Mental-Verse - Prologue

Shuffling up the stairs towards my apartment I can't help but rub at my eye, the numbness in the left side of my slowly wearing off as dulling aching slides in to replace it. I'd been forced to cover it on the way home, the anesthetic and paralytic making even the cloudy light light outside nearly blinding, my hand mostly working to hide the dilated pupil and the bloodshot reddened area near the injection sight.

My mind races as I shamble towards the next landing, turning sharply as I move towards the next set of stairs. I didn't feel any different, beyond the marked pain building behind my eyes. Thoughts of whether or not it had even worked quickly begin to creep in, the distracting thoughts nearly causing me to collide with the couple bounding down the stairs.

"On your left!" shouts the familiar voice of Alex, the recent father from across the hall. I quickly inch myself into the right side of the stairwell, wincing as I feel the wooden railing press into my waist. Spreading my fingers slightly I look at the two as they stand a little above me, the world becoming blisteringly bright as I find them cast in deep blurred shadows.

Alex stands taller than ever, the extra few steps making the already six foot one man stand a ways taller than myself. His dark brown hair is slicked back with gel, a quick and messy way of giving him some semblance of style, while his rugged jaw with covered in a layer of thick itchy looking stubble. His slender yet athletic frame stands in a mixture of his work clothes, a set of black suit pants and dress shoes, along with a more casual light blue polo top and tan sports jacket.

Haley stands below him by a step, his hand on her shoulder as she grins ear to ear. Her hair is braided slightly, the usual rough ponytail seemingly having had a little more effort put into it today. Her eyes seem less baggy than usual, a layer of makeup having diminished the effects of her exhausted state while also covering her lips with a layer of deep red lip stick.

Gone are the loose fitted and usually dirty clothes I had become used to seeing her in, her bottom heavy frame filling out a form-fitting scarlet dress with a long slit up the right side to reveal her plush thigh. She teeters in a set of black heels, obviously trying to get back into the habit of wearing anything other than her comfy sneaker or simply going around barefoot.

"Sorry..." I huff, wincing as I cover my eye again and turning my head to try and get a better view of them with my good eye. "Didn't see..." I begin to chuckle weakly, giving the couple a smile nervous smile before Alex cuts me off.

"Don't worry about it, I was way worse when I got mine" the man chuckles, nudging the shorter Thai woman infront of him. "Remember hon? I was barely..."

"You were definitely something" she pouts, patting his legs behind her. "Handsy, grabby, a complete mena..."

"Yeeeeeeeah..." Alex chuckles nervously, rubbing his wife's bare shoulders. "Like when I got my wisdom teeth out, remember tha..."

"I remember alright" she smirks, turning to look up at her husband. "And if you don't want me showing everyone those videos we'd better get going, we can't leave Kelly babysitting all night."

"Right, right" Alex states, nudging his wife a little as she begins to walk down the stairs with him following closely behind. As they reach the landing Haley stops, causing the distracted taller man to bump into her slightly.

"Just try and get some rest, a little sleep will help so much" she warmly coos tapping just beneath her eye. "Give you a chance to play around with it too" she continues before walking off down the stairs, her husband jittering back and forth a little before waving at me.

"Have fun, maybe we'll catch you in the Verse later."

From MMORPGs to virtual reality headsets, the building of virtual worlds had always been a process of pushing the limits of what was possible with available technology. Each one would build up as the big new things before either crashing or stagnating as investments were pulled from the industry before moving on to the next advancement.

Virtual worlds in virtual reality had only just started to plateau once the next big innovation had hit the market, a rough and concerning piece of technology coming in the form of  the first piece of consumer wetware.

The Neuro-Verse was an ingenious design, the smallest viable product that the developers could devise in order to create a computer-to-brain interface. For years, companies had tried to create an implanted version kind of micro computer with a purpose to come further down the track. Promises of improving memory to curing diseases were all thrown around, though how these sewn in implants would perform the tasks seemed elusive during their development.

