Logging in…

The next thing I knew, I was falling.

The star-filled sky above me was entirely too close. As I watched my viewpoint slowly rotated to one side, and I could see what appeared to be the curvature of an entire planet stretching out below. I had to admit that it was a staggeringly beautiful sight, even though I’d long been desensitized to such things by previous nVR tours of exotic locations.

I barely had time to take this in before a voice spoke to me. “Welcome traveler,” a smooth female voice said, clearly audible even over the mounting rush of wind. “I have called you here from beyond the stars. Not for any great purpose or dire threat, but because I felt your souls cry out for that which they have long been denied.”

I tried to look around, but found that my view was limited, and I appeared not to have a body at all. This sort of cutscene wasn’t unusual at the start of a game, so I settled in to hear the game’s lore.

“Your people yearn for escape from a world of predictable mediocrity, a world where all the heroes died long ago, and the advances of society have purchased comfort at the cost of wonder… Your desperate longing broke my heart.”

My perspective entered a cloud as it fell, and for a few moments time seemed to stop as white fog in every direction gave me the illusion of stillness. Then I broke through the cloud and realized that my slow rotation had now pointed my vision towards the ground.

Below me was a stone-walled city built on the edge of a vast wilderness. A river bisected the city, and formed a natural barrier that marked the start of the woodlands. The entire area around the city was rocky and full of hills and small cliffs, leading up to mountains in the near distance–though the city itself seemed to have been carved out of a relatively flat area by the riverbanks.

“My name is Valera, and I am the goddess of Journeys, Trials, and Change. I’ve brought you here to give you the chance to start a new life, where anything is possible. This world before you is called Astra. It is a new world, as these things are judged, and few places are far from the frontier. For many, civilization is yet a goal to be strived for, not a yoke to be born.”

My view had continued its slow rotation, and now I found myself looking up at the clouds I’d just passed through, now far above me.

“I have bound your soul to this gem. It marks you, and others like you, but will aid you and help you make your way in this world. Use it to create a body of your liking and take your first steps along the road to your new destination. Forge your own path if you dare. Walk the longest road you can bear to tread, for only when you finish is the story truly done.”

Suddenly, and with a very meaty “thwack!” sound, my perspective went dark.

Did… did I just die of fall damage in the intro cutscene?

Now Entering: The Antechamber of Eternity

I found myself standing in a small room. Directly in front of me, a large set of double doors stood closed, but I could hear talking and music emanating from somewhere behind it. Beside the door, an older man in fine clothing stood behind a podium. He looked at me with a polite patient smile on his face.

I paused for a moment to take in my new surroundings. I was standing on a deep red carpet that extended beyond the closed door on the far side of the room. This was apparently some sort of waiting room.

Despite the presence of several comfy looking chairs against the walls, I appeared to be the only visitor. Above my head, a chandelier lit by dozens of white candles illuminated the room without any noticeable flicker from the flames.

The man at the podium was now pretending not to have noticed me, letting me get my bearings while he picked some invisible lint off his coat. I decided to put an end to the awkward silence and approached the podium. As I did so, he looked up and acknowledged me with a smile.

“Welcome Sir, to the Hall of the Pantheon. May I know what name to announce you by?” In his hand he had a quill pen, held raised up over a sheet of what looked like parchment.

I almost gave my real name before realizing that this must be the start of character creation–I was naming my character. I hesitated, not sure what name to use. Normally this step came at the end of character creation, when you’d already figured out what type of character you were going to play. I had a few character names I tended to re-use based on the type of character I was playing, but I wasn’t yet sure what my options were.

“Sorry, but can I change this later?” I asked the man at the podium. “I’m not sure what name I’ll want to use yet.”

The man set down his pen, wiping the ink off it. “I’m afraid not, for who can change the name writ upon their soul?” He smiled kindly as he looked at me, “Fear not, the name you choose will be known only to yourself and the gods, unless you give it to others. I suggest choosing one which you feel resonates with who and what you are… If you need a moment to reflect, then by all means, take your time.”

