reflections

Today, Mr. Varga approached me, saying he had gotten into contact with a group of former interns on his Conflict Architecture project. He told me that they escaped five years ago and made a defiant effort to expose the project to the world under a thin veil. A video game, set in the solar system’s distant future.

As I listened to him wax his poetic about how proud he was of those former interns, I couldn’t help but smile. I knew the game he was talking about, and since the raid on the Technocracy when I came into possession of these victims of circumstance, I wondered whether they were based on it, or if it was based on them. As he gushed, I got my answer. And I was proud of them too. For defying the Weaver and Wyrm, for overcoming adversity by every publisher telling them this concept would fail, and for rising to the top. I looked at the tattoo on my left arm, of the Lotus sigil and the Orokin writing beneath it. Maybe my fate was always tilted this way.

He told me that he had spoken of my exploits, and of the end of the Technocracy, to them. He told them that I had tamed Umbra and brought him peace, and brought a final end to the man known as Ballas Green and his horrid army of creations.

Then, to my surprise, he asked me to load the game.

The Sacrifice was a quest we had long known was coming, in the fandom. It was spoken of for months beforehand, and were terrified of what the next chapter in the story of the Tenno might bring. Now, we knew it was little more than a week away. We waited long for it, and maybe none so much as me, after the events of the Technocracy.

Also to my surprise, the game began to patch in a substantially large update.

“How did you do this?” I asked him.

“I’ve seen you at play and noted your username,” he answered, “So when the time came that my former interns asked me who the woman with the Lotus tattoo who saved me was, it was a simple matter to give them your story. This quest is devoted to you.”

To… me?

Even after all of this, it’s still a foreign concept. I’m the leader of a tribe now. I destroyed the Pyramid that held my sister’s blood hostage and became a top name on the Red List if only they knew what I looked like. I destroyed the Technocracy and freed mystic mages from its grasp. Even after all of that, I still couldn’t think of myself as important. It was hard-wired into me.

When the game finally patched, I was once again thrust into the shoes of an uncomfortably accurate recreation of myself as a child. In this quest, I was chasing clues to find the fandom’s favorite Space Mom, and was led on the trail of a frame fueled by anger and sheer force of will. As the quest progressed, the Operator learned about the origin of the frames, and learned the story of a man talented at a strange form of Go. Like my Umbra, who I had eased, he was forced by the man named Ballas to murder his own son, who thought he was helping him. The Operator saw a reflection of the same memories I saw.

I was shocked at how true to my tale the quest was.

In the moments after Umbra was quelled, I felt my universe draw close to a world created by these former interns, where things may not be okay, but there are saviors of the waking world dwelling in that solar system ready to take charge.

I heard my own voice in hers at that moment, as she learned that the army of the man named Ballas was coming and was urged to run.

“No. Let them come.”

It was the first time, having it played back to me through a game that’s inspired me for years, that I felt my own significance. I looked through the veneer of the universe at a version of me who struggled and suffered and lost her parents threefold and, in the lore shared between my sister and I, watched her twin go blind from the power of the Void, but still rose up and championed against the forces that stole it all away from her.

I felt the determination she had.

Together, we beat through waves of the artificial intelligence known as Sentients like they were nothing more than butter. Just like I did, when Umbra was tamed. Leftover experiments came after us, but the both of us knew we could take them down, together. And under a lone tree on a cliffside, surrounded by his watchers, we ended Ballas Green, by Umbra’s hand first, then by mine.

By the end of the quest, as his body was taken by the alien being that we now knew was the Lotus, I was stunned silent.

They had taken everything I felt, condensed it, and turned it back to me.

Those interns had, by telling my own story through my Operator, made me feel like I had done something spectacular. Something important.

For the first time in a long time, I felt proud of myself.

I felt powerful.