Work Text:
It starts like this: you rent a storage locker so you have somewhere to put all the stuff you invariably manage to pile up by the end of every year, and you find a laptop tucked away in the corner. The whole thing – carrying case, charger with power brick zippered into the side pocket, et cetera. You almost consider doing your due diligence for a moment – trying to figure out whose this is and how to return it – before you remember your old laptop is still gasping and wheezing for breath on Windows 7 and you could really use a new portable computer.
So you don’t say anything. You put away your disassembled antique bedframe that you can’t use because your new apartment doesn’t have room for a king-sized bed, your shitty IKEA desk that has stickers on it you’re not ready to give up just yet, a bunch of large pots for ornamental plants you never got because you knew you’d forget to water them and watching them die would just piss you off. And it’s one thing to let people down, but your plants? Absolutely not. You’re sticking to succulents and air plants until you get your shit together, and that’s never happening. If it ever does, though, you’ve got planters in storage you can’t look at right now because they were really thoughtful gifts.
Anyway. You take the laptop.
It’s easy. You stuff it into your bag and walk right out. Nobody gives you a second thought. Maybe if you were a little scruffier, but you’ve cleaned yourself up just enough that you’re successfully pulling off “exhausted grad student” instead of looking homeless. Not that it’d be inaccurate – you’d been couch-surfing for almost a full semester before finally swallowing your pride and calling your parents about using some of your grandfather’s trust fund a little earlier than planned.
They came through for you, they always do, and you had a nice meal out to celebrate renting your first apartment, and you pretended everything was going fantastic besides the whole “not wanting to ask for help” thing. Just a little blip! Nothing to worry about!
They said they were proud of you and your heart dropped into your stomach with the worst dread you’ve ever felt in your life. Bought it hook, line, and sinker. Apparently you’re not rock bottom enough for people to stop having expectations of greatness for you. At this point you’d see more progress breaking out a power drill and/or a weird piston contraption to start getting through the bedrock.
You walk home. Take the stairs up to your floor, even though it’s like five stories up, just so you can really feel yourself winded and heaving for air by the time you get to your door. Extract the laptop, toss your backpack halfway across the room, shove some stuff off the kitchen counter to make enough room that you can set up the thing to charge, crash for the rest of the day. You forget about the laptop for the rest of the week – like, you remember to unplug it after about a day and a half, but you don’t turn it on just yet. Just in case the storage people find out it’s missing and you need to act like you were totally just looking for its owner the entire time.
Nobody comes by, which is frankly your life by design at this point, so you crack it open and immediately want to throttle whoever used this thing last because fucking of course it would be some random version of Linux, wouldn’t it? You spend the next two days you don’t have work paging through search results and Reddit threads and forum posts to try and figure out how to actually be able to use the damn thing.
In the end, it’s not actually all that searching that gets you in. It’s noticing the weird way the spacebar is stained and remembering that time back in middle school your friend showed you how to get into his dad’s desktop account so the two of you could play horror games together. Apparently the guy used to set it to a bunch of spaces because supposedly nobody in their right mind would guess that first.
And you know what? That thing was also running Linux. Needless to say, you and your friend managed to successfully scare yourselves shitless playing that one Slenderman game and never ended up telling your parents why one of you ended up having recurring nightmares for the rest of the month. Now, well, you guess seven spacebar presses, because you remember reading somewhere that if asked to pick a single-digit number, most people will gravitate towards 7. It logs you in first try. Smartass OS, dumbass password.
The guy’s desktop is even messier than your apartment already is. You catch some programming scripts somewhere, a couple note files. Nothing super important stands out except for one thing – the former owner (he? It was a guy’s name. He.) has Minecraft already installed.
Sure. What the hell. You’re going through his impersonal files anyway. Might as well see if he’s any good at building. Or at least that’s your initial plan, but then you get the itch seeing a little Discord ping pop up on your phone and you end up on PvP Legacy with a group of kinda-friends trying out stupid ass custom UHC kits for the rest of the night.
The night after, you have work and you come home exhausted. Next night you don’t work, you vaguely remember wanting to get into YTPing like three months ago and spend the rest of the evening fucking around with the guy’s copy of Sony Vegas that you’re like 80% sure he did not pay for. Pull an all-nighter the day after slamming out a research paper proposal that you were supposed to do last week (you end up getting a B+, which is frankly way higher than that mess of statistical word salad deserved). Figure out how to fix the old laptop owner’s baffling OBS settings so you can record some of your Skywars gameplay.
