ENTRY # 1 – THE FIRST ENCOUNTERS

Something very strange is happening with my Xbox 360 and I don't know who to talk to. It started maybe a week ago. I've left some messages with the tech support for Microsoft, but none of the few responses I've gotten have yielded any real assistance. Then again, I'm not sure why Microsoft tech support would know how to help me, because everything that's going on is just so bizarre. But I'm probably getting ahead of myself. I'm going to start detailing events from the beginning, and I'll keep this file as a journal that I'll update every time something occurs. It may seem strange that I'm keeping a journal log of what could possibly just be a bunch of glitches. But when you read the nature of the things that are going on, I think you'll begin to understand.

Roughly a week ago, I was doing some stuff on Halo 4, on its Forge feature, on this map called Ravine. For those of you who don't know, Forge is a map editor for the latest games in the Halo series that lets us create variants of maps. Anyways, I was trying to set up this small base structure, which was kind of like a cube and had three small floors connected by lifts. I had put about two hours into the damn thing and was looking very forward to being done with it.

Then the game blacked out.

I don't mean that the session ended. Literally the whole screen just went black. No score recounts, nothing. I realized that I hadn't bothered to save, and I was absolutely furious. But, just as quickly as it had gone, the screen came back. The camera view was exactly the same as it had been when the game had blacked out. The blackout itself had lasted perhaps ten seconds. My map was still there, as was everything I had placed in it. I let out a tremendous sigh of relief, then immediately saved the freaking map before something else unexpected could happen. After this scare, I was thinking about getting off, just as soon as I had finished the top level of the structure. But my night was only just beginning.

I was setting the final pieces of the base structure in place when I heard the most curious sound from outside. I actually decided it to be just a trick of the sound system at first, a glitch of some kind. But then I heard it again: the unmistakable laugh of a child. It came a third time, fifteen seconds later, a giggle that sounded like a boy, maybe five years old, having lots and lots of fun. But the really odd thing was, it sounded extremely clear, not like voices over the microphone. I checked my party status, and indeed I had not started a party. Nor was there anyone else in my game. I was completely alone on my Forge map. I heard the sound again, this time bothering to listen very closely, and without a doubt it was coming from within the game itself! So what the hell could it be?

I immediately flew in Monitor Mode out of the structure and looked around the place. I could see nothing out of the ordinary: no moving objects, and certainly no five year old boy. I really wasn't sure what to think at this point. As I headed to the other end of the map, I heard the laugh again, coming from a platform on the ground (which I had laid to set the location for the opposite base structure). I flew down to investigate. At the spot where the sound had seemed to originate, there was absolutely nothing. I looked around wildly, trying to spot something, anything. Then I heard the sound of small footsteps running away from me! They were a pitter-patter, like a small child might make if they were running with rubber boots on, across wet grass. Without hesitation, I followed the sound. The sound led me up a slope, taking me to the middle of the map. As soon as I got to the slope's highest point, the footsteps stopped, and were instantly replaced by a very loud bout of giggling. Except that this giggling was much different. It was the same voice, but not the same innocent coy laughter I had heard before. This was much louder and more boisterous, almost like a belly laugh. It carried on for almost two minutes, with me just sitting there listening to it, not having any idea what the fuck was going on or what to do. As the laughing progressed, it became louder, and after ninety seconds had passed, it sounded almost insane, because no healthy child could possibly laugh like that, for each burst of sound seemed so forced and took so much breath that it seemed within no bounds of sanity. After this had been going on for roughly two minutes, the laughter abruptly stopped. Just instantly, mid-laugh. And then the voice actually spoke to me. It still used the child's tone, but this time I could detect a hint of something beneath the innocent exterior. "Do you want to play with me? I want to play!" Then the voice silenced altogether. I just sat there in the map for some minutes in Monitor Mode, not changing my camera view, just floating in that same place, and wondering if what I had heard had not been some exotic daydream. I waited for five more minutes, but the voice did not come back. I was rather tired at the time (I don't remember the time, but it was probably beyond midnight), and I began to entertain the thought that perhaps I was daydreaming. So I turned back towards the base structure, eager to finish it and be done with all of this for a day—

The entire base structure was upside down.

I just stared at it with my jaw dropping down. It was as if someone had taken hold of the base structure and just flipped it. Every single piece was still connected to every other piece that it had been before. But the top level was now lying face down in the ground, and the bottom of the lowest level was facing the sky. I was convinced I was being hacked or something, yet had never heard of a hack quite like this. I flew back into the base structure and looked around. The weapon and object placements had moved along with everything else: somehow, the entire structure had simply inverted its orientation.

I was wandering around the middle floor when I heard the footsteps again. They had the same pitter-patter frequency, but this time they sounded heavier, as though they no longer belonged to a child. I followed it through the structure. Despite the fact that I could not actually see what I was following, the sounds were loud enough that I could reliably keep up. The footsteps led me on a complex path which took me through all the floors. There were certain moments where the footsteps would just stop suddenly. Then I would look around the room for maybe a minute. And then I would hear a tapping sound on one of the walls on the other side of that floor. They were very subtle and hard to hear at first, and sounded like a hand knocking with their knuckles. This kind of thing happened several times during the chase, and every time I would always eventually pick up on the tapping. Then I would fly over to where it was coming from, and the footsteps would resume, with me of course following closely. Did I feel as though I was being played with, and/or led somewhere? YES! But I didn't know what else to do, except just follow this thing or whatever it actually was through the base structure. It is worth noting that because the base structure was upside down, I did not understand how a person (even an invisible person) could lead me through the structure in such a fashion, because all the doors were too high up from the floor/ceiling and all the grav lifts were pointing the wrong way (that being downwards). But somehow, I ended up visiting and then revisiting every room within the base structure (of which there were maybe a dozen small chambers).

