Kent, 18M [Straight, simulation programmer, SFW for now]

You were a short, skinny geek, the stereotypical Silicon Valley inhabitant. Before the news of the inevitable asteroid impact, you were a programmer looking to become an indie game developer.

Of course once the news of the planet's impending doom was out, your priorities shifted considerably. Millions of programming positions opened up to work on the simulation, and you became one of those responsible for bringing it about.

Optimization was the word of the day, and there were raging debates in the office you worked at every day. The main topic was between optimizing for memory or quick loading times. The idea was this: you could either walk into a gigantic beautiful planet the size of Jupiter where lots of the data was compressed and uncompressed as different people moved around, which meant loading screens and a maximum amount of loaded environment before everyone in the simulation would start experiencing lag, or you could walk into a much smaller planet perhaps the size of the moon which had pretty much no lag and no loading bars, but took up just as much memory as the Jupiter example. Then of course there was everything in-between. The underlying principles were simple: People hate lag/loading bars. People love big more than small.

Though ultimately the people usually initiating and partaking in these debates had about zero influence on what would happen, all they could do was optimize smaller elements in accordance with orders from higher up. The same applied to you.

A simplified art style was an obvious solution to many problems the task posed for the massive performance and memory efficiency, and the results of an online poll for this lead to the adaption of an anime/manga style. People still loved realism, so there were some parts of the simulation dedicated to more realistic styles, but the rules on how much memory and performance these areas could use were quite strict. The result of this was that most of the areas using realistic art styles were small or otherwise extremely optimized in some fashion.

It was actually quite enjoyable in many ways to watch people coming up with all sorts of unique ways to squeeze everything one possibly could from tiny amounts of memory/cpu. YouTube competitions and tutorials became quite popular for this, and memes flew all over the internet. Exaggerations were a fan favorite.

'Normal programmer: *using several Terabytes of RAM, all of NASA's CPUs, and the entirety of the internet's hard drive space.* Outcome: The original Doom.
Simulation programmer: "Hey guys so today we're gonna be trying to make a game using this literal potato with the original NES installed into it..." Outcome: Destiny 5'

A phone notification brought your mind back to reality. Looking at what it said, your heart fell. Only a few days remaining, preparations for the launch were being made.

Tapping the notification, a "view avatar" button popped up. Not long ago at the office a guy brought in a 3D scanner. They scanned your entire body in order to let an AI generate an anime-styled avatar for you. You tapped the button, a little hesitantly. You weren't a big fan of your body, much more focused on the capabilities of your mind, but your curiosity drove you on anyway.

A new page loaded and after a few seconds an animated figure capturing all your most notable physical attributes popped up. You had to admit you liked your anime avatar much better than your current appearance.

Below the avatar was another button: "customize body".

The first option in the body customization menu caught you a little off guard: biological sex. You could be a female? You considered that for a moment. It wasn't something you'd ever really given a great deal of thought but it certainly had your imagination running full speed. "No..." You shook your head, "at least not yet."

You did however customize other parts of your body in accordance with your preferences, nothing too radical but you did want longer hair and a few different features than what you currently had.

Of course you knew you wouldn't be able to customize your mind in the same way, despite tens of thousands of esteemed scientists looking over the alien mechanisms and even ripping a few apart to try to understand them—permitted by various governments because it was estimated they would end up with extras—the technology was just too far beyond them. They learned a few things they theorized might be useful for the future, but couldn't figure out how the mechanisms ran the peoples' consciousness. They had however tested them out extensively and could safely say they worked perfectly. They also deciphered the inputs and outputs for the programmers working on getting the simulation to work alongside the peoples' minds as flawlessly as possible.