As he lay on his bed, he snored obnoxiously, but remained blissfully oblivious to this as he slept. Pale skin clung tightly to his arms, revealing thin veins and frail bones through his gown. He had lived his entire life in that bed. He played a video game every once in a while, but sometimes was dragged off as his blood pressure got too high.

His eyes slowly cracked open, a blank expression becoming one of confusion, his eyes darting around as if to confirm where he was., then fatigue, then the normal grief and sadness. He was driven insane by the incessant beeping that just wouldn’t stop, as the heart monitor’s constant drone perpetually continued. He watched as a man dressed in a white coat came into his room, glasses glinting with the pale, almost sickening light of the ceiling bulb. He grumbled as the man took a long, almost unnoticeable needle from the boy's arm, taking the bag from the stand and replacing it with a new one, one filled with a pale yellow fluid.

He winced as the stabbing pain shot through his system like an electric shock, firing pain from his elbow into the rest of his body, whiting out his senses for just a fraction of a second.

He didn’t speak, nor did the doctor. They were used to this routine – the man came in, replaced the piece of metal in his arm that perpetually injected a foreign chemical into his bloodstream, and walked out. The boy in the bed gave up on human interaction. He had something they could only describe as a “weak constitution.” They said this, but he knew it was because they had no idea what it was that was eating away at his body by the minute.

It all started when he was just 8. He was eating the same old boring lunch that his parents packed for him every day – it was a juice box in his “favorite flavor” of apple, which he despised, but never complained about because it would be inconvenient. With that juice box was a plain half of a peanut butter and jelly – extra crunchy peanut butter with raspberry jelly on half of a slice of processed, chemical-filled white bread. It all had the same consistency to him – it was almost like a paste that was formed into the shape of something people dared to call a sandwich. All of a sudden, his face fell straight into it, catapulting jelly everywhere around him in a 2-foot radius. For a minute, the kids all laughed, thought it was a comical scene out of a cartoon. However, after he didn’t sit up, everything went sour quickly, and he never darkened the door at that school again.

Nobody could figure out what happened. He didn’t regain consciousness for several days, and when he did, his skin had lost all color, and had become a ghastly, translucent pale – one that left him looking almost like a cadaver.

He was born into an average family. His dad made a nice six figures, his mom loved him and doted on him every minute she was with him. Eventually, though, this much failed to sustain him. His father struggled to make the money required to continue the expensive and experimental treatment that he had hardly even been convinced to agree to. The stress got to him, and… he broke down. He had a stroke, was dead before paramedics ever reached the house. His family fell apart, as his mother struggled to find employment enough to sustain her son’s treatment and her daughter’s college education. Her end was different – unable to cope with the family breaking apart, she was found dead in the one-room apartment she had after selling the house for treatment, it was ruled a suicide. Gunshot wound through the brain stem, death followed instantly. The scene was gruesome, and ever since he heard the news, the boy was never the same.

He refused food; it got to the point that his doctors put him on a nutrient injection to stop the atrophy of his muscles. He became unresponsive, to the point that doctors couldn’t even ask him how he felt. When he was in a good mood, he might give a response – an incredibly hostile listing of the events since his childhood that led to his entire life’s collapse. The immense guilt that followed left the doctors only able to apologize profusely, as they had nothing to refute. Everything he stated was fact. They started bringing in shrinks from across the region to try to find out just what could be done to help the boy’s emotional state. All of them said there was nothing left that they could do, and all that was left was for time to take its ruthless, fateful, deadly course. The boy’s life expectancy was little more than 3 years, and it would be a miracle for him to live another 5 to reach the age of 20.

Empire was a VRMMORPG – a game with a revolutionary system that simply had to have a needle directly injected into a nerve ending to create an immersive universe nothing like one people would find on a seemingly archaic system like a PlayStation 5. It was released on October 12, 2026, a date to celebrate the birthday of the company Utopia, Ltd. It was an ironic name, but one that would go down in history as one of the great innovators of the technology of virtual reality. Today, the boy’s own system arrived in its needlessly large box filled with needlessly large amounts of packing peanuts. His doctors set it up without a word, and he booted the game himself.

The game gave a single line as it booted up.

"If you had the chance, would you turn to a new life?"