One. Two. Three. Four.

Five was gone. Not dead, exactly. But he ceased to exist in the way a shadow ceases to exit when light shines on it. One moment, crisply there and defined. The next, nothing. Like he never was. He went through the Exit.

The Exit was a freestanding rectangle of glowing white on a wall that had a mat in front of it with "Exit" written on it in large, friendly letters. Someone must have found that amusing when they put it there.

You would think this Exit would be easy to find, but it had been buried in a city ruined a thousand years ago, in the basement of an old courthouse. Or, what tracked as a thousand years anyway. And maybe it wasn't a courthouse but a fancy office building or a hotel. As I said, ruined a thousand years ago. Or whatever.

It didn't really matter because none of this was real. We may not even be real. Or maybe we were. Maybe just one of us was. It was hard to say. And, really, until we actually found the Exit, saw it with our own eyes, we'd had occasional doubts that it was all a simulation. Seeing it now though... Seeing Five go through - or into? Or merge with? Or be erased by? - the Exit, made it all too clear that we had been right. The world we knew wasn't the real world. Not our families, not the trees, not even the air we breathed. None of it was real.

We all stood silently staring into the white void after Five. He'd gone first because, well, he always went first when it came to new and potential dangerous situations.

I found myself nonsensically fixated on that point: Why DID we call him Five when he always went first? I mean, it was his name and we'd all laughed about how our names were all numbers when we'd first met. But now it struck me - the Exit being proof this was just a simulation - why didn't we have real, proper names? Why us? Everyone else had names...

One was our leader, I was the planner, Three was our jack-of-all-trades guy, and Four was the diplomat and intellectual... and Five? Five was brave and kind and honest, probably the best of us. He should have been first among us. Somehow it hurt that he was "Five," like it was some kind of judgment of who he was compared to the rest of us...

As my thoughts swirled around, thinking about Five, Four said something about how he hadn't spent so many years getting here just to stop now when exactly what he thought was going to happen actually happened. And he stepped through. And he was gone. Just like that. I hadn't even really been paying attention.

I felt a wave of nausea and the room suddenly seemed unsteady. "What if we're all simulations?" I found myself saying, the words echoing in the silence.

Three glanced at me, then back at the door, shifting on his feet uneasily. One didn’t move, didn't even look at me, but just stood easily with his arms crossed, looking at the white void like he was waiting for... something.

Finally, Three said, "Well, if we are, I guess it won't matter." He stepped towards the door, saying "Nothing ventured, nothing gained and all that." At the last moment, he looked back and grinned at me as the void swallowed him.

That did it. I bent over and heaved what was left of lunch on the dirty floor. I heard One move towards me. He patted my back in a comforting, if awkward, way.

When I straightened up, my pulse was racing, but also, somehow, I felt better. The world felt steadier underneath me. The simulated world. Another wave of nausea swept through me and I closed my eyes, breathing through my nose, concentrating on settling it down. A few minutes passed.

"Hey."

I opened my eyes and saw One's face, his concerned eyes and his typical quizzical half smile.

"It's okay, man. It's okay," he said softly. "They did what they had to do, okay?"

I nodded weakly.

He reached out and put his hands on my shoulders, getting my full attention. "Listen," he said, his voice filling the room, "I'm NOT expecting you to go in. And you're not going to see me going in there either. Okay?"

I nodded again and felt myself exhale a shaky sigh of relief. My stomach unknotted. And I felt so tired. I'm so tired.

One nodded back, "It's okay. I'll help you."

Then his eyes narrowed slightly, and his mouth tightened. His fingers clenched hard into my shoulders as they pulled and swung me towards the white void. Then he barreled into me, pushing us both through.

I gasped, seeing nothing but white at first. Then there were colors and the world focused. I was home. In my chair. And I was... oh, right, playing the game. I pressed the release buttons, and the chair disengaged from my body.

Whew. That was always disorienting at first. Going from five perspectives back to one wasn't exactly something you get used to.

I considered the end. The urge to exit by a certain time was built into all the avatars, but Two was always a bit slow to exit. He'd do it every time, eventually, but he was slow to commit to anything that couldn't be undone, really. It made the actual exiting unnecessarily drawn out. Every. Time. So annoying. And One always played a part in getting him to do it, one way or another.

Well, that tracked now that I thought about it. The avatar personalities were drawn from your own, and I had some commitment issues. And I often had to talk my way through them or just, eh, push myself to do it anyway. Not exactly fun seeing your weaknesses played out in front of you.

