Image by ANDRI TEGAR MAHARDIKA from Pixabay

Suki tore into the box with wild abandon. “Oh sweet!” she cried as she saw what was inside.

“Happy birthday, Su.” Her father smiled. He kissed her on the forehead. “I’ve got to run to the lab. We’re in the middle of a project and they absolutely would not let me take today off no matter how hard I begged.”

“The fact they let you come in late so you could have cake and presents with me is still great, Dad,” Suki told him, hugging him. “Don’t get blown up.”

“No promises.” This was their usual way of saying goodbye. Her father worked in a very dangerous experimental lab and getting blown up by something was just one of the job hazards. With her mother dead and her grandparents living in a home, if Suki’s father died, at sixteen, she’d have to drop out of school and go to work. She didn’t want to do that, so she hoped he would be safe.

Suki waited until he was gone to pull out her birthday present. It was one of the new Altered Reality sets from Dynatek. AR was supposed to be better than VR. VR just let you see what was around you and interact with it. AR let you experience everything as if you were living it. There were some warnings about how dangerous that could be. If you died playing a game, the trauma could actually kill you in the real world. So far though no one had actually died, so the warnings were blown off.

Suki finished her homework first and then set up the AR rig in her bedroom. She powered it on and selected one of her favorite games from the list of options it gave her. She played for several hours, enjoying the feel of the breeze on her skin, the vibration of the sword in her hands, wincing as she got hit several times by enemies. Finally, she shut it off and went to bed.

The next morning she noticed her father wasn’t back from the lab yet. She frowned. That was unusual. Maybe they had him working late. She ate breakfast and went to school. She got through her classes and went home. She found she had a message on the comm from the police.

Frowning, she accessed the message. “Ms. Suki Nagato, we regret to inform you that there was an explosion at the Fukohime Laboratory last night. Everyone inside was killed. Your father was listed as one of the employees working in the lab and while we are waiting for full genetic confirmation, it is believed he is one of the casualties. We are sorry for your loss.”

Suki slammed her fist into the button on the comm unit. Tears streamed down her face. Her father was dead? All those jokes they’d shared about him not getting blown up, and then the lab actually blew up? Suki ran to her bedroom and threw herself onto her bed and sobbed into her pillow.

It was midnight. All she could hear was the sound of the air conditioner. There was no television. There was no radio. There was nothing to remind her of her father’s presence. A light blinked on her AR unit. Slowly she got up and put it on. She found a new game had been uploaded in an update that morning called “The Abyss.”

Needing a distraction, she tapped the game and accessed it. She explored the new world for a few hours and then, as she was getting ready to log off, the ground crumbled beneath her. She fell into a dark abyss. She kept falling and falling. Is this what death feels like? Suki wondered. The darkness swallowed her and the fall never ended.

________________________________________________________________

When Suki failed to report to school on the third day, and all comm calls went unanswered, the authorities were sent to check on her. They found her lying on the floor of her bedroom, her AR unit still active. Her heart had stopped and she was dead. There was no sign of what game she was playing because she was in the menu. Once an investigation was done, it was believed that her heart had given out under the strain of losing her father. No blame was placed on the AR unit and the incident was closed.