My name is Chase Bracket, and I’ve been dead for some time now…

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I floated through the Nexus, bodiless and uncomfortable. Screens flew by me, one after the other, advertising the newest and biggest FIVR game. Full immersion virtual reality had come to prominence decades ago now, but I always felt like every game these days was just a crappy clone of what came before.

Most people came home from work, laid down in a FIVR capsule, and just…drifted, jumping from game to game to their heart’s content. I was in a slightly different situation.

A few years back, the economy had gone to shit, and my family had come into some extremely tough times. My father passed away when I was thirteen, and my mother tried the best she could, but it eventually became clear that we were going to lose the house if something wasn’t done. My two sisters were still too young to work, and I was just old enough to be caught up in some new political bullshit labor laws. The laws saw to it that I could only make so much money yearly. Without turning to less reputable sources of income, that is.

This was right around my eighteenth birthday, which was fortunate because eighteen was the minimum age for lawful Permanent Immersion. Now, there was a lot of negative propaganda about Permanent Immersion, or PIing, going PI, being a PI, etc. The entire idea of leaving your physical body behind forever and permanently uploading your consciousness to a server net was…challenging, for some people to wrap their heads around. Me? I just ignored the negative media coverage and warning billboards on the jump-trams. I ignored the disappointed shaking of heads most people did when they talked about someone they knew that took ‘the easy way out’. I ignored how the churches got huge rallies together to protest the tech companies for allowing digital minds to live on beyond their bodily deaths. I ignored it all. To me, going PI was the only answer left.

Most people who went PI were running from something. Debt, addiction, a crazy ex girlfriend, illegitimate kids… It quickly became stigmatized, a choice only for those in society that were no longer strong enough to cope with reality. I made the decision to PI for a very different reason.

Pharmaceutical testing regulations were mounting. Companies no longer could test on animals, and human studies were so forcibly limited that it took dozens of concurrent trials to get any usable data, let alone actually release a new drug. These laws ended up bloating development costs to obscene figures, and turned cures for the worst, yet most common, diseases into designer remedies that only the hyper-rich could afford. There were loopholes though… Companies had found their way around the regulations, as they always do.

Technically, when a person went PI, their body wasn’t alive anymore. Their hearts still beat, and their brain functioned in a limited capacity, but legally they were dead. The spark of humanity was gone. Their Consciousness had moved to reside elsewhere.

Laws for testing oversight and government regulation didn’t cover empty vessels, and so, one night, over a year after the depression hit, I left home on my way to TooVast, the largest and most advanced pharmaceutical company on the planet. I called ahead, made all the arrangements, made sure the payments they were promising me ended up where they needed to go, and then, I laid down in a FIVR capsule, in some TooVast facility’s basement, and closed my eyes for the last time, selling off my body to the company for a healthy sum. Healthy enough to see my mom and two sisters through the financial crisis, and then some. Hopefully healthy enough to get at least one of my sisters through college on top of that.

Did I regret it? Not really. Even now as I stared at the dozens of dull and unimaginative newly released games in the Nexus…I didn’t regret it. Right?

The Nexus was the biggest and best retailer and host of games, large and small. I’d chosen to upload my mind into the Nexus server net due to the nearly unlimited access it had to thousands of full immersion virtual worlds. It only took a few more calls and a couple contracts signed before Nexus called up TooVast to make sure my consciousness got where I wanted it to go when the time came.

There were rules for PI’d people in cyberspace. The server owners didn’t host their minds out of the goodness of their hearts, they did it to boost concurrent player numbers on the most popular games, thus drawing ever larger masses. If a gamer saw that a game had five million concurrent players, they were far more likely to play than if it was something with only a few dozen. The Nexus cyberspace sanctuary I inhabited, solely designed and built for people who had gone PI on Nexus servers, was a back door of sorts into any virtual world I wanted to visit. Free room, free board, free existence, I just had to follow the rules, the biggest of which was that I could only leave and reenter a new virtual world once every three months…

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Over the years, I had spent time in every sort of game imaginable, so many that the concept of time itself had lost some meaning to me. The last game, the one I’d just left behind, I’d spent a whole year in. A hyper-advanced tech universe with spaceships, droids and drones, laser guns and super weapons. It was thrilling, for a time, but then it became a chore, following the developers pre-determined path, despite the fact the game had been marketed as an open universe to explore in any way you so chose. The deeper I delved into it, the more walls I found. Walls meant to limit and control. It felt like being set on train tracks, on rails, and being unable to leave them, otherwise you’d be punished by having whatever path you wanted to take nerfed into oblivion or outright removed. It had happened too many times to count…

“Three months.” I muttered to myself. Bodiless though I was, I retained the ability to speak and interact with things in the Nexus sanctuary. I drifted through more and more adds and game pages, glancing at player stats and data.