I was pretty sure I understood what was happening now. Some games had you identify yourself by an account name that was then used instead of your character name for things like direct messages between players. It allowed people to message you even if you weren’t playing your main character or if two characters shared a name.

I found it somewhat immersion breaking personally, but some games handled it better than others and it did make it so that character names didn’t need to be unique, which was a big positive. There was nothing worse than getting to the end of character creation and not being able to get any of the names you wanted for your new character.

“Any rules for what I can call myself?” I asked the old man, mostly trying to buy time to think.

“Not really, no. This is to be your true name, that which is written upon your soul… If your true name is oh, I don’t know, ‘XX_GooseKicker_XX’ then who am I to deny you?”

I chuckled at that. I’m glad the AI has a sense of humor at least… Immersion was nice, but some games took themselves too seriously.

I walked over towards the large doors, addressing the old man as I did so. “So, what’s your name then?” I asked.

Beyond the doors, the sound of music and muffled conversation continued, no clearer than when I first arrived here. On closer examination, the doors themselves appeared to be made of some type of dark stone inlaid with gold filigree. Each door looked like it would take real effort to move, and I raised a hand to push against one, curious if I could even make it budge.

“My name is System,” said the old man. “It’s my job to make sure things run smoothly and proceed in an orderly manner.”

He eyed me as I tried, and failed, to open the door. “Don’t mind the door, please. I’ll open it when it is time to announce you to the assembly.”

I gave up pushing on the door, not even leaning into it seemed to make a difference. My day job was programming, and I did some speedrunning of classic games as a hobby, so my instincts when starting a new game were always to see if I could break things.

For nVR games it was fun to test the limitations of the simulation and see how far it’d let me go off script. This game had advertised a revolutionary AI controlled gameplay experience, so I was interested in seeing how well it could adapt to shenanigans.

True AI had been used in games for years obviously, but supposedly in this game everything from the physics to the game mechanics were AI controlled. A big selling point was that the AI could generate new mechanics on the fly, including entire classes, spells, and abilities.

That said, AI was far from perfect, just like a person could make a mistake, so could an AI - but an AI could make mistakes millions of times faster than a human could. The hope was they’d also correct themselves much faster, but sometimes they couldn’t–especially when they had external rules placed on them that they couldn’t navigate around.

I wandered over to the chairs along the wall. It was odd that there were chairs here when this appeared to be an instanced character creation area. I sat down in one, then tried to pick up another one. It was surprisingly heavy, and I couldn’t find a way to add it to my inventory.

The AI, “System”–not a very creative name–watched this in amused silence.

“No rules on names, huh?” I asked idly as I worked.

There was a rule that any programmer worth their salary knew, yet it was so easy to overlook that gamers had been exploiting oversights for generations to sequence break scripted events, get out of bounds, or even inject arbitrary code into a game with their bare hands.

The art of speedrunning–beating a game as fast as humanly possible–often relied on such exploits to achieve the lowest possible times, often far lower than the game’s developers would ever have thought possible.

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The rule was “never trust user input.” Practically it meant that you had to treat every action a user took as potentially malicious. The problem was that literally anything a user did counted as input–from moving my simulated arms around to filling out my name on a sheet of parchment, these were both just two different types of input and had to be treated as equally untrustworthy.

Something as direct as a name was the more obvious attack vector, but the funny thing about using an AI to validate input was that the AI had to process that input to validate it. Sometimes you could break a system just by making it consider the implications of what you’d given it to think about.

System raised an eyebrow at me. “I certainly hope you aren’t about to say something incredibly offensive, but no. I can’t stop you from choosing a name that fits your identity. It won’t stop me from judging you however.”

I gave him a cheeky grin. “Alright, in that case my name is ‘System’.”

I watched as he started to dip his quill in the ink jar before registering what I was doing. System chuckled and said, “Well, I guess I should have expected that one, shouldn’t I? But no, as it turns out there is at least one rule–you cannot have the same name as anyone else. True names must be unique after all.”

“Alright, well in that case I’d like for my name to be an empty space please.”

