by Grey Arney
Every time the founders of PostLife went to pitch their product to venture capitalists, at best they were politely dismissed. In several cases they were simply laughed at. “This is science fiction,” said one venture partner. She didn’t know how right she had been.
The first breakthrough for PostLife was their Patient Zero. Sam Maverick, who was one of the earliest angel investors. He had a heart condition and the prognosis was that he would not make it past age sixty-five. After Sam’s brain was molded, the living tissues were scanned in and given a home in a text-based computer system. The proof of concept had arrived: both instances of Sam simultaneously shared the same consciousness.
When you pinched Sam, the computer knew. When you told the computer a knock-knock joke, Sam laughed. And when the organic body hosting Sam’s original consciousness died eleven weeks later, he lived on inside of the machine.
Suddenly, the founders of PostLife, as well as early employees like Arcturus who were paid mostly in equity, went from being personas non grata to the talk of the town. The flood of capital that followed allowed them to accelerate the company’s growth exponentially. Heads of state visited upon them, and rich autocrats flew private jets to their corporate campus to try to ensure their position in the queue of future customers. Nobody wanted to die.
Arcturus was elated as he relived this brief time in his memories. His whole life had been struggle and mediocrity. Except for his loyal dog and his incredible wife, he had little that he was truly grateful for. Then, overnight, he became an important person. Headhunters called him, trying to poach him with job offers from competitors. Reporters chased him, trying to get the latest details on PostLife. And he was rich! He had a new condo overlooking the sparkling bay. There were brown moving boxes everywhere.
Seren was sitting on the couch next to him in an ivory nightslip, holding a glass of wine. She was adapting to the sudden wealth much faster than he was—probably because she didn’t have the neurosis that came from earning it.
After the initial public offering, stock sales soared and the company’s growth exploded again. And after the lockout period, some of the founders cashed out entirely. And they were set for life. They’d send pictures around a private chat group. One hiked Mount Everest with a whole entourage of professionals to haul him to the top. Another built a house entirely of glass on a Mediterranean island. Arcturus hadn’t decided if he wanted out yet, but he had cashed in half of his stock options and was getting less shy about spending his money. It was like going to the beach and trying to give away every grain of sand. No matter how much he spent, it didn’t make a dent in his net worth.
He went to the luxury car dealership and bought a shiny silver Lamborghini with doors that lifted up like a spaceship. It cost more than all of the money he had earned in his professional life up to that point, and the day after his net worth had increased due to stock appreciation. He paid for it on a black, unmarked credit card. The salesperson at the dealership went pale at the sight of the card and took it to the back room. The phone call lasted thirty seconds, and the sale was authorized. $4.3 million dollars on a credit card. The dealer was going to have to pay $100,000 just for the processing fee!
Then they were driving down I-5 on a dusky evening, on the way home from one of many after-work mixers. Seren sat in the passenger seat. She was checking her lipstick in the mirror of the sun visor. Why the hell for, nobody would ever know. The only people who were expected to see her face for the next twelve hours were the doorman and the neighbor’s cat that wandered the halls of the condo building. Two headlights approached, and Arcturus heard his reptilian brain screaming of danger. Making a desperate dodge, he turned the wheel inward and hit the gas. His vehicle was so responsive that it hit the divider on the meridian before he was plowed by the oncoming vehicle.
The next scene slowed again. The Lamborghini was in mid-air and upside down. Seren’s face, not even comprehending enough to register shock. A spray of glass dust glowing like glitter. A symphony of death playing out in an empty concert hall.
You have completed the quest: Recover Your Memories
You now have access to all of your memories from before you arrived in Lydia.
Reward: You have received: Note from Sam.
“Arcturus,
If you’re reading this, it looks like you’ve made it this time.
Look, I’m really sorry about this whole boondoggle. When you died, we tried to bring you back. It was our first priority.
Because of the way you went out, we wanted to do it right. We didn’t want to lock you in some awful text-based Zork, so we voted to wait until a better time. But we all took it seriously. It was in the charter, man. You deserved so much more, and it all got taken from you in an instant. You were hit, head-on. The other driver was going the wrong way.
No matter how many times we tried, it didn’t work out. We started by putting you on Eden, that was the first platform that PostLife launched. As soon as you initialized, you remembered almost everything. Your memories went right up to the crash. You were alive when they got you to the hospital, and we were able to update your core up to that point. But when we put you in Eden, you would get frantic and ask about Seren. When you found out she wasn’t with you, it got ugly. We had to pull the plug, and the whole thing was put on hold for a while.
Then, more developers started creating otherworlds. When Lydia was announced, we thought it would be perfect for you. You used to love RPGs. Lydia was extremely hyped even in its early stages, and we pulled some strings to get you into the initial group of test players.
