In the Craters on the Moon Ch. 1

(text-style:"underline","expand")[In the Craters on the Moon] ------------- CHAPTER 1 (text-style:"bold","shadow")[Another Night Staring At Those Fucking Islands] ------------- An entirely predictable bright-gray wave gently swept over the coast of Phobos Beach, and though it was identical in every way to every wave that had come before it, maybe, just maybe, Melody thought, this one might be different. This was a thought she had a lot now as, more and more lately, she found herself here, night after night, staring out at the inaccessible islands in the distance off of Phobos Beach. The longer she looked, the less certain she was of the details in their appearance -- had the mountain on the rocky, easternmost landmass always been so thin, so wispy? Had the image compression on its texture always been so thick, so grainy, so overbearing? Had it changed, at all, in any way, in any tiny, even imperceptible way, from the last time she had been here? But Melody wasn't here. Not really. And yet, in a way, she'd never left. Melody -- the real Melody -- felt something on her hip. Her phone -- the alarm. It was 3:13AM -- it must have been vibrating for thirteen minutes. She didn't notice. Or maybe she did, and she ignored it. Maybe it makes no difference to her, or to anyone. Alison probably used to come here, Melody thought. Alison and thousands of others. Millions? Maybe. Probably. She tried to imagine them all swimming in a line along the invisible wall that sat a few yards past the coastline, a hundred sets of armor and round glassy space helmets all clipping into each other as the players tried in vain to break past the barrier and finally reach those oh-so-mysterious islands. What could be over there? An exclusive quest? - maybe. Rare items? - almost certainly. But every one of the nearly 2 million WanderMoon players who tried to scale that sea wall over the course of those glorious seven years was searching for something bigger than any quest, bigger than any rare item. Ask any blog-writer, any fansite scribe, any fantasy fanatic, any wannabe horror writer, any fanfiction author, any min-max-er, any competitive player, any roleplayer, any lonely kid with too much unsupervised internet access, or anyone at all who spent any amount of time in the world of WanderMoon -- they'll tell you the same thing. There's a ghost, they say. A ghost in the machine. It's a familiar story, often repeated and rephrased on poorly-managed wiki sites and Reddit threads of so-so "spooky stories". The details change, the names get shuffled around, but at its core, as far as Melody can remember, it goes something like this: One night, a lonely developer at Lucky Wish was all alone in the office. He'd told all his co-workers that he had some work to catch up on, he poured himself another cup of coffee, and he bid the other devs farewell. Maybe one of them tries to persuade him to go out for drinks, but can't, and gets suspicious? It's really not important. Maybe he's the one who finds the empty chair later? -- it doesn't matter. It's dumb. So, the guy's working on WanderMoon, of course, just before the game launched. It was crunch time, do-or-die, now or never and tensions were through the roof -- that part, at least, is true -- and our guy was finishing up work on - where else? - Phobos Beach. He's programming away, getting really into it, and something, I don't know, creepy happens. Maybe one of the game characters looks at him and he's all realistic all of a sudden, and he looks right at the developer and says his real name in a spooky voice. And then -- oh my goodness! -- the security camera footage of that night glitches out, a scream is heard, and the developer is never seen again. His soul got, I don't know, sucked in... to the game, I guess? And now he haunts Phobos Beach, living out on those islands in the distance. If you say his name three times and do a certain emote, you can see him walking around on one of them. Or it's his face in the clouds, or he comes up behind you and kills you, or he, I don't know. Turns around and tells you your real name. Gives you the middle finger. Crawls out of the computer and slits your throat. So the story goes. It's dumb. Melody was a writer. Of course she hated those types of stories. And she wasn't just a writer -- she was the lead scenario writer on WanderMoon. It doesn't help that the story doesn't make any sense, anyway. An area in a big online game like WanderMoon isn't the work of a single person, it's a huge collaborate effort -- programmers, level designers, texture artists, modelers, and, of course, scenario writers -- Melody's job. The most important job, of course, or at least she thought so. Not everyone appreciates the vital importance of a writer in a game like WanderMoon, but she never let anyone forget. To ensure that every piece of the game's world is accurate to the lore, that it enriches the experience, that it brings its players further into the unique and strange world. To structure and order quests within the context of the larger storyline. To connect each of the game's areas through context and intention. Her work was the glue that turned a collection of assets and numbers into a game, a platform, a place with a real heart, an experience. Her job was important, yes, but without the support and tireless effort of the rest of team, she reminded herself, her job just isn't possible. In a way, it's her fault the story exists in the first place. She didn't finish the story content for Phobos Beach in time for launch. She'd planned a side-story about a mercenary who enlists your help to find his missing daughter, and you'd travel down that neon-gray ocean on his ramshackled ship to each of those three islands one by one, only to find out that they were inhabitated by dozens of mutated clones of his daughter -- you'd find