4:14 Martian local, Sol 38

Mars Expedition 4 “Valkyrie”

The habitat vanished.

Commander Zhang Ho fell unceremoniously into the red dirt as his bunk suffered sudden and complete failure to exist. Veteran of many space flights, he was a light sleeper and came alert instantly. He was up on his feet and straightening his tank top before it registered that he was standing on bare dirt under the open sky. Dark night sky with a pair of tiny moons, and deep orange-red dirt without a plant in sight.

All around, his crew shouted in dismay and confusion as they stood up or looked around. The sounds were clear. The air wasn’t as thin as it should’ve been. His lungs took in oxygen.

Captain Torres, wearing sleep pants with a shirt tied around his waist, shouted what they were all thinking. “Where the hell are we?”

[Welcome Humans! You have been inducted…]

Words were scrawling across his vision, characters sliding away as more appeared. Zhang shook his head but the words moved with the motion. Already the top of the message was gone from his vision. He blinked, focusing on the remaining words.

[…However, it has been deemed only civilizations possessing a certain potential should have access to the galactic network of communications and information. You will now be tested for your race’s potential in the areas of cognition and adaptability.]

The glowing letters scrolled past and were replaced by a glaring red-lettered announcement. [Warning. This iteration has been deemed to have an unviable population of sentience. To attain the desired Evaluation experience, you will shortly be merged into an older iteration. Some disorientation is expected due to extreme time difference. In the interest of your cognitive well-being, the system wishes you to know you are not being sent back in time, but merely being integrated into a world simulation that has been operating for approximately 0.4 galactic rotations The obsolete iteration is now being updated to reintegrate with the galactic network. Please stand by.]

“What does this mean?” Dr. Tobias Schneider yelled as the words faded away. Zhang was still trying to commit them to memory. The message seemed important. Keeping a cool head in a crisis was one of the first things taught to astronaut candidates, but some of his teammates appeared to have skipped those lessons.

Commander Zhang looked around at the terrified faces of his crew as they gathered around him.

“This is impossible. We have to be hallucinating,” Schneider continued. The man was not taking this well, whatever this was. For a Behavioral Psychologist he wasn’t particularly adaptable.

“It’s an alien computer,” Samantha “Sam” Wilkins said, her voice calm. “Somehow it’s interfacing directly with our brains, probably nanotechnology.” Sam had an intense personality, deftly applied to her specialty of Hydrology. It was nice to see that at least one of his team members had kept her head.

"That's impossible," Dr. Schneider yelled, his pitch much too high. He was not a calm and focused personality.

"Calm down. Take it easy." Commander Zhang held up a placating hand. "We have to understand our situation. Please remain calm, doctor." His focus returned. First, get his crew working together. Then, figure out what had just happened and what to do about it. “We need to assess the situation and regain communication with Earth —”

"But where are we?" Nia Patel wore only a long night shirt and hugged herself, shivering as she peered around. In the moon and starlight, they could see a fair way, and there was absolutely no sign of their habitat. “Where did the Hab go? Why aren’t we all dead?”

Sam shook her head as she pointed at the rocky ground around them. "It’s not the Hab that went missing, it’s us. Even if they dematerialized the whole habitat, anchors and all, there would still be holes where the foundation anchors went in. But there's nothing."

“What do you mean dematerialized?” Nia asked. “Who is they?”

Theo Lee was walking a wide circle around the group. "And there'd be Rover tracks. No, we can't be on Mars.” He seemed calm but worried. “It’s just like my favorite book, Dungeon Delver Dave.”

“What do you mean?” Schneider demanded, still on the edge of panic.

“Nothing good,” Lee answered tightly.

"The temperature's too high, and the air -- how are we breathing?"

"Haven't you noticed?" Sam interjected. "We're not breathing."

There was a moment of shocked silence. Zhang checked; Sam was right. Swearing broke out all around.

"Holy shit, she's right." Doctor Takashi was patting his own arm and then peering intently at the skin. “The intervascular pressure seems much as would be expected, but I don't understand why there's no sign of vascular rupture.” He moved his head forward and backward like a chicken. “And why don’t I need my glasses?”

Sam nodded. “I held my breath for a full 30 seconds and didn't notice any sign of discomfort. We're simply not breathing."

Suddenly, the messages returned, words glowing in Zhang’s vision.

[Iteration synchronization complete. Please stand by for integration.]

The world exploded with light. Zhang blinked rapidly in the suddenly bright sun, which was now stood high in the sky. Red dust stretched out from them in all directions, but it wasn't quite the right shade of red. Impossibly, there was vegetation. Pale green lichen spread out around them in blobs from a few inches to several feet wide, blanketing the ground in a patchwork like red and green camouflage.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

Here and there were larger shrubs. They were roughly the size and diameter of sagebrush in the American Southwest, but Zhang had spent a good deal of time in the high desert, and he’d never seen anything like these. Rather than twisty branches, there were long, thick, cylindrical tubers hanging from straight stems, arranged in a spiral pattern around a central trunk 10 to 12 inches around. They didn't look like any succulent he had ever seen.

There was a stunned silence among his crew. From the back of the crowd came a murmur of rapid prayer in Spanish from one of the more devout mission specialists.

"What? How?" Dr. Schneider gaped around them.

[Congratulations. You have been integrated into the instance of the planet Ba‘Song. This iteration was created as a snapshot of the biomes and civilizations present on the planet you call Mars roughly 0.4 galactic cycles ago.]

"What is--" Schneider broke off as a Commander Zhang laid a hand on his shoulder and pointed. One by one, the others caught sight of what he was indicating and fell silent.

In the distance was a spire, tall and spindly, but clearly a constructed building made by intelligent hands. He couldn’t guess how tall it was. Distances in the desert could be deceiving on Mars as on Earth, but it was a hundred meters tall at least.

