My mother was a VRMMO addict. Unfortunately for me and my father, that meant we took care of the house while she was off playing SwordGate. We both loved her dearly but everyday she would spend just a little more time in the capsule. 'Just a little more?' she would ask us, and we had no choice really but to oblige.

For you see, in SwordGate, my mother was actually a self-made tycoon billionaire. The money she made in-game could be directly moved into real Credit funds for us to use in the house. She had several tens of millions of Credits in Gold in SwordGate, and the pile of gold and Credits in our bank account kept growing by the day.

Honestly, I never wanted to touch one of those damn capsules. That... that thing took my mother away from me. I was pretty much was raised just by my dad, and had minimal time with my mother in my life. Here’s a little background about me: I was born on May 20th, 2120. A little weird and outlandish of a date, but, whatever, I didn’t get to choose it. I was born into a loving home, free of VRMMO influences and grew up in a well-balanced life. My father ran an auto mechanic company and my mother did various things for extra spending cash using the “Intranet”, a ‘Bigger, better version’ of the internet, or so Sigma Studios pronounced it as. Sigma Studios, or the developers of massively popular games such as EverWorld, an MMORPG that had caused more than a few businesses to flop and people’s lives to be ruined due to the addictive functionality of the game.

However, it was 2137 now, so I was 17, having recently graduated high school and still living at home, and my dad still generally ran his business from home,and also tended to hang out at a local gas station and chat with his buddies in the mornings, which was good. I wanted him to get out and not be cooped up in the house all the time, hoping that maybe one day the woman he loved would come back to him. Hope that she would realize that she had a family waiting for her in real life. A family that loved her, no matter what.

I do realize things could have been a lot worse. I could have had abusive parents or had drug-addled parents or alcoholics, but instead I got a father trying to raise me and a VRMMO addict mom. I know she cared for me. She cared for both of us, quite a lot. My dad and I actually had separate capsules, much cheaper versions than hers, to go visit her in SwordGate whenever she had free time off from work. It was nice, since SwordGate was right on up there with the top of the line VRMMORPGs, so everything was extremely real. Pain, pleasure, the sights and sounds, the smells, the feeling of rough burlap on your fingers. Everything was just like real life in that game.

I remember my mother telling me and my father something strange during a visit with her in her household, rich with servants and finery, while eating dinner at a table comprised of well-cooked pork as well as vegetables and the like. There apparently was a phenomenon going on where the AI “Developers” in the game, along with the Developers of the game in the real world, were cutting people’s connections from the game permanently. The people who were connected to the game had their minds either virtually stuck in the game, leaving a lifeless corpse in the real world, or “virtually” slingshotted back into reality from their character, never able to play the game again. There were no “halfway” marks, no brains split into two or anything like that, it was either one or the other. That’s what I read online at the time anyway, I wasn’t sure of the actual cause.

When my father heard that from her, his face turned from a stony cold glare at his food to look at her, with hope in his eyes. I could see he thought he had a chance of getting her back into the real world. To rehabilitate her. He had already tried once by removing the capsule from the household, and he almost died in the process. People would do anything to travel to a place where they don’t have to worry about anything in life, even if virtual.

She did not look at him, for she knew what he was thinking already. It seemed to me that my parents were so far apart already, why not just divorce and get it over-with? But I knew why, because to her, she wasn’t having any issues, and she was wearing the pants in the relationship, so to speak. And she needed someone to assist in raising her kid, and it was never going to be her, and she knew it.

I really felt bad for my father in that moment. There was basically a 50/50 gamble on whether or not his wife would come back to him in real life. That she would once again be the woman he fell in love with. Although, she hadn’t changed: she was still very business-like as well as beautiful, and had the brains to go along with the confidence she exuded. He just didn’t want to be with her in a fantasy world, And what person doesn’t want that for themselves? But to be with your wife or girlfriend in forms you both probably like and want to be in, in a full immersion capsule with full senses, it’s literally the same as real life, but for some reason my father just did not want it. And I can see why, you still retain the information you’re “in a damn pod”, as my father always liked to put it.

However, one day I returned home from school and noticed the lack of a distinct noise in the house. The slight hum of the VRCapsule. The capsule wasn’t on. I thought to myself, ‘was mom actually outside of the capsule?’. I could barely suppress my excitement to give her a hug. Which was weird for a child of 16, but I was still close with my family. I immediately ran to the second floor of the house to find my mother, but she wasn’t up there. I went back downstairs and looked in the kitchen, but she wasn’t there either. I looked everywhere but the capsule, because the capsule was off, how could she be in it?

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And then it hit me.

