Virtual Reality Fantasy

Her life is overdue, and tonight she has to pay. Rachel Dankworth finds her name on a library due date card. The fine? Her entire existence. “You shouldn’t be alive,” the card whispers at midnight. “You stole someone else’s story.” Nineteen years ago, Rachel survived falling through ice when she should have died. Now the Emberwick Library has come to collect—with interest. Text crawls beneath her skin like living tattoos. Her body flickers transparent at the edges. She’s being erased, word by word, paragraph by paragraph. “You’re nineteen years overdue,” warns Dexter, ...

How in the world is he the one knocking on her door? Rachael Barnes has been writing about Silverwood Academy for almost three years. In her make-believe world, vampire hunters train up-and-coming slayers to defeat the bloodsuckers that hide in the dark corners. But when Rachael kills off her main character, everything starts to get strange. There’s an earthquake, her cat starts acting crazy, and friends from her old job ask her where she's been as if she still works there. Just when Rachael begins to question her sanity, a knock at her door confirms she's either lost her mind or written ...

Shifters. Psychic detectives. Time travel. Enter the world of Jaxon Reed's short fiction. A world of science fiction and fantasy, with visits to and from other realms and realities. A land where lonely empaths are forced to take unheralded moral stands, and orphans must fight evil with only their wits. Where time travelers meet in the past to recruit their ancestors, and bend the rules to find solutions to personal problems. Where criminals are offered opportunities to help scientists delve into the mysteries of the afterlife . . . if they are willing. Enter the world of Quantum Magic.

Kali Ling has faced down death hundreds of times for the entertainment of millions. She knows fear - and she knows what's truly terrifying.... There's a new game in town. A brutal, winner-takes-all international video game tournament showcasing the world's most elite players, promising fame, prestige, and unbelievable fortune. But there's a catch. The game uses new VR pods guaranteed to push digital warriors to their physical and psychological brink - adapting every time a gamer makes a move.

Alexandra McInnes hat als Pilotin der Special Forces zahlreiche Einsätze erfolgreich geflogen. Doch bei einem verheerenden Unfall wird sie schwer verletzt. Der Kybernetiker Dr. Jensen eröffnet ihr die Möglichkeit, an einem einzigartigen Experiment teilzunehmen: Sie soll ihr Bewusstsein in das Online-Spiel Vorena übertragen und dort vollständig geheilt weiterleben. Als Alexandra die gigantische Welt Vorenas betritt, verändert dies alles. Fortan muss sie als Kämpferin Questen erfüllen, sich mit anderen Spielern verbünden und Reiche erobern.

The familiar world collapsed overnight. As the Transformation progressed, disasters occurred throughout the Earth. Materials changed their properties, new species of flora and fauna appeared. The Game converted our world into a huge dungeon, completely replacing the previous civilization. However, the alien plans for Earth began to go awry from the very beginning. The conversion was less successful than expected. An ordinary young man stole the bonus for the first gaming action, depriving the invaders of their perk.

The Aliens have arrived... They are draining the life out of everything and conventional weapons don't work. Sidney, a call support center rep, is tasked with finding Sam, the leader of the zombies, Earth's only chance of defeating the invasion. That's the easy part. Convincing him to fight, on the other hand, is going to take a miracle because the ultimate price of defeating the aliens is the death of the zombies. Can Sidney help Sam reconnect with his lost humanity and find a reason to fight? And even if she can do that, the aliens won't go down easily. It will take humans working with ...

It is the final years of the 18th century, but a world which few would recognise. The people of Europe shelter in small islands of safety, havens from the enchanted wilderness - the strange boundless forests people call the Tumble. It is across this demon-haunted landscape that the low-born officer Taliesin must lead his men, caught up in the deadliest of intrigues while fighting wars for a noble class which despises him. With vicious murderers from the worst gutters in the Realm marching behind him, and the forces of the most powerful nations of the mainland arrayed against him, the odds ...

From the moment I drowned in the lake of secrets, I knew things would never be the same. All I’d wanted for my eighteenth birthday was a kiss and a summer to be remembered before heading off for college. What I got was so much more. I wasn’t just trapped in a cabin at the lake with a group of my rowdiest friends; I was trapped in another dimension. A dark one, where dreams manifest before your very eyes, fears are conjured in the cool mist, and the dead are living by our sides. One thing I was certain of, the only way out . . . is in. "Laura Reden has this unique ability and she drew me...

Otherland - a display of mankind's extraordinary intellect, a multidimensional universe built by the geniuses of the 21st century and controlled by the private cartel known as the Grail Brotherhood, powerful and ruthless. But now Otherland is out of control. Fleeing through broken realities, a small band of adventurers struggle to avert the nightmare that Otherland could become. The only hope may lie in an alliance with their enemy. But time is running out - and Otherland's most terrifying secret is yet to be revealed.

