“Wake up.”

The voice is commanding, male and familiar.

I sit up and find myself in a cheap hotel room with an air-conditioner unit going full bore and the curtains drawn. A hologram of a male immortal flickers at the foot of the tiny bed I am on. He is huge, nearly three meters in height and almost as wide. His bulk takes up a sizeable portion of the room which is designed to smaller baseline dimensions. The shade of his skin is so black that the holo projector has difficulty replicating parts of the image. His head and hands are over-proportioned. Lines of rage are etched deep into his face. Below deeply set dimly glowing eyes, two tusks jut out from his lower jaw curling over a thick handlebar moustache.

Instinctively, I reach up to my own face and find the same tusks there.

“This is a passive recording. I am you, give or take four hours ago,” the hologram continues, “before I wiped most of our memories.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Why? Because I, that is you are an Apex Immortal. A few thousand years ago, I woke up to a similar message. And it turns out he was right. This is what we do. It’s either that, go mad or worse still turn into a complete asshole. You’ll understand when you inevitably meet some of your peers. Less than a dozen of them in the infinity of the multiverse and somehow you will still bump into a couple.”

The hologram sneers patronisingly.

“Asshole,” I mutter.

“Also, it gets shit boring after awhile when you’ve done it all and got it all. So that’s why we, that is you, are in a completely random part of the multiverse, far from everything I built. You may be able to find your past but I wouldn’t recommend it. I’ve had a good look when it was my turn. There’s a reason why this is not the first time or even the hundredth time we have done this. I’ll tell you what I got told - not that it did me any good.”

The me of four hours ago leans forward. For a moment, centuries of grief and regret shines from his eyes.

“Try not to stuff it up again.”

The hologram flickers off.

I tnink about what I’d heard. The whole thing could be a hoax. Unknown enemies could have orchestrated this. Even if it was really me that had delivered the message, I had the feeling that there was much more to this than an eternal cycle of renewal my previous self was insisting on.

There is little else to work on so I get off the bed and search the room. I find nothing, not even the source of the hologram. The room is empty of anything that I could have brought with me. I only have the clothes I am wearing - a pair of jeans, a western shirt and a casual leather jacket - plain boring garments with no identifiable features. I check through my pockets and find nothing.

A flashing light from the watch around my wrist attracts my eye. It is 14:24:45. I touch the face and a square blue holo-frame opens above it.

System Interface Initialised!

>User ID: Root

>Tier: Apex Immortal (System Dominus)

>Level: -1

>User Parameters: ?

>System Augments Active: ?

>Substrate Modules Installed: ?

>System Locality:

>: ERROR: System not found! Reverting to local instance. Only limited services are available.

>: Dominus, you are using the basic command-line text interface. Initialise avatar? [y/N]

:_

I gaze at the blinking cursor for a moment, trying to remember what it does. I know some of its functions, for example it would have projected the holo-recording, but I also have the frustrating feeling that there’s much more to the device. The same can be said about my own abilities. I find myself always reaching to do something and then not only missing the part of myself that is able to do it but also not being to remember what I can do.

I contemplate switching on the avatar and decide against it for the time being - they tend to be annoying. I flick the holo-frame shut and decide to do something easier like having another look at the room instead.

The room comes equipped with an old television set. Shitty air-con, manual light switches, actual incandescent light bulbs - I am either in an early Tier 1 technology realm or one of those hotels that mistakes inconvenience for retro class. I am about to switch it on to get some bearings on the world when the door clicks open and a young mortal human woman carrying a suitcase walks in and sees me.

She freezes for a moment then drops her luggage, screams and immediately runs down the hallway yelling. Doors open along the corridor as startled humans peek out to see what the fuss is. They close promptly as soon as they spot me walking down. The corridor is built for their baseline portions. I have to duck slightly as I walk along it. A cacophony of panicked mortals begin to speak into their phones. The language is unfamiliar but I recognise enough words to understand that they are calling the cops. By the end of the corridor, I hear enough to almost remember the language.

The mortal continues to scurry along ahead of me screaming. As she is heading towards the exit, I follow her, giving her plenty of room. This does not calm her down. We reach a section of the corridor with three lifts side by side. They look mechanical. The mortal is mashing a button, her eyes wide in terror.

No way will I fit into one of those lifts. I spot the universal symbol for stairs to one side. The woman is almost crapping herself, so I try to be kind.

“Young miss,” I say in the local language, “fearest thou not. Thine lifes shalt I be taking.”

Her eyes roll up and she collapses in a faint.

Hmm. Maybe I haven’t got the lingo down after all.

As I squeeze myself down ten flights of stairs, I prod and itch at my memory. I can’t remember my name, what I did yesterday, my home or if I had any family or friends. Now that I am thinking about it, I have a feeling that I don’t have any family or friends, just a few close enemies, not that I can remember who they are either: when I try all I get are fleeting images of monstrous mass, oceanic vastness and the endless depths of interplanetary space. Probably other Apex Immortals then.

As for the kind of person I am, without any specifics, I know that I love the colour red and have a problem with anger and violence. So right there, the signs aren’t good especially when I add in a general lack of concern for mortals. When I probe that feeling, I land somewhere between occasionally adorable pets and irritatingly wilful pests, mostly on the pest side.

