CHAPTER 1
Launch
“Integration initiated. Test subject Jacob Todd has been selected from multiple interviews, briefed on the program, and surgica--”
“Holy shit, would you look at that.”
“Really? C’mon man, I’m checking vitals.”
“Seriously, look at his ‘waves. His Alpha...Beta...Theta, Delta, they’re all within acceptable range.”
“Heart rate is kind of high.”
“Dude, we just plugged his fucking brain into a computer and uploaded his entire consciousness into a fucking video game. My heart rate would be ‘kind of high’ too.”
“Well, we still have a few benchmarks to run, so let’s not get too excited just yet.”
“Turn on the monitor, we should be getting visual soon.”
“Still uploading, we won’t see anything.”
“Turn. On. The monitor. I don’t want to miss anything.”
“There. See? Nothing.”
“Oh man, this is too fucking cool.”
“Language. That’s the third time you’ve cursed. This is being recorded, you know that, right?”
“So? What are they gonna do, fire me?”
“It’s called professionalism. Did you ever hear Neil Armstrong curse in any of his recordings?”
“No, but I don’t watch bicycle races, dork.”
“My God you’re a dumbass.”
“Language.”
“Ok, shut up, here we go.”
***INTEGRATION COMPLETE***
Blackness.
Not the kind of blackness in your bedroom at night. If you lay there long enough, eventually some ambient light from *somewhere* will leak in from behind the curtains or under the door or something. No, this is more like the blackness of those weird-ass illusionists that dress in black and wax their eyes closed with a candle, put a black silk sleep mask on, then wrap electrical tape over that and pull a hood over their head and cinche it tight with a noose right before they shoot a crossbow at some audience member on stage or some shit.
That kind of blackness.
Suddenly, there’s an infinitesimal point in the blackness, like someone poked a hole in the night sky a billion miles away. Without warning the pinprick becomes a brilliant light, banishing the dark in an instant, a soundless supernova exploding in my vision.
But somehow it doesn’t hurt. I suppose that’s because I’m not actually seeing it with my eyes, but as an image in the sight-processing part of my brain. Thankfully the brain has no pain receptors in it, especially since I’ve got about a mile of monofilament wires, spikes and receptors buried in it, organically growing and stimulating all the various senses a human brain can experience. They may even be floating my fat ass in a vat of jelly-goo for all I know, making me look like an extra from that movie The Matrix.
That would be awesome.
From this brilliance comes a small red line, a progress bar growing from the lower along the bottom of my field of vision. Words flash by underneath faster than the eye can register as files are downloaded, unpacked, and installed into whatever piece of hardware they’ve jammed into what’s left of my brain. Or maybe what’s left of my brain is jammed into it. Do I even have a body any more?
Look, Ma! No hands! Literally!
The download (upload?) takes what feels like an hour, but the good news is I only have to wait for this load screen once. I mean, after all, it’s not like I’m ever going to see it again once I’ve been fully integrated. The task bar reaches all the way to the right side of my vision, and my world goes blank again. And then…
Nothing.
What the hell?
As the nothing stretches on, I start getting nervous. Has something gone wrong? Should it take this long? I have the strangest sensation. I know I should feel my heart racing, I know I should hear the blood pumping in my ears, like that crazy dude from The Tell-tale Heart. When I try to jog up the stairs at my shithole apartment it feels like there is a hammer-wielding gremlin trying to smash his way out through my ribcage, so I should at least feel something. But there’s nothing. Not even a quickening of the pulse or an increase in my breathing rate.
Maybe because you’re not actually breathing, moron.
I always meant to get into better shape, but that would require actually caring. I never see anyone, I have no one to impress. My only human interaction was newb-shaming people on MMO’s or defending my cyber honor on various video game forums. My defense often came at the expense of their mother’s purity and their sister’s talents on her knees, and usually included my overall superiority to them in every fathomable way, but hey? What’s the use of a keyboard if you can’t type whatever you want without retribution? Sure, I’d been banned from a dozen sites for various infractions of their puritanical Codes of Conduct, but it’s so simple to spoof an IP address and create a new profile. Screw ‘em if they can’t take a joke. Thin skinned, candy-assed snowfl--
My universe explodes.
Sunlight pours into my eyes and this time, it hurts. Instinctively I throw my hands up in front of my face and squeeze my eyes shut. Sound assaults me from every angle, and I can smell raw earth. Birds chirp, bugs buzz, and wind whispers through leaves that rub together in a soft, relaxing hiss.