It’s only later you remember you were going to check out the guy’s singleplayer worlds.
He’s got one. It’s not named. You wander around, you find his old base, you turn on OBS just in case he’s actually got something super impressive down there. You find the book, you go “what the fuck?” (audibly, out loud, but thankfully you’ve got the system mic muted), you sit back and think for a few minutes on what kind of person would set up this shit on purpose and how you could get one step ahead of whatever prank he’s trying to pull.
You go through his documents. There’s one folder just marked New Folder 5 that seems like a great place to hide epic prank footage. Instead, the only thing in there is a document titled info.pdf that reads like the opening lines of a creepypasta. Awesome start. Except for the part where there’s nothing else in the goddamn folder.
Okay. Maybe the other files are behind-the-scenes stuff. If he saved them to an external drive, you can’t do shit. But they were in a folder on the computer, which means they’re on its internal drive, which means he probably just deleted them.
You check the computer’s trashcan for the first time. Good news: you’re almost certainly on the right track. Bad news: it’s because there’s nothing in there. Whatever was in there was probably permanently deleted right before the laptop itself was left for someone else to find. You slam the laptop lid shut, grab your skateboard and helmet, and head somewhere you don’t have to think about this dead end.
It doesn’t work. It’s in the back of your head the entire time.
You take a couple falls that could’ve been easily avoided if you’d actually been able to pay attention to what you were doing and decide you’re better off just heading back to your apartment for the rest of the evening. You take the stairs up again, despite having nearly sprained your ankle in that last fall, and the ache gives you something to focus on besides this stupid fucking prank world for the rest of the evening. “Notably, when I installed Minecraft this world came pre-created.” Yeah right. Guy’s probably got a bridge to sell you, too.
You fume for several hours, tossing and turning. You get up and open the laptop to doomscroll on a larger screen for a bit and see the empty trashcan instead and it pisses you off so badly that you remember something again.
This guy’s hard drive is nowhere near full. And you’ve made, what, three videos since then? It’s probably still nowhere near full.
You took an entry-level computer sciences class years ago. Most of it went straight over your head, in part because you spent like half of it playing some knockoff match-3 game on your phone while pretending to take notes, but you do remember bits of it here and there. Specifically, how system memory actually works. One of the short-answer questions about this is the one you fucked up just badly enough to actually remember how you’d phrased it – computers don’t really delete files permanently, they just mark those files as empty space that can be saved over.
The actual explanation was way more technical than you’d had the energy for. The basic principle is the same as far as you’re concerned. Unless you somehow manage to overload the laptop with a truly absurd amount of data, whatever “documentation” this guy ended up making is still hiding somewhere and doing its best imitation of a blank hard drive.
It is too fucking late to be doing this.
You get up, grab an energy drink from your almost-empty fridge, and start looking through computer help forums again. Turns out it’s easy as long as you’re willing to install some random program to do it for you. And also as long as you’re lucky enough that it hasn’t been overwritten yet.
You choose one at random and cross your fingers it’s not a virus somehow. Triple-check whatever you need to type into the terminal against other code things to make sure it’s doing what it says it’s doing and you’re not getting pranked by the second most upvoted (is it still called that if it’s not Reddit?) comment into somehow deleting a key part of the operating system. Type that line of code with both your fingers crossed.
You’ve definitely celebrated louder than this before. You’re still pretty sure you’re going to get dirty looks from your neighbors tomorrow morning, but fuck’em. They didn’t break this stupid Minecraft riddle thing wide open like you just did, they don’t get the satisfaction of seeing a file named exploration.veg as one of the recoverable items. You’re so back.
A little part of you wonders if this is actually ethical. Like, yeah, you don’t fancy yourself being part of a clickbait video called “HOW I FAKED AN ANALOGUE HORROR SERIES IN MINECRAFT!?” or something. But these are this guy’s personal files. Whatever’s in here is definitely not something he’s ever intended for people to see. It might have more personal info. It might be something gross or illegal or just deeply weird. It might even be something totally unrelated and you’re about to discover an AMV for an anime you’ve never heard of set to some Linkin Park knockoff you’ve also never heard of.
It is not (as much as the AMV would have been kind of cool). It’s uncommentated first-person footage of Minecraft gameplay, and it shows this guy walking down the stairs to the weird mine area where you found the book.
You stop there for the night. You set up a Google Drive folder and toss the info PDF into it. You figure tomorrow you’ll watch through the project file just to triple-check there’s nothing besides Minecraft in there, and then you’ll export the video and upload it to the same folder and share it with a couple friends for a laugh.
