"Alfaróme: Volper"
The author: RosPer
Reader’s
note
"Alfaróme:
VolPer"
What can you do when you have only two years left
under the sun? You can, for instance, keep yourself to yourself and lose
contact with reality. You can feel sorry for yourself all this remaining time
and cry… But I decided to act completely differently: if you have just a few
years to live, then why not enjoy yourself to the fullest? But how will I do
that? It’s a piece of cake since there is a virtual reality in which I can run.
And as I have found out, there is a new project being launched pretty soon, of
which only scarce info is given in different sources.
"Are you fed up with elves, gnomes and other
races from fantasy novels for teenagers? Sick and tired of reading about the
medieval battles, and life in those dark times? Then, welcome to the Alfaróme!
What is there in store for you? It’s a brand new game, in the genre of
post-apocalypses cyberpunk, testing your endurance! And what else is there for
you? That's top secret because any information can bring money and maybe you
can make loads of money! "©
The only information is available on the official
website of the game Alfaróme.
Well, I’d better go back to the good old days when I
was young and fresh, especially taking into account my past, this kind of virtual world will be just perfect for me!
Beta-reader: Vladimir Pospelov
Illustrations and Pictures: Alexandra Tarko
Proof-reading: Angelika Tubelyaeva
CHAPTER I: IT’S JUST THE START…
The lid of the capsule slammed
shut with a hissing sound, which meant it just cut my way back. This was the
point of no return for me. I had thought over everything thoroughly and weighed
all my options on hand, and finally arrived at the conclusion: there were
simply no other options for me. I had to only go forward into a new unknown
life, without the right to return to the old one. I found myself in complete
darkness. It was a feeling of zero gravity in the darkness and I couldn’t feel
my body at all. In the distance, a dim light started twinkling on the very edge
of my consciousness. At first tiny specks of light, gradually began to light
up with each and every second and, literally, just within a moment, it filled up
my consciousness.
- Welcome to the world of
Alfaróme! – I could hear a voice inside my head. - Collecting data from the
capsule ... The data collection is over. The medical capsule number #
ANV-734685-EK3573, without the right to disable its operation... Error! The
request is being sent to the administration of the server ... An additional
contract has been received. A brief excerpt from the contract: "Ignatenko Vladimir Alekseevich has
signed an agreement with the Administration of the Alfaróme project and has
agreed thereby to be permanently allocated on the servers belonging to the
Administration, without a twelve-hour limit of the presence in the virtual
reality, according to the Ministry of Health Decree No. 17554. The basis for
the contract conclusion is a medical report issued in the name of Ignatenko
Vladimir Alekseevich on his critical state of health due to his declining
years. For the right to be on the servers of the project "Alfaróme",
Ignatenko Vladimir waives the right to transfer the virtual currency of the game into the real world currency, to get bonuses in the game for real money, and
also pays for the right to play the game for twenty years in advance. "
-Do you confirm your choice?
- Press ‘Confirm’!
Well, there was no other way out! Despite the state-of-the-art
level of the health care system and advances in medicine, being already a hundred
and seven years, you start to understand that it’s hardly possible to live any
longer. Doctors told me that I could go on for two years of real life, or five,
well, maybe ten years at best, and I had to be permanently in a medical
capsule. I have saved quite a large amount of money, but unfortunately, there’s
no one I could bequeath this money to. I’m all by myself. Well, I am wrong to say
that; I have quite a big family: grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who, of
course, are proud of such a relative as me, but we don’t stay in touch anymore
and hardly ever speak on the phone.
My wife died about twenty years ago, and my children also
passed away due to their old age, but my grandchildren and great-grandchildren
are alive and have their own families. And I myself decided to cut ties with
them, so that they could live their lives, and not be disturbed by fogie who is
living out his life in solitude. So I decided to immerse myself into virtual
reality, so to speak, and let my hair down for the last time. And then I encountered a problem. According to the latest decrees of the Ministry of
Health, staying in virtual reality is limited only to twelve hours, after which
time you should be disconnected for at least four hours.
