The notification sound from his phone sliced through the graduation party noise like a hot knife through butter. Chronicles Medieval was calling—his crops needed harvesting.
"Are you seriously playing that farming game right now?" Jessica laughed, her words slightly fuzzy from champagne. "We just graduated, Marcus! Live a little!"
Marcus looked up from his phone screen, where pixelated wheat swayed in digital fields. Around him, his Stanford Computer Science classmates were celebrating their freedom from four years of academic hell. The restaurant buzzed with talk about job offers at tech giants, startup pipe dreams, and gap year adventures across Europe.
He should've been celebrating too. His offer from Google was sitting in his inbox, waiting for his John Hancock. Six figures, stock options, the whole California dream served up on a silver platter.
Instead, he felt empty as a busted piggy bank.
"Just wrapping up this harvest," he mumbled, fingers flying across the screen. The familiar rush hit him as golden coins poured into his virtual bank account. Level 847. Three years playing this ridiculous mobile game, and he was probably in the top 1% of players worldwide.
"Dude, you're totally hooked," Mike said, sliding into the booth next to him. "When's the last time you did something real? Like actually got your hands dirty instead of playing in virtual dirt?"
Marcus's thumb froze over the screen. When was the last time? Back home in Ohio, maybe, helping his mom with her tiny garden behind their cramped apartment. Before Dad bailed. Before everything went to hell and he'd buried himself in code and fantasy worlds where he could control every damn thing.
"Chronicles Medieval is way more complex than you think," Marcus shot back. "The resource management algorithms alone—"
"Nobody gives a crap about algorithms right now!" Jessica snatched his phone, holding it for ransom. "You're brilliant, Marcus. You could build the next Facebook, cure cancer with AI, change the freaking world. But you're wasting your brains on farming fake vegetables!"
The irony hit him like a brick wall. Here he was, valedictorian, master of algorithms and data structures, and his crowning achievement was a virtual farm that produced jack squat. No real food, no actual impact. Just numbers floating around in some server farm.
"Maybe I like fake vegetables," he said, reaching for his phone. "They don't let you down like people do."
Jessica's face went soft. "You can't keep hiding forever. I know the divorce was rough, and your dad—"
"Don't." Marcus's voice carried enough ice to freeze hell over, making the whole table go quiet. His parents' train wreck of a split had happened right before senior year. Dad running off with his secretary, Mom's meltdown, those 3 AM phone calls when she'd hit the bottle again.
Yeah, fake problems were a hell of a lot easier than real ones.
"Look," Mike said, treading carefully, "we're all hitting up that new club downtown. No phones allowed inside—that's their whole thing. Come with us. Just for one night, be here in the real world."
Marcus stared at his reflection in the phone's black screen. Hollow eyes, skinny from too much caffeine and not enough real food, skin ghostly white from dodging sunlight for years. When the hell had he turned into this guy?
"Fine," he said suddenly, shoving the phone in his pocket. "One night. But if this club blows, I'm going home to tweak my crop rotation."
The cheer from his friends actually made him grin. Maybe Jessica had a point. Maybe it was time to get a life.
Three hours later, Marcus was crossing the street at Market and 5th, his head still pounding from crappy club music and even worse small talk. His friends had all hooked up with other graduates, leaving him to walk home solo—which, honestly, he preferred anyway.
The light was green. He had the right of way.
The red pickup barreling through the red light at 60 mph had different ideas.
In that split second before impact, Marcus's final thought wasn't about his family, his future, or the life he was about to lose.
It was about Chronicles Medieval.
About how he'd never find out what happened when you unlocked every territory expansion. About virtual crops he'd never harvest and digital animals he'd never raise.
About how he'd spent three years building a perfect world he could run, only to get steamrolled by a real world that didn't give a damn about him.
The truck's grille filled his vision like the jaws of some metal monster, and Marcus's story ended the way most stories do—badly, suddenly, and with a mountain of unfinished business.
But sometimes, the universe has a twisted sense of humor.
Sometimes, dying isn't the end.
Sometimes, it's just the opening move in a whole different game.