by C E Keene
“We believe so,” Galen answered diplomatically. “My colleague has mentioned beasts behaving more aggressively than normal.”
Talk continued between the Naturalist and the cook, with Bren making comments every now and again. Treyous was oddly silent through it all, though. More disconcerting than that, his gaze rested on Arheis for almost the full duration. The only time he wasn’t looking at Arheis was when his attention would flicker to Mira for the briefest moment.
It made him feel uneasy, though he couldn’t explain why. And when Treyous finally spoke during a lull in conversation, Arheis was on his guard.
“You mentioned you were almost killed,” he said casually, “and that Lady Amira saved you? I can’t imagine the reaction time such a rescue would require. How’d you manage it?”
The captain was focused on Mira, who was presumably trying very hard not to correct him for calling her “lady” again. She glanced to Arheis, then tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear as she answered. “It was… automatic, honestly. I could feel that he was in trouble, and I acted.”
Arheis looked between Treyous and Mira, trying to sort out the purpose behind the question. Maybe he was reading too much into it. Maybe the captain was just curious. But he had a knowing look in his eyes that Arheis just couldn’t let go.
“It was the same for me,” he said, looking right at Treyous. “There was just… something that bound us together.”
He searched for the flicker of recognition in the man’s eyes, that “gotcha” moment as Treyous took the bait and responded to something that was very clearly a game mechanic. After all, Arheis could point to the field on his stat sheet where his bond with Mira was mentioned, including the abilities it granted each of them. And while it was definitely more than numbers and code to him, he wanted to see if it was anything more to Treyous.
Because if the man recognized it for its barest form, maybe he was talking to another player.
But the captain just smiled that same carefree grin he’d worn when they first met, his eyes sparking with interest but not recognition. “Fascinating.”
After that, Arheis stopped looking for signs where they obviously didn’t exist. Treyous wasn’t a player. He was just an eccentric ship captain who was probably going to get on Mira’s last nerve before this trip was over.
The dinner continued with light conversation. They’d been served whitefish with a small, vinegar-dressed salad, and some fresh oranges for dessert, with melted chocolate Treyous raved about to dip the wedges into. It was simple but a better meal than he’d had in game so far, and thanks to the herbs Mira had given him, he wasn’t met by a wave of nausea immediately after leaving the cabin.
That blissful reprieve gave him the chance to stretch his legs before he returned to the cramped room he shared with Zindar and Galen. As Arheis leaned over the railing and looked up at the stars that painted the night sky, he tried to pick out constellations he knew. None of them really fit, of course. Estalia was different. Just a game. A game where he’d already established some very complicated relationships. A game where everything felt increasingly real, to the point where Arheis had stopped thinking about the fact that he needed to log out at some point.
A game where a man could somehow rise through the ranks of the Guild Hall, have a son he raised to adulthood, and become mayor of a village in an insanely short amount of time.
Paul Larson.
Arheis racked his brain—Simon’s brain—to see if he remembered that name from anywhere. He’d followed the development of Untamed for a while, but most people didn’t keep tabs on everyone who worked on it. Paul said he’d been a QA tester—that he’d had access to an early beta build of the game. That meant his name was probably somewhere in the real world, right?
Once Arheis tugged on that loose thread, he couldn’t stop pulling. If he could find out more about Paul, maybe he’d learn about Higrem, too. Maybe he’d be more informed, coming back with questions that would force the other man to stop being so damn cryptic and just tell him what he meant after they’d faced the Queen.
Because if he was going to have to make a choice someday, he wanted it to be an informed one.
That guidance, that rapidly unfurling thread led him back to his cabin. Zindar was already asleep and snoring loudly by the time he got in. Galen lay on the bottom bunk, staring upward and looking like he might be considering kicking the mattress above him. But Arheis ignored both of them for now, tuning out the world of Apex. He tugged off his boots, stripped down to his nightclothes, and lay down on his cot like he intended to sleep.
Then he pulled up the systems menu and logged out.
9
Simon was greeted by harsh, unnatural light that seeped into his logout-darkened vision and made his head ache from the inside out.
He squinted against the brightness, his eyes watering when he tried to open them. He had to let the glare of the energy-saving halogen bulbs seep in gradually, all while grumbling to himself about not leaving the lights on next time.
That at least served to ground him as he came back to his droll reality. If he hadn’t inadvertently anchored himself, the strange sense of not belonging to this space would have hit him even harder. As it was, his heart raced and he looked around what he knew was his apartment with the eyes of someone who’d never seen it before.
Part of that was because there were definitely things sitting out that he hadn’t put there. Not consciously, anyway. At some point his NeuroJak-controlled body had grabbed several bottles of water and some pre-packaged meals from the fridge. One of the bottles sat on his desk, half-finished. The rest were in the trash beside it, along with the meal containers.
“Couldn’t put a trash bag in there before you started tossing things, could you, self,” he muttered.
