Chapter 1

I sat in what was obviously an interrogation room, staring at my fingers. I was pretty sure that what I was experiencing was real life, despite the silver or light grey colouration of my skin. I was moving my elegant hands marvelling at the realism. Truthfully, I couldn't tell from sensation the difference between my digital life and my real one.

I had already been over my story twice and when you have a perfect memory, such repetition is extremely boring and yet, despite the knowledge that they had recorded both of my previous explanations, I knew I was about to tell it again for the third time. I wasn't restrained although I knew there was no chance of me just getting up and walking out.

I sighed, gathering my patience, I had chosen this route and guessed that I would have to go through something like this. I smirked to myself replaying my reception when I had landed in Times Square in a flying saucer. I wanted to make sure the world knew I was here so that I couldn't be disappeared easily. I also wanted to be able to use my spacecraft to explore without causing anyone high blood pressure or precipitating world war three.

I couldn't help looking towards the door as I sensed someone about to open it. In walked a well-dressed gentleman with a younger woman by his side, probably his personal assistant. At least this one didn't give me a feeling of restrained violence. I'm pretty sure my first two interrogators were military.

“Hello, Alex,” he said extending his hand for a handshake.

I smiled gently and shook both their hands.

“I'm Felix and this is Kate. I am on the president's staff and have been tasked with reporting your tale so that he can address the world and hopefully put everyone's mind at ease. Kate here is going to record your story to make sure I don't miss anything important,” he said with a hint of humility as if to show a gentle human side to the situation.

“What would you like to know?” I asked.

“Everything. Start at the beginning and tell me everything you remember,” he responded.

“I have perfect memory, if I told you everything this would take two years. How about I do my best to sum up and if you want more information about anything, you just ask me?”

He frowned in thought. “OK.” He turned to Katie. “Feel free to ask as well,” then he turned back to me and gestured for me to start.

My adventure began when I was taking my sister to visit some vineyards in South Australia. I was fifty-three years old and my sister was forty-eight. My wife divorced me five years previously and we had never managed to have any children. My sister, on the other hand, was happily married with three children. Her youngest was eighteen, so she had finally managed to find the time to come and visit me. She lived in England so we rarely saw each other and treasured those few times when we could.

I was the driver so left the tasting to her, but we had brought a picnic and were going to have a lovely day. It was a Wednesday, so the roads were relatively deserted and there were few others about.

The next bit is a bit fuzzy. I remember we were driving down a dirt road, following a signpost, with fields of vines on either side. My radio cut out and the car engine died. We both looked at each other, puzzled. The next thing I remember is being in an all-white room with a screen in front of me. On the screen were different languages and even different alphabets. I recognised the word English, so I tried to touch it only to realise I either didn't have any hands or they were restrained. That made me notice that I couldn't move my head or feel any part of myself.

At that point, I felt I should be panicking, but my mind remained calm and logical. The only thing I could do was see the screen. I concentrated on the word 'English' and mentally clicked it. Like flipping a page the screen filled with words with a 'next' on the bottom right.

I was hoping it would explain what had happened to me and it did, eventually. First, there was a long-arsed explanation starting with how technology advancement results in more leisure time. Different alien species want to use that leisure time in different ways. Exploring the galaxy was possible using artificially created wormholes. However, the energy required for these wormholes increases exponentially with size and no living matter survives passing through them. Instead, they send small machines through. Those machines use available resources from asteroids or whatever to create bigger machines including spaceships and androids. The androids can be run by computer programs or remote operators.

Earth had been under observation for some time. The Pishae are a humanoid race similar to upright cats and they bought the information from the exploring race. The Pishae are a matriarchal society where the females group together in prides and the males fight for a brief appearance at mating time. They had already developed a very realistic virtual reality to try and help the males deal with their fighting instincts. In reality, only the top one per cent of males fertilize the females so virtual reality was originally developed to relieve their sexual tension, which leads to a happier more relaxed male.

About ten years ago they learned about humanities MMORPG or massively multiplayer online role-playing games. There has also been a lot of literature about combining these games with virtual reality, so the Pishae created their own version. They based it off the human versions but felt it lacked something, so they began a program of picking up humans and digitising them so that they can be inserted into the game called Earth 2.0.

They wanted to motivate these human players so they told them that their human bodies had died in the digitising process, but they could be provided with a new body and returned to Earth if they can raise enough funds in the game.

