A woman plays her game to the very end

1.

I look horrible. I only realised that when I switched on the camera. I should have combed my hair. I haven’t been eating enough lately and I’m pale. But luckily, this is not about how I look.

Many people have left us. Mainly young adults and nuclear families from the upper middle class. Anyone who was able to, and anyone who knew how to do it. I wasn’t even aware that the transition was possible. When Viber came out, my daughter installed Viber for me. When WhatsApp came out, she installed WhatsApp for me. When WhatsApp was boycotted, she installed Signal for me. She installed Telegram and Zoom for me, then removed Zoom and installed Jeetsy, and then she installed Discord! I thought, this is how it would go on, she would always install something new and then she would communicate with me via that very channel. That minimum of a parent-child relationship.

But life has never been predictable.

Within a year, my daughter has gradually drifted away from me, and now she hardly ever contacts me. Right now she lives somewhere else, in a sterile flat, where she can have a better life. Our Restworld feels irrelevant and abandoned. From my window I can see a decaying city. Decapitated pigeons lie on the streets and the layer of rubbish has become so dense that you no longer can tell where exactly the roads run. Every day I see a disgusting structure in the distance, a huge bulky piece of flesh moving forward and getting bigger. What is it? I don’t even dare go out to examine it. We have been left with rubbish and climate catastrophes. What was left to us is nothing but dirt, poverty and chaos, everything that does not fit into the perfect billboard life, disease, death and this cable tangle that I’m trying to untangle. Three hundred times I brought my daughter to the kindergarten and picked her up from the kindergarten. Twelve thousand times I had to comfort her, 500,000 times I fed her, 1,000 times I praised her silly drawings, 2,000 times I wiped her bottom, what felt like three  million hours I spent with her in the boring playground or in front of boring cartoons. All to now avail. So that now she can represent a compulsively neat version of herself in a staid housing complex. I don’t even know where her body actually is. She keeps sending me pictures of “herself” laughing into nothingness on her terrace. And screenshots of her boyfriend from behind, wearing a suit.

Photo: My daughter’s boyfriend and his colleagues in suits from behind.

Now put on your glasses and pick up the controllers. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you can try and find someone who is familiar with the technology. Back then, I managed to get hold of the weird neighbour’s son in the corridor. Armin. I know him from the old days: being intelligent, white as chalk, depressed, he obviously had many nervous breakdowns. Polite, although somehow perverted, Armin knows his computers. A real human being. I would like to grasp this opportunity to thank him and his colleagues. They made the game mode in the virtual housing complex Eagle Hills accessible for us, among other things because they find it unacceptable to pay for any VR nonsense.

Make sure you don’t bump into the furniture or the walls. This can happen quite easily.

Now that I have put on the glasses, it immediately doesn’t matter what I look like. I look for the controllers. To start with, place the controllers in front of you, then put on the glasses. But where is the table? Okay. We need to check that everything fits and that we are standing straight. Find the center of your body. If you continue to play uncentred, the real body will tense up and you may start to feel sick. You don’t notice it at first.

It’s like sitting on a cold floor: the moment you notice it, it’s already too late.

It never rains over the housing complex. For it to rain would be impossible. The day is always beautiful. The sun rises. The sun sets. The sun rises. The sun sets. The sun rises. The sun sets. The sun rises. All the cars are new and going in the same direction. Cycle paths lead nowhere. People are sitting in cafés, but they are not consuming food or drinks, their tables are empty. Many of them are just waving, to nobody in specific. In the shop, the same satisfied customer is always laughing. The woman in the window keeps her hands on her face, and when we zoom in, it becomes clear that she has three hands clasped around a cup. The woman with the buggy is walking straight towards the wall. The lawn next to the road looks like it’s in a painting, the grass doesn’t move and looks like a drawing. The two-dimensional groups of teenagers meet each other, some of them are standing firmly on the ground, some are floating. A woman in an elegant dress is hurrying somewhere with a purse in her hand. A few metres further on, she is back again, in the same dress, striding in the other direction. Well-trained men in suits hold private conversations at street corners. The railing by the river is decorated with flowers. I wish that were possible in our world too. In our world, everything lovely is immediately destroyed. In our world, things and people grow old and rot, or they are broken or destroyed. Later in time we could think about how the Restworld could be repaired. Again, we see the woman who earlier hurried twice in two different directions with her purse, and right now she is striding towards the fashion shop. A boy with a camera takes pictures of people in a random moment of their life consumption. They look down from the terraces and laugh.

The higher the terrace, the wider the smiles.

The happier the individual human being. According to this logic, the most balanced people live on the 20th floor. They are the ones who have won, provided that this is a game for them. Supposedly they have parties around the golden rooftop pool on the 20th floor, supposedly you can’t even get up that high with the simple VR glasses. Allegedly, only one important person lives on the entire 20th floor. But it’s hard to find out anything and be sure about it. The rich people from above keep themselves undercover. Nothing is known about them, and vice versa, the lower, the more deprived the people are, the more explored they are. I suspect that I am one of those who are very easy to track.

(…)

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