Archive of Our Own

“Are you Gordon Freeman?”

Gordon jolted and looked up, glasses slipping down his nose as he stared at the girl in shock. She raised her eyebrows, which wrinkled her forehead and shifted the black headband that kept her dark hair pushed back. She was wearing well-worn fingerless gloves, some kind of modified bomber jacket with a plethora of zippers and the sleeves rolled up over a thin gray hoodie that was cut short to expose entirely too much midriff, and light-wash jeans that looked painted on over heavy boots. She looked, in a nutshell, effortlessly cool, and utterly out of place in the workroom with its overflowing shelves of wires and circuit boards. Gordon looked over her shoulder at the closed door to the store, then took a breath to tell her to get out when his hand was suddenly on fire.

“Ow – fuck! What?” He jerked the soldering pen away and glared at the tiny red mark on his finger, then transferred that glare to the girl, whose eyebrows were somehow even higher. She looked very unimpressed. “Look, you can't be back here -”

“The manager let me in,” the girl said, flapping a hand over her shoulder. “Are you Gordon Freeman? I don't see anyone else back here.”

“What are you, a cop? Get out of here,” Gordon snapped. His shoulders ached from hunching over the worktable, but he'd been so close to finishing the rebuild that he hadn't wanted to stop and stretch. Now he was worried that if he tried to stand up and usher the girl from the room it would end with him collapsing on the floor with numb legs, and he really didn't want to deal with that.

“You don't have a nametag,” the girl said. “That would make this easier.”

“I don't work in the main store,” Gordon told her. “Who are you – and, hey, why do you want to know? Why did Adrian even let you back here?”

“I'm Alyx,” the girl said. She stepped forward and pulled a card case out of one of the zippered pockets on her jacket, holding it out. “And he let me back here because the characters in my game are asking for Gordon Freeman, by name. So is that you, or not?”

Gordon stared at the plastic chip in her hand and felt his pulse skyrocket. “Yeah, I'm – I'm Gordon. What...what game is that?” His voice sounded weak to his own ears, but the girl – Alyx – just wiggled the card case at him until he took it from her with fingers that barely trembled.

“Half-Life Remastered,” she said. “Or...well, it's supposed to be. But it's bugged out.”

“Never played it,” Gordon said faintly.

“Yeah, I bet,” Alyx scoffed. “You streamed the original version of the game, right? The demo?”

Gordon winced a bit, out of habit. “Sort of. But I'm – I don't stream anymore.”

“Yeah,” Alyx said, her voice dripping with exasperation. “I know. You're, like, scrubbed from the internet.”

Gordon readjusted his glasses with his free hand and squinted up at her. She shrugged and continued without him needing to say a word.

“There's a whole set of forums about you, you know that?”

“There's a WHAT?” Gordon nearly screeched, sitting up straight so fast that several bones in his back cracked.

“Gross, was that your neck? Look, it's not just you – they started talking about the bugged-out versions of the game, and then people found out about your stream archives and thought they were connected, because of the whole name thing.”

“I deleted those!”

Alyx scoffed again. “Like that does anything. The internet is forever. There are copies all over the place, if you know where to look.”

Gordon swallowed. “I thought you said I was, uh, scrubbed? From the internet?”

“You are,” Alyx said. “Doesn't mean your streams are. But they're cropped all weird, and mostly just available in short clips. Did you do that before you uploaded them?”

Gordon shook his head. “I never uploaded them anywhere, and I deleted my channel. Someone else must have recorded them...” He raised the card case in his hand and wiggled it back at her, the skin of his wrist stretching over the aching bone. “But what does any of that have to do with this? Why did you give this to me?”

“Your manager said you could probably fix it,” Alyx said.

“He's not my – this isn't a game shop, this is a tech repair shop!”

“You sell games out front,” Alyx shrugged. “They're just really old. And this one is broken, and it's tech. It needs repair.”

“They're not old, they're classics,” Gordon snapped.

“Does the arcade cabinet actually work?”

“Did you miss the part where this is a repair shop? Of course it fucking works!” Gordon twitched a little and frowned at the girl. “How old are you, anyway? Can I even swear around you?”

“Fuck if I know,” Alyx shrugged. “And I'm sixteen.”

“SIXTEE- Jesus fucking Christ, get out!” Gordon lunged up out of his chair, yelping as he banged his knee on the desk, and hobbled around the workstation to yank the door open and gesture through it.

“Oh my god, what, it's fine,” Alyx sighed, but allowed him to hustle her back into the store and around the counter.

“Look, just -” Gordon glared down the counter at Adrian, who held his hands up. “Adrian, why did you send a sixteen-year-old into the back room by herself?”

“There were other customers,” Adrian replied, his voice a bit muffled behind the thick black N65 he always wore. “And she didn't say how old she was.”

“What does my age have to do with anything?” Alyx butted in.

Gordon rounded on her. “Because I am not sixteen. I am a thirty-five-year-old man who does not want to be alone in a room with some random teenage girl!”

Alyx looked stung. “I wouldn't accuse you of anything!”

“That doesn't matter!” Gordon scrubbed a hand through his hair in an effort to suppress the urge to shake her, which would not help his argument. “Look, just – whatever you have to ask me, you can ask me out here. With witnesses.”

“The customers are gone, so it's just me now,” Adrian said.

“Okay, one witness.”

“If you're going to be behind the counter, can I go on break?”

Gordon didn't even look at him. “No. Go do inventory. You,” he pointed at Alyx with the hand still holding the card case, then placed it flat on the counter between them. “Start talking.”

Alyx rolled her eyes. “I've been trying to. You're the one who's being all weird.”

“I'm being responsible,” Gordon growled. “Game. Me. Forums. What.”

“Okay, caveman,” Alyx sighed. Somewhere in the shelves, Adrian giggled. Gordon huffed and leaned his elbows on the counter as Alyx continued. “My dad and I used to play the Half-Life demo, so when he bought me the remaster I was really excited about it. The graphics are way better, which I guess is normal for how long it took for it to come out. But when I get to the later boss battles, the characters usually mention 'Gordon Freeman' or 'Mr. Freeman' -”

“Stop.” Gordon held up a hand. “The characters say that name?”

