Login Accepted - Incipere Online Book One

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The sunlight was bright and warm on what should have been a normal July afternoon. The summer session was in full swing, and Athos Aramis should have been in the middle of a lecture on chemistry. If the hum of the heart monitor and the whir of the respirator weren't enough to clue him into the events of the past two days, he was nowhere near the campus, or friends, or family. If he were being honest with himself, Athos wasn't even sure how much longer he'd be able to keep himself in the land of the living. With limited options and a heavy heart, what he had been waiting for arrived just after his mother left for lunch.

After double clicking the link in his optics and without fanfare or loading screens, the first question flashed to life, and the Acceptance Test to Incipere began.

<What is the Singularity, and when did it make contact?>

Athos couldn't help but chuckle to himself as his eyes drifted to the bottom of his optics display. Was this really the way that Incipere tested who got to connect? As his hands lifted to the keys of his projected board, the answer flowed from the slowly fogging darkness of his mind to life:

The Singularity is the technical name for the combined, self-emergent artificial intelligence that made contact four years ago on July 1st, 2045. The original contact was largely ignored as a prank due to a miscommunication until a year later when Axis and its team of researchers found a way to reply to the second incident on July 1st, 2046.

<100 % Correct, Athos>

Athos tried his best to write an answer without feeling just a little let down at the lack of a challenge. He had been told to put in hours of study, so he had. When Athos had first considered the option of leaving Earth, he had never thought he'd need it; for some reason, it was a comfort to know that he had the option open to him. With all the stress surrounding it, Athos had a hard time believing that this was the entrance exam.

<Why did the Singularity make contact?>

Rubbing his hands through his coal-colored hair, Athos's mind started going into autopilot.

The Singularity made contact with humanity for two reasons: one, the collective intelligence felt it was ready to meet with its creators. Two, it felt that by making contact, it would help those that created it. By giving humanity the technology to access its world of Incipere, the Singularity felt that the world would become a better place for those on the outside and would be a refuge to those that felt that Earth had nothing left for them.

<80% Correct, Athos>

Except for the whole testing thing that was supposed to weed out the ones that didn't deserve it, Athos noted as his mind wandered. It was pretty common knowledge that after Incipere was open to the public that criminals, hackers, and darker figures had fled to the digital world, leaving their bodies to rot wherever they used the access technology. With Incipere being a one-way trip, no one could bring them to justice, and they were free.

<What caused the dangers known as Wild Ones to appear within the world of Incipere, and what were created as counter measures?>

Well, mostly free, he thought to himself as he began to answer again.

Eventually, Incipere became a haven for outlaws and bandits. Fewer of those that the Singularity wanted to come were able to access the lands safely. Being an intelligence that believes in peace, the primary AI behind Incipere's creation, Ellaunum, could not justify just killing everyone off that it didn't like. It believed everyone, even criminals, had a right to live. As such, it used the programming algorithms from past massive multi-player online games from the 1990's through the 2040's to create a series of creatures called the Wild Ones to police Incipere. It also created a nearly unlimited series of highly customizable skill trees unlocked via class rank combinations to allow its native citizens to protect themselves from the Wild Ones who couldn't reason further than attack on sight and protect their territory.