The Mission

Shock, Kairi, and Smack joined one another in the Space Anomaly for a few missions. The recurring events weren't as important as they used to be but they were still an excuse for the bear, shark, and folf to hang out in VR together. After completing the daily and weekly events, Kairi checked the Nexus for something else to do and found a purple, glitched out assignment on the board. "Hey, wanna try another one?" Kairi asked. "I could use another salvaged frigate module."

"Ooh!" Smack said. He was eager to spend more time with people he liked. "What kind is it?"

"Dunno," Kairi answered, "We got a glitched one. Shouldn't be hard though."

"Okay," Shock said. The bear was mostly indifferent to the group's selections. Whatever gave him an excuse to chill at the computer for longer.

"Let's go." Kairi started the mission for the group. A short jingle played as the mission type was revealed: Unearthing ancient bones. All the group needed to do was fetch a dozen skeleton-type pieces of loot from an assigned planet. The three teammates hopped into their respective starships and left the Anomaly for their destination. The warp took them to a system containing exactly one suitable planet: One with an extreme radiation hazard.

"Ugh. That weather's annoying," The shark snarled. "Let's split up to get this over with."

"Split up?" Smack's voice cracked as he spoke. "I thought we were doing this together!"

"We are, dingus," Kairi snarked. "Long as we grab a total of twelve we're good. Splitting up means we get it done faster and we can do something else."

"Sounds good," Shock replied. The bear veered off to the other side of the planet to start looking for loot.

"Okay..." Smack was upset. The whole point was doing this as a group, wasn't it? Even if this was faster and the others were still on voice chat, he still wanted to be closer to the bear and shark.

"See ya." Kairi's ship pitched downward so she could get started. She didn't give a damn about the clingy mammal wanting to stay uncomfortably and unnecessarily close to her. Getting some space was a welcome break.

Smack sighed as he looked for a landing spot away from the rest of the group. Maybe if he helped with getting this done sooner the group could regroup and pick a mission that'd let them stay closer together.

An Anomaly

The life support system warned "Radiation protection... falling" the moment Smack left his ship. He wasn't well kitted out for these planets; he'd only have a minute between recharges of hazard support. The folf grabbed a few batteries before he started searching for burial sites to raid. These missions always felt weird given the in-universe implications of it. But it was only a game, so it wasn't actually problematic, right?

As the teammates explored the planet, each marked the nearest burial site so they'd have it on their respective visors. Smack's closest was a two minute walk away; he decided to go on foot so he could collect some other resources along the way. The other members of the team had already collected six of the required items by the time he reached his target; he still hadn't made a single contribution to the effort. Still, there were five signals in the area, so he could catch up and be useful to the group.

At least, that's what he hoped to do until the game warned him of an incoming radioactive supercell. Under that weather, he'd have only 10 seconds before he'd start taking damage. All he could do was improvise a shelter to get out of the dangerous conditions. He dug into the burial site and covered up the hole to protect himself until the storm passed. "Radiation protection... stabilizing" the game assured him. At least he could wait out the weather without risk of dying and respawning.

Despite being safely underground, however, something felt wrong. His visor had clouded over with the same yellowish color as the dirt around him. He also started to physically feel something happening to him, despite this only being virtual reality. He reached for his headset but couldn't find where to grab it. The folf shouted in fear but gagged upon dirt that flowed into his mouth. What the hell was going on?

He looked down and didn't see the spacesuit of his avatar; he saw his own yellow-furred body caught among the dirt on the planet. Worse, the ground shifted around him as if settling his body. That wasn't part of the physics model in the game! When he reached for his push-to-talk button, however, he only found more dirt that slowly moved up his arm. The terrain manipulator would have helped if he'd bothered recharging it; he instead was met with a "weapon charge depleted" error before the UI seemed to disappear.

He felt over his body to reassure himself of his existence. He was an actual person in the real world, not just a traveler-entity in a video game. Right? The shifting terrain made him question that. It felt like the coarse dirt was scrubbing his fur away. He soon realized with horror that it was scrubbing his fur away. While it wasn't painful, it was deeply disturbing to see his bare skin exposed. It was more disturbing when his skin started dissolving into a pixelated mist and revealed his skeleton beneath.

The folf was barely capable of moving against dirt around him. His arms felt incredibly weak; his muscles had started to disappear. His in-game and real-world equipment had both ceased to exist. Kairi and Shock's voices had faded away into nothingness. He was alone, buried underground, with his body rapidly decomposing into nothing more than digital bones. He curled up and started crying but, after a few more seconds, even that was no longer possible. His eyes went dry and his vision blurred further. Movement became impossible. He dimly heard the sound of voice chat disconnecting but the rush of dusty wind above dominated his hearing before the world fell eerily silent.

