SUBCUTANEOUS 1.7

So the very end of this one is something I'd love notes on, if y'all have any! Didn't want the chapter to seem too off-brand, but also don't want to throw in something abrupt just 'cause, ya know? Either way, we got another one down! So close to release date!!!

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Enough is enough. 

For all that she has enjoyed the game, for all that it clicks beautifully into a niche in her mind of exactly what she wants in an experience, something is wrong.

Are there multiplayer VR games? Sure. Are they rare? As hen’s teeth. Were there any terms or conditions that she had to sign? No, there were not, which… she’s not sure about the legality or safety of?

And, most importantly, her headset has online play disabled.

Wifi being always active means constant updates. It means downloads that she didn’t ask for from companies she doesn’t trust, a slowdown on her performance from the needs of the wider interwebs and the processing power required to keep that connection running.

And frankly, VR multiplayer games suck. If she wants to play with others, she can play Fortsnite or Warframing, mediums that have perfected the mechanics of the system and requirements.

So her wifi was off.

But that… creature. 

It waved back.

Which either means that a random area boss, potentially tied to a softlock about how far she’s allowed to go, was coded with an almost perfect reactivity… or that was a player.

In a game with no wifi requirements, and with internet access turned off.

There’s theoretically some normal way to explain this. Maybe they have a Dark Spirits-esque system of previous players and emote reactions coded into stuff. Maybe the boss always waves, a sort of cheeky challenge before it kills you dead.

…

No. 

It doesn’t fit. It’s too much. Not even New Vegas, one of the greatest games in the world, built by some of the most talented, passionate studios in the world, had this level of detail on this intimidating of a medium. It shouldn’t exist.

And then there’s the other things. Small stuff, stuff that she’d normally disregard as a failing of the senses or a sleep-deprived mind, but that’s been building since she started. The forum thread that got deleted, the weird username she’d never seen before and which she saw, she saw twitch, and now the weird sort of… flexing of her headset. The way the haptic feedback is more precise and more intense than any other game, to the point where it’s genuinely painful and exhausting.

Something is off. Something should not be.

Ilia sleeps uneasily that night. From 2am to 10, just barely meeting that 8 hour quota- not enough or at the right timeframe to wake up feeling good, but just right for having enough energy to make it through the day without problems. Same as usual.

But she wakes up sweating, wrapped in her sheets. There is a sense of animal fear and discomfort, like she dreamt of something that is out of sight, hidden from memory.

They say that you dream all night, but only remember short bursts at the beginning and end of true sleep. Whatever she’s forgotten, chased away by morning light, feels like it crawled over her until the moment she woke up.

Ilia shakes her head. Dramatic ass bitch. 

She still wakes up feeling shitty, but a break, a moment to process, does a lot. 

As she showers, gets clothed, and packs her laptop into a bag, she makes up her mind about what she’s going to do.

Research day.

Thirty minutes later, a car with its check-engine light on and a severely whiny suspension rolls into a coffee shop and deposits Ilia onto its porch.

The door hinge squeaks as she shuts the door (harder than is usually needed, which is already pretty much a slam), and she steps into a safe place of comfort. An oasis in a field of grim, poorly maintained city infrastructure.

And there’s Jay.

“Hot chocolate, two pumps caramel, and a peach tea?” he asks, the moment she walks in the door.

“You know me too well.”

“I like to think just well enough, thank you much!”

Infectious doesn’t quite describe Jay’s personality. It’s less an infection, more of a pandemic. She’s yet to meet someone able to keep from smiling in his presence; he has an easy confidence, a casual comfort with people that never feels excessive, always ready with a joke, a wink, or a little tune he’s humming. She’d call him a golden retriever in human form, but he’s much too clever for that- he’s headed for a PHD candidacy and an absolute expert in his chosen field of Egyptology.

Which is why he has a job at a coffeehouse. 

A very nice coffeehouse! One of the big three in the whole town! 

But admittedly, the career paths for Egyptology are rather limited outside of academia, even in places with more than 6,000 people total. 

