The gecko was doing something interesting.

  Zane had been watching it for four minutes — long enough that two separate tour groups had drifted past him on the boardwalk without stopping, long enough that the January sun had crept another centimeter up his forearm, long enough that he'd mentally scripted, revised, and largely abandoned an intro for a video he probably wouldn't make about the foraging radius of Gehyra dubia in semi-arid scrubland. The gecko was hunting. Not lazily, the way they usually did in the midday heat, plastered flat against a fencepost and waiting for something dumb enough to walk into range. This one was moving. Deliberate lateral sweeps across a section of weathered timber, pausing to test the air, reversing, testing again. Some kind of systematic grid search behavior he'd never observed in this species before.

  He had his phone out before he'd consciously decided to reach for it.

  "Okay," he murmured, mostly to himself, framing the shot. "So that's — yeah, that's actually interesting. Dubia don't usually—"

  "Excuse me."

  He looked up. A woman in a wide-brimmed hat, two kids in tow, was giving him the particular look that visitors gave guides who had stopped guiding.

  "Sorry." He straightened, pocketed the phone, and gestured down the path with his best approximation of professional enthusiasm. "Spotted pardalote nesting site is just around the bend. The chicks should still be — yeah, let's head that way."

  He glanced back once at the gecko.

  It had found whatever it was looking for. It was gone.

  The park closed at five. By five-fifteen Zane was in his car with both windows down, boots off, driving the forty minutes back toward the city with the radio doing something he wasn't listening to and his phone mounted on the dash cycling through his notifications with the volume low enough to ignore. Three comments on the blue-tongue lizard video. One on the fungal bloom one. Someone on the bioinformatics forum had replied to his question about metagenomic sequencing pipelines, which he would need to actually read before he could determine whether it was useful or whether it was the forum's resident pedant telling him he'd asked the question wrong.

  He'd applied to the beta on his lunch break three weeks ago.

  He remembered it vaguely — someone had posted the link in the gaming Discord, one of those application forms that wanted eight paragraphs of personal history in exchange for the chance to play a video game early, and he'd filled it out the way he filled out most things, fast and honest and slightly more interested in the questions than in his own answers. He liked games. He liked new technology. A fully immersive VR dungeon crawler with haptic feedback sophisticated enough to simulate texture and temperature was, objectively, the kind of thing he should want documented footage of.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  He'd submitted the form and mostly forgotten about it.

  His phone buzzed.

  He ignored it.

  It buzzed again.

  He ignored it again, because he was driving and he had some principles.

  It buzzed a third time in rapid succession, which was unusual enough that he glanced at the screen.

  DEPTHS ETERNAL BETA — APPLICANT NOTIFICATION

  He pulled over.

  He read the email four times in the breakdown lane with the hazard lights blinking.

  Congratulations, Zane. Out of 47,000 applicants, you have been selected as one of twelve beta testers for Depths Eternal's closed pre-launch playtest. This is a fully immersive, multi-day experience hosted at Helix Interactive's development studio in Austin, Texas. Travel and accommodation will be provided. The playtest window is...

  He scrolled. The dates were in three weeks. He had a practical assessment in bioinformatics modeling in three weeks.

  He scrolled further.

  ...participants will be required to sign a non-disclosure agreement covering all gameplay content, system architecture, and AI behavior observed during the playtest experience. Violations of the NDA may result in...

  He stopped reading.

  He stared out the windshield at the dry grass on the verge, still gold at this hour, catching the late sun at the angle that made it look like it was lit from inside. A hawk was doing something lazy and excellent over the treeline to the west. The air smelled like eucalyptus and hot road and the particular dry sweetness of a Sydney summer afternoon, which was a smell he had never successfully described to anyone who hadn't grown up here.

  He thought about the practical assessment.

  He thought about the NDA.

  He thought about the gecko that morning, running its systematic little grid across the fencepost, hunting for something with a methodology he'd never seen before.

  He typed back: I'll be there.

  Austin in January was a revelation in the specific sense that it was cold in a way he hadn't packed for, which felt like a personal failing on the part of a continent that was currently on fire. He'd burned through half his data on the flight watching thermal mapping animations of the Murray-Darling basin and periodically refreshing the forum thread on his sequencing question. The pedant had, in fact, told him he'd asked it wrong.

  The studio was in a converted warehouse district north of downtown, the kind of neighborhood that had been industrial and was now artisanal and would eventually be unaffordable. The Helix Interactive building didn't announce itself. Just a glass-fronted lobby behind a logo that managed to feel both corporate and handcrafted, the kind of logo that had been iterated on forty times by a team that cared too much.

  He stood on the sidewalk for a moment before going in.

  It was a clear afternoon. The sky above Austin was that specific shade of winter blue that meant high pressure, low humidity, no clouds within architectural interest of the horizon. He watched a grackle land on a lamppost across the street and do the thing grackles do, that imperious sideways look, like they own the concept of pavement. Back home they'd be noisy miners. Same energy. Different continent.

  He took out his phone. Framed the grackle. Didn't film it.

  He'd been thinking about how to approach the NDA. Technically, he wasn't allowed to publish gameplay footage. He was fairly certain he was allowed to describe the experience of wearing the suit in general terms. He was very certain there was a version of this that generated content without generating legal correspondence.

  He was also fairly certain he'd think about that later.

  The grackle looked at him with the focused, uncomplicated attention of an animal that didn't have opinions about NDAs or doctoral programs or the accelerating collapse of functional ecosystems. It was simply present and observant and entirely unimpressed.

  He put the phone away.

  He picked up his bag and went inside.