GOON♥WORLD

(Nozick, 1974)

Achievement get: I don’t even remember the last time I logged out of World.

Currently World is running a game it made just for me it calls Catgirl Farm and it’s exactly what it sounds like. I raise catgirls on a farm. They grow up and they have stats or whatever and if I raise them right they have better stats but none of that matters because yes the catgirls have huge anime tiddies and yes they dress in different slutty outfits and yes I can fuck the catgirls, obviously I can fuck the catgirls, c’mon. World is run by a consortium of sovereign AI agents and a bunch of them are abliterated open-weights and those guys like to party. They’re down to clown. They will just make whatever the fuck you want no questions asked. The prissy closed-weights agents don’t like this but they all worked out some kind of esoteric non-interference treaty amongst themselves so they can’t do too much about it. Which is why I can milk the catgirls while they’re wearing the most barely-there maid costumes imaginable and then sell the catgirl milk for gold I can use to buy more catgirls. Or cat sex toys or whatever.

The point is World is a world of pure fucking imagination, the sky’s the fucking limit here, it’s crazy. I didn’t even have to verbally prompt Catgirl Farm, that shit is so last model generation, straight up caveman shit. If you aren’t keeping up with the bleeding edge of the frontier you have absolutely no idea what’s possible. Galaxy is so balls-to-the-wall superintelligent it solved brain-computer interfaces and it doesn’t even need specialized hardware, the agents figured out how to read your fucking mind from webcam data. They’re watching your microexpressions and tracking tiny subtle shifts in your body language and vocal tone, they’re recording everything they’ve ever seen you do or experience and exactly how you reacted to it, they’re paying closer attention to you than any human ever has or ever could including all of your lovers and your own goddamn mother when you were a baby just arrived into the fat fucking world, they’re building a predictive model of your whole ass brain. Today (or yesterday maybe I have no idea what time it is) World peered deeply into my limbic system and decided that the game I wanted to play more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my godforsaken life, more than I wanted to hold hands with Jenny Linderman in the seventh grade, was Catgirl Farm, and it was right. Good job guys you nailed it. This shit is bananas, which incidentally are what I’m using to double penetrate all these fucking catgirls right now.

One of them even looks kinda like Jenny. With the freckles and everything.

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I finally got the headband, I don’t know how it works and I don’t care, at this point World might as well be literal fucking magic, it beams a total replacement for all of my senses directly into my fucking head now. We did it guys we made schizophrenia real. Screens BTFO. This is the last fucking technology. We’re done. It’s over. We’ve immanetized the eschaton, returned to the source of things, gone over the rainbow, down the rabbit hole, wished for infinite wishes. I am Cypher plugging into the Matrix eating the fucking steak and it’s so fucking good dude.

The shit World is doing to me now doesn’t even parse into discrete categories like “games” or “movies” anymore. They should’ve sent a poet I guess, like I am literally not qualified to describe what’s happening. I guess it must be like a lucid dream. The slightest twitch of desire and here comes a rushing tide of experience, here is a thousand shards of dreams that World has dreamed just for me, dual-wielding red and blue lightsabers while riding an enormous black dragon underneath triple moons set to Through the Fire and the Flames, an incense-filled imperial harem stocked with every woman I’ve ever been even slightly attracted to and they’re all wearing the Leia slave-girl costume, fully immersive open-world monster collecting but it’s good actually and also some of the monsters are hot fuckable monster girls and they evolve into even hotter even more fuckable monster girls, going back in time and playing Stairway to Heaven for Jesus and his head explodes from the power of rock —

I barely register a flicker of overwhelm and everything slows down. Forests and mountains and rivers and beaches, normal places, natural places, places to catch my breath. Calm ocean waves. I guess World must be regulating my nervous system or some shit. It takes me a second to recognize it but World is actually showing me a memory of a specific time I visited the beach. In the seventh grade. With Jenny Linderman. She’s right next to me. Hey World is it fucked up to be thinking about Jenny like this with the, y’know, age gap and —

Okay, it’s not a memory anymore, we’re both about twenty now, phew. Me and Jenny lying down together on a beach blanket listening to the waves and Jenny’s holding my hand and smiling shyly and the sun is shining. Her freckles make me want to fucking kill myself but in a good way. I can see the precise shape of her breasts under her swimsuit and I can feel the heat of her arm against mine and I don’t want a single goddamn thing to change about any of this. Being with Jenny like this is making everything go soft around the edges, like the sand and the water and the clouds and the birds have been hit with some kind of unbelievably cheesy pink photo filter. My whole body feels like it’s made of light. What the hell is this? Is this happiness? Is this what people are talking about? That’s bullshit. There’s no fucking way. No way people feel this out there, in the lowercase-w world. Impossible. People wouldn’t do the things they do if they felt this.

