I died doing what I loved. 

No, not gaming. Don’t be stupid. I died while being at the center of everybody’s attention. I died a star – in some ways literally, the miniature fusion reactor of my VR pod having made the trip from ‘bust’ to ‘combust’ in under a second. I suspect – though I cannot know – that there was one hell of an explosion. All I truly remember is a sudden flash of heat and light…  

So, I’m dead. Big deal. How many great works of literature still exist that were penned by the hands of the long and gone? Probably too many. Probably that’d be considered all very conventional and proper. I should do that. But listen. Nobody had the gumption to die and keep on living, until me. Am I a little bit proud of that fact? Well, we’ll see... 

Right now, believe it or not, I’m sat on a rock, peaceably enjoying a gentle breeze – a Senway Industries proprietary text editor capturing all my attention, and (I hope) all of yours. How do I explain my miraculous counter-condition? This odd life or death paradox? Easy – I can’t! I have no idea how I’m still alive. I do know how I died, though… so, let’s begin there. 

It was Tuesday the 11th of June, 12:04PM (I forget which year). I hadn’t eaten – not unless you count fingernail fragments and acid-reflux, which I did (I was that nervous). Sat in my office, feet up on the desk, eyes up on the monitor – stocks buzzing around my mind like gnats – I didn’t see Charlie come in.  

“So… you excited?” He asked, in that slow, measured way of his. 

“I’m… something.” I said, distractedly. “What’s the word from Engineering? All green? I know I am.” 

He gave me an embarrassed smile. “Slight glitch around the plasma containment field. Or… the computer that monitors the plasma containment field, but they’re patching it up now. Should be go for launch.” 

“Hold on, hold on, hold on.” I said swinging my feet off the desk. “The guidance computer? Didn’t we program the thing, ourselves? Like... years ago? It’s the most heavily tested component in the system-” 

“-Marketing wanted some of the code to be partially re-written in Gen-C. They said it was... ‘sexier’.” 

I balked. “They run that by you?” 

“At a dead sprint, yeah.” 

A quick aside to say - emphatically – that if teaching sand to think had been a mistake, then teaching sand to teach other sand to think could only ever be classified as the grandest example of tour de fuckery known to... well, sand – I guess. And true to form, if anyone was going to extoll its deployment in the field – it’d be the group of people I pay to know zip-diddly about it.  

“Let me get this straight…” I began. “Or as a Gen-C algorithm would grammatize: let straight me get this. We’re five hours away from the birth of the single most powerful VR experience the world has ever known… no… we’re five hours away from the single most important product-unveiling this company has ever known… and Marketing, the team that invests bi-weekly meetings into deciding what color the garlands should be at the Christmas party, are making last-minute engineering decisions.” 

“That’s right. Have you eaten?” 

“Don’t try and distract me, Charlie…” 

“You look thin.” 

“I look how I feel.” 

So, it was an important day. Important people were going to be there: investors, friends of investors, cousins of investors – and probably my mother. Though that last was definitely a long shot. She hadn’t been there when I punched more than the clock at my first job, she hadn’t been there at the court proceedings which followed, she hadn’t been there when I graduated from MIT at seventeen and she certainly hadn’t been there when the game me and Charlie sank our lives into crossed over a million active users. But I promised an open bar, so here’s to hoping.  

I spent the remaining hours chewing out the head of Marketing – I suppose that counts as a meal, not at all bony (I’d have to say spineless, in fact). I also played my game for a couple of hours, hopping around as an admin and using the Events tool to mess with people. Incidentally, I forgot to de-spawn one of the giant chickens on Gone-Begone island, so if this text somehow makes its way into the hands of Quality Assurance all I can say is ‘my bad’. No matter what I did, though, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something terrible was about to happen. Of course, back then I was probably only mindful of a minor, but wholly embarrassing and costly technical fault. I suppose I got the costliness right, if not the cost. 

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

The time came for the pod to be demoed, and naturally I (as the majority stake holder) was going to be the one to do it. I patted Charlie on the shoulder, took center-stage by the oversized VR Pod we’d decided to name the Morpheus (after the ancient Greek god of dreams), and made the speech which was expected of me. I won’t bore you with the details, it was self-congratalatory and non-inclusive, and I probably gave off the impression that I was an ass. To clarify, I am an ass, perhaps even more-so for being self-aware. With a nod to Charlie and a wink to the best-looking woman in the room, I took a seat inside the VR pod and leaned back until I felt the cold kiss of the machine’s Thunderbolt skin-port. The piece of plastic buried somewhere in my grey matter informed me of the connection. I noticed something which, in hindsight, is pretty telling: a loading bar somewhere off in the periphery of my vision. It probably hadn’t been there before? But oh well. I relaxed and waited for the guy we called the ‘flight director’ to announce a go-no-go. His voice came in through the pod’s speaker system, a little rough and distorted around the edges: “Sir we’re all set up here.” 

