It may be a cliche, but I hate hospitals. They’re too quiet, they stink, and everyone is so stressed the tension makes me feel like I’m swimming through mud. I glanced into the hallway as a tousled-haired doctor stormed silently by, his mouth a thin line and a tablet held white-knuckled in his hand. I moved a step away from the door.
“David,” Aunt Luci whispered. She rubbed her son’s hand in both her own, that weird smile on her face people get when they don’t want to break out in heavy sobbing.
For his part, David said nothing. He looked for all the world as though he were taking a nap. His eyes were peacefully closed, and his chest rose and fell softly. Of course, those breaths were helped along by the hose and mask strapped to his face and snaked down his throat. A monitor above his head registered a regular heartbeat, but no brain activity.
Two days had passed since the accident, and I was my aunt’s ride to and from my apartment on each of them as she spent all her time visiting with her comatose son. I touched her on the arm and smiled apologetically to the nurse standing by David’s bed. “Come on,” I said to Aunt Luci. “They’ll take good care of him. Let’s go get some dinner.”
An hour and a half later we sat at my dining table, a bucket of KFC between us, using tiny plastic sporks to eat the delicious crap they called mashed potatoes. My aunt seemed to have recovered her sense of self a bit, and we talked about the news and my mother’s (her sister’s) new litter of bulldog puppies.
Eventually the food was gone and the puppies’ adorable qualities were exhausted and there only remained the elephant in the room. I took a deep breath. “Aunt Luci,” I said carefully, “have you thought about going back to work?”
She cast her face down, but thankfully didn’t protest. “I know I should,” she said. “I don’t want to, but I should.”
Smiling, I nodded. “Maybe you could give it another day and then try for Friday? That’ll give you the weekend after to adjust and you can be ready by Monday to go back in full force.” I smiled as kindly as I knew how. Aunt Luci worked for a small debt-collection agency where she put her chilling, headmistress-like demeanor to good use. She wouldn’t do much in a state of mourning, but maybe the old habit of aggressive, wolfhoundish harassment would help her feel more in control of the situation.
Aunt Luci smiled, and it was happier now than it had been in the hospital. “Thank you so much, Nathan. For everything.”
Well, I preferred to be called Nate, but didn’t correct her. Instead I patted my aunt’s arm and returned her smile. “You’re more than welcome. You’ve put up with me enough over the years. I more than owe it to you.” I stood. “Let me get us some dessert; you sit right here.”
I breathed a sigh of relief as I entered the kitchenette and cut us each a slice of Aunt Luci’s favorite, Black Forest Cake. Thank goodness she’d be working again. She lived in precisely the wrong direction for it to make sense for her to return to my apartment after work, so I’d be free to delve into the oddity of my cousin’s accident in the evenings, something I felt was a bad idea with Aunt Luci in the same building. I didn’t want her to see me unresponsive in a truVR dive and freak out.
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We ate the cake when I returned to the dining room, and then Aunt Luci watched a soap opera on the TV while I read an old G.R.R. Martin book. At ten my aunt retired to the guest bedroom (come to think of it, she was the first person to ever use it in the two years I’d lived in that apartment…) and I closed my book.
I couldn’t take it any longer; I needed to see something of what David had been up to. Placing my cousin’s PC on my desk’s induction charger, I began to reach for my truVR gear, but hesitated. I had no idea what was going on. Better to be safe than sorry. Rolling my eyes, I hauled an old physical keyboard from under my bed and paired it with David’s PC. The computer hummed for a moment before projecting to the nearest screen, the desktop monitor I use for watching sports. Thankfully it only took me three tries to guess David’s password (nothing you need to know!) and arrive on my cousin’s desktop, three windows minimized to the task bar. I reached into the holographic layer hovering above my monitor’s glassy surface and flicked all three windows to an active position.
The first window was Google Chrome, the active page a Russian gaming forum. Weird. The second was a chat client which locked me out after four attempts at cracking David’s password. He’s smarter than I am; I use the same password for everything.
Finally was what I had come to see, the truVR client. A textbox overlaid the array of games and software:
Disconnected from server ‘9120350078154024e00f’ Sad [https://forum.royalroadl.com/images/smilies/sad.png]
…Weird. I pressed my finger onto the textbox and held it there until the box “popped” and returned to its normal size, flicking the cloned image into the clipboard icon on the taskbar, and then hit escape to return to the truVR library. I scrolled through “recently played,” wondering how David managed to get almost double the number of hours I played on most of our games despite his job forcing him to work ten hours more a week than myself. Maybe my cousin just never slept, and his coma was the inevitable consequence of a life driven by adrenaline-pumping shooters and stimulant-packed energy drinks with no respite.
Of course, had that been the case, David probably would have suffered a heart attack, not simply fallen unconscious, and the doctor had told Aunt Luci that David’s heartbeat was perfectly stable.
I was musing on that when I scrolled past the app bearing a red “Last Played” badge, Sigurd Morrison’s Bug Hunt. It looked so generic I almost scrolled past it. My eyes narrowed as I saw the playtime. One hundred and thirty-four hours. A lot of time for a game David had never mentioned, and which looked from the game tile’s artwork to have been published something like fifty years ago. I double-tapped on Bug Hunt’s game tile, sending me to the game’s Steam store page.
I’m not sure what I was expecting. Maybe embarrassing, like a puzzle game about insectoid monster girls. Certainly not the garbage fire that lay before me then.