It all started ’bout a year or two ago. Back then, ol’ Shea McCoy was still a regular guy, logging onto his PlayStation to play games and stream movies. He’d chat online with his friends as they shot their way through enemy hordes. Life was pretty good for Shea.
Then one day Shea became a father to a baby girl. No one noticed anything at first. The changes, well, they came slowly. Shea’s friends would go days without talking to him, and when they did it seemed as if the energy had been sucked out of him, like he was just a husk of his normal self. Entire matches would go by with Shea giving nothing more than sparse noncommittal grunts.
Other times, out of nowhere, everyone would hear the wailing: “Whaaaaaaaa!” There were bloodcurdling screams coming from Shea’s headset! If you listened close, you could hear the shuffling feet and the thumping of the headset falling to the ground. Then…silence.
Shea’s friends began to worry. Something had taken hold of him. Facebook pictures showed Shea’s glazed, dead eyes in hollow sockets and posts indicating that he “felt like a zombie.” The guys were determined to help their friend, but they never got the chance. Next thing they knew, Shea just wasn’t online anymore. He had seemingly disappeared into the ether.
Or did he? His friends would swear that their phones would light up in the middle of the night at three, four, five in the morning, notifying them that Shea had logged onto his console. But by the time they frantically logged on themselves to hear from Shea, to make sure he was okay, he was nowhere to be found, his gamertag sitting idle offline.
To this day no one knows exactly what happened. But that isn’t the end of the story.
They say if you log onto the PlayStation Network really late at night, and look really hard, you can still see Old Shea aimlessly watching Netflix, his shirt adorned with the stains of an infant’s many bodily fluids.
