Volper

  The author: RosPer

  Reader’s note

  "Alfarome: Volper"

  What can you do when you only have two years left under the sun? You can, for instance, keep to yourself and lose all contact with reality. You can spend all this remaining time feeling sorry for yourself and crying… But I decided to act in a completely different way: if you have just a few years left to live, then why not enjoy yourself to the fullest? But how would I do that? It’s a piece of cake, since there is a virtual reality I can run to. And, as I’ve found out, there is a new project being launched pretty soon, about which only scarce info has been given by different sources.

  "Are you fed up with elves, gnomes and other typical races from fantasy novels for teenagers? Sick and tired of reading about medieval battles and life in those dark times? Then, welcome to Alfarome! What’s in store for you here? It’s a brand new game, in the genre of post-apocalyptic cyberpunk, that tests your endurance! And what else can you hope for? That's top secret, because any information can bring you money and you could make loads of it in the game! "©

  The only information available is on the official website of the game Alfarome.

  Well, I’d love to go back to the old good days, when I was young and hale. Taking into account my past, this kind of virtual world will be just perfect for me!

  Illustrations and Pictures: Alexandra Tarko

  Translate: Anton Raksha

  Proof-reading: John King

  Proof-reading: Damir Isovic

  CHAPTER I: IT’S JUST THE START…

  The lid of the capsule slammed shut with a hissing sound, which meant it had just cut off my way back. This was the point of no return for me. I had thought everything over thoroughly and weighed all my options, finally arriving at this conclusion: there were simply no other options for me. I had to keep going forward, into a new, unknown life, without the ability to return to my old one. I found myself in complete darkness. I felt like I was in zero gravity, and yet, at the same time, I couldn’t feel my body at all. In the distance, on the very edge of my consciousness, a dim light started twinkling. At first, there were only tiny specks of light, but then it gradually began to brighten with each and every second that passed. In a mere moment, it filled my entire consciousness.

  - Welcome to the world of Alfarome! – I could hear a voice inside my head. - Collecting data from the capsule ... Data collection complete. Medical capsule number is # ANV-734685-EK3573, capsule does not have the clearance to terminate its operation... Error! A 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 Alfarome project and has thereby agreed to be permanently transferred to the servers belonging to the Administration, without a twelve-hour limit on his presence in virtual reality, according to the Ministry of Health Decree No. 17554. The basis for the contract’s signing is a medical report issued in the name of Ignatenko Vladimir Alekseevich regarding the critical state of health due to his advanced age. For the right to transfer his consciousness to the servers of project "Alfarome", Ignatenko Vladimir waives the right to convert virtual currency from the game into real world currency, get bonuses in the game in the form of real world currency, and also pays twenty years in advance for the right to play the game. "

  -Do you wish to confirm your choice?

  - Press ‘Confirm’!

  Well, it’s not like I had another way out! Despite a state-of-the-art health care system and advances in medicine, being already 107 years old, you start to understand that it’s hardly possible to live for much longer than that. Doctors have told me that I could go on for two more years of real life, or even five, possibly even ten years in the best case scenario, but I’d have to permanently be in a medical capsule. I have saved up quite a large amount of money, but, unfortunately, there’s no one I could bequeath this money to. I’m all by myself. Well, it’s wrong of me to say that; I have quite a big family: grandchildren and great-grandchildren, who, of course, are proud to have a relative like me, but we don’t stay in touch anymore and hardly ever even speak on the phone.

  My wife died about twenty years ago, and my children have also passed away due to old age, but my grandchildren and great-grandchildren are alive and have their own families now. That’s why I personally decided to cut my ties with them, so that they could live their lives, and not be disturbed by an old fogey living out his life in solitude. So I decided to immerse myself in virtual reality, in order to, so to speak, let my hair down one last time. And then I encountered a problem. According to the latest decrees from the Ministry of Health, staying in virtual reality is limited to only twelve hours, after which time you should be disconnected for at least four hours.

