Max’s chest was cold. Not like freezing or anything, but the bare skin was cooler than normal for a human, or at least it felt that way.

I couldn’t use telepresence on a living creature, of course, so I couldn’t monitor his body systems or anything, but from what I had learned of humans, I would suspect that whatever affected his heart or brain probably also interfered with his circulatory system. He was an extremely pale man and looked like he hadn’t had sun touching his skin for a very long time. Add to that a poor circulatory system, and his paleness was a little bit unsettling.

I burned off the energy to activate rapid regeneration, and his eyes both shot open. It took him a moment to see anything, but he instantly scooted back and away from where I was kneeling beside him. Oddly his skin seemed to be darkening a little as I watched, and he looked around frantically. “Why I am shirtless?” he asked, looking at me nervously.

Selena answered him, “Because Tracy thought that maybe rapid regeneration could help your injury.”

He nodded and scrambled up, surprisingly quickly, grabbing the shirt that Cody held out to him. “It is working. My health attribute is ticking up slowly right now, and so are a couple of the others. The system told me that in 12 hours the maimed status will go away.” he pulled his shirt back on and started buttoning it, and added, “Th...thank you, Tracy.”

Cody whispered loudly, “Did Max get replaced with a body snatcher?”

I was confused, “Body snatcher?” I asked him.

He nodded, “Yes, he just said three sentences in a row without adding in a movie quote, and then said thank you.”

Max chuckled slightly, “For I have become Max, destroyer of code.”

“And… he’s back.”

He shook his head, “Seriously, though. I found out some amazing stuff. Some of it is amazingly stupid.”

Selena tugged out Max’s chair, and he sank into it gratefully. “I found out what The Game of War really is, and why it has such a silly name.”

“What happened?” Selena asked, shooting me a grateful smile.

“First off, you know I had brain damage, right? When I entered, it told me that the debuff was temporarily suspended. It’s back now, but it has a time limit and is sort of fading, probably due to Tracy’s rapid regeneration.” Max asked.

I nodded, “Yes, the system makes up for any deficiencies during the tutorial. That’s not always enough to help people live through it, but it helps a lot to keep people from discorporating. It certainly helped me.”

He nodded, and the rest of us started sitting down. The table had six chairs, and Cody pulled one out for me, ignoring James’ dirty look. At least I think it was a dirty look. I didn’t quite understand what was going on between the two of them, but I found myself slightly irritated. I was underage, and Cody was informed that I was off-limits for breeding because of it. As much as I appreciated the Captain’s protectiveness, I felt like I was perfectly capable of refusing any advances he might make. Maybe it was illogical, but I was a warrior, and I wasn’t sure I needed the constant hovering as if I were unable to refuse.

Perhaps he was stronger and more physically capable than I was, but I had the impression that it would not require violence to prevent him from taking advantage of this. Perhaps these people were allies and friends of his, but I had the impression that they would not stand idly by if he tried to force me. Certainly, he was attractive, but the prospect was not particularly appealing.

“Well,” Started Max, “I wasn’t able to get much in the way of details. The science is about a million years past me, and most of the nitty-gritty would cost an awful lot of credits that I haven’t earned yet, but I can sort of see the differences now between an AI and an SI. AI’s are designed to be narrowly focused on a specific task, with adaptive coding about that task, and Synthetic intelligences are supposed to be learning intelligences, able to add on tasks that do not directly relate to their primary. It’s not sapient, or even really sentient, but it sort of works.”

“Basically, around the time earth was forming, there were not a lot of civilizations. Whoever created it knew that species had a certain lifespan, that eventually they would evolve upward or outward or downward or something, and that there were things out there on all sorts of levels that were predators, from species that were pure predators to monsters that would literally take bites out of galaxies. So they decided to create a game to get the next species involved and fighting to preserve the universe.”

