KIERAN
The championship match ended with my avatar exploding into pixels.
I ripped off the headset and threw it across my studio apartment. It bounced off the wall and clattered onto the floor next to three days worth of takeout containers.
"Unbelievable." I ran my hands through my hair and stared at the screen showing my defeat. I got second place in the Continental VR Championship. Again. The prize money would have covered rent for six months.
My already fucked up life just kept on getting more miserable lately.
My phone buzzed with a call from Mom. I declined the call like I had for the past week. She would want to talk about Dad again and I could not handle that conversation tonight.
I stood up and kicked an empty ramen cup across the room. It joined the collection of failures scattered across my floor. Dropped out of college. Check. Disappointing career as a game tester. Check. Living in a glorified closet that smelled like desperation and cheap noodles. Check.
The worst part was not losing. The worst part was knowing I had the skills to win. I had seen the opening in the final seconds, had my fingers positioned for the combo that would have sealed victory. But I hesitated. Just for a fraction of a second. Just long enough to lose.
Story of my life.
The screen went dark and I sat there in the blue glow of my monitor, watching my reflection. Twenty four years old, barely scraping by as a game tester, living in a place that was more closet than apartment. Dad would have been so proud.
Except Dad was not around to be proud or disappointed or anything else. He had vanished when I was fourteen and left nothing behind but questions and bloodstains the police could not explain.
My email pinged with a new message.
"what now?" i said in frustration.
I almost ignored it. Probably another rejection from a studio or a scam about my car's extended warranty but something made me click.
The sender address was just a string of numbers. The subject line read: ELARION BETA INVITATION.
Huh?
I opened it.
"Dear Kieran Chen. You have been selected for exclusive beta testing of Elarion, the world's first fully immersive VR MMORPG. Your gaming performance has marked you as an ideal candidate."
Standard recruitment garbage. I got these emails weekly from indie studios looking for cheap testers. I started to delete it.
Then I saw the second line.
"Your father would want you to see this."
My hand froze on the mouse.
Nobody mentioned my father. Nobody knew about him except Mom and the police who gave up searching ten years ago. My heart started hammering against my ribcage as I scrolled down.
At the bottom of the email was a symbol. It had a gold and silver interlocking circles forming something like a star but wrong, twisted, like geometry that should not exist in three dimensions. I had seen it before in Dad's study the night before he disappeared but still felt like i ahd seen it somehwere else prior to that night. It was burned into my memory alongside the blood on the walls and the overturned furniture and Mom's screaming when she found me standing there at three in the morning.
The email continued.
"The premium neural link equipment will arrive within 24 hours. No payment required. No obligations. Simply an opportunity to experience what your father helped create. Welcome to Elarion."
What Dad helped create? He was a neuroscientist who worked on brain computer interfaces. Juat the boring academic stuff. Grants and research papers and late nights in the lab. Nothing to do with games.
Except…
I pulled open my desk drawer and dug past unpaid bills and forgotten flash drives until I found it. A photo from my tenth birthday. Dad had his arm around my shoulders and was pointing at something off camera. But it was not the photo I wanted, It was what I had scribbled on the back years later when I was trying to piece together fragments of memory.
Symbols. Three of them were drawn in shaky childhood handwriting, they were symbols that Dad had shown me the week before he disappeared. He had made me memorize them and I did not know why. I was a kid. I thought it was a game.
The symbol in the email was the same as the first one.
My hands started shaking.
Someone knocked on my door.
I jumped and checked the time and it was almost midnight. Nobody visited me. I did not have friends who dropped by and my landlord only showed up on the first of the month to collect rent.
The knocking came again this time as three sharp raps.
I crept to the door and checked the peephole. The hallway was empty. But sitting right in front of my door was a massive black case, the kind of thing you would use to transport military equipment or something equally dangerous.
I opened the door and looked both ways down the corridor but it was completely empty. No delivery person. No note. Just the case.
It had my name on a silver plate. "Kieran Chen. Handle with care."
I dragged it inside. The thing weighed a ton and left scratches across my cheap flooring. When I popped the locks they hissed like the case had been pressurized and cool air spilled out carrying the smell of new electronics and something else. a sharp chemical that made me wrinkle my nose.
Inside was the most expensive piece of tech I had ever seen.
A neural link headset that looked like something from a government lab. Sleek black material that was not quite metal and not quite plastic. Fiber optic cables that seemed to glow faintly in the dim light of my apartment. The kind of gear that cost more than my car. Heck! more than everything I owned combined.
There was an instruction card printed on a thick paper.
"Put me on. I know you have questions but elarion has answers."
This was insane. Completely insane. First a strange email mentioning my dead father, mysterious delivery in the middle of the night, equipment that should not exist outside of corporate research facilities. Every rational part of my brain screamed trap.
But i picked up the headset anyway.
It was heavier than expected, cold against my palms. The interior padding looked custom fitted and when I checked the sizing specs on the inside rim, they matched my exact measurements down to the millimeter. Someone had been watching me and knew the exact shape of my skull.
My phone buzzed with another email from the same sender.
"The answers you seek about Michael Chen are waiting. What happened to your father. Why he disappeared. What he was working on before he died. Log in and learn the truth."
Before he died.
Not disappeared. Died.
What the fuck?
The police had always called it a missing person case. Mom refused to use the word died because that meant accepting he was gone forever. But whoever sent this email knew something different.
The rational part of my mind told me to call the cops, tell mom and throw the headset in the dumpster and moved to a different city and changed my name.
But I had spent ten years wondering. Ten years of nightmares about that study and the symbols and the blood spreading across Dad's desk while I stood frozen in the doorway. Ten years of Mom crying when she thought I could not hear and detective phone calls that led nowhere and teachers asking if I was okay with that look in their eyes that said they knew I was not.
If there was even a chance of answers, I had to take it.
I sat down on my bed and positioned the headset. The moment it touched my skin it adjusted automatically, padding conforming to fit perfectly. THe way it moved was so strange like it was alive. A low hum vibrated through my bones and made my teeth ache.
A screen flickered to life inside the visor bathing everything in pale blue light.
"ELARION NEURAL LINK SYSTEM. INITIALIZING FULL DIVE PROTOCOL."
My apartment started to fade. Not like closing my eyes but like reality itself was dissolving around me. I could still feel my bed beneath me but it felt distant, like I was separating from my body and floating somewhere between consciousness and dreaming.
Numbers scrolled past. Vital signs. Brain wave patterns. Things I did not understand.
"CONSCIOUSNESS TRANSFER IN PROGRESS. WARNING: DISCONNECT DURING TRANSFER MAY RESULT IN NEURAL DAMAGE."
Great. Should have read that part first.
The last thing I saw before everything went black was that symbol again, spinning in the center of my vision, and beneath it words that made my blood run cold.
"WELCOME HOME, KIERAN. YOUR FATHER'S WORK CONTINUES."