AFK

“Hey – yeah you – I’ve got a quest for you.”

Hogar the Barbarian stood by his shop, speaking to Sexypigeon69. Sexypigeon69 was a level 90 sorcerer, the maximum level allowed back in 2017, when Sexypigeon69 left his apartment to answer the doorbell and was abducted and taken to a blacksite, never to be heard from again.

But even as the user behind the avatar Sexypigeon69 disappeared in the real world, Sexypigeon69 lingered in Torgaroth. The game grew in size and scale, the world expanding logarithmically, fed by revolutionary quantum servers and the insatiable excitement of the game playing public, which was, increasingly, nearing 100% of the human race.

In this gigantic universe, the original game world was lost in time. Users like Sexypigeon69, left logged on for decades, were not exactly common, but also not unheard of. Now and again there would be a story about lost avatars discovered in the far reaches of the world.

But Sexypigeon69 was farther than anyone had ever been found. The world had moved so far beyond him that it had begun to degrade.

At first is was subtle, striations of unprogrammed color, random pixels appearing on Hogar’s face, the wooden slats of his shop. But as the years went on and the world iterated, the graphics engine expanding inexorably, the artifacts increased in severity.

Hogar’s face would morph at bizarre angles, like a balloon filled with fluid, squeezed at random points. After five years his shop began to transform, its walls taking on surreal shapes, bizarre geometric anomalies. Ten years in, and the plant life and roads began swimming in place, donning aberrational textures from other in-game entities. The townsfolk’s faces became malformed, like the flayed skin of another face had been draped over their own.

Now and again a monster would walk through the village, its terrifyingly amorphous body shifting and swelling, spasming offshoots of polygons. Its blows and bites did nothing to Sexypigeon69, who was too high level to be hurt by such a weak monster. Eventually the town guards raced in to fight, their bodies jolting around in insane bursts of speed and color, extending for meters in the direction of their movement, stretching kaleidescopes of strangeness.

Twenty years after Sexypigeon69 went AFK, the fundamental laws of the world no longer applied. Hogar floated, as did everything else, in an endlessly iterating morass of fractals, the entities of his store, and the guards, and sexypigeon69 himself, in constant visual flux, resembling more roughly spherical masses of undulating body parts than bipedal forms.

Even as the universe collapsed into entropy, silently stranded, millions of digital miles from any other human user, Sexypigeon69 remained perfectly still. The gaseous people-clouds that had been the AI guards would periodically float over, a freakish conglomeration of feet and hands, and enter into a mind bending dance of violence with a local imp or level 3 bear cub – all sharp corners and snouts.

All the while, and still today, Hogar the Barbarian, now a formless heap of faces and eyes, repeats himself every 5 minutes, triggered by the proximity to a player’s avatar:

“Hey – yeah you – I’ve got a quest for you.”

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