Dear Nobody,

Honestly, I feel kind of stupid sitting here writing this all down, I mean considering paper doesn’t exist anymore. I’m currently sitting at a desk writing it all down old school with a pen and paper style and you’re just going to end up reading this on some sort of electronic device or no one will read it at all cause we will all be dead, but I digress.

Even though the likelihood of anyone actually reading this is next to nothing, there is something cathartic about putting pen to paper even if it’s only in virtual reality. For me and 800 remaining souls on this ship a virtual world is the best we are going to get.

A little about myself, I am 24 years old, kind of I am technically over 1000 years old because I was born in 2357. What? No way, not possible you but thanks to modern technology, the good people at NASA, AlterState Gaming, 2000 years of pollution, over population and antibiotic resistant super diseases that I’m currently living in a virtual apartment waiting for the latest patch notes to be released.

While my actual body is cryogenically frozen inside a virtual reality capsule, blasting its way through time and space , and I say time but not the way you’re thinking, my physical body had been on a spaceship rocketing through space for the last 1000 years. While a sophisticated AI takes care of all the necessary repairs, maintenance and navigation needed to ensure our survival. My mind on the other hand has been under extreme time distortion in order to keep our brains as minimally active as possible in order to survive being cryogenically frozen for thousands of years.

While my body is frozen, my brain has been uploaded into… well let’s call it a video game for the sake of clarity. I have lived multiple lives in countless world, ok maybe not countless, but it definitely sounds better. As I was saying my brain is nearly 60 years old having lived through a multitude of virtual worlds. I like to think of myself as still being 24 cause none of those experience I can remember. You see we are all in a fight for survival, and sometimes it gets nasty. The System controlling our lives has determined that it would be better if we didn’t live with all the post dramatic stress attributed to what most of the time turned out to be an all-out war.

I would say that you guys are the lucky ones, even if the virus that has decimated so much of the planet continues to work its way through the rest of the population. Eventually killing off everyone you love, at least you were able to truly live. You got to hold on to your loved ones and say goodbye even as the death throws take you and everyone you have ever met it; it sounds like paradise compared to the alternative. Me I’m stuck in hell or at least my approximation of hell. I can’t die or well I can just not permanently, so my life has become an endless cycle of pain betrayal and death.

Sorry, that’s a lot I know, let me explain from the beginning, depending on what the history books say this might or might not be news to you. It’s funny how people who are so smart can get things so wrong sometimes. It’s kind of like with the virus, first with the misinformation to the public using scare tactics trying to get us to conform to their special set of rules that would keep us safe but the people rebelled, and sure it helped to quell the virus for a time, but people need to live not be confined.

Then came the vaccines stifling the virus trying to contain it or mask its symptoms until it had no choice but to evolve and change. Sure, it took another hundred years or so but instead of eradicating it we incubated it in billions of people until it was strong enough to wipe out nearly 70% of the world population.

Sure, a few billion of us eventually became immune to the disease in the process but it was far too late and now those of you left have inherited a dying world, slowly being choked by the previous generation’s transgressions. When I left earth, the truth was that the waste and excess of the previous generations was slowly killing the planet and there were just not enough people left to fix it. So, as you all waste away trying to eke out some semblance of a life trying to prepare your world for future generations, the government had other ideas to continue the now humbled Homo-sapiens.

That’s where I come in, well me and the 1199 other lucky few who once called this space station home. Fearing the virus and seeing the planet slowly dying pushed the global government to come up with an alternative solution. Again, it’s crazy how the smartest people on the planet can get things so wrong sometimes.

Their “Solution”, if you can even call it that, was to take a thousand virus immune souls and cryo-freeze them on a transport vessel and jettison us off into space. Sounds simple enough right, load us into this giant sardine can, flash freeze us and pew… off we go completely unaware of our surroundings wake up in a thousand years when we arrive at our first potentially habitable planet, sounds easy right?

Wrong, we learned long ago that Cryostasis doesn’t work is because the human brain needs stimulation to survive, without it our brains slowly waste away until there is nothing left. The whole world learned that lesson as first “successful” thawing of person from cryostasis produced nothing more than a shell of a man, his body was physically intact, but his brain was fried like a vegetable or maybe still frozen? I don’t know.

That’s where AlterState and Helion Online comes in, now I am sure you all are wondering how a video game company can contribute to this tale, but their software is the perfect way to keep us our brains active enough to survive the trip, plug us in and boom. Endless entertainment for you and stimulation for my now frozen corpse.

