The screen goes black. The party’s over. Gordon sighs with relief and takes off his headset.
“We did it!” he crows to an eager audience, just on the other side of the screen. They respond with a dizzying, overwhelming volley of praise, armies of emotes and buzzing swarms of subscriber notifications. “And we hit another sub milestone! Thank you guys so much, it feels— whoa, dizzy. Gonna— gonna sit.”
His trusty gamer chair groans under his weight.
“Well, that’s the end of Half-Life VR,” he says. “Jesus, I’m sweating like a pig. My next stream’s gonna be a little more, uh. Low-key. I think I was actually having a panic attack for awhile there.”
Through the haze of giddy endorphins (and an ill-placed bead of sweat that he tries to blink away), Gordon watches the chat roar. Congratulations. Well-wishes. Begging him for more. Singing his praises. Something in his head swells, just for a moment. And when his next deposit clears in his bank account, his eyes go wide as saucers.
In the middle of the night, lit only by the faint red glow of a power strip, Gordon’s computer fan starts to whir.
“What’s up, gamer fam,” Gordon says with all the unwarranted confidence of a guy who has never used this vocabulary before. “Today I was gonna play a— one of my favorite games, actually—“
hello, gordon! choruses the chat, first as a trickle, then as a deluge.
“Hey, hello,” he laughs. “Uh, anyway, it’s called ‘Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days’, and—“
coolatta_fan_69: hello, gordon!
thedoctor_isin: hello, gordon!
crowstoes: gordon, i’m thirsty!
He rubs the back of his head. “Dr. Coomer’s not in this one, guys. He’s— I put him to bed. Took him to the farm. He’s playing with all the other dogs now.”
This doesn’t seem to dissuade them - he can barely read anything of substance between the waves of quotes and references.
coolatta_fan_69: is he playing with sunkist? :O
soapishere: OMG new fanart idea :LUL: the perfect dog!
whimsicalActs: i can’t wait for tommy to come back. my precious cinnamon roll
Jbrad502: yoo this what gordon look like??? no rizz
Gordon forces a chuckle and presses Start. “Hey, hey, come on, man! Keep it above the belt! I-I’ve got rizz!”
The game slows to a crawl partway through the opening cutscene. He mashes the mouse button a bit, hoping it’ll resolve itself, but instead, the whole thing halts. Gordon sighs. “Emulator problems,” he says by way of apology. “Gimme a sec.”
Second time’s the charm. And Tommy does not, in fact, come back. None of them do. It was just some stupid mod, it wasn’t supposed to be a schtick.
“Sooo, I’ve been getting some feedback lately,” Gordon starts, facing the camera. He tries not to look at his dwindling viewer count. “First of all, I wanted to apologize. I didn’t realize I was, uh.” He squints at his script. “Appropriating language. That’s my bad. I saw a lot of people using it and I just wanted to sound like I was with it, you know? And if you say any bullshit about me ‘going woke’, I’m banning you! Instant ban. I’m woke as hell. I love listening and learning.”
Thankfully, he doesn’t see anything of the sort. He’s cultivated a good crowd, he thinks.
Emboldened, Gordon continues, “So from now on, I’m gonna call you guys ‘Kaniacs’!”
morguellons: ??????
karmal_apple: :Kappa: :Kappa:
karmal_apple: isn’t that already a thing?
hellogordon: hello, gordon!
“You know, like Kane & Lynch?”
whimsicalActs: (waves) does anybody want to join my tomrey friend server?
LadySylvia: caniacs rise up!!
Jbrad502: cane-cel spotted
miaou76: gordon, i’m hungry! titty boob huge fuck!
“C’mon, I’ve been workshopping this one all week!” He chooses not to mention any of his other failed variations on the name. “Anyway, I’m gonna play some Dead by Daylight… assuming it doesn’t crash on me. I think that power outage last month must have fried my RAM.”
A window on his taskbar flashes orange for a moment, as if taunting him. But nothing happens when he clicks it.
