw and forehead, taking away the last bit of mobility that I had left.

Right now, the only part of my body that I could still use were my eyes.

"I'm sorry, but it will kill you a bit," the same young woman said, this time appearing in my field of vision with a completely expressionless face as if the humorous yet decisive girl from before was a mere illusion. She then brought her hand up, raising some sort of black, slim device…

It wasn't a gun. It wasn't even a weapon.

It was a pneumatic tool used in the past in slaughterhouses to put the animals down in the most painless method possible.

A shocker, a tool to scramble the brains of its target with a single, dull strike.

"Don't worry. You only need to find a way back and then all the benefits you saw in the letter will come true," the girl didn't even bother to sound sympathetic when raising the device to the side of my skull.

'This bitch…' I clenched my jaws, ready for the one last attempt to break free from my restraints…

"Now, sleep well and have fun."

I jerked up, ready to tear everything that stopped me from taking this girl down…

Only for my whole body to fall down and relax as void took over all my senses.