Ilia’s known Jay since they met in junior year. A whirlwind, and only a year into her transition. He’d been an unexpected source of support and brightness, a note of shocking stability in a time of chaos near-absolute, and she still hasn’t paid him back for that, no matter what he might say. If not for a stunning lack of ambition and the era they live in, she’s pretty sure he’d be some genius majordomo, the power-behind-the-throne type of person. Except nice. 

Instead, he makes some of the best hot drinks in the local area and, to Ilia’s eyes, singlehandedly keeps The Golden Roast over its competitors.

She finds a seat open, one of the ones with comfortable seats, and collapses into it, slinging her laptop out with the ease of a well-practiced motion. The place is a little pricey, at least on a bartender’s salary, but it’s worth it for the high-speed wifi and the drinks (and Jay).

All in all, it’s one of the places she feels centered. There’s plenty of good in creating a home environment that’s comfortable, a reflection of yourself, but in her experience, reflections are rarely your friend, and something being comfortable doesn’t make it good. When she needs to get out of her own head and get shit done, and going from her room to the living room couch isn’t enough, there’s few places in town that suit her better.

Her laptop finishes booting up, and in seconds, she has a VPN up to disguise her presence online just a teensy bit, and a search bar open for her query.

First, she opens a second tab, pulling up her email.

She tracked the game through every stop. Different mail services, different countries, it didn’t matter: two hundred dollars is not money she can afford to lose or get cheated out of, and her excitement for the game melded with that fact to make her near-obsessive tracking the package. She goes through her flagged and priority messages, checking backwards on every step on its journey.

Before Hollow Springs, it was with USPS, who are alright at tracking their packages. She researches every address, finding three different warehouses- one in montana, one in oregon, one in nevada, all small towns not much larger than hers. From there, overseas shipping from Hawaii, the first place she got confirmation from USPS that the package was on the way.

Before that, it gets weirder.

There’s about three weeks where she got no notifications whatsoever, but before that, she got news that it was in Madagascar, off the coast of south Africa. There, her messages came from an account she doesn’t recognize, but the address for the warehouse brings up images on google-maps of a building with the words “Paositra Malagasy” on the front. An even quicker use of a fresh tab lets her know it’s the official government post of Madagascar.

Tracking back from that, New Zealand. 

That’s where the trail starts, but it’s not perfect. Her email says that the package arrived at a processing facility there, and a quick search brings up news stories about a brand new facility, the largest in the country, processing hundreds of thousands of packages. She got a second email when it was shipped out from there, but the formatting doesn’t tell her if someone submitted the package originally from New Zealand or if it came from someplace before that. 

There’s a number she can call though.

Normally, the thought of a phone call is exhausting, but somehow, to a complete stranger for a completely strange reason, it feels easier. She’s not sure exactly what to say, though.

Another search brings up substantially less results than before- there are no major VR gaming companies with a New Zealand office. The likelihood of someone having a secret game-development team there, or that team having someone leak a completed product early, or that product being a decade ahead of its time and weird to boot… well, it’s not high. What will she say if she calls? “Hey, I ordered a package from a stranger on a forum that my friends vouched for, just wondering if you have records of a package you got two months ago headed for madagascar and could tell me the return address on it?”

…It’s not as fantastical as weird meat-games growing out of her headset, but it’s not exactly the sort of thing likely to get someone to think she’s sane either. Or at least not very smart.

Still, she’s about ready to check the local time “across the pond” and call when someone interrupts her.

Jay puts down two takeout-cups of steaming hot drinks on the table, smiling at her. He’s got beads in his dreadlocks that clatter against each other very quietly, and she blushes a bit for noticing and for not noticing that he was coming over.

“Figured I’d bring them to you this time,” he says, leaning with his hip against one of the empty chairs at the table. “You seem busy.”

“Thanks, Jay. Sorry, it’s… it’s been a weird time the last two days. Doing some research on something funky.”

“Anything you need help with? You know I love funk.”

“Brazilian funk is not funk, it’s like trap-beats with rap.”

“What is any music, if not an exploration of style and genres? What is any new category of hot beats to funk to if not a blending and evolution of what’s come before?”

