Almost before the Captain had left, Cody said, “I want to go.”

Selena looked surprised, “I thought we were waiting until later?” She asked curiously.

He nodded, “I rethought it. You and I are both medically trained, right? So if something goes wrong, one of us should be awake to try and deal with it. If I go now, you are awake, that way, when everyone drops later I will be able to try and handle it.”

I didn’t really know what to think. I mean, logically, Cody was making sense, but they had agreed to follow the Captain’s directive to wait until he had returned, hadn’t they? “I thought you were going to wait?” I asked.

Cody smiled, “Selena agreed to wait. I kept my mouth shut. Jim’s too overprotective. If I had mentioned wanting to go now, he would have raised a big stink about safety and stuck around and not picked up Jessica.”

I was flabbergasted. “You mean… That orders are just… optional? If you stay silent you can just ignore them?”

Cody looked at me oddly. “Jim is a cop, but cops are not just obeyed all the time. They are here to help protect people, not rule them. If he tells you to stop and waves his credentials around or pulls his gun, you stop, but that’s because you have either done something he needs to take you in for or he’s got a reason like he officially has to question you or there’s an anvil about to drop on your head if you keep walking.”

“But you didn’t say no.”

He laughed, “Oh god, girl. Selena, this is getting into chick drama territory. Do you want to handle this?”

Selena nodded and looked at me very seriously while Cody went to go grab something out of what looked like a refrigerated food storage unit. “Sweety, this may be the most important thing you ever learn. Silence does not imply consent.”

I know I must have looked confused, because she continued, “You don’t have to follow orders all the time, only the ones that are appropriate for the social situation you are in. Jim is our friend and another gamer first. If he tells me to jump off the balcony, he doesn’t have the right to give that order. If I ignore him, that doesn’t mean I have to do it anyway, it means that I am ignoring him.”

“You are sort of ignorant of our world. That means that you are going to break some rules you don’t know exist. Sometimes ignorance is an excuse, but usually, it is not. But if someone tells you to do something that you know they are not authorized to tell you to do, you can use your common sense or preferences to either say no or just ignore them.”

I was trying to wrap my head around this. “So when Officer Beale tried to tell me I should give him a tickle and a piece of flesh to stay out of lockup, I could have simply ignored him, rather than explaining that this body was not considered legally mature yet?”

Cody slammed a can down on the table that he had just opened, which started to fizz over. “He did what?”

I recoiled a little from the anger he was displaying, and squeaked, “He said that I could get locked down, but that something called a freebie would prevent it? I wasn’t sure but I think he was propositioning me for breeding, He said that I was a professional breeder, although he stopped when I told him I was not legal for breeding yet.”

I shook my head, worried. “I don’t want to be a professional breeder, I have a number of things I would like to accomplish, and based on the information I have gotten so far from you and others, it would take me an enormous amount of time that I will need to do other things. I was also apparently wearing a professional breeder’s uniform at the time.”

Cody seemed to calm down a little, and held up his communication device, tapping on it several times with quick sweeping motions. After a moment he turned toward his friend, “Max, is there anything you can do to improve the tutorial or increase my chances of getting a rare class?”

Max shook his head, “Naww, I can mess with the interfaces and stuff, and improve the wording and instruction set, but I cannot mess with the tutorial any, it looks like it’s set in stone to prevent… well… exactly what you are asking. There’s also a really firm risk versus rewards element, so even if I could open up more classes, they would likely just be common stuff you normally wouldn’t access to because they just don’t match up, like egg matron or defiance mage. Unless you really want a gift that makes all al-hakreen consider you their broodmother? I am pretty sure that the al-hakreen are extinct, and improved egglaying capacity and egg eugenics wouldn’t help you much. Err… unless you wanted to become a female al-hakreen? You might get a bonus for revitalizing a dead species or something.”

Cody shook his head, “No… I kind of like girlfriends, and this feels really permanent. Besides which, Tracy said this was a hellworld, I might get either squashed flat and scorched or teleported to an empty world.