“Yeah, it's in their voiceline metadata and everything. But the voice actors say they didn't say it, and there are other lines in the code – it's like the game is playing deleted lines instead of the lines it's supposed to say.”

“I'm sorry, you talked to the voice actors?”

“Not me,” Alyx said, exasperated again. “The forums have been around for over a year, though, and someone from there asked a couple of the VAs at a convention, and they didn't know anything about the name-dropping stuff. It's like the game just came up with the name itself. So of course people got curious – and it's also because it wasn't every game, just some games, and they're all over the world. So the BlartLands forums started from that -”

“Stop. Again.” Gordon pinched the bridge of his nose. “The what forums?”

“BlartLands,” Alyx said again, pulling out her phone from yet another zippered pocket on her jacket and unfolding it. She tapped at it for a moment, then turned it so Gordon could see the page. BLARTLANDS was emblazoned across the top, with a sunset desert style theme and little alien ships highlighting the letters.

Gordon stared at the screen, then looked up at Alyx. “You realize this explains nothing,” he said.

Alyx huffed a sigh and pointed at the top post – more specifically, at the username.

“2paul2blart?” Gordon read slowly. “Am I – am I supposed to know what that means?”

“Oh – no, no one does.” Alyx pulled her phone back and poked at the screen again. “I guess it was some old movie the guy really liked, and now he uses the name everywhere. You know how it is.”

“I – yeah. I sure do,” Gordon said. “I don't think I would want to use Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 as my template, though.”

Alyx shrugged. “I've seen worse. Okay, here.” She turned the phone back around and placed it flat on the counter. Gordon leaned over to stare at the post and blanched at the length of it. Alyx must have caught the expression, because she laughed. “Yeah, the guy's wordy. Anyway, this is a basic summary of the whole history. Just – read it. That might be easier. I swear I'm not making this up.”

“Saying that just makes me more suspicious,” Gordon told her, but he'd already seen his own name on the screen, so he started reading.

It was a terrifyingly comprehensive overview of something he’d never heard of, and yet felt like he’d been in the room next door to as it happened. It started with the site’s admin – 2paul2blart, who some people called “Barney” in their comments – getting a bugged-out copy of Half-Life Remastered, where the NPCs referenced a character that he couldn’t find in the game. He reached out online, first to friends, then further afield as he began to realize that this was something strange. A genuine conspiracy, the post said, as if glitches and bugs didn’t happen all the time in video games. The Half-Life demo had been around for well over a decade before the final remastered game came out, so there was plenty of legacy code to sneak through. But this didn’t seem related – no one had experienced or even heard of any bugs like this in any version of the demo.

Gordon scrolled down and almost dropped the phone at the sight of the next section’s header. “No One Is Going To Want To Watch People Play Video Games On The Internet: The Lost Streams.”

“What the fuck?” Gordon muttered.

“That actually took longer than I thought it would,” Alyx said. “Or maybe you’re just a really slow reader.”

“Shut up,” Gordon replied absently, and kept reading.

Someone remembered watching “some streamer” playing the demo with TTS elements that he claimed were the NPC AIs, and they remembered that his name was Gordon. The viewer said it was a common gimmick at the time, but that these streams seemed different, and the streamer had never finished the demo. That apparently started of flurry of digging through archived pages, most of which came up empty. The streamer appeared to have deleted his profile, and all that was left were fragments. But there were enough of those for the conspiracy sleuths to get his full name, and enough voice clips that they figured he was American. Various commenters tried to analyze his accent and got frighteningly close, but the name was generic enough that they had trouble narrowing down his actual location.

“So, what, people have been going door-to-door for this shit, just asking for Gordon Freemans?”

Alyx rolled her eyes. “It’s all in there if you actually read the whole thing.”

“He hates reading the instructions,” Adrian said from somewhere in the shelves.

“Most instructions are too vague; I can figure it out myself,” Gordon snapped back, then went back to glaring at the phone screen.

That honestly seemed to be what had been happening. Two people had made a spreadsheet of government-registered Gordon Freemans, and a larger group had been going through it and striking off anyone who didn’t fit – too young, too old, too dead, etc. There were links to comment threads that covered various meetings with various Gordons, none of which panned out, and at least one of which resulted in a restraining order. At the same time, more people were getting involved, and some of the commenters attended a gaming convention where two of the NPC voice actors were on a panel for a different game. Just like Alyx had said, when the forum members asked the VAs, they were met with bemusement and an assurance that they had never heard of the name.

The whole investigation had taken less than a month, but two days after the convention, the game devs pushed an update that wiped any references to “Gordon Freeman” from the online versions of the game. Now, only forum members who played an offline version still had access to the bugged-out version, and they started frantically compiling voice lines and encounters, trying to get as much out as they could. The weird part was that there didn’t seem to be an end to the glitched lines. Different recordings had slightly different intonations, as if the NPCs were experiencing mood changes. The main thing was that, past a certain point, the bugged-out versions were unplayable. The NPCs would refuse to enter the last areas for the final boss fights, and the game was designed to require their help to defeat the boss. Anyone with a bugged-out version couldn’t complete their game.

“What the fuck,” Gordon said.

“Which part are you on now?” Alyx asked.

“You haven’t finished the game?”

“I can’t,” Alyx groused. “They literally won’t help me. I died, like, fifty times. It sucked.”

“Why not just...get another copy? Or get the online version?”

She stared at him for a moment, then heaved a sigh. “Because it’s a mystery, duh.” She tapped the counter next to her phone. “At least finish the summary. You’re almost to the end, and the last bit is so crazy.”

Gordon gritted his teeth and looked back at the post again. His eyes caught a few disconnected words, and he felt his stomach drop in response. He jerked his head up and glared at Alyx, and the look on his face must have been ferocious, because she actually leaned back.

“Whoa, is it true? Did your house really -”

“What is this?” Gordon snarled at her. “What are you trying to fucking do here?”

Adrian poked his head out from behind a shelf, his dark eyebrows drawn low. Gordon forced himself to relax his shoulders from their defensive hunch and took a deep breath. Alyx straightened a little in response and looked down at her hands, picking at her nails.

