Initializing…

My dream was the strangest feeling.

I had no body. I couldn’t move my arms or legs, couldn’t even sense them. Instead I saw nothing but a black field. In the center of that field, words slowly faded into view:

Enter the Colosseum

What? I thought. The words faded out of view, and in the moments of darkness that followed I tried to blink. How was I seeing without any eyes?

Then a new scene faded slowly into view: a naked woman, middle-aged, staring into a full-height mirror and occasionally shifting her weight from one foot to the next. New text appeared at the top of the screen:

Character Creation

Seriously, what? This was one of the weirdest, most vivid dreams I’d ever had. I tried to say something to the woman—but I had no mouth to speak with. And she was obviously not real—her movements, I realized, were an idle animation.

This is so strange, I thought as various buttons started to fill my field of view to the left of the woman, a little row of rectangles containing text much like in any video game. They weren’t out in physical space, though—unlike the room with the woman, these were in my mind, ingrained in my very perception.

I experimented with this for a while. It was a strange experience, but I found that it was fairly intuitive to select each button, highlighting them like I’d just passed over them with a mouse or controller and simply needed to click or press A. What was more, I could move my viewpoint through the room, positioning myself to view either the figure of the woman, or the total darkness that lay beyond.

I played around with the preset option, moving an actual slider to change the entire composition of the human puppet in front of me, looking through a variety of adult ages and builds, all uncomfortably naked.

If the strange feeling of realness had thrown me off, I started to get more comfortable with the idea that this was a dream: the photorealistic graphics and models that loaded instantaneously gave it away.

The first option under the Appearance tab was Race. I selected it, and the whole interface seemed to glitch for a moment.

Text appeared at the bottom of the screen:

Human detected. Initializing Inheritor Protocol…

Inheritor status—

Error: Inheritor status cannot be granted. Partial inheritor status has been granted in its place.

The options for the race tab appeared a moment later, glitching once and then settling into normalcy.

That was weird, I thought to myself. Then I read the first option to appear:

Player Race: True Human

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

And next to it, partially obscuring the man who now stood before the mirror, a translucent text-box appeared:

True Human

Human beings are the rightful masters of the galaxy and the creators of the Colosseum. As a human player, you gain the following benefits:

Human Inheritor:

Error: the full breadth of this ability’s functionality cannot be accessed by the system. At present, only the following feature is functional:

You glean more information from certain system interfaces, and the system administrator automatically flags you as a person of import.

Human Adaptability:

Instead of distributing 3 stat points as you choose upon leveling up, you gain a + 1 bonus to all your stats, then choose a stat to further increase by 1.

Human Supremacy:

You don’t spend experience or levels when claiming territory, accepting vassals, or accepting subjects.

Human Endowment:

You start with a Legendary Boon Card – Chosen. Your Chosen Boon maximum is increased by 1.

[Note: Starting chosen boons are extremely powerful and disrupt normal game balance. If you are not using the Gate of the Chosen, consider using your Human Inheritor feature to disable this ability.]

I read this all over twice.

So the game was just… kind of racist? Or was it speciesist? That was….

It was also science fiction, right? “Masters of the galaxy” doesn’t make a lot of sense for a fantasy term… except this was my player race. My character race had yet to be chosen—it was the only other option in the race tab. I was guessing that the line about how humans had built the Colosseum meant this, whatever it was, and not the tourist attraction in Rome. So… I was dreaming about a video game that had been built by a future race of really speciesist humans, and it was more real-feeling, more lucid than any other dream I’d had?

I started to feel a little unsettled, then distracted myself by going through the rest of character creation. I tried to change my player race to see what other options there were, but the option was locked.

Then I got a surprise when I went to select my in-game race. The first few options were:

Human

Dwarf

Elf

Orc

Goblin

Gnome

And then we got into some of the more special fantasy races. I wanted to laugh when I saw both beastkin and beastfolk—beastkin had the ears and tails, beastfolk were furry all over. Catering to all desires, I suppose.

They each came with bonuses, as you’d expect, but I had no idea what they meant. Extra stat points every few levels, skill points every level, extra senses—I wasn’t going to choose my race based on game mechanics I didn’t understand.

For a game you’re just going to wake up from, I reminded myself, feeling a little uneasy about it. Maybe that was a good thing—how much did I really want to play a fantasy callback game built by an empire of advanced human supremacists, all of which had been somehow drawn out of my unconscious?

At the same time… the graphics were really good. There weren’t any other options in the character creator—just race and appearance, and so I chose human:

Race - Human

You gain an extra General Skill Point on leveling up.

Game features exist that may further improve or specialize your race.

Which seemed like a pretty good choice in that it kept my options open, unlike many of the more specific stat and skill bonuses that other races received.

Plus, the only other real option was elf, since, well… I wanted to be good-looking.

What? Can you blame me?

I spent the rest of my time in the character creator doing as you do, playing around with sliders to make myself a male character with nice cheekbones and bright blue eyes, an unremarkable nose, and hair that was a true, deep red.

Then I looked around the barebones menus trying to figure out how to finish and name my character. I didn’t exactly have a start button, so I moved my mental cursor around, trying to figure out how to—

—Suddenly my character became an elderly, heavy-set woman with a waist-length braid of steel-gray hair. In my mental flailings, it seemed I’d briefly touched the preset slider, undoing all my work.

Oh, god damnit, I thought.

I started over….