I let my eyes drift open. I am lying on my back. The sky is blue above me, but I feel no weight pulling me down at the moment.

“Hey, come on, talk to me!” A head pokes into my view. Short-cropped hair, a pair of angled lines tattoo’d to trail off of the left cheekbone, a very average nose... I blink, and I finally glimpse the face as a whole – a woman, adult but slightly young, looking sharp in some careful but very minimalist makeup. She pushes a hand through her black hair, her sleeve a clearly armour-adjacent substance that is a pleasing grey, matching off with the black of her hair and the silver-blue of her eyes. “Well, at least you’re looking at me. Come, on, get up!”

I stand up, which is surprisingly hard without any reference feelings for my body. In fact, I don’t appear to have a body at the moment. Ahh, another make-yourself-as-you-go-along character creation. At least game devs had switched over to always having the alter-your-choices-before-it-locks-in thing – it was so difficult to be happy with your decisions in the moment when you didn’t have a second try. I make a mental effort to stand up taller than the woman who had woken me up, and I end up being a good head taller than her, which is a decent start. The short Ice Elf mage had been fun, but height is more reliably fun.

My surroundings are surprising. The blue sky which had suggested I was in the open had been a fake display on the ceiling. I am in a small chamber, with grey walls clearly indicating a prefab building, somewhere humans had only recently arrived within this fictional world. Waking up in a field is just too good of a cliche to miss, huh?

“Wow, you are really out of it today,” the woman says, taking a few steps backwards, in that awkward half-sidestep of trying to lead someone somewhere while also making sure they’ll follow you. “Grab your gear, and come on already.”

I look to each side, and see on my right and left a set of armour in the same style as my guide. On the right is a feminine build, and on the left is a masculine build. Since the feminine armour isn’t stupidly shaped (particularly, featuring a single structure around the breasts), I decide to go for it. Grabbing it and stuffing it under my arm, I begin to follow. My body is starting to feel present in the world, my bare feet slapping softly against the smooth floor, and my hips swaying slightly with every step.

“Let’s get you ready for the day, okay? Sure, sure, you can handle yourself, but you don’t usually sleep through your alarm for 30 minutes. There’s only so much of that beeping I can take, you know?”

I follow her into what is clearly the bathroom of these quarters, and am helped into the armour. It accepts my manipulation of its shape in a very surreal, intuitive system that is managing to read intent out of my pushing or not-pushing on bodyparts. After playing around for a bit, I get down to business. I make my figure lanky, almost unhealthily slim, with long legs and well-balanced torso. I definitely end up in the adequately-muscled range, which seems advisable given the vague military undertones of this beginning.

Looking up, I see a mirror above a sink. My actual face is staring back at me, making me wince with surprise and a touch of discomfort. Closing my eyes for a moment, I place my hand on my face and will it to shift in any number of ways. Better to start from random than from that... Opening my eyes again, I see a very different, but decently pretty face looking back. I find a few things to tweak, though, and soon am deep into the process of sculpting a perfectly matched face for my new temporary body. High eyes, a natural leftward smirk to the mouth, a chin that juts to make a statement, but smooths away before stabbing anyone.

I move onto my hair. It gave me straight brown hair, and to be honest, it really works with my face, so I simply tweak the colour to be a touch lighter, lengthen some of it to come down to just past my shoulders, and work it into a partial ponytail. I nod at my reflection, and smile as I feel and see my ponytail bounce.

“Looking good there,” my companion says, placing an arm around my shoulders.

“Both of us are...” I muse, seeing the two of us in the mirror. We aren’t a perfect pairing, but we match off well. I’m verging on gangly, she’s shorter and more generously built, and both of us seem to be a bit better-looking than average. And my sun-kissed complexion and light brown hair make good variation on her own pale-and-dark contrast.

“Oh, shut your face,” she blushes, tapping my shoulder with a gentle fist. “Ol’ Sylvie isn’t much to look at.”

“It’s a simple fact!” I retort, getting into the groove of the banter. “You are kind on the eyes. I’m just kinda a bunch of arm and leg with a bit of glue in the middle,” I giggle. “Sylvie and Ash, the two worst looking gals around...”

“Honestly, though...” Sylvie sighs, looking in the mirror. The mirth of the moment dies from her eyes.

“Honestly, though, you’re beautiful,” I state bluntly. “I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have to hang out with when the day is coming to a close.”

“Thanks Ash,” she gives me a weak smile. “Same could be said of you, girl.” She gives me a hug, holding it just long enough to sigh into my shoulder. “Now come on, we’ve wasted enough time here.”

We head out of the bathroom, into the main room of the apartment, and then to the front door.

As I step over the threshold, the world freezes, and then begins to fade into whiteness. A computer voice speaks into the whiteness, “Please confirm character ‘Ash’.” An interface materialises before me, with all sorts of sliders for all of the features of my character, and a projection of it, floating stationary with arms resting at the sides and weight shifted to one leg.

I am pretty happy with the end result, but I look over all of the options anyways, because you can always improve something. I end up only tweaking my hair-colour again, to fit with the skin-tone a bit better. That done, I turn my attention to the floating box of non-character-model options, and begin to read them off. “Perceptive terms of address? Sure, yeah. Anonymised user behaviour logs? Nope, don’t have the bandwidth, and don’t have the storage to keep it until I do. Sexualised behaviour? Nope nope nope. Physical reinforcement? Ooh, that was one of the perks of this ship. I think I will try it. I’ve heard it is great for getting a better mapping of sensations.” I reach out and tap it, and a new dialog pops up in front of me.

“Warning, user caution recommended? Consult with your therapist before use?” I consider the two options it gives me: ‘continue’, or ‘abort’. I don’t exactly have a therapist, not since I graduated Ganymede University. And... I didn’t exactly see them very often back then. “I’m sure it’ll be fine, I’m pretty well adjusted as people go, right?” I hit continue, and another dialog pops up.

“User behaviour aligns to therapist permission-with-caution parameters? What sort of behaviour are you even looking at!? Just let me hit ‘yes’ already!” I hit the relevant button again, and both dialogs disappear, only for a system main-frame dialog to open, covering everything else around me.

“User confirmation required for physical reinforcement, target is extraset from registered user? What does extraset even mean? Anyways, this was allowed to be released to the open market, I don’t understand why it won’t just trust me when I say I know what I’m doing...”

The system dialog requires me to actually sign my confirmation message by hand, so I laboriously trace my signature’s curve through the three dimensional space. By which I mean I do it quickly and without thinking about it. Muscle memory is great.

The computer voice finally acknowledges my decision. “Beginning physical sensory reinforcement. Estimated perfection in two days.” They really went overboard with the protection on that system, but also, if it takes more than a day for the computer to properly map things over, I can totally understand why.

The last option on the dialog is ‘Open to multi-user space’, which is greyed out due to my location on-board a ship that will be in the literal middle of nowhere in a few month’s time. So I hit the dreaded ‘Confirm and Lock’ button. I’ll be spending my time as Ash in this game, and only wiping the saved data will change that, now!