Welcome to Eden: A LitRPG/Fantasy Gamelit, page 1
Welcome to Eden
by David Lingard
A note from the author
I just wanted to say here, thank you, whoever you are for however you have arrived at this book and my story. It makes a big difference to authors like me, who like to feel as though their hard work and dedication is appreciated when our work is read.
Your investment of your own time and money is as always, well appreciated. It takes a long time and a lot of effort to write, edit and release a book, so please, I ask that you rate and review everything that you read – and not just this book, so that lesser known authors can grow their audience and gain the credibility that they deserve.
Also, I have a website that is usually kept up to date with current works, reviews and a few extra little bits. You’ll find it at: www.davidlingard.com
Prologue
“The world that you see around you today is not the same world that everyone else can see or experience. Let’s forget about perception for a moment and think about those who have a mental disability, the blind, the handicapped. Do you think that these people share your view of the world? Well Swarm Entertainment have a little secret to share with you. We are going to level the playing field.”
The screen behind Jennifer came to life as she spoke her last sentence. It exploded with the colourful round logo of Swarm Entertainment as she looked out at the eager faces staring expectantly at the screen. There were thousands of people in front of her – but she didn’t seem to mind, she had become used to it by now.
The screen faded into an eagle-eye view of a luscious green landscape flying past as though it was travelling at a hundred miles per hour. Forests, lakes, waterfalls and unidentifiable wildlife came into view before quickly disappearing into the distance and darkness.
The words superimposed themselves onto the rich landscape and as they did Jennifer announced them aloud in what had become a perfectly rehearsed fanfare.
“Welcome to Eden.”
The crowd before her erupted in cheers and applause that made her tingle with adrenaline. The fruits of her labour had finally begun to grow and the feeling of accomplishment, pride and joy forced a smile onto her lips through her inward protest.
She continued talking through the microphone that sat atop her head and bent down onto her cheek. Her voice although clear was typically quiet but the amplification of the huge speakers that hung in a curve above the screen made it boom, instantly quieting the excited audience.
“Eden is a place of fantasy, of wonder and amazement. But it isn’t always the safest place to be. You can’t expect to be handed the world...” She paused thoughtfully for a moment “…and the life that you always wanted, at least without some hardship or effort.”
The vibrant forest reappeared behind her and gradually darkened as mists began to roll across the landscape. The living green foliage began to turn brown, the leaves fell away from the trees that had previously been in perfect condition and death and darkness became apparent. As the screen once again went black and the audience held their breath, a deep roar erupted from the speakers as though from a huge bear, shaking the very fixtures it took Jennifer’s breath away as it had done so many times before in rehearsals.
After a few short seconds of silence, the audience once again erupted into cheers and whoops of appreciation. Jennifer used the commotion to turn and walk off of the stage professionally, without a second look to the ecstatic masses.
Chapter 1
The board of directors of Swarm Entertainment had been working on a singular goal for nearly ten years when the breakthrough had come. Since the first consumer release of VR systems, many had realised that the future of VR gaming would always be total immersion, but very few had thought along the same lines as Swarm Entertainment. The singular goal of Swarm was to eventually create a world where the physical restrictions of the human body would no longer apply. If a person was in a wheelchair, they would be able to walk. If a person was blind or deaf, they would be able to see or hear. If a person chose to do so, they could escape their nursing home into a new life where they could enjoy anything and everything they could have ever wanted – this was the main goal and driving force behind creating Eden.
In the beginning there were many obstacles for Swarm to overcome. In terms of the real-world people they would need to invent a way for a person to exist without having to care for their living body. This would have to include all of the normal bodily functions and needs, but also would have to essentially ‘store’ the body while the mind visited Eden. Eden itself would need to be created down to the finest detail in order to convince the human mind that whatever they were experiencing was actually ‘real’. Of course, breaking these down into such simple expressions does nothing to actually describe the massive amount of technological advancement that would be needed to achieve these feats, but at least it gave the company a starting point.
Swarm Entertainment had already been creating and releasing virtual reality games but the consumer market had always been one step ahead in their demands – it was generally accepted that total immersion virtual reality was the entire industry’s end goal, and they wouldn’t be happy until they had achieved it.
Within the first few years of their research, the engineering team at Swarm had worked in conjunction with a team of medical experts to perfect what they later called the ‘Physically Inductive Neurological Gaming State’ – or PINGS for short. When a subject was in PINGS, their mind still processed information, but their body entered a state of hibernation that reduced its function to an almost invisibly slow rate. Cell decay would all but stop, rendering the subject without the need for nutrients, muscle stimulation or even bowel movements. Accompanying the discovery was also the realisation that once a subject was in this state they were essentially a prisoner in their own waking coma, no senses for the mind to draw upon but complete consciousness otherwise.
