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“It’s easy, Gordon!” Bubby’s voice sounded entirely too smug for the situation. “Just run and jump to the platform, then jump down to here. It’s not like it’s a tightrope. You’ll be fine!”
Gordon eyed the platform in question, a two foot square panel sticking out from the wall about four feet ahead and one foot up from where the walkway ended. At least the walkway started up again where Bubby was standing, but that was another four feet beyond the platform, so he would have to try to do it all in one go. Jumping to the platform and standing there hadn’t worked - he’d turned to talk to Tommy and fallen right off, even though he hadn’t moved his feet at all. Luckily Dr. Coomer was there with his extending arms to catch him before he fell very far, but he’d rather not relive that sense of vertigo again any time soon.
“Look, it’s like the ladders, okay? Those took me - I got the first one fine, but that was dumb luck, it’s hard to line up just right. This is the same, I have to - it’s basically a double jump, and I don’t know how to do that.”
“You just jump and fire a rocket down to, uh, jump again,” Benrey said.
Gordon turned and pointed at him. “No, that’s a rocket jump, it’s - that’s TF2, that’s a different…thing.”
He’d learned he had to be careful when talking about the game. He could mention it in passing, but if he got too in-depth, the NPCs got distressed, and that made it more difficult to advance. Not to mention that they were upsetting when they got like that - Tommy’s voice wavered even more, Dr. Coomer’s voice went flat, Bubby got blank and started clipping through things, and Benrey - Benrey just got weird. Weirder.
“Do we - do we have a rocket launcher?” Tommy asked.
“Well, if you give me just a minute -” Bubby started, but Gordon interrupted him.
“I just said that’s a different thing! No! That won’t work! Besides, do you really want to be firing a rocket into that?”
He pointed down into the gap in the walkway, and the others peered down as well at the pool of gently bubbling lime-colored goop a good thirty feet below.
“I’m terribly allergic to green slime,” Dr. Coomer said brightly.
“Yes. Yes! I know that. We know,” Gordon said. “So firing a rocket into the green slime would be bad, right?”
“Hello, Gordon!”
“Yeah, okay, great.”
“Gordon, come on!” Bubby yelled from the other side. “Let’s get moving!”
“We’re sure there isn’t another way around?” Gordon whined. Difficulty climbing the ladders was one thing, but jumping and landing on a small platform he had to jump from again was going to be tough as hell with the latency issues he’d been getting. With his luck, the game would lag right as he tried to jump and just drop him into the green goop. It wouldn’t be the end of the world, but he really didn’t want to restart the level. He shouldn’t have to - he had enough mods packed into the game that he should be functionally immortal - but it had glitched on him before and he didn’t want to risk it. The last loading zone was a long way back.
“Sorry, Mr. Freeman, this is - it’s the best way,” Tommy said.
“Gordon, if we go this way, we’ll reach the Lambda Lab in one hour!” Dr. Coomer said. “If we try to go around and find another route, we won’t make it to the Lambda Lab for two weeks!”
Gordon sighed. “That seems unrealistic, but okay. How about everyone else goes first? Then you can - I dunno, scout ahead or something.” Hopefully they wouldn’t stand around heckling him, but from the way they’d been acting, that was more likely than not. He was going to find whoever had programmed these AIs and give them a piece of his mind. What was the point of them?
Tommy darted across without a problem, one shoe tapping briefly on the platform before he launched across to the walkway where Bubby was standing.
“See, Mr. Freeman? It’s easy!”
“Yeah, easy for you,” Gordon muttered. “Okay, who’s next?”
Almost before he finished speaking, Dr. Coomer launched himself across the gap and crashed into Bubby, sending the both of them down in a tangle of limbs and polygon angles.
“He didn’t even - holy shit! He didn’t even use the platform, what the fuck!” Gordon laughed breathlessly.
Dr. Coomer snapped to his feet and spun around to face back across the drop. “I’ll catch you, Gordon!” he shouted. “I’ll catch you with my big strong arms!”
“Yeah, I’m - I’m counting on it, buddy,” Gordon chuckled. “Do you have mods installed, too? That was a hell of a jump, have you got cheat codes?”
