What? XD I somehow feel let down, especially the way the last chapter ended. Argh, oh well. I'm sure they worked things out between themselves, though I would have loved to have seen how it went down. :P

That was a lot of gifts Lee got. At least he doesn't have to work about much for a while. The planet is certainly well off, though. So many interesting things. Though, why don't they care much for domesticating their food sources? I know it cuts out the fun of hunting, but what if you want a pet cow? Or pet chicken? I'm pretty sure people still do that today. xD

And aww! Karen and Lee are so in love... well, they're certainly starting to become attached. I wonder how that will work out for them. Hmm.

A very good chapter. I had no problems with it. :)

Velvet.

O:! This is certainly going to get interesting. XD

I will admit I wasn't much interested in the conversations with all the people coming up to Lee. I did read them, but I didn't find them quite as interesting as when Lee was talking to Eli, or at the very beginning, before people started getting up.

It was great to learn about all these people and their professions, but that's a LOT of people. If anything, I'm not going to remember half of them, except maybe Elka. And then, can it be certain that all mentioned will reappear again in the rest of the story?

Really, I just think it was the fact that it was a lot of people all at once... way too hard to keep up with. I figure if a familiar name does pop up again, I can just come back to this chapter for reference.

Overall, good. Excellent cliffhanger. Loved that bit most of all. ;)

Velvet.

Hah! Loved it. I see that you've been injecting a lot of personality in these past two chapters and I rather like it. I actually think it was better that you split the first chapter down, so that it's almost a progression when reading.

I do realize that some of the characters are going to have as many prominent roles in the story as Lee, or Scott, or Karen, but it would help if you still wrote them as if they were main characters. A stereotype is great for a passer-by character, one who barely has a line in the story, but it's hard to perceive Lee's character when he's talking to Pepe. It's kind of like trying to get an echo off of insulators. 2D characters absorb great personality and give you nothing in return.

["He specifically asked me. Says he admires your work,"] I too wonder what work. Besides the fact that Lee is apparently pretty important in changing the lives of others. :/

Also, that sentence ended on a comma. I think you were going for a period.

Great chapter, again, I loved it. Very funny.

Velvet.

Aww, how cute. Does Lee have a girlfriend now? xD And I guess it is true that everyone knows each other on Kentucky. At the same time that it is convenient, it is also a little creepy, haha! I mean, where do they store all that information about that person? Do they ever forget about someone? o: Actually, that's a really good question. *Is* anyone ever forgotten?

I like the idea of the books. They're pretty sweet. Kind of like being God-you know, omniscient. I was starting to think there could be disadvantages to that, but then I remembered how safe Kentucky is. Hmm. But they do work with the phoning system, right? What if Lee wanted to contact his dad, on the war planet? And saw him getting attacked or something? o_o Would he be able to do anything? o:

Well, certainly very entertaining chapter. I liked the length of this one, :P It was perfect!

Velvet.

The only problem I had with this chapter was the last line. It didn't give me that sense of closure that one usually expects. Like, there could have been something more that was said or done before the chapter ended. Kind of like in those criminal investigation interviews they have on TV, where they only give you a clip of the interview and cut it off in some random place. You kind of always wished that they had allowed the interview to get to some cliffhanger moment, or even end, so you get a sense of closure.

I dunno. That's as close as I can describe it. Otherwise, I still liked it. :)

Velvet.

D'aw. This is a neat story so far, How long are you planning of going with it? It seems to me like you could go on to nearly infinity without running out of things to explore in this setting. Not that I mind a good ongoing read.

I loved the emotion you put in this. I felt everything and it was really sad at the part with shannon. It also felt like I was there with all the detailed descriptions.

I also liked the whole chapter altogether with the conversations between him and his best friend. This chapter was very interesting with all the bits and pieces of info. It makes me wonder just by reading it...

Opening: It does draw you in, perfectly, and from the start I had the sense of

the dreamlike, but waking state. I couldn't put my finger on it but even if I hadn't read the prologue I would have had guessed Lee wasn't asleep, which leads very well onto the understanding he is dead.

He definitely needed the security of knowing his family were OK and he'd meet them later.

I didn't know what a chifforobe is , but it doesn't matter because it's very well described. At this point I'm realising you are describing things through Lee's five senses and it becomes tangible to him. So from here we know this environment

where the story is going to take place.

Now we come to Lee's delight that he has a younger body again, and I honestly can share that with him,especially as he walks under the the Spring trees in the warm sunshine.

