My wife thinks the world has ended. She was certain we'd been forgotten. Now she puts her faith in me to come up with something. I don't know if I'm succeeding. I know I'm pushing myself beyond all limits. My heart could fail or I could forget to breathe. All these things are easily forgotten when the time comes.
I have rigged a system which I hold in my left hand while I'm interfaced: two metal balls I must keep revolving. If I should stop twirling the balls, a mild electric shock cuts through the gel, killing the bacteria and severing the connection.
I have managed to get my time in the system up to about five minutes of real time, not that the eternity of my experience can be put into numbers.
Our son appears to have come away from his ordeal uninfected. We have that at least. None the less, I've made great strides deciphering the hindu zombie fever. I haven't the cure yet, but I can intuit how close the cure might be. A few more sessions and I'll have it.
My son's character in "Claw Hammer" now has six arms and enough horns to wrap into a crown. Nearly every part of him might be detached and used to some advantage: spying, unlocking, encrypting, decapitating. He has reached an absurd level of detail and the very act of walking has grown grotesque. He has a droopy gross belly from eating the dead and rides upon a butterfly when he needs speed, a wheel when he needs to shatter, all fours for the fun of it.
His friends are all gone now. Though he has dodged the illness as yet, perhaps they have not. Perhaps their disembodied spirits roam the earth still, applauding his pixelated heroism. What is anything worth anyway?
I've begun to lose track of the value of things. The dullness of life has tarnished all the old charms. Watching my son play his game and watching my wife paint are the last two wonders of the world.