Deadly Connection

ECHO is a VR MMO with full sensory immersion — sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell — and you have spent most of your life in it. Reports of women dying while wearing VR equipment, cause listed as cardiac arrest, are the kind of news that does not quite land until it has to. One day you log into ECHO and find yourself not where you left off, but in a rundown neighborhood that should be full of people and is not. One person is present. He is very large. He is dragging an axe whose blade is dark with blood. When he sees you, he smiles: how lovely, a new lamb to butcher.