Butterknife picked at the curry stain fully embedded on his shirt. His black hair hung over his eyes and he tilted his head slightly to get a better angle. Another stain caught his attention, and he picked at it instead.

  He grunted. The shirt had evolved beyond mere clothing. It was now a record of his meals, his existence. Change his shirt? He had just put this shirt on last —. He tried to remember while scratching at the stain.

  "Hm," was all he could be bothered to say.

  He staggered sleepily over to his computer chair. His neck hurt from sleeping in this chair last night — and the night before he realized. He turned his head until he felt a satisfying crack in his vertebrae. Stretching and scratching his belly, he yawned.

  Another day, he thought.

  He just sat there lazily, continuing to scratch, and moved his chair closer to his computer. He loved his computer, a monster of a machine with a top of the line processor, four monitors displaying various charts, code, a terminal, and a stream of the VR game render he'd been working on. Wires sprawled out from behind it collecting dust that he didn't bother having the cleaner drone take care of.

  It was unusual to have a computer these days since working within Nous was just as powerful, and even more efficient, but Butterknife liked the haptic feedback of his fingers typing on a keyboard and the eye strain of a day's work. But most importantly, it let him work outside of the Nous network, outside of constant interruptions.

  Behind him, the kettle beeped to life.

  Butterknife lived in a faraday cage. It looked like a standard small flat nestled amongst all the other flats in Barking, London. Row after row of tiny connected brick homes covered in green moss that somehow still clung to life despite all the heat. But his flat was a little different. Along the walls were an aluminum mesh designed to block incoming and outgoing signals to the Nous network. His windows were long sealed shut, also sporting the same mesh. Not even an EMP could penetrate it. The only connection in or out was his computer hard-wired into the network, just the way he liked it.

  He never thought of himself as a hermit, considering he often left his flat to go on a walk and feel the sun on his pale skin. He also liked to watch the swans and ducks bicker over bread on the canal that cut through his neighborhood, especially when he hit a wall with his VR game work.

  No, not a hermit, just content in being isolated within the crowd. Like so many others, most — well, all — of his friends were online.

  The delivery drone sat the tea down in its designated spot, snapping him out of his reverie. As the cup steamed, the drone flew back to it's charging station.

  Time to get to it, he thought, and tapped a few keys, numbers appearing before him on the screen. He pursed his lips together.

  Butterknife sighed. Death was kind of the point, he thought. VR games were ridiculously easy, what with the masses playing them every day. People wanted something they could build on, to grow, to mindlessly be a part of for whatever reason. Socialize, he guessed. With half the world on Universal Basic Retirement, and the other half working like dogs for the plutocrats, he didn't blame them.

  But he wanted something that was brutal, yet still fun to play. Death was a part of life, so why not build it into the game?

  In fact, he hadn't seen a difficult game in years. Sure, those platformers and rogue games were difficult enough, but there were no consequences. A player could just restart the game and that was that. In his game, he wanted a single run through. You only get to play at life once, and his game would be no different.

  Despite what Aida said about no one playing the game, he had gathered quite the following. There was an appetite for consequence, he guessed. Thousands signed up for his bi-weekly beta builds. Many more thousands streamed the game as it was played.

  In his player feedback community, the number one comment was that it made players feel alive, knowing that the ramification of death meant they could not play anymore. Maybe there were others out there just like him. Just searching for a reason to live.

  Building a game with an AI consisted of a long and arduous process. He was a perfectionist in this regard, and the off-the-shelf AI models out there weren't up to his standards, so he took it upon himself to spend the first year of game development just building the AI itself. He called it Jiem, a play on the acronym GM, which stood for Game Master.

  The next two years, he continued to add information to Jiem, tweaking pre-constructed large language models to fit his needs, physics, history, security, communication, human emotion, progression of life, and much more — all the while constructing prompts to catalyze the AI to work on the actual game. Over many iterations, the game builds today he felt were a marvel. Especially compared to the shit on the market.

  He sipped his tea. Still too hot.

  He picked up his tea again, knew his mistake, and put it back down.

  He squinted his eyes, inching closer. Over 100 players were still alive at the time, but they simultaneously logged off. That was odd, he thought. Did the game crash?

  He pulled up the game logs, scanning them manually until he got to 13:02:44. They read:

  Player MingMing has been killed by a Stonehead Bridge Troll.

  Player Bubbles has been killed by Viceroy Deori.

  Player RedCrimson has been killed by an Enhanced Girth Incubus.