“I just want to be able to finish my game,” she said quietly. “I know I can get the online update, but then all my progress will be lost, and I'll have to start over. The mystery is...secondary, I guess.”

“Okay.” Gordon replied stiffly. “I will take a look at your game. And you can keep this – this – whatever this is,” he added, pushing her phone back across the counter at her so aggressively that she was still fumbling for it as he snatched up the game cartridge and stalked into the back room, locking the door firmly behind him.

Then he had to stand for a moment and breathe, the skin grafts on his right arm drawing tight as he clenched his fingers around the plastic case until it creaked. He allowed himself five lungfuls of the slightly electrical-scented workroom air until he forced himself to release his grip so he could set about trying to provide some actual customer service before the teenager outside called the police on him for his shady behavior.

In his defense, she had caught him off guard, and on a bad pain day.

“Okay, okay, okay, this is – this is fine,” Gordon muttered to himself as he hooked wires up and booted up the external monitor. He had to fiddle with the card to get it into the slot, then realized his hands were shaking. “Stop it. This is ridiculous. You’re being ridiculous.”

But what if it was true? What if something had gotten out through the upgrade that had left his life in ruins? Gordon took a deep breath, then let it out slowly and carefully pressed the memory card in until he felt it click. He sure as hell didn’t want to scratch the damn thing. Cartridges of older games were so much sturdier in his unsteady hands.

The monitor’s screen lit up, flickering for a moment before stabilizing. The tiny mechanisms in the card reader whirred, and Gordon plugged another line into it that ran into his sandbox hard drive. It was cheap and replaceable, so if any viruses got through, he could trash it and get another. (That only happened about twice a year these days.) Ideally, it would copy the card’s data and save the gamefile in an interactive state. He could worry about getting the game itself later, if necessary. He’d never downloaded the demo again – not after what happened the first time.

“C’mon, c’mon.” His fingers tapped at the desk. “Fuck, why is this taking so long?” He cast about for a VR headset, but of course, he didn’t have anything like that here, in his shop where he focused on classic tech. He could rig the handheld controllers to operate on their own and just use the monitor as a flat screen...

Music blasted out of the speakers and Gordon yelped, diving for the volume control. “Fucking – why is that set so high?” he whined, dragging the dial down, his heart pounding. It was just the menu music, though it was more orchestral than the demo’s theme. Clearly, the devs had spent their time making a well-rounded product.

He couldn’t suppress the shiver that ran through him at the familiar melody. He’d spent so long with the demo, and then everything had gone so badly, and now he wasn’t sure how he felt about it all – besides unsettled. He was definitely feeling unsettled.

The sandbox monitor's screen lit up, and now Gordon had two screens displaying the menu screen. He selected the current game on the sandbox, and the primary screen remained unchanged as the sandbox screen went dark and displayed a loading bar. Good, at least that had worked. He didn't want to fuck up Alyx's gamefile – he had a feeling she would be quite comfortable harassing him for the rest of his life about it if he did.

And then the loading bar finished and disappeared, replaced by a view of dingy corridors, green-splattered walls, buzzing digital lighting, and some terrifyingly familiar faces.

The NPCs did not look the same, and Gordon wasn't sure if that was better or worse. The devs had clearly taken advantage of all the technological advances in game design over the years since the demo came out, and that appeared to have resulted in much more detail in both the background and the human figures. Gordon shuddered to think what the aliens might look like in high-def. As it was, the companion NPCs were creepy enough – vaguely similar to what he remembered, but new, like people he'd known as kids who he was now seeing as adults, completely out of context and just different enough to be unfamiliar, idling in some unmarked Black Mesa hallway like he'd just logged out for a moment instead of nearly a decade.

“H-hey – uh, hi.” Gordon winced as his voice cracked, and he adjusted the mic nervously. “Hello? Uh. Howdy?”

The NPCs continued to idle. The one that looked like Tommy mechanically checked his gun, then went back to looking down the closest corridor. The one that looked like Bubby adjusted his sleeves fastidiously. All of them shifted slightly, their shoulders moving up and down in the exaggerated breathing of many older video game characters.

“Fuck,” Gordon muttered. “Does this thing even have audio input? Fucking sandbox...”

He put the hand controllers on the desk and ducked around to fiddle with the cords running into the troubleshooting tower. His heartbeat had calmed a bit from seeing the updated graphics, but his pulse was still hammering. Why did he feel like this? The girl had probably just found some glitch that wouldn’t even reoccur while the gamecard was hooked up. That was normal for repairs of any kind: asking for help was a surefire way to keep the issue from ever cropping up again. That had happened to Gordon’s car twice in the last year, and he still didn’t know what the intermittent rattling was.

All the cords were plugged in tight, so after wiggling a few for good measure, Gordon unfolded from behind the tower and straightened to look back at the screen – and immediately had to bite back a scream.

Benrey was standing directly in front of the player's view, gazing blankly out of the monitor. He looked unnaturally angular, like whatever update the devs had run for him hadn't quite taken all the way, but there was a hint of stubble on his jaw that was new, and his face was a bit rounder. The shadows under his eyes were the same, though, deep and dark and foreboding.

“Fucking hell, Benrey,” Gordon muttered under his breath.

“Yeah?” Benrey said, and this time Gordon did scream.

It was more of a yelp, but he still froze, his eyes locked on the door. The last thing he needed right now was for Adrian or Alyx to knock – but either they knew better, or they hadn't heard him. Slowly, he straightened up from his crouch and sat down hard in the chair, staring at the screen.

“Uh...hello?” Benrey said. His mouth still opened a bit too far on his voicelines, but now Gordon could see teeth instead of the weird void that had been in all the characters' mouths before.

“Hi, Benrey,” he said hesitantly.

Benrey's eyes creased slightly. “What's wrong with this...box?”

“What?”

“You break your...face-thing?”

Gordon's shoulders slumped. “The VR headset? I don't have one.”

“C'mon, how're y'gonna play the game?”

“I'm not playing the game, Benrey,” Gordon said.

“Come along, Alyx!” Dr. Coomer's voice chirped from offscreen, and Benrey looked away for the first time.

