One morning, just after four, he gave up, threw back the covers and got out of bed. Better to just find something to do, he decided, rather than lie in bed wide awake. He didn’t have a book he was reading at the moment and didn’t feel like watching TV. He was antsy. He tried the treadmill for a few minutes and then gave up on that, too.

Finally, and without any conscious decision on his part, he found himself sitting on the living room couch, headset on and controller in hand, playing his first solo round of Infinite Frontiers or, as Brent had started referring to it, IF. Trying to recall the correct sequence of buttons it took to fire his machine gun and rummaging the 3-D war-torn landscape for med kits and discarded rations made for a good distraction. One needed to concentrate, after all, to avoid stepping on a land mine or getting shot in the head by some mindless AI sniper. It took effort, too, Jeremiah discovered, not to shoot his foot off with his own gun, a maneuver he seemed to have mastered without even trying.

After dying several unceremonious deaths and respawning in roughly the same spot he’d started at, he decided to work on his avatar instead. How many times had Brent chided him, after all, for continuing to play as the default image of a nondescript American soldier named Player 2?

The choices were many and intricate, starting with species and ending somewhere around eyebrow shape and shoelace color. If he wanted to, Jeremiah could literally have played the game as a bipedal alligator in an evening gown. But he went with something slightly more menacing.

Slowly, attribute by attribute, his avatar, whom he called Clyde, came into being. He was a stocky, stern-faced ex-marine (or so Jeremiah imagined) dressed in camouflage pants and a tattered Ramones T-shirt, which was bursting from the force of his muscular chest. He wore a military surplus helmet over messy, dirty blond hair, and goggles that looked like they were salvaged from an industrial waste site. He had a cache of weapons on his person that included an assault rifle, two handguns, a machete and a blade he concealed in one of his hobnail boots. Once he leveled up a few times, Jeremiah had his eye on a sweet Uzi and a grenade launcher, but he didn’t have the points for either yet. Standard-issue grenades were clipped in a ready row on his belt, and his pack contained ammo, med kits and rations enough to last a virtual month or more.

He sat and tweaked Clyde’s appearance for over an hour, playing with the skin tone and trying out different placements for battle scars and tattoos. In the end, though, he opted to hold off on the ink altogether, deciding that tattoos would be used to mark his eventual kills. And Jeremiah planned on many victories, even if he hadn’t come close to one yet.

When he finally positioned the nose just right and had firmly decided against a bandanna, the living room door opened without warning and Brent came whistling into the apartment. Jeremiah looked at the clock and was shocked to realize he’d been at it for four hours. It was nearly nine o’clock in the morning.