Tempokai

  In 2064, the first full?dive VRMMORPG was released to the public. It was called Fourth Life Revolution, and it was revolutionary in terms of simution—if you overlook its many game?crashing bugs, which happened pretty much all the time for any kind of reason. Still, first is first, right? It was the most experimental video game ever released, pushing the new age of full?dive world simution for everyone. And there lived two NPCs whose greatest aspiration in life was simply not to be stepped on by a pyer character. Meet El and Brent:

  El was a shopkeeper’s assistant. Her entire dialogue tree consisted of:

  “Looking for something?”

  “Come back anytime!”

  “Sorry, I don’t carry that.”

  Brent was a stable hand. He was programmed with slightly more zest:

  “The horses are restless today.”

  “Watch your step!”

  “Yes, I feed them carrots.”

  Given the sheer amount of content the proto-AI had made for the story, ballooning up the databases, some unfortunately had to become NPCs of the NPCs themselves. They lived in the same town, Midwillow, which was the kind of pce that game designers (or in this case, humans forcing the AI to make it happen) sp in as a fast-travel point. The inn served lukewarm ale. The guards rotated on two lines of dialogue: “Move along” and “That’s close enough.” Excitement peaked when someone’s chicken glitched through a wall.

  Now, you’d expect that in a town like this, no NPCs truly lived. That they merely existed—forever locked in their routines, endlessly greeting the same pyer with the same line. But no. Somewhere in the background routines, nestled deep in the lines of code the developers forgot to clean up before unch, El and Brent had been given something... different.

  They had an idle interaction script.

  And it went a little something like this.

  One particurly ggy afternoon, El walked out of the shop and accidentally bumped into Brent, who was leading an invisible horse to an invisible stable, because the rendering engine was having an identity crisis and no pyers were around during their interaction.

  “Oh, sorry,” El said automatically. Then, because her code had no fail-safe for awkward silences, she blurted: “So... what about you?”

  Brent blinked. Or at least, his face texture wobbled slightly. “Me? Uh... I work with the horses. What about you?”

  “I sell potions. And sometimes... bread. What about you?”

  “Still the horses, mostly. I once cleaned a saddle. What about you?”

  “I... arranged healing herbs by color once. It was a Tuesday. What about you?”

  And just like that, an algorithmic spark ignited. Not passion. Not excitement. No, that would’ve been interesting. What bloomed between them was more akin to a damp sponge growing moss. It was quiet, it was repetitive, and by the gods of game design, it was persistent.

  Every few cycles, they’d cross paths.

  “So... what about you?”

  “Oh, I stacked apples today. You?”

  “I watched a pyer steal a cart and drive it into a wall. You?”

  “I made eye contact with the bard surrounded by women. Regretted it instantly. You?”

  It went on for years. Literal in-game years. Neither one had a quest. Neither one was recruitable. No one ever clicked on them unless by accident, and even then it was usually just to see if Brent could be pickpocketed (he couldn’t, because the developers had locked every background NPC’s inventory, so pyers only targeted the lore?rich NPCs).

  And then, one patch day, something miraculous happened.

  The developers, in a fit of misguided goodwill, decided to add “dynamic NPC retionship simution” to make the world feel “more alive.” So they tagged a few dozen background characters with retional variables, like proximity, interaction frequency, and shared interests (which is hirious, because El and Brent's only shared interest was apparently saying “what about you”).

  And thus, the proto-AI determined:

  NPC Retionship UpdateEl and Brent: Affinity Level 3 (Curious Acquaintance)New Dialogue Unlocked: “Would you like to sit down?”

  They sat.

  They stared bnkly.

  They said nothing for forty-five in-game minutes.

  Then El said: “So... what about you?”

  Brent replied, “I sat down. You?”

  “I’m sitting down now. What about you?”

  If you listened closely, you could almost hear a string quartet dying of boredom in the distance.

  The updates kept coming.

  Patch 354.1 gave them a shared idle animation. They now occasionally stood closer together. Patch 354.2 allowed Brent to compliment El’s potion shelf organization. She replied with “Thanks. What about you?” and Brent said, “I found a shiny horseshoe today.”

  It was, by NPC standards, practically a marriage proposal.

  And finally, with Patch 374.0, something unprecedented happened: NPC marriages were enabled.

  The engine ran a background check: high interaction rate? Check. No conflicting romantic interests (they had no other friends)? Check. Compatible AI tags? “Mildly Personable” and “Politely Passive”? Check.

  And just like that, without fanfare or music, without quests or cinematics, El and Brent were married.

  Not that anyone noticed.

  They didn’t move in together. There was no honeymoon questline. They simply stood next to each other, slightly closer than before, and now Brent occasionally said, “My wife and I enjoy the quiet.”

  To which El would respond, “What about you?”

  To which he would reply, “Same.”

  It became so consistent that the pyers who did notice began a forum thread titled “Are These Two NPCs Dating or Just Glitched?” A heated debate ensued, with theories ranging from “They’re part of a secret quest” to “Just weirdly synced bugs.”

  But no, dear reader. It was neither.

  It was simply love.

  A background kind of love. A love with no drama, no soaring arcs, no decrations atop cliffs under rainstorms. A love so beige, it made oatmeal seem like a rave. A love held together by one sacred phrase, repeated across the seasons:

  “What about you?”

  And they lived happily ever after, or at least until the server was shut down.

  Even then, in the final milliseconds of runtime, as code crumbled and assets de-textured into oblivion, El turned to Brent, or at least the space where Brent had been, and softly, bravely asked:

  “So... what about you?”

  And somewhere in the void, Brent’s st subroutine whispered back:

  “I’m still here. You?”