You sleep well, despite the energy drink.
The next night, trying to wind down from a long day at work, you watch the video all the way through.
A long time ago, you scared yourself shitless playing a horror game with a friend. He had nightmares for the rest of the month. You managed to shrug them off in a couple days. You played Minecraft together after that and managed to convince him that Herobrine was real but only in pirated versions of the game, so you were safe but anyone uploading a video of Herobrine for real was a hacker and getting pranked by Mojang’s anti-piracy code.
A long time ago, you got really tired of watching a playthrough of this one magic mod because it looked neat but turned out to just be a combine-the-elements game with weird lore and a chance of corrupting the world if they did things wrong, which they also needed to do for game progression, and at that point you kind of just checked out of the whole thing and decided to watch something else instead.
A long time ago, you played this tiny browser game where you tried to save people from a fire and had to go through it multiple times to get all the right codes from different timelines to save everyone, and it had this weird plot you were kind of annoyed by because then it turned out the entire thing was one big timeloop even though, again, the game wanted you to go to multiple different timelines.
A long time ago, you finally found something on Youtube to scare you pretty badly, a series that you thought was a Let’s Play but was actually about a made-up game and that rattled you to your core for some unidentifiable reason. You never really told anyone about it. You’re pretty sure there was time travel in that one, too.
A long time ago, either very recently or before any of the above, you got tired of people expecting things from you and tired of letting them down and realized that if you didn’t try, nobody would ever get their hopes up again. That if you did less than the bare minimum most of the time, barely kept your head above water, it’d look really impressive if you managed a halfway decent butterfly stroke. But, and this was crucial, they wouldn’t ask you to do it again.
You figured it out then. Either you could wear yourself out trying to figure out where to go in life, burn the wick at both ends getting perfect grades if you just tried a little harder, get carpal tunnel from taking notes all the time, and constantly let everyone down because they expected great things of you but you’d never have anything to show for it – or you could just stop trying. Coast through life until you finally reached something pointless you could do for the rest of your life. A rock bottom, but a comfortable one. A one-way street that looked and felt like shit, but was a lot better than crashing and burning when you inevitably took on more than you could.
You’re supposed to live on a dead end. That was the plan. You would stagnate and stay right here and, yeah, it’d suck, but it’d suck less than letting people down time and again anyway when you tried your best and got absolutely fucking nowhere for your trouble.
You consider slamming the laptop shut but your fingers twitch and, disconnected from yourself, you remember you’ll have to look at this again if you don’t do anything about it now. You edit it hastily, slap a black box over the thing and over the guy’s username while you’re at it, export the video and upload it to the folder and delete the original project file so you can never get back what’s under there. You might be hyperventilating, which is funny because at this point you should be halfway in shape from taking the stairs up and down all the time. You don’t end up slamming the laptop shut after all.
There is something like the wind at your back pushing you forward, and it’s not a gentle breeze, it’s this restless impulse to do something that scratches at you like not being able to figure out the video file did a long time ago. Two days ago. Whatever. You grab the keys to the motorcycle you commute with when it’s too far to get there by longboard and take the stairs down to the garage and stare at the bike for a few minutes. You don’t have your helmet or your jacket or anything else you should have on you. You should go get those.
You don’t.
And you know what? It almost fucking works. You almost manage to get yourself run over by a semi doing something stupid and then you yank the bike off to the right, hard, crash over the guardrail and into someone’s ornamental shrub and break multiple bones and spend a couple weeks in the hospital only to have your medical debt dropped and then none of that happens and you’re standing there in front of the bike still.
And you can feel, really feel, that it almost happened. Can taste blood in your mouth that isn’t from you biting the inside of your cheek by accident. You reach out for your bike again, mostly to prove it’s still there and intact, which it is, of course it is, you haven’t crashed it once yet despite that old saying that anyone who rides a motorcycle will get in at least one accident somehow.
You take the elevator back up to your apartment.
You almost manage to sleep.
The dead-end wasn’t supposed to go anywhere. That’s the point of a dead-end. It was supposed to be, at best, a stop at the end of a long, unbranching road. You can still see that. It’s so close you can almost smell the dirt and patchy grass where the gravel runs out.
It’s where you’re supposed to be, you want to shout into the empty air. You’ve earned it, fair and square, that was supposed to be it. That should have been the only way to go. But that argument doesn’t stop the urge to go that’s buried itself in your bones, and even squeezing your eyes shut as tight as possible doesn’t stop you from seeing everything else.
