Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-26285493-20150526213549

I have done a spell check and I have had multiple others spell check this story as well, but it seems like it not up to standards with your rules and I would like feedback on why this story is not liked by your staff. Thank you in advance.

Why did you let us die…

Hello my name is Shawn Cooper, I am having my therapist type this document, why? I'm currently in therapy because of what happened me while playing a certain game, Half life two. Before any of the events happened, My family and I were living in Detroit, Michigan. My family consisted of my mother, my father, my sister and me. If you live in the United States you may know that Detroit is a scary city to begin with. There are very few places in Detroit that are decent places to live. Sadly my family did not get the luxury of living a decent place. We lived in scary part Detroit where the crime rate was high.

August/14/2007 Five days before the incident, while I was at school, I overheard that there were break ins in the area near where I lived and with the break in’s came with murders as well. The break ins did not surprise me, that was a common thing with Detroit anyway. But the murders did scare me. I know there were murders in Detroit, but from what I overheard this was becoming more common with the break in’s. I was worried about the news I heard, but I put that in the back of my mind. Later that day, still during school, I was talking with my friend David during history class because I did not care about the class. We were talking jumping from topic to topic. Then we got to the news topic that I was dreading. He had more details about the murders because his dad is a cop. He told me the details he knew from his dad talking over the phone. He started to tell me that the murder took pleasure in killing his victims. He had only began to talk about it and I stopped him in mid sentence and told him to please stop talking about it. Once I got back to my house and my parents got home from work as well, I told them about the disturbing crimes that have been recently going on. They told me that they already knew about the crimes and my father took some precautions with the limited amount of money we had. He bought extra locks for the windows and front and back door alarms, so if the doors were opened without a code lock, it would set off an alarm. This did comfort me a bit, but did not take away a paranoid feeling that this would not stop a someone that really wanted to get in.

August/19/2007 I was at home that Sunday night. I was sitting in my room and was playing the first half life game with laughable 1998 graphics. It was around two in the morning. I was getting tired, but I was so close to killing the final boss, “Nihilanth” or however you pronounce that weird boss name. I was getting teleported to different rooms from that stupid boss. I died, while trying to kill the “Gargantua” before you get to actually attack “Nihilanth”, when I died, I yelled “Shit”. As I yelled that I heard a windows glass break and the lock being messed with. I fell dead silent and walked as quietly as possible to grab my baseball bat and quickly went to tell my parents that someone is trying to break in. As I was sneaking past the staircase I looked down the staircase and saw nothing, it must have been a window downstairs near the backdoor because I could see some of the windows on the front of the house. I heard more of the windows glass being broken and the lock messed with, like whoever was trying to break in was like a child messing around with a toy. I stared down the stairs for a few moments and then as a quickly as possible got to my parents room opened and closed the door as quietly as possible. I shook my parents awake and told them to be quiet. I told them that someone is trying to break in. My mother picked up her phone and dialed 911, I was relieved that I was able to get this under control before something bad happened. Then I heard the lock snap like someone got bolt cutters and cut the window lock furiously. I told my parents that I was going to wake up my sister. I went out into the hallway again and heard that the window was being opened and as I was quietly walking I heard rustling of things downstairs. I quickly got to my sister’s room and woke her up, she was angry that I woke her up until she heard the rustling of silverware downstairs and saw the scared look on my face. She quickly realized that she needed to get to our parents. Me and her were about to our parents room when we saw a dark figure walking up the stairs and we scrambled to get back to her room. I was peering around the corner of my sister's door and saw the dark figure go into my room. I was glad that I was not in there. I heard it hit something, it sounded like my monitor which still had the half life game paused. I realized that it did this and it made me angry and I wanted to kick its ass myself, but I know I could not do it alone. It walked out of my room and I got a better view of who it was, it was man dressed in all black and I did not notice before that he had a knife in his hand. I stared at the knife for a moment while he walked toward my parents room. I wanted to yell to warn my parents, but I could not. I felt like my mouth was taped shut. I knew if I did he would come and attack my sister and me. I told my sister that we need to use her sheets to climb down from her room. As we were making her sheets into a strong enough rope, I heard a ear piercing scream, it was my mother. My sister yelled “MOM”. I told her that there's nothing we could do. My sister was in tears at this point. I tied the rope around my sister's bed post and threw it out the window and started to climb down when I heard my father yell “GET THE HELL AWAY FROM ME YOU PSC…” I was crying at this point while climbing down the rope. Through the tears I told my sister that she needed to climb down now. As she was about to climb down, two hands pulled her back in and I heard her screaming. I jumped off the rope and ran as fast as I could, screaming help. The cops were speeding down our street as I was getting to the street in front of our house. When the cops got there, the killer was gone and all that was left was my dead family. From what the cops told me, there was nothing stolen from the house, but as you may know now. My family was stolen from me, there lives gone. All the cops said to me, about my family was that I should not see it. I was traumatized from that event. I kept repeating the same phrase to myself that night was that “I could have done something or at least died with them”.

