David’s accident came as quite a shock. We played CoD every weekend, and he and I had just completed our competitive placement matches the previous night. We played a damn good game, too, each placing in the top ten thousand players worldwide. David was a few years older than me, and remembered cutting his gaming teeth on old VR shooters like Halo Dive and Battlefield 6. He was my cousin, but a pretty distant one. We met at a family reunion one year and just sort of clicked over our mutual love of shooters. I had accepted truVR as a matter of course, having grown up with it, and was puzzled how anyone could have found a game fun where you couldn’t actually feel the sun’s heat and smell the gunpowder as the wind carried it past. Apparently people played games like that for decades, though. Gaming was even popular before regular VR became consumer available. According to David (and of course old books and movies) people used to play AAA games on screens. Can you imagine? I mean, I enjoy the odd mobile game, but back then phones didn’t even have hologram projection…

Anyway, I’m sure you’ve heard the same from some older brother or friend. The reason I bring it up is to show how into games and gaming history David was. Whenever he learned something new (Hey, apparently in 2015 Hideo Kojima and Guillermo del Toro almost made a Silent Hill game together. How cool would that have been?) I’d be the first to hear about it, and likewise whenever David played a new MMO or shooter I’d be the first person asked to join his newest (and always short-lived) guild.

I never heard about Bug Hunt from David. By the time I found out, it was too late to do anything.

On May 3rd, 2036, Aunt Luci called to inform me in a voice barely comprehensible through sobs that David was in an accident which had rendered him comatose.

Not a traffic or workplace accident, but one which happened while my cousin was playing a video game.

***

I hugged Aunt Luci as I stepped into her house, tilting my head to plant a kiss on her gray-haired head. I had grown quite a bit in my teen years, and I now towered over the old lady I’d used to think of as a severe giant. Now I couldn’t see her as anything more than a grieving mother. “I’m sorry,” I said. “Anything I can do, just say the word.”

“Thank you,” she whispered, embracing me even more tightly. “I’ve never understood the appeal of these things, but I didn’t know they were dangerous.”

They weren’t supposed to be, of course. Aside from some old, crappy anime and books involving getting killed by your video games, nothing of the sort had ever happened in real life. Early in truVR’s life-cycle there was a lot of debate as to the safety of a signal which could directly stimulate a player’s nerves. Eventually it was decided the FCC would regulate a specific data service which game servers could tap to stream prefabricated nervous responses to truVR clients. It was very costly, but very safe. Client-side nervous responses were strictly illegal, and even when server-driven some things like sexual stimulation were never made available to developers at all.

In short: truVR games were designed in the platform’s infancy to be as safe as could be. If David’s “accident” had occurred while he was playing one, something was very wrong.

Aunt Luci showed me David’s room. Despite being 26, four years older than myself, David hadn’t moved out of home yet. His father had died some years ago, and he was the closest family his mother had left. Well, emotionally. Myself and a couple other cousins lived within a half-hour’s drive, but it’s not as though we were particularly close with Aunt Luci. I’d been gradually adopted into the close family as David and I did all our online adventuring together, but that was about the extent of it. That Aunt Luci had called me instead of a relationally closer relative said a lot.

David’s PC was a small, black, matte-finished cube with a pair of blue LEDs signifying upload and download speeds were normal. The rest of his room was very tidy, unlike mine—His bed was made neatly, a pair of cedar bookshelves housed a smart lineup of scifi and fantasy classics, and a single shelf above his desk held an assortment of gaming collectibles.

The only things out of place were the desk chair fallen onto its side and the wireless truVR headset and electrode bubbles scattered across the floor. I knelt and picked up the headset, noting the crack in its slick exterior where it had collided with one of my cousin’s bedposts. “How long ago was the... accident?” I asked, turning to my aunt.

“Six hours ago,” she said quietly. She hung back in the doorway, hand covering her mouth. The poor woman hadn’t even picked up the fallen furniture and gear. She was a mess.

I carefully righted the fallen chair and returned David’s headset and electrodes to their charging cradle, then picked up the small PC and carried it with me as I approached the doorway. “Is it all right if I take a look at this?” I asked gently. Aunt Luci nodded and looked away as I led her down the hall, quietly closing the door to David’s room as we left. “You can stay with me tonight,” I continued. “And then tomorrow I’ll drive you over to the hospital. Does that sound okay?”

“Thank you,” she said again, and I smiled as I led her outside to the car. Or, at least, I smiled on the outside. Inwardly I was reeling. David’s truVR headset was still on when I picked it up. One of their most basic safety features disconnected a fuse if the headset was ever forcibly removed. That was a safety feature I had thought built into the OS.

Either there was some physical flaw in David’s truVR hardware, or my cousin had been tampering with the basic functionality of a tool capable of interfacing with the human brain. A device capable of transmitting sight, and smell, and pain.

What were you doing? I asked my comatose cousin lying motionless in a hospital twenty miles away. And why didn’t you tell me about it?