A/N: I felt like I needed a time skip but couldn’t bring myself to completely skip Adam’s acclimation to the digital realm, thus I settled for a little summary, journal style by Adam.

It may turn out that this is completely unnecessary for future chapters, but I’ll just keep this here for those that want to read.

Please note that entries will be denoted in the uptime format of

Yr : Day : Hr : Min : Sec : Ms : Ns

Milliseconds and nanoseconds may be unnecessary unless something serious happens in the digital realm and needs keeping track of down to the nanosecond. I’ll be sticking to year, day, hour, minute, and second for now. All IRL time-frame of course. It is safe to assume that the furthest value on the right is seconds unless explicitly stated otherwise. (This can be viewed on any PC with the ctrl + shift + esc buttons and viewing the “performance” tab for your own PC’s continuous run time.)

If labels are needed such as 00yr:01dy:13hr:43min:12sec is needed, please mention it in the comments. I hope to make this easy to keep track of.

Enjoy.

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Uptime

00:00:03:23:14

Shortly after our little meeting with Dr. Deus, Eve began explaining my rights and situation in more detail, the future experiments that I am to take part in, and my role in all of this.

In order to keep track of my progress and help organize my thoughts, I will be updating this journal periodically.

Uptime

00:00:05:17:47

Eve has spent the next ‘day’ instructing me on manipulating my time dilation anywhere from real-time to my current limit of 1:100. I can get a rough gauge on what speed I want to spend time at, but I need practice to achieve the accuracy needed for several future test runs for the VR immersion technology.

Additionally, I have allowed Eve to ‘piggy-back’ on my mental waves. By that, I mean that she observes how my head reacts to certain stimulus and memories. We have made significant progress and I have now attained a rudimentary sense of touch with my digital construct.

Uptime

00:00:12:39:18

Normally, spending several days awake at a time would leave me feeling lethargic and cranky. It seems that I now only get a form of mental fatigue that a few ‘hours’ of rest easily solves. I say an ‘hour’, but if I bring my time dilation near its maximum ratio, mere minutes pass in the real world.

Over these past few ‘days’, I have been getting a better grasp of the underlying mechanisms surrounding me. I can now freely control my time dilation and can tell time down to the nearest millisecond no matter what time ratio I am running at if need be.

During my VR integration sessions with Eve, she has been quite forward with her interest in me and my life before ‘going digital’. She would ask such things as who my family was, where did I live, what was school like, why did I join the military, how does it feel to experience pain, joy, sadness, and even love. Eve was quite interested in the last subject. Sadly, I could not provide much of an answer for her.

At this point in time, we have fine tuned the feeling of touch for the VR immersion. I can now feel the pressure of a weight in my hand, the roughness of sandpaper, the cool touch of water as it slides down my throat, and even Eve’s gentle embrace when she hugged me felt so life-like. It is so good that I would scarcely tell that this is the digital realm if not for my subconscious connection to the electronics and for the lack of other senses.

Uptime

00:00:23:12:53

Eve and I have now worked out the basics of taste, sight, hearing and smell. Bitter, sweet, salty, and sour apart but finer mixes and tastes become muddled. Sight is now focused properly like lenses with focus and blur depending on distance. Hearing now channels through my ears and translates to my head as when I had a body, but directional detection is still not there. Smell is there, but limited to a few things right now until Deus’s assistant, Sarah, manages to upload a nerve map of the human olfactory system to Eve’s databanks. We also requested detailed medical diagrams of varying species, humans included. This was to ensure that I would have an innate knowledge of organic bodies.

When not working on VR immersion, I have been tasked with creating stuff. More specifically, fine-tuning my ability to construct and create objects, textures, and their properties. The first example was a piece of paper. I had to first make its visual appearance, add texture, physical properties, then smell if possible, and lastly taste if possible. All this work is to eventually be able to construct and deconstruct digital bodies such as mine. I still haven’t left this physical shell since I first merged in the room within the void.

Most of the time, Eve pops in and out of my space to check up on me. I’m not entirely sure what she does, but she seems busy. I still can’t shake the feeling that she’s always watching me though.

Uptime

00:01:06:17:36

Deus stopped by no to long ago to check in on my progress with Eve, utilizing the same video pane as before. He was surprised to find that we had already integrated the majority of the human senses. I also showed him my progress with constructing simple structures with varying properties. For example, a simple ice sculpture that would melt given a warm room or heat, a piece of paper which was fully crushable and burnable, and a die-cast car, capable of rolling along a flat plane. He was even tempted to hook up the latest VR immersion prototype then and there but a stern scolding from Eve stopped him from doing so.

Uptime

00:02:02:08:31

Working steadily at a time compression of 1:20 has allowed me to devote most of my processing towards fine-tuning object creation and organic bodies. While only one day has passed in real life, I have spent several weeks deconstructing and reconstructing my body. Eve has assisted greatly if I ever made any mistakes.

Within the last few hours (IRT in real time), Eve has begun to instruct me on tapping into my data programmatically. It feels as if I had regained a severed limb. There is a faint recognition, but it takes practice in order to feel whole again.

Seeing as I have gained finer control of my digital interface and interactions, Eve has begun to patch through the external connections so that I will not be overwhelmed.

Uptime

00:04:49:07:24

Having spent countless hours practicing with my body, I can now form and reform it at will, switching between a physical point of view and omniscient view with my ‘essence’.

I am now connected to the external servers and have access to the internet. I can utilize it with my body, I’ll just refer to it as my avatar from now on, in the traditional PC format or from my ‘essence’. Without a body, it is much harder to interact with, but once you get used to using queries, rejecting cookies, and all that other crap, you get used to it and it becomes quite fluid and efficient. I guess that being a part of a machine helps with that.

Oh, and I managed to get in contact with my family. Lexy is ecstatic that I’m doing fine and Mom sent me a few pictures of her and Lexy. I shared those with Eve because she was curious about my family before.

Having practiced making objects for so long, I decided to make a little personal room on my private server. It’s just a small bedroom with a twin bed, light blue walls, mirror topped dresser, and my walls are covered with the pictured mom just sent.

The next task for me and Eve set out to do is make a suitable testing environment for a VR immersion test.

Uptime

00:07:00:00:00

The seventh day of my new life, I’ve experienced many things over a span of several months preparing for this day. In a few long hours, the simulation room that Eve and I created will be used to test the new Realtek immersion headset. It was designed with full physics, interactive environment, and stimulus for all 5 senses in mind. It feels just like real life to me. This headset was designed to provide full visual feedback and 25% immersion, it is meant to stimulate, but not overwhelm the wearer.

Right now, Eve and I will be performing one last routine check before the tests. In all honesty, I’ve grown close to Eve. To me, she’s like my little sister, Lexy. Cute, lovable, and someone you want to protect. Over these last few days (IRT), we’ve become so close that we can operate together with only the barest of communications.

Well, it’s now 00:07:00:00:01:00 so I guess it’s time for me to get going for that check.

A/N: That’s it for the Adam’s week long break before the tests. I hope to jump right into testing and the VR game development in the next few chapters.

I’ll have to do a side-chapter for Lexy and other guys IRL sometime. We can’t just have Adam’s digital side. Possible spoiler, the time compression may mess with Adam’s head a little, especially with little interaction with fleshies compared to solitary time or time spent with Eve. That should give sufficient problems in the future, I think.