Sam was at a complete loss for how to act. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his message came back undelivered. He’d mustered up the fortitude to actually try calling people, only to get a recorded message about unusually high call volumes. Which made sense to him, people everywhere were probably calling around to try to find any solid footing. There wasn’t really a precedent for “Be abducted by aliens and placed in an exact replica of your reality except you can never die, no one needs to work, and the server resets at the end of the week.” What kind of reaction should he expect.

people act, based on how they’ve acted before and how they’ve seen others act, Sam thought. So what would people base their actions on? Fear was probably a major influence on general attitudes and choices. Fear was leading to people flooding the phone lines looking for answers and information, looking for danger signs. Fear would lead many to stay indoors waiting to hear from relatives or neighbors. Sam’s apartment was without electricity, but he wasn’t sure if that was because of a damaged line, some safety measure someone enacted, or if maybe the power plant was completely offline, or maybe it had something to do with everything being virtual.

Sam realized he was taking for granted that the laws of physics applied. He didn’t feel totally different, though there were some differences in how he moved, as though he were a little less clumsy, like an auto-aim for his hand-eye coordination that kept him moving a little smoother, a little more accurately. Neat random perk I guess, he mused. But it made it even less likely that this virtual world would play by the old rules. Scientists and hackers alike were probably excitedly mapping out the specific patterns of this world to find exploits. It was good to know that fear wasn’t going to be the only thing motivating people in the early days. Hollywood blockbusters had conditioned Sam to expect fear to lead to only selfishness. In reality he knew it had more to do with who the fear was directed at protecting. Self focused fear is obviously going to be more self serving. But plenty of people have rushed into their burning homes out of fear for the family pet. As a kid Sam at seen Jean and his Sister successfully beg their dad into leaving the basement during a tornado to get the family cat. So there were pluses and minuses to fear for sure, but Sam was still thankful there were likely others that were excited. Others beside Sam.

The tutorial hadn’t been explicit on what this virtual existence offered. But it seemed to him that sometime in the long life he had in front of him, he would be able to fly. Not that he’d ever been especially obsessed with flight. But it was like, one of the entry level super powers. The tutorial had said that attributes would be able to be increased well beyond biological limitations. So super strength is a definite. He didn’t have anyone on his HUD friends list, but the Prison Network had a messaging system that inmates could use if they were associated or part of the same groups. And since that would all be controlled by his mind, that was essentially telepathy, but not really mind reading. But, who knew what someone with superhuman stats in “Understanding” and “Knowledge” might be capable of. There was also the Prison Store that would have who knew what kinds of alien tech. Flight would just be a matter of some piece of alien tech, or hacker-scientist finding a loop-hole, or just a superhuman jump. His point was, it was inevitable that people would throw on costumes to fight crime. Hell, he was pretty sure people were doing it without powers before the world got uploaded. The question was whether he wanted to pursue that as a possible future. Probably not. After all, if everyone has powers, you’re less hero, more paramilitary policing force with an over-sized budget for property destruction. Well maybe not the last part, any damage would be fixed by the time loop in most cases. The time loop also added a nice effect where the gritty dark-night character would be forced to face their vanquished foes every time the time loop revived them.

Sam had to stop himself from falling down a rabbit hole of how fiction might change as having a time-looped reality became normal. Culture was going to have huge shifts. After all, no one age in the Prison Network. It was a bit of a nightmare imaging the number of people who were living out their last week of life on repeat, due to some disease or damage or just age. Maybe there was hope for them in this virtual world, maybe the Wardens took these cases into account and created solutions. But maybe not, and maybe any long term hope for relief would be years of living out the same final hours and days on repeat. Plus, what would happen with children. For one, there would be no more babies. Humanity wouldn’t shrink or grow in size in the Prison Network. Babies would never grow out of their infant shape. Maybe this was a situation where patches would be applied along the way. Clearly the Wardens were a powerfully advanced group, beyond his ability to even grasp. But even they might have trouble perfectly creating a replica of an alien species, including their entire planet, while also making select changes like a time loop. Hopefully they would notice or could be informed that there was a problem. Otherwise, Sam wasn’t sure what hope or kindness could be done for people stuck in such unbearable loops.

There were horrors and wonders awaiting humanity. That would be true even without aliens throwing in their own crazy twists. He was one person. Literally going it solo. He couldn’t stop the reality of those tortured existences. There had always been enough suffering that his empathy would drown him in sympathy pain if he let it. That hadn’t changed. Maybe nothing had really changed. How different was one week from the next for the average person? You could probably go years at a time without really noticing the time loop, or lack of aging, or immortality. Maybe, after the dust settled people would just find a new normal. One with less work and more play, more art and communication, more freedom. In the mean time, Sam had watched enough news to know that the nanobot swarms caused panic that lead to traffic accidents other emergencies back in reality. He wasn’t sure if people came through with injuries or not. When he’d fallen over the couch, he’d hurt his wrist a little, but now he didn’t have any bruises and his wrist was fine. He suspected damage was removed after the upload, but he couldn’t be sure. Maybe he just hadn’t been hurt badly enough for it to linger. For that matter. It hadn’t been 1PM when he’d died, it’d been the middle of the night. So either the clock had been set back more than 12 hours in the same day, or if it had been a week or more since the events took place. Then again, maybe Sunday at 1PM was just a convenient time for the Prison System to reset at.

Whatever the case was, he was alone, getting to family would require several hours of driving. He wasn’t really close with anyone in town besides his room mate. He had work friends, but well, they weren’t people he really went out of his way to hang out with, so they weren’t really people he’d explore a new reality with. Since he was alone, staying inside was the smart choice. But there might be people who needed help. He had stumbled over a couch, but someone else might have fallen down stairs or crashed their car and got trapped. He could at least walk around the block and see if power was out for more than just him. Maybe he really should walk down to the library, or city hall?

Really it was no wonder people hated change so much. Anytime anything new came around, it became stunningly obvious that most behavior is built on a foundation of mimicry. How does a world respond to a world wide disaster unitedly when uncertainty and fear make every major decision a controversy, and results that could have been predicted by a coin flip. He knew it was whim as much as anything that pulled him from his apartment, that and curiosity. But if he was going to go for a walk, he might as well choose a Path. Some small object or idea that he could use to help him re-frame what he was experiencing. He considered using a coin or a coin-flip as his path, but his earlier speculation about the future existence of superheros made him think of Two-Face, and he decided he didn’t like the idea of unthinkingly making decision through chance. Then he considered “being heroic” as a path. It somehow felt too ambitious and too silly, but he thought it might lead to some interesting musings on what that could mean.

Standing at his living room window, looking down at the quiet street below, Sam shrugged. “Window might work.”

It wasn’t meant to be a long path, and he felt like he could focus he decisions through that concept without too much trouble. A window separated what was happening inside to anything he might witness. A barrier, and a portal, there might be good stuff there. Maybe he’d be able to complete his first quest while he played neighborhood watch.