Chapter 1
I was born into the OASIS with a gun in my hand. I was born into the real world with far less, and only a few years after the game engulfed all of reality in a digital haze. I grew up with the game just to my side, everyone else already strapped up and jacked in like junkies chasing the dragon, while I managed to stay out of it's clutches and grounded in reality. I watched a deteriorating world get neglected further and further, being reduced to pure waste. I watched mindless masses elect a celebrity president to be our new shitlord. Nothing was going to change unless someone got off their ass and changed it. I managed to feel just fine rotting in the dumpster with the rest of humanity.
Where I grew up, which was more of in a sense, where I would lay my head to sleep, would constantly change. My dad, I only assumed was my real father, hauled me around in a large van, yet inadequate for two people to live in. We jumped from town to town along the east coast where he would do small jobs and sell whatever he needed to sell and he would leave me with people that he told me were my family. For days, weeks, months he would leave - I sometimes wished he would never come back for me. I hated living in that van. It smelled like rotting carpet, gasoline and body odor. There was no room for anything but the necessities. Food storage took up every recess and crevasse, between the old lumpy mattress and the sidewalls of the vehicle, under the seats, in the glove compartments, in the top cubby holes, tapped into stacks along the walls. We didn't really go hungry, but we were never full. Not having room for baggage made it worse, I had to cycle between two complete sets of clothes, socks and underwear included, and he had a garment bag with a cheap suit in it on top of his casual sets. He needed it, even if it was just a cheap suit. We also shared that awful mattress. I wondered why I couldn't sleep in the passenger seat, it would have been so much more comfortable, but he would tell me it's illegal to sleep in a parked vehicle and we would get ticketed or even arrested. I don't know if I believed him, but I didn't want to find out.
One of the occasions when he left me behind he probably forgot to explain our situation to my sitters, because they kicked me out as soon as he wasn't around anymore. I was probably only eight or nine years old, I have to assume, but they would beat me. They wouldn't spank me, they would punch me, kick me, lay into me on the ground like a gang. They called me things I will never repeat, they would tell me things I never want to hear again. They would cut me, burn me with cigars and cigarettes, let me starve out in the cold rain and tease me about it. When my dad came back for me, it had been the first time I remember being happy to see him. I don't know how long I was there, I didn't ask either. It felt like an eternity, though.
Fortunately, or unfortunately, I was completely indifferent on the matter in that moment. The last time he left me with family, he didn't come back for over a year without any contact. I aged some more years, becoming a teenager, at least I thought. I don't know when my birthday is. I don't know what my age is. I became too big and too mean for anyone to try to abuse me without painful consequences. The family I lived with had been too preoccupied with mind altering substances and the OASIS to even pay attention to me long enough to even conceive any malcontent. I still have fond memories of them still, they were the closest thing I had to a family. I wanted to move on and be on my own, though. Maybe I would even forget some things. So I left.
I only took the clothes that were on my back and a small sack full of dried edibles and started walking. I walked for days and emptiness filled all of those miles. This world had really become a wasteland. Trash piled taller than any building I have ever seen and landmarks I remember from traveling with my parent had sank into the filthy water. The sea levels have definitely risen in the handful of years since I had been there last. Outside of the major highways, derelict vehicles littered roadways and medians. I've seen movies where a natural disaster or extinction event made the world look like this. What has happened to us? Is this our extinction? With all that time walking I enjoyed entertaining that thought. Little did I know at the time how dangerous traveling between major cities became. Commercial busses needed a small escort of armed guards or mercenaries.
I had to walk for a few more days to get a change of scenery, a big green sign said Columbus Ohio, 10 miles. The badlands faded in the distance and I finally got to see a big city. Lound and obscure sounds came from it's direction. I got to see it light up as it shifted from dusk to night. I've never been to a place like this as long as I can remember, I must have been kept on the back roads and in the country my whole life. As I got closer my senses became overwhelmed by all of the lights and sounds and smells. The smells were the best, there was always that hint of something nauseating and off at the end, but as a whole it smelled delicious. I walked through camps of people, living in tents made of tarps strung across cables and shanties crudely constructed with scrap wood and sheet metal, it looked like these quarters completely surrounded the city. They were brimming with the least fortunate, most of which could still acquire the hardware and connect to the OASIS. Some sat out around a power pole that looked dangerously spliced and rigged to illegally distribute power. A shiny visor covered their dirty faces and haptic gloves covered their filthy hands while they sat on the ground in their torn rags and jacked in. I imagined this was what medieval times would look like if they had internet access.
Finally I made my way to the downtown area and I explored. I can't lie, I lived on the streets for a while, refusing to go back to the outskirts of town. I couldn't get a job without all the right papers or even the general knowledge of my own imperially documented existence. I had to steal and scavenge to eat and avoid the police nightly while trying to sleep, it all still felt like an adventure to me. Eventually I got caught digging through trash, an older Asian woman took me in and put me to work. She was running some kind of unsanctioned halfway house full of other delinquents. Most would come and go, taking advantage of her generosity and stealing food from her. I never did, stuck around and helped her out in return. Interestingly enough, one of the boys that came and went actually left something of value behind. He left a set of torn up haptic gloves and a beat up OASIS visor. I hid them well so I could save them for a rainy day, but the set never got pawned. I could never bring myself to let go of them, plus I knew I would get a pathetic fraction of what they were worth if I tried to trade them in for cash. They were just a heavily used, general issue rig that was handed out enmasse to all the budding students who signed up to go to school online. I would pass on this form of education.
