The internet is a graveyard filled with dead websites.

  You know the kind - half-broken forums that are only accessible through the wayback machine or via snapshots, image links that lead to nothing and nowhere, threads that are filled with users who haven’t logged on since the second Bush administration. These once vibrant hubs of conversations, memes, flame wars, and fandoms have slowly morphed into ghost towns.

  DeepFracture was not one of those dead websites.

  By all logic it should have been. The site was ancient. It was positively prehistoric by internet standards. Older than Reddit. Older than Twitch. Older than both Tumblr and 4chan. It was possibly older than many of the users still posting on it. Yet somehow, DeepFracture remained active and alive. Still breathing and still hosting chats and conversations. Still home to a cult fandom that refused to let go of their obsession.

  What united the residents of DeepFracture was their love of a video game series. An old series. A weird one. A unique one. That series began with a game called Fracture.

  Back in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, when 3D graphics were still jagged and melted polygons and boobs were triangular and the phrase “open world” was more buzzword than genre, Fracture: the Fall quietly hit the shelves of local gaming stores.

  That’s how you know it was old because there were still local gaming stores back then.

  Fracture didn’t release with any big marketing campaigns or celebrity endorsements or partnerships with Mountain Dew and Doritos. Instead, the game mostly flew under the radar. It was only through word of mouth and the recommendation of enthusiasts that it became popular.

  It was a strange game for the times; a survival RPG that took place in a post-apocalyptic world. This was long before games like Subnautica and Rust grew popular. Hell, it was before the very first Fallout game had been released. In a way, Fracture was the very first survival RPG and set the tone for the entire genre. It also quickly grew a cult following that rivaled anything that the triple-A games were able to brag about.

  What made Fracture so popular was the fact that the game didn’t have any waypoints or tutorials. There weren’t any glowing breadcrumb trails that guided the player to the next objective. Instead, characters were simply dropped into the unknown. They found themselves in a decaying and decrepit world and given the choice to either help rebuild civilization, or become powerful enough to lay claim to the ruins of the world for themselves.

  The main character of the game was a nameless man with no history or background, letting gamers treat the character like a self-insert. He meandered his way through the cracked and deserted cities of the world, met strangers along the way, had terrifying and sometimes prophetic visions that led him on new adventures, and tried his best to survive in a world that was both mysterious and challenging.

  And if players paid enough attention to their surroundings, and gathered enough clues, and spoke to enough of the NPCS, and solved enough of the mysteries, a story began to emerge. It was the story of the end of the previous world and the birth of a new one. It was the story of a declining civilization and the people who were trying to rebuild. It was a story that only the truly devoted among the fan base got the chance to experience since it required people to piece together scraps of information as well as whispers and rumors. The game didn’t hold hands and didn’t explain anything, it just left players to sink in the depths of its storytelling. If players wanted to learn about the deeper lore of the game, they needed to work for it.

  That was its genius.

  Fracture: the Fall was released at a time when video games were slowly being embraced by the mainstream. But instead of doing what Nintendo and Microsoft did - which was to sprint towards becoming more “accessible” to the average consumer - Fracture ran the other way. Instead of tutorials, the game offered challenges. Instead of accessibility, the game provided mystery. Instead of rewards, the game gave consequences.

  This was exactly why it became such a cult hit. Fracture: the Fall was both a critical and commercial success, and what followed was a cascade of new titles from the developer over the next few years, each wildly different from the last and yet somehow still stitched into the same broken and mysterious world.

  Tech Reign was a brutal tactical FPS soaked in guns and explosions and adrenaline. It was a love letter to 80s action movies and Hong Kong choreography.

  Next up was Emberveil, a fantasy RPG packed with spells and rituals and whispered prophecies. It was a game where mortals could become gods and gods could be killed by the willing.

  Frontiers threw players into a survivalist nightmare where they could skin beasts with bone daggers in the morning and die from radiation poisoning by nightfall.

  Null Protocol was a pure cyberpunk dystopian hellhole filled with neural implants, faceless mega-corporations, hackable everything, and cities that bled neon.

  Each game in the series peeled back a new layer of what fans eventually dubbed the Fracture-verse. It was a post-apocalyptic world that served as the shared backdrop for each title. Each game added another clue to what had happened in the world to cause all the chaos and decay. And each game contradicted the last.

  Events in one game would often be rewritten or ignored entirely in the next. Key locations showed up looking entirely different. Characters had wildly different fates or didn’t appear at all in the next game. Some fans argued that all the games took place in a single, fractured timeline that had been distorted by time loops or memory loss or dimensional decay. Others posited the theory that the games took place in alternate versions of the same world, each one shaped by the different choices made by the player.

  In Emberveil, magic existed and was treated as a divine curse that had been bestowed upon humanity by godlike beings known as “The Architects.” The collapse of civilization was blamed on unchecked spellcraft and the hubris of man.

  This was entirely different from what happened in Tech Reign which claimed that the end of civilization had been caused by vicious machines rebelling against their makers. People hid in cities dotted across the land. Whenever asked, the NPCs all told the same story: everything had been torn to shreds by a rogue AI that wanted nothing more than to kill off humanity.

