As Sarah lay upon the grass, beneath the warmth of an alien, yet virtual, sun, the lingering pain in her body slowly faded, as if the sunlight itself was soothing the discomfort and washing it away.
Finally, she drew in a great breath of air, released it in a slow, steady stream, and sat up. She could hear the children’s voices, though faintly, from where they were chattering away in the barn. The time she had spent with them had taught her a few of their favourite activities, so she could say with a fair amount of certainty that they were currently engaged in some sort of imaginary adventure in the hay loft.
She smiled fondly; they were sweet kids, even if they weren’t real people. She briefly considered joining them in their play before realizing that there wasn’t time. She still had a few System related things to sort out, and then it would be time to prepare the noon meal.
Leaving the children to their fun, Sarah drew herself up into a more comfortable position and turned her attention to the small row of coloured dots that glowed at the edge of her vision. She flinched as she realized several of them were red. For a moment, she considered putting them off for as long as possible. Then she called herself an idiot as she realized it would be far better to deal with the pain first and then let the pleasure soothe away the aches.
Clenching her jaw in anticipation of pain, Sarah reached out with her mind to the first of the red dots. Nothing happened. She tried again, and a third time. The red dot stubbornly refused to turn into a System screen.
Sarah explosively released her held breath with a grunt of frustration. Maybe she had to open the messages in order? The one she’d tried to open was the first of the red dots but not the first of the dots; there were two blue ones ahead of it.
For a single moment, Sarah allowed herself to pout over the System ruining her plan, and then she shook herself out of the petty reaction and reached out with her mind once more, this time to the first blue dot.
Congratulations! You have raised a relevant Skill to Level 50. You may replace your General Mastery ‘Common Tasks & Abilities’ with the Focused Mastery ‘Social Skills’.
(All ‘Common Tasks & Abilities’ Mastery experience points will be transferred to ‘Social Skills’ Mastery at a rate of 2:1; however, Focused Mastery boons are more powerful than General Mastery boons.)
Current ‘Common Tasks & Abilities’ Mastery Tier: Applicant
Current Available Boons: 0
Do you wish to proceed?
Y/N
Well, that was interesting. Sarah didn’t remember any mention of Masteries and boons when she went through the Skills menu pre-Tutorial. Mind you, there hadn’t been anything about classes either, so she wasn’t sure if it was a case of the System making stuff up as it went along, or that it simply wasn’t giving her all the information at once for some reason.
There was a part of her that was angry with the System for not offering her a class right away, nor allowing her to even choose one without first finding a town monument. Seriously, this whole Tutorial was supposed to be for humanity to adapt to the System, right? How was she supposed to do that without a class? If she needed to be at a Town Monument, the System could have at least set her initial spawn point near a town, instead of way out in the boonies.
Although, maybe it had; maybe the spot where she’d appeared in the forest was only a short jaunt from the nearest settlement and she’d just happened to go the wrong way down the road.
Sarah groaned and smacked herself lightly on the forehead. If that were true…so embarrassing!
“A sign would have been nice,” she muttered spitefully, before quickly glancing around to make sure neither of the children, or their father, had wandered close enough to catch her talking to herself. It wasn’t that she was ashamed of her sometime habit of engaging in verbal monologue, it was just…actually, she wasn’t sure what it was.
Dragging her focus back to the System screen still floating before her eyes, Sarah mentally accepted the change and watched new words appear.
Focused Mastery ‘Social Skills’ unlocked; experience transferred.
Current Mastery Tier: Applicant
Applicable Boons: 0
General Mastery ‘Common Tasks & Abilities’ unlocked by owned Skill [Keen Eye]; no experience applied
Current Mastery Tier: Applicant
Applicable Boons: 0
Huh. Okay, so if she was reading this right, there were at least two types of Mastery, possibly more, each “type” could be raised in “tier” with enough experience points, and somewhere along the line a sufficiently advanced Mastery would grant “boons.”
Given that her [Language] Skill was the one that let her upgrade the ‘Common Tasks & Abilities’ Mastery, she suspected it was her [Polyglot] Skill that had unlocked it in the first place. Not that the massively overpowered ability to speak thousands of languages and swiftly accumulate more was what she would call a “common” ability, but communication and language in general was, so she supposed that made sense.
But then ‘Common Tasks & Abilities’ had been re-unlocked, and not by [Polyglot], by [Keen Eye], which suggested two things: one, that a Skill could be used only once for unlocking a Mastery, at least without reaching appropriate levels; and two, that ‘Common Tasks & Abilities’ covered a lot of ground, which…made sense when she thought about it.
