Peaceful Mode

Winter break was more of a blessing than a curse. At least, in the summer, you could take a walk without your feet going numb in the snow. But Sophia was trapped indoors, and to make matters worse, she was by herself. Her dad was away on a business trip. Mom was taking a girls’ weekend with new friends she’d met at a yoga class at the rec center. Sophia wished she had new friends to take trips with, but no such luck. While she wouldn’t necessarily call herself an outcast, she was shy. Weirdly shy. It was the sort of shyness that had to be explained, usually briefly and off-handedly before someone else went on to have a more successful social interaction.

Sophia didn’t like high school, but she missed the routine. Without it, the days weren’t their own separate periods. They all glommed together into a huge jello cup of time that could only be labeled as “the break.” She’d wake up late and go to bed early, and in the meantime, distractions. Books. Movies. Youtube. Video games. She’d quit TikTok cause it was bad for mental health, but slid down the same slippery slope on Instagram Reels.

This break was different—a little better and worse—because she had something tangible to do: unpacking. The move had been recent, but not recent enough to excuse the cardboard boxes that lined the walls of her room. Unpacking had felt like a private activity. She hadn’t wanted to be interrupted while she tried to Tetris her old life into a new space.

Now, there were no excuses. It was time.

And so, the hours passed, and the empty boxes piled up in the hall outside of her room—but then, under a stack of books, she found a styrofoam-wrapped laptop. It wasn’t hers. This laptop was much older and heavier, and as she tore the last strip of styrofoam away, she realized whose it was. 

They’d stayed in their old house for a good two years after Adam’s passing, but eventually, the memory of him had driven them out. They needed a fresh start. People treated them differently, and they went about their lives differently, avoiding the places and things he had loved, avoiding his presence like someone might cushion an old wound, prioritizing the right leg over the left if broken in childhood.

Now, they were here. They’d gotten rid of most of his things before the move, but Adam’s laptop must have gotten mixed in with Sophia’s stuff.

She had two opposing thoughts:

The first was that she should dispose of it, somehow, because it was his and he was gone and anybody that wasn’t him shouldn’t use it.

The second was that Adam’s laptop had Minecraft on it.

Minecraft was an expensive game to buy on the PC—nearly forty dollars. That was why she didn’t have it. At least, that’s what she told herself. The alternative was that she hadn’t played one of her favorite games in the world for two years because she was afraid to do it without Adam, and she didn’t want that to be true. 

As she held the laptop in the indifferent silence of a brand new house, it felt like a crime to let one more good thing get wrecked. She missed Adam every day, but everything was different now, and while she didn’t want to blame him, it certainly wasn’t her fault.

Defiantly, she plugged the laptop’s charger into the wall and waited for it to turn on. When it eventually did, she typed in Adam’s password into the box, hit enter, and exhaled softly when she saw his screensaver. It was a picture of the milky way. A text box with an arrow pointing to a spec on the lower half informed Sophia that “You are here.” She was incredulous; that spiral was dynamic, full of light and movement. This place was cold, dark and still.

She clicked on the Minecraft icon in the lower left corner of the screen and waited for the game to load. The starting menu appeared. Minecraft Java Edition. It was an older version than she had expected, but Adam didn’t like change. She could even recall him complaining about how much the game had evolved since its release, and how he was nostalgic for the early days.

She clicked on the single player option and resolutely ignored the seven or so saved games, opting to start her own survival world. Her combat skills were a bit rusty, having been on sabbatical these past two years, so she set the game mode to peaceful. No mobs would spawn, and she would be safe to build her starter home. Once she had set herself up, she’d change the game mode to normal so she could eventually beat the Ender Dragon.

She spawned into the taiga biome, which had tall spruce trees, lakes and mountains. Everything was quiet as the square sun rose in-game, even if the spherical one was hidden behind clouds outside. Sophia went through the check-list of early game activities. She chopped down a tree with her bare hands and made her first crafting table. She crafted her first stone tools. She constructed her first wooden house. A bed. A furnace. Food. In her exploration of the land surrounding the spawn, she found a village and raided it for seeds and supplies, all of which she brought back to her base.

Finally, it was time to head down into the mines.

It wasn’t her prerogative to dig straight down, but she hadn’t found any good caves, so she built a stairway into the ground, lighting her path with torches until she reached the level where iron ore spawned. Strip mining was boring, but it did the job. As she was collecting a block of iron ore below her feet, she fell into pitch-black emptiness and swore as she took fall damage.

It was a mineshaft, she realized, when she placed a torch on the wall. This wasn’t so bad after all. There would be chests full of loot and exposed ore everywhere around.

It was still and quiet. All she heard were her own footsteps and the distant trickle of water somewhere down the line. She had to remind herself that she was in peaceful mode, that there would be no mobs, no groaning zombies or rattling skeletons, but this felt strange. As she rounded a corner, a programmed cave noise played, and she flinched where she sat.

The bounty was good. She found diamonds and emeralds, armor of various ore types, and books of enchantment. She even found a saddle. These were all later game items, and she didn’t need them yet—and theoretically wouldn’t if she continued in peaceful mode—but it was still a refreshing victory. All the while, she suppressed memories of the past.

Eventually, she ran out of torches. She could continue to navigate the mineshaft in the dark, guided by intermittent light from pools of lava, but her unease had increased, and it had dislodged a memory, a key bit of information she had forgotten: playing Minecraft alone is creepy, no matter what game mode you play in. And it didn’t help that she was alone in the dark in real life. It made the mineshaft feel more substantive than her surroundings.

She would go back home now.

As she retraced her steps, her agitation became sharper. It was not the feeling of knowing she was going to be attacked by monsters, she realized. It was something else. Something that made her glance over her shoulder, even though nothing could be there. 

