A gentle breeze of fresh air… The warmth of real sunlight…

Sam stood completely still, his eyes closed, surrounded by a field of golden wheat crop. He lifted his head high to bathe his face in the intense heat of the midday sunshine. His arms outstretched either side of him as far as he could stretch them. The Gameworld sun was nothing in comparison to the real thing.

A slight pressure appeared against his nose and chin. His eyes opened, and he gave a small sigh. He’d floated up against the glass window ahead of him. He gently pushed himself back a little bit. The golden field of wheat had vanished, replaced by the cold and featureless metallic walls that made up the small room he was in. The sense of fresh air had also vanished, another construct of his own imagination. The recycled air was heavier and held a strange taste to it that his lungs simply refused to get used to. The only thing that had been real, was the sunlight. Warm radiating light bathed the entire room, the only sensation he had left of his home, but soon, that too vanished as the sun disappeared off the edge of the window, taking its light with it. The view before him now was of the stary backdrop that was space. A beautiful sight in its own right. While it lacked the familiar warmth he was used to, even Sam had to admit the view before him was far better than any night sky could offer. Then, as if the universe itself sought to ruin the moment completely, Sam’s eyes finally settled on the new object that slowly creeped into the view of the window. A barren rock. The casual observer unaware of the history or layout of the Sol system would have mistaken it for an abnormally large asteroid. In fact, Sam himself had done so on occasion, but the presence of its shattered, donut shaped lunar companion confirmed that the rock before him, was the remains of his home world.

Earth. A barren wasteland. Waterless and void of any measurable atmosphere. Nothing but a giant rock in the sky. Sam’s hands quietly tightened into fists as he brought his arms back to his sides. His existence as an Admin of the Gameworld meant he spent very little time in this world and thus tended to miss most major events. Elections, wars, revolutions, new advances in technology, and even shifts in culture. He’d missed them all, meaning he often had plenty of homework to catch up on with his every visit here. Yet he’d gotten used to such a thing. They all had. An eternal life had that effect. You got used to everything in time but…

One hundred years ago… they’d woken up to find out they’d missed an event that nothing they’d ever been through before could have prepared them for. Their home… their planet… Gone in the blink of an eye as far as they were concerned. He’d entrusted the fate of this world to the rest of his kind as he walked another… only to see the remains of his birthplace now before him.

Sam grabbed a guardrail bolted to the nearest wall of the room and pushed himself around. Zero G wasn’t something he was used to, although he was a fast learner. They all were. He drifted his way out of the room, and through the twisting, thin and heavily plated corridors of the outer shell. A dense armour plating that made up the outer layer of the ship. After thirty minutes of silently navigating corridors, he’d memorised one hundred years ago now, he finally came to the central axil.

The outer layer held a lot of mass with the thick and dense armour plating that protected the ship from asteroids and radiation, but that meant it was difficult to spin at any notable speed, and thus the outer shell had no gravity. The inner layers had however been constructed to be able to spin fast enough to simulate earth-like gravity. Not exactly one G, more like point eight, but close enough to be habitable. The only connection between the inner layers and the outer shell was the central axil which the inner layers spun around. He quietly drifted down the translucent cylindrical corridor that allowed complete view over the inner most habitable layer of the O’Neal cylinder. The ship itself held the name Salvation, although people more often referred to it as The City, as it was the last. The only remaining remnant of humankind. Orbiting around their dead planet, clinging to the delusional hope that someday they’d be able to return home.

The cityscape that spanned the full three hundred and sixty degrees of his vision was filled with holographic screens and massive, vibrant buildings. Occasional translucent lift shafts made their way from the cityscape to the central axil, allowing for passage up and down to pretty much anywhere significant. The occasional group of civilians passed Sam by as he continued to drift. People who’d grown up completely used to the varying gravities that different habitable levels offered, and the lack of gravity within the central axil and outermost layer. The differences still made Sam’s stomach churn. Even the view before him, a city that was somehow all around him. Above, below and to either side… he closed his eyes before his mind felt too overwhelmed by it all.

He hadn’t left the Gameworld since the year they’d brought them out to inform them about Earth. Everything around him was oddly new to him despite the century long age that everything held. This ship was old. Older than him in fact, but it had been refitted one hundred years ago to better accommodate the survivors of Earth’s… well… whatever had happened to it.

Sam remembered them once trying to explain it to him. They’d taken all four admins out at once to do so… but the facts had never been that important to him. That meeting had been just after they’d broken the news to them all. His memories about those moments afterward were a blur of rage, pain and anger. The details had gotten lost in the emotional storm. He took a deep breath of the stale tasting air and opened his eyes back to the dizzying view. He’d continued drifting forwards, so his eyes now fixed upon the specific lift shaft he needed. An inelegant twist and shove off the translucent wall of the axil corridor, and his feet planted themselves onto the flat floor of the awaiting lift.

