“Subject 13617 has breached the fourth wall and opened his character sheet.” An excited voice announced. The doctor was wearing a white lab-coat, and waving a report at the man seated behind the desk. The doctor’s hair was messy and his horned rim glasses were slightly askew.

“That’s the first of the new batch correct? How long did it take him.” The man behind the desk asked. In contrast to the doctor his blond hair and dark suit were impeccable. His blue eyes were calm and calculating as he questioned the doctor.

“Just under two weeks. That puts him in the top 2%, number 147 to be exact.” The doctor was clearly very excited as he chirped happily to his boss.

“Hmmmm…. What tipped him off.” The voice was cool but tinged with a hint of interest.

“I’d have to check the logs to be 100% sure, but the timeline coincides almost exactly with receipt of his first quest.” The doctor replied.

“Seems likely, I keep telling the engineers they need to iron out the quest giving subroutine of the NPC behavioral program.” He stood up from his desk then took the report from the doctor and threw it in his briefcase. He shut it then he headed for the door “I’ve got a meeting to get to. Keep an eye on the subject, hopefully he’ll get us some good data.”

************************************************

Jasmine absently clicked through the reports she was supposed to be reading. She’d been hired by Nexus six-months ago as a Data Analysis Assistant. It was a crummy job. She spent all day every day reading play-logs from the game Otherworld looking for ‘anomalies’ and answering ridiculous questions. The questions were utterly ludicrous and what exactly an “anomaly” consisted of was pretty vague. That was apparently the reason they needed a person to do it. Computers are great at finding patterns, but they need precise instructions. The problem was there were just too many variables in human behavior. It might take a computer 1000 years to churn through the data in one of these reports and go through every possible iteration of anything that might possibly be ‘anomalous’, but a human could look at the same report and find it in five minutes. And the questions….

“In your estimation what prompted Player 8740 to exclaim “Holy Shit-Nuggets!” when MOB 174F518B946 used Master IV Rank Spell “Pyrocalamity” to destroy his party.

He mistook Item 876684 ‘Goblin droppings’ for a religious relic.

He was surprised at the special effects that the spell created.

He was in awe of how his party was defeated by a single spell.

That was what she was being paid for. To be a biological data sieve and some sort of arm-chair shrink. It was honestly the worst job she’d ever had but the pay was good. Since she hadn’t gone to college and her band had never panned out she needed the cash. The perks weren't bad though, and honestly some of the logs were pretty funny reads. She changed to her ‘favorite’ folder and skimmed over a couple.

Man gets eaten by were-shark.

Woman falls off cliff after eating magical mushroom.

Man drowns after boat runs ashore because lamia takes her top off.

Man dies after falling off flying griffon while drunk.

She’d never known her sense of humor was so dark until she’d taken this job. All the people in the reports were real people, and when their characters died, they had to re-roll. The thing was though, because of the games ‘Full Immersion Technology’ they couldn’t actually remember they were playing a game, and the game would somehow erase the memories of the last play though, so everyone had to start all over knowing nothing.

Modern humans weren’t terribly resourceful either. So she read a lot of reports where people starved to death or were killed by a wild animal after a few minutes of play. Some people would go weeks or months doing nothing but dying over-and-over again. It was honestly a pretty awful life. She wondered why they’d signed up to be testers at all.

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Author's Note: Alright! First major story milestone reached. Hope you guys have been enjoying things so far. I hope you'll continue reading now that he's out of 'Caveman' phase and starts exploring the games mechanics. Also we'll be introducing some new characters as well as another POV soon.