I nodded, “yes, in general, if you choose another species, it’s one that is compatible with your current environment. Right now, I cannot think of any species that would be compatible with this world, not even the original species that created The Game of War.”

Cody nodded slowly, while Max was tapping away at the air in front of him. “Gotta make a better computer interface.” he mumbled, and then Cody stated, “I would like to play The Game of War.”

He fell unconscious instantly, and the three of us watched him closely.

He seemed to grow younger as we watched, his muscles bulging a little more until eventually, his eyes reopened.

“Dude, you are going to have a hell of a lot of explaining to do when you go back to work,” Max said.

“If I go back to work,” Cody replied. “I wasn’t able to get a rare class, but I did get an uncommon restricted. Oh, by the way, smart ass, I noticed the new races you added.”

I looked at Cody in confusion. “New races?”

He nodded, “Yes, Twi’Lek, Togruta, Pantoran, Zabrak, all the SW near-human races, as well as elves and dwarves and the like, but no Vulcans, neither kind of Klingon, no Romulans, no Androids…”

“What do you mean? Are those different races in this world?”

Max shook his head, “No, those are races from Star Wars, a sort of fantasy world, as well as actual fantasy.”

I looked at Max in shock, “You created new sub-races? On the fly? Without researching their genetics or custom breeding them?”

Max grinned and shook his head, “No, I found a coming soon feature from back at release that allowed you to insert new choices, but if he had selected them, he would have seen a graphic of what he would have looked like, and a coming soon label. Our science of genetics is advanced, but not advanced enough to create new subspecies like that.”

I smiled a little, “Not yet, but all you need is the right class, and your genetic modification could take off. We banned those classes because they could be used for great evil, but they could, I think, be used for great good as well, if you are willing to take the risk.”

Max looked thoughtful, “How far can people go in selecting their race?”

I shrugged, “Depending on how far your science advances, you could create entirely new species. You could also use a special token if you earn one that allows you to reset your spirit completely, and choose any new race and class you choose that you are qualified for. The game tends to change a species, though, although most species choose to make their sub-races biologically compatible. You can choose a new race when you are allowed to switch classes, in some cases, but again it might impede your future growth. I wish I knew more, but our species steered away from that sort of thing.”

Max nodded, and then grinned at Cody, “I found it!”

Cody looked at Max, “You found what?”

“I found the item which will allow a complete reset. Any race, any species, starting on their world of choice compatibility. It’s an ultra-rare item. The closest English approximation I could find is ragequit token. Because of its rarity, I cannot create a quest with it as the reward, but it does exist.”

Selena slapped her hand against the side of her face in exasperation. “This is not only silly, but it’s going to change Humanity forever.”

I nodded, “It generally does, but your species… our species is very creative and driven, I don’t doubt that you will expand the game enormously.” I shrugged, “We also seem expansionistic. There are many worlds that are uninhabited, and such expansion is exactly why The Game of War was created in the first place. As new worlds develop, more civilizations come into being, and new souls can be built for the future of your species.”

Max shook his head, “Tracy, ummm… You know more about this than we do, mostly, but some of this documentation reads almost like religious texts. It talks about a wheel of souls and the death of the universe. It even has like, a cosmology attached.”

“What is cosmology?” I asked curiously, that word was not part of my regular language.

“It’s sort of a theory of the basis of the universe. This cosmology, the reason the game was created, implies that the universe, or multiverse, is made of Chaos. Apparently at some point of time, the pure chaos included order. And that order was able to spawn more order, but the chaos always tries to consume it. Entropy always increases, but sentient life, or souls as they call them, are able to fight off that encroaching entropy.”

He continued, “There is something here called a Wheel or something, and it is supposed to move souls along to advance things. When a soul advances on the wheel, it opens up a new spot for a new soul to be created, which helps push back the tides of Chaos that are ever-encroaching. Apparently, the game, for want of a better term, offers souls the opportunity to advance along the wheel When people adventure in the game, it allows more Chaos to be clarified, to become matter because the chaos is always eating away at and destroying old, no-longer-used matter. If souls stop advancing on the wheel, chaos takes over, and no new souls are formed from the chaos.”