“You’re cheating?” Benrey asked from directly behind him. Gordon turned around and sighed in exasperation.
“That’s not what I - c’mon, man, your turn to go. Go on, jump across, chop-chop.”
Below them, a particularly large bubble went gloop. Something screeched down the corridor behind them. The lights over the walkway landings buzzed faintly and reflected off the metal curve of Benrey’s helmet as he turned his head.
“Mm, no,” Benrey hummed. “I gotta - gotta keep an eye on you. Keep you from running off. Can’t leave you alone or, uh, unsupervised, not without a passport.”
“Okay, really? Can we skip this part?”
Benrey stared blankly at him. “Uh, I dunno, can you jump across?”
“Not like him!” Gordon flailed over his shoulder toward Dr. Coomer. “Not like - I don’t have that kind of power, man, this suit doesn’t do that until -” Wait, fuck, abort, don’t talk about levels. “The suit is for protection, okay? It’s not good at jumping and - climbing and shit.”
Benrey stayed silent. Gordon sighed. Maybe his voiceline pack was glitching again.
“I’m just gonna try the jumping thing again.” He turned back to the gap and raised a hand. “You ready, Dr. Coomer?”
“Hello, Gordon!”
“Yeah, he’s ready. Great.” Gordon glared down at his hands, fiddling with his grip. “Which fucking - how do I do this again?”
“You don’t jump with your hands, idiot,” Benrey said - and how was he always directly behind Gordon when he talked?
“Shut the fuck up,” Gordon said, and took a running leap at the platform.
He actually made it, too, but he misjudged a button press and walked forward instead of running, sending him plunging off the platform and toward the slime. Then the wall jerked in front of him, and he heard Dr. Coomer’s voice from above.
“I caught you, Gordon!”
“Great, thanks!” he yelled back. “Now can you pull me up?”
“Look, Gordon, ropes!”
“Oh fuck no - not now, Dr. Coomer!” Gordon yelled, peering up. He couldn’t see Dr. Coomer’s arms - maybe something in the texture pack hadn’t downloaded properly, or maybe his own mods were interfering with it somehow. But something was holding him. “Pull me up first!”
Then he was standing on the walkway. He wobbled slightly and shook his head, then turned to check for the others. Everyone was together - Benrey must have jumped over at some point, too.
“Okay! Great! Thank you, Dr. Coomer. So where are the ropes?”
“Let’s go!” Bubby took off down the corridor, and Dr. Coomer raced after him.
“A rope is a length of strong cord made by twisting together strands of - HELP ME, GORDON!”
All right, cool, there it was. Gordon tried to line his pistol up - the hitboxes on the barnacle-things were crazy - but before he’d even squeezed off a shot, Tommy picked it off and Dr. Coomer hit the floor with a cymbal crash. Gordon winced and wondered again if any of the others could hear that sound. He’d actually forgotten to disable that particular mod, but he was deep into the session now and didn’t want to bother changing it.
Actually - that reminded him he wanted to check something. The whole “lack of a tutorial” thing had been endearing at first when it appeared that Dr. Coomer would fill in for a training level, but now that it was clear he wouldn’t actually give many game-related hints without Playcoins, it was time to look for a real tutorial again. Gordon needed to know what buttons to push. He could solve the puzzles, but he couldn’t find the stairs, and the NPCs were unreliable helpers.
“Hey. What are you doing?”
Gordon exited the menu and blinked. For once, Benrey wasn’t directly behind him - now he was directly in front of him.
“I’m just - um, thinking.”
“Thinkin’ bout…Cheerios?”
“What?” Gordon snorted. “Why would I be - why Cheerios?”
“Cause you’re boring,” Benrey shrugged. “My friends think about - Fruit Loops, and, uh, Waffle Crisps, and…Cinnamon Toast Crumbs. But I bet you think about Cheerios.”
“Okay, first of all, it’s Cinnamon Toast Crunch, not crumbs. And second of all - I don’t even like Cheerios. Why would I be thinking about them?”
“I dunno, you’re the boring one who thinks about Cheerios instead of Fruit Loops.”
“I’m not -” Gordon sighed. “Forget it, let’s just go.”