Playing Minecraft alone was creepy because it was a horror game. You were supposed to constantly be on edge. There should be no peace in Minecraft because peace is not why people play the game. They play it to overcome challenges, to forget about the ones that await them in the real world. They play it to prove to themselves that they can survive and build a greater life, even when the odds are against them.

Maybe that’s why this felt so wrong. There were no monsters. No real progress. She was all alone—and yet, she didn’t feel like she was.

Once she was safely in her house again, she left the game. Maybe she wasn’t ready for this yet.

But when a day had passed, Sophia found herself opening the laptop again. It wasn’t so much boredom as it was stubbornness. After all, this was just Minecraft. Minecraft in peaceful mode. 

This time, she would play it with the lights on.

She added a garden to her house, began growing her food, and set about exploring the world beyond the spawn. She tamed a horse, put a saddle on him, marked down the coordinates of her house, and left. 

But there it was again—that unease—even though she was no longer in the cave. It started slowly and built up as she covered more ground. So many of Minecraft’s rare items exist in dark places, so Sophia had to go there to explore them. Desert and jungle temples. Haunted manors and illiger outposts. Strongholds and ocean monuments, and all these places, abandoned. Usually, there are enemies to fight there, and something to gain from fighting them; a treasure like disks for the jukebox or the totem of undying. A vivid memory took Sophia by surprise before she could suppress it—her and Adam fighting the Wither, a three headed, flying mob boss, and him barely surviving with a totem of undying in his hand. It was a hardcore world they had been working on for weeks. Hardcore means that, when you die, you can’t respawn. You’re locked out.

But that totem had saved him.

There were, of course, no totems of undying in the real world, but you can’t get back in when you’re gone, either.

The dread never left. There was nothing to fear, and yet, she still felt a sense of urgency whenever she found herself in the darkness. As she traveled through biome after biome, dense forests and hollow deserts, she realized how lonely the world really was. In survival mode, she was distracted from the loneliness by the constant onslaught of attacks, but in peaceful mode, it was all too apparent.

She kept pressing on, though. She was searching. Searching for the source of the strangeness. 

Her imagination took over. She couldn’t blame the restlessness on mobs, so she relied on her subconscious for answers. It took her to darker places than the ones she traveled through. She began to see things. A flicker of something in the corner of the screen. A figure on the horizon that was no longer there when she focused on it. And sometimes, there was even an echo like a pair of footsteps behind her, tracking her every step. It was late by then in the real world, and Sophia didn’t feel it because the adrenaline coursed through her veins, but she was tired. She should go to sleep. She knew that. 

And yet, she continued on. She hadn’t found it yet.

She built a portal out of obsidian, lit it with flint and steel, and walked into the Nether, the hell-like dimension of the game characterized by its lakes of fire, soul sand beaches, and netherrack crags. The feeling of urgency was even more intense there than in the overworld; her stay there was brief, but the journey was not over.

She was beyond the point where she could make excuses to herself. She had more than enough supplies to beat the Ender Dragon ten times over. Her first wooden house was a distant memory. She’d even started trashing some of the loot she’d found to make space in her inventory. If ever there was a time to switch the game mode, it was now. But that wasn't what drove her anymore. 

She played for hours more. 

And all at once, there it was. She saw it as she was traveling through an acacia biome: a simple house made of oak wood standing outrageously against the asymmetrical backdrop of the hills. She blinked several times, her eyes dry from staring at the screen. Had she somehow found her way back to the spawn? No, that was impossible. The world was infinite, and she’d been going the same direction all along. Still, she checked the coordinates—maybe she’d gotten turned around at some point.

But the coordinates were different.

The simmering agitation suddenly boiled over. Sophia began to hyperventilate. The sense that she was being surveilled spread to the real world, to the room around her. Even though the lights were on, she felt blind and cornered. Terrified—and furious.

This world was meant to be peaceful, and it was not. This game was meant to be an escape from the real world, but its problems had followed her here. She grabbed her sword, equipped her armor, and sprinted towards the house. Whatever was waiting for her there, she was ready to face it. 

She felt as if her fate and the fate of her in-game avatar were intertwined, but it didn’t matter anymore. 

She couldn’t stand the dread.

She opened the double oak doors and stepped inside.

But it was just a house.

Just a house with bunk beds, blue on top where she’d slept, and green on the bottom. Just a house that had checkered patterned carpet, black and white because supposedly, it was fancy. Just a house, and just how they’d left it the week before Adam had died.

Sophia’s face grew very hot.

“Oh,” she said.

All at once, the dread drained out of her, but in its wake, it left a sorrow of such magnitude, she almost wished for it back.

Someone had been watching her.

She checked the chests lining the walls, and they were full of supplies, ready to furnish Adam and Sophia for the next journey. She checked the furnace, and it was full. Everything had been kept just as it was. Everything had stood still. 

“How is this possible?” she croaked.

A terrible thought—Adam had been here all along, waiting for her.

It wasn’t he who’d left her alone, but she who’d abandoned him. Because she couldn’t stand the memory of him. Because she hadn’t wanted to keep him company when he couldn’t return the favor.

Sophia sobbed. She said, to no one, or to Adam, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to go. I didn’t mean to go. I wanted to stay but it was hard.”

And of course, nobody responded.

But the sun was rising in the game, and whenever it did, a song played. And that song was a very peaceful one.

Weeks later, Sophia would read about a rare glitch that occurred in some of the older versions of the game where chunks from other saves would load into new worlds you created. It had confused and terrified many players back in the day, the structures being attributed to urban myths like Herobrine. It had since been patched.

But anything from Adam’s seven saves could have generated into Sophia’s world.

And it had been their house.