Jacob Hemlock lived his normal life up to this point with nothing but triviality. He was 27 years old with no girlfriend and no job. His parents dismissed him and the few people he could consider his friends thought of him as a boring loner. To him, life was exceedingly mundane, and he didn't feel like he had the motivation to try any harder.
His parents urged him to go to college constantly, but he was just too lazy to apply, and he felt that at this point he would be too old to attend. His only solace was a farming simulator he had played since he was a 13-year-old kid.
Farm Online was a project developed by Reiscore Games, and it was consistently updated to keep up with the vision of the founder and CEO of the company. Anthony Kerin grew up on a farm but when he took over the family farm, he ran into financial troubles during a particularly rough year and was forced to sell the farm and move to the city.
Anthony managed to get an internship at a game development company during the early days of videogame development as a simple code cleaner and ended up showing his superiors that he was worth teaching their methods of programming and how to utilize the algorithms.
The business Anthony was working for ended up getting forgotten in obscurity, but the knowledge he gained in his early days as a videogame developer allowed him to take control of a large videogame business where he met his most trustworthy allies in the videogame industry. From there he was able to leave the business with the best people he needed to start Reiscore Games.
Due to his fond memories on his farm, the main project for Reiscore was the Farming Online MMORPG. Their aim was to create the most realistic farm life possible which started as a computer game, and around the time Jacob was 23 years old the game became a VR experience.
The game was so realistic at this point that in order to run a farm that would make plenty of money for the player to expand, they had to actually know how to grow crops and raise animals. Additionally, the player had to know how to make their crops and animals thrive to have a superior product. Then, the player had to know how to manage the export logistics and even how to broker deals or they would always be stuck with an NPC that could only get them mediocre prices for anything they needed to buy or sell.
The research and development of new techniques and technologies was up to the player as well. From soil enrichment at the molecular level to engineering projects to tackle water distribution logistics, the player had to directly manage it all. While competent NPCs could be hired for these projects, the player was still required to do the necessary research to know what was needed to be researched and built. The NPCs, while helpful, were only able to do the most basic of things. If the player wanted to have a truly powerful farm, then the player had to be capable of handling the research as part of the development team.
Jake had managed to learn how to do it all since he had been playing for so long and he even ranked on the leaderboards as one of the most profitable farms in the game. He would be a great candidate for management at any farm, R&D, or supply related business if he didn't have such a horrible antisocial personality. It is not as if he had not tried to hold a job, and he usually did a great job when he managed to get gainfully employed. His problem was keeping the job as he would quickly get fired from most jobs due to speaking to customers or co-workers improperly.
In Farming Online, he did not have to deal with too many unreasonable people since the AI could only be made to be so realistic and the exaggerated extent of actual people was hard to replicate. There was also no HR on the farm in the game, to any misunderstanding with the NPCs just resulted in a loss of reputation which he knew how to game back to max.
On a particularly long binge of Farming Online, Jake had been online for over 30 hours straight and he really needed to use the restroom. He found a good place to take a break after tending to his cows and ran to the restroom with his headset on. His restroom was connected to his room which allowed him to expertly navigate his way to the toilet while he was trying to get his headset off. Since he had to pee so bad, he ended up having to pull his pants down before he had his headset off all the way, and he wound up getting some urine on the floor on accident since he was not right over the toilet yet.
He could feel the warm liquid hitting his feet as he took his headset off, and he noticed he was just right of the toilet, so he cursed and took a step left. Due to the urine on the floor, he ended up slipping and due to binging so long his coordination was off resulting in his failure to catch himself.
He smashed his head so hard on the toilet that it broke apart and he cut his right jugular on the edge of the toilet that had become a makeshift scalpel. He passed out before he knew what was happening, so he ended up not having to feel his life ending as most of his blood spurted out of his neck.
Jacobs parents found him in his restroom the next morning since they didn't get any sort of reply when they knocked on his door and even sent him in-game messages to no avail. When they found him, his blood covered the entire restroom floor and most of the walls and he was curled up next to the toilet with his pants around his ankles, headset flung next to his dead body. They thought this seemed like the way they always figured it would happen and they only felt pity and a bit of disappointment in their failure of a son.
No one went to Jake's funeral and his parent only got him a basic pine box as a casket to save on costs and they had him placed in whatever plot was available. No one ever visited his grave either and he was soon forgotten. His headstone was made of marble and had not had any sort of treatment so it was soon weathered and became impossible to read.