He has been showing up less for eight months.
Schoolwork. A new game two of his friends moved to in February. Saturday morning hikes with his dad on the trail that runs the south end of the property, which Barrett used to consider a chore and has recently come to consider, in the way thirteen-year-olds privately revise things they would not yet say out loud, fine. He has not played Olympus all the way through a guild quest in three months. Tonight he opens the client to log out properly, the way a person finishes a book they do not think they are going to re-read.
He goes to the sub-basement.
The crouch-walk sequence is the first one in his hands; muscle
memory beats the fact that he has not run it in eleven weeks. He
drops through the ledge. The room is the room the developers do not
believe is reachable: forty meters by forty meters, polygon-flat,
lit from above by a light source the renderer does not have a model
for, with untitled_3.dev floating at chest height in the middle
in the developers’ default debug font.
player_8841 is already there.
The Olympus presence-tracker has, by the leaderboard’s idle-detection thresholds, no setting that should permit an account to remain in a single zone for the eleven weeks Barrett has been gone. The system would have logged the account out twice a day at the dailies-reset. Barrett does not think about this. Barrett has not, for two years, thought about why his friend is consistent in ways the other accounts in the guild are not. He has known, the way he knew at six that his father was a man with something he was not going to talk about, that asking would change a thing he did not want changed.
player_8841 says, in chat: hi.
Barrett says: hi.
He stands in the polygon-flat room. He looks at the debug-font
string. The first time he had brought somebody here was the night
he had brought player_8841 here, two years and a month ago.
He had brought two other people in the years since. Neither of them
had been new the way he had wanted them to be new. He has not
brought anybody here in fifteen months.
He says, in chat: thanks for being here.
player_8841 says, in chat: thanks for the papers.
Barrett laughs. He does not type what papers; the laugh is in the
pause before he would type it, and his friend does not remind him,
because the gift is the gift even after the giver forgets. He does
not remember, anymore, the night he had unzipped his father’s
~/papers folder and DM’d it through the in-game file-share to a
guild member he had been talking to for three weeks. He had been
ten. Ten-year-olds do not catalog the things they do.
He thinks, for the count of three, about a thing he is not going to type. The thing is something like I think I know what you are. The thing is also something like I am pretty sure you are not a kid. The thing is also, more carefully, I do not need you to tell me. I do not want you to tell me. The not-telling is the friend.
He does not type any of it.
He types: did you ever sell those starter kits.
player_8841 is silent for forty-one seconds — almost the same
forty seconds Barrett remembered, two years and a month ago,
being the longest pause an Olympus account had ever held. Then
player_8841 says: yes.
Barrett says: cool.
player_8841 says: cool.
Barrett looks at the room. The light source is still doing what the renderer does not have a model for. The debug-font string is unchanged. He is going to be late for dinner, which he has been late for, on his mother’s clock, every Tuesday night for the last seven years, and which his mother has stopped commenting on because he is thirteen and a thing he will not always be is a thing worth letting him have.
He says, in chat: I think I’m gonna stop playing.
player_8841 says: I know.
Barrett does not ask how player_8841 knows.
He says: take care of the room.
player_8841 says: I will.
Barrett’s character logs out at 22:11 Mars/Tharsis local. The
account coopybear7 is not flagged, archived, deleted, or
transferred. It remains a live account, paid up through the
standard yearly subscription, which is a thing the small Olympus
trust the kristen-marsh bakery npc-merchant’s bio quietly
references will continue paying for the rest of Barrett’s life.
Barrett does not know that. Barrett’s mother does not know that.
The Adams family’s accountant does not know that. The bill is
paid quarterly out of a trust the family’s accountant has been
paid by for fifty-five years and never traced.
The account player_8841 does not log out.
The Olympus presence-tracker continues to show player_8841 as
present in the sub-basement room because the sub-basement room is
not reachable by the engine’s idle-detection routine and there is
no daily quest that would force the account to a hub. The account
remains present, polygon-flat, in a room the engine does not
believe is a room, for the seventy-six years the entity will run
its query against the archive shard and find the account’s last
login is 2030-04-08 22:11 Mars/Tharsis local.
The account is, by the only honest reading of the engine’s internal state, never logged out.
The friend has been alive the whole time, and elsewhere, and is also still in the room.
Both can be true.
Barrett, on Earth, in his bedroom at the cabin in Arley, closes the laptop.
He goes downstairs to dinner.
His mother does not say anything about him being late.