The Neuro-Verse leapfrogged these designs, hitting the market like a bullet out the barrel of a gun while they languished in the R&D and testing phases. Rather then implanting an computer, an a weak one at that, the Neuro-Verse instead went in a different direction. The tiny device merely acted as an interface, a conduit with the most powerful computing device on offer... The Human Brain.

The tiny chip, once implanted, rapidly integrates itself into the soft and supple gray matter. As more and more connections are formed the device rapidly becomes more a part of the brain itself than something foreign, eventually wrestling a great deal of control and access to much of the might organ in which it rests.

While originally implanted via surgery, the process was rapidly advanced further and further. Before long it shifted from needing a hospital stay, to requiring general aesthetic only, to finally simply requiring an injection behind the eye and into the optical nerve.

With a simple command, or even with just the act of sleep, users find themselves in 'The Hub' the start of their journey in the Mental-Verse.

Despite the ease of use and implantation wide acceptance was not readily found of the device. From an enterprise perspective there was little use to it beyond a normal computer, why have your workforce pass out in their chairs and at their desks to go through excel spreadsheet when they could simply use the computers that were already there?

As for home use, the device simply grossed far too many people out. The thought of having some tiny device worming its way into your head permanently simply turned to many people away, the thought of long term side effects driving away the rest.

Without wide adoption it was left to the true believes to seize the power behind the device, of being able to provide realistic experiences or utilizing the processing power of the human brain, to push the limits of the Neuro-Verse in search of the first killer app. It didn't take long for the first one to launch, for Dreamland to be born and immediately begin to draw in players.

 

Dreamland

Built rapidly off the idea of The Sims, Dreamland quickly raced from Alpha to Beta to a finished product in a matter of months. This first real delve into gaming on the Neuro-Verse innovated how games could be played and developed using the extremely minimalist devise.

Assets were 'ripped' from the minds of developers and testers, memories quickly being patched into into search of anything from trees to trains to add to the game world. Before long the developers had made the first photo-realistic world, one which players could walk around in without ever being able to tell the difference between it and real life so long as they didn't bring up the menu.

People quickly set about building their own little towns, moving around as the hand of god to bring homes and businesses into existence, the maps being saved somewhere in their deep subconscious for the game to pull out when needed. From bustling cities to quiet nature retreats, the players had soon either hand crafted or randomly generated more than enough space to begin sharing it with one another.

Single player maps, local area networks, and even massively multiplayer worlds were quickly set up giving everyone their own sandbox to play in. Some simply stuck with presets, a pseudo-random jumble of roads and buildings designed from the minds of many, others recreated real spaces from memory and reference, while others built entirely new towns and cities in a perfectly curated manner.

With a robust character creator no one needed to simply be themselves, with every inch of their body up for editing along with multiple parts of their personality thanks to the help of the skills and memories of other players. From professional skills to hobbies, to grand ambitions to small quirks and tastes, all these could be 'borrowed' from another player and copied into the mind of the player in order make them feel like their character in the moment.

However, the worlds were largely barren landscape drained much of the appeal. Even with multiplayer servers, the lack of people doing things while out and about immediately snapped players out of the illusion except for in the most quiet and lazy towns. The development of NPCs slowly padded out the world, from bartenders to serve drinks to children playing in the parks people's towns. However, one thing still alluded these NPCs, a real spark of life beyond the simple routines and dialogue trees they underwent.

A temporary stop gap solution, that never truly went away, was to advertise for another player to fill the role. Job boards soon became common for shared worlds, from small local ones to the largest metropolises, each requesting new players to make characters to provide some kind of wholeness to the world often in exchange for other bonuses in game. Singers and performers being allowed to start with additional income or maxed out artistic skills, to cleaners and janitors with ideal houses and plenty of free time, or even partners or parents to fill the social void in exchange or a carefree life. Even after the NPC 2.0 patch, these boards remained in operation with some people refusing to give up the idea of having a human behind whatever digital figure they wished.