We get hit by the big idea: God created a not one but multiple VRs and this is a copy of that original template. Now that is a huge concept, and it's neatly side stepped for the sake of the story at this point. Lee accepts it as he does the physics

underlying the the system. I'm wondering if Scott kept his explanation deliberately Newtonian, because I'm pretty sure this reality couldn't be built out of the same kind of math that could be used for tracking snookerball- like molecules. It's have to be Quantum based, or the next level on. Currently Q.P. finds difficulty in predicting

how energy-matter will behave, and it would have an even harder time retrospectively figuring out where it 'came from and what it had done.' Now that's

in inverted commas because I suspect the model you are developing is a variant of the Holographic Universe Theory.

But as a reader , I just want to accept I can walk in a new body in a fresh landscape.

I wonder if it always going to be spring? Are the poeple going to be so 'nice' all the time. That would probably start to annoy me after a week or two . But that's me.

Now we get to the robots. Hey , I'm a blue collar worker ! One of the great joys of working outdoors is you feel a part of the 'creation' around you -If you have the eyes to see it , the senses to connect with it . And it is so beautiful, but transient , everything is transient , you can watch cloud systems and see an persistent order and arising from the chaos and , you don't need to know the math but you can sense. You don't need to know Fibonachi to see it , it's there, as well as all the other patterns. 'Heaven' can be putting your tools away after shovelling up broken concrete all day under a pink winter sky. So I fell a little left out of this 'heaven' and I wouldn't want to be a robot.

I think some readers might cry when they get to the bit about the kid who arrives deeply traumatised because of what happened in his previous life.

Now, I suspect this world isn't going to remain perfect and all kinds of 'entropy' are already in the system and this little near perfect world is going to become a conflict zone similar to the template on which it was based. That will make the more interesting read .

Incredible, prodigious feat of your imagination, and you have given yourself the opportunity to synthezise many different areas of knowledge into a coherence.

I would certainly keep on reading this.

Innit.:)

Okay, besides how long this chapter was, what you have is a very incredible story. But really! Really, really, really! If there are 80 chapters to follow, do you think, maybe you could shorten them? :D? Hehe, I don't have retinas of steel, but reading this was definitely worth the weariness on my eyeballs.

Seriously, I don't have words to express how much I love your world building. It is amazing, stupendous, fantastic! Your idea, the way you've cultivated this singular idea of virtual reality into something this... fantastic-it really blows my mind.

Haha, I guess I'm just more impressed by the fact that you asked yourself certain questions, and then chose to wrote a story in order to answer them.

Your take on God, too. Wow. That was really awesome.

And the dialogue! Most impressive. You know, I thought, in retrospect, listening to Scott tell Lee about the worlds and all these things would be like getting an info-dump, but it wasn't at all. You handled that part really well.

The description, too. Hah, all of it was just great.

There were a few mistakes (if I went to look for them I'd have to shoot myself XD), but that's to be expected of a piece this long.

Besides making the chapters short, there is nothing I have in ways of concrit. You've blown me away with this story's grandiose-ness in terms of plot and world building.

Oh, and the bots! Bots! :D Haha, love robots. Very nice work, overall.

Oh wait! The characters! Unless this is all part of your grand master plan, I didn't feel very connected to any of them. Perhaps that's just because nothing really happened in terms of conflicts or you know, connections being established.

Or maybe it's just the fact that everyone gets along with each other well. I don't know. I just didn't feel connected to any of them. The concept of them coming back young and healthy is awesome and really cool, but it doesn't leave room for flaws and limitations.

I guess what really distances me from the characters is their near perfectness. It makes them seem a bit, fake? Surreal? I don't know the word. Perhaps it will take getting used to, or hopefully, personalities will begin to emerge in later chapters.

Either way, this is, again, an awesome story! Thanks for getting me in on it. :D

Velvet (Fang)

OK very quick review on this chapter. It is 0035 in the Uk . Big one to follow tomorrow on Chapter 2.

This is like going back to school!:) I actually like learning things but I really need to think about stuff this complex and sleep on it.

I have thought myself, this is probably 'God's' VR . And very beautifully put together it is, too.

I'm not religious but it's a good way to make sense of religious beliefs though in contemporary models and frames of reference. - Wine into new wine-skins, the Christian belief system evolves and finds new structures.

As to us creating out own, Necromancer-style realities with infinite space, yes I guess it will happen, but I'd hate to get the low pixel, early version .

Bishop Berkley is the guy you might want to read up on if religion comes into it. Because if there is a creator and this is in His/Her mind, then the VR world we will create will also be in that mind , a shell within a shell. Also some suggest time in 'Godmind' happens in the same instant, all at once and we mortals only experience it as if were decoding a long linear string of 'code' a bit at a time. Bit like Edgar Mitchell's holographic model of universe reduced to four comprehensible dimensions.

Brain up to speed now , will make proper connections when I wake up in the morning.

Hope this gibbering makes sense.