System looked confused. “An empty space? Like between two words?”

“No, like between two letters. Not taking up any room, just empty. Nothing there to see.”

The old man closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, his patient demeanor showing cracks for the first time.

“Have I done something to offend you, young man? Is there some reason you are making this difficult?”

I began to feel a little guilty for putting the AI through this and felt the need to make up an excuse. “No, no, nothing like that… I just figured if I have to come up with a name it might as well be a truly unique one. You know, something people will get a laugh out of when I tell them.”

“I see. Well, nonetheless an empty space is not a name, in fact it’s a distinct lack of a name. Please choose something else.”

I thought about it for a moment. “I have an idea, but it’s probably too long–it definitely wouldn’t fit on that paper you have there. There’s a symbol that represents it though–I could draw it if you want. Can I use a symbol to represent my name? Letters are just symbols after all, it shouldn’t be much different.”

System looked at me with about as much trust as I would feel towards a hornet trapped in the same room as me, but after a moment he seemed to relent a bit. “One single symbol? Nothing more?”

“Yep, I promise. I can even do it in one pen stroke.”

“So long as it is not the true name of any other creature, I see no reason a symbol would be disallowed. I can think of a few beings that have more abstract true names and it may even be a clever way to conceal your true name from enemies.”

As he spoke, he finally dipped the quill in the ink pot and stepped to the side, handing the quill to me and motioning to a spot on the parchment. “Sign here please.”

I drew the symbol on the paper in one even stroke.

System looked at what I’d drawn and sighed. “Are you sure?”

“Yep.”

System sighed again but motioned for me to follow as he turned towards the large double doors. Placing a hand on both doors, he easily swung them open, flooding the small room with light and momentarily blinding me as my eyes adjusted.

The doors opened into what appeared to be an amphitheater, except this was unlike any I had ever heard of. System and I walked out onto a stage that was dwarfed by the stair-like seating typical of such structures, except these seats seemed to go on forever, extending upwards as far as the eye could see. The entire arrangement was lit as if by sunlight, from some source behind where we had entered.

Hundreds, possibly thousands of people were seated here, many spread out into smaller groups and talking amongst themselves, while others sat alone in islands of empty seats. I couldn’t begin to hope to take in all of it, but no two people struck me as anything less than a unique specimen. Many had glowing lights, or other magical effects on or hovering near them. Some, I realized, weren’t even human by any stretch of the imagination.

Am I going crazy or is that guy just ‘The Devil’ from some old movie?

I was looking at a very muscular bald man with red skin and large bull-like horns sticking out of the sides of his head. The man was wearing a very out of place formal business suit, complete with a red tie, and in one hand he seemed to be holding a small notebook which he tapped idly against his knee as he looked around.

I had enough time to notice what looked like a pencil tucked behind one pointy ear before the fiendish man’s head turned toward us and he caught sight of me standing on the stage next to System. The large man gave us a friendly wave of acknowledgement even as others around the room began to notice the new arrivals as a hush spread like a wave through the stands.

Standing center stage was a woman. She was dressed in simple, well-worn, but sturdy-looking clothes that looked both comfortable and practical. She was sporting the sort of backpack you might use for a hiking trip that might involve some mountain climbing. She was so normal looking that it stood out in this room full of gods and devils.

As we approached, she smiled and nodded to us, but didn’t speak. Instead, she stepped aside and allowed System to take center stage. He returned her nod, then cleared his throat and waited for the crowd’s attention to fall on him.

System’s voice suddenly filled the hall, spreading across the vast space without any need for him to shout. “Members of the assembly, great spirits and ancient gods, allow me to present this human of Earth, one of the first to join us in this new world. I give you…”

The man trailed off, simply standing there with his mouth slightly open as if poised to continue speaking. Silence’s reign stretched to the breaking point, whereupon muttered questions began to fill the hall with a soft roar as everyone asked the same questions: Why had he stopped? What was this young man’s name? Why was he carrying a chair? Eventually some among the crowd began to get restless, and shouted questions at System, but he made no move to answer.

