After getting up in the morning, Connor made sure he had all his gear on him. Spending a short amount of time in the inn for breakfast, he headed out to the gate he had used to get in the town in the first place.

‘I think it’s this way.’ Connor thought. He had arrived at the town walls and the gate. The huge gap between two sets of walls was filled with villagers passing by, handing out their plates to the guards before either pulling their carts filled with various goods inside the city. Connor found the road that Jeanne had mentioned thanks to the signs with pointy arrows and started to follow the road.

As he walked the road filled with people of various origins, Connor could not help but think of his situation. There were villagers handling carts with goods, there were young men and women walking, laughing and smiling at each other. But one thing had drawn his attention. A family of three. A father, a mother and a son. The son was on the shoulders of the father while walking together with the son’s mother. Talking and smiling.

‘I wonder how they’re doing…’ was what Connor thought. It had been a few days since he came to this world. Logged in to a game hoping to see fighter jets flying over and spend some time in realistic battlefields as he had watched, read and played before but somehow ended up here. Unable to leave. ‘They must be so worried right now…’ he was especially worried about his mother. Even though he was already 19, his mother was a very timid person. Every single time Connor was out with his friends, she would call in varying intervals making sure he was okay. Connor had to put up with it for years. Connor continued walking as he kept his eyes on the family walking by.

‘The developers would realize something is wrong by now… Did they just forget about me? Did I fell into a coma and this is what my consciousness generating to keep me alive? Did I die and somehow restarted my life? Or did the developers actually found out and frantically trying to get me out of here… ah…’ Connor sighed. He was tired of sleeping in a bed like the one at the inn. It felt like he was sleeping on a rock. In comparison to his bed at home, it was terrible to sleep on. The food was subpar. The water was basically undrinkable and the only available drink was just ale. ‘I don’t even understand how people manage to live in this pl-’ Connor suddenly stopped and slowly looked towards the sky.

‘People living in this place… Is it a game… Is it a real world… An alternate universe, a parallel world…’ he started thinking. He had read the novels before, he had played the games and watched the movies. There were times where people went to another world all of a sudden. It was pretty common to see scenes such as a doctor suddenly going back 1500 years to the past or vice versa on the television. ‘This needs to be tested somehow…’ Connor was thinking if he could test this theory. Was he teleported into some unknown dimension where the world did not advance with mages or was it that he just went back in time and that magic was real all along? No matter what, one thing was certain. This theory was needed to be tested. ‘How? How could I test this…’ Connor thought as he inadvertently moved his right hand on his face, tapping his thumb on his lips.

The game was supposed to feel real for sure, but even that had its limits. The tutorial was accurate is what Connor had thought of. He had started in a small military training area with an NPC ordering him to use the guns and whatnot, however, he ended up here as soon as the tutorial was complete. For sure, it was not the Military Base Colonna the game was supposed to send him. Moreover, the atmosphere and the setting was completely different. The way people walked and talked was nowhere similar. Every single person he had encountered felt like a real human being. Even with the current standards, that would have required enormous computing power. Arclight Entertainment was a huge company for sure but the problem of the 22nd Century was the optimization of Artificial Intelligence. Near the end of the 21st century, in 2077. Humanity had a great breakthrough in Artificial Intelligence. It was possible to have human-like conversations with an AI that had a memory to record it all, adapt to it and most importantly, feel emotions. However, there was one caveat. They had used the biggest supercomputer at the time to run this specific AI. It had cost them millions of dollars just to run it for a few hours. Even after 20 years since the discovery of this technology. The scientists were boggled as running the AI with the full feature set still cost a pretty penny. The running AIs would have most features stripped to assist with the cost savings. As the years passed the situation got better and the scientists were able to enable memory and adaptation features without having fear, nevertheless, the computational cost of emotions was still unbearable. Happiness, anger, fear, annoyance, disgust… Connor had observed all these emotions since arriving in this world. In various different NPCs, some even at the same time. There was no way Arclight Entertainment could afford the computational needs of running this AI.

‘Unless they discovered a new technology, there is no way this is feasible. I don’t see a reason for them not to market their technology on the side with the game itself… What if… what if I am not in a game?’ Connor questioned himself. In terms of technology, everything that was happening so far was impossible. The technology in the world was not feasible enough to handle an operation this big unless all the supercomputers in the world worked together to run the game servers which was… impossible. Connor looked at his MP5 while it slung on his shoulder. He had not checked what happened to the man he had shot earlier at all. In any game, after a mob has been killed by the player the body would remain there until it was looted. After the player looted the corpse, the body would disappear. It was all done to ensure the game had a high performance as dead corpses everywhere would affect the game’s performance. Connor had looted the body as soon as the man was dead, it was one of the rules of every single MMORPG. You should always loot the body. If the body did not disappear…

“And then he said, “Gloria, let's unite our farms.” Can you believe that marriage proposal? Unite our farms?”

Suddenly, someone hit Connor in the back which made him jump.

“Sorry sorry, didn’t see ya.” The peasant woman who hit Connor apologised and kept walking with her friends.

Connor looked around for a few seconds before coming out of his stupor.

‘I was lost in thought again… But, what if I am in a different universe altogether?’ he thought as he continued walking.