Digimon Empire Chapter 1

Digimon Empire

Chapter 1

Michael was sifting through stacks of paper stacked precariously over the four desks his friends and him used for their project. His dark brown hair cut short and choppy, his usual style. He wore his usual ensemble of jeans and a button up short sleeve short over a solid colored t-shirt. His usual expression and tone was serious though he did try to be light hearted, especially around his friends. A small group of friends; coders, graphic animation designers, and then... Michael. While he wasn't as skilled as his friends he had the creative mind that had drawn them all together. These were some of the things Michael thought about whenever he'd start his morning work out routine. He was an aspiring amature boxer when he wasn't otherwise indisposed due to work or the project they were all working on. He felt that it helped him keep his mind sharp and focused which was something he needed since he was responsible for organizing their massive project. It had been two years since they'd started designing everything for their project and they only very recently started implementing their system. It started just a couple months ago when they began digging out their central base, an underground multi-level complex to house their massive project.

Michael admittedly relied most heavily on his best friend, Keith. Keith and his twin brother Kyle were both engineers who were both actively working towards their Master's degrees in engineering. Kyle was the better of the two but each had their strong points. Few people could distinguish between the two if they were standing side by side, but Michael could as could Amanda who was Keith's girlfriend. The duo stood at a sometimes staggering 6' 9" and had broad shoulders. They each sported natural bleach blonde hair and a chinstrap. The biggest difference between the two was around the stomach where Kyle tended to forgo more meals than Keith. Another distinguishing difference between the two was the Keith tended to dress more rigid than Kyle who preferred laid back style clothing for all occasions even wearing sweat pants to job interviews. Keith was also missing a chip out a tooth after Michael and him fell out of their treehouse as young teens. Keith spent most of his time tinkering with algorithms and complex equations that Michael couldn't wrap his mind around. Kyle was more focused on helping out with the general things that the team was going to need such as a workable toilet system and intra-networked computer systems.

Keith's girlfriend Amanda spent most of her free time designing 3D models of different elements for their project. She'd spent several months working on rocks alone but she'd complained quite a bit about how boring they were and kept getting sidetracked making leaves, barks, and sticks of varying sizes. She was especially gifted at pulling all of these elements together into forests and wooded areas. Her brother Tony on the other hand was better with grasses, plains, and hilly regions and spent a large portion of his time toying with various wind effects on both his elements and his sisters creations.

Dj and Mark were friends from a different flock than Michael and the others. They had grown up in project homes on the rougher side of town but Tony had made friends with the pair when they'd joined the local graphic design college. They were 3D animators but lacked the skill to compete with Amanda and Tony so they spent a large portion of their time cloning and recoloring the elements made by the others. Dj found he was especially good at autumnal colors and could give Amanda's forests a gorgeous autumn foliage.

Tori and Calvin were friends of Kyle and the pair had been dating for longer than anyone could remember. Even as small children they were inseparable. These days they sported a cultured gothic style but despite appearances they were two of the best coders in the entire region. Tori worked for a high scale private security firm and spent most of her working hours tracking threats to the firewalls for her employer. Calvin on the other hand worked for new project development for Google and had personally done the bulk of the coding for the newest style of Google+ not to mention the countless smaller security updates he'd assisted with for Gmail. When the two weren't working they were home on their laptops staring and massive classes of script as they rewrote and revised the various elements in code that their graphic animator counterparts created. Tori would often make snide jokes about how much coding does it take to make a rock, in place of the commonly used phrase 'how many people does it take to screw in a lightbulb. She'd use this phrase anytime she felt people were spending too much time overlapping work which she felt was wasting time. Unfortunately she felt this occurrence was happening daily so it was something they heard quite often. Calvin would simply smile at her sweetly and then explain to the team how it would be more efficient to do things differently to provide less overlap.

When the time came to start breaking ground for the base where they would create the Digital world however this was little talk or thought of overlapping, coding, graphic designs, 3D models, or how much coding it takes to make a rock. Everyone rolled up their sleeves and set in for the long haul. Gathering the necessary tools seemed simple at first but not everyone could do everything and it took some coordination to make it happen in the end. Finally Amanda stepped up and spent more time designating tasks than digging just to help the process move along. The digging itself was arduous and time consuming. Starting with a basic mine dig out; remove dirt, enforce with boards, encase with tin sheeting, and then expanding until room size sections were dug out. The work started with just flashlights and electric lamps until the first few rooms were done. Then Michael and Kyle worked out how to get fixed power underground. This task wasn't the easiest to carry out but during a storm induced power outage the duo connected into the city power grid. Next came water from a well that Mark's family business drilled out. The first room was the entry, the two adjacent rooms were for bunks and kitchen space. Over the course of two months the modest start turned into three complete levels going further underground. There was a general lounge room, two bathrooms with showers and a sauna in each for the guys and girls respectively, and the first kitchen was turned into a dining hall with a full larger kitchen later added down the hall. The second floor was accessed via ladder and was the work station floor. One large room with tables, desks, computers, and an array of monitors to make any menial work station look lacking and primitive. The third floor was comprised nearly entirely of server space, and food storage, and the end of the floor was were a large waste access room was made for toilet and trash disposal.