When I think about all the rich fat cats who paid billions of dollars to the Helion Corporation In order to freeze their bodies until a cure can be found it makes me laugh. It’s tragic really those poor bastards who went to sleep thinking all will be good and wake up. Only to a world even more worse off than their original one, and they will get to live just long enough to see what we have become before the super virus wreaks havoc on their body once more. Lucky for my group we are immune to the virus, but unfortunately not to the stupidity of mankind.

So, as you all know unlike what most litrpgs will tell you the Helion Corporation’s VR technology was unable to grant any semblance of time distillation. The human brain is powerful, but it can still only process so much information. They found they could speed up time while in video game pod by roughly double but realized quickly that other problems started to arise and the benefits far out way the risks. One thing their experiments did discover how ever is that they can slow time down in game and our brains will actually slow down and normalize the difference.

Slowing down time had two benefits to our situation the first being the obvious, we didn’t go crazy waiting 1000 years to arrive at just the first potential habitable planet. The second being that unlike your version of Helion Online there is no hard cap on dexterity and agility builds. Where you guys could only perceive and react up to the human brain’s maximum capacity for inputting information, we now basically have an unlimited cap on both those things making dexterity and agility a much better investment in the long term. So much so that the game AI had to tweak the formula for those stats at high end levels of play.

People in season one quickly figured out that you can’t just pump and dump all your stats into one category and be overpowered. Without the help of semi balanced stats, you would be quite literally hurting yourself. Take strength for example, if you had a super high strength score but a low constitution score; any time you used your muscles you would quite literally tear them from your bones. The other stat balance issues were not so graphic, too much agility and not enough strength meant that you actually couldn’t move as fast as your agility score predicated, so you were effectively wasting those stat points.

Thanks to the time distortion instead of 150-year journey being stuck in a video game the first leg of our trip only took roughly three years. Each leg of our journey is called a Season, and each season has a different set of rules and objectives. Originally it was just a fun way to pass the time but after our first stop and the failed attempt at colonization, mainly due to the peoples lack of adaptability and to keep a cool head.

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While virtually celebrating the ending of our first season, 1100 of us watch a month-long live feed of our companions dying one after another mostly to their own stupidity and laziness. After the second Season and losing another 100 people within hours after landing on the next planet due to inhospitable conditions, the System AI decided it needed to make a change. We were a finite resource and it needed to maximize our chances at survival. After reviewing the data from the two colonization attempts System AI decided it needed to weed out the people not well suited to the survivability of the human race, and it did so all with out telling us.

After the first year in game, we received a startling revelation, for the first time ever we got a mid-season update. The biggest change to the game came in the form of a Ranking system we deemed the Ladder, a giant scrolling list of character names from 1-1000. We quickly found out that the System was secretly ranking us by was testing our ability to survive and thrive in this new virtual world. Blacksmithing, Carpentry, and crafting skills all attributed to our overall scores along with death rates and most importantly overall level of our character and skills.

With that came another change to the game, the crafting mini games were completely revamped now instead of a 5-minute cast bar and poof you built a building or suit of armor the game actually taught you the skills to create things in real life. While we originally didn’t understand the true meaning of our rankings, but it definitely turned on our competitive natures. We were still cordial enough, but there was an edge to our game play, back than most of us still thought of it as just a game. Funny enough those first three season are the only seasons in which the AI has allowed me to retain my memories from. I don’t know if it’s due to my placement or that I didn’t specifically undergo any significant trauma.

Luckily my first character was a Ranger, a jack of all trade’s type of fighter, with a pretty even stat distribution and luckily herbalism went hand in hand with my game play. By the end of our first season, I found myself safely within the top 300 of all players. That might not sound like a big deal to you but trust me it is. When thinking back to the first year of the game was a blissful memory almost utopian really, people not wanting to burn anyone who they are were going to spend hundreds of years with and who they would need to rely on later to help rebuild society.

After the first season ended, we found out the real reason for the rankings, and it quickly turned our friendly game into a not so friendly one. Think of it like the old Hunger Games novels, lower your rank the more likely you were to be chosen in the Selection process. Twenty people were selected to seed the third planet on our stop, the AI basically treated those 20 as cannon fodder. It basically chose to throw them at the planet and see if they can survive the night, if they do great, they can get some supplies and see how they do going forward as it monitored there progress and assessed whether or not it would be worth the risk to send more people the planet.

It was a death sentence handed down by a random draw, it chose ten players in the below the rank of 900th along with six others from below the rank of 600th, three from below the 300th and one from the below the Legendary 100 and it was cumulative, so if you ranked lower than 900th your name was entered in each and every raffle. The top 100 ranked players were the only people who were totally free from the Selection process. Twenty people were chosen at random by the System be the first group jettisoned to a new planet to be guinea pigs, while the rest of us all watched their progress from holo-screens in specially designed virtual apartments.

