Opening Eyes

Arch opened his eyes with a tremulous sigh. His blurry eyes sighted an army of observers glaring at him with ferocious intensity. He blinked. His mind was filled with confusion. He felt like he was displaced in time.

A month passed by. Recovery was slow. Arch frequently found himself numbed and unable to think with clarity. His eyes often glazed over and the confusion persisted. The investigations didn't stop either. Both medical and criminal.

"What is your name? What is your last memory? Do you know what year it is?" The questions were repetitive and tiring. What traumatized Arch, however, was that he didn't seem to know the correct answer to any of those questions.

His name wasn't Arch. The year was not 2018. His last memory... was hazy.

Another month passed by. Arch's mind had more or less healed. He 'knew' now that his name was Carl, yet he couldn't seem to prefer a name other than Arch. These investogators finally began letting him know some things.

Arch wasn't the only one in this medical predicament. The psychiatrists hypothesized that Arch was an 'in game identity'. A remnant of a fragmented memory. Arch found out that for over three hundred years, he and twelve thousand others had been stashed away inside a virtual reality game.

Arch struggled to understand what that meant. On the urging of the investigators, Arch tried hard to remember his past. However, his memory was scrambled. Even attempting to remember was impossible due to the pain that would emerge in both the mind and the heart.

After a month, Arch was finally discharged into a new, foreign and alien world. Things were familiarly unfamiliar to his mind's eye. His ID labeled his birthdate 318 years prior, but his body looked just like an eighteen year old.

It was in mandated group therapy that Arch met his cohorts. They were all like him. They didn't remember much except their in game names. They were all pestered by the military who wanted to explore the technological applications to aging of this mysterious phenomena. All of them had been pestered by conspiracy theorists, paparazzi and hostile activists trying to prove them frauds.

---

Two years later.

Arch had legally changed his name to Arch. He now ran a book store and café, an anachronistic haunt that attracted hipsters curious to listen to old people's jazz and antique books in a bustling neighborhood of Zone 1. Over the previous two years, Arch had taken the opportunity to travel around this new world. As his old memories began to slowly return, so did the shock at how the world had changed in these 300 years.

The Earth had a single harmonious government. Humans had nations in space. Poverty was an after thought, and life was comfortable. However, wherever he went, he faced hostile gazes.

People didn't want to believe that there were some who didn't age for three hundred years. Who reaped the benefits of the future without the effort. Others hated the previous generations for almost destroying the planet and causing nuclear war. Arch and the twelve thousand like him became unfortunate pawns in the rage politics against the past.

However, life was peaceful now. He had adjusted to his new lifestyle. He could not shed his anachronistic eccentricity, but that made him strange bedfellows with hipsters who found him cool. A lot of his patrons also happened to be other 'Trappists' like himself.

Perhaps, his familiar environment made them feel safe. He knew that it calmed him to see them, to know that he wasn't alone in this bizarre circumstance. Every Monday, this small place would be lit up with all the victims of the virtual kidnapping who lived close enough to the café. Arch would serve them for free as the group struggled to piece together what had happened to them.

In the year 2018, a virtual reality indie game made its presence felt on the scene. Arch and others from this group of Trappists remembered checking out this game. Everything else has since been fuzzy. However, news articles from the time described the event as one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of all time. Over fifty thousand registered users of this indie game, Resolve ZERO, had disappeared overnight while playing the game. Their very existences had vanished from this universe.

People had come up with all kinds of exotic theories about what happened to the 'disappeared'. Some believed that it was gods, others alien abductions, while yet others speculated if they were victims of secret experiments. Either way, this mystery remained unsolved for a whole three hundred years - by when most of those who had experienced the disappearance first hand had already passed away. People began to doubt if this event had even occurred at all. While technology had grown exponentially in the past three hundred years, there was still nothing that could explain this anomaly. All that changed when twelve thousand of those fifty thousand missing suddenly reappeared out of thin air.

However, their reappearance left even more questions and no answers. All of the returnees had lost their memories pertaining to what happened to them during the period of disappearance, with a few having even more severe memory loss issues. Secondly, of the fifty thousand declared affected by the anomaly, only twelve thousand returned. What happened to the remaining? The conspiracies grew quick and fast. Was 'wherever' a place where the kidnapped had to slaughter each other? Did the anomaly just return a group of twelve thousand murderers? Stories about being trapped in virtual environments were as old as the emergence of the medium itself. It wasn't hard to make speculative guesses about what might have happened there.

This was a question that tortured Arch for a long time as well. What happened to the disappeared? Could he have had any responsibility in what happened? Long times in therapy had only begun to heal the scarred tissue. However, others weren't so easily assuaged by not knowing what really happened. A faction of the Trappists formed the Investigative Committee, which set their goal on uncovering everything about Resolve ZERO, including the creators of the game.