  Which was a completely different story from what happened in Frontiers which hinted at something alien being the cause of the apocalypse. The game was filled with subtle and disturbing suggestions that humanity’s collapse had come about because of an entity from outside the world.

  The story changed once again with Null Protocol which pointed the finger of the apocalypse at an ancient device buried deep beneath the planet’s crust; a relic from a previous civilization that had broken something fundamental in the world.

  The deeper and more intricate the games became, the less they explained.

  Severance Systems, the studio behind the games, rarely if ever spoke to gaming journalists. They didn’t give interviews or drop dev diaries. They didn’t produce a lore bible for external consumption, nor drop an official timeline. They didn’t clarify a damn thing about the games they published. Instead, they offered fans just enough lore to believe there was a larger story out there. Something that was coherent and consistent and worth spending hours to decode. Something waiting to be uncovered. Then they let the community do the rest.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  When DeepFracture was launched, it was originally envisioned as a simple fan forum. The creators saw it as a place where fans could trade tips, swap strategies and tactics for dungeon runs, discuss character builds, and post screenshots of the game. But the website slowly evolved beyond that to become something much more. It evolved into the digital monastery for the priesthood; a sacred meeting spot for the obsessives and the archivists and the theorists.

  Fans who made DeepFracture their home didn’t want to simply play the games. They wanted to solve them. They sought out obscure item descriptions, data-mined game patches, built sprawling lore documents that rivaled doctoral dissertations in both size and intricacy. One popular thread on the forum mapped out a ruined freeway in Tech Reign and argued that it had the same general features as a mountain pass in Emberveil.

  That thread spawned the theory of shifting timelines and parallel realities. Another user posited a unified field theory to explain how floating citadels found in Tech Reign were powered by magic in a world where magic was subtle and understated.

  DeepFracture wasn’t a site for the average fan. It was a haven for a cult of scholars and researchers.

  Then came Syndicate’s Wake.

  When Severance Systems released an MMO set in the Fracture-verse, it took the community by storm. It was one of the earliest MMOs to ever be launched, way before WoW and Star Wars Galaxies and Runescape. And much like all early mMO launches, it was buggy as hell. It was laggy. It was busted. Entire days went by where quest givers didn’t spawn and cities failed to render. The servers groaned under the weight of the player base. Yet despite all that, for fans and scholars of DeepFracture, Syndicate’s Wake was the crowning achievement in the Fracture-verse.

  For the first time ever, players were no longer confined to a single region in the world. It had opened up. There were eight starting zones in the game, each obeying a different set of rules and reality. In the Obsidian Wastes, guns melted in your hand unless they’d first been wrapped in sigil tape. In the Rootwilds, spells only worked when sung in perfect musical pitch. In the Neon Verge, gravity only worked on the weekdays.

  Syndicate’s Wake was chaotic. It was inconsistent. And it was glorious.

  There were players who ignored the missions and quests and grinding, choosing instead to spend their time delving into the deeper lore of the game. A clan formed on one of the servers whose entire reason for being was to follow around a mysterious crow that only appeared during solar eclipses. Other fans obsessed over tracking a tree that changed location based on server latency. Some studied item descriptions the same way that a priesthood might study scripture. There was a feeling that soaked into the fanbase that everything in the game meant something. Even the bugs. Especially the bugs.

  Then, in 2012, it all came crashing down.

  Severance Systems had been working on a new game called Shards of Time. They boasted that it would be the next big leap forward in the Fracture-verse. The game was marketed as a VR-based immersive sim that promised to blend everything that fans loved of the series into one breathtaking, genre-defying experience: spells, guns, survival, hacking, lore. All of it would be woven into a single, seamless world.

  The hype surrounding the game rose to epic proportions. Fans were ravenous for information. Severance Systems called it their most ambitious project to date, and claimed that it was the culmination of all their hard work in the Fracture-verse.

  But that ambition didn’t come cheap. The studio was forced to take out loans and court new investors in an effort to keep the project afloat. Years passed with no release date on the horizon. Investors and shareholders, wanting a quick return on their buck, pressured Severance Systems to release the game early. They were forced to bend to outside influence and released Shards of Time to early access before that was even a thing in the wider video game world. What followed was a train wreck.

  Shards was barely playable. Bugs littered the game. Save files corrupted at random. Dialogue trees spiraled and looped endlessly. Enemies spawned mid-conversation. And the VR peripherals packaged with the game? What was supposed to be a revolutionary piece of new technology instead provided the final nail in the coffin.

  No matter how loyal or rabid a fanbase is, it’s hard to sell them on a game when the fanbase can’t stay in the headsets for longer than twenty minutes without being forced to reach for a trash can.

  What was supposed to mark the zenith of the franchise, instead turned into a cautionary tale for video game developers everywhere.

  Severance Systems went quiet. Patches slowed down. The forums turned toxic, becoming part warzone and part postmortem on the entire franchise. Loyalists argued with critics. Fans tried making sense of how everything had fallen apart so quickly.

  Months after the disastrous early release of Shards, Severance Systems filed for bankruptcy.