“No, I wanna know,” Benrey said, and stepped in front of Gordon as he tried to walk around him. His model clipped into Gordon’s, and for a moment his view was obscured by bizarre angles and the dark curves of the inside of the model’s face.
Gordon recoiled. “Dude, could you not? It’s creepy, I can see the inside of your head like that.”
“Whuh - you can see inside my head? Read my thoughts?” Benrey tilted his head, even though his expression remained mostly inscrutable.
“No, that’s not what I - it’s the -” Fuck. How could he explain his way out of this without breaking the game? At least the others were out of earshot - Gordon could hear gunfire from further down the corridor, so they were probably having fun.
“What am I thinking?” Benrey asked, and shoved his head through Gordon’s face.
“Ugh, it’s not -” Gordon brought both hands up, but didn’t move back again. For one thing, he knew if he didn’t indulge Benrey now, the guard would pester him about it until he did. For another, he was no longer sure how far from the end of the walkway he was, and Dr. Coomer wasn’t around to pull him up this time. “Look, Benrey, can you just - oh, wait, hang on…”
There was something in there, after all - something more than the creepy interiors VR sometimes showed inside character models and vehicles and walls. But in this case…why the fuck did Benrey’s model have so much rigging? There were lines on top of lines, like multiple character models were stacked on top of each other, or like something huge had been packed down into a much smaller space than intended. Was he repurposed? What the hell?
Gordon turned his head slightly and a flash of something moving caught his eye. A line of text too tiny to read wrote itself across some of the rigging. Gordon got a brief impression of colons and brackets - was that code? - before the text vanished. Another line of text popped up to the left, and Gordon tried to focus on it, but it was like some sort of eye test at an ophthalmologist - as soon as he focused on the moving text, it vanished like a blind spot. When he tilted his head to catch more text, he realized Benrey must have stepped forward to completely overlap their character models, because he was looking down into a garbage pile of internal rigging. He shouldn’t even be able to see this without getting into the game’s code, what the fuck was this?
One of them shifted, and bits of Benrey clipped through Gordon’s view. Something glinted red, and Gordon tilted his head, angling it back and forth like a curious dog, trying to catch more of the color. Typically the inside of character models was dark, made up of weird angles where visuals didn’t match up. There shouldn’t be any colors inside that weren’t on the outside of the character itself - but Benrey had something red inside. Several somethings, actually, now that Gordon focused. A lot of somethings. Once he started seeing them he couldn’t stop, his eyes automatically picking out the tiny red-lined heart-shaped pixels woven throughout Benrey’s mess of rigging where their models intersected.
“Huh,” Gordon said. “There’s a fuckton of hearts in here.”
There was a flurry of movement that resolved itself into Benrey jerking backward, glaring at Gordon.
“Stop - don’t look at that,” he said roughly.
Gordon put his hands up again. “Dude, you were the one who wanted me to -”
“What’s on your face?”
Gordon blinked. “What?”
Benrey’s eyes were flicking back and forth, and his eyebrows were drawing together in an odd expression, and - hang on, his model’s textures were fixed, his eyes didn’t move, what the fuck -
“I’m - it’s - glasses?” Gordon tried, frantically attempting to remember what his character model looked like right now. Wait, wasn’t he supposed to have the HEV suit’s hood on? Had he forgotten to do that?
“No, it’s not,” Benrey said, and reached up with both hands toward Gordon’s temples. “What is this?”
Gordon shoved out to try to push Benrey away, but then -
The VR headset moved.
“What -” Gordon yelped, and yanked his hands back to grab at the headset himself. He tugged it up and suddenly -
The player whips their head around, holding the VR headset up above their forehead with both hands, the controllers dangling from their wrist straps. There’s no one else in the room, just the dim lighting of the testing lab and the quiet hum from the server room next door.
“Hello?” they say, and turn in a careful circle to avoid tripping over any cords. The testing area is an open space, twelve by fifteen feet. It’s one of the smaller ones, but they still would have seen anyone who was close enough to touch mere seconds ago.
There’s no one there.
“What the fuck,” they whisper.
“Oh, whoa, headless horse - headless Freeman,” a tinny voice says from the headset’s speakers. “Yo, what happened to your hands?”
“What the FUCK,” the player says.
