Real Life

Mike looked at his watch. The seconds ticked away agonisingly slowly.  He checked his escape routes. All around him were enemies, he was completely surrounded. Almost every conceivable exit was a death trap. To escape, this would be about timing. He looked at his watch again. Soon.

He visualised the move, if he started too early his enemies would see where he was going and react. If he left it too late, he might miss his window of opportunity. Get ready. Check where everyone is, and where they are going. Focus.

Five…
Four…
Three…
Two…
“MIKE! Wake up!”

He started, jerking himself up from the desk. His limbs flailed wildly and he caught his hand on the edge of the desk. That hurt. His eyes ached in protest as his tired vision focused on his surroundings. Oh no. Not again.

“Mike, this is the third time in a week that you’ve fallen asleep in class.” His teacher, Mr McGonagal, looked very angry.
“I’m sorry, it’s just-“
“I know what it is, Mr Cayhill. If I recall correctly, we have already had this conversation with your parents. Too many late nights doing who knows what on the internet.”
“I haven’t, sir. Honestly I haven’t. I’ve stopped; it must just be left over tiredness.” Even in Mike’s head, that had sounded a feeble protest. Was that the best he could do? Damn, he was tired.
“Nice try. No, Mike, you’ll be seeing me after school. We’ll be bringing your parents, as well.”

A few hours later, after a disastrous meeting, Mike sat gloomily in the car on the way home. How could he get out of this? He’d said all the right things in the meeting. Yes, sir. No, sir. I do value school, sir. I’ll limit my time playing, sir. Go away, sir.

He got home, and eagerly ran upstairs and logged on. At least he was home in time for the move. For a week his guild had planned massive blob trip through the wormhole, and Mike was dammed if he was going to be the late one just for some teacher with a thorn in his backside. Five minutes to go. He checked the activity times for his guild mates and almost recoiled in horror. Five minutes to go and about 25% participation if no one logged in! No wonder the enemies were getting cocky, taking bold little snipes at his guild’s blob.

“Mike! What are you doing?” He heard his mum coming up the stairs and quickly switched to a new window, craftily disguised to look like research on osmosis. Thank God for that creaky third step. Yes, yes, mother. Please go away. I’ll be delighted to look at your poisonous kitchen slime some other time. Can’t you see I’m on a deadline? Bye, bye to you too.

So close. He had thirty seconds to go. He checked his watch, and worked out the exact second he would need to move. Ready, and, go! Done. He had fulfilled his duty to the guild once again. Shame it hadn’t resulted in profit for months.

He slept fitfully, waking every couple of hours to check on his fleet’s progress through the majestic instability in space known as a wormhole. At least, that was how he saw it in his mind’s eye. Mike had long ago decided that it was more fun to have a romantically warped image of the game’s mechanics rather than admit that it was a few ones and zeros flipping around. Those jerks on the forums were obviously not as dedicated to being the best as he was. When he woke in the morning, alarm timed to four minutes before his fleet landed, he saw that everything was pretty boring, just as it had been before the move. Some of the latecomers would be still in the wormhole for a few hours, but about 30% of the guild was landing within a few seconds of Mike’s own fleet. None were as close as him to the announced landing time though.

His day at school passed without incident for once. He managed to keep his eyes open, even through Mr McGonagal’s physics class. Oooh, you let a car roll down a ramp. How exciting. Yes, the forces are fascinating, especially friction. No, I don’t want to calculate it.

The bus home was painfully slow, the traffic unusually dense. When the bus reached his stop, Mike almost knocked people off in his haste. His computer seemed to take forever booting up. However, the wait was worth it. When he checked on the status of his blob, he could see incoming enemy fleets! About half an hour away! Finally, he would show why he was so dedicated to the guild. A quick analysis showed that there was not anywhere near enough enemy fleet to take out his guild’s mass of ships, gathered above Ceres536, and just waiting, primed for battle, to crush this feeble attempt at destroying them.

Mike started preparations. First, send his vulnerable ships on a long journey away. His recyclers were the most precious, get them to safety. Second, check the incoming fleet compositions. Are there any fleets suitable for his swarm of heavy cruiser? Yes, fortunately the enemy had a plethora of targets for Mike. The fools, didn’t they realise? Third, call his chosen targets on the guild board. No problems, while his guild had plenty of heavy cruiser fleets, Mike’s was by far the largest, fed by months of hitting small targets for little profit, but so often that he was able to keep his fleet growing. He fed it, nurtured it, helped it grow, bit by bit, and now it would reward him for that devotion.

Four minutes until contact with the enemy. No doubt, it was a good launch by the opposition. The gap between the first and last fleets was about 2 minutes, and it was no easy task to successfully organise thirty different people, all over the world to launch and land within such a short time window. But it was not good enough. Mike felt pumped, ready for battle. He could feel his heart racing, the adrenaline racing through his body. He felt like a Lion, roaming the planes of Africa, hunting small rodents to stay alive. The one day, the Lion sees a herd of gazelle running towards him, begging him to eat them. Far more than the lion needs, but he knows he will devour them all. Mike checked the incoming fleets. Three seconds until the Lion would feast on the poor little gazelle.

