The Incident at Wormhole 27
By Aditi Raine
It all started with a Caravel-subtype ship, on its way to who-knows-where, in the far reaches of the Celestial ‘Cade. One ship, barely large enough to fit two players and a hot tub, was at the center of an incident that brought Celestial to its knees.
You might think you know this story, because ARC knows there have been enough screaming headlines about it doing the rounds this week. However, most of those headlines have been focused on the what and completely ignored the how.
How did this happen? Celestial is an original section of the ARcade. It provides the base-cade for dozens of smaller regions. Celestial hasn’t dropped more than a single player at a time for decades, and most of those instances were user error or obscure bugs that were quickly patched.
During the incident at Wormhole 27, which quickly- and somewhat obnoxiously- became known as Dropgate, over 3.7 million players lost their connection to the ARcade at once. Section 231 AND Section 158 failed and six whole seconds of real-time data were lost entirely.
Petabytes of Artificial Reality, wiped from existence.
Focusing on the loss of levels is easy to do when the numbers glare at you so vividly from so many outraged sources. We’ve been bombarded by estimates all week. While none of the dropped players seem to have had their levels reduced, any that were killed before that suffered the penalty. Some reports have estimated a ridiculous 1.5million, but even the most conservative report that over 500,000 players lost at least one level in the battle.
Even more shocking was the mass Item loss. Tens of thousands of ARcade Items were destroyed in the chaos, forcing a shift of the ARcade economy at a scale that hasn’t been seen in a decade or more.
And all because of a single ship barely the size of a Minor Dragon.
For those of you who don’t spend every waking moment grinding in Celestial (I assume there must be absolutely dozens of you out there) a Caravel ship is the kind of Item your rich cousin might own.
Although it’s more likely that he owns six of them, all skinned with flames and tiger fur, and trots them out together with bots at the helms to make it look like he’s hot shit.
Tiny and sleek, and usually filled to the brim with valuable Items, Caravels rarely venture far from the big Celestial cities. They do supposedly have top-of-the-line weapons, but when it comes down to it, there’s only so much plasma you can fire from a peashooter.
“Most players have more sense than to take a caravel to the edge of the ‘Cade,” Starblick567, a witness to the incident, told us. “That player was probably a noob, or maybe some rich dickhead who just didn’t give a shit if they were ambushed.”
The owner of the Caravel hasn’t come forward and no records of them seem to exist in the public archive. We may never know what the captain of this particular Ship was up to. Given what happened during the incident, it isn’t surprising that they seem to have rubbed their identity and disappeared.
An ambush might sound like a big deal to players who stick to the Weapon-locked regions of ARcade, but it is a standard grinding tactic in the Celestial ‘Cade. The players who attacked the tiny ship were identified immediately, mostly because they had no reason to hide. Both ambushing ships had reputations as low-level pirates and trolls.
Nothing to be ashamed of in Celestial. In theory, the attackers did nothing illegal.
In practice- well, see what you think.
Unsurprisingly, only one of the attacker Ships survived this encounter- the Clandestine- and quickly changed hands after the incident, when collectors en masse scrambled to pick up any little piece of history that had survived the incident and could be verified (and quite a few bits of junk that couldn't be).
By the time her new owner entered her, the Clandestine’s logs had been wiped clean, and her insides gutted.
Her crew, and the crew of her partner, the Carpe Clunes, have repeatedly refused interviews. Many of them have now rubbed their accounts and disappeared.
The only player willing to be quoted was a gunner from the Carpe Clunes, but they wished to remain anonymous.
“That was some stupid shit,” they muttered over a staticky line during our last conversation. “Should’ve known a scam when they saw it. Some offers are just too good to be true.”
So what happened? For those of you who have been living under a digital rock for the last week, here’s what we know so far. At around 12:04 Cade Time (CT) on the 11th of March, 2089, two Xebec-subtype Ships, the Clandestine and the Carpe Clunes, attacked a Caravel. The Caravel was emerging from an established but lightly-used wormhole.
By some previously unknown trick of ‘cade physics, which so far has not been replicated, one of the Xebecs managed to fire through the wormhole.
The missile clipped a Frigate-subtype Ship -The Camel- which had been waiting to come through.
This particular Frigate was possessed and helmed by a large and gossipy guild, who quickly spread the word through local channels that they had been attacked, and the unusual nature of the engagement.
Within seconds, that word spread and curious players from all over Celestial, and even from other ‘cades, started popping in through newly-made personal wormholes, or crowding into the established one right near the action.
The sudden influx of Ships should have made the pirates pause- if not flee- but, for some reason known only to them, they continued their attack of the small caravel.
