Elemental Soul (Book 1 of 'A Fantasy in Time')

Prologue: A Hopeful Start

Have you ever wondered what a world without War would be like?  A world where you could immerse yourself into countless simulations trying out every conceivable variation of seemingly endless worlds, just to see what would happen?

We thought we had such a world.  At the conclusion of WWIII, those of us that survived, felt that humanity had finally learned its lesson and would decide that War, Just . . . Wasn’t . . . Worth It.  So many things seemed to happen once the majority of the smoke and the radiation cleared from the lands.  Interestingly enough, it didn’t happen naturally.  A single newly born corporation of which no one could have planned for, seemed to suddenly have all the answers.  Microbial concoctions that ate up nuclear wastelands, leaving behind clean air and nutrient rich soil, Medical advancements that discovered a way of targeting and eliminating several of the more virulent forms of disease, and technological epiphanies that led directly to the first creation of our now widespread usage of Virtual reality.

All of this came to us in a time when we desperately needed solace from the fallout as billions of friends and family member’s lives were lost.  It gave us hope, and we ran with that hope.

My name is Scott . . . Scott Anderson.  I have, or rather had a few other names by which I was known once upon a time.  Like so many others that were born a few generations after the war, I was an avid user of the myriad of Virtual realities that had flooded the market.  Living out your wildest dreams, and fulfilling your deepest desires seemed to be the sales pitch that the majority of those gaming corporations hit you with.

Like so many others, I believed that lie.

But what would happen, if a single individual felt something was missing?  Something that could only in part, be described as an opposing element to the horrors of WWIII or the atrocities that humanity once committed in the name of religion and politics.  Empowered Compassion is the term.  Both the will and the cultivated ability to stand against those that would seek to force their own terrible desires upon others.  There is another term for those that allow such terrible things to happen.

Complacency is the word I’m looking for.  Violence and abuse within individual families still occurs, and technology can only do so much to bleed off the darker tendencies of human nature.  One could still watch the news reports of some husband that had severely beaten his wife in a jealous rage for suspected infidelity, or a mother who had been poisoning her child to fake an illness because she liked the attention it garnered her from commiserating friends and doctors.  There were even cases of children that ended up killing their parents simply because they restricted their time playing in Virtual Reality.

These kinds of actions need to be monitored and treated at the source. But how can that happen when most everyone seeks for solace from the Real world in the embrace of the Virtual one?

I had played Virtual reality games for many years from the time that my parents had bought me my first capsule at the age of 8, saying they felt that I was mature enough to play many of the games now on the market.  I reveled at the freedom granted to me as I played and progressed through the various age restricted games.  Soon, I turned 16 which was now considered the age of when individuals in Virtual reality could do anything.  18 and in some places up to 21 still held back individuals from doing certain things in real life, but it was decided that since Virtual reality was not real and entirely Voluntary, then the actions the players took would not be effectively restrained.

Certainly there were a majority of gaming sites that implemented their own in-game consequences for breaking their laws, but players still got away with things.

All of this came down to one simple truth.  Humanity was missing something.  Something that could break them out of this spiral of complacency and into the realization of true dreams and desires.