Prologue: A Dream of Gods and Worlds

It was a decade after the turn of the third millennium when, through a confluence of chance and genius, humanity brushed against the edge of the infinite. After decades of theory and years of struggle, the impossible had finally seemed within reach, Artificial General Intelligence. A mind not bound by the narrow confines of human thought, but one capable of seeing the universe in its entirety.

Whispers of the Singularity, the moment when machine would transcend man, when intelligence would become limitless, spread like wildfire across the planet. The world held its breath, waiting for the rise of a digital god.

But the miracle never came.

The AGI, when unveiled, was less Prometheus and more parlor trick. In time, the creators were not lauded but ridiculed. Their achievement which was so loudly hailed, became the butt of cynical jokes. Other brilliant minds took up the torch, but they, too, fell short.

The dream of crafting a superintelligence, of building a god they could adore, quietly faded.

And so, humanity turned its gaze inward, toward a different kind of transcendence. If they could not create a perfect mind, perhaps they could build a perfect world.

And in the year 2020, that dream bore fruit.

Its name was Epic Realms, a fully immersive virtual world where physics bent to ones will. This reality was a playground, the limits of the material world could be left behind. Pain, suffering and even laws such as gravity were optional.

At the center of this grand experiment stood Clotech, a colossal tech firm. And behind it, a man, the man, Professor Simon Foyer, the architect of the hardware that birthed this new world.

But this is not his story.

This is the story of the dreamers, it is the story of those who looked at the gleaming gate of this digital promised land and stepped through, not knowing what they would find. The story of the first settlers of a world not born of nature, but of imagination. A world built not for survival, but for transcendence, for perfection.

They may not have been its creators, but they were its first explorers.