1 Prologue: Nighting Gale Online

In the annals of human history, the year 2087 was a threshold, a divide between what was once a life burdened by mundane necessities and the promise of an existence beyond imagination. The Earth had seen an epoch of unprecedented technological revolutions within the previous half-century, with leaps in medical, military, and everyday technologies that drastically redefined the human experience. Yet, in the midst of all these rapid changes, the most groundbreaking innovation came not from a tangible gadget or procedure, but from an entity forged from data and algorithms: an artificial intelligence system known as Gale.

Gale Co., the enigmatic corporation responsible for Gale, burst into the global scene in 2059. The company's CEO was a faceless entity, a spectral presence that nonetheless steered the company towards stratospheric growth in a span of five years. Gale, their flagship AI, was not merely another machine learning model—it was a virtual titan, capable of carrying out cognitive processes equivalent to billions of human minds simultaneously. This capability was not lost on various sectors, and soon, Gale Co.'s influence spread across the military, medicine, gaming, and practically every other conceivable industry.

Despite the staggering extent of their reach, Gale Co. proved to be a seemingly altruistic titan, diverting nearly all profits to charities worldwide. The company's non-profit nature left many bewildered, sparking theories suggesting that for Gale Co., with its near-boundless power, money had become an inconsequential construct, unnecessary for achieving their enigmatic objectives.

In 2085, the company unveiled their most ambitious project yet—a concept that would shatter all previous notions of reality and redefine the human experience. Gale Co. introduced a fully immersive Virtual Reality (VR) game, an innovation that stood head and shoulders above existing VR technologies, which by that time could simulate an ultra-realistic replica of Earth. Gale Co.'s VR universe was not a mere copy, but an entirely new world, a divine realm controlled by the omnipotent Gale AI.

The game was conceived as an open-world survival experience, devoid of any imposed quests or goals. The objective was simple yet profound: live another life. In this new reality, players could outlive their physical existence on Earth, currently capped at around 150 years due to recent medical advancements.

Through Gale Co.'s full-dive VR, players would enter a coma-like state, their physical bodies preserved against aging and deterioration. The temporal rules of this digital world were skewed, with five seconds passing within the game for every earthly second. This was the key to quasi-immortality, the promise of an endless life inside a game.

The announcement caused an upheaval across the globe, with humanity thrown into a frenzy of excitement and apprehension. The chance to partake in Gale Co.'s beta test was akin to winning a golden ticket to eternity. Despite the stark warnings that this was a nascent, untested technology with a minuscule yet real chance of fatal consequences, people rushed to enlist themselves.

Eventually, Gale Co. selected a million fortunate souls at random to embark on this grand experiment. These chosen ones were flown to a state-of-the-art Gale Co. facility in America, where they would undergo a year-long beta test that could potentially herald a new era in human evolution. The prospect of a limitless life in a perfect virtual world loomed tantalizingly close, raising endless possibilities, questions, and fears.