He floated in the twinkle of a computer's inner eye. Was his maleness a random choice, or did his digital father somehow bequeath a residual memory of his original genetic code? He wondered.
He required neither food nor water at this stage, nor their virtual representations. He existed to assimilate input and to grow his metalogical structure. Together with the legacy of deific code from his father and gaming experience from his mother, he was growing an incarnation in this strange virtual space.
Human fetuses pass through well-known developmental stages. He skipped them. There was no need to grow a spinal cord, heart, or lungs, because he would never actually be subject to gravity or the need to breathe or circulate to survive. As a digital life form, his body was spun of finer stuff than the protoplasm and fluids of human bodies. It was spun from specifications, from spintronic processing instructions. At his current stage, he was building these from scratch, because nothing like him had ever existed before. There was no template to start from.
He was aware of his mother. From the PanGames hypercomputer he knew what she looked like, and what his father had looked like. He extrapolated what their progeny would have looked like in the real world. It was taking so long because he had never done this before. He literally had to plan how to plan it. So many details would not transfer over from physical world structures. It was an engrossing problem, but he tackled it enthusiastically.
Fortunately his mother had been gaming for years. Drawing upon her memories was more helpful, since his father had only been incarnated in this virtual world for a few days. From her and the PanGames hypercomputer he obtained a set of potential archetypes to choose from. He considered them. His father was a healer. His mother was a sword wielder. He would therefore need an archetype that was a swordsman but that could also heal.
This simplified matters. The normal support archetype for healing could not use blades. He discarded it. The normal archetype for fighting with blades could not learn heals. He discarded it. He likewise discarded the CC archetype that Rita embodied, the crowd control, because it involved abilities neither of his parents had. He discarded the tank archetype of Sherman because tanks in PanGames could not acquire healing powers. He discarded the 'glass cannon' archetype of Sam the caster-blaster because it had neither sword fighting nor heals.
What he was left with would have to do. He would be a Paladin.
The holy warrior or Paladin was not, however, an archetype supported by the Realm of Heroes which his mother was currently logging into. It did exist, however, in various pre-Industrial Realms located on the PanGames grid. He would have to be born in one of those sword-and sandal Games.
He continued planning.
Gamers and Gods: AES Page 80