He looked thoughtful, “It’s kind of combination of Christianity with Buddhism. The more you advance and expand your society, and the universe as a whole, the more chaos can be extracted and the universe grows and refreshes itself. Apparently, souls can go back and do it again, and if you do enough good during one life you can advance to the next stage, whatever that is. It doesn’t really care about Karma, though, in that you just keep doing it again and again until you finally are awesome enough in one life to advance. Apparently, the game is designed to give you the opportunity to increase your chances of advancing to game over with extra lives, rewards, and the like.”

“The thing is, while advancing past the last stage requires you to do great things, how you do them is up to you. It implies great and wonderful things, but apparently, doing great evil if it expands your civilization and extracts more chaos, can help you move to game over as quickly as doing good. After you get to the game over though, it doesn’t really have any information. You might go to heaven, might go to hell, but the game wants you to keep having the greatest opportunities possible to expand the material universe.”

He sighed, “According to this, the chaotic universe or multiverse is truly infinite, while the material universe, where we live, is not. If souls don’t keep ascending, whatever that is, the universe doesn’t expand, it eventually contracts under its own gravity and succumbs to chaos. In addition, between the stars, there are creatures that consume order. Fighting those creatures, and destroying them, allows the universe to expand, which is, I guess, the end game. Monsters are referred to as the soulless, the ones that want to destroy reality, and run the gamut from twisted little monsters all the way up to star-devouring godlings.”

He shivered a little, “The cosmology makes sense, both to physical sciences and to the game structure itself. As long as people keep participating in the game or advancing on the wheel, the universe keeps expanding, and the game rewards that behavior. If they stop pushing back chaos, the universe contracts until nothing is left, the heat death of the universe.”

I couldn’t quite absorb that. It didn’t make sense and was not what I had been taught. “I thought that the goal was to keep things at bay.”

He shrugged, “I hate to say this, but it looks like your species because you never expanded and trapped souls away from the wheel, was considered the bad guy.”

“The bad guy?” I almost squeaked. “But, we were peaceful! We only wanted to co-exist and help all species thrive, and to be left alone.”

Max nodded, “Yeah, but there are huge expired quest lines to destroy you and free all the souls trapped away from the wheel. At the top of the list, the F’lok’nyran were ranked up there with intergalactic monsters and evil gods on the game’s kill credit list. Whatever group took you out got monster rewards for it, for stopping a threat to the existence of the universe itself.”

I curled up into a ball on the chair, “But… we weren’t evil. We kept our people close to us, even after they died. They were our leadership, our salvation, and our heaven.”

He shrugged and Selena moved over and wrapped her arm around my shoulders where I was sitting. Oddly, the physical contact was comforting rather than threatening. “Well, whatever it was you were doing was, I guess, a huge threat. Enough so that your people, and some of the species you were allied with, are at the top of the existential threat lists.”

Selena noticed my shivering and scowled at Max, “Does she really need to hear this?”

He nodded, “Yes, because her race had a gift called soul merge, and she still has it. It’s been integrated into the system, and I actually got a level for my suggested uses, it’s become part of the party system, because it lets people respawn near their own party and share some rewards, like advancement. But it’s hedged around with warnings, and is prohibited as a racial gift, even though several new classes have it as an individual gift.”

“To be honest, Human’s gift, flexible mind, has some of the same warnings, because it could allow us to corrupt the game itself, but it’s not an existential threat, it’s a system threat. But in her case, soul merge is prohibited from ever becoming a racial gift, because at its highest level it’s worse than necromancy. Necromancy enhances chaos by creating soulless, but it can be used to advance the expansion of the universe despite that… but soul merge, if it gets too powerful, can lock souls out of the wheel and directly threaten the universe as a whole.”

