4 In the white room with no courtains

Rowan was getting visibly bored and annoyed sitting on the white chair tapping on the white table while staring at the white walls of the white room. It was like the polar opposite of his suffering before. First, it was all black now it was all white for what seemed like eons.

Rowan's mental defenses were finally cracking a bit as he tried to log out again and nothing happened. He put his head on his hands which were spread on the table and tried to sleep.

Rickman watched him on a huge 200-inch display and felt pity. Rowan was just a bit younger as his daughter. He could imagine how he would feel if this happened to her and some creep was watching her every move. To look at her helplessness and refuse to offer a helping hand or at least a comforting word.

"If there is a God this is how he must feel like, and if there is a God we are going to hell for this.", was his last thought as he turned away and walked out of the room.

He called Robert.

"Hello, Bob."

"Hello, Jimmy."

"I will put Rowan on the official game server.", Rickman said.

"I don't think it's a smart idea. When we iron out the kinks in the helmet the server will go public at once. If Rowan is there can you guarantee no leakage of what happened?", Robert adamantly refused.

"I can guarantee Rowan won't make it on the test server until tomorrow. He is losing it as we speak.", Rickman replied.

"What do you mean losing it?", asked Robert.

"I mean he is just lying on the test table and has not moved in 10 minutes, It's just a matter of time before his stress level becomes critical and we lose him.", Rickman mixed some half-truths with the truth as he replied.

"Ok. Transfer him to Omnia but I want him out of it the moment another human not associated with our company connects. Am I making myself clear?", Robert said with a threatening voice.

"Crystal.", said Rickman and disconnected the call.

"Sorry kid. This is the best I can do."

Rickman went back into the control room and inputted his credentials on a computer which gave him the highest privileges over their servers.

First, he checked the operation of Omnia it was running normally. The load indicator showed it was not even at 1 percent of its capabilities.

Rickman was lazy at creating content so he did something most in his field of work deemed impossible. He created artificial intelligence and made it simulate creation.

It was a virtual god that was born which created a planet from scratch then filled it with creatures. The life forms were modeled from every source imaginable. From Earths own ecosystem to creatures you could only find in the myths and legends of past civilizations. If that was not enough Omnia included also the most famous works of fantasy authors and detective novels NovaTech could secure copyrights from.

To test the system Rickman let it run for a month at maximum power. The whole company's computers were sharing the workload and every available computer was at 90 % capacity. Every day in real life signified 10.000 years in Omnia on a planet that was ten times biģger than the Earth.

Robert was going bonkers when he got the reports of power usage. Luckily Rickman knew his limits and didn't employ the dedicated servers of their games which were still making them money. NovaTech actually didn't lose money they just made a lot less.

When Robert got the reports of what Rickman achieved during that month he was in awe of the man.

5 billion NPCs which were thinking they are living breathing entities with their own family trees and relationships. 100+ billion animals and even more plants which evolved and were organically still growing.

What Omnia created was not a virtual game but a virtual planet and while all of this was running at normal speed the system used less than 1 % of its capacity.

That meant that even with every human alive logging in 2031 it would not reach 2 %.

Robert was in awe of Rickman and full of anticipation. They quite possibly had the greatest game of all times on their hands and all they needed was for a way to get customers to connect to it and of course, pay for the privilege.

When he saw the helmet design though Rickman genius turned into Rickman idiot.

Robert wondered why Rickman shaved his head and now he got his answer.

The helmet Rickman designed was fully functional but only if you had less than 4 millimeters of hair in between your skull and the access points. So unless their target audience is fully bald people, Buddhist monks and skinheads this was totally unacceptable.

Not waiting for Rickman he gave the order for a redesign to another team of researchers and the 128 needle monstrosity was borne.

Rickman was livid but by the time he found out, it was too late. The headsets already went into production so all he could do was swallow his anger.

"Here we go. Good luck." , Rickman said as he transferred Rowan to Omnia.

Rowan was still trying to sleep as a sudden feeling of weightlessness made him open his eyes and he appeared in what seemed a teleportation circle in a busy town.

He fell on his ass since he was sitting a moment ago but still raised his right fist high.

"Finally.", Rowan yelled.