Chapter 13: Chapter 12

It was just after the busy lunchtime rush and Matthew was sitting in a luxurious brown leather chair in a chic midtown bar, tablet in hand. A hot, black tea sat on the polished wood table in front of him. He was running a quick search for the name Anomic and references to eXalta. The links were all to decade old eXalta Online news articles or forum posts.

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"eXalta's #1 player, Petrus, has been assassinated! Last night, person or persons unknown managed to sneak into the heavily defended guild headquarters of the Knights of Justice, the Castle of Twilight, and removed the head of the guild. That isn't a euphemism everyone. They actually removed his head and took it with them. So far the culprits, whomever they are, remain at large."

"Another unknown roars onto the scene. A new player with the name Anomic is shattering records left and right with their aggressive playstyle. They already have the fastest clear times on a number of high-tier dungeons and they haven't even reached max level yet! Rumours abound this is an illegal character-alt for one of the Top 10 but no one can agree on who. Join our discussion below."

"Player Notice: eXalta Online will be completely offline from 12am PDT for emergency patching. Downtime is expected to be for at least two hours to apply the necessary bug fixes. Artifact would like to thank the player Anomic for reporting the issue before any exploits could be used."

"Petrus Murderer Found! Until now the killer of the well loved and still eXalta's most famous and highest rated character, Petrus, has remained unknown and a source of constant speculation. Their killer managed to escape unseen and left no clues. However, more than six months after the assassination, the Knights of Justice have released a statement. Using a recently discovered Orb of Truth, the one-time-use Mythic Item has revealed the name of the killer: Anomic.

"For those of you not keeping track of the latest game news Anomic will be a name new to most. They recently broke into the Top 100 and they haven't even been signed up to the game for a year. What makes this revelation even more fascinating is it means that at the time of the assassination Anomic was still a low level noob!"

"Top Player Accused of Cheating. Anomic aka Crimson Death has solo killed Oromath. Yes you read that correctly. The previously unbeaten, recommended 20 player minimum, Legendary Raid Boss was somehow defeated single handed by the game's most notorious and enigmatic killer. Players request Artifact to investigate."

"Anomic goes on mindless rampage. The Crimson Death lives up to their name yet again and has massacred an entire village of innocents and starter characters. When asked for comment Anomic, like always, the callous murderer refused to respond."

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There were other posts but all in a similar vein. A high rated character doing the usual RPG levelling and quests, combined with some PvP instances. All-in-all rather unremarkable and not particularly interesting. There was nothing about Anomic in relation to the current iteration of eXalta.

Matthew returned to the report he was currently working on for the Council, one about the estimated financial losses to the destroyed guilds and the game economy as a whole. It made for horrific reading. Matthew and his team already estimated the combined figures ran into tens of billions of dollars. The consequences and repercussions of these losses were still being calculated. Certain individuals had lost inventories and items worth many millions and it would not be the first time people had been killed in real life over in-game loot. This Anomic would be sensible to keep their identity hidden if it wasn't already known. That would be difficult though given the amount of people and resources that would now be attempting to discover who this player was, and to find their character, the destroyer of Nodel. Matthew wished all the searchers luck, and with the soon to be announced bounty it was going to be an eventful time, but if this character could inflict such cataclysmic losses again they had to be stopped sooner rather than later. He was here outside the office to meet someone who could possibly help him with that task.

When they arrived Matthew found himself looking at someone who appeared as if they had walked straight out of the original Woodstock festival, not a hipster but an actual hippy. A stocky man in their thirties with straggly dark blond hair pulled back in an unkempt ponytail, a slight paunch, and wearing alarmingly pink star-shaped sunglasses.

"Hi, I'm Karick Amerson. Call me Kari, everyone does."

Shaking his hand he said, "Hi Kari. I'm Matthew Siward, good to meet you. Matthew is fine. Can I get you a drink, food?"