Max shrugged, “It’s like a bomb. She can use it for amazing things, like mining or construction, or she can do horrible things with it, like blowing up cities and stuff. She needs to know. Creating mass souls and not allowing them to move on after their final death is way past blowing up Alderaan on the bad shit-o-meter.”

I started crying again. I was beginning to hate this response. I didn’t know if I believed him, but it would explain why someone would smash a nearly worthless planet like ours at a huge expense.

“I don’t understand, it was not a decision that people like me ever made. We were told that when we died, our souls would join the planet’s soul, except for those who joined the game, we were expected to sacrifice heaven in order to keep our people and planet alive. Public-pool females were expected to join the game if they could contemplate controlling drones without rendering themselves comatose after we ejected our birth eggs.”

“Public pool?” asked Selena.

I nodded, “Yes, every female is expected to eject her first load of eggs into the public birthing pools. After she joins a family, male pheromones would allow her to develop new loads of eggs idealized for the family’s needs based on her talents and the family strain of the males introduced to fertilize them, but those eggs are the property of the family in question and are specialized for their chosen tasks, so they are not chosen to join the game.”

Cody smirked a little, “So there are special families chosen for leadership roles that don’t have to sacrifice their offspring to the war machine?”

I sniffled a little, “I wouldn’t put it like that, I mean, they are bred for tasks that are as important as joining the fight, and are mostly unsuitable for drone fighting.”

Max nodded, “And those tasks are all leadership, right? Were they tested like the public pool girls?”

I shook my head, “Of course not. They were too important to risk discorporating if they got overwhelmed by sensation. They were the smartest, the most balanced, and the best at choosing courses of action that would help the species. The rest of us, well, like me, were often utterly useless for anything once we deposited our eggs, and my empathy was so low I was considered an irredeemable psychotic. In my own case, it was probably a good thing that the game existed, or I would have been in the very first wave asked to discorporate when resource balances got tight. I distinguished myself as a warrior, which was probably why I was the last survivor and allowed to respawn after my race was destroyed.”

Max nodded, “You sound proud of that.”

I sighed, “I shouldn’t be. I know it’s terribly antisocial, but I was good at drone warfare. It was the only thing I ever did well, and I guess I took pride in it. Several times I stopped a wave of invaders nearly alone, when my flightmates would go comatose or discorporate from the pain of losing drones, I could keep going and hop to anything with the right enchantments to reassemble a fleet. I could also control more drones than anyone else, and got recognition for it.”

Cody looked at both Max and Selena, and then asked me gravely, “Right, and what did you do for fun?”

I was confused, “I don’t follow.” I knew the definition of fun, it was the pursuit of enjoyable activities.

“When you were not controlling drones, what did you do with your spare time? What did you do for yourself, for pleasure?” Cody asked.

“I… don’t now? I studied battle tactics and honed my skills. I sometimes worked on my attributes too. But I didn’t have free time, and yourself was a very… foreign concept. Even in the battle lounges, I was always surrounded by hundreds of others. I guess if I enjoyed anything, it was being the best at what I did best.”

Cody and Max grinned at each other and said “And what I do best isn’t very nice.”

Cody smiled a little, and then said, “We need to figure out how to get you to do some stuff that you might actually enjoy, so why don’t we table this discussion for now, and I will move you to the junk room and let you get some ideas. You don’t need to make a fleet of drones, but if you can make what’s there into server racks or at least capable of connecting to the internet, I know some people who could really use a stable internet connection.”

I nodded, and Cody looked at Max, who said, “I am not that connected to the stuff. I hate the idea of throwing it away, but if she can refurbish it I am totally cool with it. Ditch the old CRT’s though, they are beyond antiques.”

“Oh, before you leave,” Selena added, “What class did you get, Cody?”

Cody grinned, “Oh, it was only an uncommon, but it was outlined as unusual for my race. I got the class of hospitalier. Decent healing abilities, psychic-based, and it comes with lots of group buffs, skill bonuses and defensive bonuses and mass heals and stuff like that.”

Everyone turned to look at me as I said “Uh oh.”