DaddysPrincess1202

The email read: “My daughter will not be using her Fairy-Space account any more. She lost her battle with leukemia last Tuesday. You may delete DaddysPrincess 1202. Thank you for being a safe place for her during the last months of her life.

As an account administrator for Fairy-Space, I get a lot of emails every day. “I forgot my password,” or “Somebody hacked my account” or “Please block Dragon145622 from my world, he is a jerk”. This email was different.

It went on: “My little girl enjoyed feeling like she could play with other children and get out of her hospital bed while she was in your world. Last night I visited the tower she created there one last time; it was so much a reminder of who she was in real life. If only her mother and I could download her account and keep it in her room. It is so empty—not just because the hospital bed is gone. If you get a chance, please visit her world before you delete it. She was so precious.”

I’ve had to delete a lot of long, ranting emails without reading them. This one stayed on my screen for several minutes as I read it over once…twice. I lost count of how many times.

Logging in with my administrative avatar, I loaded the profile of DaddysPrincess1202. It was as if I had entered the world of a child.

The children I tend to deal with most are the trouble makers. The brats, the bullies, the ones who are one step away from having their account deleted for abuse. DaddysPrincess1202 was not like these children. Here in her safe little space she had created a fantasy tower, surrounded by a fairy garden, in which her presence could still be felt. A recorded sound byte of a young, untrained girl singing—her voice, I presume—played from a flower bed of enchanted daisies. I did not recognize the tune.

I entered the tower, decorated by her novice hand in crude, pixilated flower-patterns. At the bottom of the spiral stairs I found her message board, a mod provided to all users for them to communicate with their friends who might have missed them while they were offline. There were several blinking messages from her online friends who had come looking for her. It would be beyond my duties to inform them that DaddysPrincess1202 could not play any more.

Lining the wall to the upper chamber were a collection of user-modifiable frames. These models were coded to carry the compressed images of photos each user uploaded to the online world. The first photo was of a man; tall and thin, probably her dad. Then a woman, similar age, though the pixelation of her facial features made it hard to determine age. The third photo was of them at the beach somewhere, smiling into the camera as the sun set behind them.

As I slowly worked my avatar up the spiraling stairs, the photos continued. Two of them were of dogs—maybe her pets? Then there was one of a bunch of girls huddled around a birthday cake. The photo above that was of two tween-aged girls standing close together—perhaps the best of friends. Their cheerful grins carried that innocent youth I don’t see much of as an admin.

The next photo was another birthday party. Same group of girls…a little older this time. But one of the girls was off to the side. In a wheel chair, I noticed. She had a kerchief on her head. I went back down the stairs to the other photo and noted…she had long brown hair in the first picture; none in the second.

Back up to the top of the stairs. This tower model was designed with a large, open room at the top that users can decorate however they want. As an admin, I often have to visit the problem worlds to see if the user has gone too far. Not so, here. No torture chambers or dark, satanic imagery splattered on the walls. No signs of a troubled home-life that begs for real-world intervention. Just a blocky representation of a girl’s bedroom, decorated in flower-patterned curtains, bedsheets, and a matching rug.

One last photo by the upper window, where she had built a small desk and stool to look out into her garden below. In this frame was a photo of her sitting at a window in the real world, looking out at the sunny world outside. I noticed she was sitting in the wheelchair in this photo, too. Besides the kerchief on her head, a pixelated oxygen tube and canula draped across her pre-adolescent face. The photo was not flattering, but perhaps she had posted it not to flatter herself, but because the weariness and longing in her eyes, captured in that split-second as she turned from the window, best expressed how she felt.

And I was here to delete this. That is what they pay me for.

If you are ever logged in to Fairy-Space, wandering through the many public user worlds, you will find all kinds of personal expressions. Worlds full of monsters and the heroes a child hopes to become. Worlds full of scary things a child hopes to overcome. Worlds full of pop stars and idols a child wants to emulate. But if you ever load up DaddysPrincess1202, you will find a world that is just child’s life. A life that wants to continue living.

And so it does.