It was a bit annoying that the notification didn’t tell her how much experience had been transferred to her new Mastery but it would probably show up somewhere on her Status menu, right? Except when she tried to mentally summon her Status, she received, of all things, an error message.
Error: Personal status menu unavailable until all outstanding System notifications have been acknowledged.
Sarah sighed. Alright, fine, she could wait. She dismissed the open messages and reached for the next blue dot.
Congratulations! You have learned the Skill [Identification (Common)].
(Rank raised from Basic to Common due to your catalyzing Skill [Keen Eye].)
[Identification (Common)] is Level 1.
Ah ha! She knew there had to be a Skill for that! She hadn’t expected [Keen Eye] to be treated as a “catalyzing Skill” but she supposed it made sense, since [Keen Eye] was all about noticing and identifying items of value.
She waited for a moment but no rush of knowledge and understanding was forthcoming so she shrugged, dismissed the blue screen, and reached for the next dot, which was, of course, red.
Correction: [Identification (Common)] set to Level 2.
This time Sarah felt the level-up the way it was supposed to be, with both buzz and zap, a peculiar mix of pleasure and pain, with the former managing to outweigh the latter. The combined feeling still felt a bit stronger than she’d expected, and she wondered if that was because she was getting the effect of both levels at once. The System still wasn’t getting things quite right, it seemed.
As the feeling passed, the red System screen folded itself away, and though Sarah waited patiently for several minutes, it was not replaced.
So, only one level-up in [Identification] then. Actually, that made sense. Part-way through her first day on the farm, Sarah had found herself getting overwhelmed by all the mental tugs that were competing for her attention.
What she’d really wanted was for [Keen Eye] to stop pointing something out once she’d noticed and acknowledged it, but the only way she could seem to make that happen was by collecting the item…which she wasn’t going to do when most everything in her immediate area was already owned by someone else. Unable to figure out how to edit the way the Skill worked, she’d instead managed to turn it off.
Without [Keen Eye] pointing things out, she also hadn’t been employing that extra little twist of attention that was required to summon a System tooltip. With the tooltips providing nothing more than a label for anything she examined – and generally a very simplistic label at that – there hadn’t seemed much point. She’d made the effort to get the proper names of the [Raptors] and the [Beefalo] but that had been it. Maybe now that she had the actual [Identification] Skill the System would start doling out more information. It was certainly worth a try. She turned her attention to her shirt and ‘twisted’ her mental focus just so…
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Error! It has been determined that you are neither in combat nor in any immediate danger; therefore, you must acknowledge all outstanding System notifications before attempting to use your new Skill.
Darn it! (And yes, that was a cuss word but it wasn’t a curse word. Sarah had long ago chosen to make a distinction between the two, because sometimes one’s emotions can best be expressed by a good old fashioned four-letter word, expanded vocabulary be damned, er, darned.)
Sighing, Sarah was about to reach for the next blue dot when an odd realization suddenly crystallized in her mind. Aside from the colour and nature of the message – a red Correction instead of a blue Notification – that level-up had happened, more or less, exactly as it was supposed to. Okay, so it was effectively two level-ups at once, but instead of a buzz and then a zap, pleasure and then pain, two separate and distinct experiences, it had been a proper buzz-zap, the pain buried within the pleasure.
Why were the [Identification] levels different from all the [Language] levels? Was the System…learning? And then, she realized, there was yet another matter. According to the knowledge that the System had somehow snuck into her brain, the painful zap part of the levelling process was a result of minute (or not so minute) changes being made to her mind and body…except, when she’d first received her [Language] Skill, she’d gotten all that knowledge without the slightest twinge. Plus, all those physical changes that allowed her to hear and speak the “Bird People” language…hang on…she’d assumed they were all a result of [Polyglot] but maybe they weren’t, or not solely. The way they’d happened, a bit at a time, the pace increasing according to the amount of effort she expended, that sounded like levelling.
Either way, not once had she experienced any hint of a zap with those changes. True, they’d all seemed to happen while she was sleeping but still…it was all very odd, especially the fact that she was then subjected to all the zaps when the corrections came. That part was starting to make her a bit angry.
If this were the real world, and she experiencing it through her real body, this whole mess up could never have happened. The System-downloaded information in her brain was very clear on the matter; the pain was a result of the change, ergo, the change could not occur without causing the pain.
