Virtual
It's sudden, but let me tell you a story.
Human beings, by nature, require a certain amount of sufficient sleep, and nearly everyone struggles to secure that time.
Yet as society advances and countless reasons multiply, the infringement upon the right to sleep has only accelerated.
Soldiers must stand watch or guard duty. Students must finish assigned work. Working adults… well, there are plenty of reasons.
In any case, in modern society, various people have their sleep time encroached upon for various reasons, and as a result, they accumulate considerable mental fatigue and stress.
And the vast majority of them would express that stress as anger and irritation.
So.
The reason I brought this up so suddenly is—
DATA LEAK DETECTED
"…Ugh, what the hell?"
That was why I was woken up so abruptly—by the Icarus device erupting from my left wrist in crimson light and violent vibration, as if the end of the world had arrived.
When I came to my senses, I found myself already gripping a tactical tomahawk in one hand, eyes fixed forward. I was in a posture ready to swing at a virtual enemy the moment I willed it.
…Sigh.
Irritation surged.
"…What's with this at three in the morning?"
Even so, my mind was already analyzing the type of alert according to training. Ordinary warnings would display their nature when viewed through the special lenses. And there was no reason for sound or light during an operation—not even for the risk of position exposure. Since I'd never heard this alert before, it was easier to work backward.
"…Data leak alert?"
The Icarus data center would have to be completely hacked, or a node thoroughly compromised, for this alert to trigger. I had no idea why it was firing now.
Feeling dizziness catch up to me, I sat down in my chair and powered on the monitor I'd turned off. The computer linked to the device displayed the warning in enormous letters across the screen. Countless scripts filled the display endlessly—too many to even want to read.
From a rough check… it was cross-referencing data gathered from the internet with data inside the device, checking for matches or similarities.
The problem was that the number had already surpassed the thousands and was breaking into five digits.
If this had happened a month ago, I would have mobilized immediately. But I was already at a point where I'd leapt over the world itself.
Which meant…
"…There's a lot of related content on the internet, I guess."
What was certain was that this was no longer an alert I needed to worry about. After a few manipulations, the red light and vibration filling the room quickly faded.
It was three in the morning, and of course it was pitch black outside—but judging by this kind of vibration, it meant the collection of some meaningful data had been completed.
Since I'd have to live without any major schedule for the time being anyway, I'd investigate and then go back to sleep.
The computer was still computing, and opening additional windows might actually crash it, so most of the verification had to be done through the device's own hologram.
I excluded entirely unrelated content—Lee Eugene, New York, Washington, terrorists, Artemis, Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant, and so on… things that showed no correlation when searched individually.
Among the information derived through keywords entered into the search engine, I filtered out anything unrelated to my life or my previous world.
After excluding trivial matters or things that couldn't be grouped under any meaningful higher category, the results narrowed down to—
"…Dark Zone?"
What the hell is this word doing showing up again?
There was no need to dig hard into my memory. It was a word I'd heard just before going shooting today, while I was wondering which gun to use. But to recall the full context of that conversation… it definitely required more effort than it had a moment ago.
Memories began returning, one by one.
"…They said it was an extremely popular game, right?"
It had been a very long time since I'd played games, but faint echoes of my memories from before that freezing New York winter were resonating softly.
My hand, about to search for it on an internet site, froze mid-motion.
After a moment of silence, the sound of typing followed.
> Searching Trivia Wiki…
> Query: "Dark Zone"
…Somewhere distant in my mind, a memory whispered that games, by their nature, should be referenced through sites written from the users' perspective.
The site's name differed slightly from what I had memorized, but in any case, the layout of the main homepage was obvious enough for anyone to guess how to use it.
The search box in the upper right corner. I carefully entered the keyword "Dark Zone."
Even before pressing Enter, countless related search terms began cascading open.
And—
"…Ha."
Found it.
This thing.
It's the same anywhere in the world, but in this world, there existed media and creative works dealing with a person's life, or the world of their time connected to that person's life—including autobiographies and memoirs.
Whether fictional or real, whether a person or an event, people take countless sources and historical materials and remake them anew, and make them look good.
Movies, books, novels, or the countless lives of people reborn in such forms, and the worlds they lived in.
Occasionally, while watching such things, I'd harbor a curiosity.
It was an old story, and just a simple question—just, um… what if your own life, or information about a place you'd been, was processed into a new form of media and shown to people?
And if the person involved witnessed it, what would they think?
…But in this world, even that was more common than one might think.
Many people were already gone from the world by the time their own lives had been filmed, but given the era, there were cases where that wasn't the situation either. In a way, though… that was something ordinary people would never have a connection to.
I thought the same would be true for me.
But—
"…The sun's already up."
Actually seeing it, the feeling was… quite a lot, and rather unpleasantly, new.
So much so that I lost track of time.
It's a sudden story, but… I used to like FPS games.
Aim, center the enemy in the crosshair, fire. If it's a somewhat realistic game, you account for drop and time of flight.
And that's how you kill the enemy.
Among the countless things within the category of games, the FPS genre—where only the graphics, systems, and UI have evolved—has always maintained the clarity of its objective: running to the top, that is, the premise of shooting and killing the opponent, which hasn't changed with time.
Of course, as the era changed and technology advanced, various elements were added to this genre. For example, limb-specific damage or healing, needs like hunger, or pursuing survival rather than the premise of killing enemies…
But even these things couldn't deny the fact that their basic foundation was the FPS genre. That's why I liked FPS games belonging to the simple category where you just had to kill the enemy, without worrying about other complicated things.
But…
…It seems the CEO's name is the same as a private I knew, but more than that… New York and Washington, where I had wandered trying to normalize things after surviving death thousands of times, and countless other major cities.
The fact that all of that had been turned into a virtual reality FPS game…
"Ha…"
What was there to hide?
The information and storyline I'd gathered while wandering through this wiki—everything here was something that had actually happened there, something I had experienced… and the fact that it was being consumed as nothing more than a game left me feeling quite disgusted.
But what was even more ironic was why on earth this existed in the place I had returned to.
The world remembered my past. In a rather ridiculous way, at that.
It was as if I was facing a massive black box right in front of me. But unlike the former, which I could choose not to check… I had to enter this game to confirm what it truly was.
I had a fierce premonition that I had to.
I wanted to relax my expression, but I couldn't.
I wanted to turn away, but I couldn't. The search results derived from the keyword "Dark Zone" were like a fishhook. The moment you witnessed it with your own eyes, you were simply dragged along.
This game was inextricably linked to me, and even if I turned away from it at this point, it would eventually boomerang back to me.
Wouldn't it be an inevitable result, sooner or later?
And at that moment, I felt one of my vague memories whispering to me.
This was the reason I had come to this world.
"Hoo."
I took a deep breath and gripped the mouse again. If I had to enter it in the end, there was no hesitation. I cleared away all stray thoughts, leaving only the methods for converging on a single result.
It would be a long investigation. Since I wasn't particularly talented at information gathering, it would take even longer. By the time I reached the end, the answer I wanted might not come.
I didn't care.
"…Then."
First, let's start by figuring out how to connect.
It was time to uncover the reason I had returned to my original world, and the secrets of this world.