I went to check the capsule, and as I came close to it, it hummed to life. The capsule was in sleep mode. I looked inside the capsule. She was in there. But it didn’t look like she was breathing. I immediately tried to open the capsule door, but it was locked. Upon detecting my mother in the capsule, the capsule itself announced:

“USER DECEASED. CONTACTING LAW ENFORCEMENT AND EMERGENCY OFFICIALS TO DOCUMENT DEATH AND REMOVE BODY.”

My eyes welled up with tears. Not for the loss of my mother, who, again, I was not very close to, but for my father, who had been talking about my mother, his wife, coming back to him for weeks. It was clear his hopes were so high, he had a very high chance of crashing, burning, and exploding within seconds of hitting the hard ground. I turned my back against the capsule that was now just laying on the ground. The capsules sat at 45 degrees for some cardiovascular reason in the air, and it was lowered to the floor, to be laid flat, pretty much a coffin for my mother. I cried.

My father came home an hour or so later that day from his part time job, even though we didn’t need the money as I mentioned, and he too, noticed the hum from the VRCapsule was gone. When he came in the door, I popped up over the capsule to look at him. The emergency responders had already been to the house and had gone already. I had fallen asleep sitting next to the capsule, probably as close to my mother as I had ever felt my entire life, the capsule having gone to sleep. My activity around the capsule woke it up though, and he saw my bleary eyes and instantly realized what happened.

We both didn’t know what to do. We both knew what had happened though. She was a permanent resident of the virtual world now. Of SwordGate. But we both didn’t want to believe it. We could both go hug her in SwordGate and have her see how stricken we were, but we both didn’t know if it would matter to her or not at this point. She got what she wanted.

We buried her using the funds she was sending to us. It was weird, knowing that she was permanently part of some game's mainframe and "alive" in SwordGate, but out here, she was dead, and we were using money she made, for her own funeral. Unfortunately, she had long since alienated herself from her family, so it was just my dad and I's closest friends who came to the funeral, along with my father and myself, of course.

My father broke after a week. We still kept up visits to mom every couple of days for a few weeks since he wanted to see her, but to him and me, it just wasn't the same, even though the game was literally straight comparable to real life. But he broke and instead of joining her in the game, he killed himself. I remember his suicide note perfectly, and up until my "event", I carried it around in my wallet with me to remember him by, even though I had it memorized after a week or so. A lot of people think it's morose, but it's the last thing my father left me besides his skills raising me, so it means something to me. It read:

Dear Zack,

You know how hard it's been for you and I. With your mother constantly in that damn capsule in that damn game. I don't know what happened, honestly. We were such a happy couple, and I honestly didn't think she was even interested in anything related to video games. She had never even expressed interest in video games, much less something as hardcore as VRMMOs. But one day I came home and she was laying in the capsule, right where it was when I raised you. We never moved it.

Heh, sometimes I think she loved that game more than she loved us. I wanted her to come back so desperately that I was willing to do anything to do it. But there was nothing I could do. Those capsules are foolproof. Trust me, I've tried to sabotage it more than once.And each time that damn capsule repaired its internal circuitry and prevented me from doing whatever I did to it ever again. I soon gave up and just started taking care of the house.

Then, for one week, SwordGate's servers went down and everybody was kicked off of the game. Your mother was informed via a screen in the capsule VR Headset, and when she told me, I remember I was so overjoyed. My wife had come back to me. She had started playing that VRMMO a couple years after we got married. And during that week, we had a lot of fun. I was hoping she would remember what real life was like, how much better it was than a lame video game. And during that week, we fooled around a lot. And a couple days before the servers were supposed to open back up, we found out she was pregnant.

Her doctor recommended to go very easy on the VR for a while, at least until you were born. And true to the doc's word, she did. She spent a lot more time with me sitting around the house, helping with chores, groceries, everything I had been used to during the first 2 years of our marriage. But after she had you, she went straight back into SwordGate.

I almost broke then, but I didn't. I couldn't. We had a child now. We...I had you.

So, I focused all my energy into raising you. To be the best man you could be. To not make my stupid mistake and not divorce myself from a VR addict while I still could. To not make any of my stupid mistakes actually, hah! But you grew up, and you learned to take care of yourself. And now you're almost twenty-five. You don't need dear old dad to take care of you anymore, you're a man's man.

You just remember all those lessons I taught you growing up, and you'll be a fine productive member of society, and a fine husband and father, I know you will.

I love you, son. I always will. And maybe I'll meet your mother, up there in the big, cloudy sky, and I'll have my wife back, and we'll both be watching you, for eternity.

Farewell. I love you so, so much.

Dad

When I originally found that letter, I was so angry. How could he leave me? After everything we both had been through with her, after everything we did together, supporting each other's lives, why? Of course, I knew why, because the love of his life was gone, gone forever. And there was nothing he'd ever be able to do about it.