  Of course, it’s possible to divide this period into smaller parts, according to your own wishes. You should, for instance, rest for twenty minutes in reality for every hour you spend in the virtual one. I didn’t like that option either, 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 after concluding an agreement with a new but promising company, as well as receiving a number of game restrictions, I’ve finally achieved my target. In the meantime, I have also set a precedent, according to which, from now on, terminally-ill patients can at least play games and enjoy themselves to the fullest. Okay, since I’ve given you the backstory, 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 using your voice, thoughts, gestures, or choose another option. Attention: if you choose another option for your method of interaction, 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 this is! Why should I have to confirm everything a million times?!

  - Yes, I wish to confirm my choice! - I mentally told the system.

  - Thank you for your choice! Please choose how you would like to be notified by the system: by means of voice, text, light signals, or custom settings. Attention: if you select a custom option for your notifications, you will need to manually configure the standard list of notification options.

  - Select notification by text!

  - Do you wish to confirm your choice of being notified by the system through text-based messages?

  - Confirm!

  A short message flashed into view:

  Thank you for your choice! Select Your Character’s Name…

  I should really think about this, since it’s going to be my name in the game and I’m going to be stuck in here for quite a long time. OK, let’s 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, what can I even choose? T
his game has really made it difficult for me to settle on a name. Every time I come up with some damn thing, I get a message about how it’s already taken. But, maybe…?

  - Volper

  This name is not taken! Would you like to choose this name for your character?

  - Yeah, dammit, 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 would you like to make it your real-life age?

  I will change my age for sure, but now I have a dilemma: how old am I supposed to be in the game? If I look back at my youth, I can remember that I was in the prime of my life being between the ages of 25 and 35. If you calculate an average for that age range, you’ll get 30. But I don’t like round figures, so we'll make my character a bit younger and, as a result, this is my choice:

  - Assign my character the age of twenty-eight years.

  The character is now 28 years old!

  I could now view a three-dimensional model of my character, which is surprisingly similar to me in my youth. He’s got dark, short hair, about a quarter of an inch long; dark, slightly curved and very agile eyebrows; gray eyes with a slight tinge of brown; a straight nose, slightly upturned at the end; thin lips, curved into a smile, which depicts me as a person who often smiles, and a slightly protruding chin. He’s a really muscular man, but not overly so. He is almost six feet tall. There’s nothing special about him; the new me looks like an average young man in his late twenties. My contemplation of my youthful self was interrupted by a new message from 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 froze up, just like a computer: the developers hadn’t mentioned that there were a few races available. Damn! How could they have concealed such important information? Of course, I agreed with their statement: "In our world, even just a single piece of information is worth a lot of money". But they could have given us at least a little more to work with. Okay, I won’t spend too long reflecting on it, I have to make a choice. However, what is there to choose from? I don’t 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 bioscience engineering, the dream of each and every biologist– everything is possible here. Do you want to change the color of your skin, hair, eyes – even have a pigmentation that you can normally only wish for? Then this is the place for you since the tools at your disposal allow you to do it all yourself. You can change the shape of your eyes, face, or limbs. If you want, you can increase the number or change the appearance of limbs and body parts, as well as replace them with almost any biological or mechanical analogs. Yes, it was possible; you could change or adjust everything, from your looks to your nervous or cardiovascular system. But for me, almost all of the settings of the character were marked with an inactive, gray color, and when I looked at any of them, a message would pop up:

  This option is not available for the Human Being

  Okay, let's not overthink it and leave everything as it is. After all, I've been alive for so many years now. In the end, I'll be in my own, beloved body, without any changes. That’s very important – I don’t have to get used to any new oddities.

