The world ended on a Tuesday, or so Sarah assumed. She had, after all, been staring at her calendar when everything around her vanished into pure, empty whiteness, so she knew that happened on a Tuesday. Whether or not that was the actual demise of planet Earth, or if the world truly ended sometime later, during the period of empty blackness that followed the empty whiteness, she couldn't say. Not that it really mattered. The important part was that the world had ended, but the human race had not, though it took some time before she figured that bit out.

At first, she thought she'd died, but the whiteness was nothing like what her Sunday school teachers had taught her to expect from heaven; there were no pearly gates, or roads lined with gold, no singing angels, and especially no hint of the presence of anyone but herself, certainly not her loved ones or anything (or anyone) with the power to create the universe.

And if the whiteness wasn't heaven, the blackness wasn't hell. It was certainly dark enough, but there was a conspicuous lack of wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Sarah didn't like to think that everything she'd believed about life and death had been a lie. Eventually she came to the conclusion that - absent evidence to the contrary - she was in fact still alive and this was not the afterlife. With that resolved, she settled down to wait for something to happen.

That something eventually came in the form of a glowing blue rectangle with lines of text. It looked like some kind of holographic screen and when Sarah saw it she started to giggle.

"Seriously?" she called out to the blackness. Either she was in a coma, and dreaming about one of those LitRPG web novels she liked so much, or she was actually in the middle of some kind of real-life videogame-style world, and if that was true...well, that was just nuts. And kinda cool.

Ok, make that really cool. Because that meant she was about to find herself in a situation where magic was real, or at least where the technology was so advanced that it might as well be magic. And yeah, that was cool.

With another giggle, she finally focused on the words floating before her in the darkness.

Greetings, humans. Our name isn't something you could pronounce so you may refer to us as Builders.

Due to an error in calculations, we have inadvertently destroyed your planet. Thankfully, we recognized the error in time. While we were unable to save your planet, we were able to rescue all life forms present at the time. You have been placed in stasis while we relocate you to one of the Sanctuary worlds, established for survivors of planetary destruction.

Due to the truly enormous number of life forms that inhabited your planet, you will have to be distributed across several Sanctuary worlds to avoid overwhelming the existing cultures and ecosystems.

As an apology for destroying your world, we have created something that should significantly improve your ability to integrate into your new homes. It is called a "Menu System" and we found enough references to the idea in your popular literature that many of you should be familiar with the concept.

Sarah laughed until she was gasping, though she didn't actually seem to need air, which would have seemed odd if she weren't so distracted. After several minutes, she calmed down enough to keep reading the slowly scrolling words.

The component parts of the Menu System will take time to fully integrate with your physical bodies. While that happens, your minds have been connected with a virtual reality network, in which you will be provided with a simulacrum of the System. This will allow you to familiarize yourselves with its use and prepare for integration into your new worlds.

When you are ready, please press the button to be guided to a personalized tutorial.

(P.S.: We find this "Menu System" concept of yours very compelling. If it works well for humans, we may very well adapt it for other sentient species. Your species will, of course, receive partial credit.)

The words faded and were replaced by a large button, glowing orange against the pale blue of the screen. Sarah just stared at it for a long time, chucking occasionally as she considered what she'd read.

She should be crying right now, not laughing, she thought. Her planet had been destroyed, the entire human race was being transplanted to new worlds, she might never see any of her family or friends again since they might not end up on the same planet never mind the same continent...and all she could do was laugh at the absurdity of humanity's entire future existence being modeled after a minor branch of a minor genre of modern day fiction. Either this was some new coping strategy she'd instinctively developed for "end-of-the-world" scenarios, or the virtual reality was somehow suppressing powerful negative emotions. Maybe a bit of both, she decided.

At least she now knew one thing for sure: the universe was a lot more complex than her Sunday school teachers had ever suspected, not that those worthy individuals had been alone in believing mankind to be the only intelligent life in the galaxy. Still, Sarah had always figured that a God who could create the entire universe could certainly populate more than one planet if he so chose. After all, if God really was infinite and eternal, omnipotent and omniscient, like the pastor said, he could do anything, right? Literally anything. And if you make a massive garden, why would you plant only in one tiny corner? Why not in all of it?

She would have loved to sit down and chat with her pastor now, after everything she'd just learned. The man had always been up for a good-natured theological debate. Even when Sarah had gone to him angry or confused, he'd never gotten mad, just patiently challenged her to consider her every assertion, to think through the logical progression of her every argument, to always check the source material for every topic.

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Of course the source material for most of their discussions had been the Bible, but the old man's training had stood Sarah in good stead when she went off to college as well. She had learned more about critical thinking from that elderly man of faith, she realized, than from any of her formal instructors.

With a fond smile and a whispered prayer that she would once again see her old mentor this side of the grave, so she could thank him properly for his teaching, Sarah reached for the orange button.

The button vanished with a touch of her finger and the empty blackness in which Sarah hung faded into an empty greyness. Now that she knew this was a virtual space, Sarah concentrated on a particular memory, one deeply engrained in the mind of most every human over the age of two: the feel of standing on a floor.