"That's impossible!”

“There's no life on Mars!”

“We must have been taken somewhere else. But how?”

“How do we get home?"

The babble of voices washed over Commander Zhang as he stared at the spires in the distance. How did he deal with this? He had been trained in every form of emergency, conceivable and inconceivable, that they might face, even to the extent of their original launch coming down uncontrolled in the jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula, an extremely improbable, but just slightly possible, abort scenario. Jungle training had seemed ridiculous to the Mars mission crew, but nothing had prepared them for this.

Captain Torres, off to Zhang’s left, was jerking his head to the side and up, as if trying to catch something out of the corner of his eye.

“Hold your head still.” Sam moved to him and laid her hand on his arm. “Just move your eyes.”

"What are you talking about?" Zhang asked.

Torres gasped. “I see! How do I —”

Sam turned to face the commander. To his surprise, she was smiling. "We have menus!"

"What are you--" Before Zhang could finish, they were interrupted by the announcement again.

[Welcome to the initial starting zone. Please take a few moments to familiarize yourself with your player interface. You will shortly be given your first ability point. Now a good time to consider how to use it. You will be removed from the pacification zone in 300 seconds. Good luck, humans.]

Commander Zhang studied Sam, the youngest member on his team and yet the one who seemed to be taking this most in stride. The young hydrologist’s eyes were slightly unfocused, and she had her tongue caught between her teeth as she muttered something out of the corner of her mouth. "No, not there, not there. No good. Damn, I can't see beyond tier three. Lee, do you think —“

"Specialist, if you have any idea what's going on, please—”

“Hang on, commander. I almost have it." Suddenly, she broke out in a wide grin. "There. OK." She glanced left and right as if confirming they still in the same predicament, then raised her voice. “Guys, we only have a couple minutes of grace here, so listen up. Do you see the icon in your upper left corner of your vision?"

Lee and Patel drew closer, while Schneider, clearly on the edge of a nervous breakdown, was kneeling in the dirt pressing his hands to his face. Zhang focused on Sam’s words.

Something had been taunting him from the edge of his vision, but every time he looked, it seemed to dance away. He had dismissed it as an artifact of stress or maybe a migraine coming on. Low pressure and deep space travel did funny things with one's vision, and he had been suffering ever since their trip to Mars.

"Not like that,” Sam said. "Hold your head still and just look at it with your eyes. Think of it like a VR interface."

“Got it,” Lee called. “Oh, I — Nia, quick, compare notes with me on these talents —”

Zhang shook his head, clinging to Sam’s last phrase. “We're not wearing any VR gear.”

Sam shook her head. "I know. It's just an analogy." She reached out and pinched her own arm and then lightly slapped herself across the cheek. "There's no chance this isn't real. But quickly, sir, there's little time. Look at the icon in your corner."

As he focused on it, the small diamond-shaped icon expanded into a menu that filled half his view.

"What the hell?"

" Look for the selection that says Player and focus on it. Now, Talents."

"How do you know all this?" Zhang asked, trying not to feel paranoid.

"I've played games. It's a common interface. It's intuitive if you just relax."

“Sam, Nia and I are going for an elemental DPS and a melee warrior build,” Lee called. “You should pick up healing —”

“No way,” Sam shot back. “I already put a point into ice —”

"What are you doing," Dr. Schneider called. “Why are we all standing around?”

"What does all this mean?" Zhang asked. He felt his command slipping away from him. Schneider and most of the others seemed as lost as he was, while Sam and Lee somehow understood what was going on. He needed to change the dynamic quickly. “Wilkins, you and Lee should prepare a briefing for the rest of us. Take ten and —”

"There's no time, sir. You heard what it said. We'll be combat any second now. Just focus on the talent list and pick something that looks, I don't know, dangerous."

"Dangerous? Combat?" He found, as he spoke, a menu labeled Abilities. When he focused on it, he felt a slight feedback rattle in his brain as it blinked. A swirl of lines bloomed into his vision. It looked like strands of DNA. No, he realized as he looked closer, the design was more chaotic than that. It was made of individual points with lines between them. When he swept his eyes across one, words appeared next to it. [Fire Affinity, Tier One]. The words [Flame Touch] appeared along with in several sets of numbers.

Next to the numbers was a blinking box. [Confirm?]

"There's no time, sir. Just pick something."

Zhang selected Fire Affinity. "Ok, but what did I just do?"

[Pacification Affect Removed. You are now fully integrated into this zone.]

Someone screamed, and he jerked his head away from the vortex of lines. They snapped down into the corner of his vision, clearing the way for him to see.

The Mars mission crew scattered in panic, and then Zhang saw what they were running from. A swarm of scaly red lizards with far too many legs and snapping teeth, at least a dozen of them. Over their heads was a green bar and the words “Level One”. Dr Schneider had one fastened on his arm, blood dripping from where its fangs sank deep. He screamed and flailed.

Sam was yelling instructions to the others about picking an ability but no one was listening. Lee and Patel stood back to back, Lee’s arms glowing up to the wrist with what looked like wreaths of lightning, while Patel had her fists raised.

Commander Zhang lunged to Schneider’s aid. His hand landed on the slimy, fanged creature. There was a tingling in his palm as he touched it. At first, he thought its scaly skin had a strange texture, but then his hand exploded with fire.

"Ah, shit!" He yanked his hand back and waved it around. The flame continued.

“Stop! Don't panic!" He could hear Sam calling. “We need to work together!” Sam’s hands were wreathed in white, and she had one of the lizards by the throat as she yelled.

Zhang plunged his hand into the dusty soil of Mars, trying to extinguish the flames. He yanked it free and saw the flames still rising from his fingertips.

He was still gaping at them when the razor teeth found his throat.