Picture this. A friend of yours posted that pirates were attacking a Ship, and that they managed to fire a shot through a wormhole. Maybe you want to see the bug in action, or maybe you’re hoping to say you were there when a new Egg was identified. Maybe you just know everyone else is going to rush over there, and you want to be part of the group.
Whatever the reason, you immediately dash to that section of the ‘Cade.
When you arrive you see two huge and vicious Xebecs, firing upon one meek, tiny Caravel.
When you’re telling this story to your own friends, you want to be the hero, right?
And so, a large proportion of the newly-arrived players rapidly leaped to defend the beleaguered vessel. They fired on the pirates and, unfortunately and inevitably, at each other.
A separate proportion of the new arrivals, ones I will assume my readers can not relate to, started firing for another reason. This group, who might be kindly labeled bumblebees, and less kindly, raging idiots, started shooting at the local wormhole, trying to replicate the bug in spite of the fact that multiple Ships were using it at the time.
What no one realized at first was that the Xebec pirates had established an enormous communications damper, perhaps because they feared the Caravel would call for help. The crews have not admitted which Item they used, but it was powerful enough that it was likely Forged, or even Super-Forged. The effect appeared to reach across multiple regions, leaving tens of thousands of ships unable to communicate directly. Unable even to reach outside the effect to warn others.
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All of this, to ambush a tiny Caravel.
It was something like using a level 100 Item to chop down the Tutorial Tree.
In fairness, the Xebec crews couldn’t have predicted the sudden appearance of thousands of curious players in that sector. Players who, after the first few moments of growing chaos, had no way to tell what was happening, or who was the attacker and who was the prey. So they continued to pour through the wormhole as the lack of communication made the whole thing even more mysterious and more worthy of note and curiosity.
Sixes&Pears47, co-owner of a Drekar-subtype Ship, which survived the incident, explained: “We heard someone managed to shoot through a wormhole, which seemed weird enough for us to go have a look. You always want to be on top of this stuff. The fact that no one had debunked it or explained it after a few minutes only made it more interesting. You’ve always got to wonder if something like that is a new Egg. Of course, we didn’t know there was no explanation coming out because no one could send a bloody message.”
Celestial wormholes are supposed to be Weapon-locked. Firing in one, let alone through one had always been thought to be impossible. So it’s unsurprising that rumors regarding this supposed shot at The Camel drew a curious crowd. As everyone who remembers the Lampwick Hack of Arcadia knows, any hint of an Egg or a bug in one of the six original ‘Cades automatically attracts those who hope to witness it, or exploit it.
As even more ships arrived, and more shots were fired on them, it became obvious that the logical action for most ships in the area was to flee.
Unfortunately, at around 12.27(CT) a notorious troll ship, the Corvette-subtype Bad Coont, unleashed a Galactic-subtype Item known as a Red Light, which caused all the Ships in its aura-including the Bad Coont itself- to temporarily lose the ability to accelerate.
Fortunately, the ships still emerging from wormholes kept their momentum, reducing the pileup at the original wormhole entrance.
Unfortunately, most of them automatically slowed just as they emerged, not knowing they had no way to regain speed. So even though they moved away from the original wormhole (or from their own personal wormhole entrance) they moved too slowly to get out of the Red Light’s aura completely.
So no ships caught by the Red Light affect could move purposefully out of the escalating battle. All of them, however, were still able to fire their weapons and deploy their own Items, and it seemed that many of them chose to do so.
Hundreds of thousands of ships were caught this way, drifting together in a tiny region of Celestial space, with no way to communicate. It quickly became the most massive battle to ever take place in that Cade. Sleek Drekar-subtype Ships fired chain-torpedoes at bloated Quinqueremes who unleashed bright phasers on silver Schooners, while tiny Sloops raised their energy shields and bounced from Ship to Ship, surfing the shock waves.
The total number of combatant players per Ship is unknown, so it is impossible to tell whether it equaled, or even surpassed, the record-holding Battle of Bailey (circa 2080), which was staged in Arcadia.
However, this battle did surpass the Battle of Bailey in one very important way.
“It was stunning. Absolutely horrific,” CarstonFuckingCarston34567 told me. “Ships were blowing up left, right, and 360, and there was nothing you could do. No way to get your ship to dock, you had to just stick it out and hope you’d get lucky, or jet and lose your ship. I’ve been in battles before but people don’t bring their best ships to battles. They don’t stick around and lose the Items they worked for years to get. My little brother is only 14. He’d only just managed to get his own Ship. Well, it’s gone now and he lost a level on top of it. It was bloody ridiculous and it never would have happened back in the ARC days.”
As more and more Ships arrived, the fighting became desperate. This was no staged combat. Massive vessels were being destroyed, some worth millions of units, others uniquely customized and irreplaceable.