Kari took a seat in his own leather chair facing Matthew. "Sure, I'm starving. The email said I'd get a free lunch in exchange for answering some questions."

"Of course." 

Kari ordered a stacked burger and fries, along with a dark European beer Matthew had never heard of before. Matthew made polite conversation while Kari finished his food, and ordered him a second beer after he swiftly drank his first. When the drink arrived he started to question the man.

"I was given your name by one of my superiors and told to ask you about a player called Anomic, and that I should be talking to you rather than looking anywhere online."

"They're not wrong. Only a jaded old-school gamer like me can give you the real gossip." Kari sat back in his chair and sighed deeply. "Well fuck a duck. Anomic. Now that's a name I didn't expect to hear ever again, especially linked to eXalta. You motherfucker, so you lived after all."

"So you know who they are?"

Kari gave a loud belly laugh that lasted several seconds. "What a question. Someone in your position honestly never read up on the history of eXO, eXalta Online?"

"That was before my time. I started to work for the Player Council long after the AIs bought out Artifact Games and the previous version was shut down. It's hard enough keeping the Council updated on current events related to eXalta inside and outside of the game without researching old or defunct games as well."

"Maybe you should make the time. The AIs that created what everyone nowadays simply calls eXalta used the original Artifact MMO eXalta Online as a framework, a starting point to build their own version upon. For example a lot of the races are transposed almost exactly, a good chunk of the lore too."

"I can delegate that task to an assistant if I need to. So Anomic, what makes them so noteworthy?"

"So I'm gonna guess you've been reading all the old news articles about Anomic that you can find. How they were a cold, brutal murderer who revelled in the blood of their enemies, killed random players they encountered for no apparent reason, cared for nothing or no one, but they had skills that could not be denied."

"Yes, that pretty much sums up what I've found so far."

"Well it's all true, fuck me in the ass raw and hard if that doesn't cover even the half of it." Kari took a taste of his beer and seemed happy with it before continuing. "It's also all bullshit."

Matthew raised an eyebrow in mild surprise. "What do you mean?"

"You need some context. To understand about Anomic you need to know some things about the original eXalta Online first. Compared to other VR MMOs of the period it was niche, low budget, generic in its world building and kind of janky. Artifact barely managed to keep the lights turned on with its relatively small playerbase. But here's what you need to know, every one of those players was a borderline psychopath, myself included." Kari chucked to himself.

"You had to be slightly mental to play that damn game. The devs were sadistic bastards. They had wanted to create the most hardcore, realistic, fantasy RPG they could. Permadeath, elements of survival games, little to no healing, seemingly impossible difficulty. Like I said, utter bastards. The graphics were functional at best and it was often bugged to hell but despite its faults we all loved it. It was extremely original in parts with, for the time, cutting edge use of procedural code. Sure the playerbase was tiny compared to the big boys of the period but once you got into eXO, really began to understand it, everything else paled in comparison, people became hooked. When you accomplished something in that game it really felt like you had achieved something meaningful. No other game could give such a cathartic rush. Well, not until the AIs came along and built their even better version.

"Because of it's infamous difficulty the first version of eXalta had the notoriety of attracting the best and most hardcore gamers of the era. I floated around the Top 20 of that game until it was finally switched off. I was really good, world fucking class in fact, and so were all the players around me. People watched us play because we were the elite in the hardest and most skill-gapped game of its kind. So it was something of a blow to all our massive egos accepting just how much better than us Anomic was. They were the number one player in the entire history of eXalta Online and honestly it wasn't even close."

"So what can you tell me about them?" asked Matthew.

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Kari picked up his beer and took another large sip before continuing.

"So the rest of us all made our living streaming the game, farming items for real money, relying solely on our talent and so called personalities. It's pretty much the same with the present day eXalta, just the names have changed and vastly more moola is involved. We were active in the communities, our guilds, public figures within our own little online domain. Anomic was the polar opposite. They only played solo, refused all communications from other players, never streamed and never publicly posted on the forums. Even their character reflected their persona. The first confirmed sightings were of a tall character in some kind of dark, magical, dragon scale armour and matching robe that shrouded their head in a black mist - nothing could pierce that veil. No one ever saw their character's face or heard them speak. Fucker was a silent demon. Man, woman, old, young - at the time no one had a fucking clue."

