Charles inserts himself into a dating simulator where the main love interest commits suicide. His main objective is to stop the main character from dying, but he continuously fails at this. He starts doing more drastic things as he resets his game s...
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It smelled like burnt rubber and metal. As the simulation collapsed in on itself, a long-haired man ripped the Meta Reality headset off his face. The headset hung off a strap along his cheek as he quickly ran over to the array of computer screens that dominated a whole wall of the room. All he saw was a blank white void where once everything was so calm. Frantically, he slammed his fingers onto the keyboard, bringing up a thousand windows and consoles as he flooded the simulation with new protocols and commands. His attention was quickly taken from the screen as something burst inside of his tiny apartment room.
The server bank that hosted his simulation had caught fire. The flames burned like the fires of Hell, eating away at everything he had worked so tirelessly to create. He ripped the cables off his Haptics body suit, then leaped to a corner of the room where a fire extinguisher was. Ripping the fire extinguisher out from its mantle, he frantically sprayed the server bank with the foams. The fires died, but so did the light from his screens.
Panic. Anxiety. Death. He returned to the screens, trying hopelessly to bring anything back to life. Nothing was working. He ran to the server bank, trying to salvage anything he could salvage. All that was left were fried servers and melted cables.
Such was his catatonia that, as he backed away from the destruction of the simulation, he could barely hear the blare of a fire alarm outside. His body was listless in the wind, but his mind was still ablaze with a singular thought: in the end, he never truly saved Yori.
If that was the case, how could he have ever saved the real Yori?
...
The hospital trip was a blur. He barely recalled the police interrogation. His mind only remembered that the Meta Industries personnel took all his belongings out of his apartment. He had enough money to get a new apartment, and even enough money to buy a new Meta Simulation System. However, none of that mattered anymore. Whole lifetimes had gone by in that simulation, and countless years had gone by in reality. Nothing changed the facts: Yori was never meant to live.
All he has left is a picture of Yori, the real Yori, a girl who would forever stay 18. He remembered hearing the news about her death only the day after she had committed suicide. He remembered how nobody at school seemed to notice her gone, and when news got out, nobody seemed to bother with it too much. He remembered how that note was so brisk, yet it hurt so much.
"I'm going to disappear forever. Nobody should mind."
She was the neighbor he never knew. She was the childhood friend he never had. She was the Student Council's president that nobody loved or cared about. When she died, she died as a secret that nobody but he would keep.
That simulation was his chance to see if he could have done something different if he just changed the variables. Ultimately, however, it took breaking the code to solve her, and even then, it only made things infinitely worse. If only he could have wired her brain differently, then he would have...
