Taking a quick look at his phone Jaden saw that he had plenty of time before 5:00.

Walking into the kitchen to get something to eat he tapped out a few commands on a console sitting on the counter, he sat down as it started its process of gathering his requested cereal, toppings, and even bowl color.

While advancements in technology had made many things possible in the last few years, printing food was still out of reach. That wasn’t to say that companies didn’t get as close as they possibly could.

An average consumer basic ‘prepstage’, the brand name of the meal creator he used, could whip up just about anything you could desire if you gave it the correct ingredients. While more advanced ones like his gathered information about favorite meals and habits, then automatically ordered ingredients for food that a person would likely make in a week. This feature was often scarily precise with a more than 90% accuracy rate when predicting what a person would eat.

Gazing at the letter in his hand while the machine worked Jaden finally succumbed to his curiosity and ripped open the letter.

Hey Jaden,

Just some last-minute things I wanted to tell you. If you read the forums as voraciously as you did when we were kids you should know every player will get a randomized ability at the start of the game. All im gonna say is that im pretty sure what ability you will end up with, random in this game isn’t really random, it’s based on your personality and what the game knows about you, and the game just happens to already know a lot about you specifically. Finally, one last thing, because I know you will definitely go a crafting route, the game can only be as creative as you are. That’s all ill say.

Your friend,

Steven

Jaden was startled from his contemplation by the beeping sound of his prepstage.

Getting up and grabbing his food Jaden started to consider the information that the letter conveyed.

The fact that random was biased based on personality was actually a really good idea from a gameplay perspective, theoretically, it would ensure that everyone had fun playing the game the way they wanted.

The note about the game knowing a lot about him slightly unnerved Jaden, but eventually, he dismissed the thought. He trusted Steven so the game knowing about him must serve some purpose.

The ‘the game can only be as creative as you are’ line however really confused Jaden. After some pondering he again put it out of his mind figuring that it would make sense eventually.

Glancing at his phone again he saw that it was 3:00 already. Done with his late cereal Jaden went to go take a shower and get ready for his dive at 5:00.

At 4:50 Jaden climbed into the pod, he had showered and replied to a few emails before he got too excited to do anything productive.

Laying on the soft jell surface of the pod in only his boxers he reached up and pressed the nice big red ‘start’ button on the inside lid of the silver pod.

As the lid slid closed the area around him became dark, then suddenly with no real warning, it brightened again to show him standing in a square white room.

On one wall there was a door, right above it sat a number counting down.

Suddenly a monotone voice began to speak, “welcome to your Home Hub, this virtual location is hosted locally on your pod and as such will be the place you return to when logging in, out, or being disconnected from a game server for any reason. You can customize this room on the terminal to the right using points acquired from playing any game supported by the pod, these points are awarded at a fixed rate of a point a minute but may also be awarded for completing certain milestones.”

There was a slight pause before the voice continued again.

“If you look left you will see a dial, this controls time compression for your Home Hub. there may be some delay when changing compression as your pod calculates the safest rate to change the compression. Your maximum compression is automatically calculated by the pod taking into account your mental and physical condition. In order to ensure fairness and safety games are locked to a maximum of 3x compression and when visiting others Home Hubs the compression maximum will be automatically adjusted to the limit of the person with the lower maximum.”

“Thank you for supporting AlphaComp industries!”

Taking a look at the dial on the wall Jaden was very surprised to see a safe maximum of 15x time compression. Although he would probably never turn it that high having stocks in the AlphaComp company at one point availed him to the information that most people would go temporarily insane from compression over 8x. 15x was nearly unheard of and he would be interested to see what the average compression numbers looked like with hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of people playing the game.

Setting the compression dial to 3x compression Jaden noticed that the game countdown slowed down by a factor of three and another timer appeared above it that seemed to be adjusted for the time compression.

Thinking for a moment he set the dial to 2x and walked across the room to check out the customization panel.

The first thing that Jaden noticed when he tapped on the terminal was the ability to move anything in the room anywhere he wanted.

The second thing Jaden noticed was the amount of free stuff in the store. It seemed that the points were really only used to texture, change the shape of, and color different objects.

Knowing his disposition this level of customization was dangerous and he could spend hours meticulously crafting a perfect room

Looking over at the countdown Jaden saw that there were 12 minutes until the game would launch. With that in mind, he decided that he would give himself exactly 10 minutes to play around with the cool customization.

10 minutes later Jaden sat in the center of a well-furnished room made of mostly default-free store items. He did start with a small 100 points that he used to change the color of the walls to a subtle cyan color.

At this point the timer had a minute left so Jaden set the time compression of the room to 1x using the dial he had relocated next to the shop terminal.

30 seconds later Jaden stood in front of the door into the game.

As the timer hit 0 and he pushed open the door the same voice from previously played.

“Freedom Online is now available.”