Online role-playing games. Hundreds of them over the course of decades. Immense, immersive worlds. Servers hosting thousands, hundreds of thousands, and then millions of players. Some were populated by billions of AI-piloted NPCs indistinguishable from human players. I lived in these games. My IRL was boring as shit. I was born into a rich family and never needed to work. I barely needed to show up to graduate from an elite university. I was exceptionally attractive and went through hot girls like they were nothing to me. I tried skateboarding, mountain biking, surfing, and a bunch of other stuff my dad's generation did to feel some adrenaline and pain. But it was a cheap, old-fashioned, corny thrill. For all the Earth has to offer, it doesn't have doom dragons. Earth doesn't have worm-holing space aliens. Earth doesn't have ravenous zombies. I quickly discovered that online role-playing games have those things and much, much more.

With the advent of increasingly better full-sensory interaction, one could truly enter these fantasies... they became visceral; you could smell the air, taste the food, agonize from an injury... and then disconnect and find yourself back in your mundane bedroom.

But after experiencing star fleet battles, dinosaur safaris, and vampire hunting, one does not go back to the daily drone. I was addicted. I would enjoy one RPG in the morning, have a meal and use the bathroom, enjoy it again until dinner, shower, and get right back into it. I would even fall asleep without taking it off.

I didn't feel bad about that either. It was normal for my generation. What about relationships? What about sex? The RPGs provided those with exciting elements IRL romance couldn't. Have you ever fallen for a gorgeous pirate captain and helped her to evade the royal navy? Have you ever married the empress of a desert planet and gone to holy war with her against cyborgs? No. Next to that, dating a Nobel Prize-winning supermodel Olympic medalist would seem stale.

I had many romances in those games. The women I fell in love with were sometimes real women in the real world, but I very rarely knew anything of them outside the particular game. Some were married. Some were too old for me. Some were not even women. Some were not even human. But that didn't matter in the game, at all. And then, like reincarnation, I'd start over in another game as a new character with a new personality... with new eternal enemies and new forever loves. I was once an alpha wolf and raised a pack through the trials of nature. I was once a Moon colonist who seduced the chief tunnel engineer. I was once an esteemed Tweta of the feared Gaupi Clan and made peace between warring confederacies by marrying several princesses. It was a big event in that server.

There was sex. I have had so much sex. I can not possibly recount every sexual partner I've had in this or that RPG. I've fucked elves. I've fucked genetically superior clones. I've fucked busty blonde Vikings and slippery mermaids and hot sidekicks and famous fictional characters. I've fucked celebrity look-alikes in the same movie scenarios they're famous for. I've designed my ideal women in a character customization menu, pumped them out one-by-one, and assembled them into my own dream palace harem. I've fucked a shapeshifter, and it laid over 3,000 eggs that hatched and called me father.

I would exit the game to eat and attend to my hygiene, and find my semen half-dried all over my briefs.

In the shower, I tried to remember the last time I had sex with a person in the flesh. I was alarmed because I couldn't remember, and I was disturbed that I couldn't remember. With shampoo foaming my head, my brain kept supplying me with moments of sex, but I had to rebuff it all; no, that was in a game, no, that was also in a game, no, she was in the game too, and that one was in a game.

I thought if I got out of the shower and dried myself off, it would come to me in the way memories often jump out when you stop trying so hard to retrieve them. Nope. I still have no idea when the last time I had the IRL sex was, who it was with, or where. That moment was lost in a storm of simulated sexual experiences, each so intense and layered with hot details that they must have obliterated any trace of the regular carnal sort.

I'm 82 years old now. I have a terminal illness.

I want to have sex with a real woman before I go. But I'm fairly certain that won't happen unless I pay for it. I've taken a trip abroad to a country where my remaining money can go much farther, where treatments to prolong the inevitable are not criminally expensive, and where there are hordes of wonderful whores who'd be happy to entertain me for a night.

I reserved a room with a view of the city and its sparkling brown winding river. I met a young working-girl with her ass hanging out of her shorts in a bar; I paid the bar fine, and took her back through the crowded streets with the spicy food carts and the neon and the palm trees to my room. She was twenty-something, extremely pretty, and friendly enough. We talked for a moment, but she barely spoke English, and I couldn't speak her language. I didn't mention that I was dying. Why ruin the mood?

I tried to fuck her. I knew she was objectively gorgeous. But there was just no... no... hook! Where was the scenario? Where was the novelty? I caught myself trying to pretend there was something more to the situation, and it almost worked; I almost stayed hard to visualize her as a honeypot spy in an espionage thriller or an assassin for hire sent to collect my head unless I turned her to my side with an awesome orgasm. But my imagination wasn't strong enough to override the flat reality that she was just a normal real woman and this was just normal real sex. I found it too fucking boring, and my dick called it quits. The prostitute might've just assumed I was impotent like plenty of the grandpas she's encountered, because she didn't seem the least bit bothered or surprised. Why tell her my tool works fine if she could be a winged-fairy or an island cannibal or some fantastic shit? She wouldn't be able to role-play it right if she tried.

I paid her for the night, not to fuck but to lie naked together and hold one another. When I woke up, she was gone.

I had some breakfast. I looked out the window onto that labyrinthine exotic city and thought how it looked nice, but I didn't grant it any potential to entertain me. Beyond the prostitutes and cuisine, what was there? Beaches loaded with bikini babes? Boring. Dance clubs packed with bouncing drunken sluts? Boring. A stupid fucking temple? A slow elephant ride? I've attacked an ice mountain castle with charging mammoth cavalry and in victory defiled the temple virgins! I was then killed in subsequent battle with a dozen arrows sticking through me. What fear of death should I nurse, when I have died a thousand deaths!

I put on my rig and selected a game: Soul Harvester. It's not exactly a sex game, but it includes sex. I could find a witch bitch in there to put a spell on me and get the release I needed.

Nothing happened. The game wouldn't start.

I tried another game and got nothing. I checked everything, and there was no earthly reason none of them would initiate.

I sighed, threw my arms up, and took the rig off. Rubbing my eyes, I found I was sitting in a bedroom I didn’t recognize. There was a desk, a bed, and some used dishes and empty bottles lying around.

What in the fuck?

I stood up, too easily. I looked at my hands. They weren’t weathered with wrinkles or spotted with age. I flexed, and my arms had power in them. Holy shit!

I rushed into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. I was no old man. "I'm 42!"

I screamed. I screamed again. I went stomping around the place screaming. Man, I was crashing out.

I started crying. Sobbing! I started laughing. Cackling! I babbled incomprehensible stuff to myself until I needed to stop to breathe.

And then I calmed down. What now? I couldn't think of a single thing to do if I were to get cleaned up and go outside.

I went back to my bedroom and put on my rig. I selected another game.

I woke up on a bed of sticky, filthy straw in a dungeon. I had white fur, pointy ears, cute paws, and a long tail. I felt my face and found whiskers. I was an anthropomorphic cat, a cat in a cage!

A beautiful, perfect anthropomorphic bipedal fox guard approached my cell. She had such long, slender legs and an hourglass figure. Her bushy, fiery orange tail swished and swept about behind her.

“Why are you crying, kitty kitten?”

I meowed, sadly.

“I think, in the IRL, I’m a virgin meow-meow-maybe.”

She tilted her head sympathetically, seductively.

“Aw. Poor kitty kitten.”

She reached through the food tray slot and stroked my head, scratching behind my ears.

“Come here and suckle. Momma Foxxy will make everything better.”

She unbuttoned her vest and her massive fuzzy tits spilled out between the bars.

I sprang to my paws, and my tail stood erect.

“Meow meow!”