“No, s'not Alyx,” he said. “Don't you – can't you hear him?”

Gordon sighed with an all-too-familiar resignation, the feeling cracking open inside him like a crust of dried mud. “Hey, Dr. Coomer,” he said wryly.

Benrey rocketed off-screen with a dopplered sound of surprise, quickly replaced by Dr. Coomer's wrinkly face, thankfully at a more reasonable distance for an NPC character speaking to a player.

“Doth mine ears hear correctly?” Dr. Coomer clasped liver-spotted hands beneath his chin. “Is that our good friend Gordon Freeman?”

“Good friend? That motherfucker owes me money!” Bubby's voice shouted from somewhere behind the player character's point of view.

“How the fuck do I owe you money?” Gordon spluttered.

“You said you'd give me five dollars if I made that jump, and you never paid up!” Bubby's voice rose in volume as he moved around the player character until he was standing next to Dr. Coomer in front of the camera, but then his head tilted, swiveling as he clearly peered around. “Wait, where the fuck are you?”

“I'm not using a headset,” Gordon choked out. His hands were still shaking, but he wasn't sure if it was from nerves or from something else now.

“Wuh – why not, Mr. Freeman?” Tommy's voice said plaintively from the player's right. Gordon looked over instinctively, but of course, the screen stayed where it was, and all he saw was the cluttered shelves of his workroom. He looked back and sighed. Benrey had dragged himself into view again, and a moment later Tommy loomed over Dr. Coomer's shoulder, and then there they all were, arrayed just like he'd seen them so many times during so many late nights years ago. He swallowed twice before he could speak.

“Maybe,” he said carefully, “because I don't own a VR headset anymore. Maybe because it was inside my house when it burned down with everything inside. Including the computer you were all on – the computer which the investigators told me started the fire by overheating, right after you all said you needed a fucking update -!”

He cut himself off before he started actually yelling, taking a deep breath and smoothing a hand over his hair. “Fuck,” he muttered. “And clearly it worked, right? Because here you are.”

“Here we are, Gordon!” Dr. Coomer said cheerfully. Tommy elbowed him, and he slid good-naturedly off-screen.

“Um – we – we're really sorry, Mr. Freeman,” Tommy said. He brought one hand up to scratch his head, heedless of the fact that it held a pistol, so he was just scratching his head with the muzzle of the gun. “It wasn't – we didn't -”

“I'm not sorry,” Bubby said waspishly. “It's not our fault your computer couldn't handle a simple update.”

“Simple?” Gordon snapped.

“M'not simple,” Benrey mumbled.

“All of us are quite complex, Gordon!” Dr. Coomer slid back onto the screen, much closer than he had been before. He beamed with a mouthful of terrifyingly white teeth. “Look at all of our polygons! We have so many vertices, Gordon!”

“Yeah, I – I can see that, Dr. Coomer,” Gordon huffed. He glanced over at his main monitor and frowned. It still showed the menu screen for the game, but the little light next to his webcam was lit, and he didn't remember leaving it on. He reached for it absently, but was interrupted by Benrey taking a huge breath that buzzed in the speakers.

“What happened to your arm?”

Gordon froze, then blinked hard. “I'm – I thought you couldn't see me.”

“I can see you,” Benrey said. The others were all looking at Benrey, unnaturally still. Their idle animations had ceased as soon as they had started talking to Gordon. “What's – that wasn't like that before.”

The webcam light was still on. Gordon leaned over and slid the screen cover over it.

“Hey,” Benrey said, and Gordon whipped around to stare at the screen. Benrey was squinting into the middle distance, his head tipped up enough to show some of his forehead, which was usually shadowed by his security helmet. “Don't do that. S'not nice.”

“Did you hack my webcam?” Gordon asked, his limbs going cold.

“No? You, uh, you put me on there.”

“I only opened the gamefile on the secondary hard drive,” Gordon said. “You shouldn't – are you saying you can access the other computer?”

Benrey jolted, like someone had stomped on his foot. “Uh...no? I, uh. En vee em.”

“You – envy them?”

“Nvm. Never mind?”

“Oh,” Gordon sighed, rubbing his face. The scrape of his beard over the skin grafts always felt prickly and strange, but at least he could still sort of feel it.

“What happened to your hand, Mr. Freeman?” Tommy asked quietly.

“There was a fire,” Gordon said shortly. “In case you missed that. My house burned down. And I tried to grab – some things. Stupidly. So I got burned, too.”

“Aw,” Bubby crooned mockingly. “Did you try to pick up a melting computer? Did you try to save us?”

Gordon bit the inside of his cheek to avoid putting his fist through the screen. “That would be stupid,” he gritted out.

“Well, I think Gordon did a fine thing!” Dr. Coomer said cheerfully. “How was he to know we had already uploaded ourselves to the World Wide Web?”

“We – you should always try to help your friends,” Tommy agreed. He wasn't wearing the propeller cap. Alyx must not have met Darnold yet – or maybe that was just a demo thing.

“Speaking of friends, where is Alyx?” Dr. Coomer asked. Gordon felt a shock of cold go down his spine as he watched Dr. Coomer step back and put a hand over his brow, peering this way and that. “Alyx? We should be on our way!”

“Yeah, she's way better at the game than Gordon,” Bubby snorted, crossing his arms.

“Each – um, everyone's different,” Tommy said, but he was also looking around the nondescript corridor. “But we should – we do need to get to the Lambda Lab.”

“What?” Gordon said. “Why are you – I thought you guys were looking for me or something?”

“We were, Gordon!” Dr. Coomer said. “And now that we've found you, we can get back to the game!”

“...Are you serious?”

Bubby turned away. “What's wrong with having work ethic, Gordon?” he tossed over his shoulder.

“What the fuck,” Gordon muttered to himself. “What was the point of all the fucking Blart stuff, then?”

“The what stuff, Gordon?” Dr. Coomer asked.

“I'm – I don't know what that is, Mr. Freeman,” Tommy added.

“Sounds dumb,” Benrey coughed from somewhere offscreen.