When I finally convinced myself to 'jack in', boredom motivated me and I needed to make some money. Sherry, the old woman, didn't go outside and set up her produce cart during the winter, so I didn't have a job. I impatiently dredged through the frustrating process, it took about an hour with my rig and the unprotected wireless connection, non-GSS, to do a first time sign-up and log-in. I left my avatar as the default white male, plain face, plain everything. I couldn't come up with a name, eventually I settled on an atypical spelling of chaos that rendered it into a completely different word. While holding my breath, from a previous failure, the OASIS took my name and let me in. After that, logging in to OASIS became as simple as putting on the visor. The date and time, my first sight in game, 2038/01/18 23:28. Grinding and farming. Day in and day out, like a self-appointed child laborer in sweatshop. That's how I remember my early days in the OASIS. Finding rare items to auction bought me canned goods and the ability to travel ingame. In hindsight, the process was probably more work than it would have been to physically go outside and scavenge or beg. All the time it took and the initial investment to get to an area where the items I acquired actually started having monetary value outside of vendor cost must have greatly exceeded, in some formula, the amount of time and effort it could have taken me to have a means to an end in the real world. In my defense it happened to be the middle of winter, the average temperature for that week in particular was -10°F. Indoors it was barely above freezing, like sitting butt ass naked in a refrigerator.
Through my many hours of raw eyelids and dry mouth grinds I discovered something new to me, not really buried, an advertisement came across my screen and caught my attention. Arenas and battlegrounds scoreboard for the top 10 players. The organized player versus player scene appealed to something primal inside of me, the action and idea of fighting other people, even if it was through fiber optic cables and we were miles away from each other, flipped my on switch. I got the jitters, I felt nervous, my fight-or-flight instinct would go off. It brought me back to life, and the PVP currency bought me amazing gear and had exclusive perks, but it didn't happen overnight. At first I was awful, completely useless, I cannot remember how I survived the countless toxic teammates. However, the handful of comments that were actual constructive criticism improved my skills and understanding of the games drastically. I practiced too much, I would forget to eat. It had gotten to me, the OASIS sank it's teeth into me and started pumping me full of it's venom. I was too far gone to be saved, I didn't even notice if anyone was coming or going from the small open layout apartment.
I never studied a day in my life, and now every moment outside of practicing I had videos from YouTube open, learning new techniques and how to specialize my avatar to be more effective in all kinds of combat. I shot for being the best, like everyone else would also, but I knew I would probably just become okay or better than average at my best. I ended up reading more than I ever have in my entire life. I also discovered the practically limitless amounts of media floating around: Music, movies, comic books, everything, anything. I became an invested nerd practically overnight. Classic Metal, cheesy action flicks, The Punisher. All of it just got jammed right into my brain through my ears and eyes.
The game type I played the most was a five versus five deathmatch first person shooter, first one to win five rounds, wins the match. If you died, you were out for the whole round, and you came back in the next. The weapon load out was the same for everyone at spawn, basic Glock pistol and an M12 SMG, with various guns and other weapons spread out on the map. Knowing the map, knowing where everything is, knowing how to use the best guns, from the basics to the advanced tactics, the game boiled down to skill. I got yelled at so much, people would scream at me like we were really trying to stop some terrorist cell from blowing up an orphanage, for simple mistakes that would ended up losing us the round. The quiet ones though, the ones that could still wipe the floor with the opponents while I missed grenades and couldn't take objectives, they always shared that gem of knowledge that would make something I could not figure out click into place, and they always did it with such understanding. "Everyone has to start from somewhere."
I played for obscene amounts of time, not just in the previous game, but in Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games. Skimming across the surface of countless games, listening to random music, until I stuck to one, I always felt out the PVP scene. It was so hard to deviate from what I had been ingraining in myself that I stopped trying to do something new and just put what I know into the games I was playing. It worked, most of the time. Sometimes it was over complicated overkill that muddied the simple concepts, sometimes the habit of research and memorizing layouts made playing simple matches feel like cheating. I strayed from what I was doing before purely because of boredom, but not loss of interest. I was playing competitively, raising my rank consistently until I reached my ceiling. I needed to be good enough to win round after round, practically by myself, against a team of five individuals of equal or greater skill. I had peaked, reached my soft cap, now it was time to see what else this universe had to offer.
After reading in various guides and getting sound advice from forums about the advanced combat mechanics of the entirety of the OASIS. Every world containing a game has it's own specifications for classes and sometimes even races, but the OASIS avatar race could always be used instead, and inside of each game was a set of skills and spells the avatars could learn as they progressed. Some worlds are technology only, so no skills or spells specifically listed as magic or anything that would consume mana could function. The trade off made it worthwhile, guns, vehicles and gadgets ruled these worlds. On the other side, there were worlds where technology didn't function and only magic and old fashioned warrior and ranger skills could be used. Then there are worlds where both can be used, side by side, combined, against each other, anything. Opposite of that, null zones existed, no magic, tech, guns could be used, none of it. In the instances being specialized as a marksman and warrior gave the most benefits. Guns would always do the most damage and warriors could always take the most damage, on top of that warriors could use any other weapon and some magic adequately. So that's what I aimed for, fine tuning it in each game, and buying additional spells along the way, like stuns and other useful crowd control.
I played passively, only doing PVP in an organized battleground setting and staying out of raid groups unless it was completely necessary. I enjoyed the alone time I got to experience in a vast overpopulated universe while sitting in a crowded room of an overpopulated city, it was serene. I developed an easy and relaxing daily routine of repeatable quests between a few nearby planets in similar games. I could listen to music and watch movies with ease, traveling around alone, I even got into listening to some books on 'tape' while I was passing the time.
