Work Text:
Archivist
Statement of Martha “Honey” Martez, regarding incidents at her arcade concerning a game. Original statement given December 29th, 2010. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.
Statement begins.
Honey
I’m not really sure what I’m doing here, I consider myself a woman of science, and have always hated so-called “paranormal investigators”, and the Magnus Institute is no exception, but recently I had an incident that I cannot reconcile any way other than coming here. It’s about my arcade. I inherited the arcade from my late father in 1994, and although I did get some shit for being a woman running an arcade, it’s been fairly smooth sailing overall.
But there has always been one game. I paid it no heed for most of my career, but there’s always been something strange about it. First of all it’s Minecraft. Like it is the literal game Minecraft, but the machine is older than the game itself. My dad said he didn’t remember buying it, but that it ran fairly well and made a lot of money so he kept it around.
Second off, I lost a few repair people after I told them to patch it up and left them alone after hours. They all resigned quite rudely the day after I told them to do the work, but the strange thing was that they did it over mail, and then later the internet, I never saw them again after I told them to do the work, or heard from them again after they resigned. Most of them were good employees too. I always wondered what made them quit like that, but now I wonder if they did really quit, or if something else happened. After one of these events, I entered and saw some red liquid on the floor in front of the game, I wiped it up and disposed of the towel, thinking it was paint, but now I’m not so sure.
Thirdly, I could have sworn the game… affected people. Usually it was positive, when the kids were waiting for the game they would stand in a calm orderly line and make quiet, pleasant conversation, which if you’ve ever seen kids and teens in an arcade, you’ll know is pretty weird. The problems came when the negative effects happened. It was rare, but very occasionally a kid went insane. They freaked out, and started attempting to get as far away from the game as possible, I tried to calm them, but they wouldn’t accept it until after they had left the room that the game was in. I never questioned anything about the game, not until after this incident, and I wonder if this was the reason.
I’m sorry I’m rambling, I just don’t know how to explain this properly. The final thing though, was what happened a few days ago, on Christmas eve. I told my repairman, Randy, that we were getting rid of the game in our Christmas clearance, it was getting old and laggy and not making very much money anymore, and we wanted to clear space for new games. He stayed behind after I left to empty out the change and mark it for clearance, and maybe salvage something so we could resell it.
I was asleep when my girlfriend shook me awake at about 11 and handed me my phone with a call from Randy on the screen. I answered it and I could barely understand what he was saying, he was crying and screaming something about blood and the game, but it sounded urgent. I asked if he was injured, he said no, but that I had to come quick. Oh how I wish I had just gone back to sleep. I kept him on the phone while I pulled clothes on, I told him my girlfriend would be coming and he told me fine, fine, just hurry up. It was a cold and snowy night, and we walked as fast as we could without slipping, but my girlfriend almost fell a few times anyway.
We ran into the arcade and cried out in horror. Randy was sobbing and gesturing towards the game, which was on the floor, leaking blood. Some of it had splashed onto Randy’s shoes and gone up his arms, but he appeared unhurt. Behind me, my girlfriend was screaming and panicking. I was horrified; I could barely move. My feet felt glued to the blood-soaked floor as I just watched as the blood oozed out of the machine. After I don’t know how long, something broke my trance, and my mind started moving again. I remembered we had some blue gloves at the counter, and I felt some mild relief as I walked away from the mess, quickly suppressed by the sobering thought of what I was about to do.
My hands were shaking as I dragged the gloves up my arms. Dragging my fighting body towards the game, my legs were almost out of my control. I knelt and picked Randy’s crowbar off the floor. The panel was incredibly stiff, and I could barely pry it open. Eventually, it cracked and fell onto the floor. Inside I saw organs. Bile rose in my throat as I started down literal, pulsating, human organs. A pair of lungs, full of round, dark shapes which I realised with horror were coins, a brain, plugged full of wires, in the place where the motherboard would be, and the heart. Oh god the heart. It was huge, far bigger than any I’d ever seen, too big to fit in a human chest almost. It was beating a slow rhythm, and a quiet beep sounded for every pump. I reached out and supported it gently in my hands. I don’t know why I did that but I did. It slowed to a stop and I dropped it in disgust when I realised what I had just done.
I looked behind the machine, and saw that it had no cord. The realisation hit me, I’d never actually plugged the thing in. It’d just always been powering itself on that beeping heart. My girlfriend quietly suggested calling 999, but Randy said that no, there was nothing they could do. He said we should burn it, but he sounded so strange when he said it. He had been speaking fairly normally during the whole affair, with more fear than usual sure, but still him. However, when he told us to burn it, it sounded like someone else had taken over, like something else was speaking out of his mouth.
We dragged it outside. It was heavier than any game I’ve lifted. Blood leaked along the floor as we struggled, spilling out down the isles and splashing onto the games. We made it to the parking lot and dumped it, panting hard. Randy pulled out a lighter, and set the cabinet on fire. I could have sworn I heard screams coming from the flames, as if the game was begging us to put it out and save it from it’s fate. We didn’t. We sat there in silence, watching as it burnt to a pile of ashes, relighting it if it went out. The 3 of us stayed there long after the game had burnt itself out, just watching and shivering in the sharp december air.
Eventually we got too cold to stay outside. I ripped my gloves off and dumped them in the bin the second I got inside, I just wanted to wash my hands of this and never think of it again. My girlfriend told us we should just go home, we could come back and clean up everything in the morning. Checking that we hadn’t left anything too incriminating that would get some random passerby to call the police on us, we left. Neither my girlfriend nor I slept well that night.
The arcade stank the next day. I cleaned and aired it, although I’m afraid of what would happen if an investigation were to occur, because I just know how it would look under UV light. My girlfriend did some research about the supernatural, and although I originally wanted to write this off as just some fucked up game seller or something, the more I thought about it the more I realised there was no other explanation. She came up with your institute, and told me that maybe I should come here, so here I am, even if just to get this off my chest so I can start forgetting it.
Archivist
Statement ends.
If I’m being honest, this sounds like a hoax, I just cannot believe that a game would function with human organs inside. However the fact that Ms Martez’s girlfriend and Randy seem to back up her statements does lend some credibility. Follow up investigation by Sasha, including an interview with Ms Martez and with her girlfriend - who is now her wife, has given us some more information.
Randy took his own life after the events with the game, and was found dead in his apartment a few hours after Ms Martez gave her statement, he left a note outlining his reasons for doing so, stating that the events pushed him over the edge, meaning that we have 3 testimonies that this did really happen. Martin looked through records Ms Martez provided us, the game came into her father’s possession June 4, 1992, a few months after the place opened, and as of 2010, it was their oldest game by a long way. It was listed as “Minecraft” by her father, and I will admit, it is strange that this machine is apparently for a game that hadn’t been invented yet.
Her records also show us that she wasn’t wrong about the repair people. Martin picked a few of them and traced what happened to them after quitting, but they just vanished. Strangely, no missing persons reports were made, but there is truly no record of them after they quit their job at the arcade.
As Ms Martez mentioned in her statement, no police report was made. Martin found no reports of screams or fire made by neighbours either, and as the game was burned and then disposed of in 2010, we have no physical evidence to follow up with either. With no more leads and no physical evidence, it’s unlikely we’ll find out whether or not there truly was human remains in the arcade cabinet.
Recording ends.