Sean was confused by the city that the escape pod had landed in in the beginning of Foundation of All. Up to now he had mostly focused on collecting resources and establishing a robotic force of harvesters to automatically collect materials and store them so he could build things later. There was an option to just create things automatically with the multi-tool without worrying about all the technical details, but Sean had chosen to play the hard version instead. So he actually had to inspect and at least somewhat understand the blueprints of everything he made with his multi tool before being allowed to create it.

Generally he had to create a given object in individual components in the design at first and assemble it himself before he could just pump them out automatically. Not that he minded it much, he could feel himself learning and improving as he familiarized himself with more and more by assembling the various technologies even given how primitive they were in comparison to most modern technology he had seen.

But now his robotic workforce was up and running and hard at work collecting as many materials as they could find, leaving him to turn his focus to the oddities he had noticed about the city before. There was not a single vehicle, a single corpse, or anything written down at all on what might have happened to leave this city and planet to be abandoned. Only the small and scraggly plantlife and occasional small mammal demonstrated that this place had any life at all.

After a week or two of work, Sean managed to finish a large transport vehicle that he could use as a mobile base while he explored the nearby cities that he knew must be out there. Leaving his base behind, he started driving off into the distance. This was something he honestly should have done months ago, but he was too invested in succeeding in building the robots to take a long trip out to explore the rest of the planet.

He drove for hours, well he would have to travel the distance. But instead he marked a destination on the map he had from the game and tapped out a command with his fingers. The world shifted around him and suddenly he and his vehicle were somewhere else. ‘Hours’ had passed and he was at his destination in seconds, in the outskirts of another town. This one was much more promising already. There were several rusted out cars with wheels and the occasional scrabbly and browning plant poking up through the asphalt of the road. Bare patches of caked dirt began to appear in the plains of grass as he traveled, growing larger and larger as he went.

He carefully exited the vehicle and inspected the area with his multi-tool at the ready. Emily had assured him that things were mostly safe in the game, but that didn’t mean there was no risk at all. He stepped forward and flinched as something crunched under his foot. He lifted his foot and looked down, where he saw what he had stepped on. He leaned down and brushed off some of the dirt that had accumulated and it… a femur. A human femur. It was old and yellowed and so brittle that even Sean’s brief pressure on it had caused it to nearly crack in half. Even now he could see the cracks on its surface grow. The bone was… old. He stood and kept searching the area. Now he was taking a closer look he noticed the scattered bones, some teeth, a semicircular shard that must have been part of a skull. All had died long, long ago.

He kept searching, not deconstructing anything yet with his multi tool in case he accidentally vaporized some sort of clue of what happened by accident. Eventually in his wandering he finally found a building that looked rather more important than the others. It had several severely weathered stone statues out the front even if the roof had appeared to collapse inwards with the passage of time.

He went inside and searched but there were only more bones and a thick layer of dust. Actually, more bones than he had seen in any other of the buildings he had searched so far. He noticed with interest a rusted stairwell that went into the ground, the ceiling only sagging inwards in a few places.

He carefully went down until he reached what appeared to be a rotted wooden door laying flat on the ground near the bottom. Despite everything, the area was bone dry just like it had been the whole time Sean had been playing Foundation of All. In fact it had not rained in the entire time he was here. He proceeded inside his multi tool held at the ready, more wary of the ceiling collapsing in on him than being attacked by something in this desolate place.

He entered and noticed immediately that while the metal cabinets around him were significantly rusted, their contents were not completely destroyed. He walked over to one of the half open cabinets and saw writing in an unfamiliar black script on a whitish crumbly substance. He reached out to touch it and to his alarm most of it collapsed into dust at his touch. He looked at all the other cabinets around him presumably filled with documents and considered if he should go back to base to build some specialized equipment to scan them without touching and translate the writing. Maybe next trip, but for now he would push onwards.

He walked outside, but before he left he deconstructed several of the rusted cars and repurposed their materials to build a large antennae tower in the street out front of the building he had just left. This would allow him to locate this building later if he wanted to come back to inspect the documents.

He moved onwards and kept driving through the smaller town and nothing else noteworthy popped out to him. Only old bones and rusted cars remained behind. He used the map to skip farther to the next larger city. But to his surprise the next time he stopped was not at the city but some place in the plains of browned grass and cracked and dry dirt.

As soon as he exited his vehicle he saw why. Blocking his way was a large line of rusted cars left on the road and far more scattered bones littering the area. All were gathered around a squat concrete structure sitting just to the side of the road. Looking to either side, Sean saw more of these structures lining the area in a line into the horizon in both directions. Several of the vehicles looked scorched and something metallic gleamed inside the concrete structure through small slits in the walls.

Sean exited his vehicle and walked over to the building, curious of what he could be. He deconstructed the metallic door and entered only to pause. The metal he had seen before… were weapons. Large rusted weapons hanging out of the windows and manned by bones covered in scraps of cloth. He went to one of the weapons and frowned as he rebuilt the scene in his mind. The people out there had been fleeing something… away from the city he had been in.

They had enough time to clear out most of their possessions or at least bury the bodies well enough that Sean hadn’t noticed them when he was building his base. The soldiers had opened fire on the people when they had gotten close. But what had driven the people forward to charge the hostile soldiers? And what had killed the soldiers for that matter? All of them were at their stations still, presumably killed without even being able to react.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

It sent tingles up his spine as he stood among the bones and heard nothing but the wind across the plains. It was eerie, how quiet it was. It felt disrespectful to speak in the gravesite even if he knew that it was all a digital fiction. He thought this was supposed to be a building game, why had the creators put something so off putting for their players? But the mystery was drawing him in now, maybe if he traveled farther he could discover what had happened.