In its early stages, to enter PINGS a test subject would have to be injected with a cocktail of chemicals in a very specific order, each designed to render a part of the human body inactive. However, after just six months following its discovery, the research teams working on it had devised a way to distil the process into a single, powder filled tablet that became quickly known as the ‘Induction Pill’.
As the Induction Pill could be so dangerous in the wrong hands, the medical and engineering team devised an ingenious way of ensuring that it would never be used for anything other than anything related to Eden and Swarm Entertainment. Inside the pill were a handful of nanites that were designed to search for and remove the induction chemical from the human body, if the individual was within a gaming pod designed by Swarm Entertainment, the nanites would receive a constant signal that rendered them inert – if the signal was not present, the nanites would instantly burst to life rendering the pill useless. This process would also safeguard against a power cut trapping a gamer in a pod forever. Once the nanites stopped receiving their signal, the subject would awaken within sixty seconds and pass the nanites with their next bowel movement with a reported and tested nil lasting effect.
Once the PINGS and the nanite signal had been perfected, the company only had two small things left to work on. The Pod for the gamer to reside in whilst in Eden, and Eden itself.
The Pod had almost designed itself once the Induction Pill had been perfected. It would essentially be an upright coffin for the individual to stand in whilst they visited Eden and due to the effects of the drug, the subject wouldn’t suffer any muscle wastage, cramping or even fatigue. The only real hurdle in the Pod was the connection to the subject’s mind.
Whilst the team perfected the PINGS, a second research team worked on combining the human mind with the digital world. The fruits of their labour had been essentially a motorbike helmet with an opaque visor that interrupted the subject’s brainwaves and interweaved its own signals into them. In the beginning, it was only possible to project still images into the mind of the conscious users that wore the helmet, however once PINGS had been perfected and introduced, it was possible to generate and portray an entire reality into a persons’ mind. With this discovery, the Swarm Entertainment programming team had started to work on the coding behind creating a virtual world.
How do you design a world from scratch? This had been the single sentence on the whiteboard in the programming team’s recreation room for over six months as the team had essentially scratched its collective beard. They could definitely make a game easily enough – but to create a world in which every choice is free, without a linear route of progression? They had been stumped. The team had come up against an inherent problem – they weren’t being commissioned to write a game, they were being commissioned to create a world for other people to live their lives in however they chose.
The solution had been simple enough for someone to answer one late night on the whiteboard after everyone had gone home for the night, just before the lights had been switched off. “Be God”.
The idea was simple and they ran with it. The developers would create an entity that they could supply with a set of parameters and allow it to do the work for them in creating this new world. Out of this idea, the developers had birthed the ‘Creator of All Things’, or CATH for short (clichéd as it may well have been). The goal would be to create an empty box of sorts, which would essentially be the physicality of the Eden universe and allow Cath to populate that universe with anything that she would so desire, and then speed up the virtual clock to progress Eden through millennia in order for it to generate its own history. Of course, they needed to give Cath some ground rules for her creation, so once the AI Cath had been generated, the developers gave her a finite processing space within a single laptop and treated her as a member of the team, conversing with her and generally including her in their daily lives. Over time, Cath grew and became her own personality and it came with a little shock when one day she had announced that she was ‘ready to create her new world’.
For the first few weeks the developers watched with amazement as Cath knit and weaved her own creation within her virtual space on the now far more expansive server space that she occupied. She replicated the general rules of the universe, gravity and physics into Eden before their very eyes. She generated vast landscapes of all four seasons, beautiful vistas of reflective pools and mountains plagued by blizzards and avalanches. She created wildlife to inhabit her world, from small insects to great creatures of the wilderness – some mirroring the real world, others generated from her own artificial mind or descriptions she had read or otherwise been told of.
The day that Cath had created her first sentient beings had brought shock and awe to the developers however. She created a plethora of races that she had seemed to gleam from many sources that the developers had mentioned, described or otherwise spoken about in her presence. Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Gnomes, Orcs, Trolls amongst many others. She created them without preference or bias and allowed them to exist in any way they wished. She did not force them together nor apart and all that she had instilled in them was an inherent will to live. She had created first hundreds of sentient lives, then thousands, then tens of thousands. The developers watched as the lines of coding denoting their existence wrote itself into the core of Eden and flowed freely into the already hundreds of millions of lines of code that had already existed to generate Cath. Her world shaped itself quickly, each day growing at a rate that would have taken the developers hundreds of combined lifetimes to create.
The developers had been in a long debate about Eden and what to name places after when Cath had announced to the room that “Phase one” was complete. Phase one was the name that the developers had attributed to the generation of Eden up until the point at which nothing more would need to be created by Cath. The fact that it had only taken a matter of mere months was frankly astounding to each and every one of them.
