Ray was sitting in his chair, patiently awaiting the arrival of a certain private message that he had been waiting so long for. His eyes shuddered in their sockets, the occasional twitch sending them bouncing off the sides of his peripheral like ping pong balls over a table. The irises in his eyes were completely devoid of any color, the only sign of visual awareness being the movement of his pupils from his inbox to the refresh button. For two straight days, Ray had done nothing but periodically click on the refresh button at the top of his internet toolbar, the cyclic rhythm having rendered his fingers incapable of any other action. There was no time for anything else. He just had to keep waiting.
Three days prior, Ray had created an animation to be posted on an animation forum, TheDarkDemon.com, to be judged and critiqued. What he was most concerned about was the rank; for too long, he had been sitting at the bottom of the hierarchial barrel, working day and night, sometimes on as little as 400 calories and 2 hours of sleep a day. He had steadily risen, risen to be a candidate for Intermediate rank, the next step in Pivot animation stardom. His latest animation had been made specifically to shoot him straight to Intermediate, a golden ticket right to the top. After sending it to a Rank Team member, Ray waited. Patiently, eagerly, he waited.
Ray couldn't see anything else anymore. His entire peripheral had vanished, leaving the only thing in his steadily weakening vision his computer screen. His inbox remained empty, a spiderhole filled with dust bunnies of binary and BB coding. This didn't discourage him in the slightes. He could wait a bit longer. He ignored the persistent growling of his stomach, the aching cramps in his finger; they meant nothing to him. He also managed to ignore the air-blasted desert of a throat in his neck, screaming for moisturizing fluid. Water meant nothing to him at the moment. He even withstood the creamy, hot feeling of defecation and urine staining his pants. In just a few more hours, as soon as he hit Intermediate, he wouldn't be able to care less what waste products stained his clothes.
The next day, Ray was found dead in his room, his body rigid and cold as ice. Sitting in a steaming puddle of freshly excreted defecation and piss, his head lay on the table in front of him. His hollow eyes stared blankly into the screen of his PC, gazing into his inbox. There was a single, unopened notification in his inbox, with a jolly header of "Congratulations, Ray! Intermediates For You!"
The End