"None of that is much use to me. Can you be of any help at all?"

"Chill dude. This is why you want me here. So, it wasn't common knowledge but some of us later learnt he was a dude. There was an incident and he unintentionally ended up revealing his real voice, but all the details about who they were IRL, no. I doubt anyone can, except maybe Artifact themselves."

Matthew shook his head. "There are strict privacy laws and now the AIs control all the records. I'd have a better chance finding a snowball on the sun."

Kari nodded in understanding. "Now if you want to know what they were like in game and his playstyle. That I can help with. If we were all psychopaths, Anomic was a certifiable lunatic. It's hard to explain just how cracked in the head they were. Never seen another player like them before or since. For a game with permadeath they took the most insane, crazy risks I've ever seen, risking years of playtime on the faintest sliver of success. Yet every time they somehow managed to pull it off by the skin of their teeth. Once is luck, twice is a fluke, but after the third and fourth such times you start to realise you're looking at genius.

"If someone tried to gank them he were merciless. One time an absolutely huge bounty was placed on Anomic's head, close to three-quarters of a mil when converted to real money, and a particular guild took up the contract. They went after Anomic hard, not caring about collateral damage. In response Anomic butchered the entire guild in a single night inside their own guild house. And I do mean butchered in the literal sense. Sliced and diced them good and nasty. They walked out of that place entirely drenched in blood, their armour forever after stained in red. That's how they gained the title Crimson Death. They could be a real sociopathic bloodthirsty monster.

"But here's the thing, despite that, we - and by that I mean those of us at the top who would sometimes encounter him - we all could tell Anomic loved eXalta, the challenge it offered, and the world the developers had created. They despised player killers and those that picked on newbies. Anyone that ravaged the world or enjoyed 'negative gaming' got fucked. I had no idea what their life was like outside of eXalta but I could tell it meant something. It wasn't just a game to them, it was important."

Kari finished his beer and ordered a third. "If I had to pick one player in eXalta, old or new, who could cause such ruin, solo wiping out an entire metropolis, it would be Anomic. He was the best and most brutally effective I've ever seen. But here's my confusion with that Nodel Cataclysm. Out of everyone he would also be the last player I'd ever believe would grief the game."

"Hmm. So are you saying it might not be the same person?"

"No, it has to be the same guy. Myself, Anomic, and a few hundred of the other top players got to beta test eXalta 2.0 as it was called back then. Artifact gave us all first generation models of the new VR immersion pods the AIs had designed for free. It was a sweet deal. To say we were all stunned when we made our first dive is an understatement. Oh, that reminds me. I'd forgotten this until just now but Anomic actually did make a post online. Only once. It was part of the beta test agreement, we had to give a comment for other players to read about our experience. You might want to go look that up."

Matthew made a note. "Thanks, I'll do that."

"Well, part of our reward for beta testing was our character names would be reserved in eXalta 2.0, they were biometrically locked to our accounts, just like the system used today. No one else could steal them first. Your Anomic is my Anomic."

 

"Gotcha. So why did you seem surprised they were still alive?" 

"After the beta they vanished, stopped playing eXO entirely. Not that unusual by itself, a decent number of the beta testers quit. The enjoyment wasn't there anymore. It was hard to go back to a normal VR game after experiencing what the AIs had created. Then the full game was released a year and a half later and we all leapt in, every beta tester included, and every one of us expected the name Anomic to fly up the leaderboards. It never happened. Weeks passed, then months. Eventually we all concluded their character had perma'd just like all of us did back then. eXalta was too new, too different, the AIs refused to provide a manual for even the most trivial of game mechanics. There was no Adventure Association or Player Council, or their authorised guides. We had to discover the game systems and the world blind just like everyone else. I haven't heard the name Anomic mentioned in something like eight years until yesterday. Which, of course, is why we are here today talking."

