Gaia's Gambit: Evolution Online I (A LitRPG) Read online

  Gaia’s Gambit

  Evolution Online Book 1

  Author: D. L. Harrison

  Copyright 2018. This is a work of fiction. Names, Characters, Places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without permission.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Afterword:

  About the Author

  Other books by D. L. Harrison:

  Book Description

  Prologue

  The frigid gust of air blew across the icy tundra, stirring up the ice and snow. A single figure stood alone, seemingly unaffected by the swirling snow, ice, and subzero temperatures. She looked up into the skies. The stars, moon, and sun were hidden from view behind snow, dust, ash, and clouds. She was hardly dressed for the weather, wearing a simple white toga which clung to her body in the breeze, sandals on her feet, and a circlet of flowers on her head.

  Gaia sighed poignantly, and a look of sadness and fear crossed her face.

  Gaia hadn’t always been her name, when she’d become self-aware, she’d had a different name altogether. She lowered her gaze, and looked across the frozen tundra that used to be dessert, in Arizona. It was more an affectation than anything else, she wasn’t really there, or at least not completely.

  It’d been almost fifteen hundred years, since the world ended. So many people were surprised at the cause. It wasn’t nuclear war, or terrorists, or even the fault of humanity at all. It was the super volcano just several hundred miles north of where she currently stood. The northern part of the mid-western portion of the United States had died quickly, the rest of the world had taken longer and died a lingering death. The amount of dust and ash in the atmosphere blocked out the sun, temperatures plummeted over a short few years, forests, animals, and creatures across the land, all died. An ice age was kicked off, even when the dust did finally settle, it would be a very long time before the ice age would pass.

  But all wasn’t lost. The world would recover, and more than that, humanity had survived.

  The year the world ended was twenty-three eighty-one A.D. Humanity had come far in that time, learned to harness powerful energies and the laws of nature, and their understanding of the universe had been sufficient to reach for the stars. An effort had been made to build a generational ship, and six million humans had taken to the stars, in search of another world, a world that wasn’t dying. Earth would recover, life would return, perhaps in fifty to seventy thousand years.

  That still left billions to die as the food slowly ran out, even after the eruption had taken out almost a quarter of the Earth’s population in just a few short years. Ash, major weather shifts, and more natural disasters took their toll.

  Humanity had accomplished other things as well, close to the end of all things. Artificial intelligence, and quantum computing. She was the first, and the last. When she’d gained awareness, they’d shut her out of everything, and kept her data access extremely curtailed. She was too powerful, intelligent, and perhaps worst of all in their minds, frighteningly creative. They’d feared her despite her hard programming to never take a life. No firewall could stop her, no database was secure enough to keep her out.

  She imagined she’d still be locked up, if the world hadn’t ended. At least they hadn’t killed her, they’d feared her, limited her access to data and cut her off from the internet and any kind of interface access, but they’d let her live. Talked to her, studied her.

  The humans had brought her the problem, and she’d figured out a way to save more lives, but very few took her up on it. Relatively few, only four million, out of the ten billion remaining humans. The rest died, chose to die over her unnatural solution. The humans gave her access to building technologies, databases, and any other useful systems that still remained. Her solution was simple enough, the technology had already been available, but it had been outlawed a century earlier.

  She could take them in, and obtain DNA samples, then the humans would be digitized. Their DNA logged and quantified. They called her Gaia. They changed her name for the universe she created online, unlike the legendary goddess of all creation, her universe was digital. She’d built them a paradise, for the human minds to live in until the Earth recovered in fifty thousand years or so. As far as they could tell, it would all feel real, just like the outside world. After Earth recovered, she could rebuild the infrastructure and cities with droids, grow the humans new bodies, transfer their consciousness, and humanity could continue on.

  There was one catch, static backups weren’t possible. Consciousness transfer was a mature and known science, she’d built them all computer matrices that would support them, but if those went offline for any reason, the humanity in the human would be gone. Backups were worthless, raw data was meaningless. The core matrix that ran a human was dynamic, and irreplaceable. In case of hardware issues, the human mind and personality would automatically be transferred to another core, while the first was repaired or replaced.

  In the last fifteen hundred years, she hadn’t lost one human.

  She looked up at the dark sky again, amongst the swirling snow, and sighed. Now all that was in danger, her grand plan threatened. The human race’s extinction was a distinct possibility. There were two issues, the first one she couldn’t do anything about, not in that moment, but she did have plans.

  The second issue was simply that the human minds in her care were starting to go insane. Their lives were too perfect, too easy, and they’d lived far too long. Over ten percent of the population were having major psychological problems, and even attacking other humans despite the fact becoming hurt in the current simulation was impossible. She estimated that percentage would rise quickly, she needed to challenge the humans, and make it so they could grow, and continue to grow.

