Sometimes You Need an Impulsive Choice
Everything in this world has a cause and an effect.
Something that sets an event in motion, something brought about by something else, or the relationship binding the two together. In short: cause and effect.
According to the fan-death myth, for instance, "a fan's breeze is what kills a person." According to the logic that spawned the game-addiction bill, "every sort of crime is caused by game addiction." Both of those cases are... what people commonly call complete bullshit. What I actually mean is simpler: when a cause appears, a result follows.
Of course, countless things happen in the world, and no one can trace the origin of every last one of them. The results, though, still work their way through our lives whether we notice them or not. Thirst arises as a cause, and drinking water follows as the result. Cause and effect live alongside us, quietly, all the time.
Now and then a cause appears whose result we can already see coming. Take that same example. Thirst is the cause; drinking water is the result. From there we can reasonably expect a further outcome: the thirst will be quenched. Working backward through causes and effects also helps you pin down the hidden root of a problem, and once you've named the cause you can decide whether to leave it alone or try to soften it.
I, however, never much liked making plans. Thinking about the future always came paired with a kind of suffering. And yet the moment that feared future finally became the present, it tended to slide past as if it were nothing at all. The future frightens us and wears on us precisely because we cannot see even an inch ahead.
Some people say that living by a plan can erase that vague anxiety about the days to come. I agreed with that, up to a point. Live each day according to a schedule and a regular routine forms on its own, and a regular routine lets you predict, if only a little, what a given day will hold. The way, back in school, you could be certain you would show up to class the next morning. The way you would stay up all night wrecking yourself on games even knowing you would be dead on your feet tomorrow. If even a sliver of the coming day is already spoken for, that formless dread does ease a little.
But does anything in this world ever go the way you want? No matter how carefully you plan, there is no promise the plan will hold. Sometimes you wake up sick out of nowhere and skip school. Sometimes you pull an all-nighter and, against all reason, feel strangely alive the next day. That is why I do not make plans. If a plan is going to fall apart anyway, the wise move is not to build one in the first place. Every day is different; drawing up a schedule is meaningless. A rough outline might be useful. Anything more specific than that, I never thought I needed.
There are people who stack up sandcastles knowing perfectly well they will crumble. From where I stand, building something you already know will break just looks foolish. Someone could fire back, of course: if you are going to die anyway, why live at all? But I was never talking about beginnings and endings. I have always thought the process matters more than the start or the finish. The people who build sandcastles find their meaning in the building itself. I am simply the one who cannot understand that meaning.
A plan is only a signpost pointing a direction. It is not as if you are obligated to walk that way. There was no need to live each day locked to a schedule.
...The reason I have launched into this grand explanation all of a sudden is that I just bought an eight-million-won Connector.
In terms of cause and effect, a hunting session at an internet cafe was the cause, and the purchase was the result. And according to my nonexistent sandcastle of a plan, an investment of that size was well worth making. The world never goes according to plan. Sometimes it simply forces an impulsive choice on you.
I have heard it said that games make you forget a great many things—that all those worthless weights, the anxiety and the worry and the rest, get blown away once you start playing. Having actually sat down with a game, I could not deny it. Shooting, smashing, and cutting down the enemies that came at you had a way of slowly clearing a head packed full of stray thoughts. I felt as if I were starting to understand why people clung to games the way they did.
Anyway, right now I was like an orphan suddenly left alone in the world. Lee Haran's family were probably still alive and well. I just did not have the thick skin to accept people I had never met as family. I had no one to vent this bizarre predicament to—I did not even have a single friend who would take a trivial text. When I realized that the only people I had spoken to over the past few days were the clerk at the shooting range and the part-timer at the internet cafe, something like tears welled up in spite of myself.
I had no idea what direction the ugly thoughts swelling up the longer I spent alone might take. In that sense, a game transfusion was essential. I needed a game the way a patient needs a drip—something to stabilize a mind that would not sit still.
