November 1st, 2035

The full dive was far more intense than I expected. I felt a lurch in my stomach as if I had suddenly entered a free fall. A sensation similar to motion sickness pervaded my entire body and then I began to feel sleepy. I tried to reach for the Kabuto device, but my limbs had already been paralyzed. The drowsy feeling intensified until I lost consciousness. While this happened, I was suspended in a void of unending darkness.

An instant later, I felt myself lurch awake. I thought this must have been a bug until I saw a source of light ahead of me. A single hanging lamp illuminated a table, a chair, and a featureless humanoid figure. The entity sitting in the chair resembled a wooden doll that painters used to simulate human poses. The only difference was that the doll was approximately the size of a person. Beyond this single illuminated scene was nothing but darkness in all directions.

I stepped forward. It was a strange sensation, as I could not perceive my own body. The darkness surrounding me obscured any physical evidence of my appearance, and I could not perceive the myriad sensory indicators that came with having a body. I tried to exhale manually, but I could not hear the sound of my own breath. I tried to press my hand to my chest, but my hand grasped nothing but empty air. If I was not acutely aware that everything I perceived in that moment was a mere simulation, I would have begun panicking. I tried to speak.

“Hello?” a faint voice called out. It was not my own voice. Rather, it was as if the voice were made from the wind itself. It was as if a gust of wind had blown past an object in just the right way to produce a word.

“Hello,” a gentle woman’s voice responded. It sounded just like a real woman’s voice, but I knew that it was easy to generate realistic voices with current AI technology. “Who are you?”

“I’m, uh, Geoffrey Lachlan,” the voice made of wind said.

I tried to find the source of the voice in the darkness to no avail. It seemed to come from all directions at once. I turned my eyes to look back at the doll only to see that I was now sitting at the table. A perfect clone of Geoffrey Lachlan dressed in a blue military uniform was sitting where the doll had been a moment before. The biggest indicator that it wasn’t actually me was the fact that he was sitting with his back straight.

“What?” I asked. I gasped a moment later. This time, I spoke with my own voice. I could hear myself breathing, and I could feel the presence of my limbs once again. I felt my chest, solid once again. I touched my head and ran my fingers through my thin hair. Now audible, I breathed out a sigh of relief.

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“Do you wish to play as this man?” the woman’s voice asked.

“Huh?” I had been distracted by the uncanny sensations I had just experienced. “Uh, no thank you.”

“Do you wish to alter this appearance?”

“Uh, yes please,” I said. “How do alterations work?”

“Among other things, you may increase height, lower weight, change race, change age, or change sex if you wish. Though, your character must remain with the confines of the human race.”

“Oh, I think I understand,” I said. “If I wanted to make my avatar a few inches taller, how would I do that?”

As I spoke, my doppelganger’s head rose a few inches higher.

“Simply describe the changes to me, and they shall happen,” the voice said.

“Oh, I understand,” I said. I began to speak commands, and the figure in the chair changed as I spoke. “Make him six foot two inches tall, make sure the weight is within the healthy range for someone of that height, make his hair a lighter shade of blonde, make his eyes a lighter shade of blue, a bit lighter, like Elijah Wood, perfect. Hmm. Make the jaw a bit more pronounced, give him a bit more facial hair, a bit less pronounced, like he hadn’t shaved for two days, perfect. Deepen the voice a bit…”

As I spoke, I heard my own voice deepen.

“Bah, bah, bah,” I said, testing out the voice. “That’s fine. Other than that… can you push the cheekbones forward a bit? Perfect. Okay, I think that’s…” I started to move toward the source of light, but some invisible force stopped me in my tracks. Just as I reached a point where the light would illuminate my body, I felt a force similar to a massive but slow moving wave push me back.

“Your body sits in that chair. You will only have control of it once the game begins.”

“Okay… cryptic,” I muttered in an annoyed tone of voice. “Anyway, I was just saying that I think I’m done with character creation.”

“What is character creation?”

“Ha ha, funny.”

“Are you prepared to enter the world of Ferrum?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said. Excitement had started to build within me. The character creation process had been a bit avant garde, but it certainly caught my attention. I could already visualize a bunch of reviewers complaining about the wind voice and the nausea, but that was all pretty minor in the grand scheme of things.

From the endless sea of darkness surrounding me, I could hear the sound of a large wooden door opening. Then, the sea was overtaken by blinding, endless light.

With that, I was born.