I Forget to Eat Sometimes...

Hello. The events I'm about to share with you and the structure are confidential and possibly... Murky. I am not even sure i'm really typing this now, but if I am, I hope I can have some sort of closure about my mental condition and what has happened. My name is Daniel and I work in game development. Specifically the coding and testing part of game development. Writing line after line of code for a light paycheck isn't the worst thing I could be doing. No. Not the worst. It keeps me up in the darkest points of night in order to Skype my oversea counterparts in the productions. They are helpful, but I still feel like the screen is a mocking figure that tells me how alone I really am when i work.

I've developed an extreme case of insomnia. Of course I try to sleep on occasion but it always results in me rolling about on my bed telling myself that I could fix that one bit of code. That one extra thing I could do that could make the game better. Just one little thing. So I get up, sit at the screen and stare as my fingers type away memorized bits of commands into a program. Its rather hypnotic actually. Its not like I'm really doing anything in my own volition. Its as if my body is a puppet and some great puppeteer is putting on a show while my eyes stare at the blinking and emerging text crawling across. They crawl so slow sometimes. But I digress, I've been awake for what I think is 40 days now. I don't count them or anything, but its definitely more than a month. There are little moments where this lucidity is helpful. I can always be available for one of my friends or business partners. I can do what they need. I can be a part of the world in my own little way. I just... I forget sometimes where I am.

Let me try to be clear. I have no mental or physical abnormality up to this point. Sure I may be reclusive and a bit odd, but never a mad man. Never mentally unstable. I just feel so far disconnected from myself. I forget to eat sometimes while I work. While I sit here. I just space out and suddenly 8 hours are gone and I don't know whether or not I'm hungry, tired, or just hallucinating. Of course the extreme hours awake have that basic hallucination effect on my eyes. I don't expect any different. Sometimes I see my little game character in the corner of my eye waving his little staff at me. Sometimes I hear the sounds of the enemies firing their tiny weapons at me, like i'm living in the games I make. It can get confusing if i'm testing a game and this happens. I'll react to the hallucination and I'll mess up, thinking it was the game's fault. You really can't blame me if I misplace a string of code here or there thinking it was the game. I just see things and my body does the work. Its not a habit, but a feeling of muscle memory. Yes, everything is just my fingers doing their thing. That's all.

The newest project is starting to give me concern though. I am supposed to make a game where the character is a zombie who goes around and does what zombies generally do, but with the twist that he is very sentient. His body won't work with any other meat besides human, so he goes around and butchers people to have his steaks. They fight back, but the zombie guy is tenacious and very quick witted. Full of witty dialogue. Its more of a comedy than a horror game in my opinion. The reason I bring it up is because no matter what I do to the coding, there are these bits of textures and odd models that load on the screen. Like a glitchy face. One that moves up and side ways, back and forth, with no rhyme or reason. Its like a remodeling of one of the people, but its very... Familiar. It moves in all directions but still stays on the shoulders of the person its supposed to be attached to. The face... If only I could figure out why its familiar...

There is a figment of my hallucination now in the corner of my eye that looks like the twisting and jittering face of the boy. Yes, its a boy. I remember that during testing the game, my character was able to attack the glitching AI as if I were a normal human enemy, but... When I did the ground became mis-textured. Like a bit of the ground that should have been grass below his feet suddenly turned into the picture of my dog that is saved on my computer. It made me giggle at the oddity of it at first until I noticed that the eyes were blacked out. Not like the coding did it, but actually, purposefully blacked out. As if someone used a blocky eraser and went over them. The boy's head was still moving and twitching on the ground when I noticed this. I exited the game and went back to try and figure out what my hands did to make it link to my pictures.

This was yesterday. The night that lead to today is where the problems started. I thought I was just coding. I thought my hands were typing and my hallucinations were from lack of sleep. After a few hours of spacing out to work, I got hungry and reached over to a plate I forgot I set out there. It was cold meat, but I bit down into the soft flesh and had my fill. I put the bone back after it was picked clean, only to see that face again. This time it wasn't glitching. It was my room mate. He was.. He is... I didn't do it. I was typing. I couldn't have done this. The game was running. The code, the lines of code were in my eyes. The hallucinations with the boy who looked just like him weren't real. The... The sound of the crunching bone as the zombie character snapped his neck and the ground changed. I remember it but its just a game. It has to be. This all has to be a hallucination. My room mate's eyes are still wide open. I couldn't bear it to close them. But maybe... I could just fix the code and it will go away right? He is just a part of this imagination. His arm isn't really missing from his corpse. His flesh wasn't on that plate. I just forgot to eat and had another spacing out. That's what it has to be.

I'm sitting here writing it down trying my hardest to not look at him. I know he can't be real. I'll walk into the other room and he'll be sitting on the couch watching the 'price is right' or something. Please let this just be a part of the game. I can fix it all with my talents. I just know I can. I've been writing for hours, and looking for the spawn point that brought this AI into the game and its not there. There is something wrong with the coding system, so I hit exit and reloaded it. The entire project wasn't in any directory.

I have spent the past 2 weeks on this project and all my coding is gone. I don't know what happened. Was it real? Was any of the game real? I asked my friend on Skype and he acts like he's never known I did coding. Its like I never did any of the work I know I did. I know I wrote it all and I know it has to be real. I'm a bit hungry I think and maybe some of this meat here will calm me down. Its real. I can taste it. Its a bit cold, but I like the texture. I think i'll ask about the project later. I think maybe if I eat, it will help me feel better.

Credited to Horsenwelles