“What’s wrong with your voice?” Benrey says from the headset.
The player puts the headset down, drops the controllers, and scrambles across the gridlined mat to check the screen that should be showing what’s happening in the game. It’s not needed right now - there are no observers, they’re just testing, it’s after hours - but still, they want to see the display, to try to make sense of this. Was someone else here? How else did the headset move?
The exterior cameras aren’t turned on, because they weren’t doing motion capture. They don’t have access to security camera footage right now. But it’s fine - it’s fine, because no one else is in here. The building’s locked, it’s dark outside, no one else is here.
Maybe they left a rumble mod installed or something? The headset shouldn’t have that kind of capability, but stranger things have happened…
“...Gordon?”
On the screen, Benrey is taking up most of the view. He’s crouched with his head sideways, his cheek almost resting on the floor. The little computer speakers are turned down low so they won’t interfere with the player’s headset, but they can still hear him from right next to the screen. They just can’t reply without the headset mic.
“Did I break you?” Benrey says, and he actually sounds concerned. He’s moving like a next-gen model, now, and less like the blocky polygons of his model’s shape would suggest. What the hell is happening?
Benrey moves out of frame for a moment, then his face takes up almost the whole screen. “Gordon, the others are coming back. If you’re still…you should, uh, get up? Yes? Get up now?”
Well. What the fuck are they supposed to say to that?
The player puts their face in their hands, then scrubs their fingers through their hair. They could do the obvious thing and just…turn off the game. But the whole point of this was to do a test run with the AIs. Closing the game would delete their progress. They could do it safely from a loading zone, but if they try now, it’ll corrupt the memory file. That’s one of the issues they were trying to find the source of. But this isn’t their job - this game was just for fun, to play around with something that their coworkers joke is ‘haunted.’ There are no stakes in this for them.
Except…maybe there are. Because the NPC AIs are starting to feel more and more like real people. They seem like they’re starting to understand that something isn’t right about the world they live in. If the player turns the game off now, deletes their session progress, it’s like deleting a person’s memory, right? That can’t be ethical.
Besides, it’s not like they can hurt the player. The headset thing must have been a rumble mod, or just their mind playing tricks on them. It’s fine. This will be fine. Just until the next loading zone, where they can save and close the game safely and then go home and try to think this over in a controlled environment.
Okay. Gordon mode. Come on.
The player pads back across the mat and picks up the controllers, sliding the straps over their wrists and scooping up the headset.
“Oh, shit, okay, I didn’t - cool, you’re not dead,” Benrey’s voice sounds a touch relieved, and gets closer as the player pulls the headset on and adjusts the focus. All they can see is the texture of Benrey’s vest and a bit of his shirt - hopefully he’s not clipping through them again.
“That’s good timing,” he says, just as the player flips the controllers into their hands and looks down to lock them in with the headset. They look up, and -
“HELLO, GORDON!”
“Jesus Christ!” Gordon went over on his ass. Luckily he’d already been crouched on the ground, so it wasn’t far, but still. Ouch.
“Oh dear, Gordon,” Dr. Coomer said, peering down at him. “It looks like you’ve got a case of the crumbles!”
“It - yeah, feels like I’ve got a case of something,” Gordon grumbled as he hauled himself to his feet. “What were we - oh, did you scout ahead? Find anything good?”
“We just found some more of those, um, more peeper puppies,” Tommy said. “And there were some soldiers? I think?”
“Soldiers?” Gordon blinked. “What are they doing here?” They weren’t supposed to be cropping up in this area. Was the game glitching out again?
“Well, they, um, they’re shooting at us, mostly.” Tommy was holding his gun straight out in front of himself, as per usual, and Gordon sidestepped to get out of the line of fire.
“So did you shoot back?” he asked.
“Of course, Gordon, what do you take us for?” Bubby snapped. “Some kind of military-loving pansies?”
“I killed a lot of people!” Dr. Coomer chirped, and Gordon chuckled.
“Well, as long as they were soldiers, that’s fine.” He wracked his brain, trying to stay casual for the AIs but also kind of freaking out still, because Benrey was very quiet, and very focused on his face, and very - very real, in a strange, slightly sinister way. Gordon was pretty sure he was reading too much into things, but at the same time - Benrey had grabbed at his face and the headset had moved.
