The thing is that he– he has to go back to work. After everything. After the biggest creative high of his life, after all the praise and the adulation… he has to go to bed. And he has to get up early in the morning so he can get a shower before his shift. As if none of it had even happened. Half-Life VR But the AI is Self-Aware looms over his head like a hangover, and it makes him just as snappy.
He shouldn’t even have to be there. He should be at home, working on his next project, but he promised Stephan that he would cover the register for him, and Gordon Freeman doesn’t break his promises. Even when he really, really wants to.
So he puts on his stupid polo shirt and he drives his shitty little Honda Civic to the strip mall and he daydreams about the next one. The next big thing.
As the days come to pass, however, he’s glad he didn’t come in hot and quit his job. The next big thing fizzles and sputters. Nobody liked the fucking gnome. They called it annoying. Like they know anything. If Gordon’s learned anything from unexpectedly taking off, it’s that your average stream monster couldn’t pour water out of a boot if there were instructions on the heel. It made him laugh, and that’s what matters.
The days get shorter, and the viewer counts get smaller, and his daydreams get less and less grandiose, until he’s thinking less about “playing Half-Life: Alyx with a text-to-speech gnome” and more about “getting his higher-ups to promote him to assistant manager already”.
Which isn’t to say he forgets about the dream entirely. He still pecks away at his streams, every Thursday night (if he doesn’t have to do laundry). The few regulars he has are always a treat. And sometimes, when he lies awake late at night, he even misses those crazy little guys in his computer. The AI. He’s been a little lonely lately, okay, with all his old college buddies busy with their kids and jobs and stuff. At least Doctor Coomer was nice. They had fun. All of the fighting and yelling and boss battle drama aside.
But he’s been busy. December means mad overtime, and it’s kind of lame to just bust out the Half-Life stuff again, anyway. He needs something new. Something exciting.
Time ticks on. Gordon sighs with relief as he clocks out for the last time. Not ever, but for the year, at least. The holiday season is wrapping up, and he’s using all of his sweet, sweet unpaid time off to have the vacation of his dreams: holing up in his apartment for a week with a video game and a big bottle of bourbon.
He’ll have plenty of time to work on his side gig again, too. His streaming career’s gonna take off any day now. He just knows it. And then he won’t have to go back to working the register, or putting all the little stickers on the games once they go on sale, or any of that menial bullshit. Maybe, just maybe, the tides will turn with the new year and he’ll finally be living the life he always dreamed of.
“Later, gators,” he says as he exits the store. The door closes wordlessly behind him, a little jingle the only response.
That’s fine. He doesn’t care. Stephan’s kind of a dick, anyway. And it’s cool that he doesn’t have a whole lot going on right now, either. A chill week at home is exactly what he needs. Sure, he could try to wheedle his parents into letting him come down for Christmas again, but his dad’s got that heart condition now, and it’s “too stressful” to have to defend his whole deal to the family on top of his cousin’s crazy fucking dogs being there, too, and it’s just more effort than it’s worth.
So the dogs get to go. Gordon stays.
The first night isn’t half-bad. He gets to hop on Twitch and get a little bit twisted with it, and he attracts a good gaggle of viewers with some premium Scooby-Doo! Night of 100 Frights gameplay. He’s gotten really good at doing the voices, he thinks. But there’s a lot fewer bites at nine in the morning the next day. In his defense, it’s been snowing all night, and it’s still coming down pretty hard, and no one wants to go out in a bunch of cold white bullshit. So Gordon struggles through the grind until lunch.
He watches the snow fall for a while, chin resting on his hands. He’s always liked it when it snows. It would just be nice if he wasn’t so…
Gordon turns his head, taking in his empty apartment.
Bored. That’s what he is.
He tidies up a bit, listless, but he can’t resist the call of the computer at times like this. All his friends are in there. And Half-Life does sound pretty fun right now. Gordon ties his hair back, slips on the headset, and logs back in.
He’s not sure what to expect on the other side. Sure, he may have beaten the game, but he did download all those sketchy AI mods to get there. And given the tenor of his last playthrough - fond farewells, dramatic monologues, the works - he almost expects the game to have deleted itself in one great last hurrah. But it hasn’t. It boots up as though he had never left.
Or, more accurately, as though he’d never played at all.