Although the game describes the bones as ancient, spawning an item takes a negligible amount of time. Smack was trapped in the fetal position as his flesh fully disappeared and left nothing but a skeleton. He was dimly aware of the universe around him but incapable of interacting with it under his own power. He was now just an item to be collected.

Cheap Loot

Both Kairi and Shock were oblivious to what Smack was going through. He was incapable of communicating with them. The only notification they received was the game informing them he'd disconnected.

Smack has left the system.

"God damn it," Kairi growled. "Can Smack fix his fucking Internet already? Second time this month he's left like this."

"He'll be back eventually," Shock replied. "Probably just was a power surge knocking out his internet."

Kairi shook her head. "He's gonna whine that we finished without him, even though he can't rejoin a mission in progress and it's his fault this shit keeps happening."

"Yeah, he will," Shock knew how annoying the folf could get. "But if he's too cheap to get better hardware it's gonna keep happening."

"Whatever. Let's finish this thing and call it a day."

"Sure. You got any more items marked?"

Kairi checked her visor again. "Yeah. I still have a tag for the one Smack was doing before he fucked off. Let me grab that. Get ready to hand in the mission so we can call it."

"Yep. On it," Shock answered. He left the planet's surface so he could quickly go to whatever location they'd need to visit. Soon as the bear affirmed he'd be ready to finish things up, Kairi set her destination based on the marker she already had. At least the fucking hybrid had some use to the team by marking his location. She had no idea that Smack was also helping by being transformed into an item suitable for the mission.

When Kairi landed near Smack's last location, the digitized creature heard the sound of a starship landing, soon followed by the sound of footsteps crunching on rough terrain. His vision was dark until that player started digging out the terrain. "What've we got here..." Kairi said to herself. Smack heard her voice and tried to shout back but he was incapable of speech; skeletons don't have vocal cords. Far as the game world was concerned, he was just another object. The shark strip mined the area to expose each bit of loot for easy access. She grabbed the items one by one, including Smack.

When she interacted with Smack's remains, she received the same sort of pop-up as any other low-tier skeletal loot would have generated. There was nothing to even hint that something unusual had occurred.

Peculiar Bone Fragments

Approximately 364 years old.

---

This partial skeleton must have belonged to a creature with advanced healing capacities, as the bones show clear evidence of having been broken and repaired many times over.

---

Total Value: 59,592 Units

Kairi scoffed at the information. That was the cheapest skeleton she'd found yet. The only reason she kept it was due to a surplus of inventory space; she otherwise would've trashed it immediately. Upon being added to Kairi's inventory, Smack felt... nothing. He no longer had a physical form in the game. His entire being was nothing more than an entry in the database. He still existed, yes, but not in any real, tangible form. There was no sense of movement as Kairi returned to her starship. There was neither warmth nor cold. He heard some sound effects from the game but none of his other senses functioned.

Smack would have cried if he could. He was in the presence of one of his teammates and yet incapable of begging her for help. She was, if anything, annoyed that he'd become such a useless item... she would have called him very nearly useless even before his transformation. He didn't know what had happened, how to change himself back, or how to plead for help with his situation. All he could do was hope something would miraculously change for the better.

All Sales Final

Shock did his part as promised. It was barely thirty seconds before the mission complete sound played. All the players needed to do now was head back to the Space Anomaly and collect the mission rewards. "I'm gonna sell this crap off first before we head out," Kairi announced, "Only got one worth enough to bother holding onto." The bear didn't respond; it was such a non-event that it didn't warrant an acknowledgment.

One of the items in her inventory, however, would very much disagree with that sentiment. Being sold was certainly an event to Smack. They couldn't sell him, right? He was a person! A friend! His mind spiraled through reasons that this shouldn't and couldn't happen despite the fact it was happening to him at that very moment and there was precisely nothing he could do about it.

Kairi used her starship's economy scanner to find a trading post to offload the vendor trash. The game picked one on another planet a 45 second trip away. "Fuckin' RNG," she muttered to herself. Both she and Smack heard five countdown beeps before the ship's pulse drive engaged, followed by the grey noise of moving at such speed. While Kairi knew the length of the trip, Smack did not. Was this going to be just a few seconds to get around the world, or... somewhere further? Was she really about to dispose of him? The steady drone of the ship's engine was the only company Smack had. Each passing second felt like an eternity, given that Smack's digital form could perceive far smaller increments of time than an actual person could.

