Alexander Plansky - Arcadia

“Thanks,” she said. She sounded distant. He could imagine her staring out a window, barely registering the conversation. Then she hung up.

Lewis tossed his phone back onto the couch and continued pacing. He massaged his temples and took a deep breath, trying to stay focused.

If Miller had played Rouge Horizon , why wasn’t it on his computer? He shook his head. He was getting too paranoid, seeing connections where there were none. There were plenty of other games that could’ve disturbed his friend. It was just that that damn horror beta was stuck on his mind. There was something about the scene he had played last night that had really gotten under his skin.

And of course, the dream.

He hadn’t had a nightmare like that in years. He could still see Jenna standing there, all covered in blood and whispering the words: “ Arcadia awaits .”

It couldn’t be a coincidence he had heard that in a dream and then seen it again on a dead man’s desk the next morning, could it? Where had the word come from and how had it worked its way into his mind?

Lewis sat down again. No, this had nothing to do with the game. He’d had a strange dream. Maybe he’d seen Arcadia somewhere else recently, that’s how it got in there. Who knows why Miller had had it on his desk anyway? It may have been something from another article, long ago. After all, the desk had been in complete disarray. Miller had never been very organized.

He was reading into things too much. No, this “Arcadia” word wasn’t the key.

And yet Miller had circled it in red. It had to be significant.

He grabbed his laptop and opened up Google Maps. He found US-93, following it north away from Vegas and into the desert. There was really nothing out there, yet Miller had been heading south. He must’ve been coming back from somewhere.

Slowly, he typed the word “Arcadia” into the search bar.

A waypoint appeared. Lewis blinked. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

The first result, located out in the middle of the desert over an hour north of Las Vegas, was a compound labeled with the now-familiar name. There was a link to a website. Cautiously, he clicked it.

The page it directed him to looked like something from an 80s sci-fi movie. And there in the middle of the screen, in glowing metallic blue letters, was digitally inscribed:

Lewis went over the entire site with a fine-toothed comb. There were only three tabs other than the main page: About, Experiences, and Tickets. The first gave a fairly typical public relations spiel:

An oasis in the Mojave Desert, ARCADIA is the future of virtual reality entertainment. Take to the skies, dive beneath the sea, or visit worlds beyond your imagination. With our advanced NEBULA headsets and haptic-feedback suits, you’ll experience thrills and excitement unlike anything else. Whether you’ve come to Las Vegas for business or pleasure, be sure to escape to ARCADIA.

The Experiences page was more illuminating. Lewis saw the names of dozens of virtual reality games. Many bore alliterative titles such as Aerial Adventure , Deep Dive , and Everest Escapade . Visitors could find themselves immersed in the cockpit of a Vought F4U Corsair during a dogfight above the Pacific in 1942, evading deep sea predators at the controls of a submarine in the Mariana Trench, or dangling off the side of the world’s highest mountain with one hand.

There was just one thing Lewis didn’t get. The graphics on these games were good and the photos of Arcadia itself – sleek black corridors lined with neon blue LED lights – made it look like a fair amount of coin had been put into its construction.

So why had it been so hard to find?

It hadn’t come up in the top search results for “virtual reality theme park”, or “Arcadia”, or really anything. Maybe it was just new and they were still working out the kinks, trying a soft rollout. From what he gathered on the website, it had only opened about half a year ago in the summer of 2018.

On the Tickets page, bolded text informed him that Arcadia was all booked up for the next six months, but that they would be opening up advance reservations “soon.” Lewis scratched his chin. Maybe it was already immensely popular in certain circles, and they were purposely trying to keep a low profile to manage demand. He’d have to ask Jenna or some of her gamer friends if they knew of it.

The only clue as to who owned the place was a little strip of text hidden at the very bottom of the page:

Googling them yielded a less flashy corporate site prominently displaying a shot of the main Arcadia building – which looked like a large, black, modernist warehouse – with a gorgeous Mojave Desert sunset in the background. Something about the photo was both breathtaking and eerie at the same time.

The CEO of Andromeda Virtual Systems was a man named Victor Zhao. The photo of him on the About page showed an attractive Asian man in what appeared to be his late thirties, sharply dressed in a gray suit. Lewis couldn’t help but think his smile made him look a tad conceited. Zhao’s bio read that he used to be a game developer with “years of experience” in the industry, but his name didn’t ring any bells to Lewis. He had founded AVS in 2016 with the goal of “creating the next level of immersive entertainment.”

Lewis’s phone rang. It was Jenna.

“Hey, are you on your way over?”

“I’m leaving soon.”

He could sense some uneasiness on her end of the line. “Are you okay?” she asked after a moment.

“Yeah,” he said.

She sounded concerned. “You sure? It’s pretty shocking to lose a friend like that.”

Lewis nodded, not taking his eyes off the screen. “It’s… been an interesting day.”

The face of Victor Zhao smirked at him from cyberspace.

The only sound in the dark corridor was the exhalation of oxygen inside his helmet. Lewis danced the beam down the hallway, watching it illuminate the white floor and overturned medical gurneys. A red exit sign glowed far off in the black distance. His right hand held a shiny, blocky pistol, which he aimed ahead as he advanced forward.

It had been like this for several hours now. Rogers, his other teammate, had been crushed in half by a closing airlock door a little while back. The game’s designers had put significant detail into having his lower half jettisoned into space while still tethered to the upper half by a long knot of intestines. After that, the blood and guts probably should’ve stopped bothering Lewis, but the game kept finding ways of advancing its carnage.

The plot was secondary to the scares, which were secondary to the gore. Right now, he was heading down yet another darkened passageway to retrieve yet another item relevant to the shoestring story, so that he could somehow activate the emergency thrusters of the ship and propel it away from the black hole – or something like that. But all he could think about was the next gruesome spectacle the game had in store. It egged him on, simultaneously terrifying and exciting him with the prospect of horrors greater than those he had already witnessed.

His in-game character finally reached the end of the hall.

No monsters. Yet.

There had been some bullshit explanation about a meteorite that had hit the vessel and leaked an extraterrestrial contaminant, but Lewis felt the writers had come up with it on the fly. The plot was thin, and it was clear that whoever developed this game was only interested in the derelict spacecraft as a violent haunted house they could toy with.