Here in virtual reality, it was different. Even if the System was making the same changes to her physical body as to her digital one, at the same time, she wouldn’t feel it. All sensation from her physical body was currently blocked, which meant any pain or pleasure she felt within virtual reality was for the sake of realism and familiarizing her with the ways of the System.
What all of that meant was…there had been no need to make her endure forty-nine successive zaps! At the very least they could have been paired with a shot of pleasure like her [Identification] level-up.
From the beginning she’d assumed the System was and would be a smooth, well-balanced machine. That’s how it was in all the stories, right? Now, she was starting to see the cracks in the façade, but, she supposed, it wasn’t entirely surprising. Okay, maybe surprising, but not shocking. Any child of the digital age knew that no software that went to market was ever perfect; there were always bugs and glitches that had to be patched. So why would alien software be any different? Well, maybe aliens could usually afford to be utter perfectionists and spend the time to ensure their product had no flaws before sending it off into the wilderness of consumer opinion, but she hadn’t gotten the impression that the Builders had done that this time around. Now that she really thought about it, the presentation of the System had seemed…a little rushed.
That thought softened her anger a little bit. On the one hand, it was downright terrifying to think that the beings who were in a position to snuff out the entire human race before anyone knew what was happening were the kind of beings who made mistakes. But then, she already knew they made mistakes; that’s what started this whole adventure. *sniff* Poor planet Earth, may you rest in peace. Or pieces. One of the two.
Anyway…returning to the matter at hand…ahem…seeing evidence that the incredibly powerful, incredibly mysterious people, who had so drastically and so easily changed the fate of the entire human race, were, in fact, fallible…it made them seem just a touch more human. After all, to fail is human, right? Something like that.
As the last of her anger (but not quite the last of her pique) drained away, Sarah suddenly wondered what made the System tick. That wasn’t something she’d ever considered before. Had any of the LitRPG stories she’d read cracked open that particular can of worms? Hmm…well, most of them had the System as some kind of all-knowing magical entity, though she could remember a few of the stories explaining that their System had been crafted by some super advanced or super knowledgeable (not always the same thing) race or group of people at some point in the distant past. But what if the System wasn’t magical? What if it was created by a race that was extremely advanced in a technological sense but simply applied their advance technology and science to a concept dreamt up by a far less advanced race (aka humans) that had oodles of creativity but very little understanding in how said advanced technology and science could be applied to said concept? Wait…that was confusing, even for her.
Sarah shook her head. The point was, humans had dreamt of a magic System and the aliens who called themselves Builders were seemingly attempting to make that magic System a reality without using any actual magic. So how did that work? Well, the hardware side of it was…far outside her area of expertise, possibly outside her sphere of comprehension. Likewise, the software side was outside her area of expertise and her sphere of comprehension…but not her realm of imagination.
So, there were two general possibilities that came to mind. The first came from the pre-Tutorial messages that had said all non-human people within the virtual reality were being simulated by artificial intelligence. Did that mean the entire System was being run by an A.I., perhaps one custom-made for the purpose?
Sarah’s fertile imagination summoned up a mental image of a brilliant, young, fresh-faced intern on his first day at a massive multi-national conglomerate, expecting to be fetching coffee and running errands, but instead finding himself placed behind an enormous and ornate desk and being informed that he was now the CEO and the fate of the entire company was in his hands.
She winced in sympathy for the imaginary intern/newly made (or perhaps newly repurposed?) artificial intelligence. Brilliance, Sarah knew, (not from personal experience of course, but it was just something people knew, right?) could only take a person so far. Even if an artificial intelligence were – by its very nature – an extraordinarily fast learner, climbing the curve of the complex, yet inevitably contradictory, human-inspired, Builder-built, non-magical magical System would still take time…especially if, as Sarah suspected, the Builders were still tweaking, and coming up with many of the finer details. Maybe some of the fundamental details too, like the way Masteries had suddenly shown up. (Assuming that wasn’t simply a case of the System not thinking she could handle too many levels of complexity at once and so was doling them out like sweets to a child, which was insulting but, eh, not entirely without merit, much as she hated to admit it, even to herself. Not that that was the point.)
Somehow she couldn’t picture a newly created A.I. keeping up with all the aforementioned nonsense without spinning out just a little bit, and that brought her to the second possibility: programming and support techs, of the non-artificial variety. Now, she had no idea what the Builders really looked like. For all she knew, they might be slimy, green masses of goo and tentacles, or they might be incorporeal beings of pure energy. The great thing about imagination, however, was that she didn’t need to know what they really looked like, because she could imagine them however she pleased.