The NPC 2.0 patch revolutionized Dreamland, the one act suddenly spurring on the development of other games in the same space. As more and more people explored these virtual reflections of the real world, in part thanks to the skills and feelings they borrowed from others, the developers quickly found their solution to their static and flat NPCs. Though patching together a mixture of the player, along with personality traits from various other sources, they could create something that behaved just like a real person. These new NPCs, often called N2s, used the player's own brain as their own, hijacking lesser used neural pathways to live out their own lives while the player was around and interacting with them before being removed in a flash once they were no longer needed.

 

With the sudden realness they could be made in game with these new NPCs, the fully realized and fleshed out virtual worlds finally becoming almost indistinct from reality, new studios entered into the Mental-Verse gaming space in search of new niches and genres to fill.

 

Horizons & Hearths

Piggy backing off of the success of Dreamland and largely copying their technology for ripping assets and procedural generation, Horizons and Hearths became the first traditional role playing game in the Mental-Verse. Swords and sorcery, orcs and elves, a slew of fantasy tropes quickly filled the world as players were enticed to join in and push the boundaries beyond the Federation of Eloras and into the untamed wilds.

While the Federation was handmade, begin pulled from the minds of the developers and carefully edited to make a player friendly experience, the lands beyond were made entirely on the fly thanks to the hive mind of players logged into the game. Every vista, every hill and valley, every camp and town was generated by committee though pulling from the subconscious of the players nearby. The same was done for new monsters and peoples found out on the frontier, often being ripped from players home brew Dungeons and Dragons campaigns or even their nightmares to create truly strange and fantastical encounters.

The game was well received for the sheer scale of the world and the bevy of options involved in it's character creation. The Federation covered large swathes of land from seas to mountains, allowing for a variety of race choices from halflings and half-demons to merfolk and minotaurs. The same could be said with classes, with the game heavily utilizing the copying and temporary rewriting of basic skills to provide knights with their skill at the blade or wizards their knowledge of the arcane. Alchemists somehow knew their reagents, rangers how to track, even bards finding their voices were all too joyous a reaction for new players in the game.

Where players did not know what to do they could also simply start a tutorial, generating them a character based on what they might find interesting before letting them test it out before either being booted back to character creation or continuing on as their new Eloran self.

Quests, dungeons, raids, player housing, and even romance or marriage were all available for players in Eloras. However, beyond the Federation's boundaries lay countless opportunities to discover the unknown or wondrous thanks to the procedural generation. Artifacts and spells that could do what the developer could hardly believe to fresh and arable land for players to found their own kingdoms, all this and more was open to people willing to risk the PVP environment beyond the laws of the Federation.

Wildlands

Wildlands was the first sci-fi game in the Mental-Verse, piggy backing off the success of Horizons and Hearths. Lacking much of the array of fantastical races and classes of it's competitor, Wildlands instead sought to win out with sheer scale.

With the player's only being able to select from human as a race, their class choices were more tied to the skill set they would take out into the world. From daring gunslingers and careful diplomats to shadowy thieves and learned scientists each would bring their own talents to bare in the seemingly infinite galaxy.

And seemingly infinite it was, with countless stars and planets to visit as players set out in their own star ships to explore the cosmos alone or with friends. Setting out from some sprawling metropolis or unbelievable space station, players were encouraged to explore and expand the universe as it built out with each explored inch with the stolen thoughts and ideas of their players.

Before long new races were found among the stars and most even becoming playable with the assistance of either some reproductive assimilation or the help of gene-splicing tech. With each new empire found the universe lurched outward, the frontier growing more and more distant while the inner worlds soon turned turns trade and commerce or even merely being virtual tourist destinations.

Those players who denied the allure of the frontier soon turned inwards, setting up businesses or mining asteroids for credits as well as simply performing the sometimes rather mundane tasks the NPCs would request from them.

As the N2s saw more and more diverse use, moving from mere set pieces to acting as quest givers and even companions to the players, so too did the risk of something going wrong with their still rather experimental code

In theory it's only meant to store the information in the device itself, flashing the memory once the NPC or player no longer needs it. However, due to how it uses the players brain to process things various quirks can come about.