By the time I get down to the hotel lobby, the mortals have been evacuated from the ground floor and the building is surrounded by a dozen police cars, unmistakable from their flashing lights and uniformed personnel swarming around them. As I watch a couple more screech in behind them. Hmm. Internal combustion engines, little evidence of computing technology, communications seems limited to bulky mobile voice phones carried by most mortals: Definitely early Tech 1. Lovely, I’ve set myself up in a backwater with environmental pollution, likely affecting the climate.

l step out into the open and look around.

The hotel faces a public square lined with medium rise buildings, some obviously retail or service oriented and others looking more like commercial or government offices. I reassess the hotel’s class - unlikely it is as cheap as I first thought.

There are fifty or so police sheltering behind car doors and pointing various guns at me. A couple of media helicopters hover above us.

One of the cops, presumably highly ranked given the height and lustre of the peaked cap on his head, is yelling out instructions at me through a loudspeaker. As best as I can tell he is ordering me to lie down on the ground and surrender or they will shoot.

Mortals threatening me? I stare at the cop in utter surprise and then laugh in his face.

They mustn’t have got the joke as in the next instance, the air is full of bullets. When they finally run out of ammunition, there is silence for a second.

-Ding-

My wristwatch projects a holo-frame a little to the side of my vision.

>User parameter discovered: [Axiomatic Invulnerability]

You are as inviolate as a fundamental law of the multi-verse. You are invulnerable to every force or energy including any that you wield yourself. The only thing that can hurt you is your feelings - you great big softie you. Haha. Only joking - you don’t exactly have the widest emotional range. Yeah, let’s leave it at that.

>: Dominus, you are using the basic command-line text interface. Initialise avatar? [y/N]

:_

To me, that’s a basic fact about myself, as basic as mortals understanding raindrops cant hurt them. [Axiomatic Invulnerability] would be the simplest of my abilities. I try again to recall them and remember only that I have many but not what they are.

I give up, flick the holo-frame shut and check my clothes. They are undamaged. Good, my previous self had not skimped on that at least.

“No stairs harmeth, no injuries intendeth. Seeketh mine own way to views thine city’s fair sights.”

The cops, having reloaded their guns, empty them at me again. Even taking into account my increasingly obvious crapness in their language and strange appearance, their reaction seems over the top. They got here very quickly and in large numbers. They use large calibered, powerful guns designed to kill rather than injure. I imagine it makes for a short backlog in their court system, assuming they have one.

I look around the buildings again. They are not fortified or armed. There is no sign of damage recent or otherwise from bombardment or battles. So they are not at war or at least if they are the front is not close. Entrances to the hotel do not appear to have weapon detection systems. Hence there is unlikely to be constant civil conflict.

From what I can tell, the police themselves being all uniformly attired and equipped are likely to be general units. In peacetime, these are general units armed to the level of special forces with light armour and face concealing helmets. Intimidation or patriotic reinforcement? Occupying force or just part of the cultural furniture? Cant tell yet.

I look again. Every building without fail has at least one flag. Plastered on many walls and emblazoned on the sides of various public transport vehicles is the figure of the same human male most of them in the same pose: one hand lifted in a fist, face stern.

Ah. I have landed in a facist state. Oh good, my favourite type of autocracy. Of course, I like all the flavours of autocracies - after all they are the only group of political systems that work in the multiverse. For Immortals that is.

By the end of the week, those statues will be of me.

A thought pops up.

I check through my visual memories of all humans i glimpsed in the hotel and compare them to those few police whose visors are up. I compare it to their human dictator. Without fail, all of them have pale skin and blonde hair.

The other images not showing their leader all have idealised images of pale thin humans, showing off various clothes, fashion accessories, dietary supplements, hair dye and skin lightening products.

A racist facist capitalist state. Possibly with body image issues.

Their reaction to my appearance - a combination of hate and fear - is not just due to my substantial variation from baseline. My skin colour must also fall deep within their prejudice range.

Another volley of bullets accompanying shouts of racial abuse punctuates my hypothesis.

I sigh and push out my estimates of conquering this place. Significantly.

-ding-

>You have a new quest!

>Quest: “Freedom for the People!”

>Quest boss: “The Greater Republic of Liasval”, Facist State, Tier 1 Technology (level 5)

>Subjugate a country where every citizen hates your guts on sight! For bonus points, defeat the deeply embedded completely stark raving mad (and i am talking foaming at the jaws rabies mad) multi-generational racial hatred that their entire society has based their identity on while looking like a nightmare stereotype. Yes, your likeness is used to frighten children into obedience and generate excitement for rallies.

>Ruling smouldering ruins or a completely failed state does not count as victory. >Difficulty: On the one hand Liasval is Tier 1 level 5 so you are talking the equivalent of a goblin farmer. On the other hand, really really racist. Tough call - let’s call it ‘medium’.

>Quest giver: you (from two days ago)

>Reward: Depends on how many people you needlessly slaughtered. (Hint: large numbers are bad)

Randomly selected part of the multiverse indeed. The final moments of my hologram’s patronising expression flicker in my memory. Asshole.