Jim's PoV

When he exited the game he was in a world of hurt. Jim took a second to think about the last time he was in pain when he logged out. At first he thought it was because of what he had installed in his head, but now his theory was now leaning towards the fact that he downed all those sources.

The odd pain in his body felt very similar to both times he had gotten that weakness debuff. It was rather ominous that imaginary pain in his game had chased him back to the real world.

The pain absolutely sucked. There was obviously a massive bug somewhere. Jim closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep. Hopefully in the morning It wouldn't be so bad.

As his blurry eyes opened the next morning, the first thing that came to his mind was nope. The pain was still there. A good bit of it had gone away but he ached so bad. This time felt worse than the first time.

Coffee. Coffee fixes everything. Walking like an old man he slowly made his way across the street. Jim was about to walk into the donut shop when he panicked for a moment. Donut shops were where cops congregated!

Quickly looking over the parking lot he relaxed when he didn't see a police vehicle. Genius at work! Then he entered the establishment and immediately saw that half the people there were cops. Damn, unmarked cars! Sneaky bums! As he was about to turn back and leave he saw a marked police car park right in front of the store.

Jim sighed. He could already see the newspaper. Tech thief walks into a shop with a dozen cops and then gets arrested! They would swarm him and beat him down, and then of course the video would go viral online. It would then get clipped in with other videos of criminals doing stupid things and instantly getting arrested. Why was his luck so bad? Damn you karma!

Trying to control his breathing and act naturally, he hobbled over to get in line. So far his luck was holding and he wasn't getting a nightstick shoved up his posterior. The thought broke off mid sentence.

The old lady that was in front of him looked familiar for some reason. She turned around and then Jim knew her. Before he could say anything, she started yelling at him angrily, "I remember you, you pot smoking degenerate! Learn to drive, hippie!"

The whole shop went silent. About a dozen cops were looking at him and he started sweating bricks. The old hag was about to tell him off again but someone stopped her. He must have still had a coin in the karma jar! A middle aged woman next to him whispered harshly to the old lady saying "You promised! No outbursts or I'm leaving mother! I'm tired of trying to mediate your fights!"

But since the whole room was already silent, the whole shop heard the comment and then someone started laughing. And then another. In the blink of an eye the whole store relaxed with laughter. The cop behind him said "Don't sweat it, it's damn near legalized now. Just don't ever let us catch you driving while using it."

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Jim awkwardly smiled and turned back around. Keeping his head down he placed his order for the biggest size coffee they had and a dozen donuts. After getting the goods, he left that place and vowed never to return.

Safe back in his hotel room, he inspected his totally healthy breakfast, then he attacked. After killing off half the donuts and most of the coffee, he felt a lot better. It was crunch time. Jim sat down and started to work.

A day and a half later he had his answers and he didn't like it.

The first question he took on was, can he delete his game without suffering any negative side effects? The answer was no. Apparently his mind was now interlinked with his avatar in the game.

If he deleted the game, then every thought he had while playing the game would be erased. It seemed there were decent odds he would lose some memory while outside of the game too, but more on that later.

Interestingly, the loss of memory was also the same thing that would happen if he died in the game. So that didn't look too bad. Yeah it would suck if he lost some memories, but at least he avoided an IRL game over.

Then there was the fact that he was currently using his brain as a super computer thanks to the helmet and he hadn't gone into vegetable mode, so rather decent luck so far. The only downside would be if he died in game, he might repeat the same mistakes because he forgot them all. Well, unless he made a ton of notes.

Jim was able to look up information about the game running in his head, but he was unable to modify any of the data. The game was already set in motion. He really didn't like that answer so he started looking at the data. In hindsight he almost wished he didn't.

What he found was very upsetting. Jim looked at old data files that were scans of his brain activity. It was one of the first files created when they had got the helmet operational.

Every person in the lab had their brain activity converted to a graphical representation. Each person had their own unique patterns when looking at the graphical model. It was almost like a fingerprint, however it seemed to slowly evolve over time.

Right now he was looking at his old brain activity graph compared to a representation of NPC #0000000001. They were almost identical. That was him in the game. His own character in the game had an active brain activity that closely mirrored his own. Taking the experiment further, he took a live updating scan and compared it to that same NPC. Perfect match. No deviation at all.

That might not be too worrying, but then he went to the next one in line, NPC #0000000002. They had brain activity that was unique. He checked. He compared every co-worker that he had on file and they did not match. Neither did the third NPC. Or the fourth. Or the fifth. After a while he just ran an algorithm to see if any of the signatures were close to being similar. They were all unique. Every one of them.

Jim had over one million unique signatures for brain wave activity inside his own head. They were not elaborate if/then statements. They were not automatons. It was not machine learning. They were not slight deviations from known copies. Actual brain wave activity. Having actually talked to a few of them and seeing this data, there could only be one conclusion.

At first he didn't believe it. How could a human brain store over a million different identities? He had always thought that the processing power was crazy, but from what he could tell none of the signatures were any weaker than another, even compared to his own.

Taking a deep breath he said to himself "I have over a million digital people in my head, and they're indistinguishable from normal people in terms of brain activity."

Looks like he was a daddy. Kind of. Over a million times over. He had somehow created artificial people. Oh boy, he had a headache.