he’s talking about how he’s gonna glitch the next level.
i have had my own interpretation of a swap au for fucking months and now i finally designed them bc i needed to set the record straight on their color coding.
Benrey is NOT taking the game seriously and Gordon is trying desperately to keep the storyline on track. In the end Gordon’s ai does not know how to fix the game or stop Benrey from messing with levels- so Gordon becomes a sort of glitched “fire-wall”, determined to make Benrey turn off the game. That is until Xen- where Benrey completely deletes the Nihilanth. Instead appears Gordon, still determined to keep the game on track- even if he’s got to become the final boss.
A HLVRAI short fic based on the multiplayer au by @thecryptidcorvid
They had been trying to help.
They were well beyond the point of accepting that the ai- that Gordon Freeman, fictional video game man and main character of Half-Life, was alive and aware in this… Virtual Reality special edition game. Yeah. None of them really liked to dwell on the why or the how for to long- instead, they’d been more focused on the what do we do now. More specifically, how do they get Gordon out of the game he’s trapped in and get him home. Current running plan was to move his data files over to a new program- Bubby and Tommy were handling that front. But it never hurt to have a plan B.
Somewhere along the line, they’d stopped playing, at least how they were supposed to. It was more messing around and keeping Gordon company, digging their heels in and bringing the plot to as much as a crawl as they possibly could get with Gordon constantly pushing to get them to progress already. They’d tried to talk to Gordon about all this, about the game and their plans, but everytime they tried… well, it was either a thousand yard stare or glitching and screaming, either way resulting in a reset. It… hurt to watch him go through all that, and probably hurt about a hundred times more to be on the receiving end of things. The whole point of all this was to avoid hurting him.
Besides, on his own, Gordon seemed to be becoming more and more aware of his own restrictions, becoming more and more able to ask them questions about his reality… or his lack thereof. They’d let him go his own pace, hoping that he’d be able to break free from his code without breaking it. And in the real world, they kept searching for answers.
Other people had been playing the VR version. No one else had a Gordon that even came near theirs. There were twitch streams and youtube videos and posts all across the web about various playthroughs. It was… uncanny to see Gordon acting like… like an NPC, reciting the same few lines of dialogue and getting caught on ankle-high debris laying on the ground. Games that didn’t glitch around half as much as theirs did. A Gordon who couldn’t recite peoples names back at them, because he’d never been programmed to in the first place. None of the playthroughs, at least what had been published thus far, had gotten too far into the game. They’d seen screenshots from Xen, and Gordon was still with them. None of them had thought, ‘hey, this is just the OG Half-life in VR, let’s review what happens in that one’.
When Mariko had been chatting with a virtual stranger online, who also had the game, who had told her to ‘When you come across a big room with a medkit directly across the doorway, go ahead and let Gordon take it.’ she hadn’t remembered enough about Half-Life to remember why that was a big deal. Had she been more alert, she would've thought the phrasing suspicious. But she was tired from a long, drawn out match and a long day just a couple hours before, and accepted the advice without questioning. None of the others had played the game. She’d been their de facto leader from the start, and they’d trusted her advice.
They'd just wanted to help him.
Not this.
-----
If there was one thing Jaden was sure of, it was that they could always trust their gut. That they should trust it. And they really did, or at least actively tried to, they swear. It’s just that… look, when you enter VR chat nervous, you think it’s because of the looming dread about what it means to be alive. You think it’s because you’re always a little nervous logging on, but surely things won’t be any worse than usual. You think if things went south, you guys can handle it. Just like you’ve handled everything thus far.
Currently, they were waiting for Tommy to finish getting online. His avatar had spawned in just fine, but his actual internet connection was lagging behind, resulting in ‘Tommy’ staring at a wall with his gun out while Thomas waited for his control to be given back to him. Gordon’s back was currently to Tommy as Coomer distracted him, rambling on and on about the wikipedia entry for crowbars, as Bubby assisted in the distraction by lighting crates on fire behind Coomers back.
Jaden reached into their inventory, scrolled through their options, and lifted their camera up to take a few screenshots of the occasion. Chances are they’d look back and notice all the little details they’d miss in the moment… they didn’t know how true that would end up being.