Fifty million here, two hundred thousand there. Two hundred million ‘active accounts’, three thousand active players… I blew through all the ‘recent releases’, unimpressed by any of them, and began sifting through some of the older games. With a thought, I added ‘action’ to an inbuilt search filter, and the number of windows floating around me was cut. “Not super techy.” I added, having had my fill of sci-fi adventures for a long while. The number of games was cut again.

I kept going back in time from most recently released. If I had had a body, its eye lids would’ve been drooping with boredom. The one thing I actually paid attention to now was the current and average player numbers. Unlike most PI’d people on the Nexus net, I tended to gravitate towards the least played games, not the most. It ran counter to the server host’s intentions, but I was in the vast minority, and my actions often times went overlooked. The only time I’d gotten issued a warning was the game just before the sci-fi space one. I’d lodged myself in an RTS battle simulator for nearly five months. The server admins forcibly pulled me out of the free-to-play single player experience and told me to get into a bigger ticket world, hence the sci-fi fivrmmorpg.

Having just acquiesced to their demands for an entire year, I doubted they would be paying attention to me again for quite a while. That’s why when my eyes finally fell on a game world with ‘0’ current players, concurrent max: monthly - ‘0’, and ‘&#$^-12’ yearly average players, my interest was peaked.

The game launch page wasn’t amateurish in the slightest, in fact, it was well maintained and designed, despite recent updates or developer notes.

“AllCraft…” I said to myself, feeling how it felt to say. It was a very generic fantasy game name. I’d already passed by a half dozen versions of basically the same name in the last few minutes alone. “Survival, rpg, mmo, monster slayer, base building, crafting, exploration, farming, husbandry, forestry…” The game tags just kept on going.

Curious, I dove into the user review comments. The first review was a one star that read ‘Impossible!! Broken game!!!’. The next review was similar. ‘Five hours, no progress. Has to be bugged.’

I kept reading reviews for some time, my interest growing all along. There were nearly five hundred one star ratings from the last year alone. I pulled out of the review screen and began checking over the game’s other data. It was released in 2041, which made it over twenty years old, older than myself…I think. I wasn’t sure exactly how old I was at the moment, actually.

The release date wasn’t really an issue with FIVR games, seeing as the graphics were all real world accurate since the late 2030s. The only thing that had progressed tech-wise since FIVR was invented was better, more stable, connections. As for the actual game design side, the last twenty years hadn’t exactly born witness to anything groundbreaking, which was the exact problem that I had with all the new games. It was like the developers were trying to perfect their own favorite ways to squeeze cash out of players, rather than make a fun experience.

I hovered over the ‘play’ button, hesitant only because this decision would effect the next three months of my life. Minimum. AllCraft might very well be a terrible, bugged, mess of a game, but it also just might be a game from a bygone era that entitled brats from my own generation couldn’t handle. If it was that difficult that it forced other gamers to give up in the first few hours of play, then no one had even seen the real game systems, so how could I trust the reviews? I wasn’t entitled, and my greatest asset was my flippant disregard for ‘the norm’. If AllCraft could defeat me, then after three months of laying around in a field somewhere, or cloud watching, or enjoying some other passive activity, I’d leave the game, then leave another one star review, with a warning for all other PI players to stay away. If it wasn’t the worst game in history though… with literally zero players, and no real risk of a sudden in-pouring of new blood, there was a chance that I might very well have found a new home. At least for a little while…

I selected the ‘play’ button and felt my consciousness get compressed down as my mind was transferred from the Nexus servers, to the AllCraft game servers. It took more time with some games, and less with others. With AllCraft being an older game, I expected a longer wait time, but to my great surprise, I loaded into the world almost instantly.