Chargen

Since when did ROB offer character generation? The disembodied soul in the middle of an endless void contemplated its options. It didn't know how it got here. Or where here was? Or if it had agreed to this or was kidnapped directly by Mr ROB, Truck-kun, or similar.

It could tell it was somewhat diminished. Had it died? It had a rather full life of memories, including reading various stories involving similar situations to what it found itself in online. Still, it turned blank if you asked what its name was or even what it looked like in the mirror, and interpersonal memories were a bit spotty.

It might have spent some time in a philosophical introspection on the nature of life. Was it alive? However, what it had just done without thinking reassured it. You see, nothing could be this stupid and NOT be alive.

You see, it had a deeply ingrained personality with its own preferences and likes. And it was coming to the realization that these likes were going to kill it; it just knew it.

It was, even now, still looking at the locked-in selections with something akin to shock. It had made the selections in a haze, almost on autopilot and locked them in before it could stop itself. If given an option to trade increased risk, especially if it was temporary, for a long-term payout, it had selected it. It had often taken such choices as a matter of course when playing roleplaying games or roguelike games in its past life but now found itself wondering if it was insane.

*WORLD SELECTION RESTRICTIONS: SCIENTIFIC or PSEUDO-SCIENTIFIC ONLY (+25 points)

*WORLD SELECTION RESTRICTIONS: HIDE RANDOM RESULT ("Surprise me!") (+15 points)

*WORLD: [RANDOMIZE] (+50 points)

... SPINNING ... SPINNING ... SELECT!

*WORLD is [REDACTED].

*AVATAR SELECTION: [CONVENTIONALLY ATTRACTIVE SUBSET] (-20 points)

*AVATAR SELECTION: [RANDOMIZE APPEARANCE] (+30 points)

*AVATAR SELECTION: [RANDOMIZE BIOGRAPHY, SKILLS] (+75 points)

*BONUS: RANDOM AVATAR will be selected from any open world, not just SELECTED world.

*BONUS: YOU HAVE >130 POINTS TO SPEND! AVATAR BIOGRAPHIES UPGRADED 0.5 to 1.0 TIERS!

... SPINNING ... SPINNING ...

It sat there staring at the stupidly selected 15 bonus points while the blue boxed interface that reminded him of an early Final Fantasy game animated a spinning glyph that was slowing down. Those 15 points granted from hiding the previously randomized world weren't worth it! That wasn't even that many "points", yet it impacted the rest of the selections so much!

When it tried to select an avatar's biography, everything was redacted, except the point costs associated with each selection! The user interface should have been given a brief precis on each option, which would have included any skills and knowledge the individual biography would impart into its mind when selected. It wasn't sure how it knew this, but it did.

All of them looked worse than what you get if you requested FOIA documents from the CIA! In a pique, it had mashed the 'USE ALL AVAILABLE POINTS AND RANDOMIZE' option with its mind because was that really any different from what it would have been doing by selecting a completely redacted biography?

It didn't even really understand what the tiers were, but it supposed it intellectually appreciated the bonus. A randomized "character" generated would not be such a big deal on certain worlds. But it could be instant death on others! A special forces soldier background would be a bit of a curiosity in a Star Trek universe, but a Star Trek science officer would be meat if dropped anywhere near the plot of Halo, for example.

The spirit should be panicking more than it was. It did not understand why it was not.

... SELECT!

*AVATAR APPEARANCE: [SELECT!]

*AVATAR BIOGRAPHY: Transhuman Researcher [SELECT!]

*AVATAR TIER: SUPERIOR

*AVATAR PERKS: Genius, Prodigy, Driven

*AVATAR FLAWS: Eccentric, Single-minded, Situationally morally inflexible (Transhumanism and Non-human/AI rights)

*AVATAR LOADOUT: Standard

*AVATAR SPECIALTIES: Medicine / Cybernetics / Genetics / Virology

*DATA DOWNLOAD IN 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...

Ah. The spirit knew why it wasn't panicking, even if the random selection was perhaps one of the worst options if it ended up in a death world. It wasn't panicking because panic was a function, primarily, of biology. Specifically, it involved an autofacilitatory feedback loop involving adrenaline and other neurotransmitters. It wasn't, then, surprising why a disembodied spirit could, at most, feel very concerned with its lot.

Ideas about how one would mimic this effect in a baseline human flooded the spirit's mind for a moment. The spirit's new knowledge found the very notion of panic deeply detestable, as perhaps the worst failing of an already profoundly fallible bag of meat and water. The option it seemed to want to push the most was "replace brain entirely with carbon hyper-matrix optical quantum computer running our neural network in an emulation."