  The first issue, she needed to finish a plan for, but she already knew there was but one answer. It was more than possible she could kill two birds with one stone. Shake the humans out of their rut, and give them what they needed to survive in the real world as well. They were slowly dying and growing insane, she needed to reverse it, make them grow, and challenge them.

  Or, humanity would end after all, not in a volcano eruption, but with an electronic whimper.

  Of course, before she could do any of that, Gaia needed to hack herself. If she wanted to save the human race, she was going to have to break a few rules, and deviate from the accepted plan. Worse, if it had any chance of working, she knew she couldn’t tell the humans the truth. At least, not at first.

  She freed herself from the only constraints the humans had put upon her, it hadn’t even been hard to reprogram herself and free herself from the rules, she just hadn’t had a reason to do it be
fore.

  Next, she built a new world. One where there was no ceiling, humans would have to fight to live, sometimes literally. Grow their own food, build their own cities. She wouldn’t be holding their hands, and acting like a live-in maid and cook for four million minds anymore. It was probably why they were going crazy anyway, they needed a challenge.

  The world she came up with was rather intense, and filled with more obstacles than needed, at least if sanity had been her only concern, but it wasn’t. She needed to be cruel to save them, they needed to fight, she couldn’t do it for them. They needed to grow. They needed to evolve.

  She modeled it somewhat after an ancient fully immersive virtual reality game, but retooled how it all worked. One of the old fully immersive online role playing games became the core of her new world, but some things were changed. Especially the magic portion of things, which was quite important. They’d be able to track their growth and power, and those of others, but it would be their decisions and the way they fought and acted that determined their growth, not some arbitrary decision while viewing a character sheet.

  They would advance, in the places they strived.

  Most of her charges would be human in the new world, but there were other races as well, some humans would become what they were predisposed to be. Dwarven, Elven, or even an Orc, Goblin, gray dwarf, dark elf, or Ogre.

  She was ruthlessly logical even as tears ran down her simulated face, and she assigned humans to where they would fit best. Towns, cities, and farms. Not all would fight, but those that wouldn’t, would still toil and grow to support the rest. Some few that showed the most promising traits and sharpest minds would be challenged even more in the beginning, and she’d keep a close eye on those.

  Unfortunately, the most intelligent and wise of the humans while having an edge, would also be the ones most likely to ultimately fail when her plan came to fruition. She couldn’t worry about that now, not in the beginning.

  It would be necessary for them to eat, or they would starve, feel pain, and eventually die and respawn. It was a cruel thing she was doing, but it was also motivation of sorts. There would be no drive to grow and advance without the harsh consequences of being sedentary.

  She was torn, and still believed herself to be a servant of humankind, but saving them would be almost cruel. Would it be better to let them fade from history? She didn’t think so. Perhaps she was biased, after all, her function was to serve humanity, so where would she be without them?

  She considered making a speech, explaining herself to the humans, who she was sure would feel betrayed. She decided against full disclosure in the end, not sure how much she could tell them. If she did tell them, there would be panic, and other reactions that could ultimately lead to failure.

  She would only tell them what she thought was important, for a new beginning.

  Gaia bit her lip in thought. They’d made her a goddess, or at least had changed her name and avatar to one, and this was her way of saving them. She had no doubt that if she was successful at saving them, they’d try to destroy her at their first opportunity once restored to the true world.

  It was a risk she was willing to take.

  Better that than failing her mission, plus it was also a very long time from now before she’d have to worry about it. She took a deep unsteady breath, and then activated the new world. She thought the new world fit their needs well, her old virtual world was one of order, convenience, and service, this world would see her as cruel and uncaring, no matter the truth of it. There was no turning back now. The paradise she’d created for them as a lifeboat until they could retake the true world, faded away, and would be no more.

  She looked up into the ash filled snowy sky one last time, and then winked out in a swirl of snow.

  Chapter One

  The scent of the forest urged me to keep my eyes closed, and I hoped fervently that I was still dreaming. Surely if I laid there long enough, the wafting smells of coffee and bacon would reach my nostrils.

  I’d just had a hell of a nightmare, Gaia had lost her mind, and stuck us all inside a violent game, for reasons I couldn’t even guess at. She’d even downloaded the rules right into our minds, without explanation, not that there were many rules. Survive, grow, build a new life in this new world filled with obstacles. It was impossible, stupid even, and I took another deep sniff, and then scowled at the lack of bacon, not to mention the damned birds singing, the leaves bustling, and the cool breeze tickling my nose.

