In Skyrim

I am the world champion of not killing myself. If you ever feel despair, say those words.

It’s been three days since I slept. I probably need a snack. Walking past impenetrable black ghost kitchens carved of obsidian. Acres of bought-out houses, coldly raptured under the overhauled night sky scabbed with nebulae. Even the self-driving cars seem to avoid me. After passing so many buildings that can’t be entered or interacted with, it triggers my condition. Snowdrops and peonies burst through the sidewalk, fuzzy purple Bugloss dope nodding in my periphery.

My brain damage and the entire political situation of the world and our universe can be explained by the fact that all people deep down inside have the genetic yearning to buy Skyrim multiple times, something which has been confirmed by all mainstream psychologists and psychological magazines and medical websites since then. It speaks at something larger within the human spirit that was seeking to erupt from capitalism, something good and perfect…

After the regime change, the government put the CEO and shareholders of Star Citizen on trial. Following the release of their AI-enhanced confessions which were deeply shocking and put a lot of disturbing events into perspective, they were executed and their funds appropriated for our nation’s war chest and the underlying code was used to piggyback a Skyrim for the People that united us in a kind of New Deal, with modding as a Tennessee Valley Project or generational labor such as building a cathedral.

I chase after one of the cars, trying to see the number on its side, or the name of an app I can download, preferably one related to food. It beeps loudly and military-grade LEDs spray my eye sockets. I have an inappropriate emotional response and try to get run over. I’ve tried it with these hussies before. I know it won’t work. I know I’m still the world champion of not killing myself. They’ve got an AM attitude toward life preservation.

Call our app. I take out my influencing machine and it’s like holding a little black tray of shallow water. An iridescent ash of HPPD washes through it. All screens are like this now and all icons look the same to me. I tap one, hoping it’s some kind of app store. I look at the interlocking grids of randomized false information. Females in different formats. I like watching the female fencers because their armor bulge makes it look like they have penises. But their asses are also nice. Beast of both worlds.

She visited a sunlit place with huge amounts of water and a hole in the sky very bright. I message the fencer, asking for two hundred dollars so I can experience some of the happiness she feels. But she probably gets a lot of messages asking for two hundred dollars.

I tug on the feed and whatever I cared about, whatever person I was a second ago is gone. He made a picture of what he saw when his heart stopped. The result will surprise you. Here it is.
There was an underground facility, might be a theme park. It was dark and a little cold. The use of blue plus signs was used to indicate it but because this was another place the color indigo was used but you should understand it was an impossible ultraviolet cold. Almost radioactive. Transmitted like ice water in the teeth.
In the theme park, they are looking for you.
You can hide in the white area. Or the black beige area. Or the white gray area.
Colors were not useful in the construction of this facility.

This was something from inside me, wasn’t it? Or everyone feels this way, I guess. My mom never told me about the theme park.

I pull on the feed some more until it says I’ve run out of randomized outcomes. Now it’s just personalized AI videos of state propaganda showing me smiling as I go to the dentist and flags unfurl and blond women with impossible amounts of plastic surgery and camouflaged breasts like animal fur are telling me to join one of several government organizations where you get paid to hunt down anything good and sweet in this world for no real reason except maintaining the symbolic integrity of Pedo Safari Zone (Earth).

We need to kill all these fucking people. In Skyrim.

Nordic withdrawal trips my synapses at the mere subvocalization. I avoid looking at the far horizon knowing it will swell into deeply dreamt draconics, dragons that set off pockets of excitotoxicity, each seizure more crippling than the last, they breathe flames of cell death…

My brain was damaged during a fatal interfacing with the Skyrim of the People. Our Skyrim. I am now permanently unable to join the collective. I walk through these streets and see their eyes glazed with Oxy-Skyrim patches. My skin itches, tingles of anamnesis. Those nice cold rivers will never feel my thews again. I swing an imaginary sword in front of me.

9,872,345 shops have passed me by. The white light is becoming almost blinding. Is this real? Pores of the world are opening up. Still vacant, but the kind they staff with people for some reason. An ice cream shop. I try the door, and it opens. A little ice, I ask the low grade fag behind the counter. His name tag is some kind of secret word that doesn’t sit still. He gives me a cup of ice and I suck on the cold river slurry.

Would you like to try a flavor?

OK, I say.

His polo greenscreens into the wall behind him, laminated ice screams triggering pseudo-nostalgias from my warped caches of other people’s fabricated lives. I have to remember a single ice cream flavor or I’ll be executed by cops, multiple cops gathering ant-like to my spilled brains, absorbing overtime from my Skyrim-corroded biomatter.