Even the sound of his voice was strange. That was Arheis’ voice, and he expected to see the dark interior of the cabin; to feel waves gently rocking him to sleep. Instead he saw bare walls and felt the carpeted floor beneath his feet when he stood to stretch, an action that was easier than he thought it would be. And crazy fulfilling.
Once he was up, it was easy to walk around. He explored his apartment, looking for anything that was out of place. Almost everything was as he’d left it, though. Bed unmade but not mussed. Fridge and freezer closed, thank God, despite the fact that he’d been getting into them. Even the toilet seat was spotless, and as he didn’t find any suspicious bottles by his desk he could only assume the Jak had relied on his muscle memory to get through that, too.
This was really, really weird.
Grabbing his phone, Simon flipped through his notifications. Technology kept on ticking in its spammy way, it seemed, because he had a bunch of app reminders to minimize and tons of junk mail to delete. There was also a packet from HR, and Simon opened it without a second thought before a sharp stab of fear hit him.
What day was it?
Closing his email—despite knowing he could find it there, too—he looked at the display on his phone. February 3rd. Whole weeks had passed in Estalia, and it’d barely stretched to a full day in the real world.
“What the hell…?”
Maybe Paul was right. Maybe it was just a simple matter of the game world progressing much, much faster than the real world. But could twenty-some years have passed in so short a time? Simon had no idea, but he planned to find out, even if he only had a name to go off of.
Before he sat down and dug into the deep recesses of Google’s third page of results, Simon took a little stroll outside of his apartment. It was chilly out, and he was forced to grab a coat before heading out of his building. The crisp night air was a blissful contrast from the sticky humidity of Lacerda, but when he walked to the nearby park and looked up at the stars, he found the view a lot more lacking.
It was a silly thing to judge. Thanks to the light pollution, he’d never had a great view of the stars, whereas game devs could control exactly how the skybox looked and how all the lighting worked.
It wasn’t a fair comparison to make, and he let it go in favor of doing something in the real world he knew he couldn’t do in Apex: Ordering a pizza.
Nothing too crazy. Just something loaded down with sauce and veggies—things he was craving since meat was in abundant supply in Estalia—that he picked up on the way back to his place. He set the box on his desk, propped it open, and inhaled the scent of once-frozen pizza dough and what was most likely canned sauce stuffed full of preservatives.
Grabbing a slice and folding it lengthwise so it was easier to manage, Simon used his free hand to start his search for Paul Larson.
Of course being distracted by food apparently knocked his common sense down a few pegs, because the endless, generic database results of “pay us $200 to stalk this person” surprised him at first. Then he realized he’d only typed in the name. A fairly common name, at that.
Sighing at himself, Simon added “Apex” to the search string and narrowed the results. Now the first things coming up weren’t those shady sites selling personal information, but he was having a hard time making sense of the results he was actually served. Most of them were from online news sources, and each headline was more grim than the next.
Police Continue Search for Paul Larson
Still No Word on Missing Persons Case
Bloomington Police Baffled Over Lack of Evidence in Missing Persons Case
On and on they continued, but Simon was unable to keep from clicking one of them. He pulled up an article from a paper based out of Bloomington, Minnesota, and scanned the article, his brain seeking out Paul’s name.
Paul Larson—reported missing to the local police late Tuesday by his landlord—has not been heard from for as long as two weeks, Detective Peterson says.
“Usually we check with the family, but he doesn’t have any in the state, and no one else has heard from him in over a year. The last person who had contact with him was somebody who watched his videos.”
Larson has a small following on the gaming broadcast site Twitch, where he was reportedly last seen streaming himself playing Apex: Evolution.
“The guy’s streams are pretty irregular,” said longtime viewer Antony Bracco, who goes by the username stormchasertony. “I’m a mod on his channel, but I didn’t think much of it until the police reached out.”
Before he even finished the article, Simon pulled up a tab on his second monitor and searched for Paul’s name paired with Twitch. Thankfully one of the gaming sites had also run a brief piece about the fact that he’d gone missing, with a link to his channel at the bottom. Adrenaline spiked Simon’s blood like a potent cocktail as he clicked over to it, almost afraid of what he’d find.
But it was just a normal Twitch page. The last video was displayed at the top, with a scroll of the chat ready to play alongside it. Down below Simon found Paul’s rules for conduct in his chat, a couple links to sponsored products, and a notice saying he apparently streamed whenever he felt like it, urging people to follow him if they wanted to know when he went live.
Sure enough, the latest stream was from Apex: Evolution. Simon clicked play, his gaze riveted to the screen as he waited for Paul’s standby screen to disappear. It wasn’t replaced by a face cam, though. Just the main menu screen for the game. Eventually Paul started speaking, and aside from sounding more tired than Simon had ever heard him, he could instantly identify that as Higrem’s voice. No question about it.
Pausing the video, Simon tried to calm his racing heart before he went back to the other tab. There was no reason to get worked up over this. These articles were probably just outdated. If he’d been playing at a testing facility or something, the landlord wouldn’t have thought to look for him there. He was sure someone had eventually found Paul, and all of this was just a very weird coincidence.
