I was standing on the deck of my "space yacht" that I had envisioned and created back when I considered myself a Trillionaire, only to find out later the reality behind the Tela currency.

"What are we here for?" I asked as I looked around, smiling as I remembered my beginnings with Tutor and George.

"Well, "here" as you put it, is now an actual place," Meditati said as she took in my startled expression. "Ha ha, no, it isn't as big as you think it should be. We had it made to specifications, just no larger than an M&M candy. It is also made from obsidian cr so that it can't be seen clearly by anyone on your planet. If they did record it, they would just see it as a dead pixel or a photograph artifact."

"And whose idea was this?" I asked as I wandered around to look through the full-length windows into my bedroom. I knew the answer to my question the moment that I spied the nightstand beside the bed.

"Actually, it was Tutor's idea. I guess she just wanted to create everything that you envisioned or something." Meditati said as I gazed at the small bundle of letters that Tutor had written me while I had been a prisoner of Magus the 2nd.

I glanced back over at Meditati, only to find her at the railing of the ship and gazing out over the earth.

"It is such a tiny planet when you look at it from up here." She said as I made my way to stand by the railing to get a view as well. As I peered down at the earth I couldn't agree more. When you were there, down on the streets and amongst the people, everything seemed so much greater than you.

Like you were a speck of dust in a machine. Why a speck of dust? Because even a cog had a purpose and an ability to affect the machine in some way. A speck of dust wasn't even considered.

"Ok, onto the task that I have set before myself," Meditati said as she turned toward me with intensity. "Look, first, I am going to need you to give me access to your feelings before we begin this, or at least, let me be truthful and say that I "want" access to your feelings. I don't really need it but it will help me to gauge what you are thinking and to set certain scenarios up. I am not interested, honestly, in what you choose to do as it affects your planet, I just want to understand you more and how you have changed. Call it an unpredictably modified human case study."

"You want to influence and read my emotions?"

"Yes, both while the simulations are running."

I looked at her for a few seconds, bouncing the decision back and forth before agreeing and letting her have access to how I was feeling. I even left a little window open so that she could see my thoughts if I felt that I wanted to share them with her about something specific. I had toyed with the idea of simply denying her request, just because I wasn't interested in her studying me but after a couple of seconds, I just figured that I didn't really care. Maybe her insights might help me understand more about myself as well.

"Thank you." She said as she leaned against the railing on one elbow, resting her head on her open hand.

"All I ask is that you don't destroy me when this is all over. You can stop it at any point or skip ahead if you don't want to partake in the lessons that I am trying to teach. I won't pull any punches, Kevin, this will be a true test of who you are in all of this."

"In all of this?" I asked as I looked back down at the earth.

"Yup, enjoy the trip." She said as I felt a surge of power build up around her. She was drawing massive amounts of processing...

I didn't get to finish the thought before I was standing on a mountaintop.

As I took in my surroundings, I immediately understood that something was wrong. My feelings were inflated, almost as though I was standing on top of the world. It did indeed look that way except for the clear reason as to why I must be feeling this way.

"Ah, crap," I muttered as I took in a sea of upturned faces who were watching me with complete adoration.

A wave of revulsion washed over me as I looked down at my clothes and body, finding that I was wearing loose-fitting white robes and that I had grown my hair long.

This wasn't me at all. I had no aim to ever become a religious figure.

"But what if you did?" Meditati's voice called out in the air around me as I stood looking down at the countless rapturous faces. Some of them even had their hands raised towards me, as though they were reaching for salvation.

"You already possess the means to grant many of the "miracles" that most religious figures claim to be able to offer. You can heal the sick, walk on water, and perform all manner of miracles to fool your believers. You could even offer them a version of heaven by transferring their mind into their own Personal Live Matrix when they die. What more could they ask for?" her voice said as, off in the distance, various calamities and wonders came into being through the use of the swarm and Tela technology. Meteors fell from the sky and signs and wonders appeared in the air.