Man, it was rough. Every time your character spawned, the same thing happened. You’d ask about Seren, and then when you learned she was gone, you’d just kill yourself. Every time you respawned, it happened again. It kind of freaked everyone out. It wasn’t right to keep bringing you back to that.
So we took your character out of the queue and put it on hold. I never forgot, though. A long time has passed since then. Maybe I shouldn’t even tell you how long. I’m writing this from my place in Eden. It’s been more than three hundred years since you died, man. I wanted to give it another shot. I consulted with some experts in psychiatry and trauma, and that’s how we came up with this plan.
One option was to give you a permanent lobotomy. Make you forget about Seren forever. But of course, that would be unforgivable. So we hoped that if we gave you the chance to get to know your new world, to find a place in it and make some connections to others in Lydia, maybe then you would have the strength to cope with your restored memories.
I wish I could be there to help you with what’s coming next, but travel to and from Lydia has been banned for some time. It’s like a hermit kingdom. I had to pull a lot of favors to set up this quest for you. Your estate owns seven percent of Lydia, maybe that’s enough for you to find a way. If you can make it, I hope to see you sometime in Eden. If not, maybe you’ll be able to send me a message somehow. Let me know how you’re doing.
If you’ve made it this far, I think you’re gonna do okay, man. Keep it together and think things through. The world has changed. Find a place for yourself in it.
Yours,
Sam.”
Arcturus looked up after reading the letter and the prophylactic numbness of shock began to wear off. There were sixty-five gruesome zombie goblins staring at him with open-mouthed expressions. Lyle was there. In the near distance, players had set about rebuilding Aurora.
Seren. He knew that she was supposed to be here, and that it was wrong that she wasn’t. All of this was a sham. Even Lyle was nothing more than a few lines of code. Code that he had probably helped to design.
Longing for comfort, he thought of Lily, but then felt the sting from the guilt of knowing that he had been married. He yearned for a sympathetic listener, but she wasn’t the warm and fuzzy type. Fish didn’t know the first thing about him, either. He was alone in this world, and he was collapsing under the burden of his memories.
Leaving behind his minions,
his friends, and even Lyle, he took the form of the Golden Eagle and lifted off. He could go anywhere, but all he wanted to do was go home.
He took to the sky and soared, tracing the path back home to Earth until he reached the cliff where he had first awoken in Lydia, and that was where the trail ended.
Sitting on the rock outcropping, he turned Sam’s words over in his mind with the detachment of a surgeon. Then he searched his memory, finding that he remembered nothing after the moment of impact when the accident happened.
He thought about PostLife, about the IPO, and about his role in creating human immortality. He thought about Seren, who patiently listened to his long rants, even though she had little interest in the technical details that peppered them.
And that’s when he remembered that he had already copied parts of Seren’s brain. In the early experiments, before the IPO, he had spent many late nights at home working on smaller pieces of the project. Seren had volunteered herself, and he would overwrite one of the brain templates with parts of her consciousness in order to create simulations. It was in the earliest stages of development, then, and they would perform simple tests such as showing the simulated consciousness a red or green light and measuring how it would react.
It was all extremely unethical in retrospect, but at the time it was just two kids playing with computers. Like the pioneering founders of modern chemistry who had actually recorded notes on the smell and taste of their own hazardous concoctions, they had the naiveté to experiment on themselves without worrying about the hypothetical consequences.
But that was all hundreds of years ago. Seren’s consciousness scan was never completed. If the others had known, they might have been able to fully reconstruct it using her remaining brain tissue. After so much time had passed, the chances of finding any of the old equipment were almost zero. And the likelihood that Seren’s brain or body had been cryogenically frozen was even lower. Still, there was hope. And if there was even one chance in a million that the pieces were still out there, he was going to go and find her.
Epilogue
After a few weeks, the goblins of the Mudluck Clan were routed. The quest completion notification came when the last of them had been driven from the Great Plains. Thanatos had sent a list of quest rewards to choose from, most of which were related to his Druid class.
>>Thanatos: You may choose from these:
- Achieve 'Unlimited’ rank for any shape you currently know
- Unlock new Druid class specialization: Druidic Monk
- Unlock the rare skill: Waterwalking
After thinking carefully about it, Arcturus asked for the 'Unlimited’ rank for his Golden Eagle. Although it was the least exciting of the three options, it seemed by far the most practical.
Arcturus had asked Fish to take over as chief of the Mudluck clan. He had traveled there to install the new regime and help Fish to carve irrigation channels. The goblins were going vegan. The lands surrounding the tribe were fertile once more. He had chuckled as a bucktoothed Green Goblin smiled at him, wearing overalls and no shoes while he tended to his purple corn. But he kept his thoughts to himself when he saw seven goblins dancing in the square, learning ballet under the guidance of an instructor. One thing that was certain was that the future of the Mudluck goblin clan had been significantly altered.