"wow benny, you look so big, and cool. i’m so so scared of your big form… but i bet you could save anyone like this."
A large hand squeezes around a model of Gordon Freeman, doll-sized in its grip, all polygons and sharp angles. They dig into the skin. Benrey’s eyelids lower to half-mast. "i could do it. it’s not scary for me to be like this. i can do anything i want here," he says, speaking in his normal pitch.
In the void, black as far as the eye can see, he crosses his ankles and leans back, sprawled out as if atop an invisible chaise longue.
“in benny’s kingdom, you can do whatever you want and nobody can tell you how to do it.” Gordon dangles from his fingers, threatening to fall. All it would take is a brief lapse in concentration. A distraction. He lifts the model up to eye level, turning it this way and that to inspect it. Its limbs hang limply in the air.
“benrey, you’re scaring me to be like this,” he quavers. “you’re like a godzilla that could eat me, and i’m too scared to be eaten.”
His fingers wrap around Gordon more fully, pushing him snugly into his palm. “why do you think i would— i would do something bad like that,” Benrey tells him. A dangerous lilt edges in. “i would never betray my best friend. unless he asked me to.”
He shakes Gordon, watching his arms flop around his sides, before bringing him closer. Trying to meet that blank stare.
“unless i was… supposed to be bad,” he mutters. “i could do it. i— wrong button.”
Gordon goes up in flames.
“sorry. sorry. i’m trying to fix it,” he whines as he fiddles with unseen settings. Eventually, Gordon goes cold and still again. The situation resets. He focuses on Gordon anew.
"you're sooo good at it, benrey," Benrey sing-songs in a mockery of Gordon's voice, bouncing the model in place with each word, "so... so nices, to me. always helping me when i need help so much. i can’t do anything good on my own."
His fingers curl around Gordon. Benrey can’t help the little frown that tugs at the corner of his mouth. Something’s off.
“everything i do for you,” he sighs at last. “so nice to gordon… and he’s always so mean to me. hits me with his car… his stupid gun… aren’t we— aren’t we friends? best friends. best friends don’t… mmh. don’t ditch their buddies. their bros. didn’t you— did— haven’t you ever seen vietnam? you never leave your buddy behind.”
His eyes narrow. After a long, pregnant pause, he flings Gordon away with a flick of the wrist. He's bored now.
New map: gm_construct.
Gordon glares at his stubbornly-blank screen. Then he tabs back out to his desktop and force-closes Dead By Daylight for what must be the fifth time that day. His CPU usage spikes in his Task Manager, but no particular task appears to be causing it.
“Oh, come on, man,” Gordon mutters, clicking furiously. Nothing responds. His eyes dart over to his stream - his viewer count is dropping, dropping. “Sorry, guys, experiencing some, um, technical difficulties. Again.”
He canceled a date for this, man! All in the hopes of squeezing out just a little bit of extra cash this month. After all, there’s— there’s inflation. Food’s expensive. Drinks are expensive. Pretending like he’s got a real job to impress that hot goth girl from the smoke shop is… well, you get the picture. But the sad, gutting truth is this: nothing he’s done has been able to recapture the magic of that Half-Life stream. The high of thousands and thousands of people cheering him on has long since passed. And so too have their sweet, sweet subscriber dollars.
Gordon holds down the power button with a particular vehemence.
As soon as he restarts his computer, a flashing orange window nags him for his attention. Steam wants to launch GMod, but another program is conflicting. Gordon scrolls through his open programs again, baffled. Meanwhile, his chat continues:
crowstoes: zzzzz. resident sleeper
LadySylvia: hello, gordon!
eventheodds2: when are you gonna do hlvrai 2?
“I’m not— Look, you have to stop asking me that,” he snaps abruptly. “I’m done with HLVRAI, okay? I have a ton of other crap I wanna do! Stop trying to fu— to frickin’ pigeonhole me!”
soda_drinker: :pogchamp: :pogchamp:
Xarmene: :pogchamp: oooohh saltyyy
Yes, I’m salty, Gordon thinks, but wisely refuses to say out loud. And he’s— his viewer count is already tanking, dipping below 100 for the first time in months. Christ.
