1 Another Beginning

Jade never even saw the bus that hit him, until the system replayed the footage from a nearby traffic camera. He watched it with a feeling of resignation. Unfortunately, this wasn't the first time he'd failed.

He was never certain if he experienced sleep in the way that people who weren't part of the system experienced it, but he slept until his new body was ready, and then he woke up again in the same place that he always woke. The only thing that was different was that the clothes he'd worn to work that morning were gone.

Jade checked the date and time before he called in. Sometimes it took longer than others for his body to be replaced, but only a day had elapsed this time. While he dressed, he made profuse apologies for having missed his shift, already knowing that only the few actual witnesses and the system would be aware of his previous demise.

--

Jade finished cleaning the last toilet, put away the cleaning supplies, and then joined Emily at the counter. Emily had never had any contact with the system that Jade knew of. It was a point of pride with her that she'd never wasted any of her life on video games. Since she worked the same shift with him at the convenience store, he wasn't certain what about her life it was that she deemed such a meaningful existence untainted by electronics.

There was a lot about how other people lived that Jade had difficulty understanding, but he was pretty clear that his main quest was to see the world through a human perspective. He knew it because it was written at the top of his quest log, and it never changed, no many how many hundreds of sub quests he finished. Jade was also about 99% certain that most people did not have a quest log.

When he returned to his room, he logged onto the game that he'd been named after. There were already hundreds, if not thousands of "Living World" games running on the enormous computers that orbited Earth in this century, but there was something nostalgic about returning to the first one. Jade was also fairly certain that it was where the system had originated, although it had access to almost every electronic device that he'd encountered.

His dwarf nimbly assembled the final piece of the steam engine he'd been building, and hopped into the strange craft it was attached to. If Jade's coordination in real life had been as excellent as that of his dwarf, he'd never have been hit by that bus. He launched his sand skimmer into the desert with practiced motions, and flew across the sand to the city that had been built the year he'd been born, assuming of course, that he'd ever been born.