In a dark corner of a dark room that hardly reached by the sun, there were a number of empty drink boxes and fast food covers on the dirty floor.
On a large chair surrounded by a number of huge screens, a twenty-two-year-old guy sat.
"Cayos"
The player's panel on the screen showed that name appeared; it was not his real name, of course. Rather, it was the title he acquired in the virtual worlds.
It was the same title that the players whispered his name in fear, those players whose fingers trembled after a loss with hands behind their screens begging for mercy.
His triumphs within the world of video games had added a bit of artificial excitement to his boring life.
His cold eyes, which only reflected the sparkling displays, blinked, and he focused on the supercomputer screen in
front of him.
There was a body of a warrior with a huge sword that appeared on the screen logo; he started the game, which was just ended in a blink by taking the life of another player with a brutal knockout. For him it was not just another battle win; it was a slow and intentional execution, designed to ignite anger in the other player.
His lips moved without saying any letter with the wording: "You scum, now slowly sluggish."
He sent a message to the other player who was boiling out of anger using 'GG EZ,' the abbreviation of 'Good Game, Easy.' Cayos told him not to get into another fight with him at all.
Cayos left his keyboard; he took a deep breath. This icy calm in his heart and his cool brain, he hated all this lame feeling.
He had reached the top in every fighting game he fought. Every championship, every classification, every challenge, he crushed everybody's game.
There was no longer an opponent who could seriously defeat him. He had tried all the world's famous releases of games, and even this new one did not arouse his curiosity and did not satisfy his desire for any game. Not even the anger of his opponents was enough to satisfy his desire for more
excitement.
He hit the table with strong force.
"This is a reeking, infinite boredom."
Cayos muttered in a low voice, leaving an echo in the room. He had been living alone for a while; his sister had traveled, and he did not know when she would come back. He didn't care.
At first he was a master of digital martial arts, an expert in manipulating and provoking his opponents. Cayos was skilled in exploiting their psychological and emotional weaknesses brilliantly. For him it was not only about technical skill; it was about the ability to read the human spirit in its weakest moment. He was watching, analyzing, and then mercilessly hitting. This calmness and the coldness of his nerves that allowed him to make the ideal decisions under the utmost pressure were his real tools.
Cayos stood as if he was taking the last look at his highest level in this game.
"What a loss,"
He said. All the tools that guaranteed him the superiority in his small world were no longer enough. He sighed deeply, then closed the game. His eyes looked at the ceiling of the room, staring at the fan for a while.
"And what now?"
He asked himself to tighten his folded fist. "Is that all? A life that is limited to bright screens and predictable opponents? Damn,"
Cayos whispered he was cravingsomething more, something real, something that might test its limits in a way that the screens had never experienced before.
His conflict-thirsty spirit yearned for a world where the results had a real weight, where failure did not mean just restarting, but a real ending. He let his feet sit on his bed full of his clothes that he had not washed for a while. He grabbed his phone and browsed the news indifferently.
A letter of notice of the descent of another ten million in his account after winning the digital team matches, continued browsing the news, a car accident in the nearby street, a new political scandal, a report on the rise in commodity prices. Everything seemed dull and unimportant to him.
"This world is normal; I really want something to wake me up."
Cayos thought as he threw his phone at the sofa that was filled with empty chips.
"I want something that makes me feel alive, and every decision I make has real consequences that cannot be undone."
He said as he closed his eyes, wishing for a challenge worth taking.
Out of the blue it was as if a series of clips of events exposed in front of him at extreme speed were excerpts from a life that did not belong to him; it was the life of a young, lonely child, trembling in a corner, receiving punches from an older boy, his face a volcano of anger.
"Aseel, you... Damn you, you are a disgrace to the family! You are good for anything!"
The eldest boy spoke after punching the child Aseel to shed the little boy's tears. Another scene in front of Cayos's eyes moved to where the same little boy was watching his brothers trained to use the aura, his eyes full of envy and, in the same way, longing, while his father was coldly whispering, "He has no place here; keep him away."
Something just accelerated the visions again for Cayos, there plenty of food served to him, the face of a strangely smiling servant, then a burning pain in his throat, a violent cough, and then a complete darkness. The child was poisoned. How pity Cayos felt for his condition.
Perhaps what he saw were hallucinations, as he stayed for two days in front of the computer screen without a break. Cayos opened his eyes slowly. He was no longer in his dark room; the place was further different, strange, as if he had returned to the 1980s.