  - Finish configuration without any changes

  Assign primary attributes:

  Strength - 5

  Agility - 5

  Endurance - 5

  Perception - 5

  Intelligence - 5

  Reasoning power - 5

  Luck - 5

  Charisma - 5

  Free points available: 8

  There were two buttons for each parameter: a plus and a minus (more or less). Clicking back and forth, I realized that you could not only increase, but also decrease your attributes, thus adding to or deducting from the free points in the game. The problem was that I didn’t quite know how each of the features was related to a certain parameter in this game. And I figured that choosing at random, relying on my idea of what this all meant, would be the wrong thing to do. There must be some sort of explanation, because if there isn’t any information on their official website, then there must be a way to get this precious information within the game itself ... Umm ... I’ve realized I'm dumb. Before the game started loading, I had made sure that the game had a user-friendly interface. Highlighting the Strength attribute by looking at it, I sent a mental command to the interface:

  - MORE INFORMATION

  Strength is directly tied to the development of your musculature and determines how much you can carry, the force of your blows in close combat and your ability to use heavy weaponry or heavy systems designed for your personal protection.

  Bingo! So there is a way to determine what attributes I need, and which are less important. I only have to decide what my character will be like. Well, let's continue studying the theoretical part first:

  Agility is directly tied to the flexibility of your body and determines the success of your jumps, rolling, fine movements and your ability to perform various martial art techniques that require flexibility.

  Endurance is directly tied to the ability of your body to go through prolonged periods of pressure and stress, and is responsible for how quickly you become exhausted, your resistance to pain, and the time you have to spend dealing with long-lasting negative effects.

  Perception is directly tied to your mind’s ability to process signals from external sources and is responsible for the quality of your eyesight, hearing, sensitivity to odors and sense of touch, as well as your ability to notice various small details in the world that surrounds you.

  Intelligence is directly tied to the ability of your brain to perceive and remember information and is responsible for the speed at which you learn different skills, the rate at which you lose previously acquired skills, as well as your 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 over the course of the game. I’m just not sure about what can cause this loss, and how fast the skills would be lost. Yes, damn it, it's not even clear how the intellect would affect the rate of loss: I wonder if the rate of loss will slow down or, on the contrary, increase with higher intellect. So, what’s the connection? Pondering this problem for too long could burn me out and could possibly take hours. Okay, I think it’s time to stop torturing myself since it’s no use scrambling my brains. I’d better read the descriptions of my other attributes.

  Reasoning power is directly tied to the ability of your brain to interact with the outside world and is responsible for determining the possible volume of interactions being performed, the strength of your resistance to attacks levied against you and the intensity of your mutual interaction.

  Fuck! Dear game developers, I have a question for you… what kind of nerd wrote these brain-melting texts? You have to read them many times, and then you still 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 keep reading these instructions.

  The Luck parameter is directly tied to how lucky you are!

  Bwa-ha-ha... This is the most detailed description o
f the attributes so far. Well, after reading this, one thing is clear! I now have the feeling that at least 90% of the players will be dissing the game developers.

  Charisma is directly tied to your ability to engage others in communication and is responsible for your ability to quickly make everyone feel at ease while talking to you and your chances of getting more discounts in stores, getting rarer assignments or a higher reward for the completed tasks.

  Now I have to ask myself: what should I choose? Almost all the attributes are important in the game, you don’t want to sacrifice anything, but you have to choose which attributes you need in the beginning and which ones will be gained during the course of the game. As I was going over everything, filled with doubt and reflecting on what I should choose, I carelessly clicked on the cursor, adding and deducting points from each of the attributes, making them go from one to ten, trying to arrive at the right decision. And my mind kept telling me, time and time again, that I was making mistakes and that something was wrong here, and that there was something extremely important that I was missing.

  This is how I played around: first, five points in good luck and three more into reasoning power, and then I’d reset all attributes to the initial parameters. Then, I’d get four attributes up to the maximum, which is ten, and four of the other attributes would only get one point each. STOP IT! And why can’t I assign all the points available to me into just one attribute? 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 you the fuck out of my head! After all, there must be a reason for this restriction, although ... it shouldn’t be so – I haven’t seen such a thing in any other games.