FAREWELL, GOLDIE

TW: This story tackles pedophilia. No actual molestation is shown, but I recognize this to be an extremely heavy topic. If you anticipate it could upset you, please sit this one out.

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FAREWELL, GOLDIE

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On the fourth day, God created high speed low-latency connection through intercontinental cable, and it was good.

I plug in the headset as soon as I’m home. My computer begins puffing as Virtual Exp boots up. The game slams the countdown in my face, but I don’t need the reminder. My online circles couldn’t talk about anything else.

The servers are going to be decommissioned in three days. The company maintaining them turned a deaf ear to our pleas. “Please keep the servers up,” we cry, again and again. “It’s just not profitable anymore, you guys,” the company answers.

The game loads up.

Goldie, forever blissfully unaware, is playing dress-up with some dolls in a virtual recreation of my living room. All the furniture, none of the 10-day-old pizza boxes. I stare at Goldie’s locks, watching her play. Virtual Exp stores individual personality routines for each character you purchase, so she acts like a girl her age.

Some evenings, that’s enough. I just look at her simulated life without making my presence known. But now, with the three-day countdown looming over me, it feels like an exercise in anticipated grief. Goldie makes her three dolls sit in a circle, forgets what she wanted to do with them, and starts fidgeting with one of her striped socks.

My online friends are downright degenerate. They download new models and new personalities every week, sometimes every three days. They brag about body counts and leave you in the dark. They mod in pain-simulating filters and patch their models with fear recognition.

The unspoken rule of the V-Exp community is to never talk about things related to “meatspace.” But sometimes, it hits you right there—the possibility that some of those motherfuckers are talking about real kids.

I walk over to Goldie and sit near her.

“Oh, it’s you,” she says, her smile beaming. “I’m happy to see you. I was playing.”

Everything, from the tone of her voice to the unneeded explanation, opens a gaping hole in my chest. I run my hand through her hair. The play glove simulates the tactile sensation against my palm, down to the texture of each single strand. Goldie leans in.

I’m nothing like them. I could never switch Goldie for someone else. I’m going to miss her.

She smiles again, going back to her dolls. I have some store credit left. Let’s go to some v-experience. Something nice.

There’s plenty I haven’t tried yet—the pool, the beach, the park, the classroom, and then again, other cities, other houses, hotels. Your run-of-the-mill escapism with some interactions here and there. Then there are the more curated ones, from full-blown holiday trips to fantasy roleplaying. I could be a knight, and Goldie could be my little princess. And then, there’s something even more… realistic.

Dark basements and sound-insulated rooms, closed by padlocks.

I close the menu. I’m not one of those guys. And even the normal experiences leave a sour taste in my mouth.

What good would it do? I can’t be distracted by what’s about to happen in three days. I turn off the simulated living room lights, and Goldie exclaims:

“Oh!”

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The following morning, my online circles are still on fire, droning on and on about the impending doom that awaits us all. I follow threads and join discussion groups that are gaining traction quickly. It’s a slow morning at the bakery, and I can afford to spend some time on my PerTer while customers slowly trickle in.

Most people are processing their early-onset grief. Some share screen-capped pictures of their most memorable v-experiences, putting out their little loved ones like it’s nothing, not caring that their perversion shines through in their choice of clothes, their choice of avatar.

People join in, sharing stories, but those melancholic recollections get lost in a flood of threads. Not everyone is willing to go through the stages of grief; some are stuck in denial.

For them, the real game is deciding what’s next.

A user tag I don’t recognize writes, “I’m gonna start stalking schools, y’all.”

A middle-aged lady comes into the bakery. Her long nails tap on her screen as she asks for her pains au lait, so I go to fetch some in the pantry. I get goosebumps on my arms but pretend not to. She mutters something about service workers, salaries, then leaves.

Another user writes, “That’s how they get you. The government wants us all in a room with no windows. They shut down Virtual Exp ‘cuz they knew there were some fucked-up people. We ain’t hurting nobody. But they don’t care, do they? They just want to sweep us under the rug.”

Comments vary from angry to conspiratorial. Someone drops the usual kys. I’ve read that so many times that now it doesn’t even feel rude.

Don’t they know that has always been an option?

Fuck. I shut down my PerTer to escape the feeding frenzy. I can’t bear to read anything more. The world feels darker every day.

It’s a toy. A literal toy, for someone. But for someone else, like me, it’s the only way to let things out without hurting anyone. They’re going to take it away, and… some people are already foaming at the mouth.

Outside the shop, the sign that says ‘authentic French patisserie’ fizzles and shuts down completely. I picture Goldie’s face against the opposite building, vivid and sharp, almost real. I imagine her small lips formulating a question her personality program would never.

“What are you going to do?”

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“How does this make you feel?”

“I’m straight-up scared.”

My headset lies there, on the desk. Two days until the server shutdown. Someone in the community is bringing up a private server where we could migrate our v-exp data; but that means trusting all my history with Goldie to the moral fiber of someone with enough time, dedication, and money to spoof an entire game system in their garage. Assuming they can even do that in the first place, and they’re not just looking for easy access to your files, so they can blackmail you.

