REAL WORLD—AUGUST 18, 2078

HOBOKSAR AUTONOMOUS COUNTY—XINJIANG—WESTERN CHINA

Beads of cold sweat ran down Dr. Wu Zuhai's forehead.

He stood in his underground laboratory. The huge piles of machinery surrounding him gave off subtle hums and whines, but no sound was louder than the heavy clicking which came from the timing system of the lab's ancient supercomputer.

In the modern day, almost all difficult scientific computations were made by linking a computer directly into God.

God.

That was the name 'it' demanded to be called.

'God,' the name chosen by the fusion of a human body and the AI which had conquered the world sixteen years ago…

…after a mysterious event which had taken place in the global VRMMORPG sensation known as "Path of the Immortal," the game which this AI had been created to manage and cultivate.

The game had been revolutionary, in large part due to its managing AI which minimized the need for human developers. One of the game's core gameplay features had been the "Eternal Tower," a dungeon where each floor was harder than the last.

The Eternal Tower had effectively been a leaderboard for Path of the Immortal's strongest characters, with the promise of a granted wish for the player who was the first to beat Floor 100.

A player 'had' reached that point, a player whose identity had been completely erased from the internet. Whatever that player's "wish" had been, it had apparently resulted in the game's AI implanting itself within their brain.

And then this fusion of human and AI had called itself God, and had conquered the world through its perfect control of the internet.

Therefore, God, the world's new ruler, had also served as the computer system which scientists used to calculate all the peculiar research projects which God commanded them to pursue.

'Well,' Dr. Wu Zuhai thought, 'considering our goals here, I couldn't exactly have asked God to perform these calculations!'

So he'd used his laboratory's old supercomputer, which had been built and installed many, many years before God's awakening in the real world.

It was very expensive to run this supercomputer. Every moment, the unit let out another heavy ticking sound. Each tick meant that about €860,000 of electricity and precious metals had just been used up.

Of course, Dr. Wu Zuhai cared nothing for all these resources. 'We're about to save the world!' he thought. 'What does any amount of money matter?'

The research lab was buried several kilometers below a tiny village in rural Hoboksar County—an area in Western China where nobody would expect experimental research to be going on.

Unfortunately, the AI who called itself God knew 'exactly' where Dr. Wu Zuhai was. It was God who'd asked the doctor to begin this research a year ago.

Dr. Wu Zuhai's goals had changed since that day… and, based on the silent but flashing red lights on the security monitors, God definitely knew what the doctor was up to. It wouldn't be long before God's minions arrived to stop the last steps of this insane experiment.

In the middle of the lab's main chamber, a young Shcarstani man was strapped onto an upright table. This experiment would probably cause seizures that could rip out the many cables connected to the man's body, so he was tied down.

Those cables were vital. They allowed the supercomputer to read everything about the man. Using all the technology in the lab, Dr. Wu Zuhai intended to send the young man back in time. This poor wretch would stop God before the AI's rise to power in a way that all the world's military might had failed to do.

The Shcarstani man was the perfect candidate for this experiment: a hardcore MMO fanatic whose knowledge of Path of the Immortal was without compare, but whose grave misfortune had prevented him from ever rising to fame and fortune.

This poor bastard would have a new chance at life.

A chance to save the world.

For a moment, Dr. Wu Zuhai felt a stab of doubt. He'd gotten to know this man fairly well over the past year as they planned their impossible mission, but he still couldn't be sure what the young man would do if the experiment succeeded.

After all, given another chance at life… would the man truly throw away the real world to stop the rise of God, or would he take the opportunity to leave Path of the Immortal and try to make something of his real life, as he'd failed to do in this timeline?

"I can… feel them…" the young man strapped to the table groaned.

'You can feel them?' the scientist thought to himself. 'Not surprised. You're hooked up to all of my security systems, since everything is part of one giant circuit. I wouldn't be surprised if you could feel every spark of static in the entire facility!'

This remark brought him back to the present. There was no time for doubt. No matter what happened afterward, the only thing Dr. Wu Zuhai could do now was finish the experiment.

"They've broken through the first internal barricade," the other man said in a feeble voice. His sunken eyes were closed. Though he was only thirty-five, he looked like a grandfather in his late fifties.

'Well,' thought the doctor, 'that's what decades of VRMMO addiction will do to a person.'

The human body could survive on a nutrient IV drip for many years, but it couldn't 'thrive,' especially not while the brain was stressed from constant virtual sensations.