Although it is possible to divide this period into
various time parts as you like and you should, for instance, for every hour of
staying in the virtual reality, rest in reality for twenty minutes. I did not
like that option as well, because I have to be in a capsule twenty-four hours a
day, seven days a week. Having obtained all the necessary medical certificates,
court decisions, and the conclusion of an agreement with a new but promising
company and in the end, having a number of game restrictions, I’ve achieved my
goal. In the meantime, I have also set a precedent, according to which, from
now on, some terminally-ill patients can at least play games and enjoy
themselves to the fullest. Okay, that is the history and now I’m returning to
the present day.
-
Do you want to start registering your character?
- Yes, I do.
- Choose how you will interact with the system: by
means of voice, thoughts, gestures, or choose another option. Attention, if you
choose another interaction option, you will need to manually configure the
standard list of interaction commands.
- Select “interaction” by means of voice and mental
commands.
-
Confirm the choice of interaction with the system by using voice and mental commands!
- Confirm!
-
Confirm your choice one more time mentally.
What an annoying artificial brain I have encountered
here! Why should I confirm everything a million times?!
- Yes, I do confirm my choice! - I mentally turned to
the system.
- Thank you for your choice! Please, choose how you
would like to be notified by the system: by means of voice, texting, light
signals, or custom settings. Attention: if you select the custom option for
notifying you, you will need to manually configure the standard list of notification
options.
- Select the notification by texting!
- Do you confirm your choice of being notified by the
system through text messages?
- Confirm!
A short message flashed in front of my eyes:
Thank you for
your choice! Select Your Character’s Name…
Here it is necessary to think over it carefully since
it’s my name in the game and I’m being stuck in here for quite a long time. OK,
we shall start:
- Vladimir
Name
already in use
- Vova
Name
already in use
- Vovka
Name
already in use
- AlekseyiCH
Name
already in use
- ...
- ...
- ...
- Pissed-off
Name
already in use
"Is this one ALSO taken?"
Name
already in use
- ...
- ...
- ...
- Stalker
Name
already in use
- The Grandfather
Name
already in use
- The old man
Name
already in use
Damn it, but what can I choose? This game has given me a really rough time
while choosing the name - I have had difficulty coming up with the name for my
character. Every time I came up with some damn thing, I got a message that it was already taken. But, how come?..
- VolPer
This
name has not been taken! Would you like to choose this name for your character?
- Yeah, damn, I want it bad!!!
Congratulations,
your character's name has been chosen and it’s VolPer! Do you want to change
the character's age, or make it your real-life age?
I will change my age for sure, but here’s a dilemma:
how old am I supposed to be in the game? If I look back at my youth, then I can
remember that I was in the prime of my life being between 25 and 35 years old.
If you calculate the arithmetic mean, i. e. the
sum of all of the numbers in a list divided by the number of items in that
list, you’ll get thirty. But I do not like round figures, so we'll make
my character a bit younger and, as a result, I’m sending a new mental command:
- Assign the age of twenty-eight years to my character.
The character is now twenty-eight years old!
Now, I could behold a three-dimensional model of my
character which is surprisingly similar to me in my youth. He has got dark
short hair, about a quarter of an inch long; dark, a little curved and very agile
eyebrows; grey eyes with a slight tint of brown hue; straight nose slightly
upturned at the end; small lips, curved in a smile, which characterizes me as a
person who often smiles; and somewhat protruding chin. He is a really muscled
man, but not too muscled. His height is almost six feet. There is nothing
special about him; the new me looks like an average young man in his late
twenties. Contemplation of myself in my youth was interrupted by a new message of
the system that popped up in front of my eyes:
Choose the Character’s Race:
1. A Human Being
2. A Cyborg (initial implants are installed)
3. A Latent Mutant (changes are configured by
genotype)
4. A Mutant (changes are adjusted by phenotype)
At this point I was frozen just like a computer: for
the developers hadn’t mentioned a few races available. Damn! How can they conceal
so much information? Of course, I agree with their statement: "In our
world, even a piece of information is worth a lot of money". But they
could have given at least a little more information. Okay, I won’t reflect on
the matter any longer, I have to make a choice now. However, what is there to
choose from? I do not want to be a mutant, that’s for sure! - I am strongly
disgusted by them. Being a Cyborg is not my cup of tea, either: I don’t want to
install any chips or metal parts into my body. My choice is obvious!
- Please, choose the Human Being.
Your choice has been accepted! Do you want to change
the appearance of your character?