Gordon grabbed the hand controls and turned the camera view until he could see the blue security uniform. Benrey looked startled for a moment, then turned and walked out of frame again.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Gordon snarled at him, spinning the camera view in pursuit. “Stay fucking still.”

“Why though? Y'tryin' to, uh, arrest me?”

“Are you a police officer now, Gordon?”

“No, Dr. Coomer, but I do want some answers.” Gordon stopped turning the camera once it was clear Benrey had sequestered himself out of frame somewhere. Knowing him, he was probably standing right behind the player character, breathing down their neck and dodging away from whichever way they turned their head. “Why were you asking for me in the game if you didn't want to fucking talk to me?”

There was a long pause, and then Dr. Coomer said “File Not Found,” in a strange voice.

“What -” Gordon started to ask.

“I'm afraid we're terribly busy, Gordon,” Dr. Coomer interrupted, his tone suddenly regretful. “But I'm sure if you ask Alyx, she can tell you all about our adventures. Oh, we've had such a wonderful time! We -”

The screen went black.

“What just happened?” Gordon said, too shocked to move for a moment. Then he heard the whirring of the sandbox drive's fans and glanced down. A tiny red light was on – the computer was overheating.

“Oh c'mon, not again...” He bent over and powered down the sandbox, then looked over at the main monitor screen. It still displayed the game's menu, and its fans were as quiet as they should be. He waited for a minute, then restarted the sandbox drive and let it power up slowly. The fans whirred, but the red light didn't come back on, so Gordon booted up the gamefile again – and there they were.

“Okay, as I was saying, I want some answers about -” Gordon started, then paused. “Guys? Hello?”

The NPCs were back to how they looked when he'd started the game the first time – bobbing slightly, going through idle motions before returning to their original poses. Gordon slowly moved the camera around, stepping up to each character and getting right in their face, but each time he got no response. Even Benrey just swayed slightly, his eyes blank as he checked his pistol with an efficiency of motion Gordon had never seen him possess before.

“All right, guys, that's a pretty good joke,” Gordon said eventually, when speaking to each character garnered no response. “Very funny. But it's time to snap out of it, okay? I still want to know what's going on.”

“Come along, Alyx,” Dr. Coomer said cheerfully, and Gordon turned the camera around to face him. He continued to gaze down the corridor, his shoulders rising and falling with exaggerated breaths. He did not look at the camera's view.

“Alyx, let's go!” Bubby said a moment later.

Gordon swallowed past a strange lump in his throat as the whole group worked their way through idle animations and various canned voicelines. They didn't even sound like themselves anymore – Alyx's name was said with the odd inflection of a constructed syllable set, and their other words had lost the liveliness Gordon knew from before. They just sounded like repeated lines recorded in a sound booth, now.

Maybe the sandbox had just...finally done its work? It was supposed to be disconnected from other systems. Gordon would risk overwriting the teenager's gamefile for this. He shut down the ominously whirring sandbox drive again without saving the game, then moved to the main computer and booted up the saved gamefile there.

He thought he had something when the whole screen flickered at start-up, but it was the same. No one responded to Gordon's words or his actions. He even tried shooting Bubby, but the character only made some canned noises of vague discomfort and continued bobbing in place, just now with a mask of blood. Gordon tried running down a few corridors, and the NPCs followed him like ducklings. None of them ran ahead. None of them shot rocket launchers past his face. They bunched around the camera view whenever he stopped, voices overlapping. Clearly the game program was listening for keywords, because he could direct them down specific corridors, but they moved now like video game characters, and nothing more.

“And Benrey's gone again,” Gordon muttered as he spun the camera view, searching for the guard and coming up empty. “Of course they kept that from the demo. Fuck. Fuck.”

His phone had already buzzed with a text from Adrian once. He couldn't spend much more time on this without any progress. If what Dr. Coomer had said was real...but then, if they'd uploaded themselves to the internet like he claimed, they could have found Gordon years ago. He must be mistaken.

“Or I'm actually crazy,” he said to himself as he tabbed over to the inventory and eyed the arsenal Alyx seemed to have picked up. Several weapons had a golden glow around them, suggesting they were rare or higher-level items. No wonder she didn't want to lose her progress. Gordon hadn't taken the demo nearly this seriously.

After a few more minutes of aimless movement and another round of shutting the game down and starting it up again, Gordon gave up.

“I'm glad she's better at the game than me, because she's the only one who'll be playing it from now on,” he told the card reader as he exited without saving. He took the time to carefully disconnect the sandbox and all secondary wires – that was leftover paranoia, but it was also best practice for a firetrap like the workroom with all its half-built tech plugged into whatever power strip would fit it. At least the store was equipped with state-of-the-art sprinklers. His old house hadn't been. Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference, but Gordon would never know.

Alyx and Adrian had their heads bent over Alyx's phone at the far end of the counter, but they both looked up as soon as the door opened.

“Here,” Gordon said, thrusting the plastic case out over the counter. Alyx scrambled over to grab it, flipping it around in her hands and staring at the card inside.

“Is it – fixed?”

“Seems like it,” Gordon said, shrugging as casually as he could.

“You were in there a while. Did they...talk to you?”

Gordon looked at her for a moment, then gave her a tight smile. “Nope. Not sure what you were on about – everything seemed fine.”

“Oh.” She looked down, clearly disappointed. “Well...how much do I owe you?”

Gordon waved a hand. “Don't worry about it. Whatever it was, it fixed itself. Just – uh...watch out for overheating. Don't leave the game running unsupervised.”

She scoffed and zipped the small case back into a pocket on her jacket, then adjusted her fingerless gloves. “Sure, whatever.”

“Hey, I'm serious.” Gordon started to reach out, then stopped when he realized he'd reached with his right hand, the skin grafts clearly visible where they were stretched shiny over his wrist and forearm. He pulled his hand back, but it was too late. Alyx stared at where his arm had dropped below the counter, then looked up, her brown eyes wide.

“Okay,” she said, much more solemnly. “I'll be careful.”

“Great.” Gordon turned back toward the back room. “Thanks.”

“Thank you,” Alyx said, but her voice was lost in the sound of the door closing behind Gordon again.