It reminds me of a time when I was a kid. My old man took me to this park. He told me he wanted to play ball with me, but when we got in the truck he didn’t have a ball. Just a twelve-pack and a sad smile. He sat there drinking under a small stand of trees while I tried to ingratiate myself into a game of kickball some kids were playing. They told me they didn’t have any room for an extra, even though there wasn’t anyone on third base. One kid told me they might use me as the ball, and everyone else laughed. I tried to laugh along with them, like I was in on the joke, but just like everything else in my life, it hurt. I retreated back over to my pop, trying to dry my eyes before he saw, and he slurred, “Have fun playin’ ball with yer friends?”
Yeah, asshole, I had a blast.
I push up on my hands so I can look at my surroundings. I’m in a camp of some sort, with what looks like a simple canvas tent supported by two thin poles and string, a stone circle with the remains of a dying fire, and a bedroll (outside the tent, for some reason). The sun filters through the emerald leaves of the trees, giving everything around me a soft, natural look to it. It even peeks through every now and again, dazzling me like a sparkling strobe. I can feel the soft, springy grass under my hands as I push off and stand up, even taste the tang of a promised rainstorm coming my way. How do I even know what that tastes like? I wonder to myself, but then a much more pressing thought takes hold. Holy balls these graphics are the shit!
I turn and take in my surroundings again, marvelling at the details. Everything from the trees to the smells and sounds, I can even see a line of ants traversing a log, each one carrying a fragment of a leaf to take home for dinner. They told me the visuals would be beyond photorealistic, as the human brain has a computing power superior to any supercomputer ever built, but I had no idea it would look like this!
As I stand there, I realize something’s...off. The sounds of nature are all around me; birds, bugs, even the throaty grollup of a bullfrog, but something is missing. It takes me almost a full minute to realize what it is, but when I do, I can’t help but smile.
Living in the modern-day world, there is always some kind of mechanical whir, click, buzz, or beep of some man-made object. An air compressor kicks on from the AC unit down the hall. The distant sound of sirens. Even that day in the park all those years ago, I distinctly remember the far away, high-pitched hum of the highway, endless tires running along a million miles of road, the occasional and distant honk of an 18-wheeler as it lorded the road over some lesser vehicle.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
Here, there’s none of that. Now that I don’t have it, I feel naked. Exposed. It’s an odd thing to send me into a tailspin, but it is what it is. I look down at my hands, and the tailspin ratchets up three notches to full-on panic.
I have no body.
Well, that’s not exactly true. I have a...frame. Smooth, tan cylinders rise up from the soft green grass, attached to flattened and elongated half-egg-shaped...things that are supposed to be feet, I think? My torso is a generic 3-D, oval-shaped cylinder, like a stick of flesh-colored deodorant. My arms, like my legs, are merely smooth-formed cylinders, sporting two flipper-like appendages on the end where my hands should be.
My mind screams in dread as my flippers reach down and grab hold of where my cock-and-balls should be, only to find a smooth, featureless plane curving up and under between my legs.
“WHAT THE...?” I scream at the top of my lungs. “I’m a FRIGGIN’ KEN DOLL?”
Oddly enough, now I *can* feel my heart beating in my chest like a rabbit caught in a trap, kicking and smashing around inside my generic oval torso. With a flash, a blue rectangle appears in front of me, barely a foot away from my face. I stumble backwards, tripping over the bedroll behind me in shock. I fall on my ass, and my head whips back and forth, trying to look everywhere at once. Everywhere I look though, this blue screen follows, centered in my field of vision.
WELCOME TO PENTAMRIA!!
You have begun your new life in the world of Pentamria, a place of magic and intrigue, knights and monsters! If you want to survive in this dangerous new world, you must fight! Choose your path, and forge your destiny!
WOULD YOU LIKE TO CREATE YOUR AVATAR?
YES NO
Realization dawns on me as I understand this must be the game interface system. I have seen this a million times while playing computer games in my old life (funny how not even 30 seconds in, and I’m already looking at it as “my old life”), but it’s quite a bit different than looking at a screen and actually being the screen. It’s similar to the few times I’ve tried virtual reality, but without the discombobulation of being in one world while seeing something else. I am well and truly here.