He deconstructed all the rusted metal husks in his way on the road and cleared the path. He could just drive around, but he had noticed several cars more mangled than usual on the places that weren’t roads. Sending a recon humanoid drone from his vehicle out to inspect them had triggered a landmine that exploded and violently destroyed the drone, causing Sean to duck down in surprise at the massive spray of dirt and sound.

After that he decided to go on the road. He hadn’t died in this game yet, and he had no intention of doing so if he didn’t have to. The road seemed a much safer option.

He returned to his vehicle and started moving forward. He drove manually for now, not wanting to miss some new clue as he continued onwards.

He kept going, only occasionally using the map to skip a little ahead when he didn’t see anything of interest in the area. He was finally approaching the edge of the city he had originally aimed for on the map. The grass had completely disappeared now, only leaving dry and caked dirt and a strangely intact road to travel on as he continued.

He skipped forward one more time… and reached the series of craters. Immediately the marking for the city on the map turned into a dark black dot and the city icon disappeared. Sean looked between the map and outside to the giant pits in the ground in the place where a city should be.

What? What could have done this? Meteor impacts?

He opened the door to his vehicle and immediately his vision flashed green in the corners. He slammed the door shut in surprise and a little red bar appeared out of thin air just in front of him. It was rimmed in a flashing green rim and slowly decreasing. All sorts of windows popped up and Sean flailed around trying to figure out what was happening to him and how to survive. But in under thirty seconds the red bar fully depleted and in an instant the world around him vanished.

He was in a blank void, only a series of glowing words floating in front of him.

‘Death by Acute Radiation Poisoning.’

‘Respawn or Leave game?’

Heart still racing from his unexpected death in the game, Sean pressed the respawn button. The word changed again and suddenly he reappeared back in the escape pod from the beginning. It was one of the few objects in the game that couldn’t be destroyed according to Emily when he asked her about it.

He let out a long sigh as he thought about what had happened again. Radiation… If someone wanted to blow up a city why wouldn’t they use anti-matter bombs or something more destructive than a nuclear weapon? Why hadn’t a group from some other planet come down here and used some radiation scrubbers to clean the place up and resettle? From what Sean could see and based on the decay of the skeletons, this place had been abandoned for a very long time with no signs of intelligent or even much animal life so far. Strange… The planet still seemed plenty habitable. Why hadn’t anyone else come and resettled this place yet in all that time?

Maybe he should start working on launching some satellites next. They could help him scan this place and verify if there were any pockets of survivors he could contact and get more information from. With such an open world he wondered how the game would handle him interacting with intelligent people… well, there was one argument that there weren’t many survivors at least. Although it was simulating a whole planet as well, so who was he to say what was and wasn’t impossible… he would have to ask Emily later if simulating people was possible or not. But for now, he was done. He went through the logout sequence and reappeared right back in the white room with the treadmill beneath him. It was so strange to him how real the digital world felt despite its clear differences from reality.

He walked out of the room and proceeded to his room. “Ship? Display?” he called out and a holographic window popped up in front of him as he walked. He swiped a few times until he reached the clock and shook his head as he saw the date. Three and a half whole weeks he spent in there without stopping. All of that and he was only left with a slight headache in return, his body healing over all his bad choices.

Feeling a little bad that he had been in there for so long, he diverted his path from his bedroom to the main living space that Emily had first brought him to when he entered the ship. When he walked in there, he saw her sitting on the couch staring at the wall opposite to her blankly. He cleared his throat after she didn’t seem to notice him, and she jolted into awareness and looked at him in surprise. For a second she looked confused before a look of recognition washed over her face.

“Sean!” She said, “Wow, you really went deep on that one. Feels like ages since we’ve seen each other. You just caught me staring into space there, haha…”

Sean sat in a chair near her and rubbed the back of his head sheepishly, “Yeah, sorry about that. Just lost track of time I suppose. I was exploring the surroundings in Foundation of All. I actually just had my first death… Acute radiation poisoning if you can believe it.”

“Oh,” she replied, “So you, uh. Exploring! Tell me all about it. Finally done with the robots and factory setup?”

“Yep,” Sean replied, “I’ve got the basics down. Nothing like your base of course, but enough that the harvesters are going out and production runs pretty much automatically for the basics. I’ve been mostly focused on the mystery of figuring out what happened to that world and finding out if there are any survivors.”

He told Emily about the various clues he had found and a few of his theories on what had happened. Her face had the strangest expression as she watched him speak, but as soon as he finished she plastered on a smile.

“No spoilers,” she said, “Most people don’t really care about that part of it. I’m surprised you do.”

“I don’t know,” Sean said, “It just feels sad, I think. All those buildings, everything they built… just left empty after whatever event happened. I know it’s just a game but it’s… I don’t know, disrespectful to just ignore it and move on with the factory now that I’ve started investigating. Especially when it all looks so real.”

Emily watched him with an intense gaze for a moment, before nodding and looking away. “Yes,” she said softly, “I suppose it would be. It is sad, all of them just forgotten…”

Sean frowned as he detected real emotion as she said that. But before he could think about it any farther she shook her head and looked up again, “Enough of that talk though. I’m sure you want to get a nap to clear that headache of yours,” She said, “If you’re down, I’ve got some ancient board games kicking around we could play together. I don’t think we’ve tried chess yet, that could be fun. Really, it’s probably best that you’ve taken a break now. We’re less than a week away from the Immortal Council and all the lovely bureaucracy we’ll both have to go through once we get there.”

“Sounds fun,” Sean said, throwing her a thumbs up. A gesture he had picked up after Emily using it so many times, “Talk to you later after I sleep.”

With that Sean left and went to bed, falling asleep as soon as he concentrated on doing so for a minute or two.