FB: Chapter 1 – Back In Time

I looked in the mirror. Gone was the older jaded woman and in her place was a much younger, slightly less jaded woman who was in much better shape. By the Trinity, I had really let myself go the last time, even with the medical nanites. That was the problem with getting lower quality nanites and struggling for money for the majority of my life, it was far too easy to become a blob in a capsule.

Somehow, I had come back in time. I had panicked at first, then there was confusion, since I had thought I was hallucinating. I knew this was real now, but no explanation why the time travel happened. There was very little doubt in my mind it had something to do with the VR game Exponential. The fact that I had a hard time remembering anything right before I was somehow in my younger body was confirmation of this fact in my mind. I knew that I was probably in the game when I was somehow sent back in time, since I spent at least 20 hours a day in Exponential a decade from now. Everyone that had a capsule lived in it for the most part and could live in it if they were willing to get the necessary medical hookups.

I poked my cheeks and pulled them out, before letting them snap back into place. I looked down at my breasts. Damn, things were so much tighter back then, or now I suppose. My stomach was much flatter as well and I had an hourglass shape. Tenses were going to be a nightmare until I got used to this time travel. But at least my body had recovered quite a bit. Even with the medical nanites in the future, I had let things go horribly. That wasn’t going to happen a second time. I left the bathroom with determination and got changed into my only pants suit. It wasn’t my first choice of an outfit, but my current wardrobe was sadly lacking professional attire for what I needed to do today.

Making my way downstairs to the kitchen, my mother was making breakfast. It was a Saturday, a week before I was supposed to start college. I wasn’t going to go to college this time around. College was no longer important, and I had other immediate needs for the money that had been set aside for my tuition.

“So, going out?” my dad asked while looking through his smartphone at the day’s news.

“Yes. Going to look for a job,” I lied. I didn’t want to do this, but they wouldn’t understand my sudden change in life choices. College was no longer an option with everything that I knew. And explaining how my mind somehow went back in time would only create more problems.

“Good. Glad you listened to my advice. That got you a car, working hard all those years in high school,” he replied. My dad always liked to mention the car I had purchased with the money I had earned from waitressing. It felt it showed responsibility on my part. I nodded and ate my breakfast. I didn’t want to start up any drama if I could help it.

“Morning,” my younger brother came into the kitchen in his pajamas and mumbled. I had to bite back a laugh at the stupid mustache he was trying to grow. The attempt had only lasted a few years, but it had been hilarious. He really should just shave the entire thing off and not even try.

“You need to be like your sister, go get a job,” my father scolded my brother. “Just playing games all day.” He was 17 years old, but my father believed in working for a living. He refused to let his two children be complete shut ins.

“Hey, I have football practice. You know that takes forever and is exhausting. Also, it is summer vacation. So, who is driving me today?” He glanced at me. My father took an eye off his smart phone to give me a look. I missed this. Being with my family. I had to bite back the tears that threatened to explode. I quickly picked up a napkin and wiped my eyes.

“Problem?” my father asked me.

“No, just…something in my eye. I can take Rodrick, but we are leaving in half an hour, so make sure you are ready,” I said.

“But practice doesn’t start for two hours,” he complained and looked at our parents.

“I have work today,” our mom said. She worked part time in retail.

“Your sister will take you,” our father said, and my brother let out a sigh.

“Come on, can’t you delay, where are you even going?” my brother complained.

“Looking for a job. But I can drag you around. If you promise to keep your mouth shut,” I told Rodrick. He gave me a look and then nodded. I guess I was acting a bit differently than I had in the past and he was picking up on that.

I had considered telling my family I was from the future, but that would get me a one-way ticket to a mental health institution. I also didn’t have time to waste on such pointless drama if I was going to capitalize on the knowledge I had.

“Why not go back to that waitressing job you had? They paid well,” he said.

“I might, but I also want a change and see if there is a job out there that pays a bit better,” I partially lied. I was going to take some big risks and then go into Exponential as my job.

“Fine, whatever, I will be ready,” he replied. I finished up my eggs and then helped do the dishes so my mother could leave for work on time. After that I went up to my room and got on my computer, double-checking everything I had looked into the day before.