He had to be sure.
“Okay, Dr. Coomer, directions?”
“Gordon, for two Playcoins, I can -”
“No no no, hang on.” Gordon held one hand up. “How far are we from the Lambda Lab? Does that cost Playcoins? You were just tossing out updates five minutes ago.”
“S’twelve hours to the Lambda Lab,” Benrey said.
Gordon flinched. “What? No, Dr. Coomer said it would be one hour if we jumped the gap, so -”
“Well, that was before you took so long,” Benrey said in a catty tone of voice.
“Are you fucking - is he serious?” Gordon looked to Dr. Coomer for hope. Dr. Coomer stood still with his thousand yard stare, then abruptly turned toward Gordon.
“I’m afraid he is, Gordon. We are now twelve hours from the Lambda Lab.”
“Well that’s stupid,” Gordon said, trying to cover his slowly-growing sense of panic. “Did the lab fucking move?”
“Perhaps it did, Gordon,” Dr. Coomer said. “Black Mesa is a hotbed of mystery. Now, we’d better get moving!”
He jogged away down the hall, and Bubby followed, the two of them bickering over something inaudible. Tommy looked between Gordon and Benrey.
“Um…is everything alright, Benrey?”
“Yeah, it’s fine,” Benrey replied, flapping a hand at Tommy. “We’ll catch up. Gotta, uh, discuss something with Freeman.”
“Is - is that okay, Mr. Freeman?” Tommy asked, and Gordon found himself charmed despite knowing that Tommy was just programmed to check in on him more often - just like Bubby was programmed to be acerbic and Dr. Coomer was programmed to be helpful and Benrey was programmed to be…protective? Was that what the guards were?
“Yeah, Tommy, it’s fine, we’ll catch up.” Gordon wasn’t paying attention. What the hell was Benrey’s programmed purpose? He’d seen the game files, he should know this. Tommy’s footsteps faded away as Gordon frantically tried to remember where he’d seen Benrey’s AI’s designated job. There were only a few NPC AIs in this game - they still had to meet a couple of them, so maybe he was mixing up some others? Was there even supposed to be a guard AI? There was at least one guard character, but there were also lots of scientist characters who were normal NPCs with no AI programmed in.
Something tapped the side of Gordon’s head. “Whatcha doin’ in there?” Benrey asked.
Gordon took a deep breath to suppress the feeling of what he really wanted to do, which was jump out of his own skin. “I’m just thinking again - not about Cheerios,” he added sharply.
“Fruit Loops?” Benrey asked, and Gordon couldn’t help but relax a little. There was no way this guy was worth the amount of stress he was working himself into.
“Definitely not Fruit Loops,” he said. Then, before he could chicken out, he continued. “Hey, what does my face look like now?”
Benrey frowned. “S’like you’re wearin’ a box,” he said, and Gordon’s stomach dropped. “But…s’not all there. I can - it’s see-through, sort of. Sometimes. It wasn’t before, when you weren’t there.”
Holy shit, what? “What the fuck - what does that mean?”
“When you were on the ground and your head and your hands were all fucked up,” Benrey said, fidgeting slightly. “I tried to - I tried to talk to you, to get you up, but you weren’t moving or talking or anything. You weren’t there. You’ve, uh, done it before, but not like…that.”
“Oh.” Gordon said faintly. “Okay. Let’s, uh - let’s unpack that later.” Save point, save point - he just had to get to the next loading zone and then he could save the game without corrupting the files and then he could get out and look at the metadata and try to figure out what the fuck was going on. This game was old, and the AIs were old. They shouldn’t be capable of this kind of introspection - not yet. Not this early in the game itself.
But there was still one thing he needed to check.
“All right, so the - you can see the - a box-thing, right?” Gordon gestured at his face, and Benrey nodded. “Could you try to - gently, could you gently move it? Not like before, where you tried to take it off, but just, like, a little?”
“You want me to wiggle your face-box?” Benrey said in his monotone voice, and Gordon had to resist the dual urges to either beat the hell out of him or dissolve into hysterics.
