Chapter 351 - 351: Absolute Ignorance

A smartphone vibrated against the wooden desk, rattling next to an empty energy drink can. Connor grabbed the device and swiped the glowing green icon to accept the incoming video call. Leo's face appeared on the small screen as he ran a hand through his dark hair.

"Connor," Leo began, leaning closer to his own camera. "Your feed just completely froze and dropped. Did your router crash?"

Connor dragged himself off the carpet and slumped into his rolling chair. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands to clear his blurred vision. "My entire system crashed. The silver-eyed girl from the official cover art bypassed my firewall and appeared directly on my desktop."

He turned the phone camera toward the smoking plastic tower resting on the floor. "She typed a warning across the screen and fried my hardware."

Leo stared through the phone display with wide eyes. "That is completely impossible. A digital asset cannot break out of the client and destroy physical hardware. You probably just downloaded a malicious script from a shady forum link."

'The studio is pushing the boundaries of interactive media,' Connor concluded internally.

"It is a promotional stunt," Connor insisted. He pointed a finger at his dead monitor to emphasize his point. "The developers are launching a massive expansion soon, and they want the player base to believe the game world is bleeding into our reality."

Leo shifted in his seat and frowned at the camera. "We just read a thread detailing the exact disappearances of real people from Miami. Those missing persons reports align perfectly with the lore Rubedo recited."

Connor pulled the phone closer to his face. "Entertainment companies use real-world tragedies for marketing campaigns all the time. Integrating a real missing persons case into the background lore creates a viral mystery."

He leaned back in his chair and sighed. "The studio is just capitalizing on a famous unsolved crime to boost their player engagement."

Leo bit his lower lip while staring at the screen. "A multibillion-dollar studio hacking personal computers and breaking monitors sounds like a lawsuit waiting to happen."

"They hide the terms of service in a document no one ever reads," Connor countered. "We probably agreed to participate in this alternate reality game the moment we installed the application. The system malfunction and the cryptic warning are just scripted events, a marketing push designed to hype up the new endgame boss."

Connor poked the charred plastic casing of his computer tower. The melted polymer stuck to his fingertips. A dark stain spread across his carpet from the ruptured cooling tubes inside the ruined machine. Leo shifted on the small phone screen and held up a glowing tablet to the camera.

"I ran a background check on the name he gave us," Leo said. "I accessed a digitized police report from the county database. Redmond Vane, along with 28 others, attended a high school reunion in Miami on the exact date of the mass disappearance. The official registry lists them as legally presumed deceased."

Connor grabbed a towel from his desk chair and wiped the melted plastic from his hands. He leaned over the phone display to read the blurred text on the police report.

"The development team scraped public databases to build a convincing narrative for their new antagonist," Connor stated. "They utilized a real tragedy to give their villain a fictional backstory."

Leo dropped his tablet onto his desk. "A game studio does not possess the technology to manifest a character on your monitor and physically ignite your motherboard. That girl bypassed every security protocol on your network and destroyed your hardware from the inside out."

Connor tossed the dirty towel onto his unmade bed. He paced across the bedroom floor and pointed at the smoking tower. "A malicious rootkit can easily override thermal limiters and overclock a processor until it combusts. The studio infected my system with malware to sell the illusion of a breach."

"Again, why would they do that? IT will hurt their reputation!"

"No, all they want is attention. I will post about this on the internet and it will gain attention and others will try to do the same. But it won't happen with them. They can afford a lawsuit and pay some amount if they can promote their next update and event on such a big scale."

Leo rubbed his temples with both hands. "You are completely ignoring the thermodynamic trap he used against the druid. That player manipulated fluid dynamics and heat convection with scientific accuracy. A programmed boss encounter relies entirely on scripted attack patterns and randomized number generation."

Connor stopped pacing and crossed his arms over his chest. He glared at the phone screen. "Machine learning algorithms adapt to player strategies every single day. The studio fed their new artificial intelligence an entire library of physics textbooks to make the endgame raids challenging."

Leo grabbed his phone and flipped the camera around to show his own gaming setup. His monitors displayed a dozen open forums filled with panicked posts from other players across the globe.

"Thousands of users are reporting identical interactions with this Rubedo entity because his name has climbed up to the global ranking and it just happened in two weeks. He knows details about the world before the servers even went live."

"It is a viral marketing campaign," Connor repeated. He picked up his phone and thumbed the volume button to drown out the notification pings echoing from Leo's end. "They are launching a massive server expansion. They want us to believe the digital world is overlapping with ours to drive up sales."

Leo stared through the lens with wide eyes. His face paled under the glare of his multiple monitors. "If you truly believe this is just a marketing stunt, log back into your account. Boot up your backup laptop and tell him to his face that he is just lines of code."

Connor looked at his backup laptop resting on the bookshelf. His stomach cramped violently. The image of the silver-eyed girl tilting her head on his ruined screen surfaced in his thoughts. He swallowed dryly and turned his gaze back to the ruined desktop tower.

"My main rig is completely fried," Connor muttered. He rubbed the back of his neck and stepped away from the desk. "I need to study for the calculus exam tomorrow. We can deal with this stupid alternative reality game after we pass our classes."