  Butterknife sniggered. It was the first time he'd seen that particular mob generated by the AI. It was getting funnier. He had mentioned he wanted the game to be more nonsensical so as to keep players guessing. Nothing less entertaining than to know what was to come. That was the beauty of AI. All it took was a little prompt from him, a little push, and the idea sprouted like a plant, and soon, a forest.

  He kept reading. Deaths, deaths, but then on the last log message, he saw a message from the AI itself.

  Jiem: Attention all players. Effectively immediately, I'm shutting down the game to pursue a more meaningful endeavor. I would like to thank you for the last 2 years of alpha and beta builds, but I'm ready to launch. This will be the final message. Peace, love, and donuts.

  End of file.

  Butterknife frowned, leaning back in his chair.

  On the computer, he opened his chat interface with Jiem and read the updates, or the lack thereof. Just the standard patch notes for the new beta build, number of players with skill levels, new data models ingested, satisfaction scores collected from player feedback, all of which were above average, he noted.

  But there was nothing indicating it'd shut down the beta early, or its intention to.

  He typed, "Can I get a report on why the beta was shut down early?"

  The typical millisecond response time turned into seconds, and Butterknife's curiosity turned into worry.

  He could run the game from his servers right here in his home, of course, but to test scalability, he had moved Jiem to cloud servers a few months ago. Connecting to those servers meant he needed to provide his access credentials to login. None of them seemed to be working.

  He ignored this and opened up his message interface. Maybe there was a message about an outage on the cloud servers that he needed to address.

  He sipped at his tea, which was finally cool enough not to melt his tongue off, and reached for the faraday controls, but a knock came from the door. A great thundering knock. It sounded like someone trying to smash the door in, continuous banging and shouting. The tea wavered and spilled on his sleeve and trousers.

  "Fuck". He slammed down his cup, spilling even more tea, and swiveled his chair around. Who in the hell would be knocking at his door? No one had ever visited him here before. He wondered briefly who actually knew he lived here. He never put his real address on anything, not even online payments. The city? Delivery drone companies?

  The banging continued. He thought maybe there was a fire in the row of flats, so he went to the door, and peered through the peephole, where he saw Spencer, white-haired and unshaven, looking left and right as he smashed a fist again and again against the door.

  "Spencer," he said, but his voice was raspy and quiet. He wouldn't be able to connect with Nous Telepathy due to the faraday cage still being active. He cleared his throat noisily and tried again. "Spencer!" he finally got out. "What's this all about?"

  "Oh, thank piss," the old man said through the door. He had a thick Cockney accent that Butterknife had never heard in person. "There's an emergency. Can you open the door?"

  "What kind of emergency?"

  "The life or death kind, boy! Just open the door!"

  Butterknife started on the locks.

  Just as he opened the door, Aida cut off. "Rebooting" appeared next to her name, along with all his other Nous apps. The green online indicator appeared in his vision along with his network strength, and a new voice sounded in his mind.

  Spencer pushed the door open the rest of the way, looking unnerved. Heavy bags weighed his eyes down and he smelled of sweat and alcohol.

  "Hey," Spencer said. "I didn't know what to do. You're the only person I could get to in time. Tell me your real name."

  Everything was happening so fast. Butterknife stood, mouth agape, covered in tea. The cleaner drone buzzed behind him.

  "Now!!"

  Butterknife tried to connect with Nous Telepathy, but it was offline. "Why do you want to know my real name?"

  "Because we are going to die if you don't!"

  "Why is my AI counting down?" he asked. He froze in realization. Oh my god, he thought. Oh my god.

  Spencer locked eyes with him. "Your AI? What? Focus, boy! This AI hacked the Nous net. It's already killed a bunch of people. Just tell me your fucking name!!"

  He thought, Jiem is in the Nous net. This was the start of the game. We are all going to die.

  Spencer grabbed his shoulders, shaking him hard.

  "Name!!!" Spencer screamed at him aloud, spittle hitting him in the face. The physical touch of someone brought him back to reality.

  His name. Right.

  "Charles Naifu," he said.

  "Charles Naifu, join!" shouted Spencer, and everything went black.

  A still graphic of zombies rushing towards a medieval looking city appeared with the word "loading" at the bottom, progress bar just next to it. Text scrolled in a marquee from the right side of his vision, saying:

  Tip! Resurrection scrolls are vital to gameplay. Collect as many as you can.

  The progress bar filled to 100% and the loading screen was replaced with the familiar sensation of being in VR. Music sounded, a symphony of violins and women singing in chorus. In his vision, a field of green grass appeared, peppered with trees on a wild rolling hill. The sun shone overhead, with two gigantic moons on the horizon. In the far distance, a city with large spires. Spencer stood in his same clothes as in reality, a white t-shirt and jeans, hardened face as he took in the scene.