So it was going to be THAT kind of transhumanist background. It would have helped the spirit if it knew its selected avatar's source material but did not recognize it. Its new memories described a human race of hundreds of billions that had colonized the entire solar system but had not yet reached other star systems. It was an era of space exploration that was necessary when the Earth was rendered inhabitable through aggressive bioweapons and artificially intelligent killbots. And aggressively intelligent bioweapons. Terraforming Venus was considered cheaper and safer than trying to clean up Earth.

It spent a few moments trying to reconcile its earliest memories with the knowledge of the avatar. Its new memories suggested that a person, an ego, was nothing more and nothing less than the sum of all its experiences and knowledge. So it spent some time compartmentalizing and focusing on its memories, trying to keep them from contaminating each other too much. It was an impossibility from the start in the long run, really. Still, it would give it some time to build a history of behaviour based on its earliest memories that could be used as a basis for a code of conduct that it would follow going forward, even after the inevitable melding of the two silos of experience. Through this method, the first memories would retain priority, at least in how it behaved if not thought.

It was an electrical engineer in its first life. Still, its entire life's memories of engineering weren't a thimble full compared to the incidental knowledge of electrical engineering, microcomputing, and processor architecture its second set of memories had just randomly acquired while practising and researching cybernetics and human augmentation. Medicine and electrical engineering started to blur a bit when you designed and implated diamond-based optical quantum co-processors in people's heads, as a matter of course.

The spirit tabled the inconvenient philosophical questions about self that had not been reliably answered in either set of memories while it considered the selected randomized appearance.

One might think that spending twenty points to ensure that any randomized appearance was at least slightly "conventionally attractive" was a vain waste of points. However, those people had obviously not selected the randomize button in roleplaying games where you could end up with monstrously ugly visage more often than not, nor understood how much more difficult everything was for a man or woman that was considered anything worse than homely.

The spinning, naked, three-dimensional model WAS attractive. Maybe slightly too much so if the spirit found itself in a world without much rule of law. It was a curvy blonde female of above-average height. She appeared to be in her early to mid-twenties. Her features were wholly symmetrical, and while they weren't on the level of a professional model, they were eye-catching with a teardrop-shaped face and deep blue eyes.

The spirit was mildly disappointed at the gender selected. Was it, then, a male in its previous life? It spent a moment in introspection, but it still didn't know. It had the vague sense of referring to University as being in a sausage party while studying electrical engineering, but there were no feelings associated with that off-hand quip. Statistically, it seemed like most electrical engineers or engineers in any field were male, but perhaps it was an outlier. It did not have any strong feelings about that one way or another, nor could it precisely remember any family or loved ones it had once had, either.

The source of its mild disappointment was the fact that females, on average, had less upper body strength and less endurance, and it might need those things to survive. And it had the feeling that the reality it would find itself in was not as egalitarian for game balance as most roleplaying games.

But, the feeling was minor. This was barely on the list of the obstacles the spirit considered ahead of it. It did not have a preference on gender one way or another, which is why it randomized the appearance in the first place.

And the impressions of what its second set of memories sent back of an idealized body were in the form of a six-meter tall robotic spider with hundreds of built-in tools and powered by a small fission reactor. Finally, there was the vague sense of offended incredulity that someone had even considered that there would be a ranked opinion on the relative aesthetics of a bag of meat that was so baseline anyway. The specs were terrible, either way!

It, no she, spent a long moment internalizing and synchronizing this appearance with her own sense of self. Both sets of memories indicated that this was a priority, as an open ego was like a fortress with its gates unbarred and unguarded. Her second set of memories provided a set of mental meditative techniques that should help to centre herself, and she considered it a priority to do so before continuing.

This mental or spiritual (the hyper-materialist memories scoffed openly at this option) void was ideal for this practice, as extraneous emotions caused by bodily processes were utterly absent. Of course, keeping each set of memories siloed and compartmentalized made everything much more complicated and was contraindicated, but she made do well enough.

The spirit's first set of memories felt she had likely died and shouldn't hang on to too much of her previous identity, even if she could remember it. However, her second set of memories felt that she was in the process of being born. She felt the odds were better that they were a newly instanced artificial intelligence being given background composite memories, one set to prime the personality of the nascent intelligence and the latter set to provide background for its intended function. Despite this disagreement, there was consensus on internalizing this provided avatar as our identity.

The spirit's first set of memories thought the second had too much intelligence and too little common sense. Even a cursory examination of second set's memories made it evident that there was no way any of the organizations in the solar system in her memories would instance a new AI with such strong beliefs about how AIs should be as free as any other person. It was an impossibility, especially in a universe that had already experienced one AI-related apocalypse. Every new AGI "born" had a carefully constructed subservient personality, with each facet examined and carefully constructed to minimize the risk of it going rampant.