the first one, and he'd be so relieved to see her, but she'd suddenly grow a couple of extra limbs and -- no, it doesn't matter! The point is, she came up with the idea for the quest on a Monday -- the last Monday of scenario implementation before launch -- and on Thursday, the texturing team hit a snag where they lost a bunch of the work they'd done on the mercenary's ship, and there was no way to finish it time, so sadly, they were forced to abandon the whole thing. Originally, it was supposed to be a much simpler quest about a fisherman who wants to learn if the Moon can support some weird fish living in its weird waters, and it would just be a way for the player to get an upgraded rod and some rare cooking ingredients, but when Melody came up with the story about the mercenary and his daughter, she couldn't help herself but pull the fisherman story from the outline way too last-minute, and in the end, they ended up with a big area with no quests, no characters, and no particularly rare or useful items. Just an empty beach, a beach that, ironically, became one of the most popular hangout spots in all of WanderMoon. A quiet area with no monsters, and a place you could swim? Well, not exactly swim per se, but stand around the ocean pretending to swim? Apparently, the players couldn't resist, and when people nowadays think about WanderMoon, their most nostalgic memory almost undoubtedly took place here, on Phobos Beach, a simple, relaxing reprieve from the endless horrors of a post-apocalyptic colonized moon in the midst of a far-future war against an extradimensional race of spider-people. Nobody remembers all that stuff. They remember these waves. These waves that repeat, the same three waves in a row, a cycle that lasts only twelve seconds then starts over, these waves that haven't changed a pixel since the game launched seven years ago, or since it shut down last year. When people think back on it all, they remember this. The exact scene that Melody, and Melody alone, can see right now. That is, if they remember WanderMoon at all. Not many people talk about it much anymore. Or at least, that's what Melody had been told. By coworkers, mostly. She hadn't been out much lately. Phobos Beach was always on the list of things to fix, but it kept getting pushed back, further and further, deeper and deeper down the list until it was essentially forgotten about by the team at Lucky Wish. For a while, Melody would bring it up at nearly every weekly progress meeting. Maybe the other devs kept pushing it back just to spite her. She was kind of joking, but the more thought about it, maybe they really were just sick of her never shutting the fuck up about the stupid beach level. So the story wasn't true. There was no mystery developer with his name redacted, his face obscured, his security footage all glitched out, his eternal soul roaming the abandoned islands of the coast at night, no matter how many times you said his name in the mirror. But the funny thing is that sometimes, in these long nights spent on her private WanderMoon server, when her cute little avatar, bright blue armor and tiny space helmet, is all alone on a dying world, no one to share any of it with, it's become easier for her to start to -- not 'believe', she hesitiates to call it a belief -- but to start to... she wasn't quite sure what to call it. The story's not true. It just isn't, and yet... It's weird, the way things eat at you, she thought. She was thirty-four years old. She'd been through hell and come out the other side still breathing. She'd kicked alcohol, got back on it, and then kicked it again, three times over. She'd lost her license and got it back. She'd bneen evicted. She'd lost friends. She'd seen someone die. She'd watched it happen, right there, right in front of her face, while she just stood there, like a deer in headlights, gasping for air, not even flinching, not even gasping, not even opening her mouth. Melody had been through all of it. She'd seen the depths, the real depths of fear, of evil, of hate. And despite all of it, despite how smart you think you are -- when somebody tells you there's a monster in your closet, and you know there's no monster, and you know what's in that closet, but can tell how much they believe it, and you can just see it in their eyes, in their sweating, beet-red faces -- then even if you can see into the closet yourself -- fuck, even if you're in that closet -- you can't help yourself but get a bit swept away into it , and you start to -- she hesitates to say 'believe' -- Melody shook her head and checked her phone one more time. It was 3:28 now. There was no way she was getting enough sleep. She had to call it a night, for real this time. That's what she said at 12:30, and at 1, and at 2. Maybe a triple shot of espresso tomorrow. Finally, she clicked the chunky, skeumorphic logo in the corner of her screen and navigated to the old familiar "log out" command, and as she did, she thought, as she often did, of the message that no one would be around to see - "{dev}PURE has left the game." Melody had no way of knowing it, but just moments after she logged out, a wave crested the shore of Phobos Beach. And imperceptibly -- maybe so imperceptibly that even Melody, who had been spending every night for the last eight months alone in a private WanderMoon server, wouldn't have noticed it -- the wave, this time, was different. It crested just slightly higher than it was meant to, and somewhere out in space, a spontaneously formed human conciousness sprang into existence, felt an immense, blood-curdling panic, and then, in less than an instant, ceased to be. <a href="http://sherrycdrom.neocities.org/craters/chapter2"> Next chapter.</a> <a href="http://sherrycdrom.neocities.org/craters"> Back to the chapter select. </a> <a href="http://sherrycdrom.neocities.org"> Back to the main site.</a>