7/5/20xx
Somewhere in the USA
On Friday evening - the end of a long, long week and a much longer month - my utter exhaustion finally gave way to utter euphoria at the idea of gaming online for the first time in forever. By Saturday evening, I was in handcuffs.
Now it’s Sunday morning, and while some people prepare for church and others gear up to raid a dungeon online, I’m locked away in an actual one. Well, the local jail, I suppose, but forgive me my melodrama. It’s been a scary, sleepless night, and I still don’t fully understand just how things got to this point.
Things started going wrong when I was trying to log into Eternal Fantasy Online for the first time in months, that Friday after work. My favorite MMORPG and a steady comfort for several years now, I’d had to temporarily set it aside when our latest project at work started coming apart at the seams. My boss’s pleading that we give it our all “for just two weeks, done before you know it” to get the project timeline back on track had ultimately stretched out over four, grueling months.
But we delivered as scheduled, just earlier that day. And after all the back-patting and celebrating and outright moans of relief, I was ready to revel in the surprised greetings of my Eternal Fantasy friends and guild-mates. But when I entered my username and password, I found only shock and outrage:
No saved characters found. Create a new character?
After a few stunned minutes performing a spot-on “deer in the headlights” impersonation, panic took over. Had Eternal Fantasy purged my character for being inactive? Had my account been hacked? Four months away from the game unsurprisingly meant the startup screen had automatically installed multiple patches before allowing me to log in - maybe one of the updates went awry?
Clicking my way through webpage after webpage, bouncing between the Eternal Fantasy support site and various user forums, let the panic coalesce into a perfect knot of cold terror in the pit of my stomach. The Eternal Fantasy character retention policy remained unchanged at two years of inactivity before purging, no major warnings about patch problems were being displayed, and wading through endless minutia of patch technical notes had the exhaustion I had so gleefully discarded earlier returning in spades. I also found particularly chilling an FAQ post reminding users that we were responsible for securing our own accounts, such that any losses due to a compromised account would remain lost.
Finally, I bit the bullet, emailing customer support for help and then rising to make dinner. I wouldn’t be playing Eternal Fantasy Online tonight. And if this last ditch plea for help fell through, maybe never again. I had walked the continents of Thersia in all their digital glory for so long now that I couldn’t actually recall what year I had first started playing. Have I been playing for five years? At least five years. And yet, while I couldn’t remember exactly when I started, crystal clear was the memory of pouring endlessly over character options, mixing and matching over every little detail, agonizing over stats and appearance with equal fervor… until, finally, the anticipation of actually playing become too much. A flurry of mouse clicks spamming the “Confirm” button, waiting for things to load, and finally opening my eyes to look upon a new world. Yeah, that was a memory, a magic, that would never fade no matter how much time might pass.
For five years or more, nearly all my free time had revolved around transforming myself into Secia Aetherborn, party healer and guild crafter. As Secia I’d made friends, laughed at the misfortune of rivals, and groaned when luck turned against me. As older friends dropped offline with a final fond farewell or a seemingly permanent AFK, new faces appeared, sparkling with that same first magic I had reveled in, and I eagerly welcomed them into the fold. Just exactly who Secia was, who I was, I reinvented and lost and found and reinvented again, until I would have happily answered to Secia at work, had anyone ever called out the name in the break room (so thank goodness there was no rational reason for anyone to ever do so). Yes it was all make-believe, but it was grownup make-believe, a shared dream, goal, and passion all in one.
And if I’m really being honest, it went even further than that. In the soul-crushing wake of yet another late night or looming deadline, those moments of mechanically chewing my lunch or waiting at a stoplight longing to finally have the time and the energy to log in once more had transmuted into time spent scripting fictional conversations between Secia and the friends I so hoped to see again. And however logically or irrationally, it eventually became conversations between me and Secia herself.
Laugh at me if you will. It’s not like I didn’t understand that I was actually just talking to myself. But I was tired and needed a friend, and Secia made for a good one. After all, I knew her name, her face, how she talked and what she’d say inside and out, without question. That she was imaginary didn’t matter - not having to face again alone the bleak despair of the alarm clock trumpeting loudly another new work day - that’s what mattered. Especially when flesh and blood friends and family had made it clear that they had no more patience for my griping about unrealistic timelines and an employer’s labor market.
This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.