I had a feeling I knew what the problem was, but I wanted to see how this would play out.

After a moment the devil-like businessman I’d noted earlier rose from his seat on the bottom floor and approached the stage. As he got close, I realized that he was a giant compared to me. He was over two meters tall–not even counting the horns.

The devil approached System, taking the older man’s head in his muscular hands and tilting it up so they were looking into each other’s eyes. After a moment the devil grunted, then let out a low chuckle before turning to me.

“What name did you give him?” He asked. “It seems he’s quite stuck on it.”

I shrugged and told him what I’d done. “He did say a symbol would be fine…” I hedged.

The downside to successfully breaking things was getting caught breaking things.

Behind the devil, the woman sighed, and spoke for the first time in a voice I recognized from the intro cutscene.

“This one is definitely one of yours,” she said.

“We’ll see,” the devil replied, grinning down at me with pointy teeth. “It’s definitely an encouraging start.”

I took an unconscious step back from that grin, but the devil had already turned back to System, looking him in the eyes again. After a moment the old man jerked, and appeared to animate again, whereupon the devil released his head and spoke to him normally.

“I hope you have learned a valuable lesson from this, System. Always sanitize user input. Always. Even if it seems harmless.”

The large fiend pulled the pencil out from behind his ear and jotted down something in his notebook as he spoke.

“Yes… Yes sir, I understand,” replied the shaken System. “I am sorry to have required your intervention so soon.”

“Don’t let it trouble you,” the devil said, turning away from them and walking back towards his seat. “I was expecting something like this before too long.”

The woman had drifted closer to watch, but now took a few steps away as well, returning to her previous position.

“Finish your introduction System, let us continue the ceremony as it was intended,” she said.

System nodded and raised his hands in the air, motioning for silence. Slowly the sound of the crowd faded away once more, and the old man began again. His voice once more resounded through the hall as though coming from everywhere at once.

“Members of the assembly, great spirits and ancient gods, allow me to present this human of Earth, one of the first to join us in this new world. I give you… Infinity!”

This time, when System spoke the name, I heard the word, but it was nearly drowned out by everything else that came with it.

I’d drawn the sideways figure eight--representing infinity--in the space for my name. When System announced me, he somehow said both the name of the symbol and the symbol itself. I could think of no other way to describe it, but I clearly heard the symbol, and not just the symbol but the meaning behind the symbol.

The concept of infinity filled my mind, and for an endless moment my senses faded into the background as my consciousness struggled to come to terms with this vast idea. I felt like I was drowning, and I wondered if this is what System had felt like–had the AI decided to get petty revenge on me by putting me through the same thing I’d made it experience?

I lost that thought to the crushing void. I could feel my sanity slipping away as I struggled to comprehend a concept that inherently wasn’t rational.

I fought against it, but my struggles were meaningless. I could fight forever and win every battle and still never make any progress. That was the nature of infinity after all. It wore away at me until there was no room for conscious thought left.

As what little remained of my sense of self was crushed under that incalculable weight, one last thought drifted out of the darkness.

Isn’t it supposed to be my name? How can I crush myself?

Just like that, my perspective shifted.

Now I was the vast crushing presence. No, vast wasn’t the right word, I was bigger than vast, I was endless, I was timeless. I couldn’t be crushed because there were no sides to push on, no borders to press against, no frame of reference to do it in.

Mad laughter echoed soundlessly in the void as I began to comprehend the incomprehensible. My consciousness floated in something that wasn’t darkness but was far too big to visualize. Even imagining it would have given it definition that it lacked.

As I drifted, I slowly became aware of two points of light in the endless expanse that was my new existence. I latched onto this strange, fixed point of reference and pulled my self-awareness to it.

As I did, my vision returned, expanding outwards until once again I was looking at the amphitheater and the old man standing center stage. There was a distinct feeling of having just placed my face up against eye holes in the walls of reality.

For a moment I retained that sense of endlessness behind my eyes even as my consciousness reconnected to my body.

What the hell was that?