Heavenly Warrior III - 19 (Z Final Type)

The three of them huddled around the LED television set, the last of its kind in North America. On the screen, a game that resembled a cross between billiards and jacks was taking place.

"Come on, come on, I have two meal credits riding on this," pleaded one of the two men playing the game. He pushed a few buttons on the game controller, which was held together by a combination of superglue and electrical tape.

"Snake eyes!" shouted his opponent in recognition of an unsuccessful turn. "You got red Solo cupped, Terry."

"Oh fuck. Fuck goddamn. What is wrong with me?" Terry asked. "I don’t have anything left to eat. I can’t beat you, man. I can’t do anything with this game anymore. I just want to die."

"You got reg-flipped," said the onlooker. "He canceled his run, played a niner, and then Q-balled your ass. That’s top tier shit. Pro."

"Yeah, pro my pwn-hole," Terry sneered. "That was cheese, plain and simple. Used to handle that weak Sriracha with the greatest of ease. I was top tier, a two-slot camper when we were the opening event at EVO in 2016. That was our year. The year Q-Ball went big-time."

"Just pay me, brocephus," said his opponent, who was considerably younger but no less bedraggled and worse for wear. "I don’t have time for a history lesson."

"Like, that move you did was fine, but as I’m saying it was total mud tier cheese," Terry continued. "We never played like that on the dollar circuits."

The opponent shrugged. “You were at EVO twice, like we give a shit. Why’d you even ask me to play this dumbass game if you’re starving and can’t give up those creds?”

Terry turned off the television and scanned his meal credits into his opponent’s account. “I just wanted to get back to what was pure and tebow, get you kids playing a classic again. One more time, so you could see the perfect game as I knew it. So you could see how balanced it was.”

The opponent’s friend laughed. “It’s just some mod game that you gotta dust off and boot up with that old zip drive. And all you doing is rolling dice and pushing buttons. Rando and goatse.”

His opponent patted him on the shoulder. “Anybeans, look, we gotta amazingrace back to the labor camp, Terry. You just take it easy, all right? Maybe we do one tomorrow, huh?”

Terry nodded. “Yeah, I’d like that. You guys go and dox all that info you been mining. I’ll just kanye it here for a while. I’m cool, I’m milano.”

After the pair of them had departed, Terry eased his aging body onto the rice mat that served as both his couch and his bed. The media conglomerates no longer supported his LED set, and he’d stubbornly refused to invest in a VR implant, so all he was left to entertain himself with were Blu-Rays of The Boondock Saints and Fight Club and the homebrewed modification of Heavenly Warrior III - 7 (X Type) that he and his friends had devoted a half-decade of their lives to creating.

A half-decade rendered completely goatse first by the refusal of Heavenly Warrior’s creative team to embrace the competitive gaming community’s obsession with Q-Ball and then by those wretched implants. The former couldn’t believe they’d created the perfect game and the latter had made controller-based games obsolete altogether.

Terry caressed what remained of his custom, retrofitted Xbox One controller in his arthritic hands. Every ache he felt in his fingers reminded him of a past battle. He had bested far greater adversaries in the past than today’s cheese strat-abusing Data Engineer 1 - Entry Level. He took the legendary CF_69burgerTime420 to extra throws at the Worlds in 2016 and then went straight-up rolls against deaf-mute Q-bal savant LoL_BoogerBrigade51482. A few months after those triumphs, he had won the entire 64-man invitational at the Gamespot World Series.

God, what a year that had been: back when wages were denominated in dollars, he had cleared over $5,000—and totally tax-free, at that. It was almost enough to afford the food and water he needed to sustain himself while devoting 20 hours per day to Q-Ball. He was grateful to his parents, who let him flourish like a tuber hidden from the sun in their basement while he chased his dreams of gaming glory.

And he was glorious, wasn’t he? He was one of the highest-karma’ed members of reddit.com/r/QBALLINFO. Some of the other posters, the ones who could never hope to equal his proficiency on the d-stick or his facility at reg-flipping, used to draw funny caricatures of him on wide-ruled notebook paper and upload them to the forum. Why hadn’t he saved a few for these lean years? That picture of him slicing open the heart of Heavenly Warrior protagonist Razorkina with a radioactive Q-Ball sybian had always brought a smile to his face.

But no cared about Reddit karma or even Reddit itself nowadays. The implants had ruined everything. Games today were nothing but sad, graphics-heavy affairs that consisted of people uploading their conscious minds into the bodies of genetically enhanced house cats and terrier dogs and then cutting a bloody swath through hundreds of sewer rats. How could anyone who had experienced the beauty and simplicity of Manifesto Q’s version of Q-Ball possibly derive any enjoyment from bathing an eight-pawed, eight-eyed cat’s body in the blood of swarms of dead rodents?

Terry, who could no longer undertake the thousands of hours per week of Q-Ball practice needed to maintain top-tier skills, should have been training the next generation of Manifesto Q players. He should have been the right hand/cat’s paw of Hideki Toriyama, helping this visionary redesign ever more sublime versions of Heavenly Warrior in which all of the detestable actual gameplay was removed in favor of balanced Q-Ball duels with minimal load times.

Instead, he lived alone in the closet-sized cenobitic shelter that the Pan-American Social Services Agency subsidized for him. He had all the time in the world, since he was too old to dox in the data camps, but little of this time could be directed where it mattered most. Instead, he watched The Boondock Saints and Fight Club over and over again, sometimes exceeding a half-dozen combined viewings per day, and pondered what he had done to offend the universe.

"Haven’t I paid for my crimes?" he asked the surveillance speculum that hung suspended from his cell’s narrow ceiling. "Haven’t I?"

Thousands of miles away, the Data Processing Assistant 2 - Extern assigned to monitor Terry’s building made a brief notation in his file: SUBJECT BLOOD PRESSURE DIASTOLIC AND SYSTOLIC WITHIN ACCEPTABLE RANGE AND NO SIGNS OF COHABITATION IN DWELLING.

—
OLB