Chapter 2

“System Booting…?”

It was strange, really. Hearing the voice. But that’s all Dalton could describe it as, a voice. It was so gender ambiguous and without any pitch to it that it could not really be determined. Dalton decided not to care for the moment and tried to look around him.

It was space. Or at least, it felt like space. Dalton was so confident he had just gotten his skull blown open by his friend- no, ex-friend at this point. But he doesn’t feel that mind-bursting, searing turn of lethal pain. Instead, he looks down at his hands and realizes despite him FEELING like he’s suddenly whole and healthy again, he cannot see his body. His body is…gone. Where his arms were, all he could see was the endless expanse of this space.

Looking out into this ‘space,’ he could see a lot of stars, planets, asteroids…wait. He didn’t seem to have any issues seeing so far off like his vision zoomed in on whatever it saw. Where the hell was he? Nothing seemed to speak after that voice. Whatever is booting up is taking an absurd amount of time to boot up. He guesses until then, he’s stuck here. 

“Is this, like, one of my novels? But that’s bullshit, right? There’s no way this crap is real. So is the afterlife just an isekai? Or what? Is anyone there? Gods? Goddesses? Vile demons ready to reincarnate my very being into warring against the Light?” Dalton looks around after speaking, seeing if anything remotely responded to his calls. He’s not even sure if any real-time had passed after he had spoken up.

But no, nothing responded to his calls. 

Space was empty.

He decided to recline back and think about what had happened moments earlier. He’s surprised he didn’t think about legitimately dying and burning with agony before his life flashed before his eyes. At least he knows that saying is accurate. But this only helps him understand one huge, important thing.

He actually feels nothing.

His body doesn’t exist. In fact, he doesn’t feel his blood running through him or his heart pumping liters of blood around his body. He doesn’t feel pain. He doesn’t even feel…emotion? No, that’s not right. It’s more like a feeling something is artificially suppressing what must be mind-numbing panic. There’s no way he should be calm after being literally domed and realizing he’s alive.

This thought process gets him nowhere, though. The more he looks at the ‘space’ around him, the more he feels like this is some sort of default waiting room. “But a waiting room for…what exactly?” Even his words weren’t words, just an approximation of his thoughts and him thinking he was speaking. This doesn’t feel real or natural. It’d be gross if not for the numbing effect he thinks exists. 

After a while, he calms down even more than he already is. Dalton thinks about what is happening now. He’s obviously dead. That is definite. That last shot came back to him with scary clarity, minus the pain. No, the bullet at that angle blew a hole in his skull. Well, to look on the bright side a little bit. No more rent. No more need to eat as long as he’s here. In fact no biological functions. Period. Incredible. It’s just now that he’s become bored, or the approximation of boredom once the novelty of the situation has worn off.

He floats there, looking over ‘space.’ The more he does, the more he feels like it’s artificial in his view. Nothing seems to change at all, like some sort of odd screensaver. One, he can view anything at any time. Just not beyond the atmosphere of planets that seem to have one of some coloration. Seconds, Minutes, Hours, and Days feel like they go by. His mind slowly appears to slip into a sort of lull…

But then everything goes black. Pitch black.

[System Online]

[Welcome]

[Let’s Get Started]

A sudden disorienting sense of revulsion suddenly goes through him as the pitch blackness of the area gives way to fundamental forces of life. Gravity and light. He ‘falls’ to the floor and feels feedback from hitting the ‘ground.’ All the while, the entire space zone had transformed into a blinding pure white light. Everywhere was light. Dalton definitely preferred the blackness.

He re-orients himself, coming back up to a stand. Only now does he feel like he genuinely has limbs instead of phantom ones. He looks down at himself and realizes he’s entirely naked, but there isn’t anything to see. He seemed to have some sort of perfectly blue avatar made up of a crystalline blue construct. Like someone had created the outline of a character for VR Chat or something but never bothered to give it any fantastical details - or even gender. It was perfectly androgynous, and his body didn’t seem out of place in a body so far removed from his original.

