Thankfully, David’s forum account was still logged in on his PC. I scrolled through his recent post history. Most of his posts were in threads similar to the one about MOBA skins, talking about trading “red fox ears shackles” and “small sized monster pet capes” and other oddly-named items in exchange for “swords” used by a character named Limbo. Either my browser’s translator function wasn’t quite up to the task, or there was something going on more than trading in-game items for some MOBA I’d never heard of.David’s posts seemed worded oddly differently than most of the rest of the people chiming in on the threads, and I wondered if he was just translating from English to Russian. Or maybe he actually spoke Russian, and that was just another thing I’d never known about my ever-stranger cousin.

Besides the trading threads, I found what I was looking for in a few threads asking about Bug Hunt’s features and mechanics. David never liked to read beginner’s guides or anything like that, so I figured Bug Hunt must be particularly obtuse.

Nothing seemed odd about the posts, though. I’d been expecting… To tell the truth, I don’t really know. Deranged ranting, maybe? Some kind of Jekyll/Hyde dimorphic personality that would come some small way to explaining what all this business was about?

Then I noticed the private message icon in the upper right corner of the screen. The site was so poorly designed the icon was barely visible against the forum’s background, but overlaid on a stylized envelope was the numeral “1.” A new message since my cousin last logged on.

I reached out and tapped on the hologram hovering over my monitor’s surface, calling the PM inbox to load. The newest message sprang onto the screen. Three Roman alphabet letters.

RIP

The fuck? I stared at the message for a moment. Maybe Sadie was right about the virus. This had to be connected. Could a virus tap into a truVR headset’s stimulus function and… kill the user? Why would someone want to even do that?

My hand was reaching for my phone to call the police when I realized how bad this looked for David. The weird behavior, the sketchy posts on a foreign message board, the technology breaking its basic rules of functionality. In another situation it might have sounded like a bad cyberpunk gang story. Hell, maybe that’s what it was. Either way, my cousin was at the heart of it. Even if he had never told me about this corner of his life, David was like a brother to me. I owed it to him to sort things out before involving the cops.

Out of force of habit I clicked “inbox” to back out of the ominous message.

Two more, older messages sat in David’s Triage Gaming Forum inbox, the oldest a bit older than two months. They were both titled in English. I clicked on the oldest message.

>Just Desserts >>Hi deathclaw thx again for ur service >>A deals a deal here u go >>9120350078154024e00f >>Were on 1800PETT usually >>Obviously some on more lol but u cant make that yet >>Keep the faith brother only a couple more years right? >>CY(k)A (blyat) >>>haha (a joke)

I read the message a few times through. DeathClaw2015 was the username David used for everything. That was the easy part.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

“thx again for ur service”

David was doing something for this guy… I checked the sender. RedExPatriot. That made sense, sort of. The guy had been writing (a bastardized form of) English, the kind laced with shortcuts born of actually knowing the goddamn language.

A quick Google search told me PETT referenced the Kamchatka Time of Russia’s east coast. Nineteen hours ahead of our own British Columbian Pacific Time. Six PM (if that’s what 1800 meant) PETT would mean Eleven at night for David. That was later than he and I gamed together, allowing for time to play with RedExPatriot and his posse before work in the morning.

Assuming David, like, didn’t sleep. I wouldn’t be surprised, concerning the way things were panning out.

I looked at the next line of the message again.

“A deals a deal here u go”

And then

“9120350078154024e00f”

There was that string of characters that was apparently a server address, though it didn’t look like any standard protocol I knew of. I dragged the address into Google, but nothing relevant came up. Maybe it was encrypted. In any event, David had received this address for in exchange for something, likely “ur service.” Whatever that was, I doubted it actually involved trading hundreds of MOBA skins for “Limbo swords.”

The next part of the message puzzled me.

“Obviously some on more lol but u cant make that yet”

And then

“Keep the faith bro only a couple more years right?”

I had no idea what this meant. A few more years? Was David planning to go to some gaming convention with these people? Was there an MLG team he was forming I didn’t know about? If RedExPatriot expected David would be part of a guild for any meaningful length of time, he would find himself disappointed soon.

I tabbed over to the other message in David’s inbox I hadn’t read. This one was shorter, but again from RedExPatriot.

>Kick It Up A Notch Spicy Style >>Hi deathclaw u did REAL GOOD in the raid >>I said be patient now it pays off brother have a gander at this >>real good shit >>Just drag and drop the new RTP it unpacks itself >>CYU in the rillist world!!

The underlined text hyperlinked to a P2P file sharing site. The file in reference was an 800 GB archive, nothing too out of the ordinary for a AAA game. I checked David’s Downloads folder, but it was clean, unlike my own. I swear everything I’ve downloaded over the past five years is still sitting right where it fell.

Well, the file sharing site had no description of the file, but I figured it was some kind of mod that made the ugly game look prettier. David always was a sucker for visual fidelity. Even if gameplay was most important to him, he’d spend hours configuring a new game to get it looking as beautiful as he possibly could.

I cared nowhere near that much. Games are all about responsiveness and a great core gameplay loop to me. As long as there’s good sensory feedback, a game could look like it came out in 2000 for all I care.

So I exited out of the browser and shut down David’s PC. I sat on my bed for a long while, digesting the things I’d just read. Russians, skins, encrypted servers, modded runtime packages. I was at too high a level to understand what was going on. A bird in the sky might as well try to scope out an individual ant crawling in a forest teeming with life.

It was getting late, but before retiring I made an account on the Triage Gaming Forum, introduced myself as Danger2Close, and began to download Sigurd Morisson’s Bug Hunt from Steam. I lay in bed for a long while, thinking of some creepy ex-pat sitting in a Russian basement a thousand miles away, before sleep finally claimed me.