A single button press, and the doors above his head sealed. The lift then quickly flooded with a pink, translucent liquid. Sam let his body become completely submerged and calmly began to breath in the liquid instead of air. Travelling from the central axil down to the rotating cityscape was a wild ride of changing forces. The acceleration of the lift, the rotation of the cityscape itself, all induced forces that would throw his body in a variety of directions. The dense, thick, air rich liquid prevented him from becoming a puddle of jam as a result of the journey by firming up under the pressure of such forces. It was as if he were embedded in warm jelly, only he could also breathe it. The lift shot off. The acceleration of the lift made it feel like the cityscape was above, but as the lift met terminal velocity, what Sam could define as up became a little harder to focus on. Finally, the lift began to slow, which now made the cityscape feel as though it was beneath him. The lift came to a dead stop, and the liquid quickly drained away. The pink liquid almost immediately dried as his own clothes seemed to react to his wet state. They dried the liquid from both them and his own skin with a blast of hot air, as if he’d walked into a hot wind tunnel. After a few more seconds, he was as dry as when he’d gotten into the lift, and the door to the city beyond snapped open.

The existence of the game mainframe was a complex one in the politics of the current world, mainly because the mainframe itself was incredibly complex in its own right. To Sam’s knowledge, the Gameworld had originally been marketed as a simulation experiment. Create a world with realistic people and watch what happened. Scientists, philosophers and even governments would pay literally anything to get results from the Gameworld, to understand fundamentally how people on a whole respond to crisis or specific world changing events. The game’s creator had made the world to understand what it truly meant to be alive, what it truly meant to exist in the world we know. It also held a secondary objective as a means of testing AI in a controlled environment, but that experiment had long since been abandoned. Despite its lack of ability to yield any worthwhile results due to the stagnation of the people of the Gameworld, the creator of the game argued that the world should continue to exist anyway. Contracts for the admins included the possibility that their job could and most likely would continue indefinitely, and despite laws changing, due to the nature of the contracts, the laws that they were created within hold to this day specifically for those contracts due to some rather annoying loopholes in the law that the creator had taken advantage of. All a part of Evelin’s plan, as she’d never intended for her creation to simply be some experiment. She’d dreamt of a perfect world and wished to make it a reality. A dream that had convinced Sam to be where he was now.

Many cases had been raised to shut the game down, but they had all long since failed. ‘A waste of resources or manpower’ was the main reason, but the game mainframe had been designed to last forever. It had the ability to sustain itself indefinitely without much aid from the outside world. The core mainframe had access to 3D printers, although limited to only make replacement parts for itself and upgrades with approval. To add salt in the wounds, they tested four random subjects within the Gameworld for every test they had to prove that the artificial lifeforms that existed within the virtual world were nothing more than programs, machines, instead the Gameworld residents passed every single test they could throw at them. They met every single scientific condition for having free will, conscious thought or generally being a form of life. Despite the failure of the experiment, the imperfect first generation of AI first introduced into the game had since evolved to have minds almost identical to a real human. It was deemed unethical to shut the Gameworld down, with the crime for such an act being seen as multiple accounts of genocide.

Thus, here they were. The Gameworld had first been brought into operation twenty thousand years ago, making Sam just as old, with the slight additional rounding error values of his age before becoming an admin. A number long since lost to time. Eventually Sam made his way back to the very small building in the city dedicated to the game mainframe. The mainframe itself was surprisingly small for its complexity, only taking up about half of a small office building which was dwarfed by every other building around it. The other half of the building was mainly taken up by the cryogenic systems and facilities to house each of the admins should they ever consider spending more than one day out in this world, none of them ever did though. He now stood alone in the room with nothing but the pod, which he slowly walked over to. He’d come out to organise his own thoughts, perhaps try to manage his emotions. Things certainly seemed clearer now. Zoie had been right. He was sick of existing as a ghost. In this world he had little choice… but the Gameworld offered a chance to exist as something more.

He placed his hand against a particular wall panel. The clothes rack from before slowly slid out from the wall once again. He undressed and pressed the wall panel again to retract the rack after hanging his clothes back where they’d been before. He made himself comfortable in the pod as it slowly closed up around him. He expertly reconnected every single wire before laying back and closing his eyes. It would take a while for his body to be restored to its cryogenic state, but his mind could enter the Gameworld almost instantly, leaving the pod to deal with the complex process.