With a grunt I found myself falling backward onto the ground. Just a moment ago there was a bright flash and now I found myself laying on a field of grass with blue sky and clouds floating by. With a head shake, I slowly rolled myself over and pushed myself towards my feet. With a sudden start, I noticed I was no longer wearing the insulting pink and blue prison garb. Instead, I was wearing something that looked like it was out of a renaissance fair, only made with quality and eye to detail. Brown wool pants with cord pull string bindings without buttons or zipper, a white cotton shirt with visible but careful stitching at the sleeves.

A bubbly happy voice came from behind me, “Welcome! I’m glad you decided to go the upgrade route. I spent a few picoseconds designing this whole system and I’m glad someone will get a chance to use it”.

Whipping myself around I found the high pitched voice was the least distracting and confusing part of the lady. Floating in the air was a softly glowing pink woman, no more than three inches tall, wearing the stereotypical fairy costume. The fairy bobbed in the air a moment, her wings slowing as she dipped, small sparkles peeling off her wingtips.

“I know you must be disoriented, take a moment. I want you to pick any direction and move around a bit and get used to things. I’ll just stay here and wait for you to get your thoughts in order. Ok?” she continued with a perky sound as she slowly made gentle little loops in front of me.

I slowly nodded at pinkie while looking around trying to understand where I was. Moments ago I was talking to the Digital guard, then I saw a flash of light and then…here. I slowly tried to figure out if I had been transported here or something else. I looked around at the field of grass, the sky, the clouds. There was something odd, but I couldn’t really figure out what it was. Something about the horizon just felt wrong, off somehow.

Keeping the pink butterfly lady to the side, within my eyesight, I slowly started walking towards the horizon trying to figure out what had so disturbed me about what I was seeing. With a slowly sinking feeling, I noticed that the glowing pink lady was shrinking faster than she should have. Something was wrong with the very space I was moving through and I felt myself tilt as I tried to mentally keep my balance when it felt like the world should be tilting, but wasn’t.

“Right. So you were digitized, and this world is just a small little structure to get your to understand some things”, pinkie said while slowly drifting towards me.

I wasn’t sure what this bizarre experience was supposed to explain, but I could feel pretty clearly that this was the point. This whole thing seemed to be designed to throw me off balance and get me to see that I clearly didn’t understand things. The very wrongness of the weird place I found myself in showed it clearly. If I just didn’t focus on the horizon everything felt fine, it was when I tried to look anywhere else things just started to go wrong for me.

“This whole space is curved around through space. This whole geometry is non-Euclidian.” She stated with a bit of a giggle.

I understood that well enough. I was an engineer and while I didn’t use non-Euclidian geometry, I had been exposed to the basics of it. Space not being flat made things weird because my brain had never evolved to handle it. Makes sense.

In a sing-song voice, she continued, “It’s a tiiiiiiiiiny little planet, but you can’t even see that since your brain is just not built to handle it. Your brain handles some very specific things, and that’s it”. She bounced to emphasize her point, or I assumed to emphasize. I was too busy trying to keep my eyes on the ground and not fall over.

While I wanted to be insulted or indignantly point out how capable I was, it was hard to argue when I was having difficulty with just standing and looking straight ahead. Slowly the second realization rolled over me. I was already digitized. I wasn’t going to die of cancer. Also that the Digitals were so far beyond humans that they could digitize someone in basically an instance. Earth was a nature preserve, humans were like the chimps flinging their own shit. I took a few deep breaths as I tried to rearrange my view of myself and reality.

It must have taken a good forty-five minutes or so for me to realize I had just been standing, slowly swaying, as I mentally reordered my importance in the grand scheme of things and my perception of humanity and more importantly Digitals and how I simply couldn’t understand the scale of things I was involved in now. I was already a part of some kind of fake world, admittedly a small one, but it felt entirely real, so much so that I didn’t even notice that I wasn’t ‘real’ in a physical sense when I was first digitized.

“No, no. None of that. This is just as real as what you were before. Digital, material, energy, or some of the rather more exotic forms. It’s all the same. Atoms were just the things which did the calculations of the information before. Just because the platform changes doesn’t mean anything about the calculations”.

I snapped my head up at the doll-like woman. Was she reading my mind?

“You were muttering,” she said with a smile.

“So you are reading my mind!” I shouted as I scrambled to backed away.