“Okay,” he says, uncertain. He flexes his fingers experimentally and watches as his model poorly attempts to mimic it. “Alright, uh. Half-Life, two! Or, um, Half-Life one. Part two. We’re back at it again. And…” Gordon glances around the tram cabin and finds it empty, just like before. No one peers through the windows to get a rise out of him. Or jumps out from behind a seat. “And it’s a perfectly ordinary day at Black Mesa.”
And it remains so. The intro plays out just as he remembers it. He waves hello at ordinary, minimally-responsive NPCs, taunting them, waiting for them to spring to life, but it’s like wringing blood from a stone. Gordon frowns. Then he attempts to push one of the scientists around, but it doesn’t budge.
Okay. That’s fine. Just because they aren’t throwing a fucking party for him on arrival doesn’t mean anything. Saying it aloud doesn’t make him feel any better, though.
He rounds the corner to the break room. “Oh, Tommy,” Gordon lilts cartoonishly, expecting to see him in the same place as before, but he’s not there.
Maybe he just has to keep playing. They couldn’t have deleted themselves, right? In a fit of pique, he tabs out of the game and fumbles through the headset UI for his mods folder, but everything’s where it should be. He just doesn’t get it. To make matters worse, playing through the game a second time is kind of a slog. The magic of live cutscenes and physics puzzles wore off on him in, like, 2004. Without the AIs, without the audience, wandering through the halls in search of his crowbar just feels… boring.
So why, then, is he even bothering? Maybe he’s just holding out hope that lightning can strike twice. Or maybe a part of him wants to go back to 2020, when he finally got his big break. When everybody else was a jobless loser stuck in their parents’ place, too. The rest of the world was finally on his wavelength: staying home, playing games, and trying not to panic.
A weird, bad feeling settles over him as he heads down the elevator to the test chamber. Maybe there is no more Tommy. No more Bubby or Dr. Coomer. Maybe he can never go back.
“Okay, fine,” he says. His high-strung tone betrays him: it is not fine. “Don’t play ball with me! It’s not like I missed you guys!”
Gordon waits for a moment, hoping that’ll prompt a response from the game. When it doesn’t, he swears.
He enters the chamber and gets into position near the cart. “Ooh, look, Dr. Freeman’s about to fuck it up again,” he mutters. “Everybody yell at him! Beat him with sticks!”
He fucks it up again. The crystal flashes angrily. The screen goes black. This time, however, he’s quiet, not bothering to sell the fear to an audience of none. And this time, in between arcs of green light, he sees something unfamiliar.
A figure.
“Hello?”
It walks forward, but it doesn’t appear to be getting any closer. Gordon takes a nervous step backward. It flickers. A leg starts to jerk, and then an arm, the chorea of a malfunctioning model. He takes another step. It slides, then snaps back into place, over and over. His heart pounds out of his chest.
Gordon squints against it as the flickering intensifies. Each cycle, it gets closer, closer still. Until it gets close enough to resolve itself. And he spots a familiar set of blue and grey textures.
“...Benrey?”
The game crashes. Gordon flinches backwards as though he’s been hit.
What the fuck was that? He wastes no time in booting it up again, and it drops him into that empty black void again, arcs of bright green plasma searing his vision. And this time, as the searing lights die down, Benrey stands in front of him. Massive. Unmoving. A-posing.
“What the fuck?”
Suddenly, Benrey drops into an animation, crouching before returning to a normal standing posture. Then he blinks. At this scale, his eyelids move almost like a lizard’s, slightly off-sync.
“oh. it’s you.”
“You,” says Gordon hoarsely. “Don’t you– don’t come any closer to me, man! I’ll fucking–”
He clenches his hand on instinct, expecting his minigun-arm to fire, but it doesn’t. Because it’s not there anymore. He flexes uselessly instead, and Benrey just looks at him, gaze impenetrable.
“arm come back?”
Gordon rotates it out in front of himself, demonstrating for the both of them. “Arm come back,” he says, defeated.
Benrey leans in closer, as if to investigate, but Gordon heads that shit off on the pass by waving his arms in front of his face.
“Did you hear me?! I said back off!”
He expects Benrey to menace him, to leer at him, to play along with the whole “big guy” act, but Benrey only shrugs. “chill out, maybe?” he says, head tilting to the side. “i’m was… playing toys.”