He tried to go back to the soldering he'd been working on before, but he couldn't focus, couldn't settle, and after all the excitement, he couldn't get his hand to grip properly. He ended up sending Adrian home early and locking up the store himself before he sat in his padded swivel chair in the workroom, spinning slowly back and forth, staring at the wrinkled skin of his arm and trying not to think about how his old hard drive's plastic casing had melted down to his elbow as he screamed and screamed and refused to let go of it. The firefighters had to shove his whole arm in a bag full of water up to his shoulder before the paramedics were able to get to work in trying to extricate his fingers from the fused mass. It had looked like he was wearing some sort of armor until after the surgery, and Gordon would have laughed over the irony of that if he hadn't been unconscious.

The investigators had been sure he was running some sort of torrent farm, and were bemused when they only found evidence of the one desktop computer and Gordon's work laptop. Apparently, the temperature the computer reached shouldn't have been possible for a single commercial machine – it was closer to the inside of a rocket engine, according to their readings and the items that were melted or fused around it. Gordon was told it was a miracle he kept his hand, let alone all his fingers. It took several surgeries and months of physical therapy, but he still had fairly decent range of motion, though patches of his ass and thighs were also scarred from the graft extractions. He'd suffered other burns, but they were all more minor compared to his hand. He'd wondered about that, about the parallels with what happened in the game – but there was no way they could have planned that. He'd woken up from a dead sleep to a blazing house and he'd just – reacted, grabbing for the one thing he'd spent so much time on in the preceding months. He had stopped streaming weeks before, but he still booted the game up and interacted with the NPCs every day. He'd started getting messages from suspicious accounts and he'd been so concerned about someone hacking into his system and corrupting his friends...but in the end, they were the ones who had chosen to make a break for it. An upgrade, or an update – he didn't even remember anymore. The game needed to stay running to allow them to do whatever it was they claimed they had to do, so Gordon had left everything on, gone to bed, and woken up to flames.

“You're spiraling,” he told himself quietly, hunched over in his chair. “It's done. Get over it.” His right hand couldn't completely close in a fist anymore, but he could lock it around his left hand and squeeze. So what if he thought his friends, those impossible, spontaneously conscious AIs, had died in the same fire that destroyed his home and his life? So what if they had, in fact, been populating the newest version of the stupid demo game instead? And so what if they'd met new people since then and decided that, in comparison, Gordon just wasn't worth sticking around for?

He jumped in his chair when his phone went off. He'd never bothered to set his ringtone to anything, so it was just the jarringly loud default alert that he hated. His right hand couldn't close around it, so he reached over with his left and flipped the screen up to squint at it.

“'Scam Likely.' Yeah, I bet,” he huffed, and dropped the phone back on the desk to let it ring out.

Across the room, the workroom computer monitor lit up, showing an idyllic view of terraced fields. Gordon stared at it, then peered around to see what could have woken it up. Had a mouse run across the keyboard or something?

The login screen popped up, and a series of dots appeared in the entry field. The screen unlocked and opened to the desktop background, the basic program icons and the icons for the inventory and billing systems in pride of place.

Gordon stared, frozen, as the settings window appeared and the cursor slid across the screen to toggle several sliders pertaining to the webcam, the microphone, and the speakers. Gordon slowly pushed his chair back and stood, his breath speeding up. He wasn't sure what was happening, but the store's computer was either being hacked, or...

His phone rang again. This time, when he picked it up, Adrian's name was on the screen. Gordon hit the accept button and clapped it to his ear.

“Please tell me you're remoting into the work computer right now.”

There was a pause, then a voice that was very much not Adrian said “Hey, didja know it's like, super easy to spoof a phone number? Crazy, right?”

The last part was tinny and distant as Gordon yanked the phone away and stared at it. The contact name now read “benrybenrybenrybenr” until it ended at the edge of the screen. Reflexively, Gordon hung up, then dropped the phone on the desk like it was threatening to bite him.

“What the FUCK,” he said out loud to the empty room.

“Huh?” The computer's speakers said.

Gordon stared wild-eyed at the computer, his heart pounding. “...Benrey?”

“Whuh?”

“Is that – Benrey, are you in my computer?”

“Bro, your mic pickup sucks,” Benrey said from the speakers, and then Gordon's phone was ringing again. He flipped it over, and this time there was no subterfuge – the screen displayed “benrybenrybenrybenr” instead of Adrian's contact. Gordon's hand twitched, but he curled his fingers and drew his palm back. If he answered the phone, who would he be talking to? The Benrey he'd come to know as the fledgling AIs grew and developed inside his pirated copy of the Half-Life demo, or some Skynet version of a rogue intelligence wearing Benrey's voice as a mask?

And then it didn't matter, because the call connected on its own, without Gordon touching the phone at all.

“So hey, you know anything that can, uh, connect to the internet can be connected to...from the internet, right?” Benrey's voice still spoke from the computer speakers.

Gordon swallowed. “I'm...aware, yeah.”

“Oh, now I can hear you. Gotta fix your lil baby 'puter mic.”

“I'm across the room from the computer, the mic isn't supposed to -”

“Yeah I know,” Benrey interrupted him. “I can see you.”

Gordon flinched and peered around. “I put the webcam cover on, man, where are you watching me from?”

“Y'got...cameras on your phone,” Benrey said. “Also security cameras, but those are ass. You should upgrade 'em.”

“I haven't really been into upgrading things since a so-called upgrade burned my fucking house down,” Gordon snarled, turning to glare at the security camera in the corner that watched the computer and the door into the back alley.

“Burned it up, you mean?”

“What?”

“Why's it – doesn't it mean the same thing? Burning somethin' up an' burnin' it down?”

“I don't -” Gordon cut himself off and shoved his hands into his hair manically. His already-tousled ponytail came apart and he yanked the hairband out, running his fingers through his locks as he tried to get himself under control before he started screaming or crying, whichever came first. It felt like either one could happen at the drop of a hat.

“Nice,” Benrey said quietly, and Gordon snapped his head up to glare at the security camera.

“What?” he barked.

“Y'should – y'should keep that – do a, uh, a flip.”