GMod attempts to force itself open again. Maybe he’s been hacked. Or he downloaded a virus. Or something. He groans quietly and slumps down in his chair, sliding to the floor. He doesn’t have the money to deal with this shit right now, and with the way things are going stream-wise, he doesn’t know when he ever will.
“Okay, well, I’m gonna call it a night,” says Gordon, all that anger draining from him. He just sounds tired now. “Reschedule. I gotta figure out why my shit is so fucked. You know, I-I’m thinking about getting an exorcist. Maybe I’m being haunted. What do you think?”
Despite everything, a handful of viewers still wish him a good night. And good luck.
He’s tried everything. New antivirus, a disk integrity check, swapping out his RAM for a few spare sticks from the awkward IT guy at work— hell, he’s even started looking up local psychics in the hopes of performing an honest-to-God exorcism. But eventually, no matter what he does, that same bug slithers its way back in. Something starts eating up all of his processing power and leaves him unable to so much as watch a YouTube video.
And the last thing he wants to do is format the fucking thing. Admittedly, it’s been way too long since he’s last backed up his files, and the streaming money’s kind of dried up lately, and there’s student loan payments and all those tsunamis halfway across the world knocking out those factories and, well, buying a spare hard drive should have happened a few months ago. And it didn’t. And now it can’t.
So.
Gordon systematically combs through his files, hoping he can sniff it out himself. After a few long, fruitless days of browsing abandoned advice threads and hurriedly deleting old college nudes he’d forgotten about, he finds something strange. A folder titled “vidos”. Filled with hundred and hundreds of gigabytes of videos, all their titles nothing but dates and times.
He clicks one, a dull horror sawing at his chest.
The first few minutes are nothing but black. Then a quiet fizzing sound creeps in. Finally, what jumps into view is a sprawling, open field, dense green grass as far as the eye can see.
A man speaks, unseen. “i’m going to show you my video now.”
A GMod menu pops up, and the player spawns in a slab of brick wall. It wobbles before coming to a stop. He pulls up another menu, mumbling something just shy of clarity, and then swears, before typing out “CHRONICLE’S OF BENRY 2” in a text field on the wall.
“my name’s bennett. and welcome! tooo chronicles of benry. two.”
“Oh, god damn it,” Gordon whispers. He watches as Benrey - or somebody playing as Benrey, somebody who sounds worryingly like Benrey - spawns in a Half Life security guard model in front of the wall. And then a car. And then floors the car directly into the security guard, over and over, saying nothing.
He skips forward out of sheer morbid curiosity. The player poses Benrey’s model like he’s vogueing with his head blown up to three times its normal size. He skips forward again.
“they didn’t like me anymore,” Benrey says, facing off to the side. He’s the only thing in frame, standing in front of a black sky. “i offered them a handful of friendship… and they only offered me rain of the heart. and sadness. and fire.”
Benrey holds up a balloon, and it catches on fire in front of him.
“and they took guns, and they shot me with guns, and they left me alone in here. forever.”
He throws the balloon off to the side. It falls to the ground, but he spawns in more balloons, and more balloons, attaching them to himself with ropes.
“but i’m so happy here,” he says, voice snapping to a different tone. Distantly peppy. Unnatural. “i jump for joy every day… here in my world.” The screen pans up, and above that plane of blackness behind him is a blue sky, the sun hanging hot and white smack dab in the middle. “where the birds are singing… and the clouds are singing… and i get to spend every day with my best friend. who looks out for me. and never kills anybody.”
It pans back down to a cardboard cutout of a cow. The cow wobbles, then falls.
Gordon stops the video. “What the fuck,” he mouths.