Each Ship that was destroyed left debris, making the field of battle even more deadly for the remaining Ships. Players were abandoning their Ships rather than lose levels as well at their inevitable destruction. Some players viciously set their weapons to auto-fire even as they jetted.
Livelihoods were lost.
And, unnoticed by most of the players, the ARcade servers were being overloaded.
We take the ‘Cade for granted as stable and enduring, a place which follows its own well-established rules of Artificial Reality. However, as disarmingly solid and eternal as it seems, it still depends on algorithms and the flow of data from mega-server to mega-server. Too much data in one spot and… Poof! The server goes down. And the backup server suddenly has to take all that data and keep it flowing.
But, what if the backup goes down?
Three other backup servers hastily, flawlessly step in to scoop up the flow, as more and more ships surged into the area, knowing only that something interesting was happening. More ships, more players, more Items, more firing weapons, and all of it rendered in perfectly knitted Artificial Reality, the sights, the sounds, the smells, and all.
A massive amount of data. Possibly the most moving parts the ARcade had ever had to manage in one spot.
Yet, this still could have been kept going by the three backups, working together, without so much as a blip, if it hadn’t been for the Sandbox.
It was opened at 12.39CT.
Anyone can open a Sandbox, of course, although most people never bother. In a Sandbox, players can experiment with developing their own ‘Cade Items or Skins.
Anyone can open a Sandbox from the ARcade Lobby, that is, by passing through the final archway.
Very few players have the ability open a Sandbox smack-bang in the middle of a ‘cade, given the massively unpredictable consequences it can have on the surrounding software. Of those few, none would have dared to open a Sandbox in the middle of a battle, let alone the most massive and deadly battle ever seen by Celestial.
Troll? Opportunist? A wild experiment gone wrong? Needless to say, we still don’t know who opened the Sandbox or what they hoped to achieve. As of this article being published, the majority of players with permission to open Sandboxes outside of the Lobby have been contacted and offered proof they were not the culprit. The mystery remains.
However, we do have some hints.
The Sandbox seems to have originated very close to the last known whereabouts of the infamous Caravel. A Caravel which was apparently worth a lot of bother to the Xebec pirates in the first place.
Whether or not it is fair to put the blame on the owner of that ship, many throughout the Cade have done exactly that, which is why if that owner has any scrap of intelligence at all, they have rubbed their identity to the grain and disappeared permanently.
The Sandbox was responsible for the beleaguered servers collapsing completely.
“It was like I went deaf,” GandalfSimp5EVA remembers. “I thought my gear had failed. It was all hot and blaring and bright with lasers and explosions and my shields were getting low. I was thinking it was maybe time to jet, and then suddenly… nada. Like, not that bell noise that you get when you die. I know what that sounds like, believe me. It was just… nothing.”
From the intense noise, heat, and panic of space war, suddenly silence. Millions of players were booted back to the Lobby as several sections of the ‘cade failed.
Nothing like it had happened for decades. Not since ARcade was expanded onto the solar mega-servers in anticipation of the Quentith joining as players.
After much scrutiny, it appears no lives were lost and no real injuries were taken when the Incident occurred. Thankfully there have also been no reports of any Quentith ships among the debris, so it is unlikely to cause an interstellar incident.
There had been some speculation that entity players could be lost or corrupted if they were dropped, or that fiber players might suffer some physical or mental trauma, but no consequences of that kind appear to have happened either, thank ARC.
Eight minutes after the mass drop, the servers had been rebooted and thoroughly rechecked and ships were made available to their players once more, carefully parked at nominated home docking stations. Any that had been destroyed before the Sandbox was opened, however, stayed lost, much to their players’ vocal dismay.
“It’s not fucking fair,” SlinkFTS456, captain of a lost Sloop, complained. “It’s always the poor players who get shafted. If I had the units to buy another ship I wouldn’t have been looking for a bug in the first place. I needed that ship… do you know how hard it is to make units now? I’ve got a kid to feed. That ship was the only way I had to make money and no one gives a fuck.”
Celestial Admin has refused to make a statement about the incident, aside from firmly pointing to the rules that no compensation will be made to players who lost their Items for any reason, aside from a genuine bug, or server failure.
The local wormhole was permanently closed and a temporary No-Go field preventing personal wormholes was placed over the debris field, stopping players from flooding in too quickly to gawk or salvage. Anyone who wants to see the site will need to spend at least two hours in their ship, flying to the right co-ordinates, and by this time the debris has been thoroughly picked over.
So this is how it stands. We still don’t fully understand what happened, and it’s possible we never will.
Who was piloting the Caravel? Why did the Xebecs spend so many resources attacking it? How did they manage to fire through the wormhole? Who opened the Sandbox, and why?
Within 45 minutes of its start, the incident was over, leaving only questions and a cloud of space dust behind.