She snorts, taking a sip from her hot chocolate. Scalding hot, but she doesn’t mind- the heat wakes her up a bit, and she doesn’t flinch, even as she almost burns her mouth. “Far be it from me to yuck your yum, nerd.”

“‘Yuck your yum’. And I’m the nerd. Scoot over, what’s got you frazzled?”

She sighs, making room for him on the fancy beanbag-couch-seat. He takes one look at her open browser and flinches.

“Dang, girl! You still ain’t learned to put your tabs down when you’re done with them?”

“I’m cross referencing! Shut up. I bought this game online, off a forum. The guy I bought it from got vouched for, but I hadn’t met them before we started chatting for it, and when they sent it, it went through, like, half the globe before it arrived, and since I plugged it in, it’s been weird. It’s a weird game. I’m trying to see if I can figure out where it came from.”

Jay snorts, stealing a sip of her hot chocolate and flinching hard when he realizes how hot it still is. He shakes his head, putting it back with a sour look, before turning back to Ilia, who is successfully holding back a giggle.

“You bought a game off an internet weirdo and now the game’s weird. Who would have thought.”

“Not like that. It hasn’t glitched, or set up a connection somewhere, hasn’t slapped me with any viruses I found. If anything, it works too good- it runs butter-smooth, best graphics I’ve seen, and it’s got so many little details and gimmicks that it doesn’t seem possible. I’m trying to find out if I can see where the package got sent from so I can check for some big-name gaming companies there.”

“Sounds like a plan. What’s the problem?”

“The problem is that the trail ends in New Zealand, and I don’t know if it starts there. And if it does, then some crazy savant coded this thing in a basement, cause there’s no VR-centric gaming companies doing anything like this over there.”

“Hmm.” Jay leans back into the seat, perching his head on his hand as he turns to stare at her. “Any reason this is freaking you out so bad?”

“I’m not ‘freaked out’, I’m just-”

“Freaked out.”

She sighs, turning a glare on him… but there’s no heat to it, and she ends up rolling her head back with a groan.

“Fine. Freaked out. Just… it’s too good to be true, and it’s really weird. Like finding freddie mercury’s long lost cousin’s albums, except he’s just as good as freddie but also clearly high on bath salts. And last night, I swear I had my wifi settings turned off for the headset, but it felt like one of the boss characters that popped out waved back at me.”

“Maybe it was built in? Make for a fun little note?”

“If it was just that, maybe, but on top of everything else? It’s too much.”

Jay sighs, leaning into a fake pout. “Hate to see you so wiped. I can tell you were really looking forward to it.”

“Yeah, it’s… it’s a really good game. It’s just…”

“I getcha. Well, not really, I’m more of a moviegoer myself, but I can tell this frazzled you. I’ll be off work in a few hours, if you wanna stick around, maybe work on a few job applications…?”

She scowls at him, turning to take another gulp of burning hot chocolate (with two caramel pumps). “I like the bar job, Jay. It pays well and it’s simple work.”

“And you’re way too smart for that and I think you will have an even better time somewhere else and I’ve said this before so byeeee~,” he says, shooting up from the seat with an almost comically athletic ease. “If you do want to hang out later, just text and let me know, ok? Hot chocolate’s on me today. My gift to my weird, smart, delightful, in-need-of-comfort friend.”

She rolls her eyes, but it comes with another sigh and a nod. “Thanks, Jay. You’re… thanks.”

He smiles, wide and like a sunbeam. “Ain’t no thang, gorgeous. I’ll get you for the tea when you head out, ok? And again, if you want to hang out, get some socializing time outside of work, wait here or just let me know, alright?”

She nods. “I can do that. Thanks, Jay.”

He winks at her. “Hey, what are friends for?” 

And with that note, he turns on his heel, practically jogging back over behind the counter, somehow magically just in time for a fresh set of customers to walk in.

She watches him go, his dreads bobbing, his skin almost glowing in the early afternoon sunlight.  She takes a deep breath, closing her eyes, refocusing.

Research. And hot drinks.

But she can’t help it. She looks at the back of him one last time.

She almost chokes on the hot chocolate as she glimpses something moving under his dreads. Something that blinks at her, and is gone again before she can so much as take another breath.