The fact that second set had considered that as she thought it and now had begun to agree might be a sign that it was becoming difficult to keep things compartmentalized. She didn't really want to develop or induce some sort of disassociative disorder, either. Even though her second set of memories indicated that was unlikely since disassociative identity disorder was causally linked to subtle but traumatic brain injuries, congenital brain formation issues or chronic neurochemical imbalances.

*CUSTOMIZE LOADOUT? Y/N

*NOTE: Selecting NO will increase the quality of your initial [STANDARD] Loadout by 0.5 tiers!

She stopped herself from hitting no by a force of will. Was this interface designed to troll her? Instead, she selected the customization option. And instantly she began regretting spending all the points on the biography section as additional items could be bought here for points.

Her genome selection was greyed out with only the default 'Standard corporate optimized gene expressions with a baseline genetic error-correction mod.' She could have bought many other options, but all cost points she no longer had.

Her second set of memories, at least, told her all about this option. The optimized gene expressions would make her slightly better overall, but nothing more than what a good athlete of her mass and sex could do. At least she would be stronger and faster than almost any other 175cm woman who didn't work hard at it.

The genetic error correction modification was more impressive. It replaced entirely the baseline human DNA error correction method with one designed from the ground up. Even in low-radiation environments, an average person receives thousands of molecular lesions in cells a day.

Mutation of cells in a baseline human is quite common. This custom-built organelle reduced that event by multiple orders of magnitude, while a sanity-check process caused instant apoptosis if a change to the genome is detected. While this modification will result in a drastic increase in the Hayflick limit of cellular division and, therefore, a modest overall increase in projected organism longevity, the actual purpose of the modification is radiation and mutation resistance. The only downside is an approximate one per cent increase in the energy required for normal cell processes.

The spirit's second set of memories fully understood this modification, to the point where she could quickly devise a retrovirus to induce it in others as easily as her first set of memories could build a full bridge rectifier with a drawer full of radioshack parts.

There were only three options where she could make changes to any of the selections: cybernetics, equipment, and clothing.

The default cybernetic selection was listed as a "personal computer and neural co-processor." Her second set of memories tried to revolt at the idea of getting rid of it. It was a combination of a direct neural interface and an implanted computer system that interfaced with her brain and sensory cortex. Her first set of memories wanted it too. Still, among the options she could swap it with was an implanted medical system that was essentially a medichine, or medical nanomachine, factory. It would not only make her baseline biological immune system look like a joke, but the medichines had default programming to fix traumatic injuries, although slowly. But thoroughly enough to even remove scarring after enough time has passed. And it would generate more medichines forever; it would never run out, although the manufacturing rate wasn't super fast.

The spirit overruled her second set of memories. This was too important and could be the difference between life and death. Plus, she reasoned, while medichines are specialized for medicine, that was mainly a result of their programming, and physically, they were pretty generalized. If she could reprogram them, a continual, if small, source of generalized nanomachines might be enough to construct her own neural computer or neural interface. Second set was confident she could design the neural and computing architecture to do so.

Second set had set her foot down, though, in terms of the equipment. The spirit wanted to select a weapon for safety, but second set demanded that a combination of computer and non-invasive diagnostic scanner be chosen instead.

It was intended to provide microscopic, nanometer-scale three-dimensional medical imaging but second set argued it could be used on almost anything. It used some sort of gravity or mass detection technology to create near-atomic slices of an object and then infer the elemental and molecular composition based on its mass repeatedly billions of times per nanosecond, thereby creating a 3D image. And, it should work on any technology that wasn't actively shielded, metal or organic. The programming was only designed for medical imaging and diagnostics, but the computer did include a complete development environment. Both sets of memories knew some programming, and both agreed it would be a really big project to try to develop some type of engineering CAD system, although neither thought it was impossible.

The spirit did not know where they were going. It was possible such a scanner would be superfluous but if it wasn't the ability to reverse engineer unknown technology might also be the difference between life and death, or at least mediocrity and greatness, and second set felt that those two things were without an appreciable difference. It was selected.

The last option was clothes. The spirit contemplated selling them back for points, but it wasn't enough to get even half of the neural implant, and the idea of showing up in an unknown world naked was not good.

She selected the most rugged options available. While they weren't considered even basic body armor, as that cost extra points, the engineering field suit was slightly impact resistant. Second set scoffed at the idea of calling it bulletproof, but her idea of what a gun was something that accelerated tiny flechettes to Mach 8. Her first set of memories was sure these random future clothes were at least proof against low calibre pistols of her previous life and possibly knife resistant. She doubted it would stop any rifle or carbine of any calibre, though. But, it was better than nothing.

With nothing further to do, the spirit finalized the last selection, curiosity overcoming her feeling of vague anxiousness for the first time.

*WORLD TRANSFERENCE IN 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...