“Everything ready game-side?” I asked. 

“Yes sir, welcome party’s ready and waiting.” 

“Alright.” I said, with a level of certainty only the ignorant can muster. “Punch it.” 

And that’s when it all went to shit, really. Like I said, I don’t remember much. Smoke, a flash of light and... then the limpid blue of a virtual sky. My character wasn’t supposed to be lying down in a field, and yet I could feel dry grass prickling my skin, the weight a tunic on my chest, the weight of gravity pulling my limbs into the flat, open ground of a place I was absolutely not meant to be in. The briefing had said I’d spawn in the town of Tuet-An, in the province of An, which was of an intermediate difficulty– and also a desolate fire-scape, utterly deprived of grass. So, I sat up and had my fears confirmed. I was not in Tuet-An, there were no fire golems, no lava mage NPC’s, no Incendiarites with their foot-long flaming claws... there was only quiet, still greenery – a babbling brook somewhere nearby and homogenous evergreens filing away in all directions, upright and sparsely inhabited by unusually conscientious songbirds. In a word: idyllic. In another word: creepy. 

I looked around and tried to soak it all in. That’s what smart people do, or reconnaissance operatives. Or toilettes. I wasn’t processing anything, however. I was numb and dumb and utterly perplexed. Some things made sense. I was in the game, my game – The Stones of Tiax. I could see a heads-up-display, the only heads up I was likely to ever get from that point on. I had my complete set of senses, which was a product of only the latest VR pods, Morpheus and its immediate predecessor Phantasus. The fidelity of what I was experiencing told me that this was a Morpheus uplink. But despite those small comforts, there were even more things that alarmed me. The first thing I tried doing, because I am an idiot and because I’m a sucker for tropes, was to pinch myself. It hurt. It wasn’t supposed to hurt. But hurt it did. There were laws about this, huge, detailed pieces of litigation that my developers and engineers had to war with – and ultimately yield to. That I felt pain was a giant red flag, not just because it was something that shouldn’t happen – technically speaking, it was something that couldn’t happen. There was no user metric for pain, it hadn’t been created, it had been danced around – after all, pain is just a more insistent form of other tactile sensations – but no code existed to implement it. 

 When I studied my user interface with more keenness, I discovered something else that made my blood run cold. There was no ‘Log out’ button. Now, that by itself is fine, you can’t have an entirely immersive VR experience without a few contingencies for escaping to the real world. So, alternatives existed – each with their own, entirely separate APIs to ensure fail-safety. But... I tried looking through the other menus and found nothing. I tried opening the admin terminal and entering the /logout command. I couldn’t. The terminal wouldn’t even open. Another red flag. The final thing I tried was an unknown to most users, for very good reasons. The MRC or ‘Manual Re-seizure of Control’, was a sequence of movements against a user’s physical body in the game that would revert the pod’s enforced muscle atonia (something akin to the paralysis one feels when asleep). I enacted the MRC sequence and mimed sitting forward, carefully, an action which should disconnect my Brain Stem Interface from the pod’s skin-port, severing the connection. I expected to come-to, nauseous and disoriented (like I said, there are very good medical reasons why MRC remains undisclosed), I did not expect... nothing to happen.  

Y’see, MRC is built into the kernel, which means it is fundamental to the entire system. Log out buttons can run off following patch changes (it’s unlikely but not impossible). There are a pinched handful or reasons why an MRC sequence might fail, and all of them come with error messages being fed back to the user. There was no reason why an MRC sequence would fail silently. Until I remembered the flash of light, the smoke and the fact that the pod’s fusion reactor had its guidance controls partially re-written by a moron made of sand. You can’t run ‘kernel’ commands if no kernel exists. It could mean only one thing: catastrophic hardware failure. Given what I knew, I guessed some kind of an explosion, something to do with the containment field failing to contain the massive amounts of energy the pod required. So, I stood up, stretched out my back for no good reason and found this rock, upon which I am now currently writing. I don’t really know what to do. I don’t really know what’s going on or how I’m alive – if this counts as living. All I know is one thing... technically speaking, I made this bed, if it should come to it – I can find a way to sleep in it. Just gotta puff up the pillows a little...