Max shrugged, “The intro was a bit of combat junk. You know, melee, ranged, and then a bit of a tactical ground and space battle. Pretty basic stuff. Swing a stick at a four-headed newbie maggot, shoot a few pop-up monsters, a little bit of tower defense with groups of robot defenders and a swarm of newbie maggots, and then arrange some kind of guns to shoot up some incoming space maggots from a station.”

He smiled a little, scratching at the table. “Apparently whoever wrote it was used to combat. I mean, they were sheer intro stuff, but it felt pretty real. The thing is, whoever created it had no idea how to do games. It was like, they decided to create that Roberts Citizen thing, kept adding on features, but made it about as much fun as a trade wars spreadsheet. Whoever wrote it knew war, but I don’t think that fun was part of their mental makeup. And trust me, the situations they had access to, still have access to, have huge amounts of fun potential.”

He shrugged, “As a result, the whole thing isn’t very appealing, even though it could be. Add to that a huge number of civilized species that never even got to the game until after they had thoroughly stamped every single hint of fun out of their personality, and the game kept getting bigger and more detailed without ever having a fun aspect. It’s no wonder that most species just use it for communications and trade.

I sighed, “That’s what my people used it for, communications, trade, and the base framework to defend our world. We had to give up the hope of spending our afterlife in our own sort of heaven just to play, so it was reserved for… expendable females.”

Max nodded, “So basically you had this big framework, created by the equivalent of retired old soldiers that were on their deathbed, but it was supposed to be taken up by young, vibrant, and excitable civilizations after they were gone. But instead, they tacked some kind of computer thing to it designed to try and expand it, create quests, and keep it balanced, and you are left with something like that company out of Bethesda used to make. And then they soft-launched it.”

Gasps of horror came from around the table.

I had no idea what was going on, so I asked, “What does that mean?”

James responded, “There’s a famous game company that runs out of Maryland, that wrote really awesome games, but they always released them almost totally unplayable. Broken messes, that they sort of abandoned. They were fun enough that pretty soon every amateur programmer would release patches to make it work right, improve the graphics, fix the gameplay, so after a couple of years the games were finally fun and useable.”

“The company got so used to that behavior, that when they finally released a game that a bunch of people could play at the same time, they used the same model. A buggy mess. But because it was competitive, they couldn’t just let players fix it anymore, and their entire studio had no idea how to fix stuff they screwed up during development. The thing finally more or less flopped, because they had to spend tons of money hiring new guys that used to work for free just for the fun of playing.” James finished.

Max nodded, “Exactly. It’s a nightmare. And soft launch meant that once they had something barely useable, and unfinished, they had to launch way before it was ready, and it was just barely in a playable state. This thing designed to protect the entire multiverse by exciting and mobilizing races that were basically teenagers as defenders, was only available to old, established, and utterly peaceful races.”

Max chuckled, “It was like releasing the hot new MMO to a bunch of nursing homes and expecting them to upgrade it, make it fun, and finish its development. The thing is, the old races don’t interact with the teenagers. This thing is supposed to dramatically reduce the chances of young races exterminating themselves by giving them an outlet for their aggression, and use them to defend the multiverse and advance themselves to established veterans and eventually move past the need, but the old races that had it just tended to sit back and let them age until they were decrepit and finally joined galactic civilization themselves. By that point, none of them wanted to play the game anymore.”

“What do you mean by advance themselves?” I asked.

Max shrugged, “I couldn’t get much information, but old races tend to stagnate and die off or turn themselves into something that doesn’t need the multiverse anymore. They leave and never come back. Maybe it’s like a star trek thing, where they ascend to a higher plane or something, I don’t know. But young, aggressive races seem to pretty frequently blow themselves up, deplete their planet to the point where it cannot sustain them anymore, or die out due to some extinction event that could have been easily avoided with slightly more advanced technology or faster development of colonization or expansion technologies.”

Max sighed, “And the old farts just sit by and let it happen. Then they pat themselves on the back like the prime directive in Star Trek, at having avoided another calamity of allowing a young race to become multiverse defenders and maybe shake up the power balance and status quo.”

