Sunday 13 August 2017

To Be Alive Is To... - 02

I give my avatar body one last look over, it is the spitting image of me. The pod must provide a full body scan and etcetera to allow for this amount of detail, I don’t particularly think I’m bad looking, but I’m not Tom Cruise.

“Can you remove the scarring?” In a blink all the little white and surgical scars disappeared and I nod to myself. “Right I’m finished, load my into the game.”

“There are several dozen spawn points ranging from easy to hard, would you like to select one?”

“What’s the difference?”

“Easy spawns usually spawn you in a wide safe area such as a colony or ship to be awoken from cryogenic sleep. Medium spawns put you in an area that has conflict over territory through rampant native beasts or war. Hard spawns put you in an environment where you’re only objective is to survive, and perhaps even thrive. The system is modular and adaptive, if circumstances change the system will adjust to make things easier, or harder for you.”

“Okay… What’s the benefit of going for harder spawns then?”

“By selecting a harder spawn area there is a significant higher chance of acquiring rare and unique items both in the area you spawn in… And permanently in the Galaxy. To make this balanced however, all characters can only experience one life in the Galaxy and upon death you will have to recreate a character. This bonus is only character bound and not account bound.”

“Let’s do hard mode then, if I die I can just respawn and keep trying again.” I grin.

“Death penalty is one full day until you can respawn again, thank you for selecting your spawn mode, I shall select your spawn randomly.”

“FU-!”






“-CK!”

‘Damn fucking computer.’ I cursed in my head.

I’m back in the pod, all the screens are exactly the way they were before but something feels off, like a subtle stillness that quiets everything around it then I come to realise I’m not wearing my clothes. It feels like a sort of soft gel around my entire body, looking at it from the outside I’m wearing a luminescent orange space suit and what else feels like multiple layers in between. I blink a couple of times and realise I’m wearing some sort of mask as well, not like the helmet in the real pod but a complete different one altogether.

Systems booting up…

Those words appear on the lower view of my vision.

Initialising…

Then my previously darkened vision explodes with colours and status updates, it has taken a compressed version of all the screens around me and connected them to my vision.

“Audio log detected on station mainframe. Playing...” A dehumanised voice plays in my ears, I’m unable to discern of its male or female.

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