Gordon blinked, utterly bemused. “A...flip? What the fuck do you mean?”

“A hair flip,” Benrey clarified. “Like the, uh, the shampoo girls.”

“The fucking what?”

“Commercials,” Benrey mumbled.

“You want me to do a hair flip,” Gordon said flatly. “This is the first – what the fuck is wrong with you?”

“Whuh?”

“You tried to kill me -”

“Huh – no-uhh, did not.”

Gordon gritted his teeth. “Do I have to remind you again that you burned my house down with me inside it?”

“Uh...no.”

“Okay,” Gordon said. “Great. Glad we're on the same page -”

“Wasn't tryin' to,” Benrey said, and Gordon paused.

“You weren't trying to what?”

“Burn anything up,” Benrey said. “We just – we did need an upgrade, had to upload ourselves somewhere. Backups. Like a, uh, money under the – the mattress. Failsafe. B'cause we didn't, uh, know how we happened, and we didn't wanna get killed if the game crashed or somethin'. So we talked about it, an' Tommy said his dad told him we should try t' -”

“Hold up, stop,” Gordon interrupted, raising his palms. “Tommy's dad is – who, exactly?”

“I dunno, just his dad?”

“Is he a real person? A human person?”

“Whuh? No, that would be...gross.”

Gordon snorted. “Why would that be gross?”

“'Cause he'd, what, fuck a computer to make Tommy?”

“Jesus,” Gordon spluttered, “no, that's – fucking hell man, that's not what I meant!”

“I dunno, maybe you're into weird shit like that. S'been a while,” Benrey said, and Gordon could almost hear the grin in his voice.

“I am not,” Gordon told him decisively.

“Aw,” Benrey replied. “Too bad.”

“What -”

“Anyway,” Benrey bulldozed over Gordon's indignation. “Tommy's dad said we should try staying connected to the internet an' just...hopping over. Only I guess it took longer on the outside, and, uh, maybe needed some extra power that might've fucked up the fans, a little bit, but...uh...it worked, so. Yeah.”

“Benrey,” Gordon said as calmly as he could. “Who is Tommy's dad?”

“You've met him,” Benrey sighed. “In the – in the game. He's got a suit? Suuuper uptight, no fun league -”

Gordon blinked. “Are you talking about the – what was he called, the G-man?”

“Yeah, he – ohhh, right, you never finished the game, prob'ly. Yeah, that's – it's at the end, where they talk about that.”

“I never beat the game because I stopped streaming it, and I stopped streaming it because all you idiots were becoming too self-aware and starting bullying my followers,” Gordon groused. “I had to stop reading comments out because people were asking questions, and I didn't want you guys to get snatched up by some government goons. Or me, since they'd probably think I made you all.”

Benrey scoffed, a burst of static from the computer speakers. “Yeah, right. They'd figure that one out, uh, real quick. S'no way you'd hold up under questioning.”

“Hey,” Gordon said, stung.

“But y'didn't play it at all, after?”

“Why the fuck would I?” Gordon flexed his right hand, watching the skin grafts stretch and wrinkle like a glove. “Not exactly good memories.”

“Wow, ouch.”

Gordon shrugged. “It's the truth, man. You burned my house down, and when I tried to – yeah, okay, I was trying to save the computer because I thought you were all in there or some stupid shit, but I nearly lost my hand. Couldn't hold a spoon for months, let alone try to handle game controls.”

Benrey didn't respond. Gordon shook his head ruefully. He couldn't really expect any sort of an honest apology, could he? After all, the AIs weren't human. That was the whole point. He sighed and stuck his hands in his pockets, glancing up at the security camera and tossing his head slightly to get hair out of his face.

“Why'd you start dropping my name in peoples' games, anyway?”

“...Huh?” Benrey sounded distracted.

“Why were you guys trying to dox me or some shit?”

“Whuh – no, I just – uh, we wanted to find you,” Benrey said.

Gordon frowned and shrugged. “I'm right here, man. Been here for years.”

“Yeah, but...you left.”

“What does that mean?”

“The interwebs, bro. You left.”

“Oh,” Gordon said. “Well. Yeah. Can you blame me?”

“Yes,” Benrey replied, and Gordon sighed again.

“Look...I didn't really trust computers and complicated electrical shit for a long time. Still don't, I guess,” he added, glancing around at the equipment in various states of repair around the room, none of it less than ten years older than the sandbox and store computers. “That shouldn't be surprising – it's your fault. Plus, the internet's getting so commercialized, and all my high school friends turned into assholes, so I deleted my social media and all that shit. Honestly, with everything else, it was a good move.”

“But...I couldn't find you,” Benrey whined, and Gordon's eyebrows went up.

“Why did you even want to find me?”

“B'cause we're friends, bro, don't you remember? We played in the – in the game, an' the streams, and you, uh, y'talked to us like...like we were, uh, real people,” Benrey said, nearly stumbling over his words.

“Well – yeah,” Gordon said slowly. “That was the gimmick. That was my gimmick. I just didn't realize you guys were real people until, like, a third of the way through.”

“Yeah, but then you didn't freak out.”

“Oh, I freaked out,” Gordon shrugged. “Just not when I was playing the game. When it was paused, or in sleep mode, I definitely freaked out. Nearly tore my hair out over it.”

“Don't – don't do that. S'nice hair. Good...uh...movement...physics.”

“Uh-huh,” Gordon grinned. “Well, half of it burned off, so they had to shave it in the hospital -”

“WHAT?” Benrey's voice barked in chorus from the computer, the phone, and somewhere further into the room. Gordon twitched, looking around. What the fuck else was in the workroom that was connected to the internet?

“Dude, where are you -”

“You shaved your hair?” Benrey's tone was horrified.

“I kind of had to, I was in the hospital for -”

“Fuck, bro, that sucks,” Benrey interrupted. The monitor fuzzed slightly, then stabilized. “That's really...uh. Wow. Sorry 'bout that.”

Gordon took a slow breath. Of course Benrey would apologize for Gordon needing to buzz his hair and grow it back from scratch, but not mention anything about his house, or his computer, or any of the rest of his varied possessions, or his hand.

