Go into a world full of monsters and injuries! Explore the post-apocalyptic wasteland, create weapons and combine objects, communicate with friends, create guilds, create your own base with protection and, of course, hunt for a lot of bugs with reliable modern and realistic weapons! Changes log… 1.02 Fixed a problem where monsters fled through fences and buildings to attack players. I'm sorry! 1.2 There are better effects and performance for poorly made equipment 1.3 Now the game has something else, yes, you can build a MACHINE GUN to attach to the base and protect your friends throughout the night!

That was Steam’s store page description of Sigurd Morrison’s Bug Hunt. It was puzzling, to say the least. The publisher was only listed as “SM Productions,” and they had published no other games since Bug Hunt’s release in… Yeesh, 2020! Not exactly fifty years old, but the terrible quality of the preview screenshots and videos piled on years like an old man’s liver spots.

Low-polygon models were framed by an ugly puke-green GUI that looked like it was trying to emulate some kind of night vision goggle HUD. Overenthusiastic particle effects sprayed terribly fake-looking blood from the neck of one ghillie-suited wasteland survivor as another stabbed him in the neck with the handle of a spoon. Three guys with assault rifles rode through a barren desert on a land speeder which looked like it came from some other, better game. None of the screenshots or videos actually seemed to show the “bugs” mentioned in the title. Maybe it referred to the game being an unplayable mess, which is what the comments complained of.

“The devs told us they fixed bugs walking through walls,” one review whined, “but it just takes them longer now. What’s the point of trying to run away? You might as well just log off.”

Another was an angry, slur-filled rant about the intelligence of your average Russian developer (I suppose that explained the weird wording in the description) and how if you were going to shut down servers a year after release you owed it to the userbase to refund everyone’s money. I checked the price of the game. Whatever “StormFeight101” had paid for the Bug Hunt, it was the price of a sandwich now.

In short, I saw nothing that seemed to justify David having spent over a hundred hours in the game. I leaned back in my chair and rubbed my tired eyes. I’d forgotten how shitty Steam reviewers could be. Well, tomorrow Aunt Luci would be gone and I could get actual research done.

***

“Nothing’s wrong with it,” Sadie said with a shrug. She stepped into the hallway leading to her apartment and returned the cardboard box with David’s truVR gear I’d asked her to look at. Sadie printed circuit boards and built retro game controllers as a hobby, so I figured if anyone could quickly help me it’d be her.

“You sure? It’s cracked on the side, that could have done something.”

Sadie rolled her eyes. “No, it couldn’t have. There’s a gel pad right here…” She tapped me hard on the side of the head. “…and here and here.” Each word was punctuated by another painful prod. “Because those internals are expensive, yo. Your cousin wouldn’t have been the first person to crack his head and knock himself out without harming the internals.” She shrugged. “Shit happens.”

I shook my head. “No, that’s what we thought at first too, but the doctor said David showed no injuries bad enough to knock him into a coma, and based on the angle of the injury he thinks David was unconscious before he hit the floor.” I shifted uncomfortably. “Besides, like I said, the gear was still on when I cleaned it up six hours later.”

“Yeah, I don’t get that at all. I tested it out, and the fuse disconnected every time I pulled it off my head.” Sadie wrinkled her nose. “Tell your cousin to brush his teeth more. The inside of that thing stinks.” If he ever wakes up, she didn’t say.

It got a grin out of me. “I know, right? Pretty sure he uses garlic and onion toothpaste.” I looked down into the box. The long crack on the headgear’s side shimmered sickly in the hallway’s dim fluorescent lighting. “Well… thanks anyway, Sadie. I owe you one.”

“Maybe you’ll finally take me out to dinner one of these nights,” she said with a smug grin.

She really was cute, and super smart, but I’d had enough trouble in the past dating coworkers from the same department, so I regrettably had to turn her down again. “The minute you get that promotion to the upstairs office, well…” I tried to return the smile, but I don’t do coy very well. I probably looked like a constipated emu. “You can treat me to dinner to celebrate!”

Sadie punched me in the arm and began to close her door, but froze with a contemplative look on her face before completely dismissing me. “You know, if what you’re describing wasn’t just some freak hardware accident, you could be dealing with something like a virus.”

“Yeah right.” Viruses just didn’t exist any more, not for over ten years. Computers were fantastic at second-guessing things which tried to exploit them. They had gotten to that point because of software engineers like Sadie and myself. Well, not really us, but people like the last generation of engineers.

“Whatever, it was just a thought. Hope your cousin feels better.” She was clearly pissed at my dismissal of her idea, which worried me. She hadn’t meant it as a joke. Sadie was the best software engineer I knew. If she thought a virus was possible, maybe it was.

***

An hour later I sat in my room again, staring at David’s PC. Sadie had me worried. Better safe than sorry, I guess. I booted up David’s PC in safe mode, copied down the address of that Russian forum he’d had open, and shut the PC down again. I then booted up my own, larger computer and pulled up the Russian forum in my browser.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t read a single one of the runes (I think they’re called Cyrillic?) making up the text of the forum, so I allowed my browser’s auto-translate take a shot. Apparently I was looking at the “Triage Gaming Forum.” Not the most inviting name, but whatever. Maybe the translation was off.

The thread I was reading, which David had pulled open, seemed to concern trading in-game skins in some MOBA. Hundreds at a time. For quite a lot of money.

For the fiftieth time, I suspected something was amiss.