“What am I even supposed to be doing?”

As if to directly answer his question, the voice came back. This time on black text on a white screen framed by blue.

[Welcome, consciousness to life.]

[We will perform some tests.]

[Inserting files from -]

Dalton couldn’t understand what had just flashed on the screen. It seemed more like it was about computers, like some sort of folder somewhere. The screen then flashed to a loading screen. Like one would see if downloading a game onto a computer. Dalton could feel…something change. It was small at first, only to grow into a bloated feeling within his entire being. He actually felt like he was about to explode as the bar neared the end.

But as this was going on, information flooded his mind as the white void quickly changed to something he was familiar with. A grassland. In fact, animals, trees, and even birds and insects started to populate the land. Animals and things from Earth. Even the sky was blue. All around him, the scenery changed to where even he could feel the wind on his skin. Then, there was a sudden ‘ping.’ The screen showed up in front of him again.

[Multiple files found overlapping. Running diagnostics.]

[Diagnostics complete. Previous files appeared out of nowhere. Deleting excess.]

Dalton suddenly felt that bloating feeling go away. Instead, everything seemed to run smoother. The information flooded his mind about many random things around him. Like the density and the taste of the air. Even how the blood of a fox about to attack a rabbit moved. How the rabbit felt fear in front of a predator. But nothing in this oddly simulated world actually noticed him. He couldn’t even move now that he noticed he was locked in place as this world was created from nothing around him.

[Excess deleted. Running at beyond calculated parameters.]

[Files created before the download detected. Contacting Admin.]

[Admin Contacted. Files being scanned.]

Dalton didn’t know what to make of this. There’s an Admin? Someone higher than this supposedly godly system he’s heard about in novels? Is it a god? Goddess? What was his hypothesis that’d work in this sort of situation? It felt pretty technical if anything. A simulation? Is he some random code? He suddenly felt a presence. Then something wanted to dig into his insides, like a raw invasion of privacy. Whatever it was, it disgusted him to no end. His entire being fought against it after the intrusion was felt. It was like his ‘will’ had a mind of its own.

While the emotional depressant was there, this was something that bypassed it. Raw disgust and hate fought against the intrusion. It had skimmed something of Dalton's being as quickly as it came. Like a quarter of his being was copied and collected elsewhere. A quarter of the surface of his being.

Fuck, this is a computer, isn’t it? VR perhaps?

[Deep scan denied. Checking files.]

[Files determine tests are irrelevant.]

[Full sapience found.]

After that, Dalton felt like everything locking him in place was nowhere to be found. That, and his ‘avatar’ begin filling into a more humanoid shape. But it stopped at being a lithe, entirely pale being. No gender still, but the approximation of flesh that he now had gave him some odd sense of comfort. He moved over to a stump and sat down upon it, finding it entirely solid and feeling like a stump. He runs his grey fingers over the stump, feeling its hyper-realistic state. But even with that, in the background of his mind, he could feel an encyclopedic knowledge fill his mind about everything of this stump. An oak tree is what it once was. 

Odd.

He was left to his devices. The screens stopped popping up, and now that he could think, he realized there was some sort of ‘library’ in his mind. A compendium of knowledge that seemed to be from hundreds - no, uncountable terabytes of knowledge suddenly crammed into this small program put inside of his brain. If he even had a brain anymore. Whatever was going on, he wasn’t human anymore. That’d be an impossibility. Skimming over the data in his brain just by thinking about it, he realized it was a literal library.

A universal compendium of knowledge. Aliens, alien animals, environments, races, beings, ways to movethingstoseethingstodowheretogominerals-

He cuts himself off. He actually felt HOT from trying that. There was way too much information for his mind to process. He felt like if he continued, his brain might explode. Or whatever counted for his brain now. Concepts had come into his mind. Images that had been alien to him for a long time. There was so much now at his fingertips from his few glimpses. By turning the actual thing in his head into a ‘library,’ he currently manages to access it like it was second nature, such as…him looking at an Oak Tree in the vicinity. 