Two…
One…
Goodbye gazelle.

Mike clicked furiously, the pages of the game loading excruciatingly slowly. However, his screen displayed page after page of reports detailing his attacks. He looked with approval at each one. Within a few short minutes, the entire enemy fleet had been decimated; those left had fled out of the battlegrounds. Cowards. His guild message board was on fire, hundreds of messages every minute. Mike added his own opinions to fuel the celebratory mood and recalled his recyclers from their long trip. They would be needed now, billions of credits worth of debris littered the battlefield, waiting to be picked up and turned into more fleet. A job well done.

“Mike! Dinner!”
What the hell? Oh yeah, reality. That sucks.
“I’m not hungry, mum!” Mike was not in a mood to leave his guild mates and friends at this time, not after the glorious feeling of being part of something big. Odd how he found it tricky to call it a game, though.
“Not an option, mister! Get downstairs now!” Apparently his mum wasn’t in the mood to leave things alone either. Mike quickly checked the situation. His guild had nearly 4 billion credits worth of fleet sitting there, picking up debris. He would be fine to leave for an hour or so, maybe recoup some brownie points with his family. Mike was in such high spirits, he would probably be fine to listen to Mr McGonagal drone on about Newton’s Laws of Motion. Well, maybe. Let’s not get carried away.

Dinner was not the tense, nervous affair it usually was. Mike contributed to the conversations and instead of spending the time worrying about his fleet, bolting down his dinner and disappearing after five minutes, he stayed a talked to his family, safe in the knowledge that nothing bad could happen. He had won a great victory, and his guild would surely reach new heights, as the debris they collected would swell their fleets beyond the reach of any of the other guilds. Life was good.

After dinner, Mike checked what was happening. The jubilant atmosphere on the message boards was still prevalent and as Mike suspected, nothing had happened. His Lion was still there, crunching gazelle bones. He did a quick calculation and saw that he would still be picking up his share of the debris when he woke up the next morning. With that comforting thought in mind, he went to sleep, and didn’t wake up until morning.

When he awoke, he knew something was wrong. He had overlooked something. Several things. His instincts were telling him that he had missed something. Unfortunately, they were reticent about what those things were. As his computer booted up, he strained his brain trying to remember what his usual routine was when he made a hit.

Damn! He hadn’t checked enemy jump gates in the galaxy. Someone would have though. Surely? No guild leader would order a move to what could potentially be hostile grounds. Mike felt a sunken feeling in his stomach. They hadn’t realised the defeated enemy fleet was there, what else had they missed? Why was his computer taking so long? Memory cache failure? Dammit, he restarted the computer. Why now? Don’t you dare die on me now!

Damn! Less important, but he hadn’t checked to see how long the guild would take to collect all the debris. Mike’s share was big, what if other people had taken part of it, not killed as much, but fallen asleep and stole his share? Oh well, he would find out in a few minutes, if his computer would bloody well load. AH! Finally! Mike’s fingers sped across his keyboard as he typed in the url for the game. He loaded it up and logged in.

Oh no.

His private inbox had about ten new messages, and displayed the red light that indicated he had been attacked. Cold sweat broke out on Mike’s forehead as he gingerly opened his inbox. As he saw the first message he felt as if his heart had stopped. A cold feeling spread through his chest and he felt his entire body go limp. His energy drained out of him like oil from a punctured petrol tank. Or like blood from a wounded lion.

It was gone. It was all gone. His fleet. His precious fleet. His project for so many months, the fleet he had nurtured, fed and expanded, his lion he had grown from a cub, had been destroyed. He felt like crying, the coldness he felt when he first saw the news now became angry warmth that threatened to burst from his eyes like a watery fountain of grief.

No. Control yourself, you picked up debris, you have millions of cred-

Damn. He looked over the messages again, diverting his eyes from the details of the attacks, looking instead at the time. It had been thirty minutes after he went to sleep that his had been attacked. All that work, all that time, all that devotion to the guild and to his fleet, to the game. Funny now how ‘game’ was easier to say.

“Mike! Breakfast!”  His mum. Had she no respect? Had she no sense of personal space? This wasn’t the time for idiotic things like breakfast. Who the hell did she think she was? Didn’t she know how much this meant to him?

No. Mike stopped his angry train of thought, derailed by the realisation that he hadn’t really spoken to his mother, or anyone, really, for months. Of course she didn’t know. It wasn’t her game. It was his. It was his life, and had been for a long time. But it hurt too much. He couldn’t build another fleet, not after the first one meant so much to him.

“Coming, mum!” Mike closed the window, for once there was nothing he could do on the game, there was no need to wake up in the night and check on his fleet. There was no reason to play, really. Maybe he could enjoy things outside of the game. If he tried really hard, he might be able to get some friends, maybe even a girlfriend! Wow, that was a thought.

Goodbye, my brave lion. Thank you for everything.

He reached out, and switched off the computer, and ran eagerly downstairs to re-join real life, a comforting thought echoing behind his eyes, resounding through his brain.

No more of this game for me.

At least, not for a few days.