[Original Novella] Tell Me What the Rules are Going to Be, Part 2

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Predictable. Nobody would piss off a stranger so badly without taking basic precautions against retaliation. I did my best to think about the situation from his point of view. Assuming it was in fact a man. I decided I shouldn’t rule out use of a voice filter. I began to diagram possibilities in my notebook on the bus ride to and from class. Looked for all the world like a paranoid schizophrenic’s diary.

I popped open the minidisc tray and loaded in the next one. Horribly impractical compared to just using my phone or something but I like physical media and never got tired of the stereotypical retrofuturism of tiny discs. This was a later model you could write files to directly from your PC. The older ones were like tape players, you had to record the songs you wanted and manually make your mix tapes.

I zoned out, watching raindrops slither down the immense bus window, until I heard a familiar voice. “Tell me what the rules are going to be.” I bolted upright, choking slightly. I checked my phone. Nothing. Could it be…? I hit back, and listened carefully. Sure enough, at the same point in the song, his voice cut in. My body went cold. I could feel beads of sweat forming individually as every little hair, head to toe, slowly stood on end.

When had he done it? Could it be that he broke in? More likely he’d somehow accessed it through my PC while it was connected. Who can do that sort of thing? But then, who can trigger epileptic fits over the phone? I sat there quietly as panic consumed my mind. Just as I reached the threshold of madness, my stop came up.

It continued to trouble me through my classes. It was useless to fight it. I knew somewhere, he was laughing about it. About how a couple of phonecalls and a parlor trick was all it took to hijack my life, occupying my every waking moment with paranoid ideation. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction but could find no way to think of anything else.

“Tell me what the rules are going to be”, it said in small text at the upper left of the digital whiteboard. New installations, all the professors love them but it’s unclear to me how they benefit students. It was almost unsurprising to see it there. Another display of power, calculated to collapse my will to resist.

I saw it again on the LED traffic sign on the way home, as well as a video billboard. If anybody else noticed, they didn’t mention it. A glitch, they must think. Only meaningful to me. I looked down at the little LCD display on my minidisc player. “Tell me what the rules are going to be”, over and over, slowly scrolling by.

I sat by the phone, fidgeting nervously until he called. Before he could ask, I answered as I assumed he wanted me to. “I can’t tell my housemates. Or anybody else. Right?” I heard a faint chuckle. “Very good.” Absolutely maddening. “What do you want from me? Why do this to anybody?”

“Soon, you will receive a package. It will resemble junk mail. Do not discard it. There will be instructions inside.” I fought the urge to throw my phone at the wall. If only he’d slip up, however slightly. All I need is the smallest clue. I waited for more, but after a time, he hung up. I sat there bewildered, nerves shot and on the verge of tears.

The next day after class, I checked the mailbox. Sure enough, loads of junk mail. Not sure what I was looking for, I opened all of it. Looked pretty standard. No obvious messages anywhere. Until I got to the “50 hours free internet trial!” CD.

It would be consistent with his methods so far. Not really something I wanted to put in my PC for fear of giving him access. But he evidently already had that. When I pushed the disc tray in, following the whirr of the disc spinning up, a splash screen appeared. But for a game of some kind.

“World dot com, premier multimedia virtual reality cyberspace experience.” A variety of low quality sprites of pre-rendered 3D characters stood in a pixellated 3D room. Not much I could discern from the screenshot. The copyright was dated 1996. I waited in confusion while the installation finished.

The installation dialogue closed, and the icon appeared on my desktop. I hesitated before clicking it, wondering what to expect. Upon running it, a window appeared and I found myself controlling a 2D penguin in a large, low polygon atrium of some kind. Spinning signs here and there advertised long-irrelevant bands, websites, and TV shows.

The whole mess looked like a 1990s time capsule. At some point this must’ve been the latest and greatest, an MMO of sorts where people could chat, sell shit, and whatever else. But then it became obsolete, was abandoned, and the content wasn’t update after that. Everything frozen how they left it, a digital ghost town.

The personalized rooms proved stranger than the rest. The door to each bearing the name of whoever created it, the interior customized to their taste. As much as the primitive 3D engine was capable of. One had aquarium wallpaper and a slowly spinning low poly model of a teapot inside. Another was plastered with posters for a Pauly Shore movie, Beavis and Butthead, and some Playstation hockey game.

Somebody made each room. Spent time decorating it, so that it reflected them. Then one day, they left it behind, perfectly preserved. Probably assuming the game’s servers would stop running one day. Which made me wonder how in the hell I could still connect to it.

I did a bit of Wikipedia sleuthing and discovered the game was the work of one guy, who kept it running as one of the criteria necessary for his lawsuit against the creators of a much newer, vastly superior game based around the same concept. His hope seemed to be proving that he’d come up with it first, but successful litigation required maintaining the pretense that it was still relevant and used by a significant number of people.

That was the biggest shock yet. A few times, I glimpsed other users. Who could possibly still be on here? Inhabiting this abstract time warp nightmare of low resolution clip art and janky low poly environments. I tried pestering some of them for answers. Some kind of armored minotaur first. He ignored me, then warped to some other region.

Next, another player using the default penguin avatar like mine. Again, silence. Finally I asked a neon pink mickey mouse imitation in a party hat. “My computer’s old, it won’t run new games. I put a lot of work into my room, too. All my stuff’s on here, and a few friends still use it.” Fair enough. “But look out for Nexialist. He never leaves. And if he catches you, he’ll send you to the bad place. It’s a bitch to escape from.”

Who? Send me where? I pressed her for details, but she’d told me everything she cared to. Studying her name in the chat, I noticed next to it was a number listed as how long she’d been online for this session. An appalling 19 hours.

Like the minotaur, she disappeared abruptly. A skill I had yet to learn. Clicking around the interface eventually brought up a map of the surprisingly limited areas possible to teleport to. Everywhere I went just looked like a 3D Geocities page complete with cliche gifs of spinning 3D skulls, a CG dancing baby, wireframe skulls (when were skulls so popular, and why?) and so on.

Some areas had auto-play midis, ear splitting renditions of the themes to television shows popular at the time. I recognized one as the opening to Sea Quest, in a room with a flickering animated sprite of a whale hanging overhead.

When I exited the room, across the atrium I spotted a strange figure. All black, textured as if burnt. Wearing a robe or gown of some sort reaching all the way to the floor. The head resembled a deer skull, complete with antlers. I typed out “Hello”. No response. I didn’t move, nor did the black figure.

A moment later, it was in front of me. Filling my screen. Despite the terrible graphics, I yelped in surprise and nearly fell out of my seat. Somehow it teleported me to a region I’d never seen before, and trying to use the map to leave it proved fruitless. The walls and floor were pulsating, swirling red flesh.

I never thought such a joke of a game could pull me in this way. Hunkered down in front of my computer, flickering light from the monitor playing over my face. “Tell me what the rules are going to be” appeared in chat. I objected that I’d already guessed as many as I could. He just repeated himself.

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^{Stay Tuned for Part 3!}