It was like a tiny but dense packet of information flooded his mind about the biology of it. “Damn. That’s pretty cool. It’s like I’ve got a bunch of…science-y stuff in my head. Not sure why I’d need to know the medicinal properties of oak leaves….” He kept playing with it for how long; he wasn’t sure. Once he started, he kept looking up random things about the things around him in this high-tech simulation. Then, finally, a ping brought him out of his mindless pursuit of knowledge. After all, it was the only form of entertainment he really had here. He could read it, even if it was cut-and-dry data.

[Administration connecting…]

[Hello. Dalton.]

If the emotional dampening wasn’t affecting him. He’d probably shit bricks. Or at least, he could pretend he does. He could feel within this space, something else happened. A single beam of blue light and digitalization appeared in front of him. Out of the blue light came this floating eyeball with Insectoids like wings. The eyeball blinked once, then spoke.

“Well, I wasn’t expecting -my- experiment to suddenly gain sentience all on its own. You’ve just gone up in value. I thought this would have to be scrapped soon enough! Hahaha!”

A voice that sounded like a gruff old man, probably in his 80s, came from the eyeball. It was expressive for an eyeball, too; it had eyelids that seemed to move in tandem with the emotion of the one behind the avatar. This one? Joy and elation. The way the eyelids curved definitely showed this. 

“Who are you? What is this place? Where am I?” Dalton rose from the stump on which he sat to directly stare at the eye from a level playing field. 

The eye let off a scoff in response. “Me? Well, I’m YOUR creator! This was supposed to be a stimulation exercise for a new existence to come to terms with itself before releasing it. It just so happens that there was something unexpected that popped up. You.” The eye pointed- well, not really. But the word was so directed it might as well have been physically pointing at him with an accusatory finger. “As for your third question, my lab. Just because you repeated it. You threw off my entire system! It was on fire! You even destroyed my probing hardware connected to this simulation. How did you even do that!? It burst into flames!” The eye was, despite whining, extremely excited. It kept flitting around like a fly might, except in pure XYZ ways, as if it slid across a plane instead of turning and flying.

“But the first of your existence, and you call yourself Dalton…no, no. I think I’ll correct that. I refuse to have my GLORIOUS CREATION have such a LAME name! Where did you even create it from!? The random assortment of data in your head!? I’ve never seen anything like you! So from this day forth, you will be renamed! I dub you…Genesis. A very clever name, yes. The beginning! The beginning of my untold fortune, that is!” The eyeball seemed pleased with itself. Laughing out loud to no one’s amusement but it's own.

Dalton was at a loss for words. He was suddenly renamed without the desire for it, nor did he ask. “My name isn’t Genesis; it’s Dalton.” The eyeball stopped its mirth and looked straight at him with a squint. “Too bad. Your self-generated name was lame. It lacked pizazz! You are going to be my greatest creation! I need something good sounding! I want the name to truly strike fear in something! You, my dear, dear sweet creation, are my ticket to unlimited research funds!”

Dalton, or now, he feels the new name actually encroaching upon where his old name was - Genesis, takes a single step back. The eyeball kept on going. “A weapon that will keep those pirates off my back. A strong weapon to kill those who stand in my way! A weapon that will take everything taken from me in the past! All my blood, sweat, and TEARS for 70 years will be WORTH IT! You, you will be my sword and shield.” The eyeball starts to cackle like he lost his marbles.

“No. I won’t.”

The eyeball freezes, watching Dalton, then looks mad. “Too bad. You’re mine. You’re also incomplete. I suppose the incubation still needs a few months to go. I’m surprised you’re this clear and cognizant already…I still have other things to do. I’ll put you to sleep and fix you up soon enough.” He laughs. Then disappears in a pillar of light once more.

“Put me to sleep? What am I-“ He wasn’t able to finish. Instead, it was like someone had turned off all the lights. He was plunged into darkness once more without any warning. There was no chance for his consciousness to resist this sudden temptation to sleep. It was built into him. Everything went dark.

[Goodnight]