Join the new world

Part I

I woke up with the strangest feeling, which I identified as coming from the stretch receptors located in my stomach. When had I eaten though? Upon inquiring the person next to me, I found that awake or sleeping, all citizens of this world ate at midnight, or around that time. And they didn't eat at any other time. And here, I immediately thought of an Inventing Room, chewing gum, and someone turning into a blueberry.... I got up and walked outside of the shelter.

The day passed somewhat similar to the previous one, although I did notice that I didn't make as many logs as yesterday. I also noticed a most peculiar event after I exercise😛 a message from my PDA told me that I had "levelled up". I didn't notice anything different though, except for a "3" in the top left corner of my PDA instead of a "2". I presume that it started at "1", meaning I must've missed it going up yesterday.

Speaking of things I forget yesterday, I forgot to mention that I had received a message from "Immigration Canada"--what? I started in Canada, though; I had not immigrated from anywhere! Nevertheless, I was offered $15 Canadian dollars. I had replied back immediately, but I had heard nothing yet.

Well, up until this moment. For the PDA suddenly notified me of a message saying the $15 CAD was sent. Unbelieving, I opened my wallet, and lo and behold, there was an extra $15 CAD inside. I went to the marketplace and bought a few take-outs--but I wasn't hungry at all. Even though I had worked and exercised, I had no appetite. I began to think that what that person had told me, that everyone only eats at midnight, was true, however farfetched it was.

Regarding that little number in the corner of my PDA, it seemed to be quite important. I had seen a myriad of newspaper boxes, and I had wanted to create my own. However, my "level" needed to be eight, and I needed gold.

Gold?

So I went to the foreign exchange market--wait, no, it was actually called a "monetary market"; strange--and noticed that one gold coin cost about 30-35 dollars (I forget the exact amount). As well, I noticed many other currencies available to be exchanged, one to each country. It suddenly struck me that in the marketplace, no currency other than Canadian dollars was accepted. Hmm, I thought to myself, that's a pretty strong sense of nationalism--I now know that this was the case in all of the "countries" of this world; that they only accepted their own currency.

I had nothing else to do for the day, so I walked around. "Walked" was a relative term, since everything seemed to be only a couple seconds away, as I described yesterday. Also, even with 800 other people in the city...region, there always seemed to be no one around. I came to something similar to the monetary market, but it was something different. It was an exchange with gold coins and some currency whose sign was €...it looked oddly familiar. In a flash, I recognized it as the euro currency sign...but that was a currency in the world I had come from. The two worlds were so radically different, and yet they were connected by this one factor. Also, you could buy other things with the euro currency. The one item that caught my eye was the "Unlock all features" one. It was curious, for it seemed that there were many things that were not available to me in this world, as I was not "experienced" enough yet. I took a look at my PDA, which contained a "map" of all the things I had available, and the things I was restricted from.

I noticed that nearly nothing was available to me--only the things I had already done, those being working and training. I wasn't even allowed to "vote" until I was "level" 6...

So I realized that in order to do anything important in this world, I had to plough on through maybe a week or so of the monotony of working, exercising, and maybe the occasional exploration of the world. And now I realized why there were so many dead people on the shores of this place--they had given up, they had gotten bored, and slowly starved to death (although for some reason, they were somehow able to survive for about a month). But I resolved to push on, for I thought that there must be a purpose somewhere for me here.

Before I went to sleep, I forced myself to stay up till midnight. And sure enough, as the clock struck 12, I had the sudden urge to take out a meal from my backpack and eat it. I devoured it within a couple minutes.

And yet again, I found a shelter and spent the night inside it, envying the people who had houses--some had mansions!--for themselves.