It all started when I was hit by a truck and died.

As I bled out on the pavement and my consciousness faded, I found myself floating in a dark space with a bright light ahead. I knew I was supposed to move towards the light, but I couldn’t help but consider what that meant leaving behind. Truthfully, for me, there wasn’t much holding me back. I was 34 years old, single, and working a job that I didn’t have any passion for. I wasn’t close with any friends and didn’t have much of a relationship with my family. My dog, who was my closest companion, had passed away the year before. My days were empty and my evenings were lonely, with my leftover free time meaninglessly spent on games and entertainment.

With nothing to lose, I pushed forward into the light, and was born again.

Being a baby again was an odd experience. I couldn’t really hold on to a thought, and my emotions would oscillate wildly between hunger, sleepiness, discomfort, and temporary satisfaction. As my eyesight improved, I came to recognize the faces of my parents, and attached them to the voices I had started to discern meaning out of. As I grew, I started to gain control of my movements, slowly at first and then much more rapidly until I could walk for increased amounts of time. I started to find my voice, and slowly the meaning of language came back to me.

In all this time I knew, broadly, that I had been reincarnated, and that I retained memories of my old life. However, it was like there was this fog that I couldn’t quite penetrate. Was it because my brain wasn’t developed enough yet? Or was it that this brain didn’t have sufficient language skills to parse my own memories? I wondered how that would even work, when I had moments of clarity enough to consider anything at all; how could I have memories without the neural structure to support them, in the first place? Was that proof of a soul? I hadn’t even believed in the existence of souls in my previous life.

As an infant, long-term memory was my primary problem. I found myself repeating the same patterns of thoughts because I wasn’t yet able to remember my own former considerations on my new reality. I was increasingly able to think about my situation for longer periods of time and, slowly but surely, found myself remembering the thoughts I had on it previously.

From the outside, my parents would say that I was a reasonably well behaved child, but not necessarily out of the ordinary. I learned fast, although as their first child they didn’t have that much of a basis of comparison, so they didn’t think I was particularly beyond the norm. I learned their names–Horg, my father, and Sharma, my mother–and also learned my own name: Pilus.

Sometime between the ages of three and four, the fog lifted. My family had gone to the beach for a picnic and an afternoon of play. It was after lunch when I looked down at my hands, the small hands of a young boy, and with startling clarity I recalled my adult hands of my former life. I remembered my accident, my death, my former life, my language, my knowledge, and knew that it was all different from my current life, language, and knowledge. I assumed then that I had developed enough neural framework and language capacity to maintain this train of thought. I was finally forming long-term memories. I heaved a deep sigh and tried to sort out what I knew.

What I knew about my present reality: against all odds, I had reincarnated. Or, it was at least against all that I had thought I had known from my previous life. Perhaps everyone reincarnated after all, and the only thing that was unusual was my retained memories. I would need to more carefully consider the nature of reality and the universe when I could acquire more information to figure out more. I established that I had not reincarnated in the same time as I had died: the technology level on display in my home and town was primitive, at best. While primitive, it clearly wasn’t poverty; my family seemed to do well enough, we didn’t lack for food or clothing, and everyone I met seemed healthy. This world seemed peaceful, too. My first long-term memory from this world would be an afternoon picnic with my parents at the beach. This couldn’t be a world that just recently collapsed. I couldn’t bring myself to believe that I had reincarnated into the past, since time normally only flows forward. Could civilization have collapsed long ago, and this was far into the future, after humanity had recovered some semblance of social decorum?

My first clue was the language I had learned as I had grown up. I knew off the bat that it wasn’t a language from my time, at least none of the ones I would have been capable of recognizing. I was no polyglot in my previous life, but I was worldly enough. I had seen plenty of foreign films, and would have recognized if it were any of the romance, Slavic, or Nordic languages, which given the facial structure and complexion of my parents seemed the most logical. What was more, I couldn’t recognize any of the prefixes or suffixes, I picked up on absolutely zero loan-words, and the grammar was completely different. Since we were at the beach, and not on a vacation, this was a seaside town; I had a pretty good grasp of the geography of Earth, and knew the coasts well enough. This couldn’t just be a sufficiently remote country I had never heard of, so this must be very, very far into the future.

