University Police were called to a campus apartment Wednesday night when a local student reportedly wouldn’t stop screaming “It’s full of numbers, it’s full of numbers!” from within his locked studio apartment. When police arrived, they discovered that sophomore Chip Fredrick had lost his sanity after playing the popular internet puzzle game known as “2048.” According to their reports, Fredrick was staring at his screen, screaming the above phrase over and over while rubbing Peeps into his ears.
“Last time I saw the dude was a week ago. He looked pretty tired and stressed. He had like 60 packages of Peeps in his hands, and he kept mumbling about numbers that were divisible by two. The dude’s kind of a boner, you know, super weird,” said senior Chad Dense.
Though numerous other sources confirmed Dense’s comments, the severity of Mr. Fredrick’s spiral into isolation and addition-based madness appears to be unprecedented. Fredrick went from a student with nearly a thousand active Facebook friends, as well as an army of Twitter followers, to a loner who literally deleted his social-networking profiles for the sole purpose of making more time for “2048.”
“He was such a talented young man,” said Chip’s mother, Margaret Charlotte Fredrick-Casanova, while exiting the Wisconsin Institute for the Insane. “Excellent GPA, plenty of friends and respectful to adults. But, apparently, our little Chip-off-the-ole-block couldn’t handle the fact that he hadn’t beaten the game after a solid four weeks of nearly continuous play. Oh well, we still have Dale; he’s always been our number one! You know, he got to 4096!”
At press time, Chip was drawing even numbers on the walls of his padded cell.