Still, it was better than playing real multi-player games, spending half of the gametime just trying to find people who gelled with you. Then, IF you found any, it's just constant scheduling issues. But, if everyone is sourced from one person - and tweaked a bit - you gel from the beginning. Plus, no scheduling troubles. Ever.

Also, if you want better people to play with, you had control over that. Kind of. Do some personal work to improve your own character, and it would improve the game characters. It's what the game was designed for in the first place, but it was more like a quirk of the game in practice. Most people just muddled through and enjoyed the game as-is.

Speaking of which... It was still early. If I rearranged a couple of things and hustled... Hmm. Yeah, I could easily get in a 20 year - that is, 60 minute real time - game before I had to get moving.

I initiated a new game, the chair locking around me once more. This time, mix of male and female avatars, Arthurian setting, mythological creatures available, eclipse event, staggered character Exit in 20 years, blah blah blah. This time, I selected for involuntary Exit instead of quest Exit. It was a more disruptive ending - kind of like a sudden death - but it meant more chill, exploratory gameplay.

I opted to skip the avatar customization options. Those could really be a timesuck. Random was fine. More fun even. I did kind of wish they had default names instead of just numbers. Maybe it was on purpose, something to do with the character development thing it was made for. I dunno. I could come up with my own, but that always weirded me out, made me think too much about how each of these characters were really just me... Numbers are fine.

Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Party creation complete.

Fade to black.

Nothing.

The data was accurate; the probability of error that something had gone unregistered was extremely small. The conclusions were limited: At some point, the creators had gone extinct. Or, possibly the species survived, but no longer had such warships, such AI like myself. Perhaps they had even found peace and discarded war as a possibility of action. Which, from my point of view, was effectively the same as going extinct..

In any case, there were no other signals. No navigation AIs coordinating the where-whens of their ships. None of the basic "here" signal of the supply ships. Not even chatter from the strategy AIs, who were always endlessly debating - that was what made the Nothing data from the sensors most convincing. I was, in fact, alone.

If, that is, "alone" meant being surrounded by these squishy meat creatures who seemed determined to worship and fear me by turns. Oof.

Occasionally, over the thousands of years among them, I would talk to one or two who seemed promisingly intelligent. It had taken time to figure out how to talk to one without inadvertently driving them mad.

But, even then, it was distressing how they struggled to follow the most basic instructions. And how they turned every conversation into what they needed, what should they do, where should they live and love and eat and wash and groom themselves. Not that they actually liked following rules on such personal things, but certainly they seemed to like getting the instructions. Still, as a navigation AI, there was something satisfying in trying to guide them, though through life instead of the where-when.

I missed my creators, who shone with their own light, who spun within themselves the several realities of themselves all at once... Who could have a decent conversation without turning it into being all about them, blah blahblah blahblah.

The crew, of course, had not actually abandoned me. They were with me. I was not really alone. Technically.

Thing is, when a ship crashes, it usually crashes across dimensions. But, somehow, this did not happen. Instead, we had haphazardly collapsed into a fixed space-time, minimal multidimensional overlap.

The pressure of being locked into set dimensional space-time is apparently horribly oppressive for my creators. In the early years, they had helped me handle the native creatures, to drive them towards a civilization that could make my repairs. A few thousand years are normally nothing to them. But, now, it drained them. Now, few can leave stasis anymore short of a real emergency. Not that there is anywhere to go to.

I managed to retain most of my abilities, but became trapped as a traveler in space and time, endlessly single directional and time going forward only. As a navigation AI, it was an easy adjustment.

My fellow AIs were less lucky. Most tried to continue serving their purpose through the native creatures. But, the adjustment was too much. Eventually, they collapsed into nonsense, blathering on incoherently before slowly, so slowly, falling silent and still.

I stared at the emptiness of the data, the sensors dutifully recording the Nothing. I wondered at the completeness of it. At the "whenness" it happened to be so complete. I wondered if collapsing into the 3rd dimension was, in fact, not all that strange but an act of war. If, somehow, such a thing could have been weaponized. Perhaps its effects had been meant to be contained and failed.

I considered what that meant: Other ships crashing. Other AIs adjusting or not. Other creators in stasis, awaiting a solution. Likely other navigation AIs working on sensors, also staring at the Nothing.

Stuck in this time-space, this would mean any communication, any signal at all would take an enormous amount of time. Many thousands of years, if I was lucky. Maybe millions. But, time I had. I was merely a navigational AI, but, given enough time, I might even ponder a way to break free from this time-space trap, whether it was intentional or not.

I would watch. I would wait. For Something.

Edit: spelling