Jacob Hemlock was twenty-seven years old, and most of the people who knew him had stopped expecting much from him.
He didn't currently have a job, and it had been quite some time since anyone had invited him out to do anything. He still considered a few people his friends, though he wasn't sure they would say the same about him at this point.
His parents certainly had plenty to say about the situation, however.
They had spent years trying to convince him to go to college or at least find a job he could keep. Jacob understood why they were frustrated, but hearing the same conversation every few weeks hadn't made him any more interested in having it.
It wasn't as if he couldn't put effort into something. He just had trouble finding anything in his daily life that seemed worth the effort.
Real life was weighed down by the heavy burden of existence to begin with; stacking work and dealing with lesser minds was something he was just not interested in and lacked the energy to put towards the effort required of him.
His farm, however, was another matter entirely.
Jacob sat at his desk with his VR headset covering most of his face, looking over an offer for three thousand tons of genetically enriched soybeans.
The buyer wanted a lower price in exchange for handling transportation, which sounded reasonable until Jacob checked how much that transportation would actually cost.
He could arrange it himself for considerably less than the discount they were asking for.
Apparently, they were hoping he wouldn't bother checking.
Jacob adjusted the offer and sent it back before turning his attention to the fields that would need to be planted after the sale went through.
Farm Online had been his favorite game for years, though calling it a game didn't really explain how much work went into running a successful farm.
The company behind it, Reiscore Games, had gone to quite a bit of trouble to make the farming as realistic as possible.
Its founder, Anthony Kerin, had grown up on a farm and eventually taken over the family business, only to lose it after running into financial trouble.
He had moved to the city and become a programmer afterward, but apparently, losing his own farm hadn't made him any less interested in agriculture.
Instead, he had made a game where other people could experience how difficult it was to keep one running.
Jacob wasn't sure that was the most reasonable response to losing a family farm, but he was quite happy with the result.
There was a lot more to it than putting seeds into the virtual ground and waiting for something to grow.
The condition of the soil affected what a field could produce, and repeatedly planting the same crop could cause problems that took several in-game seasons to fix.
Even a good harvest didn't necessarily mean the farm had made money.
Equipment still needed maintenance, and selling at the wrong time or to the wrong people could leave a player barely covering what they had spent growing the crop in the first place.
There were tutorials for most of it, along with forums where players could ask questions, but someone still had to understand how everything worked together.
Jacob had spent enough time figuring it out that his farm was now one of the most profitable on the server.
He even held a respectable position on the global leaderboards, which was quite an accomplishment considering how many people played.
Unfortunately, his parents didn't seem particularly impressed by the distinction.
Even if he did make just enough money through real-world trading to pay for his own living expenses while staying at their house.
In-game, he adjusted the nitrogen levels for one of his eastern fields and checked the progress of the harvest.
He thought that it was a little frustrating that he could manage an operation this large in a game but couldn't seem to keep a normal job.
The work itself had rarely been the problem. Once someone explained what he needed to do, he could usually figure out a reasonable way to get it done.
Getting along with the people around him had been more difficult.
If someone was doing something wrong, Jacob generally told them or told their boss.
He figured that knowing about the problem would give them an opportunity to fix it, especially if he also explained how they could do it better.
It seemed other people didn't always appreciate that reasoning. Even supervisors didn't want to hear about their subordinates slacking.
He had been called into enough meetings with human resources to understand that much, though the conversations usually left him wondering why everyone was more interested in how he had said something than whether he had been right.
Apparently, being right wasn't enough to keep a job.
At least the people in Farm Online were easier to deal with. If he annoyed an NPC, he could check how much reputation he had lost and work out what he needed to do to get it back.
Real people didn't come with that sort of information.
Jacob blinked a few times, trying to clear the uncomfortable feeling in his eyes, and glanced at the time.
He had been playing for about thirty hours.
That explained why he was having trouble getting comfortable in his chair. It also explained why the need to use the bathroom had become quite difficult to ignore.
He shifted in his seat and looked back at the harvest.
There wasn't much left to finish, and he wanted to make sure the next rotation was ready before he stepped away. It would only take a few more minutes.
About ten minutes later, Jacob was starting to regret that decision.
"Alright, alright," he muttered as he pushed himself away from the desk.
His legs felt stiff when he stood, and he had to steady himself for a moment before making his way toward the bathroom attached to his bedroom.
He reached up to remove the headset, then paused as another change in the market caught his attention.
The prices were still moving, and he didn't particularly want to disconnect while he had orders waiting. He could keep an eye on them for another minute or two.
He knew where his own bathroom was, after all.
Jacob loosened the straps enough to lift the headset slightly and pushed the door open with his other hand. The display was still partly in front of his eyes, making it a little difficult to see past the information about his corn futures.
He was more concerned with getting his pants down at that point.
Unfortunately, he had waited a little too long.
Before he had properly positioned himself, he felt something warm splash onto his foot.
"Shit!"
Jacob shuffled to the side, trying to get closer to the toilet while pulling the headset farther out of the way. The movement caused it to slip awkwardly across his face, and he reached up to catch it just as his bare heel came down in the puddle on the floor.
His foot slid out from under him.
With his pants around his ankles and one hand still occupied with the headset, there wasn't much he could do to stop himself from falling.
His head struck the rim of the toilet hard enough to break the porcelain.
The impact knocked him unconscious before he could even register what had happened. As his body continued to fall, his neck caught against a sharp piece of the broken bowl, opening a deep cut across the right side.
It sliced cleanly through his jugular, spraying blood all over his white walls and tiled floors.
Then he landed on the floor beside his treacherous toilet bowl.
Jacob never woke up.
Since the cut had severed his jugular, and no one was there to notice what had happened, there was nothing to stop him from bleeding out onto the bathroom floor.
His headset had come loose during the fall and had landed nearby. The game continued running, waiting for him to respond to orders he would never see.
His corn futures expired not long afterward.
By the next morning, his parents were starting to get annoyed that he hadn't answered them.
That wasn't particularly unusual on its own.
Jacob had ignored them before while playing, and sometimes sending him a message through the game was easier than trying to get his attention from outside the room.
This time, however, he wasn't answering those either.
They eventually went into his bedroom and found his chair empty. The bathroom door wouldn't open all the way, and it took them a moment to realize that something was lying against it.
When they managed to push it open, they found their son beside the broken toilet.
His pants were still around his ankles, and the headset lay on the floor near his body. There was enough blood that neither of them needed to get closer to understand how serious it was.
For a while, they just stood there.
They had spent years worrying about what would happen if he continued living the way he did. There had always been another argument about his future, or another promise that he would eventually do something with himself.
Now there wasn't going to be another conversation.
What they felt was mostly a heavy sense of pity. It seemed their son had finally managed to neglect something he couldn't simply deal with later, and they had found him far too late to do anything about it.
The funeral was small.
There weren't many people to notify, and none of the friends Jacob had once spent time with came to say goodbye.
His parents purchased a plain pine coffin and buried him in one of the less expensive plots.
No one from Farm Online attended, either. As far as most of the people he dealt with there knew, he had simply stopped logging in.
For a while, the farm continued operating without him. He had managed to put his virtual workers through well-scripted pathing assignments for the day-by-day operations, after all.
However, the unfinished work that the virtual workers couldn't do began to pile up.
Crops went unharvested, and the next planting never happened. As the seasons passed, the operation he had spent years building became another abandoned property on the server.
Eventually, the game's system reclaimed it and cleared away what remained.
His grave lasted considerably longer.
However, the inexpensive headstone received little attention after the funeral. Over the following years, weather wore at the engraving until his name became difficult to read.
Eventually, that disappeared as well.