"Not this again!"
John put the goggles on, and then a red beam hit his eyes. He felt nothing at first, then he felt as if someone pulled the plug. His mind froze, and he lost his feeling with the outside world.
The moment he felt normal again he found himself standing in a vast blank space. Everything around him was white in colour, pushing back a recent and unpleasant memory!
"What? Don't tell me you hate this colour!" Just as John was feeling panic, a human body appeared in front of him. It was a robot, a humanoid robot, with a metallic body and a face that John recognised.
"ED?" John took a long look at that robot, even circled around it a couple times, "amazing! You are real here!"
He tried to pass his fingers through ED's face, yet this time he hit something solid.
"Of course I'm real! This is the virtual space, the one you loved to call your own backyard! Ah ah, before I forget, I used to have this place look different than this, but for the record you were the one who insisted on making it blank white!"
"I did?!" John felt little surprise, before he started to grow a theory in his mind about this situation. 'I must have inherited a few things from John, at least this place held some sort of importance to him,' he thought to himself, while ED kept talking without pause, as usual!
"In this backyard of yours, you can do anything you want. This is your own space, where I will provide anything you ask for, as long as it matches your clearance level. About that, your clearance level is as low as just two. So if you want to have more fun in the future, you'll need to raise it, like for real raising it higher!"
"Raise it for what? What can I do here?" John's only experience with this place was related to bad memories, so he couldn't help but interrupt ED and ask.
"Like playing games," ED waved a hand, and a game console appeared. It was similar to how advanced game devices on Earth looked like, just a bit bigger, with lots of lights and showy stuff on its surface, "you loved to play all the time, wanna play now?"
"Forget about that," John didn't like how the previous owner of this body behaved, "give me something else, show me all the possibilities I can do here."
"Well… Basically, you can do anything, literally anything," ED didn't question John this time, waved a hand and that game console disappeared, before new stuff showed up.
This time it wasn't a single item, but lots of things. "You can train on your military career, learn and evolve your driving and fighting skills on my mecha, learn how to shoot using different weapons, even learn rare skills like medical and engineering skills!"
ED wasn't speaking without showcasing what it meant. When it mentioned learning how to drive and fight with mechas, an exact copy of John's mecha appeared.
When ED spoke about learning how to shoot using different weapons, a long rack of various weapons appeared. John even spotted big killing machines that he never saw or heard about before, not even in the wildest video games!
Everything appeared and then moved to a side until ED finished its speech. "So, in brief, I can have anything I want, learn anything I desire, and you'll help me do that?"
"That's what it takes, yes yes, that's why I'm here, to help you, but…"
"But what?"
"You never let me help you before, are you sure you are ok?" ED came closer to look John directly in the eye. John didn't flinch this time while giving the excuse he already adopted as his safe passport from any trouble:
"I had a head trauma," he paused when ED didn't flinch or move back, "I also had several brain scans, so I'll know what's wrong with me sooner or later."
"Ok, ok, I just want to say your condition seems a bit worse than what you expect," ED finally took a step back, letting John heave a sigh of relief, "you are like a totally different person, which isn't a good sign!"
"I entrust you to keep this between the two of us, ok?" John didn't need such information to leak, not from his personal AI.
"Clipped and deleted," ED pointed at his mouth in a way that made John smile despite not getting what really ED meant, "now, what shall we do? Do you want to play games?"
"Nope," John cracked his knuckles, "it's time to work, let's start with driving the mecha, shall we?"
"As you wish!"
John started a long session in training without realising it. ED gave him a variety of options, and John simply decided to start from the first lesson, from the very beginning.
John couldn't hide his excitement! He thought he would suffer to learn the basics. It never crossed his mind that everything he needed was easily accessible for him. On top of that, what he was doing here was quite confidential, no one could see or hear what he was doing as this was literally inside his mind!
Yet he didn't know that outsiders could judge based on something else. Even if no one could see what he was doing there, they could still track how many hours he spent in training! And John didn't realise he spent lots of hours while figuring out how to drive the mecha!
"Amazing! You finished the three major courses in learning how to drive, fly, and fight with mechas! That's quite unbelievable!"
"Hahaha, don't flatter me," John was the type to lose himself whenever he found a new toy, "I just wanted to get rid of such a burden once and for all!"
"Burden? You finished courses that you never finished in the past few years man! I begged you many times to go through them, even if just doing it the same way you did now!"
John was feeling some achievement by what he did, yet he paused when he heard what ED just said, "what do you mean by the way I did it?!"
"I mean you just went through all the courses, yes you tried everything a couple of times, but that doesn't make you an expert," ED casually said, "to me you are just surfing through these courses."
"You are wrong," John felt a little challenged.
"I'm not," ED wasn't speaking out of arrogance, but confidence, "the best you can do is to repeat what you learnt with one percent proficiency, which is quite good actually!"
"You are wrong," John got riled up, "and I'll prove you wrong! Let's do a test with the mecha, let's have a virtual battle!"
"A virtual battle? You don't have such clearance yet," ED laughed, as if he heard the most amusing joke ever, "to have such privilege, you'll need to rise one more rank."
"Then… How to raise my rank?" John paused, before sighing, "forget it, it'll take a long time to do so."
"That's true, as you will need to fulfill certain criteria, like how many training hours there are, how many training hours in the real world, your assessment record, your mission record, really tons of stuff!"
"That's a lot… Wait, there is a record for how many hours I spend here?!" John never knew this, "what's my standard record then?"
"Soldiers need standards to assess their training in the virtual world," ED paused, before adding, "time here passes at a different speed than outside. As you are level two, your speed ratio is just four to one, which means…"
"Four hours here equals one hour outside," John knew the general concept of what ED was talking about, "but doing this will put mind to great stress, how can soldiers handle this?"
The general concept of accelerating time was known on Earth, of course in a theoretical manner. The main drawback of this theory was the mental pressure one would suffer if he succumbed to a time ratio higher than normal!
"I beg your pardon, what pressure?!!" ED looked confused, "there is zero mental exhaustion or pressure of any sort over soldiers training here, not even when you are at the highest level, a paragon level!"
"P… Paragon?!!! Are there Paragons here?!!!" As if he saw a ghost, John's body trembled the moment he heard this word. He knew where he heard this unique word before, in that bad experience he lived through, the one he considered as a mixture of dreams and hallucinations at best guess!
"Yes, we have Paragons in our world, not widely known information, so keep it secret or else you'll get into trouble!" ED honestly advised John, trying to make him forget about this. And yet ED didn't know he sparked tons of interest and doubt into John, as he realised just now that Paragons weren't known to many, actually known only to a selective few of people.
"Hey hey, I know that look of yours, that means trouble," ED looked panicked when John didn't say anything, "you won't be the only one to get into trouble, ED will also face lots of trouble, perhaps even… They'll kill me!"
"..." This time, John could tell ED was genuinely terrified, "Don't worry my friend, I will keep your secret safe, clipped and zipped," John said it the same way ED did before, with a slow and heavy pat on ED's shoulder.
'I finally found a thing to use to push you to do what I need,' John was celebrating something else inside his mind. He knew ED was restricted, but it seemed he could now ask for a few favours from time to time, to break such restrictions without no one knowing about it.
"Now, shall we start world lessons?" John turned to look at a side where there was a comfy red sofa, "let's start learning about this world from A to Z!"