MetaWars: Fight For The Future

Book 2.0 Preview

Jonah Delacroix loved to fly.

He spread his arms wide and pushed his toes together.  He swooped low over the sprawling new digital city of Changhai. The warm wind against his face was virtual, but the thrill in his stomach was real.

In the bustling streets below him, new buildings pixelated into existence and throngs of avatars populated this brave new world. Behind each avatar was a real person whose brain interfaced directly with the internet, generating a digital representation of the user called the avatar.

Jonah lived most of his waking life inside a virtual world called the Metasphere. In this, he wasn’t unusual. Most people had gone meta.

But now, the Metasphere had a rival.

This fast-growing new world that Jonah soared above was called the Changsphere, and it was drawing avatars from the Metasphere with its higher-resolution graphics, faster servers and infectious sense of optimism. To Jonah, the Metasphere – with its rich, 3D rendering and sharp, lifelike recreation of all five senses – had always seemed more real than the crumbling real world. Inside the Changsphere, however, everything seemed richer and sharper still.

One of the things Jonah loved about the virtual world was the sheer diversity of avatars. They took all shapes and sizes, from the familiar to the ridiculous. As he soared, he saw a cat riding an elephant. On the city streets below him, he spotted a chimpanzee selling apps to a raptor, and a shark strolling on two legs. He noticed two translucent triangles (one isosceles and one equilateral) pulsing as they bickered, and a mallard duck parading three ducklings behind it.

Suddenly, Jonah realised that he had no way of knowing if those avatars below did, in fact, have a real person behind them. They could, for all he knew, be dead.

In the Metasphere of old, some users chose to Upload themselves, digitising all of their memories and storing them in their avatar. They would live on in the virtual world in a state of ignorant bliss, confined to a specific island, the Island of the Uploaded. The uploading process, however, killed the user; every Uploaded avatar had committed suicide to get there. But in return, they were immortal.

Immortal, but not indestructible.

The server farm that stored their memories had almost crashed, and in the nick of time, Jonah had led the millions of Uploaded avatars into the light of the new Changsphere world, where they were now roaming free among the living. For Jonah it was a miracle that the dead could come back to life – or at least a digital life.

Jonah had opened the portal between the worlds two months ago. Looking down, it was hard to believe that back then Changhai had been nothing but a digital grid, zoned for development. In fact, this entire world had only recently come into existence.

Jonah wasn’t alone in the sky. He flew past a silver, five-pointed star and nodded his head. ‘Good morning.’

‘It certainly is in here,’ the star replied.

Jonah caught a glimpse of his avatar in the star’s reflection. He looked just like his real-world self, gangly with an unruly tuft of dark hair. But what struck Jonah more than anything was how lifelike he looked. The graphics here were so sharp that he could have sworn he was looking into a mirror in the real world, and not at a digital reflection.

Thousands of new settlers were arriving in the Changsphere every day. They were buying up plots of virtual land, building homes and businesses. They were moving their entire online lives here. Jonah shared the optimism of these virtual pioneers as they explored their new surroundings. But to Jonah, the Changsphere represented more than a second chance. It was the one place where his father was still alive.