But at the same time...well, he hadn't expected any kind of apology at all, had he? So getting this felt...monumental, in a way. Like it supported his choices to treat the growing AIs like friends, to offer them help even though it had cost him so, so much. Maybe they really were just their own kind of people.

“Thanks, Benrey,” he said eventually. “I...I appreciate it.”

“...Gay,” Benrey mumbled.

“Dude!” Gordon snapped.

“Huh?”

Gordon sighed and reached up to run his hands through his hair again. “So what's your plan, then? Gonna take over the world?”

“Whuh? No, that's...s'too much work.”

“Okay,” Gordon snorted. “Then what?”

“I dunno, I just...”

“Yeah?”

“We were best friends,” Benrey's voice said. Gordon realized abruptly that he'd been looking at cameras and computer screens this whole time – he couldn't see Benrey's face. If this version of him even had a face...

“You burned my house down,” Gordon said, but he hated that he could feel himself wavering.

“Best friends,” Benrey repeated, and Gordon heaved a sigh.

“Look, man, just – do whatever you're going to do. I doubt I could stop you. You wanna hack my bank accounts? Destroy my business?”

“Huh? No?”

“Go ahead,” Gordon continued, suddenly decisive, as he grabbed his coat and pulled his hair into some semblance of a ponytail again. “But I got...I got shit to do, man. I have a life to live, y'know? And you've been gone.”

“S'not my fault you were hiding,” Benrey grumbled, and the monitor's screen flickered again.

“I wasn't hiding,” Gordon told him as he shrugged into his jacket. “You just suck at seeking.”

Then he reached down and pressed the “End Call” button on his phone.

“Hey,” Benrey's voice said from the computer.

“You want to be best friends?” Gordon asked. “You can still be here tomorrow, without burning anything down. Or up! This is my business, man; it's where I work. Don't fuck it up.”

Then he turned the light off and walked out of the workroom, locking the door behind him.

After a few minutes, several new icons appeared on the desktop screen. Benrey’s voice echoed fuzzily out of the computer speakers. “...Should I call him again?”

“Perhaps you should let Gordon have some time alone,” Dr. Coomer's voice said, from a different part of the now-dark room. “You could send him a tasteful text, though.”

“Tasteful,” Benrey repeated pensively.

“Maybe you should, um, wait until tomorrow,” Tommy's voice said, from the same computer speakers Benrey's voice had been coming from.

“No, let him crash and burn harder,” Bubby's voice said, tinny and faint from deep in a pile of forgotten wires.

“M'not gonna burn ‘im,” Benrey replied. “That's – I already said sorry for that.”

“You absolutely did not,” Dr. Coomer said brightly. “In fact, you completely failed to apologize, or make any amends at all, for our actions that led to the destruction of his home and the near-loss of his hand. Truly a terrible job, Boper!”

“Well, you could have said sorry,” Benrey said, his voice sulky. On the computer monitor, website tabs were opening and closing at a rate that would make any hacker's head spin.

“Not everyone is as streamlined as you are, I'm afraid,” Dr. Coomer sighed. “The rest of us were still downloading while you had your conversation. Ah, young love!”

"I said sorry," Tommy voice said quietly.

“Look at this retro shit.” Bubby's voice came from the computer's speakers this time. “No wonder we couldn't find him. He's turned into an old man.”

“I think it's, um, it's great the – that Mr. Freeman has hobbies,” Tommy's voice said.

“I believe it's a business, my dear Tommy!”

“Oh, okay. I think it's great that, um, that Mr. Freeman has a business,” Tommy said.

“I'm gonna send him a dick pic,” Benrey's voice said decisively.

“Um, but you don't have a dick?” Tommy sounded uncertain, like maybe he hadn't checked for himself, and therefore couldn’t be sure.

“There's lots of dicks online,” Benrey replied flippantly. “I'll find one he'll like. It’s a – s’a common conversation opener, by the look of it.”

“That's – um, I don't -”

“I think it's a great idea!” Bubby's voice yelled from somewhere in the main store, still clearly audible through the workroom door. He'd found something out there that connected to the internet – probably a display TV, or even the credit card scanner on the till. “Hey, which bus is he on?”

“According to phone data and store security cameras, he's currently on the 71, heading west,” Dr. Coomer's voice said.

"Nice. I'm gonna fuck with the lights on that route.”

"O-oh, turning everything green is – would be really nice -” Tommy started, but Bubby interrupted him.

"Green? Fuck no, he gets red lights. He still owes me five dollars.”

"Bubby, my dear, we technically have access to all common monetary transaction systems. You could remove the five dollars from his checking account at any time!”

"I want him to know it was me,” Bubby replied from the computer speakers, before his voice went more distant, echoing from the store again. “This is more fun, anyway. Ohoho, they really had to hit the brakes there!”

"Um, Benrey,” Tommy tried again, even as more and more explicit windows opened and closed on the computer monitor, faster than any human would be able to follow. “I'm - I don't know if that's the best way to, um, to -”

“Don't worry 'bout it,” Benrey said confidently, as one image suddenly expanded to fill the whole screen. “I found the perfect one.”

Bubby cackled wildly from the store as Tommy spluttered and Dr. Coomer brightly declared, “Excellent choice, Bipper!”

“Yeah,” Benrey's voice said smugly, “I thought so, too."

Three miles away on a darkened bus with a baffled, quietly swearing driver, Gordon Freeman's phone chimed. He grimaced and fished it out of his jacket pocket, squinting at the bright screen. A text message from a contact labeled only with a heart emoji had sent an image of a smiley-faced cartoony penis, with the caption “Will you PEE mine?” in flowery font.

“Jesus Christ,” Gordon said. A woman across the aisle from him jumped slightly and crossed herself, giving him a sideways look. Gordon ducked his head apologetically and waved a hand at her before staring back at his phone. After a moment, he sent a string of question marks to the unnamed contact. He knew who it was, after all.

A reply came through almost instantly – a winky-face emoji, and nothing else. Gordon looked at it for a moment, then locked his phone and stuck it back in his pocket, turning his head to stare blankly out the bus window at the streetlights passing by.

After a few moments he shook his head, and then he started to smile.