Except deep down, Simon didn’t believe in coincidences. Not when they were this big.
He went back to the search list and clicked on the third article. That one was from a local paper, and it was dated a week after the last one he’d read.
Bloomington, MN — One week ago, Hugo Cassel visited the third floor apartment of Normandale Community College alumnus Paul Larson only to find an eerie scene straight out of a science fiction movie.
“He was just gone,” said Cassel. “People leave town, skip out on their rent and they take everything with them, obviously. But he didn’t take anything.”
After not receiving September’s rent from Larson—a punctual tenant, according to his records—Cassel went to check on the man.
“He seemed like he was really stressed last time I talked to him. I thought maybe something happened,” recalls Cassel.
But when he unlocked the door to Larson’s apartment, he didn’t find his tenant, nor did he find evidence that Larson had planned a trip. According to Cassel, everything was locked in time.
“It was seriously like he’d been in the middle of eating a meal, then he just got up, and he left. Food out on the table, dirty pots and pans on the stove, and everything left behind,” Cassel stressed. “Car keys. Key to the apartment. Wallet with his ID, his credit cards, all of it. Everything was there.”
Bloomington police are similarly baffled by Larson’s sudden disappearance, though they’ve kept a tight lid on any theories with regards to the case. Cassel has not been so secretive.
“Look, I don’t believe in aliens and all that shit, but something happened to that guy. People don’t just disappear.”
The Sun Current has reached out to lead investigator Detective Michael Peterson for further comment. We will update this article once we receive his reply.
Simon stared at the article until the words started to blur together and the migraine he’d experienced upon first “waking” ratcheted up to eleven.
Paul had disappeared. He was just gone, like he’d stepped out for a second—without any of the things he’d normally need—and hadn’t ever come back.
It was impossible to believe, and the implications were too numerous for Simon to even process. Mostly his brain kept getting hung up on the fact that he’d apparently just vanished, and somehow nobody had any idea where he might be.
Except me.
The thought came unbidden, and Simon quickly chased it away. It was crazy and terrifying and he didn’t want any part of that line of thinking. People didn’t get sucked into video games, no matter how real they felt. It just didn’t happen.
But even as he continued searching, Simon had the unsettling feeling that he knew exactly what had happened; what could happen. Paul told him he’d need to make a choice. Obviously he’d made that choice for himself a while ago. What if the choice that needed to be made was—
No. He needed more information.
Clicking on a YouTube video from a popular conspiracy theory channel entitled “Paul Larson: Everything They Don’t Want You to Know”—and wasn’t that just a clickbait title for the ages—Simon’s attention was glued to the screen.
“You’ve probably never heard of this man,” the creator of the video began. “The name ‘Paul Larson’ probably means nothing to you. But if you identify as a gamer, you need to wake up and start paying attention.”
The immediate jump into sensationalist nonsense almost made Simon click away, but then the creator showed a picture of the man. Just a selfie that looked like it had been his profile pic on some social media platform or another. Paul had apparently made the same choices in character creation as Simon, because Higrem looked a lot like his player. His face was a little more filled out, his beard patchy, but the man was easily recognizable.
Somehow it made this whole thing that much more surreal.
“Paul was like most of us. Mid-twenties with a dead-end job that paid the bills, but just barely. A lifelong gamer, he started to supplement his income with Twitch streams and the occasional vod, but his content never garnered enough attention for him to become a Twitch partner. It was a passion project more than anything, and Paul frequently streamed whenever and whatever
he wanted, not caring that much about pleasing his fans.
“Isn’t it strange, then, that Paul was contacted by the developers of the Apex series, to not only test out their newest game, but test it on brand new, unprecedented immersion technology? Hardware worth thousands of dollars and a game that much more popular streamers and content creators would have killed to get their hands on early.”
Simon had to roll his eyes at that. The guy was reaching, and without any actual proof to back it up. For all he knew, Paul had an in with the company. Or maybe there was just someone in the office who watched his streams and liked his content. It didn’t have to be some big conspiracy theory designed to rile up a bunch of angry gamers.
He was so close to clicking away from the video that he tuned out the next part of it. That was until the creator said something that wrestled Simon’s attention away from the jaws of skeptical annoyance.
“On his Twitter account, Paul mentions, quote, ‘something huge is happening,’ right around the day Kotaku ran an article about a few select people being given access to the Apex: Untamed beta. There can be no doubt that was what he was referencing, and he goes on to talk about it several more times, always in vague ways to skirt the non-disclosure agreement they must have had him sign.”
Several tweets flashed by on the screen, and Simon read each of them.
Paul Larson @pauliebeast93
Tech is insane these days. When I was growing up, if you wanted to interface with a game you had to use a clunky ass controller. Kids don’t know how good they have it now.
Paul Larson @pauliebeast93
Had a dream a Culasta was chasing me. Shit’s never felt so real before. #imjustsayin
Paul Larson @pauliebeast93
Think my boss will let me call out if I tell her I’ve got people depending on me to save a village?