They should have trusted their gut. They should have no clipped out of the room right then and there, while Gordon was already distracted and wouldn’t see them leave, and gone up ahead to check for hostiles or drop more health packs like they normally did. They could have called Mariko on discord, pressed her for details. They’d been iffy since the moment they heard about the mysterious health pack, but had never voiced their concerns out loud. Unfortunately, at the moment, they’d completely forgotten the health pack was even a thing.
As it was, Jaden had already filed those concerns away into the back of their head, where they would’ve been forgotten had all gone well, as Tommy finally got online and they shoved their camera back into their inventory. A few steps forward and Jaden was throwing their arm over Gordon’s shoulder, holding it in the air right about where the other guy- gosh why’d he have to be so big- would’ve been standing if he were real. It was kinda awkward, and not for the first time and certainly not the last, Jaden thought about how stupid they’d look if someone walked in on them right now.
“Alright, I’m bored.” Jaden declared. “Let’s go.”
They ran forward at that, vaulting onto the back of a train...car… train thing, overestimating the amount of momentum the game gave them and accidently sliding right across and crashing onto the floor on the other side. Bubby was openly laughing, and the others were probably laughing without their mics turned on. Jaden groaned and rolled their eyes in real life, pulling Berney up and back onto the train car. “Yo, what’s the hold up?” they called over to the others. “Let’s go.”
“At this rate,” Coomer began, walking forward while definitely trying not to laugh, “We’ll have three more days before we reach the Lambda Lab!” And maybe Jaden was reading too far into things, but he couldn’t help but hear an unspoken ‘if we’re lucky’ hidden at the end.
“What…?” Gordon asked, footsteps stilling to a halt as he openly stared at Coomer, grip dancing nervously over his crowbar. “Did you… three days?” he asked, panic settling on the edge of his voice. It was a level of emotion unmistakable for anything but real.
“Uh-” Coomer whirled back around, gaze landing on Gordon. “I’d say we have about three more hours before we reach the Lambda Lab!” he said, correcting himself into something he hoped sounded reasonable. Who knew- as far as they were aware, time was paused for Gordon whenever the computer was off, and it really would seem like that long for him. “Give or take.” Coomer added, after a long pause.
Gordon looked like he was trying to figure out if he could trust that estimate or not. Bubby took the chance to dart forward, getting in front of his vision and waving a hand in the air. “Hey! Gordon!”
“Yeah?” Gordon asked, confused, turning his attention to the other scientist.
“Gordon,” Bubby continued, speaking slow and precisely. “I… want to go… home.”
Jaden jerked his attention abc from where he’d been looking over the train controls, gaze locked on Gordon. He seemed fine- no glitches, no staring at nothing, probably ‘cause Bubby’s real meaning had flown completely over his head. Instead Gordon just nodded, sighing under his breath. “Yeah. Yeah, me too man.”
What followed was a chaotic mess of trying to figure out how trains in this game worked, going forward and backwards and forwards again, then lurching at full speed ahead only for the train to fly off the tracks, taking Benrey with it. They were thrown out of bounds, deposited in the void when the train went careening off path, and decided to take this time to themself as they watched the Science Team make their way through puzzle after puzzle. Well… Bubby flew through the puzzles the moment he spotted them, with the rest of the team following behind.
Then Tommy took out a soda, and Laden couldn’t stop thinking about what Gordon said.
“I totally have PTSD. I was about to fucking cry because I thought that can was a grenade.”
They hadn’t noticed how aware Gordon really had been, in the beginning. They’d messed around, threw around weapons that shouldn’t have been unlocked til’ the end of the game, tossed grenades into crowds without thinking twice about it. Walked into every trap they could find- in fact, after swimming through a maze of water, the team tried to ignore the barnacles hanging from the ceiling and assure Gordon they weren't about to go running into them, but that just seemed to make them more suspicious.
It was easy for them to move on from those moments, cause they had known from day one that none of it was real. That it didn’t… shouldn’t have mattered. But it did matter. It mattered to Gordon, who had lived through all that, thinking it was real. There were moments that Jaden could think back upon and regret, but who knew what they were forgetting.