“What?”
Benrey reaches into his pocket and pulls out toys.
[write a scene here aauugghh fuckkkk]
When Benrey fails to respond, Gordon says, “Well, what do you want from me, then?
“huh?” Benrey blinks. “nothin’.”
“Seriously? Then why did you even show up?!”
Benrey shoots him a disdainful look. “i didn’t do nothin’. you’re in my house.”
“Oh, so this is your house now. Looks really good in here, man. I can see why you like it.” Gordon spreads his arms and takes it all in: his nothing. “Can you just be straight with me for a moment? Just answer one little question? Where’s the rest of the science team?”
This time, when Benrey speaks, he doesn’t even bother looking at Gordon. “i dunno. i’m just chillin’,” he says.
“Don’t you guys, like, I don’t know, hang out?”
“huh?”
“Oh my God,” he mutters. “Tommy! Wasn’t he your friend? Does– Is any of this shit– Are you doing this on purpose? Like, just to fuck with me? Or are you really just like this?”
“what do you care,” sulks Benrey, hunching his massive shoulders. “you’re just… sayin’ all this mean crap to me, for no reason. gordon hates me and he wants me to be killed.”
“What?” Gordon blurts out, shocked into a laugh. “I don’t–”
He stops himself. Of course he does. It’s Benrey. All the guy has ever done is piss him off and get on his last nerve! But at the same time… he doesn’t know, man. It’s nice to be able to argue with someone who can remember his name. And, more to the point, Benrey’s the only one who might know where to find his friends. So maybe they can put off the killing for awhile.
“I don’t want you to be killed, dude,” Gordon says at last. “I just wanna know what’s going on. Everything’s different.”
Benrey makes a noise low in his throat. His eyes shift under the shadow of the helmet, searching for him. They’re dark. Unreadable. “i’ve been having so much fun,” he says, voice pitching up unconvincingly. Then it flattens back out. “in here. without you.”
With that, he extends an arm out into the abyss and drops something. One of his toys. The orange one. Gordon watches his player model tumble away into nothing, shrinking into a point of light. Then there’s a shift, something just beyond the edge of perception, and the lighting changes. When he looks up, Benrey’s lit only in red, casting sharp, violent shadows.
“you’re interrupting my me time, bro,” Benrey says.
[i had a chase scene here but i don’t actually think its a good idea. i think its better if benrey isnt the bad guy at all here]
“whuh?” All of a sudden, Benrey stops. Then he shrugs. “yeah… so, i’ve been– i’ve been good. without you.” He scratches the back of his head. “thank-you.”
Gordon stares up at him. Benrey waves him off.
“buh-bye.”
“Buh-bye?! What was that?!” Gordon grips his head. “If you’re going to be the bad guy, you gotta commit!”
In the blink of an eye, they wink back into the world, back into the test chamber. Benrey stands at his side, back to his usual size, shape, and color. Gordon shouts in surprise.
“but i’m not the bad guy,” he says to a dizzied Gordon, as if nothing had happened. Behind him, an alarm blares among the wreckage. “you’re in my house… yelling at me… i think– i think you’re the bad guy now.”
“Ha!” Gordon waits for Benrey to smile, or crack up, or something. But he stands stiff as a board with an expression to match. “Oh, wow. You’re serious,” Gordon says at last. “No, no, no. I’m the main character, okay? Gordon’s the good guy! Don’t get it twisted!”
Benrey reclines, as though he’s on an invisible chaise longue. “stealing… killing… editing wikipedia without a license,” says Benrey, raising a finger for each offense. “sounds pret-ty bad to me. i oughta put you under arrest.”
“You’re a security guard!” Gordon bites back, trying to restrain his laughter. “You don’t even have the jurisdiction– wait, where are you going?”
“home-uhhh.” Benrey calls out, having turned and walked away. He does a cheeky little wave without looking back.
Gordon jogs after him. “Uh, no? I thought you were gonna help me! Let’s get the gang back together again!” He makes a little punching motion to demonstrate his enthusiasm for the idea. When Benrey doesn’t stop, however, he gets more desperate. “Come on, you gotta– I– I need your help, bro! You’re the only one I’ve run into!”
Benrey stops walking.