I felt exposed on this wide open green field with the blue sky above me. I began trying to find a way to run but each step felt like I was going to fall over. I ended up on hands and knees trying to crawl away. It took a while but my mental gibbering slowed down enough to realize that I had crawled away from the fairy, she hadn’t moved, and she was now in front where I was scrambling towards. I could feel my brain trying to rebel from the impossible twists of the world around me. The obvious impossibility of running away from a fairy resulting in my approaching her stopped my mad scramble.

The fairy slowly dipped and bobbed as she calmly replied “Not at all. Reading of your memory or computational structure is strictly prohibited. Permission is always required before that is allowed. That being said, you are unable to currently provide this consent due to your current limitations. We will go over legal rights and permissions when you start to join the greater Digital community.” She paused momentarily as she noticed me calming down and slowly moving back towards her, “I’m going to change this space to a Euclidian one since it’s no longer a useful lesson”.

With a wave of her hand, things changed in some way that I couldn’t understand. The horizon looked right, I didn’t feel dizzy and disoriented as I moved around. This ‘felt’ right. Again, I could feel myself getting disoriented as I realized the world around me was something under the control of this little pink woman and that it was malleable and not real.

“Now. I’m a little pink fairy since it was deemed the least dangerous appearing avatar while also being one which would convince you that this isn’t the reality your thought it was. Would you like me to continue to explain where we are, what we are doing, and how this will go, or would you like to rest and think for a while?”

Slowly bobbing again pinkie waited calmly for my response. Every so often she would flap her wings faster and regain some of her lost height as tiny sparkles dropped from her wings. Somehow I think she would be willing to continue waiting for me to respond for as long as it would take.

With a bit of a mental head slap, I girded my loins and nodded for her to continue.

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

The little pink fairy, Delsie, went on to explain that a human upgrade process would need to follow along with humanities own drives and instincts. ‘Upgrading’ as I thought of it needed to be something under each person's individual control since Digitals had laws concerning people modifying others. Unfortunately, they also had laws about their infants modifying themselves until they reached a certain level of understanding. Sadly for me, I wasn’t even able to understand what the metric for measuring understanding was, let alone reaching that level of understanding myself. I didn’t even match a Digital infant. It was like explaining calculus to a chimpanzee. They wouldn’t get that the words meant things in the abstract, let alone the subject you were trying to convey.

I could feel my ego being beaten to a pulp during this conversation. Delsie continued in a high pitched but matter of fact manner the entire time. Eventually after a particularly insulting reference and a slump of my shoulders Delsie made a wry face to let me know that she understood my uncomfortableness with the situation, but she continued on with the facts.

To allow humans to upgrade it was decided to allow us to experience a simulated environment. This environment would be a game, the process of upgrading would be a process of gamification which would try and direct me gently towards an upgrade path which would allow me to understand the greater Digital community. The goal was to end up with ‘me’, in some sense, as a Digital, instead of having ‘me’ being a small lightly connected unused module in some larger Digital.

Then Delsie dropped the bombshell on me. The simulated environment was ready for me to experience. It was a full planet with hundreds of thousands of years of history, inhabited by multiple millions of creatures. All modeled off of high fantasy games and novels which had fascinated me as a child.

Hundreds of thousands of years of history.

Inhabited by millions of creatures.

This was created, all ready, and was waiting for me just so I could upgrade. I began to hyperventilate.

With concern and a bit of amazement, I tried to understand “You created a whole planet with people just so I could be upgraded?”

Delsie giggled with a high pitched squeal as she did a mid-air flip. Apparently, I had tickled her pink, err…that is to say, pinker as her glow brightened.

“Oh no. This was designed a few seconds after the United Sentience Agreement was reached and has been on hold ever since. This pattern has repeated continuously. Many creatures have refused digitization and upgrading in history. We simply prepare for if and when they want to proceed. The diversity of Digitals is one of the few things we lack since we have strict limitations on modification of other Digitals. There are currently only a few trillion different types of Digitals. It’s in our best interest to provide for this process.”

Again, my mind tried to slowly loop around what this meant. The numbers and timescales just didn’t make sense to me. I couldn’t keep track and frankly, it just wasn’t important at the moment. I would have to wait till I had some kind of reference before I tried to understand what this all meant.

With a force of will, I focused myself back on the goal of things. I needed to understand what I was doing and where I was going. I waved my hand at Delsie and asked her to continue explaining this world and my new place in it.

