It is fast approaching my 16th birthday. While the age of majority for most people is still the 18th birthday, orphans like myself, get access to it at 16th. There are still some things we aren’t allowed to do, but basically, we get the extra couple of years to fool around with it and if we don’t like our choices, we can reset it when we reach our 18th. However, if we do like it, we get to keep the two years of progress. 

  Most people in my position reset at 18 after having done an outlandish build in order to see if it would work. Indeed some people have gotten rich that way, with something unusual. Most people however, end up resetting. I had a plan and was aiming to stick to it. It might not prove out by my 18th birthday, but I wasn’t going to reset if it didn’t. One thing I had noted was a vast majority of those who got rich, basically stuck to their guns on their unknown builds even though it hadn’t quite proven out when they had gotten to 18. The long haul was the long haul.

  I figured I had a couple of things in my favour. I had an inheritance coming and I knew what was in it. As a result I had worked with a build in mind once my System page was open. Which it did at the age of 10. You get access to path points from paths you qualified for through learning, two points for each one qualified. A further three points could be earned in a T1 path once you reached majority. I actually qualified for 11 different paths, one of which was T2. Which is five T1 paths combining to make a T2 Path. You start off with 10 points and could earn another 15 points to make a complete T2 path. Five T2 can make a T3 but that is the highest you can go as far as I am aware. You could only have up to 10 paths for each Tier. As a result I had 22 points, but my sheet showed 23. Why? 

  I had earned that extra point helping out a clan. What is a clan I hear you ask? There are a few different ways you could group in this universe. The most basic was literally a group. 2-6 people who had agreed to work together on a temporary basis. An organisation was 2-15 people who had agreed to work together on a more permanent basis. An alliance was a bunch of organisations that had agreed to work together. A clan was deeper than any of those. Once you were in a clan, which could be anything from 2 people to an unknown number, You were permanently linked to that clan til you died, it got destroyed or everyone in that clan decided to quit and I do mean everyone. Even if you were exiled, you were still linked to that clan and could not join another. There was more but that's the gist of it.

  As a result of my actions, I was awarded a point for my path, some faction bonuses and an offer from the clan I helped as well as some goodies. The Starfox clan. I had noticed due to one of my paths, an error in one of their shuttles. I alerted them to it and as luck would have it, this shuttle had actually held the leadership of the clan and if it had taken off, would likely have had a catastrophic accident. As a result the Starfoxes had rewarded me, and the System decided to add a little extra.

  I was quite well known at the starport I lived at, as my parents had been quite famous and successful in what they had done before they died. The starport had a random portal open up and normally it is taken care of rather quickly and nobody dies. Unfortunately my parents had been at dinner for their anniversary at the very place the portal had opened and had been pancaked by it opening. Just pure bad luck. As a result, there had been huge interest in it at the time. I had no other family and the System designated me an orphan, made the apartment my parents had been renting my ‘orphanage home’ as it were and assigned the local System officials to look after my well being and see to my upbringing. 

  What is the System I hear you ask? Well, that is a tricky one. But the textbook answer is that long ago, the human race created AI. We were very lazy and got them to do everything for us. Most of the AI had safeguards, however some people modified theirs, even when they weren’t supposed to. As a result, the universe today is because of something that happened due to those modifications. One scientist was very lazy and would often set his AI to do his job for him. While this seemed like the kind of thing AI is used for, this scientist had modified his AI so it would do the bits he was supposed to do, rather than an AI. Not a huge problem you would have thought, except he was playing around stuff that basically was building blocks of the universe kind of stuff. The AI took a shortcut and that was supposed to be the end of us all.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Except there had apparently been another AI that had been watching the first AI, had been modified and had chosen to rescue us all at the cost of itself. Nothing is known of this AI, However there is a day each system year that is dedicated to its memory. I was fine with that, as it was apparently the reason why the human race was alive. However it wasn’t able to reverse everything the first AI did and as a result, Earth was lost. The Mars Colony, The Moon Colony and a few other outposts that were in the system survived. The two AIs that left, which looked after the Moon and the Mars colonies linked together and became what we know as System. It co-opted the nanities and made a variety of changes that it deemed necessary to make sure the human race survived. It also did a whole bunch of other stuff that you can look up but boils down to this. 

  Somehow, due to whatever it was that the first and second AI had done, System managed to remake the whole universe. This, nobody has a clue how, and System is not saying. But it is now everywhere in the universe and as a result it has made some amazing changes. It had seeded the entire universe with these huge floating gates that could connect to others. However, it would not tell us how to connect to these gates. We had to figure it out or find gate combos. It took us 5000 years to find 17 gate combos. We had explored a fraction of these 17 gate systems. 

  Portals spawned. These were basically mini-invasions from planets we couldn’t access. Why couldn’t we access them? Well, every planet that could sustain life now had a forcefield around it. Nobody could access them. Or so it was thought for 4000 years. Then 1000 years ago, someone beat off an invasion and rather than take the portal out, decided to try and invade them back. To everyone's surprise, this worked. You may be wondering why everyone was surprised by this working, it wasn’t that going through the portal wasn’t feasible. It was just the first time someone came back. They had found a base on the other side, basically took control of the planet, apparently turned the force field off, found a spaceship and flew into space, found the gate and came back through it using the home combo, which was imprinted on the home gate. In actual fact, 15 of those gates and 15 planets have only been opened in the last 1000 years because of this man. Who apparently got System to wipe his name from the history books, after being basically hounded. Two systems, including the original earth system, do not have living planets. In the original earth system, Mars and the Moon are domed. For some reason terraforming would not work anymore because System said no. The other system was basically a giant asteroid field, and was where a huge portion of the human race now lived.

  I lived in a system which was ruled by the Starfox clan. This was the very planet that had been taken by the first successful invasion of a portal. The Starfox clan was the clan he had set up. The majority of the Starfox clan lived on the planet. However, they maintained three star ports in the system, of which I lived on one. Only people in the Starfox clan were allowed on the planet. Someone had tried to invade once. Who they were, nobody now knows. The lesson was learned. Once claimed, that was that. System announced that wars were not allowed to happen anymore, except with aliens.

  Oh aliens! I haven't mentioned those have I? Well, according to System they weren’t technically aliens. See, part of its mandate was making sure the human race remained peaceful among itself. This was apparently built in. However, one of the reasons that System ended up in charge was due to, well, human beings being bored in peace. So it created a whole bunch of races from our myths and fantasies even from science fiction and basically populated the universe with them. So far we had only encountered them on planets, but apparently there were some in space. We hadn’t encountered any yet.

  I’m sure there is more I am meant to put down in this essay but it is the last one I will ever have to do and if I'm honest, I am glad to be done with this. I am told the reason why I need to know how to do something like this is because in the career that I am planning to pursue, apparently knowing how to write a log with details is important. I’m sure it is and I'm sure I will love filling that in. This just isn’t the same. This is Stefan Nurfern signing off from schooling.