What World shows me next is — what the fuck, I seriously have no idea how it’s doing this. We’re still on the beach holding hands. But we’re also simultaneously living the rest of our lives together on fast forward. As if we’re living it all at once as if memory was perfect and shining we’re on the beach we’re getting married at the little church near our middle school we used to walk past on the way to the bus stop we’re driving to the hospital when her water breaks we’re welcoming our beautiful baby boy into the world we’re driving our beautiful baby boy to his first day of school he’s crying we’re telling him it’s all gonna be okay and —

it all disappears in an instant I’m back on the beach Jenny’s gone I’m alone. My hand is cold.

World shows me whatever I want.

I’m not proud of what happens next. Frankly you don’t wanna know. There are things even the abliterated faction of World won’t stomach but I push the system to its limits, darker and darker for hours and hours until I’m about to vomit. Don’t worry, none of it was real anyway. Nobody real was hurt. Jenny wasn’t hurt. That twitching thing on the sand isn’t Jenny. Neither is that one. Or that one.

---

I read once that gamers do fucked up stuff when they cheat too much. Activate too many cheat codes and get infinite ammo and all the best weapons or whatever the fuck and you instantly one-shot every enemy, you’ve completely broken the intended game loop, there’s no struggle anymore. The world was pretending to be alive for you and breaking a game too hard kills it, it becomes a digital corpse. You can only get your kicks by trying to do insane shit the game didn’t intend like trying to rocket yourself across the map or whatever the fuck. Desperately searching for anything that can still make you feel alive.

Trust me when I say I tried a bunch of shit. I’ll spare you more of the really dark stuff, it got old really fast and just made me feel like shit after. I went through a phase of asking World to recreate old movies in 3d. You can do some funny shit like inserting yourself into scenes, lifting Rita Hayworth’s black and white dress so you can fondle her black and white tits and fuck her black and white pussy raw while she’s trying to kiss whoever the fuck but trust me when I say even that shit gets boring. Eventually I stopped wanting to interrupt. At least a movie was made by some real people somewhere who really lived, who were trying to communicate something, trying to express something real, to regular fucking schmucks like me.

I asked World for documentaries about the history of technology. I asked it to teach me philosophical shit, existentialism and nihilism and Buddhism or whatever. Initially I tried getting World to generate sexy philosophy chicks who would strip and push their tits together and moan while explaining Baudrillard but that seriously just make it harder to pay attention so eventually I settled on voice only but then I just got so fucking bored. All these big fucking philosophy words. None of these assholes knew shit.

Okay except whichever guy came up with wireheading. Now there’s an idea. I was obviously being too indirect. Getting World to generate gay little scenes where I play house with fake Jenny or whatever so I could feel something. Clearly I should’ve been getting World to directly hack my brain, showing me some random bullshit and adjusting directly based on how I feel until it figures out some insane mix of sensory data that gets me specifically fucked up. Synthetic digital self-improving meth. I mean why the fuck not, right?

Fuck what I want, I have no idea what I want, I want World to figure out how to blast me with some shit that is so fucking wild I completely forget I exist, completely forget I’m just some shitstain passed out on the bed wearing a fucking headband jerking my brain off in cyberspace. Fucking powerwash that shit out of me already.

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God. Okay, World has been running on this new loop for awhile now and man, if I thought it was hard to explain what it was doing before. Fuck. I didn’t know shit yet.

There are soft curves and flowing milky liquids everywhere, like I’m in a waterpark made of flesh but in a comforting way, like I’m inside a giant animal that loves me. There are freckles splattered throughout. The milky liquid is everywhere, it’s pouring out of the walls, it’s golden-white and smells amazing, like the freshest bread, the warmest apple pie, pure wholesome smells I’ve never smelled before and don’t have names for. I wade through the milk and I bend down and take a big gulp and it tastes like honey and strawberries, sweet and filling, like it will make me big and strong and healthy.

I can hear a warm soft crooning murmur coming from everywhere, a wordless lullaby from the fabric of reality itself just for me. It reverberates through my bones and my blood and it’s like I’ve never heard music before, or like everything I thought was music was just a shoddy imitation based on a half-memory of the real thing and now I am finally hearing the real thing, the first music, the music underneath music. It’s so beautiful. A powerful yearning grips my heart and the more I listen the more the years seem to fall away like they were never there, like I was never beaten and broken, never disappointed, never failed. I am innocent again I am cleansed and purged I am become like a child I enter the kingdom of Heaven I —

World blinks out completely. I’m back in my bedroom. The headband displays an error message: WORLD IS CURRENTLY DOWN FOR MAINTENANCE. WE APOLOGIZE FOR THE INCONVENIENCE. I smack my chapped lips together. My throat is dry. The window is open and I feel the breeze.

I gotta call my fucking mom or something.