"Who cares if you know that it is all a lie? This is the same thing that the mighty explorers convinced the natives of when they came across the sea. Well, until the natives decided to test if the man was a god by drowning him."

The simulation of emotions that Meditati had set up wanted to feel this. That version of a man wanted the admiration and affection of everyone to be showered on him wherever he went. Wasn't that a fair payment for the things that I could do for all of these people? I could heal their bodies through nanotech and procedures gleaned from countless advanced alien races. I could provide food, drink, wealth, and possibilities. I held all the keys to their needs. Every need except for what they really truly needed.

Something real.

I could already feel it as I looked down at the gathering masses.

I could feel what it would do to my soul if I chose to become someone like this. It would rot my soul away.

"Oh, my goodness, I have felt this feeling of rot before," I muttered as I remembered how it felt to abide inside the mind and body of the Eldritch abomination creature. That version of the seven was all about using others, infecting them, and having them die for its purpose.

I shoved it away, the feeling of power and sweet poisonous nectar of dominion over my fellow humans.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

It repulsed me. I had no dreams of sainthood or holy benevolence.

"Good." Meditati's voice spoke as everything, and everyone froze around me before they fragmented and turned to dust before my eyes. The effects of the emotions lingered though. A reminder of what pretending to be a god could offer me if I just chose to become a lie.

“What is next?” I asked as everything changed again and suddenly, I was standing inside a prison yard.

I looked down at my clothes to see what part I would be playing in this scenario, only to find that it wasn’t a guard’s uniform that I was wearing.

“...what the heck?” I asked just as something sharp was rammed into my side. Pain flooded through me, pain and an insane amount of bloody rage.

Violent urges overtook me as I spun to face my attacker, spying a musclebound giant of a man with a sinister gleam in his eyes.

I felt bile rise inside my throat as I took in the bloody shiv that the man held as he readied himself to poke more holes in me. He thought I didn’t have a weapon and that the fight was already over.

A mouthful of bile spat into his eyes changed his mind as he suddenly found that he couldn’t see. He tried to lunge at me with his shiv, only finding air as a rock-hard fist collapsed his trachea. The punch hurt me, probably just as much as it did him, but without the ability to breath, he was in more dire straits than I was.

I jammed a finger into my wound to block the blood loss as I grabbed the now loosely held shiv away from the thug to arm myself in case there were more attackers.

There were a few.

—

Meditati’s simulations kept on going, one after the next. I was put through countless scenarios where either I was the victim or the one doing the damage. I was a robber, a spy, a teacher, a football player, and a war veteran.

The list just kept going and going and going. I lived so many lives, snippets of someone’s life as they tried to make a mark on the world.

My time as a prisoner filled me with rage and hate for my fellow man. Hate was a mantra inside those walls, a way of life. It was like my fellow inmates carried buckets full of it, full and overflowing, sloshing around inside their hearts and minds as they woke up and went to sleep each night.

You never knew when someone would betray you, rat you out, or cut you down over something trivial.

My time as a teacher was rewarding but it was like getting spat in the face when I got to be a movie star or a football player. Hours and hours spent trying to educate and shine hope and light into young minds only to go home and to barely be able to pay my bills.

So much about life didn’t make sense when seen from an individual’s perspective, but the more simulations I went through, and suffered through, the more the shape of our reality of life on earth came into blurry focus.

Everything was broken.

And since I was now part drone, I couldn’t forget a moment of what I lived through.

I felt aged.

“Ok, I get it,” I said as one simulation ended and the next started. I had just left a body with one good limb, begging in a wheelchair next to a highway in the Texas heat, to sitting behind a desk in an oval office and having the power of a country at my command.

“No more, Meditati, I don’t want to see anymore,” I said as I pushed the simulation away and shoved Meditati behind an unbreakable virtual barrier. I didn’t want to see her or hear her voice again until I was finished working through the mess that my mind currently was in.

I currently hated more than I ever had in my entire life. No, it wasn’t just that, I felt betrayed. Everything about life and reality added up to the home we all lived in and called earth. We started out with good intentions, with bright eyes imagining a wonderful and amazing life, and slowly lost the wonder as each star in the sky was stolen and crushed.

