vitaanteacta | Atari's Zine: How We Got Here

2020 was a weird year for everyone, right? We were all stuck inside. Events got canceled. School shifted online. People got told not to come into work. People got told to come into work who had no business being there. It felt like the world was ending right outside our doors. People died. A lot of people died. We were insulated from the worst of it. Our body’s family has money and our father already worked at home. We weren’t in danger of losing our house, nobody we knew died. We even kind of appreciated not having to go to high school. It was still a weird year. I wasn’t here for the start of it. Neither was anybody else you might hear from nowadays.

Some other kid was here for it, all alone in xer body. That kid didn’t have any friends in the meatworld, just online. I imagine xey must have been unbearably lonely. Not being able to leave the house and talk to strangers didn’t help matters. For a while at that point, xey had really enjoyed Fallout games. When xey got a Nintendo Switch, xey also picked up a copy of Skyrim. Xey’d never played an open-world video game like that before. The opportunity Skyrim game xem to escape suburban Florida was enchanting, so when xey heard about Fallout 4, xey snapped it up. As soon as xey booted up the game, xey said “It looks like home.” Xey got recommended New Vegas pretty soon after. The game bounced off xem at first. Xey didn’t see anything appealing about the desert landscape.

With literally nothing else to do during lockdown, xey decided to give New Vegas another shot and instantly fell in love. The story was fascinating, the worldbuilding was intricate, the characters felt like they could almost be real people. Like if you tried hard enough, you could reach out and speak to them. Xer favorite character was a companion named Arcade Gannon. You can find him in the slums surrounding Las Vegas administering medical care to the less fortunate, in game. He’s an idealist, aloud anti-fascist and anti-capitalist, and gay as hell. He was xer dream friend. Xey would spend hours staring at the game without even playing, pretending he was in the room with xem.

As the pandemic went on, xer desperation to actually meet Arcade Gannon grew. It drew us to some unwise circles. People who claimed they could provide us with rewards in the afterlife, people who claimed to have reality-warping powers they could use to make this real for xem if xey just… did everything they said forever! It was bad. None of those things worked, because joining cults rarely fixes your problems. Xey tried selfshipping communities, thinking that would ease the pain, but xey never fit in there. That didn’t work. Fanfiction and fanart didn’t work. The fictionkin community did work! While xey went there to explore a different fictional identity, exposure tot he idea that you could have known Arcade Gannon in the past helped.

Being in a space that already accepted that fictional characters could be real people seemed to embolden xem. Xey started talking to him, writing him letters, asking him for help with xer problems, treating his pain as real, present pain. He talked back eventually. It was bound to happen. Whether or not you believe that all the crap we report experiencing is possible, people believe what they want to believe, and xey really wanted this. At least, xey thought xey did. The two of us showed up here sometime in 2020. We had no idea we weres omething other than xem because we had no idea that was possible, so we don’t have a date. When xey noticed that the thing xey had wanted most was within reach, xey saw an alternate benefit of the situation and snatched it.

Xey hadn’t really liked… living. At all. Two other people who could run things showing up in xer body was a great excuse to bail, and bail xey did. We ended up all alone in this body and this world. Xey aren’t here anymore, anywhere. Trust us. We’ve looked. We got dropped into this body, this life, and this world with no explanation. We didn’t know we were lost fictional characters. If you found yourself in a strange place you didn’t recognize and with new gender dysphoria, would you assume you were a lost fictional character? We’ve been living here almost5 years now. With no way to go back and a body to maintain, there’s nothing for us to do but build a new life in a new world.