Unless this wasn’t Earth at all.

If I was being honest, I was already hoping that might be the case. I had been a big fan of reincarnation stories before my death, as well as stories of heroes being whisked away, summoned across worlds. Otherworlders would bring strength or knowledge to the new world and save it, or themselves, or both. The notion of reincarnating into a magical fantasy world was already pretty well ingrained into my head, but this was my reality now and I wanted to approach it as reasonably as possible. It wasn’t like I was summoned here, fully-formed and with magical or overpowered cheat abilities. I had to learn to speak and understand words as an infant; I wasn’t gifted some otherworldly language comprehension abilities. I had never seen magic…

Wait. I shut my eyes and rolled back my memories, new as they were, as far back as I could. We had come to the beach to have an early summer’s day picnic. Before we ate, my mother and I played in the cold shallows of the sea while father watched from the beach. I had run around a bit chasing bubbles my mother blew, and once I was tired, we ate lunch. After lunch, I remembered my reincarnation. Something about this picture wasn’t right, but I couldn’t place it. Was it the food? The water? The…

The bubbles. I hadn’t chased traditional soap bubbles full of air blown by my mother, like I might have as a child in my old life. They had been floating globules of water. When they popped, they splashed me. They contained a sufficient amount of water that would have been impossible to be floating around under their own power. And since there was no technology at play, that could only mean one thing.

The orbs of water were magic. This world had magic!

I turned on the beach, looked towards the water, and took an excited breath as I clenched my tiny hands into tiny fists. The sea breeze whipped my messy black hair back and forth, the salt in the air stinging my blue eyes which were wide with excitement. I couldn’t wait to explore the possibilities. If my mother could do magic, that boded well for me, as well. I raised my eyes to the sky as my brain swam with a newfound excitement, and, oh–

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Over the horizon of the ocean sat a massive gas giant, a burnt orange orb with bright purple rings which occupied a huge portion of the otherwise clear blue sky.

Ok, so, this definitely wasn’t Earth.

* * *

Over the next few months, I sometimes found myself falling back into a youthful stupor, not necessarily forgetting my situation but simply so distracted by the wealth of new experience that my growing brain was overwhelmed. It was an odd feeling, having adult memories and an adult’s knowledge and logic but being swept along by the whims of a child’s brain. It begged the question how any of this was possible, but then, in my former life, magic wasn’t possible either.

In fact, magic broke just about every law of physics I knew. If the rules of reality were broken, I had to wonder, was any of this real at all? Was this an extended misfiring of my dying brain? Was my current life and existence real, but my former life and all my memories from it just some kind of defect with my current brain? No, that couldn’t be right. I clearly carried some knowledge I shouldn’t be able to have from past experiences that this version of me never had. I would have to do some experimentation to be absolutely sure, but at the very least, I had knowledge of arithmetic that I could do already that I would not be able to do as an almost-four year old, such as multiplication, which I could prove to be true just by counting.

Maybe this was a simulation. After all, I could not prove that my previous life was not a simulation. A well-known philosopher, Nick Bostrom, popularized the simulation hypothesis in my former world, which suggested that all of our existence could simply be the product of a simulation of a sufficiently advanced civilization and that we would have no way of knowing. Of course, that didn’t necessarily change the meaning of one’s own life, but it might explain how I could now exist in the form that I currently do.

That was unlikely to be provable one way or the other. Of course, while I was regularly curious about how the universe came to be and what it all meant during my previous life, it rarely affected my day to day. I would likely have to accept that I would never understand how or why I was reincarnated. As this was a world where magic was real, one could assume that the presence of magic here allowed for reincarnation to have happened. If there existed a world that could summon people from other worlds, or at an even larger scale, if there existed a universe that could summon people from other universes, it did not necessarily need to obey the laws of the target world or universe at all.

