By Erin O’Loughlin

Minecraft Miller used to sit in front of me in school. I can see his desk now, where he hid his iPhone in boring maths classes, absorbed by the far more important task of clicking 3D cubes together. Minecraft Miller’s name probably wasn’t really Minecraft. Unless maybe it was. Maybe he was born with a square head, and they thought his eyes looked like shiny, glowing pixels. “Look at our beautiful baby boy Mr. Miller,” his mother would have said. “He looks just like an 8-bit baby.”
“So he does Mrs. Miller,” his father would have said, thinking of his favorite go-cart game. “Let’s call him Mario.”
“Mario Miller? Everyone will laugh at him,” his mother would have replied. “Let’s call him Minecraft.”
That’s probably not how it happened. But I don’t know what his real name was.

Minecraft Miller boasted that even his dreams were made of bricks. By day or night, he was a master craftsman, builder and destroyer of worlds. Entire villages were ravaged at his command; whole civilisations flourished or fell at his desire. While the rest of us played at aliens and spaceships in the dirt behind the monkey bars, Minecraft Miller was ruler of entire universes, and knew all the secrets of creation.

Minecraft Miller’s mum begged him to stop. “You’ll turn your eyes square,” she told him. “Your dinner’s getting cold”, “You need to sleep!”, “It can’t be good for you!” Minecraft Miller didn’t care. He was raising flocks of chickens to feed his villagers. One villager looked a bit like his mum, but she got eaten by zombies.

Once in class, Ms. Snyder caught Minecraft playing with his phone and she confiscated it.
We all stared while his face got red, and his eyes went dark with anger. We waited to see if he would explode at her. It almost seemed like lightning would shoot from his eyes, like a comic book supervillain. Then someone sniggered nervously, and Minecraft seemed to deflate.  “Please Miss, I have to keep playing,” he said.  Ms. Snyder scoffed, “Nothing’s going to happen if you turn the game off for a few hours Miller.”
Minecraft mumbled something under his breath, looking forlorn. Later, Jimmy swore that Minecraft muttered “It’ll get me,” or maybe “The Nether will get me.” Jimmy also said he French-kissed Clara behind the gym. Everyone knows that Jimmy’s full of it, half the time.

That last week, I walked past Minecraft in the park on my way home from school. He had his phone out, but he wasn’t playing with it. Just staring into the distance. The weird thing is, I could see the little square people on the screen moving around anyway, diligently building, like they just knew what he wanted them to do. I was looking over his shoulder, and his hand was gripping the phone so tightly it had gone all red. From my angle, it almost looked like the phone was dripping little drops of blood.

The police think Minecraft Miller ran away. Or maybe he was kidnapped. They can’t find any evidence at all, but that’s their best guess. Mrs. Miller thinks her son was eaten by the computer.
“I came into the room, and one minute he was there, and the next minute he’d been sort of sucked inside it!” she tells people.

That’s probably not how it happened. But not everyone thinks she’s crazy.