Douglas vanished and left Sara and I standing in silence on her front lawn.

Sara spoke first, "Maybe we should get out of sight."

That made sense to me, "Sure, you've got my chat when you want to talk."

She looked at me as though she wanted to say something, nodded, and walked back into the house. I looked at her front door for a few moments longer, then thought I had a creepy stalker vibe and made my own way back home.

The moment I walked inside my front door I stopped. I felt like a stranger. Nothing had changed, and yet everything had changed. I felt the door again. I felt the couch. This wasn't real. Nothing was real. Yet it didn't matter because in this simulation I could still die. That reminded me, at some point people would start killing each other for resources.

Fucking Elon Musk.

Stop whining James. You've played enough games in your time that you know what you need to do. You can either level yourself up or you can team up with stronger people, or both.

I thought about all the people I might want on a team. I grabbed my phone and began scrolling through my contacts.

Bill, mathematician. George, mathematician. Sarah, programmer. God dammit why hadn't I hung out with more people in the military or at the gym. I guess I could go out recruiting, but what if they just killed me. It would take some serious persuasion to convince someone with a real skill to join a math nerd. And then it hit me. Sara. I could ask Sara to go with me and convince people to join us. Hmmm. But why would she want to work with me? I better have something to offer her. I pulled up my skills list:

Notable Skills:

Algorithms: 35

Puzzles: 24

Mathematics: 20

Sarcasm: 14

Reading Comprehension: 10

Negotiation: 10

Drawing Pictures of Breasts: 5

My eyes lingered on Drawing Pictures of Breasts. Dammit James, your lack of focus is what got that one up to a 5 instead of developing an actual useful skill. I looked at the top of my list: Algorithms, Puzzles and Mathematics. Ok, that could be useful. I can solve problems better than most. So what is the most important problem to solve? We need the best team in the world. Maybe I could use my skills to build a list of who we should recruit. Yeah, that would be really valuable. Then I could convince Sara to work with me to recruit the team.

But how do we get a list of people to recruit. For some reason an old story about foxes came to mind. There was this crazy guy in Russia who thought he could breed foxes. He fathomed that if wolves had been domesticated into dogs, so could other animals. He followed the same theory, that some wolves were more willing to hang around humans and their campfires and not attack. The one's that didn't attack were fed. They were then able to breed more than their belligerent cousins and the gene that steered them to passivity kept getting passed along until, aye chihuahua!

So... I just need to find a signal that tells me who might be most interested in working with others. Then, if I had a way of classifying them by what they have to offer, I could rank them and build the most efficient path to recruit each of them.

The job board! It wasn't perfect but willing to trade could be a good candidate. Then we only go after the people who offer the right type of rewards. That would give us a damn good candidate list.

I pulled up the job board.

742,392,103 listings

Oh shit. That was a lot. Don't panic. I can filter the list down. It would probably take too long to travel across the planet to connect with people, so I could filter to this area. Still, if I only looked at people in this neighborhood I would severely limit our options. I decided to limit the posts to people in the New York Metro area. I was based in a New Jersey suburb, but it seemed like using Manhattan as the epicenter would provide a much broader set of skills. I could get to anyone within two hours, assuming I didn't get killed along the way. I applied the geographic filter:

851,212 listings

Better, but scanning that list would take too long. This filtering system was way to rudimentary. If only I could use that damn lab to modify this job board interface.

I looked at my desk. I had this beast of a machine I bought from Lambda Labs sitting there. I used it to crunch seriously huge data sets using my own AI algorithms. I wished I could get that job board out of my head and into that machine.

Or... would that work? It might.

I pulled the machine into my inventory. I saw my potential energy go down. I'd have to remember never to hack on an empty stomach. I went into the lab. I saw the machine in my inventory and placed it on the lab table. Ok, now comes the stupid, dangerous part. I looked at the inventory tab. There it was. I had somehow overlooked it the first time around. In addition to the tab that showed my items, were tabs for my body and my skills. I hadn't thought about the skills as something I could modify, but they were code like everything else so why not?