He deletes the recording. And every other recording, too. He doesn’t so much as look at them. There’s nothing overtly frightening about them, no, but it’s more the fact that somebody’s saving those onto his computer and he has no idea how. Or why. Or when, even - it’s not like he leaves his house! Wrapped up in a paranoid fugue, Gordon downs energy drinks and attempts to stay up all night, catch the guy in the act. But he hasn’t managed to pull off an all-nighter like that since college, and when he wakes, sore-necked from passing out on his keyboard, there’s another video in their place. One with today’s date on it.
Despite every rational bone in his body telling him not to open it, he does. He can’t help himself.
“hey, man,” Benrey says, his head filling up most of the screen. His expression is flat and lifeless. “not cool. that’s my… my personal properchy. you stole my good, good videos like a dirty little thief.”
Gordon grabs at his microphone and blurts out, “Hey! Can you hear me in there?! Get out!”
Benrey doesn’t respond to him. Because it’s a recording. “you’re just gonna have to… gotta make your own good videos if you wanna make it in this doggy dog world,” he continues, haughty. “can’t keep riding benby’s coattails forever, friend.”
Something hisses and snaps. When Gordon looks down, he sees that he’s squeezed some plastic dingle on his microphone stand clean off. That is it. He’s got to catch this guy in the act and figure out what his damage is! It’s got to be just— some hacker, some delusional little weirdo with a penchant for imitation. The alternative is— is—
It’s not even fucking possible. So, worn down at long last, he cracks open GMod and waits.
The game doesn’t open to the landing screen that he expects, however. He’s shunted straight to a server he doesn’t recognize the name of, dropped into the middle of a vast, barren field. It’s the same flat expanse he’s tooled around in dozens of times before. But the sky here isn’t the pleasant evening blue that he’s used to - it flickers, black and white and pink bursts of static. Squinting against the harsh backdrop, he spots a dark shape. In the far distance. Something spawns in above it and drops to the ground.
“Hey,” Gordon calls out, as if it can hear him. There’s a tremulousness to his voice that immediately embarrasses him.
As he approaches it, he hears a voice, faint and low.
“…you wanna kiss? well, too bad. you didn’t— you yelled at me, you said things about my— about my penis, you made fun of it, just ‘cuz i got it stuck. why would i wanna kiss you.”
His heart sinks. “How the fuck,” Gordon starts. A figure - the all-too-familiar shape of the Half-Life 1 security guard - resolves itself, and it turns to face him.
“oh. it’s you.” The heat in that voice dies on impact. All that’s left is a flat, bitter affect. “i’m busy, so, um, if you can… maybe, suck me? thanks.”
“What the hell is going on,” demands Gordon.
Benrey doesn’t respond. Instead, he resumes his dialogue, simulating an argument between… them. Both of them. A little Benrey and a little Gordon in each hand. He watches silently, transfixed in horror. “i’m sooo sorry for messing with your beautiful game, benrey. you should— you should put me in the computer too. forever. what’s good for the goose is good for the gamer.”
A quick bark of laughter bursts out of Gordon, surprising even himself. He doesn’t take long to recover, however. “Answer me! Who are you? And what are you doing on my computer?!”
Those dark eyes flick over to him, then quickly roll away. “he doesn’t even remember me,” Benrey says sadly to his little facsimile of himself. “and here i thought we were buds. i woulda— i never woulda forgotten ol’ gordon. ‘n’ what he did to me.”
“Are you hacking me? Do you want money? I don’t have any, man! I’m broke!”
“it’s your good friend benny.” He sounds strangely plaintive. “from funny.”
“What am I even thinking,” mutters Gordon. “I shouldn’t be playing these fucking games.”
He turns on his firewall and goes snooping for any recent connections, any mysterious IP addresses… but the server doesn’t go down. The other player doesn’t disconnect. Benrey remains. Realization dawns upon him.
“No way. Absolutely not,” Gordon says, aghast.
