– Online.
His phone buzzed. A text from his friend Marcus: “Dude, r u online? Saw u join a custom game just now. U good?”
weirdo [left the game]
The search spun. Then, instead of a simple “Taken” or “Available,” a page loaded with a timeline.
But the achievements kept unlocking. The friends list kept growing. And somewhere in the cloud, a ghost kept looking up its own name, just to remember what it felt like to be human—even if only for a few milliseconds of server time.