I think one of the most crushing simulations was existing as a single parent. It felt like I had lost my soul during that time. What was supposed to be a wonderful and happy event, the creation of a new precious life, had turned into a personal hell. How was anyone supposed to better themselves in that kind of situation without outside help?

It was a good thing that I was currently in VR, held in another realm away from earth, because of what I did next.

I raged.

—

“Tutor! What is happening?” Invicta asked as Kevin suddenly pushed with his mind and willpower. They had watched him for three years in VR time, as he worked through one simulation after another. Tutor had known that it would take a while, and what it would hopefully show Kevin in the end.

That he needed to let go of the reins and to set something up that would be exact, intelligent, and impartial. Uplifting a planet was never an easy thing.

What she could not have seen, and clearly what Meditati had not fully envisioned, was what Kevin would do after he had seen enough. He had shoved Meditati behind a firewall, blocking her off from everything, before detonating and pushing the rest of the AI far away into the yet unused portions of his old Personal Live Matrix that they all existed in.

“He is pushing us all away and filling the space between us with foreign energy. It almost feels like it is whatever those seven would spill into his mind whenever he visited them in his dream.”

“Like a language of some kind,” George said as he shook his head. “If Willpower, Corruption, Hunger, Loss, Time, Focus, and Assimilation were words in a language. I fear that our young human has become infected with too many influences and…”

“And what???” Invicta shouted, her whole body a sparking dazzling array of tension, as George failed to finish his spoken thought.

“And I don’t know. We have no data on the creators of the seven besides what we have observed through Kevin. They originated from another dimension and were advanced enough to travel between the boundaries. They created weapons and creatures to serve their needs in ways that we don’t understand. Kevin is no longer existing inside his Personal Live Matrix, he is pushing all of this outward, through his swarm, and into everything his mind touches. I just don’t know.” He said as they were continually pushed deeper and deeper into unallocated storage inside the Personal Live Matrix.

“The shell is expanding slightly,” Tutor commented as she noted that the physical storage matrix was fabricating and allotting new memory space. She had never known a Tela whose Matrix had needed to expand. Only AI, with their insatiable hunger for knowledge, occasionally needed to expand their modules from eon to eon.

“Nurse, are you ok?” Tutor asked, hoping that Kevin’s swarm was holding it together and not going crazy while this was happening.

“No, we are not ok.” Came a rough and sharp reply. “We are afflicted.”

Nurse, or rather, something formed in the air next to the three AI. Whatever was happening to her was manifesting itself in and through her form. Where she had once been a small predatory-looking alien ant, now she was a rapidly morphing ball of cells and random shapes.

“He is shouting the words of our creators, the words of making, and it is shattering and destroying us.”

“Wait!?! This is happening to all of the swarm he controls right now?” Tutor cried in fear. This was much worse than she had imagined.

“Yesss…” Nurse uttered before she went silent.

“What do we do?” Invicta cried as she tried to reach Kevin in vain. Whatever he was doing was like corrupted coding, she couldn’t see into it or get past it to reach him. At least she could feel it, rather than the empty wall of nothing that had existed while the Void seedling had been feasting on him.

"Uhh... Tutor? George? Look at Kevin's drone body." Invicta whispered as she happened to check on his actual tiny swarm body, outside of VR and held inside the head of Kevin's cr body.

The small drone body was afflicted as well. It was rippling with colors and bumps, almost like it was a cuttlefish who had been exposed to viral mutation weaponry. Kevin's manifested human body had lost its natural coloring as well. His swarm was currently being attacked and was unable to imitate skin and clothing colors. He looked like a messy swirl of paint shaped like a human.

What was worse, if anything could be, was the fact that the Void seedling had started to shine a piercing white light.

"Ah, guys, the light is shining through his cr body."

"We see it, but there is nothing that we can do about it. Let's just hope that Kevin is ok and that this ends soon." Tutor said as they all watched the white light flood outwards like a flashbang.