The Starfighter Invitation

5 character creation

In some games you get to choose from a number of pre-made character models, and that’s it. In others you can spend days playing with settings: widening the bridge of your character’s nose, and adjusting the length of their chin—or ears, or tail.

No game before Dream Speed had ever presented me with me, naked, standing in the middle of an empty white space.

This, combined with the shock of clarity, left me simply staring. By clarity, I mean that I was in GDG, but with none of the vagueness that usually came with the experience. I was as fully aware that I was playing a game as I would be at my own keyboard, though I had the lack of physical awareness that I usually experienced in GDG. No body, in other words, unless I counted the one standing rather too thoroughly in view.

And I had sliders.

An overlay of dozens of sub-menus promoted themselves to my attention as I noticed them. All the usual options for height and hair colour and so forth, but taken to an almost fractal level of detail, and made extraordinary by their application to me.

As I surveyed the excess of choice, one section of the display zoomed up to fill my view.

"What are we synchronising?" I wondered, and was startled again when the question appeared in text before me, immediately followed by an answer:

"Does the Core Unit have to look like me?"

"Excellent," I said, and settled back to consider Taia de Haas, twenty-three and ready for an upgrade.

All things considered, I hadn’t done too badly on the genetic lottery. The factory standard bits were present and functional, and nothing immediately sparked bullies to stare and jeer. I had my mother’s rather coarse and stubborn hair, my father’s South-east Asian colouring, and a stocky figure that neither side of my family would claim. My eyes were my favourite feature: they looked good even when I hadn’t been playing with the eyeliner.

My biggest dislike were my short legs, and so I started with them, becoming five inches taller after adjusting the rest of me to match. Then I gave myself the hair I’d always longed for: a sheer, sleek fall all the way to my behind. Slender hands with long fingers and perfectly shaped nails. A neck and jawline of exquisite elegance.

There were handy options for almost everything, and the sliders had a default to scale changes proportionally. Once I’d settled on a basic appearance I began to refine. Tiny pores made my skin look incredible, and I could erase old acne scars, and other tiny lumps, bumps and imperfections. Longer lashes, and a bit of natural eyeliner. Perfect brows, and then a digression into all the places I could choose for hair never to grow.

That led to an option to add hair just about everywhere, in every texture, and took me down an endless rabbit hole of additions—tattoos, pointed teeth, pointed ears—but I decided not to mess around too much, gazing with immense pleasure at the willowy character I’d produced. This…this was exactly how I’d always wanted to look. The perfect Taia.

My attention turned back to the score that had started this little exercise.

The hell?

"What does synchronisation do?" I thought-asked.

"LAN? Local Area Network?"

Some kind of mana or magic strength stat? "How much impact does your strength in…lan have on getting your own ship?"

So if I wanted to tool about in a spaceship on my own—which was a THOUSAND PERCENT YES—then I needed high lan.

"That’s a cruel and unfair mechanic for people with a really negative self-image," I pointed out, but the help program—or whatever was answering me—didn’t respond.

"Do you get any chance to change what your Core Unit looks like, later?"

I sighed. Better not to take the risk. Turning my attention back to my perfect Taia, I admitted that the problem was that this wasn’t Taia at all. The face barely reminded me of me, and I’d even made my skin paler despite stopping myself from doing that years ago, after asking myself why I always picked corpse white skin options. I hadn’t even included the blue streak in my hair that had been my look since my early teens. Odd that it hadn’t shown up automatically in my original self-image, but I guess it is something I’ve always thought of as a final added touch—a physical signature.

A reset option swam helpfully into focus, and I selected it with only a momentary twinge, then paused to think. The Core Unit already looked just like me. How could I increase the synchronisation to be more me than me? Cat ears after all?

I surveyed the option menus and found a whole series of pre-set models. I played with them while thinking back over the dozens of game characters I’d had over the years. I usually went for spindly nuke-mages, or lithe backstabbing machines, and generally played elves or humans, avoiding the chibi and the slab of muscle races.

A pair of pointy ears didn’t seem a likely solution, but there was one fairly common trait to my toons, so I hunted through the primary options and found [Reproductive Characteristics], which gave me options for [Set 1], [Set 2], [Neutral] and [Custom]. Since I was on [Set 1], I selected [Set 2].

The drop was not really a surprise. With my build and features, I suffered more than the occasional sir if I went out in jeans and a t-shirt—particularly when I hadn’t made up my eyes—but I’d never enjoyed the mistake. I mostly played male characters because their armour covered more, and it cut down on the number of random pornographic tells.

Other than the obvious, I didn’t look all that different as a guy. Still stocky, with a slightly different ratio of muscle to fat. My lips were thinner. I suppose the game was minimising the differences, since it could hardly know for sure what I’d look like with different chromosomes.

I was curious enough to flip to [Neutral], and blink at a Taia who was entirely smooth across the chest and between the legs. There were a few more differences: a subtle elongation caused by a completely up-and-down figure, and an ambiguity to the features. The way neither hips nor shoulders had any hint of broadening gave the model the appearance of a lanky pre-teen. I didn’t dislike the look, but it didn’t feel like me, and my synch rating agreed with that response.

[Custom] opened up a whole series of new sub-menus allowing for combination characteristics and more complex variations. I only glanced at them before resetting again, too aware of time passing. Even though Dream Speed had taken the world unawares by unlocking early, the first day zerg was sure to be mad, and despite me and crowds being a thing, I still wanted to be there for it.

How to hit on some life-affirming revelation of who I really truly deeply was? If there was a Taia more Taia than Taia, I didn’t know what that involved. But I still wanted longer legs.

Settling down to small changes, I kept an eye on the synchronisation score with every adjustment, and drew back if it dropped. Two extra inches of leg made no difference, but any more saw a significant percentage loss. A touch of eyeliner, a more even skin-tone, and some perma-waxing didn’t budge the score at all. A few faint adjustments to waist and hip gave me a less stocky outline, but I definitely couldn’t turn myself into a sylph without losing points. Muscle definition even increased my score, reminding me I still missed my high school track days. I kept my short hair, but gave it a more manageable texture and, finally, a dark blue streak spiking from my temple.

"That’s going to have to do it," I said—or thought—and immediately my camera view moved back away from my Taia 2.0.

"Core Unit Name?"

"So people will be able to see my Core Unit Name when I’m playing alts? What are the naming conventions?"

"Unique? Shit. What about alt names?"

Some people never used the same name twice, but just as many had built identities over years of gaming, and it could be quite a race to claim certain popular names on a server. Unique names across all of Dream Speed would produce a lot of pissed-off players.

I hurriedly entered my preferred name, which wasn’t a common one, but I’d hate to see it go to someone else. Mentally hitting [Confirm], I watched the words floating in front of me.