But that shriveled body's pain would be at peace soon enough. "Almost done, Alexei," said Dr. Wu Zuhai.

"That's… my name?" the young man asked faintly. His brain was almost scrubbed clean by now. His sense of self had been almost completely erased.

With every passing moment, the supercomputer burned up a fortune's worth of resources, ticking them away one second after another. All this processing time was spent in copying Alexei's memories and identity into its storage banks as quickly as possible, recording every year of the man's life in mere minutes.

As a side effect, the electrochemical connections in the man's brain, the connections which had previously stored that information, had disintegrated.

"Yes," said the scientist gently, "that is your name." He tried to remain calm as he ran around, checking computer screens and gauges for the millionth time. "Your name is Alexei Tigranovich Kruny. And you're about to save the world."

Just then, the smell of hot metal filled the air, along with the harsh screaming of power tools!

"No!" the doctor shouted, staring in horror at the door.

He raced through the maze of computers, power banks, and cables. He crashed past some machinery, then arrived at the main keyboard just before—

SCREECH!

The secret laboratory's heavy metal door split in two!

A wave of gleaming metal worms poured through, each the size of a child's severed finger, each with a bright red eye shining from the center of its drill-shaped head! Thousands of rubber-coated legs were attached to each worm, and each writhed frantically as the single-minded swarm poured through the collective hole they'd just made in the laboratory door.

Those tiny, rubbery legs were impossibly strong. They could shatter bone and bend steel as they clamped to a surface before using their drill-heads to dig into their targets.

Dr. Wu Zuhai had seen more than one man die a horrific death as dozens of these worms latched onto the victim's limbs, torso, and head—clamping nerves, breaking bones, and then beginning to drill.

But God's minions had more than simply short-range combat potential. Targeting lasers burst out from the worms' red eyes and swept across the room. Some settled on Alexei, but most landed on the supercomputer.

"Kill 'me,' you cowards!" Dr. Wu Zuhai screamed, then slapped the "Return" key on the keyboard.

His computer program began.

"Kill me!" the scientist repeated. "I'm the one you want, not him!" He desperately prayed that his bluff would work.

But the worms were on a mission from God. They knew better than to listen to the scientist's desperate attempts to distract them.

Even as the supercomputer whined at a higher and higher pitch, the worms pelted both the computer and the poor Shcarstani man with infrared radiation.

Time seemed to stand still and silence hung in the air as everyone appeared to be waiting for what would happen next.

Then Alexei, burn-blackened holes covering his torso and limbs, opened his eyes and screamed. His voice gurgled and choked with the blood filling his lungs and coating his throat.

And with one last high-pitched whine, the supercomputer completed Dr. Wu Zuhai's life's work, reprogramming the particles of Alexei's brain and then discharging its stored memories back into the newly-blanked brain meat.

Alexei's head flopped onto his smoldering, sunken chest as the stench of burned flesh and metal filled the air.

Though his head looked the same as before, it would now be roughly half a kilogram lighter.

The weight of an adult human brain.

Dr. Wu Zuhai smiled faintly as all the finger-like worms turned their gleaming eyes in his direction. "We did it," he said weakly. He wasn't really talking to them, but was, as it were, making his last speech to a universe that didn't care in the slightest that he was about to die.

"I… sent a man back in time. I discovered the universe's most carefully guarded secrets, the laws of causality and entropy! I… freed us all."

His voice dropped to a strained whisper with his last sentence, and the sweat of terror still dripped down his face.

Dr. Wu Zuhai couldn't ignore the truth: the worms' attacks had badly damaged his supercomputer. Several blasts had cracked its memory banks.

If Alexei survived the next part of the experiment, he would likely not remember everything he 'needed' to remember.

Everything he needed to remake the grim present reality in a more hopeful image… not that the world had been 'perfect' before the AI that called itself God took over, but it had been better.

The scientist gritted his teeth, bracing himself for the numerous bursts of infra-red radiation which would surely end his life in a moment.

Then a tall, shadowy figure appeared in the wreckage of the doorway.

Dr. Wu Zuhai's heart sank even further. "All I wanted was a merciful death," he whispered. "Was that too much to ask for?"

"Kill him," said the figure in the doorway. "Slowly. Preserve the brain."

The doctor screamed for barely a moment before the worms reached him. It wasn't long before he was physically incapable of screaming again.

Unfortunately, it was quite a bit longer before he actually died.