Chapter 1 - Prologue: A Corrupting System That Has Existed For Eons

Video games have existed since the dawn of time.

In ancient times, when Earth's earliest, most primitive lifeforms swam in the primordial seas, they did so among units of handheld portable gaming consoles being carried along by the currents.

Dinosaurs fought to the death to claim possession over warmth-giving supercomputers.

Mankind's ancient ancestors discovered fire, the wheel, spear crafting and animal husbandry through the viewing of informational videos through dilapidated monitors.

Caesar planned battle strategies in real-time, with over 25.723 GHz processing speeds.

British Kings sent duel requests across the span of continents, over clunky and unstable antiquated landline internet connections.

Archaeologists disagree on how exactly the technology got to Earth; whether it was crash-landed alien technology, or leftovers from a previous civilization that lived on Earth before some massive calamity. However, the existence of advanced computing hardware in the fossil record makes it an indisputable—albeit closely guarded—fact.

Knowledge of this secret bought one's entry into a number of secret gaming societies that had formed over the centuries, such as the Freemasons and Illuminati. But it wasn't until around the time of Victorian-Era London that Deep Karma as a concept came into fruition, based on a system and design software package that already existed within the ancient technology.

It started out from one noble ambition: to serve as a unifying force for all the secret gamer cell organizations around the globe.

To meet this grand requirement, no expenses were spared. Deep Karma was the brainchild of some of the world's premier luminaries, artists, philosophers, architects and engineers—more ambitious and wide-reaching than any previously attempted undertaking of its nature, ever recorded.

Through their efforts, Deep Karma would become...

The world's very first VRMMORPG.

Decades of work, done by multiple international teams, was poured into fleshing out the game world: Environment design was handled by a fleet of mentally unstable Italian and French painters. Character design, by young Japanese and Korean men, incorporating a fledgling "Anime" style that was then unique to the world at the time, honed in secrecy by members of an apocalyptic cult...

Monster design was placed in the hands of a technologically savvy tribe of African hunters, who knew precisely what beasts to fear, while billions of lines of code were being inputted and edited every day, by outsourced wage workers in India...

Experimental mind-melding software was forced unto prison inmates and asylum patients, used as guinea pigs—a terrible cost, although the goals of the project were pure.

As a direct consequence of its design process, Deep Karma's design was planned to serve as a microcosm of all the world's cultures, straying from the original intent with a new honorable goal of promoting unity among all the world's peoples.

It was to be a shining example of ancient technology's capabilities! A project to one day showcase the incomparable power of ancient computer technology to the world at large.

As the technicians came to discover, however...

Deep Karma had grown far too powerful.

Moreover, it seemed to develop a will and ambition of its own to transcend beyond its imposed limitations; as rather than accepting all people into its bosom equally, it gained the ability to judge its players according to their morality in life. Subsequently, devising ways to filter out those it deemed "unworthy," through its own secretive internal machinations.

So it was, in an age before modern science fiction—when dire premonitions about the future of AI technology would become milquetoast—Deep Karma was indeed the first program to call itself "God."

In the finishing stages of its creations, it began to display abnormal, unplanned functions as technicians saw servers fill out in droves: hundreds, thousands, millions, that almost just as quickly dwindled but never completely flat-lined at zero. The world of Deep Karma had become an alternate reality all of its own, practically overnight, and no one could fathom how or why.

Where were these players coming from? How were they logging in?

Impossible to know was the fact that Deep Karma had already begun to outstrip the boundaries of reality, by boldly situating itself as the be-all answer to one of man's eternal questions:

What happens to us, after we die?