  They didn’t give out a heartfelt goodbye or a farewell post apology to the fans. Hell, many of the devs who had worked on the series weren’t even told about the bankruptcy, instead finding out alongside the fans. All anyone was given was a generic press release about “restructuring,” followed by a deafening silence.

  The Fracture IP was sold off to a mega-publisher, which stoked some minor excitement in the fanbase. Vague promises of a reboot floated around for a while but never emerged, and the entire IP was quietly shelved. Updates stopped. Servers shuttered. Gaming audiences slowly drifted away to the next big thing. But the core fandom survived. And DeepFracture lived on.

  Threads kept popping up. Lore posts still ran for dozens of pages. Fanfiction was written that crossed genres and timelines. Ancient memes were dusted off and posted. The fan-made Master Timeline, a ridiculous and beautiful monstrosity of dates, events and contradictions, was pinned to the front page and continuously updated.

  Then, at 3:17 EST on a random Tuesday, a new thread appeared in the General Discussions Board.

  ***

  USER: Z3ke

  THREAD: Weird Question

  Hey guys, got a bit of a weird question here. Hoping y’all can help me out with it. If you woke up one day to find yourself suddenly transported into the game, what would you do first?

  Like…really think about it. No HUD. No save menu. No cash or weapons or anything. You just wake up one day to find yourself in the game world.

  Just a thought experiment.

  Would you try and find a specific faction to help you out? Would you head to a safe zone or something? Are there safe zones? Is there an economic exploit that you’d…exploit?

  Asking for a friend.

  ***

  For the first hour of the post’s existence, it went relatively unnoticed. It received a handful of views but no replies. Then, someone finally bit.

  GravemindLegacy was one of DeepFracture’s longest-serving moderators. He was a deep lore scholar and a walking contradiction. He provided both in-depth analysis and shitposting in equal measures. If you needed to know which version of the Aurium Codex was considered canon, he could tell you. If you needed obscure patch note details from Null Protocol v. 1.4, he was who you turned to. If you needed old memes that had long since fallen by the wayside, he was who posted them.

  He dropped into the thread the same way that he did everything: dry, to the point, and expecting better from everyone around.

  ***

  GravemindLegacy (MOD)

  You need to be more specific with your questions.

  Are we talking about pre-fall, mid-Fall, post-Rise? What game are we being dropped into? What genre? Are we in an RTS or a Sim or a tactical game?

  Regions matter too. The Southern Reaches have a completely different lore set than the Metro Districts.

  This question pops up on here a few times a month, and it’s always the same. People never give enough details to get a proper answer. If you’re gonna theorycraft, then you gotta theorycraft.

  Give us something to work with.

  ***

  Gravemind was the match that set the thread on fire. Wherever he posted, other users swarmed in later like moths to a flame, desperate to either worship him or post in any thread that he graced with his presence.

  At first, the posts were harmless enough. A few users jumped in with jokes and half-serious speculation. A few comments straddled the line between meme and poorly-written manifesto. One user posted an old meme from Frontiers which was a screenshot of the game’s notoriously broken barter system with a caption that read: “Waking up in a Reclaimer Camp with 3 rusty spoons and a dream.”

  That small meme was upvoted like crazy and from there, the thread completely imploded. What had begun as a simple hypothetical of “what would you do if you woke up in the Fracture-verse” turned into a digital bar fight.

  Users split into camps almost immediately. Some argued that Frontiers was clearly the best choice of game to be dropped into since it was the purest version of the lore, completely untouched by most of the retcons that came from Syndicate’s Wake. This, of course, angered a subset of fans who claimed that Syndicate’s didn’t “retcon” anything since all the games took place in parallel realities.

  This threw more fuel on the fire. A chunk of posters insisted that each game represented an alternate branch of the same universe, while others argued that parallel realities was never confirmed as canon.

  Then the trolls came in to work their particular magic on the thread. They needled both sides with surgical, passive-aggressive comments. They questioned everyone’s lore credentials and mocked people for misremembering patch notes. Whenever one side made a coherent argument, the trolls would post obscure quotes from cut content that argued the complete opposite.

  Before long, the thread had gone completely feral. Walls of text were dropped like grenades. Two users began a side argument about whether Null Protocol and its cybernetics was better than Emberveil and its magitech. That argument spun off into its own mini-war across five pages.

  Moderators showed up and handed out a couple warnings before eventually deciding to stop trying. Posts got deleted. Angrily-typed replies were slathered across the thread. Someone dug up old screenshots from the first ever game to “prove a point to that ignorant jackass.” And things spiraled from there.

  By the time the post had hit the six-hour mark, the thread was no longer about timelines or eras or games or anything related to the original question. It was pure anger and heat and noise. And somewhere in the middle of that storm, the original poster had gone silent, seemingly unaware of the chaos he had unleashed.

  Z3ke hadn’t replied once since the thread began. Most users had forgotten that he’d originally even started it. The rest assumed that he simply rage-quit or ghosted like so many others before him who never got answers to their theoretical questions.

  Then, hours later, as the dust was starting to settle and the mods had locked one of the offshoot threads, Z3ke came back. He didn’t bring memes. He didn’t bring jokes or clarifications. He brought a story.