Zero #119 was a vatgrown super soldier.
The year is 2275.
He is actually only two years old.
But he has the developed body of a 21 year old.
He also has experienced the equivalent of 18 years of education in virtual reality.
During his 'free' time. He enjoys taking apart old technology.
On the way back from a mission, he stumbles across a ruin.
In this ruin is some old-styled servers that are no longer functional.
He grabs the hard drives and continues his way back to Genesis.
Once they do a check-up to make sure he is running properly, as well as top off the nanites in his body, they allow him to go back to his cell.
He immediately pulls out his personal cortex and attempts to connect to the hard drives.
But the technology is not compatible.
There also wasn't a port for his cortex.
So he instead makes a request to his 'parole' officer.
And ask to use the binary extractor.
After handing in the hard drives and them making sure it doesn't go against regulations, they put the hard drives on the dump and extract all the binary from it.
Most of it is corrupted, but they put it on a chip and send it back to Zero.
Excited to see what he has found, Zero waste no time and puts the chip into his brain.
Immediately downloading the information... he finds that most of it is corrupted.
"It seems this was one of the servers for a site called royalroad. Or somebodies personal copy of the site."
"Only a few hundred books are uncorrupted unfortunately."
He enters his virtual reality chamber and sets the time conversion to 432:1 the highest time conversion (that one can use safely).
Where 432 hours in virtual reality is equivalent to 1 hour outside it.
He was genetically modified to not require sleep, but this means that he is constantly doing missions.
After spending about an hour and a half in virtual reality... he finds a weird book.
The book is called "Paradox".
It was written in 2022... quite a long time ago.
It advertises to teach a path that even reality itself will try to prevent you from following.
Step 1: Dreaming.
After reading the chapter he finds it a little funny.
Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.
He is physically unable to sleep.
So this 'path' is impossible for him to follow.
In a way it did seem like reality was preventing him from carrying out the steps in the book.
Step 2: Tulpa
Why would he have trouble splitting his focus?
Every single subject grown in this facility has a Chip in their brain that allows separate threads of consciousness.
It is at this point where he gets an idea!
What if he replaces the step of sleeping with virtual reality?
The chemicals released in his brain during virtual reality are quite similar to the ones released while dreaming.
He makes his hand gesture an 'S' and hops back into the virtual reality chamber.
He does the hand gesture at the start, waits a few seconds, does the hand gesture at the end and then exits the simulation.
He then rejoins the simulation and does this again and again.
Instead of spending months trying to be able to do this at the start and end of dreams, he is able to precisely do the step without ever sleeping.
The problem then changes though.
He needs to open a portal in the nothingness of sleep to times when he did the gesture... then he needs to repeatedly do that as far as the eye can see.
Then to condense this moment into a single point.
"How the hell am I supposed to do that?"
Maybe if he changes the activation time of the simulation.
He adds a whole bunch of objects to the simulation to cause it to lag.
"Hopefully this works."
Because of all the items he spammed when he reloaded the simulation it had a slightly longer load time.
During this loading time, he was in a nothingness.
He immediately did the hand gesture opening up a portal to his memory.
He then repeated this as far as the eye could see.
Then he ordered the chip in his brain to condense all of these memories into a single point.
He then followed the directions of "Paradox".
Breaking it into 5 pieces.
Then put it in his sea of consciousness slot 0.
Then had the animation run on a loop.
Right after doing this step... he realized the chip the facility gave him was gone.
He asked around about it... but they told him he never turned in any equipment.
But he clearly remembered finding the servers and reading almost every single book available to him.
"This is odd."
Luckily, he still had all of the steps saved in his mind.
Time to continue step 2.
Again... why would he need help having another thread of consciousness running?
Although thinking about it... he still needed to do this step.
Because if what he was reading was correct.
His current threads of consciousness would disappear with him.
But him having a thread running with ECHO wouldn't.
So for this step he simply re-programmed the chip in his brain to match that of ECHO.
He added the functions listed there.
He then did a restart for his chip
[ECHO]: Initializing...
He also made a copy of his sea of consciousness and memories and put it in slot 2 along with ECHO.
Now it was time for him to do step 3.
----------------------------------------
What I will need:
1x Mirror
1x Laptop/computer
1x Case of water (No sugary drinks)
1x Empty room to spend eternity in.
Well I have a mirror next to my toilet.
I have ECHO as the computer in my brain.
I also have access to a water fountain in my room.
This cell will function as the place I spend eternity in.
March 23rd at 11:57 PM.
That is the date the book says to do this.
It is currently January 1st.
So a about 3 months away.
That is so long.
I suppose I'll work on ECHO.
An idea appeared in my mind...
What if I downloaded the programming of my virtual reality chamber and installed it in ECHO.
That way, I'd be able to do simulations using ECHO.
The only problem is that the reality chamber is very data heavy... about an exabyte of storage.
It would take roughly 60,000,000,000 seconds to download it to my chip and make it a part of echo.
It would take over a thousand years.
But step 3, says that it'll involve some time travel.
I'll apparently be stuck in a loop that'll last about 3 minutes.
If I spend that 3 minutes in virtual reality... that'll be 1296 minutes so about 21 hours.
I'll start the downloading process in virtual reality.
When I reset, the memory in my brain should carry over. As well as the data in my chip.
If I spend around two thousand years in virtual reality, then break out.
Only three minutes would have passed in reality.
It would normally only take centuries to break out... so I should definitely be able to pull it off.
It was at this moment that he received a alert on his chip.
[ECHO]: {User: "Eternus", Message: "Report to the debriefing room"}
Oh... time for another mission.