Entering World Online…

“Nyaa-chan, what are you doing?”

“Ah, I was just reading the boards. Nothing good is coming up at all.”

“Didn’t you hear about that Chaoser who got a new subclass?”

Damn, I wanted that one to stay hidden for a bit. Can’t you keep quiet Cowboy? Were you that excited? Did you want to impress me? I’m not really a girl you know! What if he confesses? Ah, it would be awful, awful for him and me. I remembered back in my youth, doing stupid things like that.

“Nyaa-chan?”

“Sorry. I got overwhelmed a bit. I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it at all.”

I had my feet up on a table in the guild hall with a board in front of me, checking the message boards and chat logs. It was a great place to get leads on my cases. Not that my cases were real or I got paid mind you.

“I saw you went to Hesiod the other day on the guild list, the player’s name is Cowboy. You sure you didn’t see him?”,her voice was rising and mocking.

Damn it, she figured me out. I never watch the tone of my voice at all these days, even when I’m playing Nyaa-chan. Maybe it’s just around her.

“You got me, Mynise. Just like a Negativer like you to bring a Positiver like me down,” I sighed in union with my character.

“Hey, don’t be like that, I just wanted you to let me in on the fun. You’re always running around making up new things to do, why don’t you bring me along?”

“I work alone, you know that. Get off of me.”

My time alone as Nyaa-chan is precious. Don’t judge me. I happen to know this girl I’m talking to is at least 80. Not level 80! Or she’s lying, I wouldn’t put it past her.

“Oh, you’re no fun. I’ll guess I’ll go bother someone else since you’re being so stingy.”

She left me alone, good. I kept browsing the boards. It’s just like someone like her, a subclass like Boundaryless, to be all over people.

I have to admit, I enjoyed her checking in on me, if just so I could tell her to leave me alone. Wait, does she know that? I stared out over the fountains through the window in despair, afraid I’ve been found out.

It’s no big deal right? They didn’t even mind at work. It’s really just me who cares about it, isn’t it?

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I remembered back when I started the game because of the magical girl subclass. I wasn’t about to play one though, too embarrassing, so I mixed it with a detective. At least when I got flustered trying to role play I could just act like my usual self and pass that off as a detective.

Magical Girls? Man, those girls are so pretty! I love the designs so much! But, if anyone knew I liked them, my face would turn beet red.

I was working hard at coding. It would be late at night and I would finish a big chunk and feel satisfied and tired inside. One night, I turned it on inside my mind.

I shouldn’t be watching this, I thought. This is for kids! Little girls! You’ve got to be ten. Ten years old, I tell you.

My head hurt as I felt the images wash over me. Simple characters, simple designs, a purity and adorableness.

Aren’t they invulnerable?

Aren’t they efficient?

Aren’t the voices just like music?

The best thing about girls that aren’t real is that you can pick all the best parts and pull it together.

I design programs, what wrong with making a girl or two? Everything. I looked at the dating sites. It’s not like I didn’t get the courage up to try.

I remember going out with her, realizing the conversation was heading off the cliff, and she just turned the conversation to “I have to get home for blah blah”.

“You want to hang out again?”

“Maybe,” she said. I knew that meant no. I’m not stupid.

Hey, you weren’t that cute either. I could name a hundred things wrong with you, all of them I could tell you how to fix. But I would never do that, no way. I’ll be polite and wait for this conversation to end like all the rest.

That’s when I met her. You know this ends badly right? There’s pain, wanting, not wanting to reveal your feelings to them because then it’s over. It was an unrequited love. She didn’t think much of herself, and I couldn’t convince her that I wasn’t lying when I said I liked her.

She moved away. Down the street. And got another job. Really, she didn’t need to do that. She could still be in the next place over and I’d ignore her for the rest of my life.

A girl that let me down, a girl that I loved. Neither could compare. When I think about it, I want to tear my hair off. I’m just a guy, what's wrong with me? Shouldn’t I get married? Shouldn’t I date more?

Ah, it happened again. I was crying in the guild hall alone in Nyaa-chan’s form. As I felt the non-real tears in the game in my mind, I wondered if the real me was crying too.

To end this pain, I was looking for a way. It’s dark, I know. I won’t tell anyone. If they knew, they’d stop me.

That’s the truth that I haven’t told anyone. There’s programs out there. I searched for them, researched the history of the brain chips, how the neurology connects and the intersect between the hypnoid receptors and the real world receptors, the safeties that they had in place.

It was just interest at first. I was spending more time in the game and then I found it. A flaw in the system, like I was looking for that one space out of place in a line of code.

A deleter, destroy the mind entirely, that was hard. They designed the whole system to use as much of the user’s brain as possible.

“No, they’ll just think it’s real. It’s that simple. Then, all we have to do is load the necessary information into the subconscious.

Once you have all of that in there, the conscious mind is entirely submersed in an independent reality. It’s quite ingenious really.

We spent so much time of human history welding our world with our hands and tools that we missed that we could just weld our minds.

I would have never stumbled on it without my background in hypnosis, from when I was struggling with an autoimmune disorder.

The mind-body connection, the subconscious mind, biomechanics, smartphone technology, and finally moore’s law becoming economically unsustainable.

We needed another computer.

Why not the mind?”, I read that in a book in my mind, some guy named Myalor? He’s famous.

I didn’t want a deleter, mind you. I was just interested. I was looking for the opposite, an uploader.

If I can’t be a Magitective in real life, I’ll be one on Mental World Online.

If I have a real life I don’t like, why not just code it out?

“Are you crying again?”

“Oh, god damn it, Mynise.”