The first thing Sam registered was cold.
Icy tendrils of water lapped at his feet. The sensation crept up from his soles, past his ankles, bringing with it an undeniable, intrusive awareness of wetness, of sand, of disorientation. It was cold, far colder than it should've been. Not just physically—but viscerally wrong.
His eyes blinked open to a glaring sun perched high above a horizon of endless blue. Seagulls wheeled overhead, their cries distant and distorted. The sky was too vivid, too clean. Sam's mouth was dry as he pushed his torso up with trembling arms, coughing salt from his throat, breath heaving.
That was when it hit him.
Something was off. Very off.
His body didn't move like it should.
He looked down—and froze.
The first thing he noticed was the full, unmistakable swell of breasts resting on his chest—large, round, and very much unclothed.
"...What the fu—"
Shock turned his—or rather her—stomach into a knot. Her voice was higher now, lighter, strange and unfamiliar in her own ears. Her hands flew to her chest instinctively. The sensation was real. Her skin was soft, her body was alien. Panic surged in her throat. But before she could spiral, she caught sight of something that drove a spike of realization through the chaos:
A small, triangular object embedded just beneath the skin of her left wrist.
Glowing faintly blue. Familiar. Too familiar.
She stared at it, heart pounding, as a gentle, pulsing vibration traveled up her arm. Sam knew this shape. This glow. This implant.
"No way," she muttered, taking an instinctive step back, as if the sight could be undone by movement. "This… This isn't possible."
Eyes wide as she scanned her surroundings. The glistening beach. The palm trees swaying in the wind. Distant mountains. A parasaur moving slowly in the distance.
"Oh no way—"
Sam had seen this place thousands of times before, on her monitor, from her old, familiar desk chair. Only now she wasn't holding a mouse and keyboard. Now, the grainy textures were gone, replaced with impossibly real detail. She could feel the sand in her toes. Smell the salt on the wind. Her throat was dry, her lips cracked.
This was The Island.
From Ark: Survival Ascended.
And she was here.
In the game.
In someone else's body.
Naked.
Exposed.
"…I'm dreaming," she muttered, trying to sound convincing even to herself. "This is just a dream. Weird lucid dream. Right?"
But everything—everything—said otherwise.
The beach. The sky. The trees. The creature in the distance. The damned implant.
She had played Ark: Survival Ascended for hundreds of hours. Spent thousands in Evolved. She knew this island better than some neighborhoods in real life.
And now she was here.
Somehow.
Some impossible how.
As she tried to process it all, something broke through the haze.
A sound.
Low, guttural. A kind of barking chirp.
Sam froze.
To someone unfamiliar, it might have sounded like an exotic birdcall. But she wasn't unfamiliar.
She was a Jurassic Park fan, had rewatched the movies more times than she could count—and more importantly, she had died to that exact sound hundreds of times in-game.
It was a raptor.
"Because of course," she breathed, already turning. "Why wouldn't a raptor spawn in a supposedly 'safe' zone?"
She tried to run, sand sucking at her feet—but it was too late.
Pain blossomed along her back, white-hot and savage. She hit the ground face-first, her mouth filling with grit. Claws tore into her spine, a snarl just behind her ear, and before she could even scream—
Darkness.
===============================================================
"Survivor death detected."
"Resurrection protocol initiating…"
"Reconstructing neural pathways… Biometric sync complete."
"Rebooting consciousness at default respawn point."
===============================================================
She gasped awake, lungs snapping into motion as her face broke the water's surface.
Sam flailed wildly, slapping waves until she got footing under her and stumbled forward onto the shore.
She coughed, spat seawater, and fell to her knees.
Alive.
Again.
The sky looked identical. The sun hadn't moved. As if no time had passed.
Had she just died? For real?
She looked at her body. No wounds. No blood. The same strange, unfamiliar shape. Still the same woman. Still naked.
It hadn't been a hallucination.
And yet here she was. Breathing. Moving. Whole.
Sam turned around and froze.
The raptor—the raptor—was there, but now its corpse was crumpled beneath a slow-moving carbonemys. The giant turtle lumbered forward through the surf, triumphant. The predator that killed her had itself been taken down.
Sam exhaled hard through her nose.
"Well... karma, I guess."
But the scene drove something else home: she had died. And somehow, she'd come back.
Just like in the game.
A respawn mechanic. She hadn't imagined that voice—there really was some kind of system controlling things. Resurrection Protocol? Neural syncing?
It sent a chill down her spine.
Sure, she'd come back this time. But what if the system failed? What if this wasn't infinite? Or worse—what if there were limits she hadn't discovered yet?
It was best not to test how many lives she had.
Especially not in a world full of things that wanted her dead.
===============================================================
Time to get to work.
She pushed up to her feet and scanned her surroundings. Her stomach was still twisting from the shock, but her instincts—her player instincts—were kicking in.
First things first: gather materials.
Her eyes darted across the ground.
A few small stones lay near the shoreline. She hurried over and snatched them up, noting the dry texture and heavy weight of them, and then she felt the implant in her wrist give a gentle hum. The stone vanished from her hand.
Sam blinked.
They hadn't just gone into a pocket.
She felt them added somewhere—mentally. Like a backpack inside her head.
"Inventory," she whispered.
She imagined the rocks she picked up earlier—and one appeared in her palm. It was different now. A little stylized, shaped like the icon from the game.
The implant was doing something. Storing, converting. Holding onto materials as if everything she touched could be broken down into data and reconstructed.
And the weight felt the same.
"Okay… so it maintains volume but standardizes form?"
It made sense in a weird, gamified way. But right now, theory didn't matter—survival did.
She gathered more rocks, more branches, more thatch.
Then something changed.
A sudden wave of knowledge washed over her.
Not memory—something else. As though it had been installed into her brain like software.
She knew how to make a pickaxe.
Her hands didn't just hold materials anymore. They knew what to do with them.
A faint, familiar sound played in her head. The ching of a crafting process. The music of early-game Ark.
And then—pop—a stone pickaxe materialized in her hand.
Rough. Primitive. Real.
She swung it once. Solid. Balanced.
This wasn't just surviving. This was playing the game for real.
Except it wasn't a game.
Not anymore.
===============================================================
The sun dipped slightly lower in the sky.
She didn't know how much longer she had until dark—but she did know what came with it.
Raptors, dilos, bugs the size of housecats… worse things.
Sam stood tall, pickaxe in hand, and let the ocean wind dry the last of the salt from her skin.
This was real.
Her body wasn't hers. Her life was a mystery. But she knew this world.
And she was going to survive it.