The weight of gravity pulling her down; the strength of her muscles holding her up; the steady, unyielding presence of solid ground beneath her feet; these sensations had accompanied her throughout her life, but had been missing since that first flash of white.

Sarah sighed with pleasure as she ceased to float. She looked down to see a surface of smooth grey stone. She then imagined the faded blue armchair from her living room but sighed again, this time with disappointment, when nothing happened. She tried something simpler - a basic wooden chair - and then even more simple - a small three-legged stool - before frowning in frustration. Finally she tried a lump of grey stone in the rough shape of a large cushion. That worked.

She settled down onto her makeshift seat with a hmmph of triumph and turned her attention to the glowing blue rectangle that still floated half an arms-length in front of her chest. The screen, as she decided to call it, had replaced the orange button with words.

In preparation for your personalized tutorial, please choose from the following options:

Below that was a series of headings, each with a small arrow indicating a drop-down menu.

-- Difficulty Level

-- Group Size

-- Type of Challenge

Sarah reached out and touched Difficulty Level. Just like with the orange button, she felt slight resistance under her fingers, though if she pushed too hard her hand went right through the screen. She wondered if it was possible to make a selection mentally, since this was a virtual space, and resolved to try it next time she needed to press something.

Difficulty Level expanded into another list, below which was a warning.

1) Easy (5% chance of death)

2) Normal (25% chance of death)

3) Challenging (50% chance of death)

4) Suicide (95% chance of death)

Caution: While the tutorial will occur in a virtual space, and death is therefore only a simulation, there is a 61% chance your mind will not be able to tell the difference. Since your mind is, of course, still connected to your physical body, there is an 87% chance that a simulated death perceived as real will echo through to your physical form and become a true death. In short, if you believe you are dying, you will probably die. This will be your only reminder of this fact.

This, Sarah thought, this is where they always seem to get it wrong. Those world-ending-system-integration-style LitRPGs she'd enjoyed reading always seemed to have their protagonists choose the hardest possible version of the tutorial, the option with the lowest chance of survival. And since it would be a really stupid story if the main character got killed right off the bat, they always - miraculously - managed to be one of the very few people to survive the stupidly dangerous test.

It was so stupid! At least, that's how Sarah saw it. What kind of person said, "I have a snowball's chance in hell of surviving this thing, but it is theoretically possible and the rewards will be awesome, so let's give it a go"? Did that sound like the thought process of a sane, well-balanced mind? Not remotely!

Sarah realized she was getting herself worked up and made a deliberate effort to calm down. She could understand the appeal of strength and power, she really could. After all, if you're one of the strongest, most powerful people around, you're a lot less likely to get stepped on by someone else. The thing about strength and power though, is that it doesn't do you any good if you're dead.

She studied the list of tutorial options again. 95% chance of death meant a 5% survival rate. She'd read stories where the survival rate for the most extreme form of the tutorial was less than 1%, so it could be worse. And really, the 95% was only the chances of virtual death; then there was the 61% chance the mind would think it was real, and then the 87% chance it would become real, and that made...uh...87% of 61% of 95%...uh...

Sarah had never been very great at math, so doing this kind of thing without a calculator, or even pencil and paper, was a non-starter. But it didn't really matter because the point was that even if not every virtual death would result in real death, any one could. And dying for real was not in Sarah's plans for the immediate future.

Obviously she knew she couldn't control every variable, and she was still confident that her afterlife was sorted, but that didn't mean she wanted to die. She certainly wasn't going to go dance with death for no better reason than a faster path to power.

That meant the Suicide level was out of the equation, and the Challenging one too. She briefly considered the Normal option but 25% chance of virtual death meant roughly one in four people would die for real in that tutorial. That...well, that might actually have been normal mortality rates in some parts of the world, she wasn't sure, but Sarah had grown up in one of those nations that some people called a "first world country" and others called a collection of rich, comfortable pansies out of touch with reality.

Sarah didn't think her fellow citizens had been that bad - not all of them at least - but she knew herself. She had been blessed with a safe, comfortable home. Her family had never been rich (by first world standards) but there had always been food on the table at mealtime, there had been warm clothing in the winter, no bombs ever fell from the sky, and she never had to worry about wild animals hunting herself or her pets.

Now she was wishing she’d not had it quite so easy. Sarah had never killed anything bigger than a wasp (unless you counted that one frog who hopped in front of her bike when she was five, and hadn’t that been traumatic) but if she knew her LitRPGs – and she did – killing was going to be a critical element of life from now on; killing in self-defence, killing for food, killing for loot, killing for experience, there just wouldn’t be any way to entirely avoid killing, not if she wanted to live and thrive, to find her friends and family, and build a new life.

So, she would have to learn how to kill, but that didn’t mean she had to be careless with her own life. Decision made, Sarah concentrated on the Easy option. Orange buttons popped up, asking her to confirm her choice. Carefully, Sarah turned her focus on the Yes button. It briefly glowed before disappearing.

The menu rearranged itself. The first drop-down list vanished and the first heading changed to Difficulty Level: Easy. Sarah nodded in satisfaction and turned to the next list of options, Group Size.