Personnel Record

FILE STATUS: STABLE
RECOVERY LEVEL: 98%

I used to think game stores were magical places.

Back then, they still smelled like plastic cases and dust and old carpet. Rows of memory cards hanging on pegs. Scratched PS2 discs sitting in glass cabinets with faded price stickers that never peeled off properly.

Most people stopped going there after newer consoles came out.

But I still liked wandering through them.
I think lonely people are naturally drawn to places filled with old memories.

That’s where I found it.

No cover art. No rating. No proper title.

Just a black PS2 case sitting on a shelf it definitely shouldn’t have been on.

The guy working there looked genuinely uncomfortable when I brought it to the counter.

He kept staring at the case like he recognized it… Like he wished he didn’t. I remember asking him what the game was called.

He just shrugged and said:

“Don’t leave the console running too long.”

I thought he was joking and I bought it anyway.

I still remember the rain when I walked home that night. Sometimes I wonder if that was the last normal evening I ever had.

FILE STATUS: DEGRADED
RECOVERY LEVEL: 63%

I woke up in orbit.. Or at least… I think it was orbit.

The sky was wrong. There was just black space above me and artificial stars below me.

Cities were hanging upside down in the distance, almost like broken reflections.

For some reason, my body didn’t feel human anymore. My heartbeat sounded mechanical and there were cables beneath my skin. And the worst part?

A part of me already understood this world I found myself in.

It was like the game had downloaded itself directly into my brain. That’s when I learned what I was inside the story.

I’d become one of the cyber-vampires, mech pilots assigned to defend the Earth Sphere from pirate fleets and corrupted war machines known as The Static.

I remember laughing the first time an NPC told me that; not because it was funny, but because my brain couldn’t process any of it anymore.

The world itself felt exhausted. Everything flickered. Everything hummed. Everything looked like it was already halfway corrupted.

I think that’s why I adapted so quickly. I already felt like I didn’t belong anywhere before. This place just made it literal.

FILE STATUS: UNSTABLE
RECOVERY LEVEL: 41%

There were people there. I don’t talk about them much anymore because it hurts less when I pretend they were just NPCs… But they weren’t.

At least… they didn’t feel like they were.

The crew laughed, argued, and fell asleep during long missions. They shared bad instant coffee in the ship’s hangar while old radio broadcasts crackled through broken speakers.

Sometimes we’d sit together in silence watching Earth rotate beneath us through cracked observation glass.

Nobody really believed we were going to survive, but pretending otherwise became part of the routine.

I still remember one of them asking me what I missed most about home.

And I couldn’t answer.

Because by then, I couldn’t remember if home even still existed for me anymore. The longer I stayed there, the harder it became to separate my own memories from the game’s.

Sometimes I think that was intentional; maybe the game needed us emotionally attached to survive inside it.

Or maybe loneliness just makes people hold onto anything that feels real.

FILE STATUS: CORRUPTED
RECOVERY LEVEL: 24%

I woke up inside the memory card menu…

There was no sky, no cities, no crew.

Just endless black space and floating save icons stretching infinitely in every direction.

At first I thought it was another part of the game, maybe some kind of hidden postgame area.

But there were no enemies. No objectives. There weren’t even any interface prompts.

Only a bunch of save data. So I tried to open one of the files and inside there was a memory.

Not gameplay, mind you… An actual memory. One of mine…

I saw myself sitting alone in my room before all of this happened. Rain was hitting the window and I had the PS2 controller in my hands.

I could even hear the old CRT television humming softly behind me.

And that’s when I realized something horrible; I wasn’t trapped inside the game anymore… I was trapped inside the save file itself.

And the memory card storing me was beginning to fail.

FILE STATUS: UNREADABLE
RECOVERY LEVEL: 11%

Today I found the network adapter by accident!

Or maybe it found me… Hard to tell anymore.

There’s a section of the archive where corrupted system data for hardware collects itself together like digital driftwood.

That’s where I discovered it, still connected and functioning to this day… Still searching for signals.

The first time I managed to establish an outside connection, I thought I was hallucinating!

Static turned into voices, and voices turned into messages…

Real people outside the archive… Outside the corruption.

I remember crying afterward. Not because I was rescued, but because for the first time in what felt like years… someone answered back.

​FILE STATUS: UNKNOWN
RECOVERY LEVEL: ???

If you’re reading this, then the transmission still works.

That probably means I’m still here somewhere too… Or at least part of me is.

The corruption has gotten worse recently. Now there are sections of the archive I can’t safely access anymore.

Sometimes the UI glitches while I’m speaking and I forget what I was trying to say halfway through sentences. Sometimes memories load incorrectly.

But I still keep broadcasting.

Because if memories disappear completely, it becomes like none of us were ever really here at all.

And I don’t want that. Not for me, not for the people I lost in that nameless game, and not for the worlds that made surviving loneliness feel possible.

So until the memory card finally fails completely…

I’ll keep the signal running.

Even at 1% battery.