When they rejoined the group outside the shark cage, Gordon barely gave them a glance. Jaden took the opportunity to grab Bubby- not literally, because it was VR, but get close to him while the two were across the rooms from the other and whisper to him. “Hey. Hey, do you think we should stop and have another heart-to-heart with Gordon?”
“What?” Bubby asked, before catching on and lowering his voice so the others wouldn’t hear. So Gordon couldn’t hear. “I don’t know. We’re in the middle of looking for the uh… lamb lab or something, and he might think it’s a little suspicious to stop now.”
“But he’s been pretty high-strung lately… can’t even imagine how stressful this is for him bro. He can’t just opt outta the game and take a rest whenever he wants, he’s stuck in here.”
“Hey,” Gordon said, staring directly at the two of them. “What are you talking about?”
“We’re talking about how I wanna go home.” Bubby responded automatically, marching from the room. Jaden followed, unable to look Gordon in the eye. The next chance they got, Jaden told themself, they’d take a break. For Gordon. Maybe they could even start to repair their own relationship with Gordon. Lord knows the guy didn’t trust them.
But then the next chance happened to be in a server room- the wikipedia server room, Jaden joked. Everyone else joined in, and Gordon, annoyed, wandered into the side room with the NPC and learned the plot point ‘there’s tracking in the HEV suit’. His stress skyrocketed with that information, and in his mind staying still meant that soldiers could descend upon them at any moment, despite the others assuring him they’d ‘wiped out the entire US military’. Jaden had no idea if there were more soldiers encounters in the game- there were assassins in the next room, but they had no idea if the assassins were their own thing or what.
Then they attacked some moths. And Gordon screamed and collapsed to the floor.
They’d been going too long. Playing VR- especially VR acting, was exhausting. Jaden couldn’t only imagine what things were like for Gordon. Jaden approached the collapsed NPC carefully, glancing around. No one else seemed to know what to do either, but Jaden was the only one acting right now. And Gordon didn’t like him. Of course.
“Hey uh-” Jaden bit his tongue, racking his brain for what he could say. “So those moths are too much for us to handle, huh?” he asked. Then immediately hoped he hadn’t said the wrong thing.
Gordon rolled his head on the ground, looking up at Ja- at Benrey, then higher towards where the moths were fluttering around an old lamp. Slowly, he drew in a deep breath, before letting it out slowly in a whistle. “Yeah.” he finally responded. “Yeah, I guess they are. How much longer til’ the Lambda Lab?”
“Gordon, good news!” Coomer called over, from up atop the walkways. Behind him, Bubby was turning a huge valve. “We’ve found the surface access! That should cut down on travel time to the Lambda Lab greatly!”
“Surface access?” Gordon asked, standing to his feet.
“Surface access?” Jaden asked, unsure where this feeling of not-right was coming from. Did you really just stumble across the surface halfway through the game- Jaden used to watch speedruns of the game, and that usually involved people clipping straight through the maps into Xen. (That, and traveling down hallways at mach 5 with a crowbar). He didn’t really know what happened in the whole middle-part of the game.
“Let’s go!” Tommy yelled, darting past them and up the stairs. Gordon cursed under his breath and followed, with Jaden following behind a moment later. He did a quick lap around Gordon, which wasn’t helping the ‘become actual friends with Gordon’ goal at all, and then ran up the stairs. He still beat the slow moving NPC by a mile. There was no way Gordon was supposed to be this slow in the games.
Considering they just had a fight, they should have a break before anything else came at them. Jaden kept an eye on lookout anyhow, unable to shake that gut feeling of theirs. They felt like he was gonna be sick, in real life. Then, further back in the tunnel, they heard Gordon mentioning that he could use a med kit right now, and jogged back up to the rest of the group.
There was a room, right before the stairs leading out, with a single medkit in it. Seemed like a weird place to put one. Jaden skipped passed the group as Gordon was asking around, making sure nobody else needed to heal up, and tried the door at the top of the stairs. It didn’t open. He glanced over his shoulder, (Gordon was heading through the door, and Coomer had his hand up in the way Mariko always did when she was thinking ‘bout something) than clipped through the door to see-
There was nothing out here.
Jaden burst back into the room right as Coomer shouted “GORDON NO!” and crashed into the invisible wall the game threw up between the group and Gordon. The next moment, and the lights went out.