My first, and completely nonsensical, thought is, Man, they really like exclamation points. My second thought actually gets voiced out to the world. “Hell yes I want to create my avatar!”
No sooner do I think that than a white square flashes around the “YES” icon, selecting the affirmative. A second screen appears in place of the blue one, this one with a pleasant rolling hill motif in the background, a misty suggestion of snow-capped peaks even further afield. A figure taking up most of the foreground stands in a small camp right up close, identical to the one I am in. It’s a completely neutral mannequin in a cro-magnon stance. Its shoulders hunch, arms relaxed and hung down over a pair of slightly-bent legs. The face is a smooth egg, with no eyes, nose or mouth, and it dawns on me that this stick-man is supposed to be me. I realize it’s an exact copy of an artist’s wooden poseable doll, often used as the rough framework of a human being to maintain accuracy of anatomy in action.
My hand moves up to touch my face, almost afraid to feel the smooth, featureless surface. On its way up, the edge of my flipperhand passes through the image and catches on something that offers a slight resistance. It feels...sticky isn’t the right word, but there’s definitely something there. I reach out and gently touch the screen. It feels for all the world like I’m touching a highly flexible piece of plastic, like an honest-to-God tablet touchscreen. My flipper catches on it briefly, tugging slightly as I push, and the image in front of me distorts ever so slightly.
I experiment with this new phenomenon, pushing until my hand “breaks through” the object. There is no sound, no tear or rip, it just...slides through the resistance and the image snaps back into place. I try again, reaching out to touch the left elbow of the figure in the box. I slide my hand around gently, and the mannequin rotates at my bidding, allowing me to get a 360-degree view of my blank avatar. It’s a common feature with most role playing and multiplayer online games, allowing the player to see what their avatar looks like with their armor and weapons. One game even went so far as to whenever you went AFK (away from keyboard), the camera would pull back and rotate around the player, showing not only their avatar, but the surrounding areas. It was freakin’ awesome if you climbed to the top of a mountain. The entire landscape panned majestically around with you at its center. It made you feel like the lead character in an action movie. Invincible. In fact, they even called it “vanity mode.”
My attention refocuses on the slumped over, fleshy statue on the screen in front of me. “I don’t stand like that,” I say to myself, and I stand up straighter. The figure in the image mimics me.
Ok, maybe I do.
I spin the figure back to it’s front-facing orientation and try to focus on the images I’m seeing. The box itself is semi-transparent, so I can see the surrounding campsite and forest behind the floating image of the figure. The double vision begins to make my head ache a bit, so I close my “eyes” that I apparently don’t have and the box becomes my sole object of focus. I discover with that accomplished, I can look around to various sidebar buttons on the left-hand side using my eyes with no discomfort. As long as I don’t move my head around, my eyes can easily browse the screen while my hands can adjust and slide the options around. The bar on the left has several choices, starting with gender, then moving on to body type, skin tone, head, etc.
First of all, hell yes male. ALL male, muthafukka!
In all, there are over 15 different options to choose, each option opening into another menu with more specific options on slide bars. Each slide bar affects the desired body part, from the nose bridge to the size of the hands and feet. Different muscle tones, brow width and thicknesses, jawlines, everything is moldable. I can make an eight foot tall beefcake, probably weighing in at just shy of half a ton, all the way down to a four foot tall weakling resembling a walking stick figure that would get airborne in a stiff breeze. I have no desire to make my avatar resemble my old self in any way, shape or form, as I have lived with my appearance long enough. If I am reading the prompt correctly, this is the avatar I will be stuck with so I carefully consider my options. I know for a fact that I want to be in shape, so I bring the slider for weight to an acceptable level, say something just shy of an NFL linebacker, but larger than a wide receiver. I center the height slider between six feet and seven. Yeah it would be cool to completely tower over everyone, an experience I’ve only ever felt when I was being duct taped to the locker room wall my freshman year, but what if I want to be a sneaky rogue or something?
I figure 6’4 or 6’5 is ok.
I bring my skin tone to a light and healthy tan, much better than my real pasty-pale complexion, when a realization strikes me. Hard.
I will never see my body again. I will never have to hear snickering when I walk along the buffet line. The stereotypical taunts of, “Shit, we better get up there before he eats it all,” or “I wonder if he knows what he looks like up there, piling all that food onto his plates?” Hell, there isn’t even an option for acne, the various faces that appear before me all smooth and perfect.