I sighed. That sounded just a little too accurate. “So what else happened?” I asked curiously.

He shrugged, “I was in there for a really long time. I am not sure how long.”

I nodded, “Yes, the system protects you from neural burn and prevents your brain’s heat from getting excessive. That allows you to access multiple parts of your brain simultaneously, as well as access parts of it that are often atrophied because your body cannot meet the demand of the section plus normal neural function. That’s one of the biggest reasons most people accept the system, because while it doesn’t help you think faster, it helps you think more… completely, and access racial abilities that are usually reserved for a few outliers with brains capable of handling the demand. Inside the training, you probably felt a lot of time go by, while out here it was only a few time parts, long enough for us to get you down on the floor and your shirt off for me to try to regenerate.”

He nodded, “Yeah, it felt like days, especially for the space battle. But the whole time I kept questioning the SI about details to pick the best class fit, and see if I could find any exploits, and eventually, it gave me a weird reward, something called Meta-Gamer.”

He shrugged, “At first, it offered me some common classes like sniper and basic sorcerer, and some uncommon classes like magician and hacker, but after the Meta-Gamer tag it offered me the perfect rare class.”

Selena offered, “So what class was it?”

He held up his hand, “Just a second. At first, I was hoping to pick a different race, like a Vulcan or an elf or something, but all the races were grayed out, and most of them were gross. I had to pick something that could survive on this planet with our current technology. Did you know that the Sintar look like those eyeball mosses from the Labyrinth? Same size and everything. And Tracy’s original species looks a lot like her drone, but way smaller, like maybe the size of a hermit crab. But if we want elves or something like that, we either need to meet a race like that capable of surviving our atmosphere, or create a subspecies ourselves.”

I nodded, and Cody asked, “But what class?”

Max grinned evilly, “System developer.” he answered.

I had no idea what that was, but as the questions gained speed and volume it became clear that this was not a combat class. It allowed him to present ideas for interface, classes, and quality of life ideas to the SI, as well as new methods and balance options, and have them seriously evaluated. He gained abilities like analyze and temporal zone, which could give him time to think and plan even in the middle of hostilities, he could purchase technology, resources, and even upgrades right in the middle of a fight.

He could even use some sorcery buffs if he ever found himself in a fight. He had much higher resource and credit requirements to be effective but gained class advancements via improving the game’s function itself. Simple suggestions, if they were approved, would net him ranks and enormous power. It was exactly what he most loved, and he was genuinely excited. His excitement was contagious, and soon even the Captain wanted to join the game.

“Technically it’s not an adventurer class, but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be useful in a monster fight. I can earn credits by either trading in local funds or by pushing through new developments, or if we get some profitable facilities like a factory or something like that I could sell stuff through the inventory for credits or in the real world for cash. As long as I can pay for the buffs on the fly, I could make a party incredibly ready with temporary upgrades to take on almost anything, and I can loot stuff that’s normally impossible if it has the potential to be used in an upgrade.”

Again, I was reminded of how crazy humans were. But if the system were actually designed for them, it began to make a lot more sense. Some few females on my former world who were required to volunteer to join the game were utterly unsuited to be drone riders. They chose the administrator class instead, and use the organizational abilities provided, such as monitoring, auditing, and appraising to help keep the world stable or handle inter-civilization trade so none of the rest of the species would ever have to interact with anything that wasn’t F’lok’nyran. Unless they attacked us, of course.

But someone who chose a non-combat class, and immediately started working out how it could be useful in combat? And even more, how it could excel in an adventuring role once the individual started leveraging it? It was insane, but somewhat wonderfully insane, as I was beginning to discover. The idea of him proving that screwdrivers make perfectly good hammers had an almost artistically creative appeal to it.

“Do humans do that a lot? Figure out ways to gain combat utility from a clearly non-combat role?” I asked.

Cody grinned, “Oh, figuring out how to put square pegs into round holes is not only human but a specialty of gamers like us. You should check out the videos of people making Cathedrals out of popsicle sticks, model factories out of toothpaste lids, and even giant sculptures out of discarded trash.”