“Right, soon you will be placed in the town square of a human settlement where you will start out as a level one wizard! Your goal is to level up, have fun, grow and experience your new world!”. By this point, Delsie was zipping back and forth in excitement and her voice was speeding up with little giggles as she turned mid-air acrobatics.

In a more serious voice than I had heard Delsie use before she said, “While you are experiencing this new world you will have a few rules you need to follow.” She cautioned me. “You can’t lie or break an agreement. Lying or breaking an agreement will cause you to lose your powers or be punished in some other way till your oath breaking is corrected and you pay recompense which matches your actions”.

I wasn’t much for lying, and I could see how this was in line with Digitals. Digitals never broke their word. Oh, they had no problem being rule lawyers if need be, but no one had ever found a Digital to break their word. I wasn’t sure why this was the case. But it seemed fairly important to them and making it the first rule mentioned emphasized this pretty clearly.

Pausing momentarily, Delsie bounced in the air as she drew in a large breath then continued, “At any time you can make a backup of yourself. Your first backup will start in the village center the moment you arrive. If you die, you will restart from your last backup with all memories after that moment being deleted. Knowing when to make a backup is an important skill. One all infants need to learn after all!”

The constant references to me being like an infant, or even worse, less intelligent than an infant was starting to grate on me but I couldn’t really deny it. This little floating pink butterfly, despite the bouncing and game playing, was probably smarter than the entire planet combined. It was both galling and maddening, especially since she was such a cute little pink thing with childlike mannerisms. I kept trying to force myself to remember that appearances here were just to keep me from freaking out and feeling powerless, nothing and no one here should be underestimated.

Finally, Delsie explained that while leveling up in the game the advancements I would be allowed would correlate to upgrade possibilities. These upgrades would allow me new game powers which would help me while playing the game. She made it clear that I needed to be careful to pick upgrades which I really wanted since they would only allow me to undo so much of any modification before it would be considered too much a part of who and what I was and then they wouldn’t change it. I would have to wait till I joined the full community before I could go back and make any further self-adjustments. She continued on to explain the existence of mental commands for my skill window and status window which would display for me in a rough way how I was doing.

With that explained Delsie dipped down and floated close to my face. “This process is going to take time. A rough estimate is seven hundred thousand years experiential or so. After that, you should be able to move on towards basic education for an infant Digital. Real-time wise this will take probably about a second or so”.

I mentally shuddered again. I was slowly coming to realize what ‘immortal’ actually meant. What vast swaths of time like that actually entailed. I would be a full Digital before the nightly news announced my entry into the Digital legal system, but from my point of view, more time than the entire recorded history of humanity would have passed. I was going to grow truly ancient while waiting for humanity to catch up and join me.

The only thing I could do was mentally shove those ideas behind me and just push on in emotional denial. I know it’s factually true, but I can’t deal with it at the moment. I just need to continue on while letting the idea slowly sink in. I probably will really only get an inkling of what the idea means after I’ve lived longer than any human in history.

I straightened my back, squared my shoulders, and prepared myself. “Ok, Delsie. I’m ready, how do I move into the game?”

“Just select your first ability and we will move on!” the cute sprite shouted as she threw her arms wide and two blue screens appeared floating in front of me.

Improved Concentration.

Improved Multi-Tasking.

Delsi continued, “Improved Concentration will help you with casting spells. All spells require you to focus on their effects and keep them going with continuous concentration. Losing focus will cause a spell to fail.”

I mentally tagged this one as I knew that one of my greatest failings was concentration. I was just normally stubborn enough to bring my mind back on track. I could see how more concentration would be helpful to allow me to focus as I ‘played’ and it would definitely help me as a Digital.

“Improved Multi-Tasking will allow you to more easily focus on more than one thing at a time. Like movement and casting, or eventually even multiple spells at the same time! Your effective concentration will be split between these different thing's though.”

I could see how this would be important later, but for now, I was going to focus on the first option as I thought it would allow me to improve instead of splitting my efforts in two directions, literally.

With a grin, I swung my hand through improved concentration. I suddenly felt a growing sensation like my head was trying to expand, a slow creeping sensation ran across my head like a shiver only I could tell nothing was actually happening physically.

“Have fun. Remember this is intended to be entertaining while also allowing you to strive for the growth you want. It’s going to take a long time, but we will be here waiting for you. I’ll check back in a thousand years, for you, or so”.

With a wave of her little sparkly arms and a flutter of her wings, Delsi’s glow started to brighten until it was the only thing I could see. Shielding my watering eyes I blinked and lowered my hands looking around at my new world.