“Okay, we log out, wait for Sleep Time, and log back in,” Van said as he narrowly dodged a player’s dead corpse as it was thrown right at his head. It seemed the City Guard had arrived and was trying to put down what was turning into a full-scale riot.
“Perfect!” Sang said with a grin as she pulled up her menu. “You are going to love the peace and quiet!”
Everything was silent. Van shivered a little as they walked down the empty roads of Verrata. He could see that things were somewhat off. There was a Dwarf walking in the street, yet half of his head was floating a few inches above the rest of him. NPCs were glitching back and forth, blinking in and out of existence. Even the sky itself seemed to be a strange and hazy combination of barcodes, stars, and error messages. Being in the game during Sleep Time was too strange for him. There wasn’t even any kind of background noise, and his own interface barely did anything other than tell him the time.
“Follow me!” Sang said as she continued walking through the streets of the empty city. “The cave isn’t too far away, which is why people have been flocking to it. From what I can tell, it’s actually located in the Royal Park.”
“The Royal Park?” Van repeated, shaking his head. “That’s less than ideal.”
“Why?”
“Well, the park is located in the epicenter of the town, and it tends to be visited by Dragons.”
“So?” Sang scoffed. “The game is closed right now, so we’ll be fine. No Dragons, no players. Just us and the cave.”
Van nodded. His heart rate was a little higher lately, making him more jumpy—he wasn’t sure why, but he felt so nervous about being inside during Sleep Time. He had never broken a game system’s rules before; he wasn’t that kind of a guy, and while it was part of a somewhat noble cause, it still felt a little sketchy to him.
They walked through the still and silent town until they reached the center of the city. There was the big lush park known as the Royal Park, temporary home to many a visiting Dragon dignitary or ambassador. Much to Van’s amusement, he realized that there were no smells, nor was there any feeling of temperature. The game had to reduce all haptic feedback systems during the downtime. It made sense, after all; why use the processing power if no one was around to enjoy it?
“There!” Sang said, pointing to a massive cave. The flickering and spastic words CAVE OF VISIONS were hovering above it. There was a large stone blocking its entrance, however.
“We’re gonna have to figure out a way in there,” Van said as he followed Sang cautiously into the park. There were no Dragons to be found, which was a good thing. It would have been a terrible situation if a Dragon were to show up. It would either report them or devour them, and if a player ever died in Sleep Time, the character they were using would be deleted since there was no legal reason for being inside during Sleep Time. That meant they would have to restart the game all the way from the very beginning, and that would be torture at this point.
“Don’t worry about it!” Sang said as she reached her hands out and waved them around for a moment.
“What are you doing?” Van asked.
“Cheating,” she replied. Her skin suddenly took on a translucent tone. She walked toward the boulder and simply moved right through it, disappearing from sight.
“Hey, where’d you go?” Van called out as he walked up to the stone. He put his hand on it, but felt his fingers go right through. He looked down at his body then, and saw that he was also translucent. “Oh, noclip, I get it,” he mumbled as he floated through the big stone.
Van emerged from the other side of the stone and gasped at what he saw. The cave was sizeable, and there were thousands of bright crystals sticking out of the walls. They were all differently colored and shined in brilliant hues that gave him pause. He stared intently as the lights danced against the cavern walls. One crystal, about eight feet tall, was in the center.
“This is incredible,” he whispered as he watched, nearly hypnotized by the display. He could feel a moist, damp air within the cave, and realized that the haptic systems were still functioning at full levels here.
“It is beautiful,” Sang said as she pushed at Van’s shoulder, distracting him from the gloriously brilliant display. “But we’re not here to look at little green crystals; we’re here to find little green men, remember?”
“Oh right, I forgot-, sorry, Scully,” Van replied.
“Why do I have to be Scully? Mulder was the real star,” Sang replied as she poked around, investigating the area. “I mean, Scully literally saw evidence of the supernatural and the strange every single week, and she was still too dumb to figure it out.”
“Wow, so you do watch TV!” Van excitedly cried.
“Yeah, well, how do you think I decided to join the CIA? Originally, I wanted to be in the FBI, but I—” Sang’s words were cut off midsentence as one of the crystals began to shift and move. They both stopped and stared as the large crystal in the center of the room started to warp and contort. It was the same, strange kind of shifting that had happened with the boulder back near the sheriff’s castle. Next, the crystal began to flicker rapidly.
“Someone break the light switch on that thing?” Van asked as the brightness of the illumination overpowered him for a second. It was randomly blinking, dozens upon dozens of times. He put a hand up to shield himself from the overwhelming flickering; this central crystal seemed to be so bright that it was overpowering all of the other crystals.
“Interesting pattern,” Sang said. “I… I think it’s… no, that’s not right.”
“What?”
Sang glanced at Van and then back at the rapidly blinking crystal. “Well, judging from the patterns, um… it’s Morse code. There’s space between some of the blinks, meaning that those are patterns. Definitely Morse code.”
“Can you read it?” Van asked.
“Yeah, just give me a minute,” Sang said as she stared intensely at the blinking lights. “E-A-R-T-H,” she said aloud as she read it. “D-A-N-G-E-R.”
“Of course it would say that,” Van muttered under his breath.
Sang continued watching the lights, reading, and then shook her head. “It’s just repeating those words over and over again.”
Van shrugged. “Well, it’s weird, yeah, but probably just an Easter egg. Not a glitch. I meant, if this was alien contact, wouldn’t they have some other way of communicating?”
“I have no idea,” Sang said. “But let me try something.” She walked over to the crystal and began to tap on it rapidly.
“What are you saying? Tell them we have nukes!” Van joked, leaning back against the cave wall. It was starting to become apparent that this was probably just part of the next expansion, and had nothing to do with aliens. It wasn’t like he’d fully believed in the possibility anyway, but he was open to the idea.
“I’m just spelling out ‘hello.’ Let’s see if it works,” she muttered.
There was a brief moment when all of the lights in the cave went out at once, all of the crystals quitting their glowing, but then all of them began blinking rapidly in the exact same pattern as the big crystal in the middle. Van could also hear that strange shifting noise that he had heard when he’d first seen the glitch a few days ago,
“They’re spelling out… D-R-A-C-O,” Sang said. “Wait! There’s a question mark. They don’t know who we are.”
“Tell them we’re friendly and that we can help them phone home,” Van said, chuckling a little to himself to fight off his nerves; this was as terrifying as it was interesting.
“Friends,” Sang mumbled as she tapped on the crystal. It began to light up rapidly again. She spelled out the meaning again as she read: “K-I-L-L... Wait, that can’t be right.”