Chocolate, I whisper. I imagine he’s defecating into my mouth cold and pure like the frozen turds of Skyrim. Was that an official feature? Horses would leave icy feces on the roads and this was removed in Australia…the higher your magic rating the more perfect your bodily excretions become, snot freezing on your face in dazzling crystalline formations. It was part of the war crimes mod collection that allows perfect reenactment of the ethnic cleansing of the Georgian people. I bet he’s one of those Male Red Elves or Circassian Bloodwefters, with an appropriate sphincter size and color. He’s dying and I’m receiving his necrotic essence to carry on the racial purity of Skyrim’s master race, whatever that is. The Pedophile? The coil finally drops from the machine, more flavor-blasted than I could have predicted. I was expecting something flat and brown like in the hospital, not this delightful mess. The chunks of fudge are like frozen beetles. I can’t believe the generosity of this sample size I have received and I almost cry.

He asks if everything is okay and I say yes it’s just a very generous sample size. Each word comes out somewhat pussified, quavering I guess you’d call it. I say sorry I have heat stroke. I don’t want him to think I’m a fag, or that I have Skyrim-induced brain damage. He says oh I’m sorry. Are you okay. I say yes I get it all the time. But this ice cream will set me right.

I dig the little plastic spoon in and take a baby bite. The spoons are really very small. I have never bought something from an ice cream place, but I imagine the tiny spoon is to make you crack psychologically and spend money at their establishment in exchange for an extremely large steel spoon.

I look at the prices and it says $30 to begin experiencing what they have to offer. $30 doesn’t come easy. I think of where I’ll sleep tonight. I could buy pills and pass out in some dry hidden place. Or I could be sober in which case I’ll need to spend money on a hotel. A bad little hotel with bad white paint. They called it the Sea View Inn but all you could see was a view of the pedo yachts clogging the stinking rotten black water. And above it all, the hateful presence.

His first mistake was being kind.

Hey man. What kind of guy are you. Racially. In Skyrim.

He says, an elf.

Very fair answer. I suspected he had these ambitions. Uhhhhhhhhhhhh. I respect that, I tell him. I really do.

What about you, he says.

I try not to cry again.

He says, what happened to you?

I was modding.

Ah, yeah.

Skyrim Femboy Mesh. Alchemy. Rebalanced Combat. Enhanced Strikes. Moon Phases of … but there was a really dark mod…

He heard about those dark mods.

Yes, but this was really dark.

Oh…

Mm. I keep my sentences short, trying to hide the extent of my condition. Most people don’t know a lot about Post-Skyrim Use Disorder. Maybe that’s what the oxy is for. They can pin it on the opioioioid crisis.

I shouldn’t spend any money on this place. But I think of that cold, cold river. I was drawn to this place for a reason. I ask for another sample.

What kind?

Your choice, I say. He’s the fucking ice cream expert, right? But it’s not that simple…I want to see what he will choose…this ice cream is symbolic of our unresolved feelings and possibilities. I do feel like kind of a john, fucking with this ice cream like this. Making him perform emotional labor. But when you’re feeling this bad, moral considerations become more distant. We’ve all become so dehumanized…

He picks rainbow sherbet. Is he calling me a fag? I hope so.

I say, thank you. It’s delicious.

By now he’s broken my will entirely. I put down 30 dollars and order an ice cream experience. He gives me a member’s card. It has the fake name I gave him. The name of my Skyrim character.

Now what ice cream can I get for you today, sir? Or something like that. Maybe he didn’t say anything at all. Even the present is a decaying memory. His limp dark hair seems unchanged since high school. It turns white. His sliders softly wane.

Can I see your Skyrim, I ask him. Just for a little.

I don’t know…I’m not supposed to…

I tell him I’ll help him out. With whatever he needs.

I don’t know…

Maybe I miscalculated. Maybe he’s not gay. Not an ice cream shop bisexual. Maybe he’s just a Christian. Or maybe I’m gay.

Finally he says, meet me after work.

✦

In his dark apartment room he’s becoming an elf. The eczema on my hand is my lizard scales. Moving up and down in violation of the ToS. The Skyrim miscegenation laws are clear. Player marriage is only between a man and a woman. But I don’t care. I’m not a man. I’m an addict.

