Prologue

Everyone in my generation remembers where they were and what they were doing when the announcement was made. The government had at the time made a nationwide media release on all channels and sources.

“It is our great pleasure to announce, through the great efforts of our countries scientists, the world’s first virtual capsule machine will be released for the mass in the coming months.”

Why the big deal you ask?

With the ever growing human population and the ever dwindling oil supply, the world’s economy is literally going into the gutter hole. The lower end of society was already taking it hard with the increase in commodity prices, but now a simple drive in a car was a luxury for the rich.

Now this is where the virtual capsule comes into place. Some genius geek in a attic lead a online campaign asking for a state run reality world so that the mass can enjoy the pleasures of life that we could no longer afford.

Boy was it a hit. In merely a day, a quarter of the nation’s population signed up for the petition. The politicians picked up on this like a animal sniffing its prey. In their effort to win over the voters, they dumped a enormous portion of the countries next 10 years budget into further developing a existing VR technology. Now, the capsules not only fool your sight, your smell, hearing, and even touches, everything takes place inside your mind. Meaning it’s not much different from reality!

I can’t say this decision was smart for the country as a whole but it sure as hell won the voters over. People were in the streets celebrating like the world was raining money. Beats protesting in a war zone like the old world in Europe and Asia.

Can’t blame them, I was just like all my friends.

Imagine 14 years of my life, never did I ride in a car, or go on vacation overseas. Now all the things people in the 20th century took for granted can be experienced by me in the 21st century!

Names Jack. Semi loner geek that loved spending my days on the computer browsing porn and watching old anime’s on the open web.

Oh no, you got me wrong. I’m not fat at all, in fact, my body is skinny like a stick and my muscles are like a cheesy tofu but I do sweat a lot. Life was simple; I go to school and get decent grades while I leech off my father that barely made enough to get us by. I can’t blame him for our shitty life of a two room apartment; he was hard working and bright. It’s just hard working things out since my mom passed away during my birth.

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It’s not like I don’t want to help the old man out. It’s just I don’t know how. My pops not exactly the mentoring type; he’s more of the let the kid do his own thing and he will manage somehow. Some may say it’s the best and it’s true to a certain point.

I know my family relatives around my age all worked part time or have some prospect to get a scholarship in a university waiting for them. And here I am no job or grades to get into a decent college. The elders in the family don’t say it in my face, but I figured they’ve been making comments behind my back.

Then one day, my salvation appeared.

In a attempt by NASA to produce a self-regulating computer to monitor the worlds ever escalating problems, the Cerebro was born. This massive ten ton satellite in Earth’s orbit was the world’s leading program in regulating the web, can’t say it was self-conscious but it was damn close.

Now the best part about the AI Cerebro was its ability to access anything in the web but also opens itself to foreign access. Now some young entrepreneur came up with the greatest idea of the century. In a attempt to outdo his competition, he asked some programmers to infused a part of the Cerebro AI core into his games system core. The result was something beyond imagination as the world’s most powerful AI went rogue on its creators. The Self-monitoring Cerebro thought the game - Noah was defective and looked to ‘fix’ the game.

Now the techno behind what happened is too complicated for my high school educated brain. In simple terms, the AI infected just about every piece of technology on the planet to use as a server for the game. Oh don’t worry; it’s not like a virus that corrupts its hosts. Everything continued on like nothing was wrong except Cerebro could use the extra computing power for itself.

Through the vast information on Goople and other less known search engines, Cerebro used the original lore in the game and built a entirely different VR world on it.

No one knows how big the game truly is now, what I do know is that it was huge. Thanks to the integration of the every computer on the planet, a person would not need to have all the data in the game to access it. Now the thing every kid plays after school is to log into their VR capsule and get into Noah.