“Welcome to Ilmarinen, the most realistic MMORPG this world has ever seen. Beta testers have called it a second reality. It is a game with few restrictions on gameplay and constantly adapting environments and NPC’s. It is possible to become kings or live as poor farmers and craftsmen in a magical medieval society. under the careful watch of one of the worlds most advanced AI programs, the game will adapt to allow for lifelike interactions with NPC’s and gameplay that adapts to actions we never expected a player to make in the original game. Like the typical MMORPG characters will be able to gain stat points and levels through the subjugation of mobs or other players and quests. However, just like you will be able to train attributes manually and there will be no inventory, unless you get an enchantment or spell for one. Also, like in reality there will be no levelling skills. If you want to do something use your own two hands and learn how to do it!”
----------------------------------------
VR has come a long way from the old pieces of plastic people used to put around phones in the early 21st century. The first FIVR, full immersion virtual reality, was the T-5 capsules that shocked the world. At first they were used to allow the rich and busy explore the most iconic parts of the world which the VR scanner technology had recorded. soon it inevitably began to be used for porn. Who needs to hire prostitutes if you could have sex with any girl you could imagine? They wouldn’t even need to be human. It was also easy to program because you only needed one room of data and sensory information on one body that can be adapted for VR harems. Soon with the spread of nanotech there began to be whole worlds of fantasy created for FIVR just like the old VRMMO games and often with the same unconvincing NPCs.
Suddenly, a breakthrough in neurobiology allowed for the cheap and easy selective disabling of motor neurons from the base of the spinal cord and smaller devices for the reading of the signals sent to the motor neurons. At first the fear of the motor neurons in vital organs prevented this technology from going public until they found out this “kill switch” didn’t exist. The vital organs worked based on their own neural clusters so interference in the signals from the spinal cord and brain would never affect them the brain could also not be switched off as the process only worked on the input and output signals to and from the brain, not the processing neurons. People soon began using these devices for FIVR and it finally took off on a public global scale. People began fully investing in the possibilities of this technology leading to the final creation of Ilmarinen.
In the rest of the world we have had many interesting changes since the year 2000. Most impressively being humanities survival of multiple events we believed would lead to our extinction. We felt the full wrath of global warming with mike pence leading the global denial of climate change. Luman laid the groundworks for a nuclear holocaust. A meteor struck the earth during the eruption of the super volcanoes causing an eternal night and winter. This was humanity in the end. We survive everything. It stopped the problems of overpopulation, destroyed organised monotheistic religion for better or for worse, created a global government and created a greater measure of equality among all species. Most importantly, it created a reliance on computer assisted technology that led to our current automated communist government. We survived that winter by virtue of the explosion of the star IK Pegasus A and a supermassive solar storm, two other extinction level events.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
All these disasters left enough radioactivity to cause hypermutation and the rise of multiple other sentient species such as giant telepathic spiders and goat-fish. We also met some aliens that were friendly but with all the other stuff that happened it barely made the history books. It turns out these aliens had as much technology as we did in the 2030s and but threw it all into a single space mission to find intelligent life and skype back. They had to use their world’s equivalent of Morse code. They were very disappointed by that.
Back then few people had jobs, few people needed to, and weird species kept cropping up due to relationships and specie groups being able to reproduce despite all the odds. The giant telepathic spiders were great builders. Removing their web gave them a burst of building-based brilliance and euphoria. With that combination and the help of the other sentients we finally got our world repaired and back on track. We began to innovate and built the VR machines for Ilmarinen as well as finalising a cure for aging.
Unfortunately, we also developed a portal to other universes and only a few people got the cure before we had our best, first and only meeting with people from another universe. That seemed good but the people in question were from an anti-universe. They had positrons instead of electrons and negatively charged protons instead of positively charged protons. In other words, they were made of anti-matter (see Minecraft antimatter bomb). When they flooded into the world they and the space around them became bundles of neutrons, releasing a great energy that killed off all but the most frugal of survivalist nut-jobs or their friends that just happened to be with them at the time. Because none of the other races had truly gone through the horrors of the extinction level events, these survivalists were almost entirely human.
As was typical of humanity, they undid everything we had achieved and killed off almost all remaining non-human sentients, hiding the fact that they ever existed. Sitting on a plannet sized lump of rock, limping through space with all their old flaws, life continued as always under the rule of the still active systems that had been set in place by mankind at the dawn of the post-apocalyptic golden age…
----------------------------------------
Who am I? I am one of the few to have gotten the cure for aging and visit a certain survivalist nut-job friend. I am also the ghost in the system. I see all but can do very little. I only have my wife and survivalist friend to interact with one is a female, giant, telepathic spider whilst the other is a unique decedent of a goat-fish and a strange lemon-with-legs-type sentient, that evolved from who knows what. The system provides everything we need.
They both got the cure for aging too.
Eternity is a long time to spend with anyone.
A very, very long time.