What to Eat

After a few hours of this Dithers realized he was hungry. His cabinets were typically bare for the average simutronics user. One of the latest features was being able to eat food within the game while also consuming food in this world. You could be feasting on roast duck (or Sea Serpent, as Dithers had favored) while in the real world eating a wholesome, low fat, nutrient rich, fiber bar. Which, naturally, Dithers had been doing for months. There were several boxes of fiber bars and some old dark chocolate. There was even a beer in one corner, as old as Dithers had been playing the game long. Dithers checked his wallet and realized that ever since he had started playing the game his chief expenses in life: food, alcohol, or going out, had all dropped significantly. He decided to order something. He flipped out his X-Gear and dialed an old place he’d liked before starting the game. The dial hit the tone picked up and then went blank, an operator explaining that the number was no longer in service. He began to wonder how long he had actually been playing ‘Worlds of Realcraft’. He scanned the net for numbers of delivery joints near his apartment. Nothing came up. Dithers finally found the number for a Help Directory and called. Like Dithers’ job, it wasn’t that an A.I. couldn’t easily answer any questions a person could pose. It was just that given how much processing power answering questions like, “Does peanut butter go bad if its been in the sun?” over and over again proved an unnecessary drain on processing power. It simply let humans deal with human error to ensure there was ample time devoted to more important matters. After haggling with the human operator for a few minutes, Dithers was surprised to discover that there were almost no restaurants left in his part of the city. “They’re all uptown now. Bars too. All the ones in your part of town went out of business,” the operator explained.