“Yes,” he said instead, his voice coming out strangled. “Please…do that.” He’d been standing in arm’s reach the whole time, which, in hindsight, was probably a bad idea.
“Oh. Uh. Okay,” Benrey said, and reached out with one hand. Even before he wrapped his fingers around the edge of the headset, Gordon knew it was going to work. His movements were too sure, too confident, for him to be lying about seeing it.
For a moment, Benrey just held the edge of the goggles, and Gordon could almost convince himself that he wouldn’t be able to interact with it - but then Benrey tugged gently sideways, and the VR headset shifted, the edge digging into skin just a little bit, just enough to -
“Let go,” Gordon snapped, and Benrey yanked his hand back like he’d touched something wet that was supposed to be dry. Gordon brought his own hand up to grab the headset and -
The player spins quickly in place, peering out at the room. It’s still empty. There’s still no one there.
“Shit,” they say, very quietly, and resettle the headset onto their face.
“That was weird,” Benrey said. He was fidgeting again.
But still not enough information. “I can’t believe I’m asking this but - can you try to, um - clip through me again?”
“Whuh?”
Gordon flailed his hands, losing a controller in the process. “The - the thing, when you wanted me to - to ‘read your mind,’ which I still can’t do, by the way, I just - ow!”
Benrey had stepped forward and smacked into him, sending Gordon stumbling back a step.
“Okay, whoa, wait, try that again, I don’t think I was ready.” He wiggled his hand until he had a solid grip on both controllers, then nodded. Benrey gave him an indecipherable look, but leaned forward again.
His shoulder bumped against Gordon’s, and he leaned harder into the chestpiece of the HEV suit. Gordon staggered and resettled his feet, bringing both arms up to catch Benrey as he went boneless, laying all his weight against the HEV suit and, by definition, Gordon himself.
“What the fuck is going on?” Gordon muttered quietly.
Benrey mumbled something nearly inaudible.
“What?”
Benrey blinked placidly up at him. “Wanna kiss?” he said, louder.
Gordon stared, flabbergasted. He should just drop him and walk away. But something had obviously changed, since Benrey could see and interact with a real-world object that had no place on a character model. He hadn’t said anything about the controllers, yet, but that was only a matter of time. Still, Gordon had clipped through other characters before - so what had changed this time, when Benrey walked into him earlier and he’d seen - wait.
“Hang on,” he said slowly. “Is this what all the hearts were about?”
Benrey clawed his way out of Gordon’s grip and was across the landing at the mouth of the corridor in seconds. “Oh, hey, we should get going,” he said loudly. “We should - we gotta catch up. I can’t wait around for you, you just - you’ve gotta keep up.”
“Oh, fuck you,” Gordon snorted. “You’re the one who melted into my arms like some sort of romance novel cover.”
“Whuh - I did not -” Benrey snapped. “That was - you asked me to - you don’t even have your passport!”
Gordon couldn’t help it - he burst out laughing. The indignant response, Benrey’s flustered face, the adrenaline and confusion of the last few minutes - it all came to a head, and Gordon bent over, put his hands on his knees, and allowed himself to laugh hysterically for just a few moments.
“What the fuck are you two doing, having a tea party?” Bubby’s sharp voice cut through the air, and Gordon snapped upright like one of the soldiers at attention. The scientist was standing with his arms crossed, fists perpetually clenched as he glanced between them.
“It was Gordon’s fault!” Benrey said quickly.
“I don’t care whose fault it was, you’re holding us up. We’ve killed everything in this wing and it’s boring now. Let’s go!” And with that, he spun on his heel and stormed off down the hall again.
Gordon let out a few residual chuckles, then shook his head and started moving forward. “I think we better do what he says,” he told Benrey, who jumped a little, looked at him, then hurried down the corridor after Bubby.
“Yeah, whuh - uh - let’s go,” he stuttered, and Gordon smiled.
Something may have gone very strange in the game, so Gordon was just going to get to the next loading zone, save the game, and get the fuck out to try to discover what exactly it was. In the meantime, he might suddenly have someone in the game with him that could manipulate parts of the real world - but judging by what he’d seen both inside and outside of his head, Gordon couldn’t see Benrey being a danger to him at all.