The trading account had been opened and linked with my bank account. I had done a test run with $500, confirming I could purchase the stock shares I had wanted. Now I only needed to cancel my enrollment to get my tuition back, get a couple shady loans, and then invest everything I had into Exponential, the name of the company that was making the game that would dominate the world. The company and the game shared the same name.

No one could have predicted the four huge factors that made it a huge success. While the VR technology was the first factor it wasn’t expected to be new or ground breaking compared to past iterations, except that it had been or was going to be. The tenses regarding time travel were really starting to annoy me. Regardless of tenses the immersion of the custom capsules was insanely good. Then there was the development of medical nanites in the next year, which would be combined with the VR gaming pods. That brought the medical industry and insurance industry into the game sphere.

This included all the retirement homes. It would be much easier to stick old people in a game capsule and only check on them occasionally, rather than have actual nursing homes with nurses and activities that required supervision. Also, the old people liked it, since their bodies worked in the game and weren’t old and in pain. So, all that saved up pension and retirement money was quickly paid out to get the old people into game capsules with medical nanites.

The third factor was Quantum Artificial Intelligence, or QAI running the entire game. Even a decade in the future, trying to understand how it worked exactly was headache inducing. It was a common joke that you needed at least two PhDs from top universities just to get an entry level position just servicing the thing. It was cutting edge, fast, and most importantly, highly adaptable. Far more than the past AI that various companies had used. It used a unique form of computer processor, which I hadn’t understood in the future, to process vast amounts of data very quickly compared to other AI systems. All I knew was that it worked very fast, and guzzled energy by the fusion plant to keep its quantum nodes operational.

While QAI might not be the most creative in all aspects, there was or would be a service in place to hire creators and testers and pay them for the quality of their work in helping developing content for Exponential. Time travel was really messing with my tenses even in my head. This pulled in a lot of the creative industry, while strengthening the foundation of Exponential.

The final factor to Exponential’s success had been the defense industry. Initially it had just been to keep soldiers on call for deployment with a link up to combat drones. Then they had looked into using nanites to enhance soldiers and get people fit for combat when research came out about the small passive enhancements medical nanites could give. The problem was the adjustment time needed. You start changing things about a person’s body, you ended up with body dysmorphia, a serious mental illness. Even now, it was hard to reconcile the current me with how I had been. There was a feeling of some things not feeling quite right. Thankfully the game wouldn’t launch right away, so I had some time to adapt back to my younger body.

Exponential eased people into minor improvements once they were discovered and the military began subsidizing soldiers into the game in even greater numbers. Since the capsules could have a separate system that linked up with combat drones and separate servers for real life modeled combat. Rather than have the soldiers exit, just keep them in their capsules so the military was always on standby. If a war happened, just flip a switch and the robots and drones wouldn’t be simulated in a virtual environment but would take information directly from whatever battlefield they were on. Having Exponential with magic and melee combat was seen as a way for the soldiers to have some down time in a war setting that wasn’t modern while stuck in capsules.

That brought in the defense industry, which was a huge business. Robots and drones controlled by soldiers in VR were the future of combat. When the US did this, all the other countries quickly began to follow suit like an arms race. Other countries might just train soldiers and not use robots or drones, but it was still more money for Exponential.

A decade from now, a quarter of the world’s population would be in game capsules. The rest of the world was there to support them. The cities that had been dying experienced a small surge as capsule housing blocks were built to replace unused office space and apartments. Just a room with a capsule and guaranteed maintenance with a direct line to a QAI node.

But I had come back to the first day of the pre-launch, which was yesterday. That was the closed alpha test. It would run for two weeks, then the results would be announced, with plans to go live a month after that. Many people thought Exponential would fail due to requiring expensive game capsules that were exclusive, but the game wouldn’t fail. Instead, that would be the key selling point that would make Exponential live up to its name, rapidly growing to take over the entire world.

The stock price of the company was going to surge from around $20 a share to $120 a share in a period of ten days. After that it would plummet back down to $60 a share once the demand for capsules far exceeded the supply and there were supply chain issues a couple of months after launch.

A year after that, the nanite development came out, quickly followed by insurance companies, and then the military and governments over the following three years. The share price would soar and there would be stock splits. A single share purchased at that low $20 price point would balloon into over $200,000 worth of shares by the end of the decade.

The only reason I knew all of this was because it had been a common topic of conversation, about how if a person had only invested in a single share at the start, they would be rich and set for life with nothing to worry about. Now that I had the chance, I wasn’t about to let it slip through my fingers.

