Plus1

This prologue contains some rather heavy spoilers of things that will be introduced way later in the story, so jump straight to chapter 1 if you want the to be in suspense about the origin of the Playboy System and why the MC got it. You won’t miss out on anything important to the story; the only thing you won’t get will be the very first line of chapter 1.

A wave travelled through the vast cosmos. It passed by expanses of endless darkness; through regions crowded with rocks of all shapes and sizes, in constant movement, crashing and splintering and reforming anew; places where space itself was set aflame, burning eternally despite having no fuel, or where it seemed to break apart at the seams, reality distorting and bending and breaking in chaotic, mesmerising patterns; it flew by a star so brilliant it drowned space in all-consuming radiance and could be seen from a universe away.

Said wave was a seemingly trivial thing, a small ripple that would go undetected by all but the keenest sensors–attributed to a small lapse in measurement or the whims of entropy–but containing an encrypted message within, one of utmost secrecy.

Impossibly, it moved faster than light many times over, for while it held many similarities to electromagnetic waves, it was not shackled by the restrictive laws of the mundane. It was more.

After a distance so long measuring it in light years would create a string of zeroes, It reached a being of pure consciousness, manifested as impossibly bright light, as corporeal as it was ethereal.

It–for the being had no gender–decoded the message in the time a photon took to move a nanometer, and parsed it in only slightly more time, only having taken so long to make sure no secondary message was hidden behind some pattern or other.

Said message, crudely translated to a language comprehensible by our feeble minds, would read like following:

The being possessed no emotions, but if it had had them, it calculated it would have felt exasperation at the constant drain of energy and resources caused by the unceasing Awakening of frontier sectors and the need to regulate them while adhering to the Law.

It sent a perfunctory message back, having already given the exact same command uncountable times.

That was more than enough. Too much, even. But even so, it added three small words at the end, summarising what protocol DZ96 entailed.

And so began the travel of another inconspicuous ripple, to the farthest outreaches of Existence.