Otherland is civilisation's most stunning achievement: a private, multidimensional universe built by the greatest minds of the 21st century. But this most exclusive of places is also a jealously guarded secret, created and controlled by the Grail Brotherhood, a private cartel known to a few and made up of the world's most powerful and ruthless individuals. The purpose of Other is still a mystery. But it may not remain so for long. For a small band of adventurers has penetrated the secrecy that surrounds it and has broken into the amazing worlds with worlds it contains.

Otherland is a realm of the imagination where anything can happen, a triumph of technology, a virtual world of enormous complexity and possibility. But Otherland is owned and controlled by a secret cartel, The Grail Brotherhood, whose motives remain shrouded in mystery. Trapped in this extraordinary world, the quest of a small band of companions to unlock the secrets of Otherland is running perilously short of time. For the Brotherhood has finally set the date for the Ceremony when they will make their bid for immortality. The journey will lead them through a strangely unfinished land and an endlessly labyrinthine house.

Past and future are converging, threatening to erase all of human history. Who will achieve DOMINION over time? Elizabeth Sapphire, 26th century time traveler, has made a revolutionary temporal discovery. After a rogue energy wave hits her asteroid, she is stranded in the past, in 1909 without a time machine. Meanwhile, Sapphire has located her custom U-boat time machine, summoning it from the depths of time, and has embarked across the Atlantic to Italy to retrieve. Primeval operatives, including a monstrous version of her long dead sister, pursue Sapphire relentlessly, seeking to seize ...

Andy Tremain has a terrifying ability. Using virtual reality, he can create monsters from his unconscious mind. And he's obsessed with dinosaurs. A psychiatrist in the United States promises a cure, but when Andy and his brother and sister realise they are prisoners rather than guests in Dr Kaplan's luxurious desert complex, Andy's dream becomes a nightmare. When his powers change and reality itself begins to shift and tear, Andy is so dangerous that society clearly cannot afford to let him live.

When disaster strikes a cargo flight over the arctic, pilot Andre decides it's time to upload. He pays to have his brain sliced and scanned so his mind can live in the computerized, virtual world of Talespace. Since Talespace runs on the logic of a game, Andre takes full advantage. He becomes a high-flying pegasus learning the magic of the sky and battling monsters for the Night Queen. He's even in time for a fun little war.

Dive into a collection of ten extraordinary short stories where the boundaries of reality are tested and the unknown beckons. From a man who controls the weather to an explorer who discovers a hidden island of mythical creatures, these tales explore the thin veil between the familiar and the fantastical. Each story offers a journey into worlds where forgotten prophecies come to life, virtual influencers alter reality, and ghost ships harbor century-old secrets. In Whispers of the Unknown, the impossible becomes real, and the truth is never as it seems.

Eleven-year-old Chloe gasps in awe at the magical splendour of the theatre performance, but her excitement soon vanishes during an autograph hunt and an encounter with the baddie from the show. His unbelievable claim of a flawed universe freaks her out. This starts a chain of unexplainable events that threaten to destroy the only reality Chloe has ever known. Then, one night, they come for her. Claiming to be her friends, the Scientists try to persuade Chloe her life was some kind of experiment that went horribly wrong, and a computer virus left her with no memory of this alien planet. ...

“A computer virus and a human virus are two different things, right?” Not anymore. Programmer Joe Norton finds his reality turned inside out when an AI bug crosses the brain-machine interface. With instructions to kill and a virtual menu of bad choices, his all-too-ordinary life in Philadelphia is coming apart at the seams. Is the only way out, to go further in? A visionary dive into into the slipstream of emerging transhumanist technologies, PsyBot exposes a dark underworld of mind-control black ops. PsyBot, like the novels of Michael Crichton or Philip K. Dick, explores the limits of ...

Ariel and Jenna’s escape from the Mysterious Island is only the beginning. The simulation, once thought to be controlled, has evolved—rewriting its own code, bending its world to new rules. Now, they're being sent back in… but not to the island. The island is gone, swallowed by the sea after a cataclysmic volcanic eruption. They barely survived, rescued by Captain Nemo aboard the Nautilus, now bound for the legendary lost city of Atlantis, deep beneath the Aegean Sea. They’re not alone. Iris joins them—wings folded, eyes watching. Their mission: face a new enemy. The Kaigan. ...

Das Rennen um die Entwicklung einer superintelligenten Künstlichen Intelligenz hat begonnen. Und das Land, das gewinnt, wird den Globus beherrschen. Als Amerikas Programm zur Erschaffung einer mächtigen KI sabotiert wird, beginnt für den US-Agenten Cameron Carr eine verzweifelte Suche nach dem Schuldigen, wobei das Schicksal der Menschheit auf dem Spiel steht. In den richtigen Händen könnte eine solche KI die Zivilisation in ungeahnte Höhen führen. Aber in den falschen Händen könnte diese Technologie die größte Bedrohung darstellen, die die Menschheit je gesehen hat.