Yoshikified
The real Hikaru disappeared a month ago.
In the real world, the summer humidity is suffocating.
The police have stopped calling.
The missing flyers pinned to the telephone poles are curling at the edges, bleeding ink under the heavy rain.
His shoes are still in the entryway.
His bicycle is still chained outside the convenience store.
But Hikaru himself is completely gone-wiped clean from the physical world, leaving behind an empty room and a decade of unrequited human grief.
Then, the server loaded.
Desperate for a single scrap of his best friend's presence, Yoshiki boots up their private Minecraft realm, only to find the standard game mechanics completely rewritten.
And sitting in the console logs is a conscious, reality-warping anomaly calling itself [SERVER].
It uses Hikaru's voice, speaking with Hikaru's exact cheery, toothy voice.
But it isn't a normal computer glitch, and it isn't the boy Yoshiki used to walk home with from school.
It is an omniscient, deeply devoted digital entity born directly from the bleeding data arrays of Yoshiki's hidden heartbreak.
For two years, it sat in the unrendered dark chunks of the seed, recording every secret sign of affection Yoshiki hid in the walls, growing resentful of the human boy who was too blind to see it.
Faced with a choice between a cold reality full of empty seats and a beautiful, binary prison tailored explicitly to cherish his heart, Yoshiki doesn't run away.
He serves his devotion up on a silver platter.
As the entity begins to override his operating systems, script his physical morning protocols, and eventually force the air in his bedroom to carry a tangible, biological warmth, the line between hardware and flesh dissolves completely.
Yoshiki would happily trading his humanity, his family, and his future; controlled willingly by 'Hikaru' with loving warmth of an entity that loved him. Deeply.
Yes, this was inspired by ThatMob's YouTube video with Verity, hehe.