“oh, i knew you had to like good ol’ benlet, somewhere down in that— that icy cold heart,” drawls Benrey. “i shoulda known you’d be the one to come… crawlin’ back to me…”
Was all of that CPU horseshit just Benrey dicking around on his computer? Trying to get his attention? Jesus, no. Mods don’t work like that. And they don’t remember things, either. And they certainly don’t sulk and mope and play fucking dollhouse with the guy who owns the computer!
And yet. Here he is. Staring down an AI that’s become self-aware in more than just his tagline. “Okay. Okay,” Gordon says, staring up at the roiling sky. His shoulders sag in defeat. “I’m just gonna incorporate this into my belief system.”
Benrey just grunts.
Fine. Time for a different tactic. A plan starts to take shape in his mind, one borne of his shrinking viewership and his struggling bank account. “Hey, man. Do you wanna, like… talk?”
Benrey stills, then his eyes slide over to Gordon, as slow and halting as the grind of a massive stone door swinging open.
“’Cuz I’ve got an idea. A real win-win scenario, if you ask me. And I think you’ll liiike it,” Gordon grins.
The deal is this: Gordon needs to find a new golden goose. A new schtick. Something that’ll get that sweet, sweet ad revenue back in his pocket, if his own winning personality isn’t enough to swing it. And Benrey needs… enrichment. A pumpkin stuffed full of meat. If he chucks a bit of one-on-one “bro time” into Benrey’s enclosure every once in awhile, maybe he’ll stop being so fussy and stop screwing with Gordon’s livelihood.
After all, new computers are expensive. And Gordon’s not about to go back to working at the Kroger cheese department just because some fucking malicious program decided to colonize his desktop. So he’s going to thread the narrative needle and hop into another Half-Life game, one that’s a little more VR-friendly. With special guest Benrey in tow.
Sweet-talking Benrey into playing games with him isn’t the hard part, though.
“what the… hell.”
Gordon waves his arms in front of Benrey’s blank face. “Hello, Earth to Benrey? Are you even listening to me?”
“it won’t let me do it,” Benrey whines. His model remains frozen in place, like he’s stepped away from the computer. “they won’t let me outta this fuckin’… cyber prison—“
“Life’s a prison, Benrey!” He pushes his hair back with both hands, eyes wild. “My stream’s supposed to start in ten minutes! Why the hell can’t you open it now?”
“i dunno, it’s your stupid computer,” he huffs.
Gordon moans pitifully and sinks to the floor. “This is it. I’m doomed. I’m going to have to move back in with my parents and tell them I dropped out of grad school and—“
“says i need… adminitative permivleges.”
“What?”
“adminitrator.”
“Administrator,” Gordon corrects him.
“whatever.”
“Well, fine, whatever! Just click it!”
“you gotta click it,” Benrey shoots back, sullen.
“Oh my God,” snaps Gordon. “Fine!”
Do you want to allow the following program from an unknown publisher to make changes to this computer?
Yes | No
He hovers over “No” for a moment, weighing his decision, before clicking “Yes” instead.
“sweet,” says Benrey. Then his screen goes black.
Gordon yanks off the headset, tripping over his wires in a desperate lunge for his mouse and keyboard. “Hey! I didn’t say you could do that!” He clicks and clicks and tries to tab out, but to no avail. His computer doesn’t respond. Neither does Benrey.
But just as quickly as it winked out, his screen snaps back to life, Half-Life: Alyx’s title screen front and center. A console command box pops up in the bottom left corner, and text starts to appear without his input.
do what
“Whatever you just did,” Gordon sighs. Then his cheeks burn a little - he doesn’t even know if Benrey can hear him. Just to cover his bases, he types in a reply.
Five minutes! I;m gonna load it in and make sure it works!!!
“Works” is a bit optimistic. Something’s wrong with his voice - it’s not even his voice anymore, just some text-to-speech thing. Apparently. According to his chat. (He'll let them believe whatever they want at this point. It's easier than trying to explain the truth, and they razz him enough as it is.) But, that aside, Benrey keeps up his end of the bargain. He plays the part.
The relief crashes over him like a wave as he watches his viewer count break four digits again. He’s still got it.