Matthew stared into space thinking in a vain attempt to get rid of writer's block. This always happened to him. He had been an avid reader of Fantasy and Science Fiction ever since he was a kid, and about 2 years ago he had finally been convinced by his friends that he should just write his own book. What they and himself hadn't realized at the time was that writing is mind-numbing work with constant temptations.
Sitting in front of his laptop for hours constantly second guessing what he had written just killed his motivation. He'd get distracted and an I'll do it later would turn into a Wouldn't it just be better if I just started over with a better idea? In the 2 years he had been doing this off and on he still hadn't completed a novel to his satisfaction. If nothing else it had left him with a whole new level of appreciation for those people who write for a living, even that one guy who keeps putting off the last book in his trilogy.
He was 19 now, and if he didn't have a workable novel by the time his college was up he'd have to just get a job at whatever work he could find, which would be kind of a waste of that literature degree he'd been working towards. That thought kept spurring him back to his latest train wreck of a novel, Supers. It was supposed to be a doomsday setting kept afloat by people who had superhuman powers, but it just wasn't going well. Cynicism kept bleeding into his writing ever since he had called it quits with Stacy, which kept affecting his characters and making them seem like jerkasses even to his own eyes.
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After grumbling for a bit he did what he always did when he got writer's block, which was bring up some flash games and screw around. He had just logged on to his favorite site when he got a popup.
“Want to know the meaning of life? Want to live… a real life?” YES / NO
Leaving aside how a popup got through his legion of blockers and it's appeal to the depressed, he actually recognized the inspiration for this one. Chinese novels had been picking up a cult following on some of the forums he visited, and he'd actually read some of the Infinite genre, starting with Terror Infinity. He didn't really like them though.
It was probably a joke by one of those guys down in tech, but better safe than sorry. He decisively clicked NO.
Distrustful of people? We now have a new offer. Play alone today! YES / NO
Ugh, not one of those again.
With a brief internal promise to just exit off whatever webpage it sent him to and run the antivirus software again later, he clicked YES.
His vision went dark.