I needed more immediate money and to set myself up in the game. So, I would be buying and then dumping at the small peak, multiplying my money by six times. After that I planned to make more money by earning it in game and then buying up shares while they were still cheap. All my money that I wasn’t using to purchase a capsule would be going into shares. My plans might change, but my course was set.

A decade from now Exponential was worth quintillions of dollars. My goal was to own as much of the company as possible. In my last life I had gone to college, graduated with a degree in accounting. Two years later, the company I was working for was hired to do accounting in game for one of the various super guilds.

After that I became a low-level flunky and worked part time as a support caster. It was miserable. My brother wanted to play professional football and was depressed when the NFL closed up, since Exponential had begun taking over everything. The battles and competitions in game were much more exciting and crushed the sports scene. He got a job as a maintenance capsule tech and had started drinking heavily.

My father and mother retired and played the game casually, since it was the cheapest option for their retirement, but Exponential was rough in various ways if you didn’t have money to start with and earning money to live comfortably in game wasn’t simple when you didn’t know what you were doing and started behind everyone else.

There was a huge swath of lower level minions that did grunt work, grinding up skills, gathering knowledge, calculating damage and defense values for various builds, and various support tasks to support the people leading the pack. This competition only grew fiercer as one got closer to the top, as more and more people from the real world were mobilized in Exponential.

With all the investment, there were corporations, countries, and various forces that were all scrambling for a piece of real estate and power in the virtual world. It wasn’t simple getting real estate either. The NPCs weren’t idiots with QAI behind all of them. Moving up socially in the world of Exponential was far harder than grinding levels mindlessly. But that was a problem for later. Right now, I needed to get as much money as possible and get ready for the full launch of the game.

The biggest question I needed to figure out was my starting point. That meant picking one of over 1,200 towns, villages, or forts throughout the Human Empire. It wasn’t just about picking the most optimal location for experience. The real issue came from interference.

Outside of the settlements, where the Eye of Vigilance wasn’t watching, player killing was rampant. Also, the number of monsters spawning into low level grinding zones was limited. For most grinding zones, 1,000 people were the recommended max.

But that was still terrible, since that meant all 1,200 beginner areas could only accommodate 1.2 million people. In reality anything more than 100 people were a nightmare. That number was made even lower when people used luring tactics combined with altars to draw all the monsters in an area towards themselves.

There was a lot of space in Exponential, but it wasn’t endless. Space was needed for monsters to spawn optimally. Fast travel wasn’t cheap enough for starting players. All of this meant that finding and killing low level monsters was a bit of a pain sometimes and wasn’t just about picking the best spot. QAI did not like making separate instances and it was only very rarely done.

The world was dynamic to a massive degree, so things could change, and instances ruined that. As I waited for my brother, I had a notebook open and was listing out information, so I didn’t forget various pieces of information in the future.

My starting location would decide everything. I needed a place where no one went and that I could lure in loads of monsters. Also, I needed to decide on my combat style as well.

The second question wasn’t too hard. The best combat style in my mind, which stood the test of time against almost anything was a focus on poison skills and the Luck stat. While it wasn’t completely broken, it had been the most nonsense build a decade later. Enough that the very few people who had stuck out the horrible starting part of that build had become very difficult to deal with.

Countering this build required a person to specialize and there were very few monsters, NPCs, or players that were immune to poison. Most players just used potions or had a resistance. Even then, there were ways around such things. Also, the Luck stat would be decent no matter what build a person used. Normally that stat completely sucked unless someone went all in, but once they did and reached the later levels, critical hits were key since the damage would be immense and bypass certain level based protections. The increased drop rate didn’t hurt either.

Still, all of that paled in comparison to figuring out the most important thing. This question was incredibly important, and I needed to think about this heavily. What in game name was I going to pick?

***

AN: Welcome to my new story. As a thank you for your support through my hiatus, you are getting this story early. I am doing a final re-read and posting the first 24 chapters over today and tomorrow, with one chapter a day going forward, to reach 30 by Monday when the RR release drops like I had planned.

Please make sure to review on RR at that time, and I will give a reminder. Also hitting the follow and favorite buttons helps as well. I will also say that around 130 chapters are currently written and this story is planned to be 180 chapters long.