Zack blinked as the sun beamed into his eyes. He just woke up, but his mind was racing.
Angie was visiting today for the first time. Zack was excited, but since he had a crush on her for what felt like the entire year he knew her, he wasn’t sure if it’d be the perfect way to disappoint himself. He’d wish the entire time she was more than a friend. Whatever that meant – his friendship was never clear to him. To him, it wasn’t a regular friendship. But to Angie, it was clear: the two of them were friends who hung out, and she flat out told him she wasn’t interested in more than that.
A humming noise came from the east side of his room. It wasn’t like the digital atmospheric sound when transitioning between cyberspace server domains. That was Zack’s real world. The humming here was fake, a manufactured piece of a reality that arbitrarily made him into a conscious ragdoll. The Servers were authentic for him – he had infinite potential inside as a pattern of bits.