WARNING: FICTION ALERT!

But if you want a pretty good short story, then please do read on.

When I was pre-pubescent I played World of Warcraft. I’m a little ashamed of it but there it is. Why deny the truth that I was that high-voiced kid. The guild only brought me along because getting forty people together to kill a giant black dragon was difficult. My qualifications were that I skipped my homework every night. I was always available.

Everybody remembers their first kiss. It usually doesn’t come in the form of a late-night instant messaging session. Now before you begin labeling me as anything more sad than a “WoW” player, hear the rest of my story. Sure, she had purple skin and long pointy ears framing her perfect hair. But those were traits she shared with every middle-aged man in the guild. That wasn’t what drew me to her. No, what I noticed about her was her voice; it was small in the way you’d expect a twelve-year-old girl’s voice to be. But it was booming like a warlord. Anytime she was in the chat, you knew it. Everyone knew it. She usually got muted within minutes of joining the chat. And every time she did, she would hop over to a private chat with me and we’d get lost in our messages for hours. You know, silly stuff, talking about how we hated our teachers or other preteen bullshit. Actually… I remember this one time, she told me that she had just got out of the shower and I ceased to be able to think about anything else for the rest of the night. I almost wiped us during the raid because I kept walking right into a room full of enemies. It’s funny how stupid twelve-year-olds can be

my parents figured out that I wasn’t using my computer time for the schoolwork I was telling them about. After the second report card with all “unsatisfactory” marks, they got rid of the computer. I was the only kid in my high school that didn’t have a computer at all. Parents, if you ever want to raise a social pariah in the digital age, look no further. After a while I stopped missing it as much. Though every now and then I would stop and think about her again. And you know what the worst part is? I never got to say goodbye. My dad came and took the computer while I was in the middle of playing. She said something about standing in the dragon’s fire and then my guild must’ve just heard shouting from my end. Then it went dark.

I got to college and was finally allowed to have a laptop. But I was on the pre-med track and barely had time to talk to people, much less start up a game that required a daily commitment. Besides, by that point I had forgotten the email address I even used for the game. There would’ve been no way for me to log back in. And every day I just kept telling myself that she probably doesn’t play anymore anyway.

And that brings me to here. I graduated last week at the top of the dean’s list. All my professors came to me to tell me that they would write a letter of recommendation to any medical school I wanted. The application date for those schools was over a week ago. I’m sitting on a couch. My computer is in front of me and I am watching as the installation progress slowly moves from left to right. A big snarling green man (an “Orc” if I can remember correctly) is staring at me from above the progress bar. I can tell that he’s warning me. “Go no further, and the dull ache will be as bad as it ever gets” he says. I contemplate this the whole time it’s downloading but I never close the window. And then it’s ready and I click on the big button that says, “PLAY”

The big swirling gate to Outland greets me like an old friend. They had reverted back to the old login screen for nostalgia’s sake. Blizzard’s new MMO had grown so successful in the year since it had been released that they were shutting down the servers for old dependable WoW. The subscriptions had already dwindled to a tiny fraction of their prime, but when Blizzard gave the one-month notice for the shutdown there was a mass exodus. I had read all about it, keeping abreast of the information, constantly debating with myself if now was the time to come back. That was one month ago. Today was the last day. I was ready to see the apocalypse come to my make-believe world.

I plugged in the username and password I had created mere hours before. My new name was “Shoshimaru989”. I just added some random numbers to the end of my old handle. I felt justified in that, safe with the knowledge that every twelve year old had an ill-informed japanophile phase those days. I chose for my avatar a buff dude with flowing blonde hair. I made him a warrior with sword and shield. It was the closest I could get to recreating the original Shoshimaru of years past.

Shoshimaru landed in the middle of a war-torn land. One that brought so many memories flooding back I almost couldn’t keep playing. I expected it to be more different, or for me to not care. But the second I saw that same armored man standing in front of that same stone cathedral from my childhood, I could barely handle it. I guess the human brain isn’t meant to experience perfect replicas of memory. When you go back to a location from your past in the real world it’s always different; more frayed at the edges. But this… Azeroth was almost exactly as I had left it. Almost as if I had never left at all. I could run up to the anthropomorphic cave-rats and they would still shout, “You no take candle!” with the exact same punctuation and grammar.

I didn’t spent any time idling, I just walked. It was enough for me to take in the sights and the sounds: The green patches of serenely flat grass, the wolves and thieves wandering aimlessly without anything to attack, the dirt road cutting through the pastoral emptiness. I came to an inn in the middle of the fields and it was supremely empty. Normally this area would be flooded with players. This tiny hamlet was where the humans used to come to convene. But now it was just me; a sightseer looking at a blacksmith without a market for his weapons. There was a war in the world but nobody left to fight it. It almost made Warcraft feel peaceful.

