Chapter 1: Last Day on Earth
The notification sound from his phone sliced through the graduation party noise like a hot knife through butter. Chronicles Medieval was calling—his crops needed harvesting.
"Are you seriously playing that farming game right now?" Jessica laughed, her words slightly fuzzy from champagne. "We just graduated, Marcus! Live a little!"
Marcus looked up from his phone screen, where pixelated wheat swayed in digital fields. Around him, his Stanford Computer Science classmates were celebrating their freedom from four years of academic hell. The restaurant buzzed with talk about job offers at tech giants, startup pipe dreams, and gap year adventures across Europe.
He should’ve been celebrating too. His offer from Google was sitting in his inbox, waiting for his John Hancock. Six figures, stock options, the whole California dream served up on a silver platter.
Instead, he felt empty as a busted piggy bank.
"Just wrapping up this harvest," he mumbled, fingers flying across the screen. The familiar rush hit him as golden coins poured into his virtual bank account. Level 847. Three years playing this ridiculous mobile game, and he was probably in the top 1% of players worldwide.
"Dude, you’re totally hooked," Mike said, sliding into the booth next to him. "When’s the last time you did something real? Like actually got your hands dirty instead of playing in virtual dirt?"
Marcus’s thumb froze over the screen. When was the last time? Back home in Ohio, maybe, helping his mom with her tiny garden behind their cramped apartment. Before Dad bailed. Before everything went to hell and he’d buried himself in code and fantasy worlds where he could control every damn thing.
"Chronicles Medieval is way more complex than you think," Marcus shot back. "The resource management algorithms alone—"