Unfortunately for the unlucky few we quickly found out that the planet we arrived at was not so welcoming to the human race. We got to watch twenty of our friends slowly suffocate to death on a planet with very little oxygen in its atmosphere the Artificial Intelligence on board saw the loss of life as a waste and promised in the future in order to save on resources, that it would decide to send an empty pod down to test the atmosphere of the next planet beforehand sending more people to the planet.

With that planet being an abject failure, we were once again plugged back into a new season with the ever-present Ladder. In order to keep the game fair, the AI decided to not change a single thing anything during following season, it calculated our progress and changed its calculations and rankings according to what it felt like we needed to focus on the most unfortunately for us the next four years of our lives were a real low point for all of us. The 1367-day trip to the next potentially inhabitable planet was a blood bath.

Savage groups of players playing barbaric races such as orcs, trolls, and other beings, who’s very culture rewarded the torture and mutilation of others ran rough shod over the more civilized players, neither of which escaped the trauma of the things we did or had done to us. We ended up slaughtering each other over and over again on the way to the top and the AI allowed it, it even rewarded it in some cases, if you spawn camped someone over and over again it would drive them down the on the ladder due to their number of total deaths.

That was until the next group was selected, another one hundred individuals were chosen and sent down. The savagery and brutality in which we put each other through manifested in a few of the people were so traumatized by being repeated killed and tortured that upon landing on the planet they all basically went on a rampage. After the fighting concluded, the rest were killed by the giant fauna that we found out already dominated the planet, think of a t-rex crossed with a gorilla, and you will understand why the AI chose to leave that accursed planet behind.

What would lead to that you might ask? The answer is pain. Pain is very real inside the system, the pain from an injury is muted a bit based off your stats and the pain of an injury is affectively dulled by 90% just a few seconds after the initial injury but still that shit hurt. Can you imagine getting tortured for hours on end and every time you were close to death your torturer would heal you just enough to start the process all over again. It was the first time that the AI decided it needed to do a memory wipe after the season was finished. You would retain basic information about how the season went, but specifics eluded us.

Three other things came of it, the first being that the monstrous races were no longer playable. The second, the tribes of monster we created stayed in game continuing to terrorize the countryside as the AI thought it would be a good for us to have a common enemy to rally against. Lastly, player killings came with stacking penalties, so while they still happened especially a few groups of sadistic individuals who realized killing others and stealing their loot was a great way to get ahead in the game would eventually see penalties that far outweighed the rewards.

Sure, you probably get a few kills in before the penalties got to high and that might give you some short-term gains, but you would never get into the Legendary 100 with that type of game play, it also made grouping up with other players harder for you, and no one ever got to the top without the support of a large group of people.

We are currently on our sixth restart after three more failed attempts to colonize potential planets. From the sentient flora that quickly wiped out our third group of settlers to the fourth that fell due to acid rains which killed any chance of survival and that is after sending two additional rounds of settlers to the planet. The last and most successful attempt proved fruitless when our seeds and crops couldn’t survive the planets ecology which led to a slow starvation that lasted over a year. The survivors furiously searched for edible food but to no avail. The system deemed it enough of a risk to send a few additional groups to the last planet with extra supplies since the original group lasted more than a month but unfortunately, we still failed to colonize that planet as well.

We have now lost four-hundred and people which means only 800 players remain and the AI which we now most of us all the System has informed us that because of our lack of remaining planets we can try to inhabit it will now be choosing another three hundred people in the Initial drop. One hundred fifty people from below the 600th rankings, one hundred people from the 300th rankings and fifty people from below the legendary 100th.

That meant if you ranked lower than 600th you had a 75% chance of being chosen in the first round. If you made it through the first Selection, either by sheer dumb luck or by ranking below the top 300 you had roughly a 28% chance of being selected and if by some miracle you made earned a spot within the top 300 or dodged both of the previous proverbial bullets, you would have a nearly a 91% chance at survival. My odds were not looking good, in the last five season of the game I had not once ranked higher than that second season, in fact I am already pretty lucky to still be here in the first place.

So now more than ever I need to earn a good ranking, now it is more important than ever to achieve that top status for, we all basically attribute the Selection to be a death sentence and my track record wasn’t great. I had 687 days, and I would need to make each of them count if I was going to survive. As I sit here writing this all down part of me understands that I have a good chance might only be alive for the next 2 years, but I won’t let that stop me from trying my damnedest to survive, no not just to survive but to thrive in this upcoming season.