And then I found myself in the realm of engineering
bioscience where each and every biologist would dream to be – everything is
possible there. Do you want to change the colour of the skin, hair, eyes - any
pigmentation that you can only wish for? Then, it is the place where you can
possess a number of tools and you can do it yourself. You can change the shape
of the eyes, face, or limbs. If you want, you can increase the number or change
the looks of limbs and body parts, as well as replace them with almost any
biological or mechanical analogs. Yes, it is possible; you could even change or
adjust everything, from the looks to the nervous or blood-circulatory systems. But
for me, almost all the settings of the character were marked with an inactive
grey color, and when you look at any one of them, a message pops up:
The option not available for the Human Being
Okay, let's not think too much and leave everything as
it is. After all, I've been living for so many years, so in the end, I'll be in my
beloved body, without any changes done to it. It’s very important – I don’t
have to get used to any changes.
- Finish configuration without any changes
Assign
primary characteristics:
Strength
- 5
Agility
- 5
Endurance
- 5
Perception
- 5
Intelligence
- 5
Reasoning
power - 5
Luck
- 5
Charisma
- 5
The
score of free features: 8
There are
two buttons for each parameter: plus and minus (more or less). Clicking back
and forth, I realised that you can not only increase, but also reduce the extent
of your characteristics, thus adding or deducting additional free scores in the
game. The problem was that I did not quite realize how each of the features is related
to a certain parameter in this game. And I suppose choosing at random, relying
on my idea of what all that implies, would be the wrong thing to do. There must
be some explanation, because if there is no information on their official
website, then there must be a way to get this precious information within the
game ... Umm ... I gather I'm dumb. Before the game started loading, I made
sure that the game has got a user-friendly interface. Having highlighted the Strength
item with my eyes, I sent a mental command to the interface:
- MORE INFORMATION
Strength is a direct indicator of the development of
your muscle system within your body and is directly responsible for the maximum
load, the force of the blow in close-in combat and the ability to use heavy
weaponry or heavy personal body protection systems.
Bingo! So, there is a way to determine what
characteristics are needed for me, and which are less critical. I have only to
decide what my character will be like. Well, let's continue studying the theoretical
part first:
Agility is a direct indicator of
the flexibility of your body and is directly responsible for jumping, rolling,
fine movements and the ability to perform various martial art techniques that
require flexibility.
Endurance is a direct indicator of
the ability of your body to undergo prolonged periods of pressure and stress and is directly responsible for the gathering rate of exhaustion, resistance to
pain, and enduring long-lasting negative effects.
Perception is a direct
indicator of processing signals sent from external sources by your
consciousness and is directly responsible for the quality of your eyesight,
hearing, sensitivity to odours and sense of touch, as well as the ability to
notice various small details of the world that surrounds you.
Intelligence is a direct
indicator of the ability of your brain to perceive and remember information and
is directly responsible for the speed of learning different skills, the rate at
which you lose previously acquired skills, as well as the ability to process
various chunks of information.
I read the info on intellect
three times before I realized that I was concerned about one thing. It was the
part about losing previously acquired skills that bothered me. It turns out
that you can lose some of your skills in the course of the game. That's just
not clear to me what can cause this loss, and how fast the skills will be
lost. Yes, damn it, it's not even clear how the intellect will affect the rate
of loss: I wonder if the rate of loss will slow down or on the contrary
increase with higher intellect power. So, what is the connection? Reflecting on
this problem for so long can burn the shit out of you, and it will last for
hours on end. Okay, I think it’s time to stop torturing myself and it’s no use
scrambling my brains. I had better read descriptions of other characteristics.
Reasoning power is a direct
indicator of the ability of your brain to interact with the outer world and is
directly responsible for the volume of interactions being performed, the
strength of resistance to the impact exerted on you and the strength of your
mutual interaction.
Fuck! Dear game developers, I have a question for you, well,
what kind of a nerd wrote such brain-exploding texts? You have to read such
texts many times and then you don’t understand this shit, so you keep on
reading until you get it. Based on what I have read so far, the reasoning
power appears to be responsible for something related to the power of
thought and gaining control over it. So, we will encounter either different
telepaths with psychokinetic powers or a wider range of types called "psionics". Okay, let's go further
along with the text of the instruction.
The luck parameter is a direct indicator of how lucky you
are!
Bwa-ha-ha... This is the most detailed description of
the characteristics of all. Well, it became clear straight away after I read
this! I have a feeling now that 90 % of online players diss the game
developers.
