Ryu never knocked when he got home, preferring to open the door himself. It was faster, and he himself hated having to get the door for others.

“Ryu? Is that you?” shouted the voice of his mother.

In front of him appeared Caragh in her work clothes. She rarely changed, which, oddly, led him to wonder what she slept in at times.

“Yeah,” said Ryu, looking at Caragh’s clothes. “How was work?”

Sometimes he felt like he was coming home to a wife waiting to greet him, except his wife was actually his single mother.

“It was good… have you had dinner? I can cook you something.”

On the bright side, she could cook.

“Yes please.”

Ryu ate dinner alone, did the dishes and retired to his room. He liked his room, even though it was smaller than Ruri’s and Caragh's, it was his.

He placed his bag to the side and quickly changed into a shirt and boxers. Nothing was specific, it was always function over form in his eyes.

His computer was already on, sleeping, so a light tap on his keyboard was enough to wake it up. A quick check of his emails and his favourite subreddits, nsfw included, took a couple minutes, after which he grabbed his headset.

He didn’t put it on. The whole point of him reading all those coding guides was so he wouldn’t have to play.

Beep

He plugged the headset in and it beeped.

[User not detected] popped up on his monitor. The headset needed someone to be wearing it in order to login.

He checked his code again. He’d checked it hundreds of times, often revealing another bug or inefficiency which he had to stomp.

“Fuck it.”

He couldn’t find anything wrong, he hadn’t for weeks but had resisted the urge to run it. He didn’t have the luxury of a test environment, not for this. Either he’d immediately be red flagged or he’d do what no no one else had done before.

Everything was ready and compiled into a single file, he just had to run it.

“Go.”

The headset was resting on his desk, still idle, when he started it.

He’d taken his time with this, going so far as to implement a simple GUI for the hell of it. Had it introduced more bugs? Yes. But did it make him feel like some leet hacker? A little.

[Headset detected]

[Attempt link?]

[Yes/No]

Ryu didn’t give himself time to hesitate.

[Constructing artificial user.... complete]

[Injecting user profile…]

“Ryu!”

Ryu’s body shook at the sudden entrance of his sister's voice. Ruri was standing in the doorway.

“What?” said Ryu.

“Have you been in my room? I swear to god if you took my clothes-”

“Why would I take your clothes?!”

Ruri’s mouth flipped open but then shut itself.

“Whatever.”

The door slammed shut behind her, and Ryu let out a breath.

“Does she think I’m a fucking a pervert or something?”

Sure, he looked at porn, and he did dabble a little into wincest, but he never had her in mind. Those were fetishes, and everyone had them.

Beep

Ryu’s eyes jumped to his monitor.

[User validation complete]

[Connect to game server?]

[Yes/No]

“Holy shit. Did I do it?”

Ryu reached for his mouse and hovered over “yes”. As he’d programmed it, a tooltip popped up.

[If you are seeing this, you did it.]

“Oh shit.”

Ryu jumped out of his seat and ran around his room, punching the air as he went.

But he didn’t scream or shout in joy. Ruri would probably kick him if he ran around shouting “I DID IT I DID IT I DIT TIT!” like a kid high on C6H12O6.

When he finished his momentary celebration he seated himself again.

“Yes, I would like to connect.”

At times Ryu did wonder if he was different to other kids. Whether he was special. Did other people talk to themselves and sit in the dark in front of a computer all day? Probably, is what he believed as he clicked “yes” to connect to the game server.

[Establishing connection… complete]

[Logging in... complete]

[Loading objectives… complete]

[Task assigned from priority queue: “Level up”]

[Determining methodology…]

Something of Ryu’s was getting hard as he stared at the stream of text on his display. It just kept coming, as he’d programmed it to, and it was beautiful. The only thing which could’ve made it better was if he could fuck it, but he already knew that was a problem he’d be working on for the rest of his life.

As Ryu slept that night, he left the bot running, both as a test of how long it could last, and also as evidence for the following morning that he hadn’t gone mad.