Chiseled jawline? Check.
Flat, six-pack stomach? Check.
Sizable bulge in the ol’ loin cloth? Well, there’s no slider for that, but I’ll say “check” anyways.
I settle on a dark, short mohawk (dubbed a “warhawk” in the menu, so I choose it based on the name alone), a perfect amount of stubble (just enough to look rugged, not enough to start itching the ladies, if you know what I mean), and an Olympian physique that I know I could never achieve in reality. I look like Jason Statham and The Rock had a love child. And since I’m probably not much more than a pincushion brain floating in a jar of pickle juice by now, that suits me just fine. I feel a giddy rush of emotion course through me, a combination of fear and elation, and somehow my featureless face smiles. I think.
The last thing I settle on is the eyes. I fight the ridiculous desire to have glowing red irises, or even “lavender orbs” like a certain famous character from that old series of fantasy novels from the late 1980’s and ‘90’s. Whether it’s nostalgia or narcissism, I choose to keep at least one facet of my old life. I was never loved by the ladies, I was forever rejected by the jocks, and I barely was able to group in with the gamer geeks, but the one thing people always mentioned were my eyes. They were a shifting hazel of sorts; in certain light they looked brown, but if viewed in direct sunlight they revealed themselves to be an olive green. Apparently, even with the world as my playground, I felt the need to stay grounded. As Doc Holliday once said, “My hypocrisy goes only so far.”
One thing I notice before I decide to forever mold my silly-putty frame into a Greek god-bod is the lack of race selection. It’s entirely possible that this world doesn’t even have playable races, but honestly it’s a “meh” situation for me, since all it would do is stretch out the process. I have literally sat in front of various computer games for an hour trying to decide which race has the better stat bonuses, skill bonuses, or racial bonuses. Am I a lithe, stealthy elf or a stocky, bull-headed dwarf? Do I want natural night vision, or the hardy constitution that allows me to out-drink everyone? It’s an odd sense of relief that I don’t have to weigh my options, that I can just get on with my new life.
I forgo any other options of facial tattoos or piercings, figuring if I really want to defile my body with any modifications like that I can most likely do so at my discretion. Who knows, after I meet the local NPC’s, or Non-Player Characters, I might discover that having a flowered swirl tattooed in rainbow patterns across my forehead is the height of fashion in this world. I scan down the bar once or twice more, checking for any more preset options before I finalize my avatar, making sure that I’m not missing out on anything cool. Offhandedly I wonder if my hair will grow normally here. Will I ever need to shave? Can I grow my warhawk out and make it a combover? If I eat too much, will I get fat? Some games squeeze in a “makeover” feature, allowing you to alter your avatar in case there’s new downloadable content, but as I gaze over my character-
I pause once more as my altered reality gobsmacks me across the face. This isn’t my character. This is me. I reach up with my flipper-hands to rotate my avatar one last time, sliding it across the screen back and forth. The digital figure in front of me rotates as I make miniscule motions across the screen, first right, then left. I even tilt the camera with an “up and down” motion, looking from all perspectives.
Yup. Broad shoulders, narrow waist, tight ass. As an afterthought, I select the “Legs” option and make my calves a bit bigger. “Tag a bro that skips leg day,” I mutter to myself.
I know I have to stop looking at the options now. If I don’t, I could literally stand here for hours looking at my stats, second-guessing myself, wondering if I’d miss not having that little extra scar under my lip, or even that cool one that crosses over the right eye from hairline to cheek.
To ensure I stop with the nonsense, I reach out with my hand and tap the “Continue” button on the screen. A second, smaller screen pops in front of my field of view:
WOULD YOU LIKE TO CONFIRM YOUR AVATAR?
YES NO
My flipper hovers over the “YES” for several long seconds, and I think to myself, Ladies, here I come! With more courage than I’ve ever exhibited in my life, I flick the icon.
The motion is barely finished when agony rips through my entire body. It feels as though a thousand hooks are imbedded in my flesh, tearing it off. Acid courses through my veins, eating away at my muscles as everything sloughs off my bones. Then my bones simply shatter. I can actually hear them break. My jawbone cracks underneath my ear, and my body jerks involuntarily as my shoulders, both of them, dislocate with an audible pop.
The world in front of my eyes, the only thing I didn’t change about myself, goes grey at the edges, then narrows to a tunnel, until I mercifully black out.