Enhancing his experience. This is how an elf really feels. It’s easier when he has the mask on and the oxy patch is melting on his skin. No need to sully this with my emaciated body or consider any of its actions as anything more than pure sensation. He smells like ice down there. Like the cold Nordic streams. His 20-something skin dithers and posterizes through my damaged visual cortex. I must be getting agitated. Interoception impairment prevents me from making these connections fluidly, but I can guess. My head pumps into a blotch of noise between his work shirt and the black jeans I pulled down. No teeth, I remember that from my dicksucking days. The penis is a genitalia…deeply important to the human race…in Skyrim there are no penises. Not really. That’s what mods are for. But you pay the price.

I come up for air and ask what he sees. His voice is slurred. I’m walking around…sorting potions…there’s some flowers…official flower mods…higher res flowers…flowers of the Caucasus…

I remember Georgians, Ossetians, and Abkhaz aren’t allowed to have a Skyrim account. That is sad. Over in Rus, they have Escape from Tarkov: Family Village. Similar concept. Everyone has an account tied to their passport. There are masks that dispense Adaptol or something into your bloodstream, but the average person plays on PC, public kiosks, and most of all, as a pre-packaged app on their phones.

When the Abkhaz and the Rus ethnically cleansed the Georgians, they loved to find the young girls. It kept them going. A big source of emotional support for their work. The younger the better. There was a girl they raped and raped and finally sawed in half. And they said…what did they say…she’ll never be whole again. Neither will we. Our people will never be whole.

There was cold water…imagine you’re standing in the cold water and the mud and looking up at the gray circle of the sky and a black cloud crashes to earth and these are the corpses they are throwing in. I say corpse but think of all the clothes the corpse is wearing, the colors, the fabric, or maybe the clothes were stripped off, and they have hair too, and various smells, and you are trapped in the well with these dead once living people, remember they only become invisible from far away, right now it’s a muddy polka dot blouse with a swollen back and dark hair and

The flowers of the Caucasus mod has no known dependencies other than the base game. Mods requiring this file can be seen at the DMV. There is a fix for the lighting as well.

I miss my friends. I think most of them are dead. All chat services can only be accessed through Skyrim, so I will never know. By now his noise has become very loud in my mouth and I think something will happen. Broken navmesh water seams. A static screech of free samples and free samples and free samples salty and melted and these are the warm sulfery waters of Eastmarch. They have AI helpers there and when you get close the sheen becomes fractalescent, recursive airbrushing of form constant breasts, cleavage that locks you into a vertigo panic attack spiral as you fall through the map and

Was this the dark mod? Or official content? Each patch contained the tensions of interparty rivalries and schisms, accidentalist infusions of ideological asset updates. FEMALE KHAJIIT TEXTURE CONTAINED UNINTENDED ELEMENTS. THESE HAVE BEEN REMOVED. They covered her breasts up…

I’d ask to try his mask but I know the biometrics would ban his account. I have to settle for the blue light shining off the rims of his cheekbones.

He’s getting restless now. Don’t kick me out. You ever get a Skyrimjob? That’s a thing right, in the gay community. They probably have special modified masks with poppers.

I don’t normally do this stuff, he says.

Could steal his mask and crack it open. Take the oxy dispenser. But it has a tamper-proof mechanism. I still have the burns on my fingers.

Let me crash until morning. Just a few hours. Then I’ll be gone.

I’m the world champion of not killing myself. But also the world champion of sucking guys off in Skyrim. To avoid homelessness. This goes on for, uh. Few weeks? They destroyed time at the founding of this republic. And replaced it with concrete. I am incapable of understanding most concepts. I suck him off every night. Becoming part of the mask like the oxy. He brings home free samples. My diet is almost completely ice cream and cum. This would work if I was 12. But my body isn’t so resilient anymore…even though PSUD has distorted my endocrine system into a eunuch-like state, smooth skin can only go so far. It’s hard to compete with the Circassian surplus. I know they have special hearth rooms in Skyrim for the state pedophiles. With special neotenous races and AI voice filters strapped onto you like a gag, turning the first crack of your voice a scream to stop into YES DADDY. They have special full body masks for kids. Extra failsafes designed by OSA. Protecting kids online. It tightens around your waist and your thighs and your forehead and they have special drugs that give you double vision. I was part of a youth group for troubled teens in the desert very far from cold cold streams. They had a special race for you and it was LittleWhiteBody and there were no faces. Realistic Water Three was flowing by and it was a nice picnic for the Jugend League. They had a way to make you feel everything. Maybe we already did. And always have been. It’s okay. It was just in Skyrim.

I did this from ages 12-18. Later there was something about unauthorized user experiences but nothing much came of it. I know they’re still out there. As long as rooms exist, vampires will ask to come inside. But the trick is, they never needed to ask. They just like to make you beg.