Secia was me and more than just me. The idea of saying an unexpected farewell, of losing her, of starting over from scratch, left me feeling physically ill. And it was in that oh-so-cheery frame of mind I was forcing down the flavorless I’d-already-forgotten-what-I-made when my inbox chimed. I knew it was probably far too soon to have received a reply from any customer support rep. It was probably just an automated acknowledgement that I had submitted a request for help. Or a lifetime ban from the game. Or spam. Because there’s always more spam.
And so I opened it to read:
> To: *******@*****.com
>
> From: J.Perez @ EFO-support.com
>
> Subject: Character not found after logging in - Please help! [Ticket 008137421]
>
> Ms. Remmy,
>
> I totally understand your panic on this. I’m an avid EFO player on our test server, whether we’re actively testing something or not. Any time whatever patch we are alpha testing causes my character to glitch, I vibrate between biting my nails and flipping out. So I totally get you on this, and I have some good news:
>
> We pulled the access logs for your account, and they confirmed that no one has logged in under your name since 2/21/xx, just over four months ago, so if that was when you last played EFO, then it sounds like no one has been fooling around in your account. That seems to align with what you wrote in your support ticket. So I don’t believe you need to worry about this possibility any more than you have, although if you are aware of any suspicious account activity we’ll assist you in investigating further.
>
> Even better, we have no record at all of any support request to delete Secia Aetherborn from the system. Not from you, not from any GM, not from the EFO admins. So while I don’t have any information yet on what did go wrong, at this point I am very confident that this is a technical issue. Which in turn means you can absolutely count on us to get you up and running again.
>
> With the tech issue not resolved yet, I know it’s hard to put your full faith in us getting this fixed to your satisfaction. But please rest assured that Secia is not gone forever. We have a very robust data backup policy, with daily backups archived and maintained stretching back at least a year, and a comprehensive log of every in-game action. So even though your character is currently missing from the sever itself, we have her data on hand. It’s truly just a matter of identifying what went wrong, locating the missing files in storage, and loading it back onto the live server.
>
> In the meantime, I’ve escalated this to one of the best software engineers we have on our technical team, and you can expect to hear from me again soon once he’s finished looking into this for us. And when he does have you in good order again, I’ve credited your account with two months of free game time as an apology for the inconvenience. You’ll also receive a platinum voucher that can be redeemed in-game at Fredrich’s Premium Item Shop in Rumeria, located in the teleport plaza. So treat Secia to something nice on me!
>
> I know we’ll be seeing you in Eternal Fantasy Online again, and thank you for your patience while we sort this out.
>
> Sincerely,
>
> J. Perez-Mitchells
>
> Supervising Customer Support Manager for NA Service Area II
>
> Eternal Fantasy Online Entertainment Limited
>
> A wholly-owned subsidiary of EFO Global Software Worldwide
Oh… oh thank goodness. This isn’t all on me. This is fixable. I, wow, yes, yes, thank you, thank you!
I returned to my dinner in a much better mood. I finally realized that I had used way too much salt, even if I still couldn’t exactly identify what the dish was supposed to be. And I didn’t care! Food consumed, dishes stacked in the sink, exhaustion crashed over me like a wave and would be denied no longer. And yet, as I padded off to bed, I had to admit that it was a weird, smiley sort of exhaustion. Did that make sense? No, not at all, and it didn’t dampen my big dopey grin in the least.
I drifted off to sleep, excited for the day to come. Of course, that was because I didn’t know that Saturday was going to end in handcuffs. And the “why” of that still mystifies me completely.
It’s been very difficult getting any sort of straight answer out off anyone. Saturday, yesterday, was a blur of police and lawyers and questions, questions, questions. Some asked loud and some asked softly, pointed questions, roundabout questions, and just about none that I could actual answer.
But as best as I can work out… EFO Worldwide is accusing me of hacking their computers? All their computers? I think someone even mentioned a development environment isolated from all external connections? Because Secia’s data was missing from every single one of them. Apparently, attempting to query one backup in particular had caused one of their active game servers to crash outright, temporarily disrupting EFO for other players midgame, despite that server having nothing to do with that archival system. I even overheard one of EFO’s lawyers claim that I had perpetrated the most sophisticated cyberattack in history.
Which is as frightening as it is nonsensical. But what really worries me is that it sounds very, very likely that I’ll never get to log on as Secia again.
Secia, I miss you. What happened to you? Just where did you go?