He grinned, “You just did that yourself, in fact. You didn’t just build a new drone, you turned a pile of broken machines and trash into something entirely new and effective. I know you said you could repair drones in the field, but those were not drone parts. They were old hard drives, computer games, and broken tools. But you turned them into something new and never seen before in minutes. And if those 4-inch claws on the front are any indication, it’s probably perfectly capable of defending itself against violence too.”

I had? Oh, by the depths, I really had! And he was right. It could be used as a tool, and it could easily defend itself as well if told to. It didn’t have the judgment and experience yet to determine when such an action was appropriate, but if slowly taught, it shouldn’t burn out as it learned how and when force was appropriate.

I beamed. I mean, I should have been horrified, I had turned a set of information-accessing devices into a potentially lethal weapon, but I was proud of myself. Was this what it meant to be human? To know that you had the ability and talent to defend yourself? It was a strange sensation, to rely on yourself and your own talents rather than simply being a disposable part of a greater whole, but couldn’t you be both an individual and part of a whole? It was… surprisingly gratifying.

I noticed that both Cody and James were grinning back at me and I laughed. Okay, the idea that smiles could be infectious was something else I would have to get used to. “So how do we want to do this? Everyone could join at the same time, but if something goes wrong, I don’t know how much use the two of us would be. It’s a risk, but it’s up to you if you want to take that risk, or just join one at a time?”

James chuckled, “I don’t think it’s much of a risk, but to be fair, I am really interested in the insights each of us can potentially bring as we wake up with our new class. Still, we are all kind of eager to get it done. I think I need to go get Jesse, though. If I make a decision like this without her, I will be sleeping on the couch for a month.”

I knew it was probably just another cultural misunderstanding, but I went ahead and asked, “Why would you be sleeping on a couch instead of a bed?”

James grinned, “Because she’s my wife. We make big life-changing decisions together. If I join the game, we both do, or neither of us. If I went ahead and made this decision without her, it would be sort of a betrayal of that bond. She won’t want to be near me for a while if I did that if our marriage could even survive it. If it were a spur-of-the-moment emergency, she might be upset for a while, but we have had plenty of time to discuss it.”

Was this the human version of a family? It was more like a very special sort of individual or paired soul bond. The thought that maybe I could work towards a bond like that simultaneously warmed and scared me. “Thank you,” I said.

“For what?” James asked.

“For not disrupting your bond with your wife. I would feel horrible if I knew I had been the cause of such a betrayal. Thank you for choosing to honor it and reveal it to me, it sounds wonderful.”

The Captain nodded to me seriously, “It really is.” and then smiled, “I will pick her up tonight. Do we want to wait till she’s here to start?”

Selena nodded, “Error will be here too. I think we should wait, that way we can sit here and quiz the crap out of Max for a while, maybe get a better idea of what classes are available or how to unlock rare, as he did.”

James nodded, “Still, superpowers or not, I have to get to work. I will stop by afterward, If you guys can keep Tracy busy?”

Max said with a grin, “Oh, I have an entire load of broken machines and considering that she seems to be able to write AI’s, or SI’s, with ease, I have more than a few projects she could work with until you get back. I do have a slight problem though before you leave.”

He started looking a little worried, “Tracy, I’m the only one that’s changed so far, right?”

I nodded, “As far as I know, yes. If someone accidentally says something akin to wanting to join the Game of War, though, I guess it may be possible they were offered a prompt if they are close enough to a receptive piece of hardware. It doesn’t generally offer though unless you know what you are asking for. So I’d say the chances were not good.”

He nodded, “So, can you give me an idea of the actual chances of that happening?”

I shook my head, “I don’t think I can. I mean, all I know is that you are supposed to ask for it, and pretty much everywhere I have ever heard of before Earth already knew about it.”

He nodded slowly, “The actuarials are telling me that right now there are three people on earth that are participants in the game.”