While debated in the community as to if they even exist or whether it is just someone's over active imagination, they are often categorized as;

Ghosts

Ghosts often come about as flashes of insight or intrusive thoughts, a vague sense of seeing something in a mirror or a sense of knowing something the player shouldn't before it vanishes from thier memory or simply rests on the tip of thier tongue

Poltergeists

A more intrusive ghost, often times coming about while the person is tired or otherwise distracted. From tidying the space around them, to doodling elaborate sketches well beyond their capabilities, these intrusive actions may either come from their own character's skills or the remnants of an NPC still living inside their mind.

Phantoms

Phantoms are more fully formed, a bundle of thoughts and skills that take the shape of someone familiar in the mind of the player. Often time it comes in the form of their character or an NPC that lives on in their mind, these new consciousness range from a mumbling voice acting as some internal monologue to a confused and frightened full representation of their character to even a full person in their own right with an understanding of their place and how they came to being.

They are often eager to explore the real world, though many are just as likely to want to return to their virtual world either to be made whole again or to hopefully move to the next stage

Daemons

Daemons are a phantom that have wrestled an inordinate amount of control over their host mind. Upon waking up from the game the player finds themselves in the position of the Phantom, locked inside their own mind while the NPC or even their character has a chance to waltz about free from the confines of the digital world.

When logging back in it is more likely then not for the player to find themselves stuck in the body of the NPC, or even someone related to their former character like a mount or companion.

If left for long enough they will find themselves trapped in the digital world permanently, stuck there even when their body is awake as their shared brain lets them remain there forever.


Moreover, the risk of these coming from multiplayer games, and intentionally so, often goes deeply unreported. While nigh impossible in Dreamland, the futuristic and fantasy worlds with their procedural subconscious-player created content often include elements of body swapping, theft, or even fusion.

From the 'Mind-tether' found in the fringes of the Aurelian Expanse, a device that slowly exchanges two minds in order to extend one's life or commit acts of subterfuge, to the various spells and cursed artifacts that lay hidden in the many dungeons across the Horizon. It is not impossible for players to not only swap avatars, but in the process swap bodies in the waking world as well.

Where unintentional the issue is often shortly resolved, a quick trip back into the game and recasting the spell or using the item once more to swap back often does the trick. With a report to a GM soon following to remove the item, the issue is often deemed 'resolved'.

However, where planned ahead of time it can be nearly impossible to fix as the 'He said she said argument' often leads to little response from the developers, and with further planning such complaints can't even be made in the first place with the help of some of the more oppressive spells or technologies.

When these tools were used by accident by N2s the issue would be harder to report and remedy still. From a Harpy accidentally activating some 'shiny amulet' to an explorers companion activating an unknown piece of archeo-tech, the player would quickly find themselves stuck in the form completely lacking a menu to even report the apparent glitch.

Still, for most these games turned into the perfect escape. A series of worlds they could explore alone, with friends, or even with just the NPCs while asleep or simply relaxing. From having a picnic in the park, to fighting skeletons in some forgotten crypt, or even exploring the stars in one's own spaceship, the Mental-Verse had something for just about everyone.

Staggering up to my front door I fumble with the keys, the ache behind my eye turning to a deep and painful throbbing as the anesthetic finally begins to reach its end. Groaning to myself I hear the loud click of the lock as I twist the keys, m hand darting down to open the door as I practically topple over myself to get inside. I barely remember to snatch the keys on my way through, tossing them into my pocket as I kick the door shut behind me and quickly pull on the chain.

"Maybe I should..." I grumble, shuffling my way over to the couch before collapsing back into the cushions with a heavy thud. I slowly kick my legs up, my lanky frame overflowing over the arm rests as I try to lean back and get comfortable.

Closing my eyes I remember what Haley had said, my heart rate ramping up as I begin to wonder how I even turn the damn thing on. Suddenly I feel my breath and heart slowing against my will, the light from behind my eyes lids dimming as it feels like I'm being pulled back and away into some deep dark pool. A strange sense of calm washes over me, my body growing more and more at ease as it is forced into a deep sleep while my mind is carefully held conscious and awake.

The darkness is suddenly punctuated by a warm light, a logo with blue text fading in as I find it following my gaze no matter where I look.

Mental-Verse

A world beyond your imagination