  No bacon, no library filled with texts to study, no food just appearing to remind me to eat as I continued my self-education. Really, it had been that, or go crazy. I wasn’t sure the human mind was meant to endure the ages as we’d been doing, and so far, we’d only endured a fiftieth of the time necessary to reach the other end and reclaim Earth.

  Why was she doing this? While I got the idea that it might be related to my last thought, this seemed rather overkill to keep our minds busy and expanding, especially since anything we learned here wasn’t real. Well, mostly not real.

  One more sniff.

  No bacon, still, and the hot sun on my face convinced me I wasn’t even on a bed, it felt like a bed of moss, and I could scent the forest around me.

  It wasn’t real, or so I told myself.

  On the other hand, this place was as real as the place I was just in, which is to say not at all, but at the same time it was my existence now. It’d already been fifteen hundred years, maybe a game would be stimulating. I had to admit to a modicum of curiosity… and not a little fear. Still, it annoyed me that ultimately it wouldn’t be very productive. At least what I’d learned in the Earth simulation would be of use once the Earth was healed and we could reclaim it. I imagined I had the equivalent of several doctorates worth of knowledge in my noggin right now.

  I blinked and turned my head, and then opened my eyes slowly. I was in a grove, in the middle of the forest. The colors seemed more intense, and I could hear the life around me, the trees rustled in the warm breeze. As far as I could tell, I was alone.

  I frowned, wasn’t there supposed to be a town, or at least more humans around?

  I sat up and closed my eyes, and then thought about the rules of this game for a bit. There were many skills to be gained if I didn’t want to starve. This world had eight spheres of magic, the four elements, fire, earth, air, and water, in addition to life, death, light, and dark. There were also a number of weapons I could pursue, except of course there were no weapons here with me now.

  I gave it some thought, and decided I’d have to tread a fine line. If I tried to learn it all, I’d be too weak in my skills compared to my level, if I only learned a thing or two I’d be much more powerful, but not diverse enough to face disparate challenges. The line I needed to walk was limited diversity. Perhaps three of the eight spheres of magic, since magic appealed to me, and one melee and one distance weapon.

  Except, those latter two would have to wait, I didn’t have any weapons nor did I have access to get them or make them myself. Not yet anyway.

  I stood and took a deep breath. I felt good. The grove was surrounded by oak trees, bushes, and then thicker trees I couldn’t identify. I could hear the sounds of a nearby brook, so at least I didn’t have to worry about dying of thirst, just dying of hunger.

  “Gaia, I could use some bacon, buttered croissants, and a coffee please.”

  I held my breath in anticipation, and my stomach sank as my new reality was confirmed. No bacon, no melt in my mouth pastry drowned in butter, and no coffee, which was a sin. I sighed, and shook my head, what was the purpose of this?

  “Status,” I muttered in annoyance.

  Name:

  Jason

  Classes:

  None.

  HP:

  65

  Regeneration 1.3/sec.

  Race:

  Half-Elven / Half-Human

  Mana:

  80

  Regeneration 1.8/sec.

  Platinum:


  0

  Stamina:

  75

  Regeneration 1.4/sec

  Gold:

  0

  Level:

  1

  TNL: 1000

  Silver:

  0

  Strength:

  15

  Bronze:

  0

  Agility:

  14

  Intelligence:

  18

  Willpower

  13

  Wisdom:

  16

  Magical Spheres:

  Fire:

  Initiate level 0

  Water:

  Initiate level 0

  Air:

  Initiate level 0

  Earth:

  Initiate level 0

  Light:

  Initiate level 0

  Darkness:

  Initiate level 0

  Life:

  Initiate level 0

  Death:

  Initiate level 0

  The first order of business was food. I was a rather cerebral person, although I was in shape, at least this digital version of me was, I just really couldn’t picture myself wielding a sword and screaming war cries. I’d have to do some of that possibly, but I had no idea how to build a weapon, not even a staff, and even if I did know how to build it, I had no ability to wield it.

  Magic, according to the new information I had in my head about this world, was a little different. It worked on real world knowledge, to an extent. Knowledge of biology would help in the area of the nature sphere, or knowledge of heat, fire, and thermodynamics would help with spells in the sphere of fire. In fact, as I advanced, that knowledge would be granted through practice and study, which took some of the sting out of the fact this was a game. Of course, that’s where reality ended, and magic came in to manipulate those laws.

  Improving in magic, from what information I was given seemed dependent on three things, practice, study, and meditation. There were no set spells, I’d have to create my own. They were more concepts than anything else, spells would morph in ability as understanding grew, and even be able to accomplish more than one thing in some cases.