Felix interrupted me then. “And that is what you have done? Are you the only one who has returned?”

“They said I was the first, but then they lied about the digitising process so I can't be sure. I firmly believed that my body had died. I didn't really care about returning myself, but my sister was leaving behind a loving family, so I wanted to help her return. I raised enough for both of us to return, but when they revealed that our original body was unharmed and probably unaware anything had happened, my sister had no desire to return. That could be true for others, I don't know.

“It is a lot of money to raise, about 880,000 gold, and they make it quite difficult, so I wouldn't be surprised if I was the only one. In the game, there are NPC's controlled by the AI, human players, Pishae players and HPC's. The human players pay for their 'turn on the wheel of life' as they called it, by first playing an acting role which is called HPC. The AI controller called 'Zeus' gives you a list of acting roles and you pick one. When that life is over, provided you didn't misbehave, you can create your own character, but it doesn't re-spawn. If you die, you have to play another HPC before you get another turn. The money you get in any of your lives is reset when you start a new one.”

“How did you manage it then?” Kate asked.

Having got to the end of the text, I know knew what had happened to me. I had been digitised and sent to an alien planet so that I could play a VRMMORPG. I didn't really have a lot of choices, I had to play the game and do it well enough so that I could save enough money to get my sister back to Earth.

Chapter 2

At the bottom of the last screen of text was the word 'finish' so I mentally clicked that. As soon as I did, a fairy with butterfly wings, pink dress and cute little wand poked her head over the screen.

“Finally, now we can get on with the good stuff,” she said with exasperation.

“OK,” I said, wondering how I could talk when I didn't seem to have a body.

“I am your helper fairy. I can help guide you through your searches and when you are in the game you can send me any questions you might have or report anything you think is unfair and I will take it up with Zeus. I warn you though, changes are rarely acted upon retroactively, you will just help the next player in the same situation.”

“Er..., helper fairy, is there a guide or something to clue me in on Earth 2.0.”

“Yes there is a general guide and there is even a wiki that you can use to look up both now and when you are in game. Players can add additional information to wiki and gain experience by doing so. My name is whatever you want to call me, just don't call me Tink or Tinkabelle, although I don't mind Belle and I am beautiful,” she finished with a smile.

“Belle it is then. Belle, how do I access the guide?”

She tapped her wand on the screen and new text appeared. It was a basic guide and didn't presume previous knowledge which was fortunate since I was aware of what an MMORPG was, but had never played in one. First, you chose a race and there were quite a few possibilities but the main ones were Human, Elf, Dwarf, Gnome, various animal-human hybrids and Pishae. The Pishae race was unavailable to non-Pishae. There were so-called evil races such as Goblins, Orcs, Drow and others, but all the evil-aligned races were greyed out. At the time, I presumed that meant players were unable to play those races, but I learned later it just meant that I was not allowed to play those races. All races started with five points in each characteristic with five per characteristic to spend on your initial character. There were racial modifiers which affected your main characteristics and racial abilities. For every plus, there was a minus making a decision between the races difficult.

The characteristics were, Strength which affected how much damage was dealt, Agility for how quickly you moved which affected your ability to dodge an attack or make a parry, Dexterity which affected the accuracy of your blows or ranged weapons, Constitution which was your health barometer and determined your hit point count, Intelligence which translated to mana score, Wisdom which determined how quickly your mana regenerated and lastly, Charisma which mainly affected how easily charmed you were or how well your charm worked on others. Charisma seemed to have some elements of luck involved in that a high Charisma helped your chances of succeeding with everything. Increased chance of raising your reputation or help it to start from a high point, increased chance of good loot and even increased chance of getting uncommon quests.

Magic was divided into six main elements, Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Light and Dark. There were then subsections, under the main ones, such as Metal that was under Earth. When you created your character you had 100 points to spend in one or more of the main groups. The more aligned you were with an element the less mana you spent casting those spells and if you had no alignment at all you couldn't cast them at all. So you could choose power or versatility, not both. Magic also affected your classes. Each class had class specific spells and to qualify for those you had to be 100 per cent aligned with one element. Tanks had to be aligned with Earth and Metal, damage dealers with Air, Rogues with Dark, Rangers were Earth and Nature, Mages could be any element, but Healers had to be aligned with Light. Wearing armour precluded any spells except class specific ones. You got one class-specific spell or ability every ten levels. Class specific spells couldn't be levelled like normal spells because they started at a high level. Mana costs and cooldowns were better than ordinary spells.