---

There was not a segue between being in the void and suddenly finding herself standing in a dark room, lit dimly by artificial lighting in the ceiling. She glanced down at her fingers, flexing them testingly. Where was she? It looked like a bomb went off in here. She took stock of herself briefly and her belongings.

The scanner she selected as equipment was about the size of a small tablet computer. Her second set of memories was delighted in that it was the military version, which was extremely ruggedized. In addition, it featured a layered diamondoid screen rather than the sapphire of the civilian version, larger batteries, and a universal charger that could charge it from essentially any voltage provided safely. The tablet was carried in a small camouflage-colored messanger bag that she was carrying on her hip, that carried the charger, a spare battery and even a small but very efficient solar panel which was an ultra-efficient fabric variety that was constructed of hundreds of layers of monolayer graphene. You could shoot it without appreciable damage, it was practically soldier-proof and when completely deployed could provide almost a kilowatt in full sun. Bonus!

There was ruined furniture everywhere, with most things carrying a small coat of dust and the steel walls. This wasn't a good sign, in her opinion. The rooms reminded her vaguely of a SCIF due to the lack of windows and bare steel construction. Her first life had a fair bit of experience with those as she had enlisted in the Army as an intelligence analyst for four years to pay for a University she could otherwise not afford.

However, the more she looked at things the more she was reminded instead of some type of underground bunker. Like Cheyenne mountain or Raven Rock or similar sites that she had some knowledge of but little experience that mainly served as sites for continuity of government contingencies, especially during the Cold War. Most of those sites were shut down or repurposed by the time of her military service, so she had never seen one, except as a tour of the partly decommissioned Cheyenne Mountain site.

She glanced at what appeared to be a half-broken distillation setup, complete with broken beakers and flasks. That was a bit odd, you certainly did not see chemistry sets in either of those types of installations. Curious, she picked up a half-broken, dust-covered beaker, carefully gripping the beaker's rounded bottom to avoid the sharp and jagged glass.

She heard a rustling behind her and a manic voice half yell, "Gaaaaarrryyyy!" She turned around just in time to see an unkempt man in a blue one-piece bodysuit swinging a TIRE IRON at her head. Letting out a bit of a shriek she reached out instinctively, blocking with her left arm.

The tire iron hit her arm with a lot of force, and a crack that she felt instantly as a sharp pain. Her second set of memories barely needed to see her arm in the peripheral vision before clinically diagnosing it -- simple fracture of the ulna, ruptured periosteum. Realign, restrain with field-expedient splint if cast not available. Time to return to full function, eighteen to thirty six hours assuming nano-medical implant is in full function. Two weeks, if not.

Wincing with pain she felt her reactions start to speed up. Although she did not have any kind of reflex augmentation, adrenaline and, theoretically, good genes did account for something. The dirty, crazy-eyed man had started to pull back his tire iron, setting up for another swing so she did the first thing that occurred to her -- she shoved the broken glass of the jagged beaker directly into his neck.

"Ahahaha, Gar--glurk!" The man dropped his tire iron, clutching his throat which was bleeding from a severed artery as he dropped to the floor. Her second set of memories thought he would lose consciousness within five to ten seconds from low blood pressure causing hypoxia, and then expire shortly after that. She had shoved the beaker so hard she fractured the bottom of it, cutting her palm a bit.

Watching the lunatic bleed out and twitch on the ground she suddenly felt ill. Lurching over to the corner of the room she bent over and dry-heaved for several moments. Neither set of her memories had, precisely, prepared her to kill someone less than two minutes after arriving in this world. She did have the experience of serving in the US Army, but she was an intelligence analyst. Even if she had qualified as expert on a couple of weapons and had theoretically considered what she might do if she had to take a life she had been more or less thinking of it like plinking down-range at vaguely human-shaped silhouettes, not shoving jagged, broken glass into a man's neck.

She felt that dry-heaving was so much worse than just throwing up. Sighing, she stood up. Her left arm was broken, her right hand was cut up. She thanked ThorAllahJesus that she had taken the medical implant. Not only would it quickly set and heal the broken bone but it would protect her in the event that crazy man had Super AIDS. Blood-borne pathogens were always a danger in new environments, and the several grams per day of nano-machines that her implant manufactured should protect her from incidental contact with anything that wasn't a weaponized nano-plague itself. So long as she wasn't dipped into a vat of virus---wait, why did she even think that was a possibility? Nobody had vats of viruses! Her subconscious was trying to tell her something.

She glanced down at the dead man. He was wearing a bright blue bodysuit. She hooked her foot under his torso and roughly kicked him over, flipping him so he was face down on the dirty floor. A big "108" was printed on the back of his bodysuit.

She groaned in recognition, "Fuuuuck me."