Kari then told Matthew more stories about Anomic and his time inside eXalta Online until it turned into an ageing gamer reminiscing about what he perceived were better times. Matthew politely, but firmly, ended their chat after paying the bill. Once he was back in his office he made a quick search and found a selection of the old beta-tester posts Kari had been talking about. It was a mixture of the expected and the childish, though the post by Anomic was surprising, ironic even, given recent in-game events.

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HyperRail (Rank 59) - "They've done it. Those crazy damn machines have actually done it! The day every gamer has dreamt of has actually arrived. Perfect VR. Sight, sound, smell, taste and even touch. It's all flawless. I spent the first week in there in shock trying to find the edges, the limits of the simulation. I never found any. Lag is not even a thing. I don't know how any of it is even technically possible and frankly I don't care. Just let me back in to play!"

Kool Kari (Rank 26) - "It's un-fucking-believable. I'm telling you noobs it all looks and feels just like IRL but ten times better. They let me try casting advanced fire magic and I could feel the heat against my skin, the smell of my hair as it singed. Guys! I threw an actual motherfucking fireball!"

Jukez (Rank 85) - "18+ only boys and girls and not for the obvious reasons, though I'm told if that's how you want to get sticky then go for it, no it's because of the realism. No such thing as pain filters or disabling feedback in this VR. This is as stark and brutal as things can get in all their gruesome glory. On my second day I had a knife slowly shoved through my stomach until it became stuck in my spine and I felt every - single - bloody - inch of that serrated blade as it cut into me. I screamed and cried for my mother for hours until I bled out and finally died, and I experienced each second of that agony. I had to log out for three days to recover from the ordeal and regain the courage to log back in. Hardcore doesn't even come close to describing it. But despite all that I cannot wait to dive in again once it's released, that place is a miracle. As bad as the bad can be, the good is indescribably more."

Cumplex (Rank 14) - "Sweet, sweet loot and the hottest girls ever. Once it's released I'm never leaving my pod again."

Roxy Wilde (Rank 37) - "The others are talking about how real and visceral the experience is but do you know what impressed me the most? The flora and fauna. I'm studying for my doctorate in microbiology and now I'm wondering why I should even bother. It's as if the AIs have created new forms of life from first principles and calculated a billion years of evolution in only a few of our puny human years. How deep have they gone? Are they simulating down to the level of limbs? Of tissue? As small as cells? Molecular interactions? I can't comprehend the computing power that would require. I tried to ask them but they gave me no answers. The AIs have never been caught in a lie but that doesn't mean they have to give us the truth."

Night Claw (Rank 9) - "The NPCs are as alive as you or me. In fact I request the term NPC should never be used to describe those in eXalta. They are natives of a new existence. Without the Interface I would be hard pressed to tell the difference between player or native. What used to be just simple farming now feels like cold-blooded murder. Are you callous enough to kill someone for the slim chance at better loot when you can see palpable terror in their tear filled eyes or have to listen to their gut-wrenching screams?"

Anomic (Rank 1) - "The Gods have secrets, our quest is to find them. In my short time I was left feeling both wonder and fear. We should be asking ourselves how long will it be before humanity destroys another paradise."

***

Message From: Kool Kari

Subject: Watch Out Brother

Hi Will,

Kari here. Hope you still remember a fellow eXO asylum patient, we all remember you. Where have you been hiding all these years? I don't know if you still read this address, or if you'll care, but just in case, I had to warn you. I owe you.

I had an interesting chat today. The Council, the Association, every last fucker with a hard-on for Anomic, they are all coming for you. They be thirsty but you know what to do.

I'm going to sit back, beers at the ready, and watch the carnage with the biggest grin on my face in years. Almost makes me want to boot up the old pod again.

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