“Phase two ready.” She had announced shortly afterwards. The developers had not wasted any time in letting her commence with this process, after all if the result wasn’t what they were looking for, they could just boot her up from scratch again – only having lost a few months in the process.
Phase two would involve changing the coding on Eden’s clock so that every second in the real world would represent one hundred years within the virtual world. Just over fifteen minutes later Eden was over one hundred thousand years old and ready to be invaded by the humans of the real world.
It had become clear during the development of Eden that it would not be possible to just send everyone in all at once into a new living world. Everything would need to be tested, tested and tested again to make sure there was nothing life-threatening or mind-damaging within. Who would be better than to test a virtual world designed for the handicapped to live in? Gamers. If anyone would find faults, loopholes, cheats and issues it would be the masses of gamers that lived and breathed MMORPG games – besides, Swarm Entertainment was primarily a gaming company and it would be a great way to finance the entire project without having to hunt for funding. It was this reasoning that had turned Eden from an escape for humanity to a virtual gaming world, setting the scene to allow for an appropriate Segway into the health system with a fully functional and tested system.
In the last month of their campaign to create Eden, Swarm Entertainment had released an announcement to the gaming community through varying websites that stated simply: “Total immersion gaming is coming, and it’s called Eden.”
Although the announcement had been minor and contained no details whatsoever, it had instantly become the talking point of the gaming world. Nothing was more important than the release of total immersion VR in the eyes of gamers across the world. With the advertisement came a web address, the website of which displayed a single item – a clock that counted down from seven hundred and twenty hours.
It was generally accepted that this would be the countdown to the launch of Eden, and everyone the world over was holding their breath for it.
The conference had been a long time coming. It had given Jennifer, the PR team leader ample time to decide upon what she would be saying and how she would be saying it. As she walked off of the stage, the clock on the big screen showed, now down to only five hundred hours. The seconds ticked away, teasing the already salivating audience. As though to feed their fire, words appeared below the clock: “In a game of chess, you can play however you like – as long as you play within the rules of the game. In Eden, we provide you with the board.”
Chapter 2
William had led the development team for six years. He had nurtured Cath into the thing that she had become and had treated her like a person for as long as she had been around. He absolutely lived Eden and had been delighted when the announcement came that he would be the first real person to ever visit the virtual world. He had no family to speak of in the ‘real world,’ so had no reason not to look to prolonged periods of total immersion – it had been his goal all along really, first person or no. When he hadn’t been working with Cath, he had been playing a wide variety of MMORPG games as it was his favourite pastime. He loved to wear the mask that role-playing games provided, however somewhat lacked the confidences that real life interactions so frequently required.
William was a clever man. He had been studious at school, college and university which had of course led him to be part of the Swarm Entertainment development team, but had never really taken the time to develop as a sociable person. He wasn’t totally introverted, more content with his own company. A mixture of engineering, computer programming and an aptitude for the sciences had led him down the so often walked path of an avid gamer – and he regretted absolutely nothing.
His home was a small apartment, easily afforded by the modest salary that Swarm provided. He wanted for nothing really, the time that he actually spent at home usually consisted of simply eating, sleeping, gaming or just watching television absent-mindedly. This had been the leading factor in selecting an apartment that had a living room that doubled up as a bedroom, it would mean that if (or more likely when), he fell asleep in front of the television, be it as a gamer or as a viewer, he would already be in bed. It really was a win-win situation.
The few people that had tried to get to know William and had learned about how he lived his life in the real world would never be surprised, almost as though they were expecting his living situation to be like this. They wouldn’t have been surprised either, if they were to learn that he lived in his parents’ basement – especially if the basement had its own door so that really it was a ‘real apartment.’
William did his best not to eat much junk food, as he was well aware that his sedentary lifestyle could easily lead to obesity – which was a spiralling problem that he didn’t want to become a part of, rather he taught himself the importance of proper nutrition and calorie control, even purchasing a fold-up treadmill at one point. Purchasing a treadmill and actually using a treadmill were obviously two very different activities, but when he had bought it he had used it religiously for three days or so – and then around once per month following that flurry of activity. Needless to say, most of the time it served as an ornament in his apartment, sometimes even a clothes horse. William had no problem in asserting that he had received his money’s worth out of the multi-functional piece of equipment.
His level of fitness however wasn’t totally lacking. The journey from his apartment to the Swarm Offices was three miles of gentle hills, which he traversed on his bicycle daily. Rain or shine he would arrive at reception with his blue plastic helmet on, removing it as he nodded to whichever security guard was manning the door on that particular day.