And with that thought, the last of Sarah’s anger and pique washed away in a tide of laughter as she dove once again into the world of her imagination, where a scene played itself out on the stage of her mind…
In a dingy room lit by the humming flicker of fluorescent bulbs and thick with a miasma of burnt coffee, empty takeout cartons, the sharp stench of old sweat, and the musty smell of overworked electronics, sit a row of beings staring glassy-eyed at the enormous array of computer screens and control surfaces by which they are surrounded.
Clothes are rumpled and stained with sweat, for there has been no time for a shower and change since the program launched. Hair sticks out in greasy clumps from the many times it has been clenched and pulled in frustration or despair. Eyes are bloodshot from too many hours spent staring at backlit screens. Hands and muscles twitch and tremble from too many stimulants failing to compensate for too little sleep.
In the midst of all this, one technician flinches like a gun-shy horse as a new alert pops up on his screen. He reads the alert, fighting back tears of overwhelming exhaustion. With a deep breath, he brings himself under control and turns wearily to his nearest neighbour.
“Steve.”
Steve freezes, waiting to hear the inevitable, knowing his exhausted colleague would not have made the effort to speak without due cause, yet desperately hoping that this time, this alert, won’t be like all the others.
“It’s another one.”
Steve’s shoulders slump and his eyes close for a long moment as he attempts to summon up the will for yet another round of wrestling insanity and improbability into some form of reality and order. As a Builder, a member of such a highly advanced and technologically and scientifically astute race, he has never before taken seriously the imaginary concept called “magic” with which the primitive races are all, inevitably, obsessed. Now, he is finally starting to understand the appeal of being able to fix things and make things work without any of it actually having to make more than superficial sense.
“I’ll call the Supervisor,” his co-worker finally says.
Steve’s eyes snap open.
“No. Not yet.”
His colleague looks at him, confusion just barely managing to rise above exhaustion.
“Think about it, Bob. She’ll make us go through all those protocols, even the ones that are no longer valid because the brain trust upstairs decided to do things differently two shifts ago but haven’t gotten around to updating the protocols.
“If we bring her in on this, it’ll take three times as long to solve the problem as if we just fix it ourselves. We’re the ones staring at the code all day and night, we have a better understanding of how it works than she does anyway.”
“I don’t know, Steve, what if she…”
“Bob. How many of these bugs have we patched since launch day?”
“Umm…I can’t remember. I’ve lost count.”
“Exactly. We could do this in our sleep. We don’t need the Supervisor’s protocols. Those are just to make sure no steps are missed. Are you going to miss a step, Bob?”
Bob snorts. “Like that would happen.”
“Exactly. So, we fix it ourselves and then submit our report of ‘problem identified, problem solved’ and move on.”
Bob turns the idea over in his tired brain.
“She’s going to yell at us for not following protocol. She might even suspend us.”
“At least then we could shower and sleep.”
Bob’s eyes light up and a slow smile spreads across his face.
“Let’s do this.”
As the imaginary scene came to a close, Sarah chortled again and then sighed happily. She hadn’t indulged her imagination like that since…since before the world ended. That thought stole a bit of her sudden good mood, but not all of it.
She was quite certain the reality of whatever was going on behind-the-scenes, as it were, of the System was far different from anything she could fully comprehend, never mind imagine, but that wasn’t the point. For her own peace of mind, she needed to maintain some sort of mental image that would bring even the tiniest bit of sense to the incredibly complex and powerful thing that now controlled so much of her life.
She wasn’t sure which of her imaginings she preferred, the intern-turned-CEO A.I., or Bob and Steve in the basement…maybe reality was closer to a mix of both. Either way, Sarah decided that for once her meandering mind’s penchant for tangents had been a blessing. Instead of freaking out over being under the thumb of unknowable, unopposable aliens (and yes, she had been slowly working her way towards that, no matter how many times she ignored that particular dark corner of her subconscious), she decided that, from now on she would think of the System as just another person, or group of people; powerful and alien, true, but also, in at least some small way, relatable. As a coping mechanism, it had promise. It certainly wouldn’t erase that dark corner of her subconscious, but it might keep it at bay for a little longer, maybe even a lot longer. One could hope, after all.
Now all she had to do was go through the rest of the outstanding notifications and corrections from the System and she’d be ready for the next stage of her adventure. How many were left? One, two…ah. Ten dots. Seven blue and three red.
Well, there’s no time like the present, as they say. Time to get cracking…Did I really say that?