It snowed all night.
I crouched beneath the broken eaves of a shack in the game. My health bar was hanging by a thread, and my body temperature bar flashed red.
Hunger twisted my stomach as if a knife were stirring inside it.
It was the most sadistic game I'd ever played.
No in-game purchases, no revives, not even a place to warm up unless you fought for one.
I cursed the developers a hundred times and was about to log off.
A man in a gray gown walked over through the snow.
He crouched down and took half a moldy steamed bun from inside his coat.
He didn't ask me to complete a quest or watch an ad.
He said, “Eat. Stay alive.”
Then he asked my name.
I told him my ID.
He shook his head. “That's not a name. You're a person.”
“Comrade, what should I call you?”
I was stunned for a long time.
In real life, nobody cared what I was called.
The foreman called me “hey, you,” and the boss called me “Employee 237.”
I lived like a brick that could breathe.
I told him my real name.
He smiled, took off his padded coat, and draped it over my shoulders.
“Come on. There's a stove going inside.”
I followed him, stepping into the tracks he'd left in the snow.
Suddenly, I started crying.
Not because I was cold.
But because in this fake world made entirely of code,
for the first time,
I felt like a living person.
Only later did I learn that half that steamed bun had been his family's dinner.
That padded coat had belonged to a friend of his who had died.
Later still, I died beneath a hail of bullets while handing out a leaflet for him.
As I died, I heard him shouting:
“Comrade, ”
It was worth it.
In this life, someone called me that once.
That was enough