The road opens up ahead of you, and you can see all of it. Everything on the map and everything off of it, too. Every trade route, every tiny hiking trail, every international plane route and every last small-town cul-de-sac, each narrow alleyway and even all the gravel paths like yours. And you know, you’re supposed to be on the road now. You’ve got a better sense of direction than ever before. You know you can go anywhere from here on any route and it will work itself out at least halfway no matter how hard you try to yank the wheel and veer off the road or into traffic again. But, even though you know every single speed limit and where you’ll get caught for breaking it, everywhere you could cut offroad, every railroad crossing, everywhere the traffic’s going to get bad and when and how to avoid it, something is still missing.
You know every possible journey. You know every single destination.
You can’t stay. Your almost meticulously planned stagnation has been thoroughly interrupted. Even if you tried to go back to normal, you’d know what you’re supposed to do more often than not and it’d make messing anything up practically impossible. And besides, the feeling in your bones is only going to get worse and worse the longer you ignore it.
You should go.
You don’t know where.
It won’t fucking tell you where to go.
It’s the first time in a very long while that you’ve woken yourself up by shouting. You’d have been a teenager then. It was a nightmare then, a terrified scream. It may or may not have been a nightmare now, but the sound you make that’s loud enough to hurt your throat is undoubtedly rage.
You get up. You get dressed. It’s a Sunday and you don’t really have anywhere to be early on Monday. You need to leave here by tonight, or at least be doing something.
You choose spite, sit down, open the laptop, and pull up your own recording from the other night in the pirate copy video editor. You don’t have to think about what to change or how to change it. It’s just a single keyframe switched around and then it’s up along with the description you already had halfway typed out. You upload it and while you wait for it to finish you pace around the room like a nervous animal and try very hard to avoid deliberating what to do next. You eat breakfast at some point. You don’t remember what it was and you don’t really care.
The video goes up. You turn off the laptop, tuck it and the charger back into the bag, tuck that into your own backpack, grab your helmet and gloves and jacket this time even though you will literally never need them for safety purposes ever again. You shove some extra clothes in your bag just in case, which you’ll end up wearing but not before you come back to your apartment anyway. You don’t need to pack. You know you don’t need to pack. Sure, you don’t know where you’re going, but–
–There is one place you can think of, despite everything. You’d avoided figuring it out before, didn’t really plan on returning the thing so you didn’t really want any of that guy’s personal information. It would be perhaps the biggest asshole move you have ever pulled in your entire life. It is absolutely twisting the knife and it’ll hurt you to do it, too.
But you are supposed to be a fuckup, and this might be your last chance at ruining something, even if it’s small and pointless and petty and futile.
You hit the road. Your tires screech as you weave through traffic like a total asshole, running red lights and riding the yellow line whenever people are going too slow. You’d have liked to have looked it up the hard way first, but that part was already spoiled for you the second you made up your mind to go there. All this information at your fingertips and fuckall to actually do with it besides that burning feeling that you have to do something. And he’ll be there, you know he will. You need to look him in the eyes for yourself.
Nobody manages to catch your plate number or any identifying marks and you manage to stay just out of sight of every single traffic camera. You pop up onto the curb and cut through a pedestrian alleyway, which would normally be a dick move even for you, something you would normally call someone a lot of colorful language for. You don’t care right now because you are basically just throwing a temper tantrum and you know that’s all it amounts to.
You park the bike off to the side somewhere and take the keys with you even though nobody will really even glance at the thing until you’re back. You relish every single last bit of pointless bureaucracy and procedure you can get away with doing and you almost consider getting a parking permit and wasting even more time. You are practically shaking with what you really, really hope is rage.
You take the elevator again, even though it’s only one floor up.
You knock, even though you don’t need to because he never really locks his door these days unless it’s a night someone might actually try something.
He opens the door all the way, takes one look at you, and takes a sharp breath in that doesn’t quite match the faintly distant look in his eyes or the neutrally friendly expression on his face. He knew you were coming, but more than that, the look on his face tells you he knows exactly how this interaction will go. This is rehearsed and choreographed and has been a million times over and over. It’s over his shoulder, not yours, and it’s cutting off every avenue he has for any expression outside of it.
Its hands are still off the steering wheel. Infinite paths and no direction. You could, and probably should, be nice about it. You’d get along with him if you’d met under better circumstances and you both know that.
You pick the asshole move one last time, even though you know deep down it’s part of what you’re supposed to be doing, and say the first thing that comes to your mind instead of a proper greeting.
“How come you get to know your lines? That’s just unfair, man.”