Theme: 35 Top Of The World
Title: Everest
Word Count: 387
Summary: Noa climbs the tallest mountain in the world.
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There was a brief period when Noa grew tired of merely creating.
He had mastered the art of combining his access to the internet and to various databases and his power over the virtual world in order to build anything that came to mind. He had recreated famous landmarks, than improved them; he stole blueprints from advanced computers all over the world and simulated them, admiring his own power. He could even do a fair job of creating miniature ecosystems for his amusement.
And so it occurred to him that if the virtual world could easily simulate the sensory input of life for him, it might be interesting to pretend to be human again and do things with human limitations.
At first, he built theme parks and went on all the rides. He hiked through a rainforest, and he went snorkeling in a coral reef, and he experimented with food, but found it unsatisfying compared to his dim memories of having a real tongue. But he was still acting as a god, willing anything inconvenient out of his way, going without hunger and thirst and exhaustion.
It was fun for a while, and then it lost its luster. In need of a challenge, Noa wrote a program that would temporarily give him all the pain of a real body and then recreated Mount Everest. Maybe he'd never get to really climb it, but he could do it here.
He lasted two hours.
He had given himself supplies and downloaded the information needed to use them, but with a human brain he couldn't remember it all, or do anything competently. He had the muscles of a child and was soon tired. The cold bit at him. And he couldn't hack himself out.
Noa curled up in a ball in the snow, weeping as frostbite set in, waiting for the twenty-four hour period to finish so he could leave the Everest simulation. He fell asleep. He suffered.
When he awoke, he was the god of the virtual world again. He built himself a palace of ice that was balmy and warm, and he buried himself in Kaiba Corp. Records form his father's glory days, and he deleted the human program.
And he tried to convince himself that he really did want a body outside the virtual world. He did.
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