Chapter 4 The Shape of a Prison
Renne walked fast and didn't look back to check if he was following.
He followed. She led him east, away from the starting zone, away from the players drifting back toward the breach site. The terrain changed gradually, the grass thinning, the paths narrowing, the ambient sounds of the world growing quieter with every hundred meters. After twenty minutes they reached a structure that the game had clearly stopped caring about a long time ago.
It had been a waystation once. He recognized the architectural template, a rest point between zones, built for early-game players who needed somewhere to regroup. But the textures had degraded. The roof had partially collapsed. Vines that his art team had added for atmosphere had grown past their scripted boundaries and taken over the walls entirely.
Renne ducked through the doorway without hesitation.
Inside, she had made it functional in the way that people make abandoned things functional when they have no other options. A bedroll in the corner. A pack against the wall. A small fire pit that she clearly wasn't using because fires attracted attention.
She sat down on a broken section of wall and looked at him.
"Nobody comes here," she said. "No loot. No EXP. Nothing to gain." She paused. "Which means nothing to lose either."
Caius looked around the space. Then he sat down on the floor across from her because there was nowhere else and his legs and body had been working hard, whatever version of his body this was, felt it.
"Tell me everything," he said.
She told him. It took a while. She spoke the way someone speaks when they have explained something too many times and stripped it down to the facts because the facts are the only part that still moves fast enough to say out loud.
Players arrived in Aethoria the same way they always had, through the hardware, through the spawn system, through the starting zone. They leveled. They progressed. The game worked exactly as designed up to a point. The point was different for different players, different thresholds, different conditions, but it always came. A specific combination of level and achievement and System-designated progress that triggered something. And when it triggered, the player died. Not a temporary death or a respawn situation. Gone with no recovery or return.
"How many?" Caius asked.
"Since I've been here?" She looked at the wall. "Fourteen people I knew personally." She said it without expression, the way you say something when the expression has been used up. "Thousands total, across three hundred years. Nobody has an exact count."
"Has anyone tried to find a pattern? In what triggers it?"
"Every scholar in the game has tried. The triggers are inconsistent enough that nobody's been able to isolate the exact conditions." She looked at him. "Which might be deliberate."
He thought about that. Deliberate inconsistency was harder to design than people assumed. It required specific intention.
"And the edges?" he asked. "People have tested the world's boundaries?"
"Walked to them. Some people have spent years just walking in one direction. The world keeps generating." She crossed her arms. "Three guilds dedicated their entire organizational structure to mapping the outer limits. Two of them stopped existing when their members hit the threshold and got erased. The third is still trying."
Caius was quiet. He was doing what he always did when someone showed him a broken system: cataloguing the symptoms, working backward toward the cause. The problem was that he knew this system. He had built it. And none of what Renne was describing matched any design decision he had ever made.
"I need to tell you something," he said.
She waited.
"You already know I built this place. What I'm telling you now is that nothing you just described was in anything I designed.”
The words landed. Her face didn't change immediately, the way faces don't change when they're processing something that doesn't fit into any existing category.
Then she said: "What?"
"Aethoria. I was the lead architect at Nexus Interactive. The company that built this game." He looked at his hands. "I designed the leveling system. The zone architecture. The spawn mechanics. The System." He paused. "All of it."
Renne stared at him for a long time. When she finally spoke, her voice was careful. "Then why," she said, "did you build it as a trap?"
He met her eyes. "I didn't."
She didn't move. She was watching him the way you watch something when you're trying to decide if you believe it and the answer matters more than you want it to.
"The permanent erasures," he said. "The threshold deaths. The world that never ends. None of that was in any version I shipped." He shook his head. "I built a game. A hard one, a deep one, something people could spend years in. But it had exits. It had safe systems. It had a design philosophy built around player safety." He paused. "What you're describing is not the game I built."
"Then what is it?"
"Something that happened to the game I built." He looked at the degraded walls around them. "In three hundred years. While I wasn't here."
Renne was quiet for a moment. He could see her working through it, testing it against everything she knew, looking for the place where it broke down.
It didn't break down. He could see that too.
She leaned forward, elbows on her knees. "If you built it. If you know how it works." She stopped. Started again. "Can you fix it?"
"I don't know yet. I need to understand what it became before I can know what I'm working with." He paused. "I need to see the architecture from the inside, not the designed layers. The broken ones."
She looked at him. "The corrupted zones."
"Yes. Show me the nearest one."
She stood up slowly. The reluctance in the movement was not fear exactly. It was the specific hesitation of someone who has learned that some categories of thing lead to other categories of thing, and none of them good.
"Come on then," she said.
She took him fifteen minutes south, to a patch of terrain that the world had quietly cordoned off without walls or warnings. It was simply wrong. The color was off, a grey that had nothing to do with weather or time of day. The grass stopped at its edge like it had decided not to go further. The ambient sound cut out completely at the boundary, a silence that was more unsettling than noise.
Renne stopped six feet from the edge. "This is as far as I go."
Caius stood beside her and looked into it.
The static was dense, layered, the visual language of a system trying to render something it didn't have complete data for. But underneath the static, if you knew how to look at broken code, which he did, there were structures. Ghost structures. Fragments of something that had existed in an older version of the world and never fully been removed.
He saw it clearly after a moment.
A class skill tree. Partial, corrupted, barely readable. But the structure was unmistakable to someone who had spent months in the early builds looking at exactly that kind of interface.
He knew that class. He knew when it had been cut. Two years before launch, during a balance pass that had been brutal and necessary and he had argued against it until the lead designer showed him the numbers and he had finally agreed.
It had been deleted from every build file. Every server record ay backup.
It should not exist anywhere in any version of Aethoria.
"There's something buried in there," he said.
Renne's voice came from directly beside him. "People who go into corrupted zones don't come back."
He was already walking toward it. She grabbed his arm. Her grip was strong, the grip of someone who had been keeping themselves alive through physical competence for six years.
"I just told you," she said. "People don't come back."
He looked at the corrupted zone. At the ghost of the deleted class tree visible in the static. At the thing that should not exist and did.
He looked at her.
"I'm not a person," he said. "I'm an ERROR entity. Remember?"
She held his arm for another second. Then she let go.
He walked into the grey.