Young Writers Society

I'm bored. So bored. So I wrote this.

I see this going somewhere in the near future, so if it ends all unsatisfactorily, I apologise. There might be more in the works.

There is a boy, leaning on the edges of the realities, both virtual and otherwise. He is a ghost. He is a shadow. He watches the game. The game tore lives apart. It brought people together. It was a way of life, and it could lead to your death.

But what was it?

Its name was MIRG, or, to be precise, Marble Industry’s Real-world Gaming. On the street, it was called Merge. The game brought new meaning to the words 'virtual reality'. So much so that the fine line between the simulated and the physical worlds was blurred. You could die in the game. But you could live too, by solving puzzles, studying pictograms, and learning new things. There was only one problem for the children: no one under eighteen could play.

This law had been passed a solid three years after MIRG had been created, once a boy had been caught in a bad fight and when his parents went to get him out of the game, they found he was dead. Brain dead. You see, the Connector that plugs you to the game is attached to your brain, the parietal lobe being the most important, and the brainstem. The parietal lobe is the part of your brain that detects pain, pressure, your sense of touch. This means that if hurt in the game, you would actually feel it in your real body.

To do this kind of immersive play, the MIRG system uses a satellite to transmit the game. Its only job is to send images and stimuli to the player’s brain in order to give them a more interactive experience, and it does just that, in the whole sense of the word. It conveys signals to the brainstem, into the parietal and occipital lobes, allowing the player to ‘see’ or ‘feel’ objects in gameplay. Unfortunately, because the satellite cannot control the amount of stimuli it forwards into the brain, it can send too much, and it could overload the brain and, naturally, the brain would shut down.

Despite these rules, it soon became clear that there were dissenters in the groups of younger adults who were not yet eighteen, sneaking on MIRG connections illegally. They were known as Anomalies, and were active as rebels against the MIRG system. Because of this, security was beefed up, and yet the Anomalies still found a way on, protesting their rights for the system. Riots broke out across the entire system. But the battle was brought about by the game itself.

MIRG was not intended as a gaming system, despite the word 'gaming' in its name- that was only put there to deceive. MIRG was really supposed to be a high-tech way to train soldiers. As cliché as it sounds, these soldiers were deadly in the wrong and right hands. Soon came the protests. Fights broke out once the immoral techniques leaked. Bigger battles began to wage. It was the Anomalies, the death of the boy, and the fights that triggered the beginning of the new age.

War had been looming for months by that time, and the first casualty was a Dr. Stephan Lukyan who had worked previously for MIRG in the past. He had long since retired to care for his son after his wife suffered from an unfortunate accident with the system. Dr. Stephan stepped out of his office one night and was shot twice by a Browning 9mm semi-automatic pistol. The perpetrator was never caught, but Dr. Stephan was the first casualty of the war that began the next day and went on for an exact total of five years. His son was three when it happened, and disappeared. Or so we’d like to think.

As much as we try to push it to the back of our minds, as much as we think it should stay out of sight, it cannot. Technically, he doesn't exist. Not really. But he is the one who started this war, and why not begin with his story?

Hey, what the hell.

We've got time.