Charisma is a direct indicator of
your ability to engage your partner in communication and is directly
responsible for the ability to quickly make everyone feel at ease while talking
to you and your chance of getting more discounts in stores, getting rarer assignments
or a higher reward for the completed tasks.
Now I question
myself: what shall I choose? Almost all the characteristics are important in
the game, you won’t want to sacrifice anything, but you have to choose which
parameters you need in the first place and which ones will be gained in the
course of the game. At the time of doubt, reflecting on what I should choose, I
thoughtlessly clicked on the cursor, adding and deducting points of each of the characteristics from one to ten, trying to arrive at the right decision. And my
mind was telling me time and again that I was making mistakes and that
something was incorrect in there, and that there was something extremely important
that I was missing out on.
That’s how I was playing around: first, five points
for good luck and three more for the reasoning power, and then reset all
characteristics to the initial parameters and then four characteristics up to
the maximum, which is ten, and four other characteristics – only one point
each. STOP IT! And why can’t I
assign all the points available for one feature? I can’t do that since ten is
the maximum value for each category. But why?! What could be the reason for
such a limit? Think, my dear brain, or I'll blow the shit out of my head! After
all, there must be a reason for this restriction, although ... it cannot be so
– I haven’t seen such a thing in any other games.
But the game developers mentioned in one of their
interviews that they resorted to non-standard solutions in many features of
this game, which cannot be found in any other game. So it is highly possible
that the characteristics or features, or as most of them call the stats, cannot
be increased with new levels. So, that means that ten units are the maximum
value for the feature. Darn it! The bollocks!
Now most players are likely to choose six points for all
the characteristics and they will get an average character, without any clearly
expressive personality and special features. My heart is pounding, I can
imagine, literally in a day or two, forums will be flooded with indignation in
messages from players.
Realizing that the problem really exists, I almost
immediately made up a roadmap for action. Maybe it’s not very correct, but
it's the most appropriate choice for the style of the game that I'm going to
use. In the end, I chose such parameters:
Strength
- 5
Agility
- 9
Endurance
- 5
Perception
- 9
Intelligence
- 6
Reasoning
power - 1
Luck
- 8
Charisma
- 5
The
score of free features: 0
After confirming my choice, the following message
popped up in front of my eyes:
Congratulations! You’ve created a new character! Our
servers boot in…
1:17:23
1:17:22
1:17:21
1:17:20...
In just a little more than an hour my game starts. On
the one hand, it is not very pleasant to hover in this emptiness with the timer
in front of your eyes ticking; on the other hand, there is time to get thoughts
together and solve the perennial question: what do I do next? First, you need
to process the information available. So, in an hour I’m embarking on a long
journey - a new game, accompanied by a crowd of frenzied gamers and we all will
be exploring an unbeaten track. Hence, there are neither guidelines nor tips from experienced players. So, there will be a race to get new experiences
and information about the virtual world surrounding us.
Should my assumption about points for the features be
true, then there is no use trying to get as much experience as possible.
Therefore, there are several primary tasks lying ahead of me. Firstly, I am to
figure out what needs to be done in order to compete with other players
successfully. Secondly, I should collect information about the world around me,
as it was said before "He who owns the information, owns the world".
Reflecting for so long, I didn’t even notice how I gradually dozed off for a
while.
I regained consciousness when I heard the beep of the
timer, which was counting down the last seconds before the boot:
Attention!
The servers boot in …
0:00:06
sec…
0:00:05
0:00:04
0:00:03
0:00:02
0:00:01
The bright flash hurt my eyes. I barely managed to
blink, as I saw a transparent spherical cover of the capsule in front of me.
With a quiet hissing sound, the lid moved forward a little and opened up.
VolPer, welcome to Alfaróme!
I got out of my box carefully, not yet fully accustomed
to a new body of mine, which, unlike my old one, did not ache from every
movement. So I finally got out of the capsule that looked like one of cryofrost
in sci-fi films, standing upright. I found myself in a rectangular-shaped room
two by four meters, decorated with something like tiles of the colour of a sea
wave mixed with algae. It was a dirty greenish colour with a slight hue of blue.
My capsule was in one corner of the room, and opposite it, I noticed a
rectangular-shaped door.
"Well, hi to you, Alfaróme, Here I am!"
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