Life and death Stories

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 eli...

Charles 5 was overjoyed at how the day went. He had spent the entire afternoon at the float-disc arena and had been beaten nearly every opponent. The one guy who managed to slip a disc past him and into the net was a sandman. Naturally. Still, it was his favorite thing to do and he spent as much time in the arena as he could. The door of his quarters closed behind him and he stripped off his clothes and stepped straight i...

Love is the person you can’t get out of your head. Love is the first thought when you wake and the last breath before you sleep. Love is a craving so deep in your marrow that even your bones ache for it. Love is an irresistible force pulling you toward someone, a thorny rose stem curled round your heart, tugging tighter with every beat. Love hurts. And that’s how you know it’s real. Love is the reason I’m standing in a ch...