After selecting the option, Jake felt as if he were falling. He fell for what
seemed like an eternity, but what really only the span of a couple minutes.
When the sensation finally stopped, he found himself suddenly lying in a
hospital bed. He was still in his regular body. A machine to his right was making
a long note that you hear when someone dies on movies. Suddenly, a nurse
rushed in.
The nurse was no ordinary nurse. She was an anthromorphic golden retriever
with a large bust in an old-style nurse's outfit. Jake was at a loss for words,
when he remembered that this was the Cyber World. However, he questioned
the need for hospitals in a fake world.
"Oh my word!" she said when she saw Jake sitting up and looking around as
the machine declared him dead.
She ran back out of the room and returned with a normal man in a doctor's
uniform. He looked at Jake, then the machine. His eyes widened a bit, but he
did not say anything. He walked over to the machine, disconnected it, and told
the nurse to get a different one. He then checked for Jake's pulse, listened to
his heartbea, checked his reflexs, and all manner of simple check-up
procedures. When the new machine was brought in, he hooked it back up and
the same note was given. The doctor disconnected the second machine and left
the room. Jake heard him talking on the other side of the door as if on a phone.
"Well, sir," the doctor said, coming back into the room, "I'm afraid I don't know
what is going on. You have no pulse, no heart beat, nor any other internal sign
of life. But your body is reacting just as though it were still alive. In a sense,
you're the walking dead."
"Wait a minute," Jake said, putting voice to his thoughts, "I'm in the Cyber
World, right?" The doctor nodded. "Then how could I have any signs of life
anyway?"
"Well, you see, each avatar is programmed to show the same signs of life that a
real person would so that we know when a person is dying in the cyber world
and will be reformed in the real world. It's a very complicated process that I
cannot fully explain. However, I have called the creator of the cyber world. He
will be here shortly to look at you."
Not more than ten minutes later, a man with a completely white suit and pants
with a white top hat and cane strolled into the room. He had a brown handlebar
moustache and goatee. He conferred with the doctor for a moment before
sitting down on the end of Jake's bed.
"What's your name, boy?" he asked in a southern accent.
"Jake, sir."
"You don't have to call me 'sir', Herb will do. I'm the inventor of this here Cyber
World. I know its ins and outs, how it runs, how it works, how it makes things
possible. You however, are quite impossible." The man got up and began to
pace. "You were found unconscious on a road in Cyber City, the main city in
Cyber World. You were brought up here with no information saved on your
watch. The disk inside was a blank. When the nurse came in, you were both
alive and dead. In other words, you have somehow managed to bypass every
rule we have for getting into Cyber World. So, unless you want to get into some
serious trouble, you'll need to explain exactly how you got here."
Jake told the man how he had bought a display model with a preset disk. He
told about the invisible yet visible menu full of numbers and letters where he
had picked the first option in confusion. He told how he had felt like he was
falling, then was suddenly in the hospital. All the while, Herb sat in a chair,
taking in the information and processing it in his brain. When Jake finished,
Herb sat there for a long while, just thinking. Finally, he stood and began to
pace again.
"It would appear," Herb began, "That the disk put into your watch was
corrupted. That corruption made it so that your body in the real world was
destroyed, and you have become a part of this world. That would explain the
fact that your avatar shows no signs of life because you aren't alive anymore.
You are Cyber World. At least, that's my theory. To test that, you will have to
attempt to do something that normal users cannot do. The simplest thing to do
would be to change your avatar without a disk. Go on, imagine you're
something else; a snake, or a centaur, a woman, or a dragon, something."
Jake thought about himself being a snake slithering along the floor. He
immediately felt smaller and faster. He had no arms or legs, he was just one
long figure with a head and a body.
"Ah, just as I feared. You have become one with Cyber World. You are
essentially in control of everything now. However, don't think this comes without
consequences. I can always evacuate the other users and reset Cyber World
without you in it. You don't have a body to return to in the real world, so if this
world dies, so do you. However, if you help me maintain order in Cyber World, I
will let you have free reign so long as you don't destroy my world."