Sinner's Run Ch. 07

A prickle started to run down Garthex's spine. "Someone who wasn't your team changed the map?"

"Just so." Vivian went back to the map, staring at the screen for a long time. Then, she pulled the camera back and turned the view angle slowly. A large, black, boxy area came into view pixel by pixel. "What is...?"

"Is that not supposed to be there to?"

"Yes and no," Vivian said, closing in on the black area. "There's a developer room in an area far away from the main map. It's also the area we used to model the menu screens of the Barracks and such. There's not supposed to be anything else there." She double-clicked on the black area. Nothing happened. Vivian frowned, then tried again. "Okay, this keeps getting stranger. I can't edit any of the parameters of this zone."

"But you're head of the map team, right?" Garthex asked.

"Exactly." Vivian looked over her shoulder, out of the room she was in, which Garthex presumed was her office. "This is very strange indeed, Garthex. Your friend disappears with no warning, and then messages seeming to be from him show up in my map build without warning along with a whole new area that I can't access?" She bit her lip. "I've never seen anything like this."

"Is there anything I can do?"

"For now, no. I'm needed for a meeting, but I'm definitely going to investigate this further. We may have a security breach, and I don't want to potentially send out malware to hundreds of thousands of players on patch day. I'm going to look into this more, you have my email, let me know if anything else strange appears in your changelog. Understood?"

Garthex nodded. "I can do that."

"Good. I'll reach out again if I have more answers. Have a good day." Without waiting for his response, Vivian killed the call. Garthex felt like he'd been given whiplash by the conversation. Stranger and stranger.

It was two days before he heard from Vivian again, again from her private email.

Garthex, something strange is definitely going on. Another alteration to the map appeared today without me or my team's consent or knowledge. It appears that something in the system is leaving them, one at a time. What's more, none of us can get into the black zone that's appeared in the in-house map build. I've instructed my team to keep it between us for now. There's a patch going live tomorrow with balance changes. I'm going to work some magic and try to sneak a little something in to determine what's going on. If - and this is going to sound ridiculous - if Noah is somehow in the system, we need to make contact. Is there a personal detail you could provide us to facilitate that connection?

Garthex glared at his screen for a moment before typing out an angry reply. You're joking, right? You think my friend is actually inside the game? What sci-fi have you been reading lately?

Her response was quick. Octavia Butler, if you must know. And I am not joking. In the absence of a tangible solution from my team or myself, I am left to consider more far-fetched possibilities. It could simply be a virus masquerading as your friend. In order to know for sure, we need a detail that only the man himself could answer. What character did he play the most?

Either Larka or Archangel.

Perfect. I'll contact you again after the patch goes live.

True to her word, Vivian reached out again the very next day after the patch dropped. But it wasn't an email, it was a request to video conference again. When the programmer's face appeared on-screen, she looked like she'd seen a ghost, a stark contrast to the stoic professionalism she'd demonstrated in all their interactions thus far.

Garthex looked at her curiously. "And?"

"I put a message into the patch," Vivian said. "Instructions on how to access the debug room and use a string of code to create an outgoing message on the in-house build. I watched the computers here all day." She gestured to the empty coffee cups on her desk.

"No wonder you look rough," Garthex said.

"Indeed. But listen. Twelve hours after the patch went live last night, there was a tiny update to the in-house game code. I went looking for it. It was an incomprehensible string at first, until I recognized it as export code for our in-engine video maker software."

"The one you make all the trailers on?" Mechantix's promotional cinematics were some of the best in the games industry, all created on a well-publicized piece of in-house software.

"Exactly." Vivian sounded both excited and terrified. "So I plugged it into the software and it compiled the code back into a video." She dropped a video file into the messenger chatbox. "This was the result."

Garthex slowly moved his mouse cursor over the file and clicked Play. The video started as a black screen, but then suddenly switched to a shot of a plain, white room. Mounted on the walls were all of the weapons in the game, as well as shelves for all of the kit items and consumables. On the far wall was a door, open to a yawning black void.

Standing in front of the camera was Noah. He looked slightly different, his features altered somewhat to match the graphical style of Sinner's Run. But it was definitely him. Garthex leaned in close to his screen.

"You got my message," Noah said. "I lowkey wondered if I was crazy, but looks like I really am stuck here in the game. I don't know how I got here, wherever here is, or why. But that message means you're listening, and I followed the instructions, so hopefully you're seeing this too. I'm safe, if you can call competing on the Run and getting shot up but respawning afterwards 'safe.' Things are holding together for now, but I don't know how long that'll last." Noah leaned on the computer console. "Garthex, buddy, if you're listening, get me out of here. Please. I'll do whatever it takes."

Noah went still, and the video ended. Both he and Vivian were silent for a long time.

"What the fuck is going on?" he whispered.

"I don't know," Vivian said. She reached into her desk and pulled out a scrunchie, hooking her hair through the elastic so it snapped against her head. "But we're going to find out. And then we're going to get him out."