In an otherwise empty white space, James stood gazing at a floating holographic screen.  As he gazed at the text on the screen James couldn't help but smile.  He'd spent every penny he had and then some for this chance, the chance to leave Earth behind.  Permanently.

James Rothschild was a nobody, plain and simple.  Sure his life had its highlights and low points, but as far as the wider world was concerned he may as well have not existed.  And for James that was as he liked it.  He wasn't too happy with his existence in the first place.

Born as the youngest child of 3 in a family just above the poverty line, James was the one with the most potential and the least motivation.  It was somewhat amazing that all the children in such a low social class family were of above average intelligence, and James' brother and sister made the most of it.  Through hard work piled on top of their natural gifts his siblings had forged good lives for themselves, his brother as a doctor and his sister as a lawyer.  But James, by far acknowledged as the most gifted among them, fell through the cracks.

It wasn't that James did anything wrong.  He went to school, aced his classes, won several competitions, and avoided the hazards of drugs and alcohol.  But all of that was just a joke.  Everything was so ridiculously easy for James that it held no value.  He never learned how to work hard at something, and as he had no great ambitions he couldn't see the point in trying to use his brains to help a terminally ill society.

Ultimately James dropped out of college, learned programming to further his own hobbies, and eventually turned that into a career.  Now he was a slightly balding, obese 42 year old programmer with a scraggly beard and out of style glasses.  He had no friends, no significant other, and hadn't seen a member of his family in close to a full decade, though he sent Christmas presents for his nieces and nephews every year.

And then two months ago Olympus Technologies made an announcement that shook the very foundations of civilization.  In an effort to create a completely realistic full immersion virtual world they had accidently either created or connected to an actual universe.  Which was unknown because the advanced AIs tasked with the virtual world creation had all vanished.

Immersion virtual reality had existed since James was a teenager, but the limit of realism had always been about 80%.  He'd played a few, but never really got interested as the immersion was too reliant on game mechanics.  There was no true freedom of action, and aside from PVP everything was just as scripted as any previous game.

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Technically Olympus Technologies had begun the experiment to create a full immersion VR more than a decade ago, and the results had been in for nearly 2 years.  They'd been mum about the issue as they were investigating the mind-boggling results.  And after more than a year they'd learned very little.  This was due to the conditions of character creation and the fact they could pull almost no data for anything beyond that.  Once you created your character and "logged in" your mind vanished from our universe, leaving behind an empty shell.

The question then became, how did they know logging into the "world" didn't simply fry a person's brain?  The answer, what little information they were able to retrieve from the "world" and an entity they'd spoken with called the Overseer.  This being was not an AI, but had informed them it was responsible for the transference of souls between worlds.  That's right, souls.

Needless to say there was a great deal of skepticism and incredulity, but Olympus Technologies stood by their announcement. They then said they had negotiated with the Overseer and were opening their server for people interested in "migration".  Olympus released what information they had on the new world, and despite the lack of absolute proof, a migration frenzy ensued.

This new universe contained many races, intergalactic travel, far advanced technology, and psionics that may as well be magic.  It was a world where individual beings could grow strong enough to create and destroy worlds with ease.  And when you migrated a body was created for you, in any race you chose, humanoid or not.  A person could literally become whatever they'd always wanted to be.

Olympus announced that one had to use their facilities to perform the migration, so they were auctioning off the first migration spots on a weekly basis.  They could handle approximately 5,000 per day currently, and would expand based on interest.  The slots for the first week would also randomly receive between 1 and 10 extra points for character creation.  They stressed that every one of these points was incredibly valuable, but wouldn't say why.

James couldn't really understand why, but this called to him.  He became desperate for one of the first available migrations.  The prices were astronomical, with the first day migrations costing tens of millions of dollars.  After selling his house and most of his possessions James secured a slot on the last day of the first week for $860,000.

He had said his goodbyes to his family and left for Olympus' "migration" facilities.  After filling out dozens of forms, including those about disposing of his body, James had entered an immersion pod.  Now he was in the character creation room, ready to see a brand new universe.