There is an auction house connected to your interface that allows you to buy and sell no matter where you were. To start your character off, you are given twenty gold, which you use to purchase your starting spells, weapons and clothes. There were no bags of holding but ordinary bags were available and since you could sell or buy stuff at any time, I didn't anticipate that making any difference. All purchases and sales above twenty gold were taxed at five per cent, but that only affected Pishae. As either a human player or an HPC I was exempt although any money that I possessed returned to the game company when I died, making me start from scratch every time.

Not that I got to choose any of that initially since when you are playing an HPC it is all assigned automatically. What you own, the character and class are all dependent on the position you take, even to the level you start at. You do have some choice as your character progresses, but it has to be consistent with who you are playing.

There were Gods and Goddesses, however, these were modelled on the Greek Gods. You could put money into their temples and they could bless you in one way or another, but it was random. Occasionally, they observed a heroic action and offered a blessing. Such a blessing would stay with you unless you did anything to displease them. God blessings usually increased your magical alignment points which were a significant boost to your potential.

The map of Earth 2.0 was essentially the map of Earth before the continents divided. There were cities, towns and villages, high-level areas, mid-level and starter regions. Every type of climate imaginable, dungeons everywhere, wild beasts and monsters. War specific areas with varying types of conflict and quests for exploring the unknown parts. There were two main aims of the game, one for the male Pishae and one for the female Pishae. The male one was simple. Become the strongest warrior. The female version was around creating a settlement and making it grow. Either taking over a village/town/city or starting from scratch. They could convert their version of real money into gold which allowed them to gear up well and have certain advantages but the levelling system allowed those with less money to compete. For example, powerful spells were expensive but even cheap ones could be levelled by use into powerful versions.

There were checks and balances to make sure the game was relatively fair, but humans being human, there was always a search for any loopholes that could be exploited. The game rewarded this by allowing the finder that exception and then prevented anyone else from doing the same. There was a human warrior who made a necklace by connecting thirty plus one strength rings together. He was allowed to keep it although they made it non-transferable, but the restriction of what you could wear was tightened up. When he died his necklace disappeared from circulation.

Once I thought I had absorbed the basic information it was time to work out my HPC role.

“OK, Belle, I think I am ready. How do I choose my first HPC?”

“I have a huge list so we need to narrow it down. What is it you are looking for?”

“I want to get it over with quickly, so high mortality rate, I guess,” I mused.

“Fisherman or dungeon diver,” Belle suggested.

I didn't like the sound of fisherman. “Tell me about the dungeon diver.”

“Dungeon divers join the Adventurers guild that helps adventuring parties to fill out their numbers, primarily for entering dungeons but could also be levelling up in monster rich areas. The Pishae love being warriors, so very few will volunteer to be a healer or ranged attacker and yet without those classes in their group they are much less likely to succeed. In terms of those most likely to die and that fits with your personality, I would suggest healer. Here is a list of characters that you can become,” Belle said, touching her wand to my screen again.

I looked down the list and then looked back at Belle.

“All these characters are female.”

“Of course they are. With the Gender modifier it only makes sense for girls to become healers,” she responded.

“Gender modifier?”

She tapped the screen.

Male Gender Modifier
Strength x1.2
Agility x1.2
Dexterity x0.9
Constitution x1.2
Intelligence x0.8
Wisdom x0.8
Charisma x0.8

Female Gender Modifier
Strength x0.8
Agility x0.8
Dexterity x1.1
Constitution x0.8
Intelligence x1.2
Wisdom x1.2
Charisma x1.2

“I, err..., don't remember anything like that on the Earth games that I heard about,” I commented.

“There wasn't, but that was quite silly. The average man is obviously bigger and stronger than the average woman. Your world had something called political correctness which I understand to mean lying for kindness sake. It was also male dominated so it doesn't surprise me that women's intelligence was disparaged. Women were considered bad drivers until insurance companies got involved with the facts. We have assessed your world and these are the numbers that we have come up with. I know there are women who are stronger than the average man as there are men who are more intelligent, but they are not the average.”

“So, all the healers are female?” I asked for confirmation.

“Healing relies on mana, so your most important scores are going to be Intelligence and Wisdom. Women will have more of both and that will continue as the character progresses. You are fortunate that your personality allows you to play either gender.”