The Forest of Worlds

What exactly ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠was this place for? Boxy, perfectly rectangular machines flashed and hummed as they worked, but I couldn't tell what any of them were actually doing.

The space was as quiet as an underground parking garage at dawn, as hollow as the black night sky over a city. I held my breath and walked slowly between the machines. Something like a sign was mounted on each device. Some were in Korean, some in English, others in Japanese or Chinese.

I walked and walked, taking in the countless machines and the signs mounted on top of them. This vast space stretched as far as the endless corridors I had already passed through — and it was far larger than any of the big rooms nestled between those halls.

Even after I had gone by machine after machine, there was still no end in sight. I walked for nearly thirty minutes before I finally gave up on going any farther.

"...There's no end to this place."

Before I knew it, I was hemmed in on all sides by massive devices that looked like servers. It felt as though I had been stranded in a forest of machines. The enormous mechanical forest also looked a little like a city packed with apartment towers. The only difference from a real apartment jungle was that these server-like machines were arranged at perfectly identical intervals.

If this place were a single vast city, it would have been a meticulously designed planned city.

I turned around, facing the opposite direction from the way I had come, and retraced my steps. Walking faster than I had on the way in, I made it back to the room's origin point in twenty minutes.

I sank down right there. I hadn't walked all that long, but somehow I felt exhausted. It was probably because the room's layout and structure were so oppressively monotonous.

Why were these machines guarding this enormous spaceship? The countless devices looked almost like tombstones in a graveyard. Maybe this vast room was a single communal cemetery. I didn't know what it was meant to commemorate, but the thought occurred to me all the same. A novelist's imagination, kicking in out of nowhere.

The moment I thought of them as gravestones, I pictured zombies bursting up through the hard floor, cracking my skull open and sucking out my brains. Goosebumps rose on my arms.

I reached toward the machine in front of me. I was worried that touching the wrong thing might trigger something strange. But if I wanted to unravel even a fraction of this enormous room's identity, I needed to give it some kind of stimulus.

The moment I ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠stretched out my hand and touched the side of the machine, a vivid notification window appeared before my eyes.

"......"

It was a notification window packed with lines of text whose meaning I couldn't immediately grasp. I read through it carefully, trying to extract as much information as I could. The window was introducing a creative work called Solari World.

I touched the part of the window labeled Official Site. A new notification appeared, displaying what looked like a website. I studied its contents slowly.

It was the official website of a game called Solari World. Had a game like this ever existed? I wasn't exactly well-versed in games, so I had no idea. I looked over the site from top to bottom, and by the time I was done I had a decent picture of what Solari World actually was.

Solari World was an RPG made by a game company called Dynamic Square. It wasn't an MMORPG that crowds of people played together — it was a packaged single-player title, the kind where you followed a fixed story. According to the official site, the game had been so popular that novels, comics, and an anime had been produced based on the original.

I didn't stop at the official site. I looked through the fan sites and the online communities as well. They were, quite literally, internet sites where users of the game Solari World gathered and talked. Every community was one I had never seen before. I had no idea whether these were websites that actually existed or not.

They were packed with information about the game, the novel, the comic, and the anime. After checking the sites, I turned my attention to the Download Content section of the original window. Game Download, Novel Download, Comic Download, Anime Download — and like the Official Site label, they all seemed to be hyperlinks.

I touched Game Download. A bar-shaped loading window appeared in front of my eyes. It filled from 0% to 100% in an instant, and then a message popped up.

Along with the message, a new notification window popped up like a dialog box. The new window had a white background. A bright, cheerful melody rang through my head. The letters DS suddenly appeared on that white field, and I remembered that the company behind Solari World was called Dynamic Square.

"Is this... a game window?"

After the logo faded, a game menu appeared in front of me against a forest backdrop. On the left, wooden signposts listed options like New Game, Continue, Options, Credits, and Exit.

It was a start menu not all that different from any ordinary game. I realized the newly appeared window was a screen I could actually play on — and that the game in question was almost certainly Solari World.

"A game...? Don't tell me all these countless server-like machines are storing games?"

Speculation circled through my head. Maybe this enormous spaceship called Unix was a private server farm owned by some giant game company. If I thought of it that way, the whole sequence of events unfolding in front of me started to make sense.

And yet there were still things that didn't add up. If that were true, how was I supposed to explain the outrageous power I had gained by possessing the Unix Cube? Had some absurdly overpowered alien game company possessed technology strong enough to warp reality itself?

That wasn't the only thing that didn't make ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠sense. The writing all over this spaceship was clearly from Earth. The game called Solari World was in Korean, and so were the communities. If this enormous vessel had flown in from some alien beyond I knew nothing about, that would have been easier to accept — but the countless lines of text inside it all pointed to this being something of Earth. That fact only confused me further.

Maybe some staggering alien technology was manipulating my brain, making letters I didn't recognize look like they belonged to Earth. It was a complicated assumption, but I couldn't rule it out. My head was a complete mess.

"Haa..."

I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I didn't understand why this enormous server room was storing entertainment content, and I didn't understand why I had been chosen by it. My knowledge was pitiful — embarrassingly so.

What could I even do? Surprisingly, the answer wasn't far away. Wrapping your head in your hands with zero information doesn't produce a single productive conclusion. I focused on the game window still floating in front of me, slowly reached out, and touched New Game.

The window responded to my touch the way a tablet would, and the game started up without a hitch. And so, in one empty corner of a hollow spaceship, I began to play.

Solari World was a pretty fun game. It was polished enough that you'd pay full price for it in the real world. I played it with genuine enjoyment.

The game window, like the other notification windows, could be controlled at will. If I wanted to stop, it shut itself off. ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠If I wanted to play again, it turned itself back on.

Once I was back home, I lay on my bed and played in peace. Solari World was set in a medieval fantasy. Medieval fantasy is the industry standard of fantasy fiction, a genre still flooded with mass-produced slop — and games are no different.

The setting of Solari World was that same tired medieval-fantasy stereotype, but the game itself was remarkably solid. I could feel it from the character creation screen alone. The customization offered an enormous degree of freedom, the number of detailed stats was considerable, and the starting regions were incredibly diverse. A game that hands you this many choices is always welcome, as far as I'm concerned.

The difficulty was quite high. Clearing the prologue alone took me well over an hour. But it was so absorbing that I lost all track of time. I hadn't felt like this in a long while.

"Playing a game after so long is actually pretty fun. Picking up gaming as a hobby wouldn't be the worst idea."

I'm not particularly close with games. That isn't to say I never play them. I've tried the so-called trend games that everyone else plays a few times. But given the nature of my work, I'm closer to novels than I am to games. Still, throwing myself into gaming properly for once didn't seem like a bad idea.

After clearing the prologue of Solari World, I closed the game window and searched for it on my real computer. The game I had been playing just moments before didn't turn up at all. The official site, the fan sites, the user communities — every last URL was one that did not exist in reality.

I wasn't particularly surprised. I'd had a feeling it would turn out this way. It was pure gut instinct, but it felt as though the game called Solari World had been created in a world entirely different from the one I lived in. Maybe the Unix Vessel was a spaceship that had crash-landed here from another world. A visitor from Earth-2, in other words.

I lay down on the bed. There were an enormous number of things I didn't understand, and even more that I needed to know — but no matter how hard I thought, I didn't feel like the answers were going to come. The moment I closed my eyes, sleep came for me almost at once. And with that, I drew the curtain on an exhausting day.