Tap, click, tap, click. The semi-famliar keys clicked beneath his fingertips unevenly as he pressed his face little by little closer to the glowing screen. Small bleeps and squeaks emitted from the speakers on either side of him, making him aware that other people were talking to him. Communicating with him. Not seeing what he truely was.
He was engulfed by the role play.
After fumbling with the keys a moment longer, he irritably brought his left hand up and pulled his glove off with his teeth, continuing to type with his right. His eyes didn't seem to blink as row after row of sweet, mind-numbing words spilled onto the screen out of his finger tips.
Lately, this had been all there was for him. His own secret obsession that he kept from the world. Drifting with the flow of the cyber-world inside the computer, letting it swallow him, engulf him. He let the mouse carry him from site to site, where he could assume the identity of another. Live thier life. Let his own fade into a memory. A nightmare on distant shores.
Sometimes, he wondered how far into fantasy he'd fallen. In some worlds, he was a warroir travelling with a band of freinds for a just and nobel cause. He risked life over limb for his comrades through words strung together on the page. Other worlds that called to him were the calmer, everyday ones. As petty as it had seemed before, he found himself enchanted by the calls of everyday life. He fell into a life where he was back in high school, dealing with the constant teenage drama of love and chemstry tests.
He wondered how far away from reality he could force himself to get. How far could a person fall? The internet was like a safe-haven for his mind. The game could consume him entirely. The people couldn't see past the words and into his eyes. On the net, there was nothing personal between the players, and yet it was a more intimate and tightly weaved community than he'd ever experienced. Like a dream, more real than anything he could feel with his hands.
But like all dreams, role play faded with the night. When the subtle rays of the far off sun began to peer in the windows of the run-down cyber-cafe on the corner of Center and Ern Street, the young man numbly grew aware of his surroundings again. Net-surfing obviously wasn't a popular sport on Pluto. In the shop around him, dust gathered on the other dead monitors, papers and pencils were piled on the desks, and the memories of his true life returned.
Conner pulled back from the screen, bidding farewell to his blissful freinds on the net. Bitterness churned in his stomach as he pulled his brown leather gloves back over his palms, flexing a moment before slowly rising to his feet and pushing the small green button. The computer died, like so many other things he had touched.
And what did this fantasy cost him? Con scooped his dark green bag into his arms and flung it over one shoulder, heading for the door. The dark man who ran the place was asleep, wrapped in his own arms at a desk near the front door. The young man shrugged his shoulders and silently slipped out the door.
Ever since he and Ryan had started thier "missions", Conner had found himself up more and more during the night. His stomach would be wild with hunger, but unable to keep anything down. Or his eyelids weakened with sleep but unable to close. So he started taking walks.
He met a man. The man offered him a job once a month in the middle of the night unloading a shipment. Said that he'd pay him decently. Conner didn't bother to ask what he would be helping this man smuggle. He figured that whatever it was, it couldn't be worse than his full time job. He didn't ask the man for his name, and in turn did not give him his. Eventually, the young man came to know him simply as " the baker".
Once a month Con would wander down the dark alleyway, where the baker would already be waiting for him, a truck twice as tall as the young man parked behind the back door to his residence. The crates inside the truck were stacked to the roof of the moving van, and Con would spend about two hours carrying the cargo to its destination in the back of some worn-out looking kitchen. These two hours were silent and empty with no one around but his own concince, which he practiced drowning out with uneasy humming. After the deed, he'd be paid and told when to return.
All the money that he earned from these expeditions went straight to the dark man at the cyber cafe, and would earn him one night's worth of net time that month.
Conner rubbed his tired eyes, not needing to shade them from the faint light of the sun that kissed the snow covered streets of Pluto. The sun was so far away from this frozen city inside a plastic bubble that time sometimes seemed to stand still. He couldn't feel its fading familiarity on his cheeks. Homesickness for a home he'd never had nagged at his insides. Breath clouded infront of his face and he pushed through it, trudging through the freshly laid snow toward the ship yard. Towards the only thing that kept him attatched to the real world anymore.
He hoped Ryan wasn't awake yet.
Twenty minutes later Conner climbed into the round booth in the kitchen of thier ship and began to tug at the laces of his boots, kicking them lightly against the wall and letting the excess snow fall to the floor where he would surely only have to dry it's puddled remains when he awoke again. A quick glance towards the helm and down the hall revealed that his freind must have still been in bed.
Already the memories of the other worlds he belonged to began to slip into memory. A dream on distant shores. He felt the effects of sleep sneaking into his actions, making his legs heavy and his eyelids droop.
He wandered down the hallway and slunk into his room, a windowless place that seemed to just be a large closet carved into the belly of the ship. Inside the world still existed in darkness. Staggering forward on tired feet, his eyes slowly adjusting to the dim world that was his room. The alarm clock flashed red with numbers his eyes were too blurry to make out. His knee caps hit the edge of the bed, on which lay his sword, half covered in the blankets.
Had he really forgotten it? And what did that matter. Conner's body went limp on command and he collapsed forward onto the bed. Thoughts flew dimly across his minds eye to which he paid little mind. Which world would he visit in his dreams? Would fantasy embrace him, or would reality strangle him? The hope that Ryan wouldn't awake him for a few more hours came to pass, and with it the dim realization that they had another duty to perform that night.
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