Focus James. Skills later.

I opened the tab that showed the parts of my body. So far I'd only used it to dress myself. But what if... I clicked the image of my arm and a representation of it appeared on the table. I looked down at my real arm and... my arm was gone. I vomited at the sight. I immediately moved the image of my arm back into my inventory. My arm reappeared.

Shit, shit, shit. This was crazy. I mean, was it worth it? I went into my kitchen and grabbed a sleeve of thin mints. I deserved these. And no I was not going to put them into my inventory, I was going to eat these the old fashion way. You binge eat, it's in the name. I was about half way through them when a chat request came in from Sara.

"What's up Sara?"

"I need to come over, right now!"

"Um, sure, something wrong?"

"Yes there is something wrong. Some guy just went into my neighbor's house and started killing the people in there."

"Shit, come over."

Holy shit. I sighed, put the rest of the cookies into my inventory, and clicked on the lab, and put my arm on the table again.

This time I didn't look down at where my arm should be. Now that both the arm and the computer were on the table I turned on debug mode. The two items swirled like something out of a bad horror film. I stared at them closely. There were definitely differences between them. They didn't look like an arm or a computer in debug mode. But I felt like I saw a pattern to them. What that pattern meant, I had no idea.

What had Douglas said? Once I combine code I can't split it back out. So if I did this and I screwed up, I might not have fingers or worse, my arm might turn inside out. Hell, what if I couldn't reattach it to my body.

But people were already killing other people. In my fucking neighborhood. I decided I didn't have a choice.

I nudged the blob of a computer into my blob of an arm.

And then it did that weird blobby dance as they merged into each other. I was curious what it would look like in real life so I turned off the debug mode, and I immediately regretted it. It looked like my arm had exploded and the computer had exploded and the two explosions had been made into a taco salad. I turned on debug mode again and waited for it to stop churning. I could see the process was using a lot of energy and some memory storage. I thought about eating a cookie but even if I could without using my stomach, the sight of that arm taco had turned me off to food.

And then it stopped moving. My eyes danced over the debug mode option. Not sure why I hesitated to flip the switch as there was no going back.

I turned debug mode off.

And I looked at what was supposed to be my arm. It looked like some sort of... transformer arm. It was like the arm had been made of the plastic of the casing. Except it was not exactly plastic. It looked like, I don't know, like bone mixed with plastic. I wanted to touch it but I saw no way to do that. This lab had its limitations. I wondered if I could upgrade the lab itself.

Focus James.

I decided my curiosity would only be satisfied if I felt the arm in real life. Or simulife. Nope, dumb name. Whatever. I put the arm back into place in the inventory. And then I looked upon it with my own eyes.

And it. was. AWESOME.

"What the fuck?" Sara had opened the front door and was now staring at me.

"Awesome, right?" I flexed my arm. Ok, I gotta admit that it took some getting used to. I looked part transformer, which was awesome. But I also noticed I had a little less movement. My fingers couldn't quite close into a fist the same way and when I tried to put my arm behind my back I couldn't make it very far.

"What is it?" Sara, now over her initial shock, closed the door and plopped down onto my sofa.

"I merged my arm and my big machine learning computer together in the lab." I was starting to understand Sara's different expressions and I could tell her blank stare at me meant, "A... what?"

"Hang on, let me see what I can do with it." I thought about what I wanted to do. I wanted to run a search on the best candidates to partner with. I squeezed my eyes together and thought it real hard.

Nothing.

Crap, what if the only thing I got from combining that machine with my arm was plastic skin. That would suck. I decided to go back into the job board to see if I could run through the list faster or something.

And that's when I saw it. In my main menu I now had a new choice.

'Programs'

I clicked it. It looked like a...

"What? What is it?" Sara asked, annoyed.

"Sorry, I have a new menu item called Programs. I clicked on it and it kinda looked like the IDE I used to program software."

Now her facial expression conveyed to me, 'Speak English or I'm going to kill you.'