Thinking this through, especially before the age of four, regularly gave me a headache. The important part for me was understanding enough about the nature of my reality in order to use that knowledge to better myself and my situation.

It was not like my former life was bad, per se. It was just disappointing. I had regrets, and those regrets started coming up pretty early in my life. This was a new opportunity, and while one cannot protect from all future regret, I wanted to do everything I could to get ahead. Whether or not this was some kind of simulation or game or another kind of reality altogether, I simply wanted to close the gap between what I knew and what I didn’t even know that I didn’t know, before I missed out on any chances.

Was this a game? I thought back to specific reincarnation stories that I knew of from my former life. It was usually stories of summoned heroes who would get stats displays and skill boards, but I was sure I had watched one or two reincarnation shows where the main characters could see their own stats. Usually it involved a simple incantation, like saying “display status” or “character sheet” something similar, and it would appear in their vision. Of course, if this were a PC game and an RPG, I would probably tap the profile key. As I envisioned my old computer’s keyboard and thought back to the last game I played, it was probably the P key…

As I imagined myself pressing the P key in my mind’s eye, my profile screen popped up right in front of me.

Pilus Horgson (Lv 1)

HP: 10/10

MP: 13/13

Status: none

EXP: 27/100

Skills: none

Right after that window came up, a second window popped up that read:

Skill acquired: Appraisal

I closed the pop up, which simply required a force of will, and saw that Appraisal was added to my previously non-existent skill list.

Right, so, this is some sort of game, I thought to myself. Then I corrected myself, because maybe I was just having a mental break of some kind. This didn’t prove anything, although it certainly did suggest that this was not exactly a level of reality as I had previously expected to be living in. It also, at least to some degree, suggested that my previous reality might have been more likely to be a simulation or game as well, as my former mind and memories still existed. Some kind of data corruption, perhaps? Although I would have thought that the advanced civilization that could make these kinds of perfectly real game simulations would have solved pointer errors already. Of course, none of this ruled out the fact that my memories of my previous life themselves might be false, and they were simply programmed into this young brain for some reason.

To be honest, I put aside those questions pretty quickly. I didn’t really care about the nature of reality with this screen in front of my face. Sure, I wondered a bit about how it could exist, since it wasn’t a physical construct; I could put my hand through it, and my mother, who was nearby, didn’t seem to see it when she glanced over to check in on me before going back to her work. My imagination was not so good that I could summon up visual hallucinations like this on my own. If I thought about a racecar, I couldn’t summon up a true image of a racecar in my vision, just the usual memory of a racecar. This was some kind of magic, or technology, that was beyond explanation at the moment. Two things leapt out at me that took over my priority.

First, that skill acquisition told me a lot. I seemed to have gained a skill through the act of doing, alone. That certainly suggested that I could unlock new skills if I could figure out how. I didn’t seem to have any skills beforehand, although that didn’t rule out that other people weren’t born with inherent skills, and didn’t tell me anything about whether or not they could also learn new skills this way. I would have to investigate more about skills somehow.

Second, and maybe more immediately important, was my EXP. I was already just over a quarter of the way to leveling up, and had not yet leveled up before. How had I gained these experience points? It was either something I did very infrequently over the last few years of being a baby and infant, and gained rare points from it, or something from the act of daily living that had diminishing returns, as otherwise I surely would have gained enough to level up already in the past nearly-four years. What even was an experience point?

I had not killed any monsters, or fulfilled any quests, so it wasn’t purely a reward for some achievement that I was aware of. Taken at face value, if I gained experience points through new experiences, a child such as myself doesn’t really experience all that much. A huge amount of my life so far has been sleeping, eating, and casual play. I had learned to crawl, then walk, and I had learned some motor skills, but those were pretty basic things. Perhaps I needed to try more new things to gain more experience.

Except, I wasn’t even four years old yet. What could I even do?