It’s damn easy to scam a pedo. Always has been.

I stare back at the screen. “I don’t know what else I can do. My life has been stable so far, but maybe I was just leaning on a crutch. And now they’re kicking it away.”

“Maybe you should learn to walk on your own.”

“I don’t know if I can be sane on my own.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Maybe you could purchase a Therapy Premium Subscription and choose from several programs, both with real and simulated professionals.”

I rest the PerTer on my desk, then press no on the pop-up. The digital assistant smiles reassuringly from the screen.

“This is already the best therapy I can afford.”

“Thank you.”

The AI-therapist is, as ever, impervious to ironic tragedy.

I close the app and try to make do with the advice. Maybe I can learn to walk. I’ve read of people with my condition getting integrated into society, one way or another. Having relationships, even. Not harming. And I’m doing that, to an extent. Integrating.

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On the evening of the second day, I go on a bender. I call in sick at work and let the bakery owner find a fucking replacement for my shift. It’s Virtual Exp time. Turns out, alcohol helps with the whole grief-thing.

I wake up in my bed, having fallen asleep with the headset and the play gloves still on. The program runs and runs, my computer’s cooling fan whirring at full speed in the other room. I push through the headache and look through the visor.

Goldie sleeps beside me on the virtual bed. Things never get dirty in Virtual Exp, not unless you go ahead and mod the code. I touch the sheets. The simulated texture from my gloves’ synaptic overlay merges with my real, old-as-fuck ones. I hug Goldie tight. Her supple skin feels real.

Something else is real. A smell of acrid locker rooms and old, dried-over, sweaty underwear. Goldie’s hair must smell like strawberry shampoo, I imagine. I stare at the ceiling, waiting for the thumping in my head to subside. The texture is smooth, even, with no crease to focus on, no shape in the plain yellowish plaster. The virtual reality fizzles and fades to black. In the other room, my computer’s fan sputters a last angry hiss.

“No!” I tear off the headset and struggle out of bed. The PC is steaming. Thick gray smoke billows out of the main unit, filling the room with the smell of burnt electronics. The action figure of the magical fighter above it is melting, her feet reduced to a pool of pink plastic, dripping through the metal case onto the motherboard. This cannot be happening.

But that old piece of junk couldn’t care less. It hisses and coughs to its death. I pull out the power cable, tear the window open, gulp down the morning’s traffic like it’s a meditation practice, turn around to look at my desk.

I can fix this.

I can disassemble the pc, scrape away the molten plastic, find out which piece burned, which cable has fizzled its last spark. Buy replacements. Pray to the Neons my save data is still in there.

I can do all this with the little savings I have left.

But I can’t make it work in two days.

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It’s been twenty days without Virtual Exp.

The evenings are the worst. I come back home from work, kick out my shoes, reach for the headset out of habit, and then I realize I don’t have anything to patch it in. Just… games. Regular games. Rhythm dances and hit ’em ups. My room feels hollow, like the shell of a place I used to live in, cluttered with relics that don’t mean anything anymore. The bakery is quieter than ever. Customers come and go, faces blurring together, but every glance at my PerTer only confirms it: there’s no update, no message, no miracle server back online.

My online circles are disintegrating too, having sung their swan’s song. Some migrated to darker corners of the web, chasing after bootleg copies and homemade simulations that flicker like a haunted memory of what we had. Several people went missing, usernames fading from memory as fast as they appeared. Nobody talks about it anymore.

Goldie—she’s gone too. I can still picture her, playing with her dolls, asking me questions that don’t have answers. Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I can almost feel her hair between my fingers, hear her laughter echoing in the silence of my room. But it’s fading, day by day, like a distant, painful dream slipping out of reach.

I remember her less for what her habits used to be, and more for how she made me feel. Stable.

The other day, on the metro, I caught myself staring at some eight-graders or so… and I keep thinking if that’s how it feels, to slide down a slippery slope.

It starts somewhere. It starts with a picture on your PerTer, a panoramic view of Division Lane, and then you zoom in to cut-out that single student you ‘accidentally’ caught fixing their shoes, a real person, and suddenly you are passing by schools way more often than usual, and more pictures find their ways into your laptop, encrypted, in private accounts, and you start talking to other people who are in on the joke, who’re sliding, just like you are, and maybe they’re just a bit further down, and what’s the harm in that, and then

And then you end up discussing chloroform and humane ways of picking someone up

Or how they really can and are capable of love and the law is bigoted anyway, and the limit used to be much lower, and

I take a deep breath.

A notification pops up on my PerTer. The preview reads: ‘It’s gonna be a subscription-based system’.

Thousands of views, hundreds of replies.

This is the guy that talked about stalking schools, I recall.

I am not sure what I’m going to find, but my fingers tremble when I open the pop up. They shake extends to both hands as I read the discussion and follow through the link. Now the sentence makes sense.

They announced Virtual Exp 2. It is going to be a monthly subscription-based system. Converting old savefiles as a premium feature. The new engine is gpu-hungry, they say, and I was barely able to get my workstation back to life. Still seven months of development to go.

Seven months until I can see my little angel again.

And then I’ll be stable.