Those were my thoughts as I walked in to Stormwind, the great city and stronghold of the Human race. In the game that is. That seems like it would be everybody. But only some people choose to be human. That never made sense to me when I was younger. I took it as a point of pride that I was human. It felt like I was representing the species when I chose one of my own as my avatar.

At the gates of Stormwind there are humongous statues of heroes long passed. They used to seem like distractions from the hustle and bustle of people coming and going. I barely even looked at them. But now that I finally stopped to stare there was a grandeur about them. Especially in the silence of the empty city. With nothing else for contrast they almost came.

But then I saw it; the telltale purple text in my chat box that meant that somebody was talking to me. It said, “Look behind you.” I followed its directions to find her. And I mean her. Like, her her. And everything was all the same: The purple skin, the pointy ears, the long hair. The name was even the same, “Mooncutter” Apparently she had stayed using the same character all this time. Only now her level was some ungodly number up past one hundred. It made my single numeral look so puny.

“Moon,” I typed. I didn’t hit enter yet. There was so much I wanted to say. Where do you even begin when you haven’t talked to your childhood crush in a decade? Eventually I realized she was still just staring at me. I had to give her some confirmation that she had found the right guy. So I typed, “It’s me.” And sent it to her.

Before she had a chance to say anything in return though, the chat box was filled with big red letters. They said “THIS AREA WILL BE SHUTTING DOWN IN 10” Then another entry popped up that simply said “9”

Moon said, “run! lets meet up in ironforge” and she started running. Then she got on a griffon and I watched her fly away. But when I got to the griffon master, I realized that my starter character didn’t have any money, let alone enough to get a griffon to Ironforge. Then I saw the angry red letters say “1” and then “0” and everything froze. My character could still move but everything else was perfectly still. I walked through the city to see the crystalline remnants of it all. There were two children chasing each other but now the chase had been forcibly shut down. I remembered them from before; they were practically the only non-adults in the whole game. Now I guess there weren’t any. And then before I knew it the game disappeared. Not just in a blackout, and not in a stream of numbers like in The Matrix or anything. It was more ethereal, more surreal, more like fireworks as every texture and model flashed out of existence one by one until there was nothing left but me, floating in the void. And then the client crashed to my desktop and I was staring at my blue computer background.

I quickly restarted the game and logged back in. Shoshimaru was gone. He had simply been erased from the character select screen. I wasted no time in making a dwarf with the same name. She had said that she was going to Ironforge, the home city of the dwarves. Maybe it wasn’t too late to find her.

The second I spawned in the world I turned and headed for Ironforge. All of these paths were encoded in my brain. I barely had to think at all to know exactly which direction the giant steel castle was. All of those late nights came rushing back. When I should’ve been doing homework and I instead was creating my 7th dwarf Paladin out of boredom. I walked into the entryway of the towering fortress and saw nobody. That was as to be expected. I wound my way through the passages until I reached the main room of Ironforge; which was the forge that the city got its name from. It was a giant pool of molten fire that poured from dozens of feet in the air and filled the whole room except for the paths that the players could walk on. And true to her word, she was right there. Standing in front of the fires and the dwarf smiths who were working their infinitely looping toil animation.

I said, “Moon” only to have it drowned out by “THIS AREA WILL BE SHUTTING DOWN IN 30” Then a “29”

She turned around and ran for the griffons again. But she stopped when she saw me. “they are shutting down the eastern kingdoms first. we have to go to kalimdor. make an elf. i will meet you at the starting area.” Meanwhile I was trying to type out my home address. I didn’t know what that would do. Maybe she would write me a letter, or even come find me. But no matter what, at least then she would have a piece of the real me. It would officially stop being the case of my imaginary girlfriend.

She got on a griffon though, so when I did hit enter, all that came out was, “477 East Rutger streeWAIT” and she didn’t even see that because she was already flying away.

And I was alone again with the big red “10”. I could’ve logged out before it happened. But I wanted to see the spectacle. For the most part it was exactly the same as before. The only major difference is that at the end of the crash the big stream pouring into the forge stuck around for a bit. It wasn’t pouring any more, it was just a big solid pillar of flame that towered over me. And then I was back to the finality of my desktop.

This time I made an elf. He was tall and handsome. I gave him a trimmed beard; green, to match her hair. And when I finally logged in I saw her right in front of me. Something was wrong this time. There weren’t any red letters crowding up the chatbox this time, but that’s because there wasn’t a chatbox at all. The entire user interface was gone. They had shut it down. Which meant that there was no way to talk to her, no way to kiss her, no way to tell her that I hadn’t meant to go away. The only things we could still do were move and jump. So that’s what we did. The two of us moved around each other constantly jumping. I did it to let her know that I was still there. I can only hope that she shared our bouncy dance for the same reason. And so we hopped around like idiots, just waiting for the digital world to end.