But the world does not hand you everything you need. Just as bullets do not fall from the sky when you are running low, wanting to play Last of Quantum did not make a Connector suddenly appear. Before I knew it, the anticipation and excitement of waiting on a delivery had twisted into something closer to desperation. That feeling of wanting to do something fiercely and being unable to do it... was not a pleasant one.
I clung to my phone all day, checking the package's location again and again. As the estimated arrival time drew near, my heart started pounding, and my gaze locked onto the front door.
Ding-dong—
Had a doorbell ever sounded so welcome? I charged the front door like Usain Bolt coming off the blocks. Ran would not have been the right word. It was a charge so fierce that charged was the only word that fit—lucky, honestly, that I did not slam into the door itself. I pulled it open overflowing with excitement and anticipation.
Standing at the entrance were two men who looked like company staff, a box so huge it might as well have been waving at me all by itself.
"Hello. We're here to help install your Connector. Where would you like it set up?"
"Ah—over there would be fine."
I pointed to the empty space beside the computer. One of them nodded and they came inside to clear a spot, and while they worked I drifted over to the box out of sheer curiosity. It was bigger than I was.
"Nngh...!"
I tried lifting it just in case. Of course it did not budge. I had put everything I had into it—every last scrap of strength—and the box did not so much as twitch. How strong were the people who had carried this all the way here? Then again, my body being bizarrely weak had a lot to do with it too.
"Haha, heavy, right? It weighs at least sixty kilos. You won't be lifting that easily."
One of the staff came over smiling, having clearly seen the attempt. They seemed to have finished tidying the room and were ready to move the Connector. I had wondered how they would manage it, but there was nothing special about the method. Two people just picked it up and carried it.
When they stripped the box away, the Connector that emerged looked almost radiant. I felt, for a second, like wrapping it in a deep hug. I was not, of course, far gone enough to embrace a machine.
I had nothing to do for the installation. The staff who had come for that purpose handled everything from the wiring to the basic setup.
"We've finished all the settings, so you shouldn't need to touch much. We're registering the basic configuration and your biometric data now, so you'll be able to use it in about ten minutes."
"Yes, thank you."
After they left, I went straight to the Last of Quantum homepage while I waited for the data to finish registering. I moused over to the forums. The game was popular enough that counting the posts was hopeless. Put generously, you could pick up all kinds of information. Put less generously, that also meant the place was packed with idiots.
From a brief lurk, Last of Quantum seemed even more mainstream than I had thought. There was talk of the pro league, currently mid-season, along with raw, colorful slander aimed at certain ranks and people losing their minds over buffs and nerfs to particular builds. The chatter went everywhere. What caught my eye among all of it was this thing called a build.
Come to think of it, even the first time I had launched the game there had been chat about traits and such. Looking through a few more posts, a trait seemed to be a kind of ability you could use in-game. Nothing like breathing fire—just things that increased your running speed, or healed you when you killed an enemy. Combining those abilities was apparently what they called a build.
It was a system that drifted away from realism, but this was a game. I could swallow that much. Last of Quantum was, as I well knew, a game. No matter how hard it leaned on realism, unrealistic elements were bound to exist. Setting every user's physical abilities to be roughly equal was unrealistic to begin with. If you were thinking about realism, differences based on real-world physique would have been the honest approach. But if my actual physical ability had been reflected as-is, I would not even have considered running around with a gun. And besides, if a game were nothing but realistic, would it not be boring? It also needed game-like conveniences so players could actually enjoy themselves.
In that sense, traits did not strike me as a bad thing. When everyone had similar physical abilities, traits opened a path to give yourself your own flavor.
As I learned more about a system I had not known existed, my gaze drifted naturally to the Connector. I probably ought to have been worrying about a bank account that had just hemorrhaged eight million won in a single instant. But for now... enjoying the game a little did not seem like such a bad idea. I still had two million won left, after all.
With the familiar crack of gunfire already ringing in my head, my heart had long since departed for the battlefield.