Modern Loneliness/Modern Warfare.

There is a strange melancholy in finishing your work for the night and then, because you're on your own that evening and aren't ready to go to bed, logging onto the server of a multiplayer shooter which was very popular ten years ago and which you used to regularly play with your brother as a means of staying in touch while you were living overseas. The server's empty now, the players have all moved on. But you're still bored and at a loose end, so you log onto the same old deathmatch you always used to log onto when the game was full. You wander around for a while in the generic Middle Eastern market square where you remember calling in a hundred heli-strikes and taking a thousand head-shots, and it feels a little bit emotional, this walk through a deserted make-believe place, this fantasy gleaned from the imaginative parameters of a server that has been left running out of sheer indifference, quietly consuming its megabytes of bandwidth in nibbles and pecks all over the world like some vast indifferent mind. You explore a little, try getting to some inaccessible places you couldn't ever access before, because that's where everyone wanted to go and you'd always get shot before you even managed to lie down. You fire off a couple of rounds, and they echo back at you from the surrounding buildings, perhaps a little mournfully. You switch weapons, wonder who's haunting who. Up in the eagle's nest, you gaze down at the main thoroughfare and think about the good old days. And then – then some total bastard sneaks up behind you and cuts your throat.