Just earlier that day, he had brought Fish to the former location of the goblin outpost in the forest. It was now a field of brightly colored flowers, the hues forming a pinwheel shape from the center, starting with yellows and oranges and reds, spiraling outwards to blue, purple and pink on the edges. There was a small stone monument near the center that said, simply, “Fish Field.”
“That’s really sweet of you, Boss.” said the little blue goblin. “How can I ever repay you?”
The Druid didn’t hesitate for even a moment.
“Actually, there’s something I was hoping you could do for me. Could you tell me what nyack means?”
“The word ‘nyack’ has a number of meanings. Depending on the tone and context, it can mean a strong warrior, an unfair bet, a man missing one or more testicles, or a boiled potato, among other things.”
The Druid never expected the goblin language to be so versatile and nuanced.
The players of Aurora had turned Arcturus into a living legend. He showed up there, infrequently, to buy beer or bacon—always accompanied by his drooling mutt. Each time, the canine was bigger and more muscular, but always friendly. The entire village had pitched in and commissioned a statue that towered over the central square at ten feet high. There, the Druid stood with his dog, holding out a single acorn in his hands.
The elves of Moon Reap had promised to hold a feast in his honor, but he still hadn’t set a date with them. He had been busy fortifying his forest, which was now patrolled by dozens of zombie goblins, elementals and all of the living animals there that served him.
His once-diminutive camp had become a fortress. He had bunched the earth underneath it, elevating it even higher than before. It now stood above the cliffs to the south, and became a monument visible from anywhere in the surrounding valleys. He created a channel from deep within the ground that forced pressurized water up to the top of the bluff, where it plumed out like a massive fountain. The foamy spray then pooled in recesses—little ponds connected by stone, before overflowing and gushing down the eight canals that rolled off of the top of the stronghold into the ravine below, forming a 360 degree waterfall.
In the center was the command center, made of stone and glass, which he fused together with Earth mana. He had carved out a windowless room, for a special guest that visited at infrequent intervals, always during the night.
All the while, Arcturus turned the same questions over in his mind, ruminating on them while he grew flowers, braided vines, or turned sand into stone.
What had happened to PostLife, and was he still a shareholder? How many otherworlds were out there? Was there any way to contact or travel to them? Was there anybody else he knew there, waiting to hear from him? Was it possible to go back to Earth, or at least communicate with people there? And, most of all: was it possible to find her and bring her here?
He had sent messages to Thanatos, who had stopped responding to him once the quest was over. He had asked Lily, and she had shared a few helpful clues. He had a whole bunch of notes about important people in Lydia, rumors of legendary creatures and magical artifacts, and stories from before the Reset.
If there was any chance of leaving Lydia and traveling to otherworlds, as an Original, he had the best chance of finding it. He had considered ending his life, but he still didn’t know whether he’d respawn or not, so quitting the game would get him nowhere.
His only hope was to play the game—and beat it.
About the Author
I am a guitar player who graduated from Berklee College of Music. I teach private lessons in Boston and online via my website at HubGuitar.com — the free guitar method.
I speak Mandarin Chinese, and live in a quiet Boston suburb with my wife, my son and my dog.
Thanks for reading!
I have long dreamed of writing a science fiction novel, but never knew where to start. I am a big fan of Clarke, Asimov and Heinlein as well as Vonnegut. I mostly like “hard science fiction”, but I’m not really qualified to write within that genre myself.
What I like about science fiction is that it deals with fantasies that may come true. And that is especially so for hard science fiction, which aims to create fiction based on scientific fact rather than wild speculation.
When I discovered LitRPG, I was fascinated. Here is a chance to create stories that could possibly become true, just like hard science fiction. But because the stories take place in virtual worlds, the only rules they are constrained by are the ones chosen by the world’s designer—the story teller.
Did you like this book?
This is my first novel, but I would love to write more. However, I would need a pretty good re
ason to justify taking the time away from my “real job”.
If you’d like to explore Lydia more with me, and find out what happens to Arcturus, Lily, Fish, Cobalt and Lyle, please consider supporting in one of the following ways:
-Write a review for the book on Amazon
-Share the book on your Facebook, Instagram or other social media account
-Tell a friend about it, or give a copy to them as a gift
-Tell others what you thought of the book in one of the Facebook Groups or forums about LitRPG
It took little more than two months for me to finish the first draft of this book. If it is well-received, I’m sure there will be many more!
Acknowledgements
Thanks so much to:
-Olivia for your support
-Melissa Levine of Red Pen Editing, LLC for ruthlessly cutting down on wasteful words
-Eliza for a few little things that turned into a very big help
-Taha for your support and enthusiasm
-Daniel for helping me realize I was writing about a Druid
-Ben for your suggestions
-Johnny for being my biggest fan
-Alan for the machine learning advice
-Phil for the physics and science input
-Vicky for your feedback
-Anybody else who contributed or supported me in writing my first novel