Now Michael was spending his time sifting through the stacks and stacks of pre-conceived materials and disbursing them to the appropriate work stations for everyone to work on. Most everyone else worked during the day but Michael was still in college and took his courses online which appropriated him enough free time to work on the project during most of the day. Tori was who funded most of the project as she'd inherited a small fortune from elderly family members who had passed and it took a lot of the relief away from financial strain regarding the servers especially. Kieth was studying to be an engineer and was busy tinkering on the third floor for a virtual reality pod. In hardly any time at all Kieth took his pod concept from paper into reality and Mark whose day job was working for a chemical engineering firm helped further this along with the necessary chemicals and compounds to add in a stasis like aspect to the pods. This design would allow the user to enter mentally into the component while they were put into a stasis like state of being.

The next six months were spent expanding the base further, adding additional servers, doing massive amounts of coding, animation, and concept design. After six solid months of work the team had finally created a world in their digital intranet that was roughly 1/24th the size of earth but it was a complete world. Varying continents, islands, and topographical features. Trees, grasses, and even rocks to sand were coded and designed individually. Every feature that we see as mundane in the world had to be designed and coded. Once this world was completed their was a lengthy process of backing up the world and saving it as this copy, untouched, on both the servers and external saving sources in the event that something catastrophic happened.

Then they finally began designing the inhabitants of this world they'd created. Digimon, there had been great debate over how the entire system would work but ultimately they agreed to pull aspects from all elements of the Digimon universe. The designing process and coding process took months more to complete with nearly a week of solid work per Digimon but it included all elements of the Digimon evolution hierarchy. In-Training, Rookie, Champion, Ultimate, Mega, Ultra and at that point the evolutionary level label varied pending on various elements such as affinity and life experiences of the Digimon. The Digimon creation process carried on steadily for two more years. Kyle, Ca;vin, and Tori revised, replaced, revised, replaced, and revised yet some more the overall personality algorithm of the Digimon. Never truly satisfied, they did their best to emulate their personalities being influenced by real life situations. No one left the project over all this time but they did add a couple more graphic design artists after Amanda started working for a popular gaming design firm and got a couple of her coworkers, Jen and Jamie, to join in on the project.

Almost four years after the project began Keith approached Michael and asked him to be the first to test the pod simulation. A simple test, he would enter the Digital world at 00:00:00 and he would stay in the world for 60 seconds and then ejected at Digital world time 00:00:01. Keith had been experimenting with a world speed enhancer. He intended to simulate time in an accelerated pace by tapping a download of information into the bulk of the human brain that was otherwise unused to avoid any damage done to the brain. The basic idea was that a day would pass in the Digital world in about a minute or so. Michael would be in a slower version of this at merely 2x speed. He would be in stasis in the pod for 30 seconds but 60 seconds should pass in the Digital world while he was there.

Michael agreed and the team went forward with preparations. It took three days but finally Michael climbed into the pod. As it slid shut the last thing he saw was the excitement and jealousy in the eyes of his friends. He felt himself drift off to sleep as his mask pumped him with the stasis gels. Then he felt his mind wake up. A rushing feeling around his mind, like when you dream you're falling and wake up with a start, and then with a slam he was laying there on the ground. He was naked and cold, standing he looked around, he was standing at the edge of a clearing. Trees swayed, wind blew, he could smell the crisp air, he could feel the grass between his toes. For a moment he doubted he was in the Digital world due to the level of detail and the subtle chirping of birds around him. This doubt was quickly subdued as he witnessed a Seadramon breach out of a pond he could see beyond the clearing. The Seadramon was a more basic minded Digimon, they were created to fill the role of a predatory eel. The Seadramon carries a classic sea serpent appearance and was designed as a natural constrictor, killing its prey by wrapping its long body around it until the prey suffocated. Seeing this his heart started racing. Then he began to count in his head, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5... ...58, 59, 60, 61, 62. Something was wrong, several minutes passed and he was still here.

Michael's mind was trapped in the Digital world.