It all started with a simple time waster phone game. It started out as a weird tower defense. Basically you fed loops of what the game called aether into approaching blobs to make them swell up and burst. The leftovers from the blobs then latched onto the loops and fed back into the core. These power-ups were named mana and let you make the loops wider and longer to better take out all the blobs.
The cool part was that you could limit the width of any individual loop and it wouldn’t kill the blobs, but the returning loop still carried mana. This added a little twist to the game, the optimal strategy was to run a small loop through as many blobs as possible until the core was in danger before spiking the loop and popping them all. This could feed you up to ten times as much mana as just popping the blobs as soon as they came into range.
The problem here was that some of the blobs wouldn’t pop when you used the slow strat. This lost me a few early games. The solution was actually kind of neat, you could spin a loop of aether into a copy of one of the blobs. This would limit the total aether you had available but gave you a defender.
You could also spin aether into walls and items. The walls were useful but the items... Well, food would act like bait but anything else like gemstones or chunks of metal were ignored. The final trick was that you could tie the aether loop off and make the walls, items, and defenders permanent. This was good for the walls and bait because they would become stronger, but very bad when used on defenders because they would leave your control. At that point the defenders became just another blob, it might still attack other blobs, but it might also attack the core.
This is how things went for months. I’d play on the bus on the way to work, I’d play a bit at lunch, I’d play a game or two while watching TV at night in my little studio apartment. I played so much that I started dreaming that I was playing.
The dreams were odd. None of the prompts or dialog boxes popped up, and I could only spin up things I had a pattern for, i.e. things I had fed aether into and absorbed. Even then I had to keep a small loop of aether spun into the right shape but not pushed out of the core yet.
The first dreams were vague and indistinct. The sort of thing you’d expect from playing the same game for months. Things started to change, the dreams were more vivid and easier to remember. Even stranger the new game mechanics started showing up in the phone game. Popups and dialog boxes became rare and eventually just stopped, the pre-made items and walls were the next items gone. I had to actually use aether to eat away at stone and the leftovers of the blobs to spin up in the core. The blobs were also different. They became insects and small animals. The game stopped being a simple 2d image on the phone and started being fully 3d. All of this should have been worrying, but for some reason I didn’t really register that things were changing. To me, it was still just the little time waster game that I had always played.
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I’ll admit that work was starting to... blur a bit. I think it was a Tuesday when Tim Miller called me into the office.
Tim barely let the door close before starting, “Mark, we need to talk about whatever the hell is going on.”
“What do you mean?”
“I just watched you on the lathe working the SE job, you cut the part 15 thou under spec and used the wrong stock, You haven’t fucked up like that since we were in high school.”
“I’m sure I cut that one right, but I mean linkages are a bit complex cut...”
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
“Mark, we finished the linkages last week, you were cutting for the ram.”
“I was? I don’t remember...”
I was a bit confused here. I could swear I was holding the spec sheet for the linkages but when I looked down at my clipboard I saw that a rat with a snake-like tail had just entered the range of my labyrinth. This would be the hardest battle I had yet faced. I distantly heard something about an ambulance, but that wasn’t important. The rat was entering my first tunnel.
Over the last few weeks I’d found that aether loops had become less and less effective as weapons. They might pop one of the weird little green ants that I kept getting but were almost useless on one of the big red beetles that occasionally came by unless it was right next to my core, and that’s not something I wanted a repeat of. I almost lost the game last week thinking I could still rely on popping intruders.
I’d seen this same rat yesterday at the edge of my range, but the entrance was a bit too small for it. I guess it had been gnawing on the stone of my entrance. I had made a template for a reinforced stone, but it was pretty expensive and I’d only managed to convert the center third of my labyrinth. It was a neat little exploit I’d found.
The trick was to create a block of one substance and then carve channels that you fill with something stronger. I cheated by using synthetic ruby laced with a titanium-tungsten alloy weave. I’d gotten samples of both from work...
The rat. Right. I needed to stay focused on the important thing here.
At this point my labyrinth was fairly simple, a single path that spiraled around in a few layers leading to a central room where my core. There were several rooms along the way filled with various defenders. These were a recent addition and I wasn’t really happy with them. To widen out the hallways into rooms I had to weaken the walls quite a bit. I hadn’t thought it was an issue, it just looked sloppy.
I had placed out a trail of bait, small pieces of a sugar-like substance that I pulled out of one of the ants.
Now, I say that this would be a fight, but the truth was that the goal was to delay. I was pulling more mana off of the rat than anything else that had ever entered my range, and it didn’t even look uncomfortable with all the aether loops I had flowing through it. I added a few more and watched my mana intake quadruple. It really didn’t like that. Not one bit.
The rat was panicking a bit. I actually felt a bit bad about it, simulated as it was there was no need to be mean. Really, who would simulate that level of pain?
I started pulling back aether loops until the rat calmed down again. I settled in for a long milking session when I noticed that the rat was eating my bait much faster than I had planned for. It made sense, the bait was set up for ants and beetles. I would just make more bait, but that was not a fast process. It took just a few minutes to spin up a new item template but anywhere between a few minutes to a few hours to fill in with aether and materialize.
It looked like a fight was going to happen after all. I readied my defenders. I kind of liked that my early defenders had an upgrade path, if you could call it that, They were really just bigger versions of the original blobs. At this point I’m calling them slimes because that’s what they were. A gigantic (beetle-sized) single cell organism. They fight about the way you would expect, they wander around aimlessly unless directed and try to engulf and dissolve anything they encounter, including walls.
The rat met the first of my defenders in the tunnel about halfway between my entrance and the first room. The rat paused and stared cautiously at the slime. The slime moved randomly as was its wont. The rat was too big to move past the slime and the slime too brainless to acknowledge the rat. The two stood at an impasse, which suited me just fine. Delay is the name of the game after all.
After a short pause during which I gathered more mana than my first month on this save file the rat moved forward a step and slowly lifted its paw to touch the slime.
That was the start signal, the fight was on.
And just as quickly the fight was over. The slime tried to engulf the rat’s paw the rat tried to pull its paw back out of the slime, both failed. The rat then just bit the slime and ripped it open. That was it. The fight was over.
The remains of the slime slowly dissolved into ectoplasmic goo before evaporating into nothingness. The only thing left was a small crystallized core of twisted aether and mana. I had accidentally discovered these sometime last week. Using these cores let me cut down the respawn time down from a couple of hours to a couple of minutes.
I sighed and triggered the respawn process. That’s when everything went sideways. The rat ate the core.