The hum of rapid travel gave way to the cacophony of atmospheric drag when Kairi's ship neared the planet. While the shark experienced nothing but some visual clutter in her VR headset, Smack felt the ship itself shaking around him. This was real, far as he could tell, and he was desperately hoping it was just some freakish nightmare he was about to wake up from. The shark didn't give a damn, though. She landed the ship and walked to the trade terminal. Every one of her steps marched Smack closer to oblivion. With each item Kairi sold, a beep was followed by "Units received." When she sold the remains of the folf, he heard the beep and then utter, deafening silence. In that instant, he ceased to exist.

Garbage Collection

Smack hadn't died in the usual sense. He was simply a non-entity. A bit of stray data in memory that was now marked clean for reuse. He was utterly, completely deprived of his senses. There was only the total nothingness of being disconnected from the world he'd become a part of. It wasn't a sensation of heat or cold; there was no medium even carry those feelings to whatever sensory capabilities he retained.

The data that he'd become would be reallocated somewhere else. A function grabbed him as part of random number generation and respawned him at another random place in the universe. His reappearance was as shocking as the lack of input he'd received for an unknowable amount of time. He had reappeared on a volcanic planet. The dirt around him was fine, powdery ash. The heat would have been intolerable if he were alive but, as mere digital bones, he was only dimly aware of the effects of the environment. A nearby volcano erupted on a pseudo-random timescale; it was the only way he had of marking time.

Each in-game day lasted half an hour in the real world but, for Smack, they felt like true days, then weeks, then months. Nobody in the world--real or virtual--even knew he existed. How could they? He was just a marker on a map on one of the quadrillions of planets in the game's universe. Even if someone landed on this planet, they'd have to stumble across him among all the other randomly placed fossils buried just under the surface.

Trading Up

It was purely a matter of luck when another traveler happened across him and dug him up. He was still a cheap bit of low-tier vendor trash unworthy of being taken to another system with better prices for tradable goods. Still, for a new player randomly wandering between planets, even a low-tier item was worth the trouble of carrying to a nearby outpost.

Light and heat overwhelmed Smack when he was exposed to the air for the first time in a virtual decade. He'd nearly forgotten he was even capable of feeling things. He had no idea how long he'd been buried and, unfortunately, no idea how short-lived his time out of the ground would be. Once the player dismissed the pop-up for their newly-acquired item, Smack's senses were once again reduced to just vague sensations of movement. Someone he didn't know was handling his body like just another relic to sell... because, far as the player knew, that's all Smack was.

The newbie hadn't yet acquired a starship with an economy scanner. Instead, they'd acquired an navigation chart that'd show them the nearest colossal archive. Those outposts had a number of additional features that would be useful. They wanted to fill their inventory up first, though, just to get as much out of the trip as possible. As they explored, the occasional burst of searing heat his made Smack cry out in pain. The newbie occasionally explored too close to an erupting volcano or neglected to recharge their hazard protection. Mere acts of carelessness by an inexperienced traveler were enough to torment Smack in a very real way.

Once the player's inventory was full, they headed towards the marked location. The dozen items they'd picked up might allow them to buy a better ship! They talked with each NPC along the way and shopped for a few other items before arriving at an artifact exchange vault. The terminal allowed a player to hand in one ancient item and receive another of equal or greater value in return. They flipped through their inventory for the cheapest valid option and selected Smack; he was the only one worth less than 75K.

Unlike when Kairi sold him, Smack had far less warning before he was disposed of. There were few audio cues and, as the player wasn't on voice chat, they didn't have any reason to narrate their travels to him. Smack heard the sound effect of a valuable item being acquired and then, once more, the world around him disappeared.

"Aww, heck yeah!" the player said to themselves. They received a legendary item worth more than thirty times what Smack was. That'd go a long way towards their ambitions to explore the universe in style. Smack, conversely, would have barely made a difference in the player's finances. He was that insignificant on the scale of the game's economy.

Next Iteration

Another cycle of nonexistence overtook Smack. It was an unsettlingly familiar experience to have complete sensory depravation. He once more lost any sense of time or self until, with no fanfare at all, he was again randomly seeded into another planet somewhere in the universe. This time, the soil around him felt damp and temperate. He was placed on a lush world--what the game also termed a paradise planet--for some other traveler to find.

Despite the planet supposedly being a paradise, to Smack it was another round in hell. He was trapped. Unable to move. Unable to speak. Unable to escape his situation even if someone found him. As that realization set in, his mind began to break and fragment, as even he questioned his existence. He wasn't a person. He was an object to be created and destroyed repeatedly until the game's servers went down for good.