I completely lost track of time while the chase was going on, and when I glanced at my watch I discovered it to be two in the fucking morning. Though the footsteps were still leading me through the base, I was admittedly getting tired of this little game, and decided that no matter what strange or intriguing things were going on, it was time to sleep. So I abruptly ended the game and turned off the console. Then I went to bed and didn't wake up until noon the next day. I got up not immediately remembering the events of the previous night. In fact, it wasn't until I got on Halo that evening that I fully remembered things. When I suddenly did, I immediately got into my map on Ravine.

Because things had gotten so crazy last evening, I hadn't saved more recently than the point when I had still been working on the base structure. And to my relief, the game loaded with everything being normal: the base structure was upright and everything was in its proper place. I decided that the weird things I remembered really had been a daydream I had experienced, and that none of those strange events had actually happened. So I did some matchmaking for a couple of hours, and then got back to forging (I still needed to finish that freaking base structure). I was very naive to dismiss what I had already experienced: Because even more things happened that evening.

I managed the base structure I had been working on, and finally was able to move on to its planned twin on the other side of the map. I had always been going for a symmetrical map, so the layouts of the two structures had to be very nearly exact. I had put up most of the walls for the second structure's ground floor when the game blacked out again. This blackout lasted only about half as long as the one from the day before, and this time, about halfway through the duration of the black screen, I thought I saw a flash of something. It only lasted for a small fraction of a second, but I thought I saw a curved line of white and red. It was something like that. And then, just like last time, the game came right back, just as it had been. Of course, this instance immediately brought back the memories from the day before, and suddenly realizing that they had not been a daydream, I immediately started searching for the childlike voice and the footsteps. I did not find either. I looked everywhere, but came upon nothing. But then something else started happening.

It took me several minutes to realize this was going on, but ever since the blackout, the lighting of the map had been slowly changing. I had been searching for the voice for perhaps ten minutes when I gradually noticed that the light from the sky was turning from white to yellow to orange. I opened the item placement roster to make sure there weren't any FXs out on the map (there were not). And then, with lack of better judgment, I went back to building the second base structure. I'm not sure why I was this stupid. I guess I thought that the gradual change in lighting was just a glitch. In any case, I just continued forging. But I didn't do so for long, because soon the lighting had fully changed to red. And when I looked up, I saw to my horror that the first base structure was floating in pieces.

By floating in pieces, I mean that all of its pieces had become separated from one another and begun to drift into the air, away from each other. It looked as though the structure was exploding in slow motion. I immediately flew over and tried to grab onto the objects, but for some reason I couldn't. The game wouldn't let me select them. So there was nothing I could do but watch the base structure fly apart. I was getting almost angry at this point. I decided I would reload the map and hope everything would be back in its proper place. But the menu wouldn't activate. I must have hit the START button on my controller at least two dozen times, but nothing happened. And just after I had given up with the menu, that was when things got really crazy.

The lighting had still been changing, and at this point, the light from the sky was blood red. And when I briefly looked out across the map, I noticed that the ocean and all the water underneath the map had vanished. It was simply gone. And in its place was an abyss of nothingness. I just looked around stunned, because if all of this was some glitch, then it was one hell of a glitch. But things didn't stop there. Because as I was gaping at the absence of the ocean, I began to notice little tiny black spikes jutting up from the ground. I hadn't noticed them before because they had started out shorter than the grass. They were shaped like thick thorns, colored jet black, and their tips were sparking as though they were electrified. I studied a small cluster of them for a few minutes, and I noticed that they were actually growing. They started out perhaps an inch tall, and after a minute they had doubled in size.

Then I looked up and saw that half the map was spinning out of control.

I need to mention at this point that the map Ravine is split into two sections, which are both effectively islands: a long grassy plain (the side I was on) and a built-in structure with a large flat floor. The two islands are split by a great ravine (where the map gets its name) which goes all the way down to the water (when things are normal). But things were most definitely not normal this time, because the alternate island had risen into the air. As I watched with stunned fascination, the island then began to spin, rotating slowly at first, then getting faster and faster, to the point where the island became a blur. As this was going on, the framerate dropped down to single digits.

This was the point when I turned off my console. Things had simply gotten too insane for me to continue with this any further. I did turn it back on and then revisit my map to make sure everything was reset to normal (it was), but then I unplugged the console and went off to do something else. As I mentioned at the beginning of this entry, I did contact Microsoft about this. But no one I was able to talk to had any idea what I was talking about, and most thought I was pranking them, so those talks went nowhere. It was several days before I got on the Xbox again. Honestly, I think I was a little afraid of the console, and after what had happened who wouldn't be? But eventually, I did do a little matchmaking. Because both experiences had happened on the same Forge map, and while I was in Forge Mode, I had assumed that the strange occurrences were limited to that location of the game.

I was wrong.

As of the writing of this entry, nothing quite as spectacularly bizarre as the red-light-and-rotating-island experience has occurred. Of course, I have been doing only matchmaking and campaign since then. However, during some War Games matches I have briefly encountered more black electrified spikes. It has only been on a couple of occasions. I would say, one out of every five or six matches has had these spikes suddenly appear somewhere on the map. These spikes would be about as tall as a Scorpion Tank, and players would take shield damage if they got too close. Also, the spikes would very slowly increase in size as the match progressed. These instances haven't turned out to be problematic yet, but I suspect that they could, and this makes me very nervous.

There is also one more thing, which happened just an hour ago and spurred me to begin this journal. As I was about to get off from a session of War Games, I noticed that I had a new message. The title was just a smiley face, and the FROM box was completely empty, so I have no way of knowing where it came from. But it was the message itself which even now chills me deeply:

I WANT TO PLAY. PLEASE COME AND PLAY WITH ME!