November/6/2007 It has been about two months since the event. I was going through therapy from the event. My grades were slipping in school. I went into an extreme depression and started doing drugs. Now I have PTSD or post traumatic stress disorder from the event. I often wake up from night terrors because of the event. I now live with my grandparents in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The reason I am continuing this story is because of a modified version of Half Life Two. I was sitting at home and was trying to get my mind off school. Since I did not have much money at the time, I was torrenting a lot of the games. I was thinking about what games series I had not completed yet, and then a thought popped into my head, the half life series. I started looking around the internet for a torrent of the half life two. I kept searching for half life two torrents, but any I found were full of viruses and malware. But luck was on my side, or so I thought. I found a website that had the torrent, but I should have suspected something was wrong with this website. The website was very bland, it had a white background with only links to the torrents. The website had torrents for PC games only from what I saw. Why would the website be sketchy? The logo of the website was just a face with a evil grin like the face had something in mind to put upon you. You would think its just a face, who cares? Well that's what I thought too. I clicked on the link to the half life 2 torrent, the torrent page had just the download to it, nothing else. But the name of the download struck me as odd. The name of the download was as follows “HalfLife2w1h6y3d0i7d”. I did not think anything of it at the time when I was downloading it, but when I looked at it more closely after it was done downloading and I had to install it. Something in my mind just clicked and I noticed if you take the numbers out after Half Life 2, it says “why did”. I found this odd but I did not care and wanted to get the thrill of playing the game. When I started up the game it did look normal and I got to the main screen, and I started a new a game. Since I never played the game before I did not know what to expect. When the game started, it showed the Half Life 2 logo and Gman was standing in front of me. He did not say a word for several seconds and I thought the game was lagging or something, until he tired to say something, but it sounded broken. “W...h..y….di..d…...yo.u”. I thought the sound file was corrupted or something but shrugged it off because it is a torrent and there maybe a few files that may not work. So I would get the full game experience, I looked up the Gman cut scene and heard was suppose to be said. I thought back to what Gman tried to say to me and it did not line up with the actual dialogue. I thought that maybe it was just a fluke and the game would continue on normally. But just to compare the dialogue from the torrent to the actual dialogue I kept a notepad file open with what I heard from the odd dialogue and the actual dialogue. I continued on and found that the game was running normally. But when I got rescued by a girl whom I found out the name of later, “Alyx”. I was taken off guard by her angry expression that she was making at me. She did not say a word other then follow me to the elevator. This did not seem right. So I looked the first cut scene with Alyx and it was completely different from what I saw. The torrented version I was playing was tampered with for sure, but I still wanted to play the game even if the cut scenes were different. I know that they are really not cut scenes but it's the best way to describe them. I continued playing the game and found nothing else wrong until I reached black mesa east. When I entered the airlock to black mesa east. The women whom I later learned her name (Mossman), was talking to Gordon with her normal dialogue, but when I exited the airlock and Gordon and her started to walk toward the door. Mossman should have been silent until her and Gordon reached the door to the next room, but the game dropped in frames for a few seconds and in that time she tried to say “Le...t...us…….d..i...e”. About two seconds after she said that the game returned to the normal amount of frames. Once again I took note of what she said in the notepad file. I look at both pieces of dialogue and the dialogue combined made since “ “Why did you let us die”. I sat back in a state of shock. This text was bring back memories of the incident. I started tearing up and had to save the game and walk away from the computer. My “PTSD” came back and I was laying in my bed, staring at the ceiling and crying. Once I collected myself again, I laid there thinking, why do the characters say that, I don’t get it.

November/7/2007 I thought about the combined dialogue again and it made me want to uninstall the torrent entirely, but I wanted to complete half life two. I started the game back up and started playing again from where I left off. Gordon and Mossman were walking toward the elevator and the dialogue was normal and I was relieved. I could not take a lot more of this even if it was just broken dialogue. The bad memories would drive me to insanity. But when Gordon and Mossman entered the elevator, she was about to say something but then just stopped. As Gordon and Mossman went down the elevator, she just stared at Gordon with a ashamed look on her face. Her look made me feel like guilty like I did something wrong. I tried not to think about it for now. I did not want to have another break down before I even started playing again. I looked up the what she should have said to see what I missed. It did strike me as odd that there was no broken dialogue, it was just silent. When Gordon and Mossman got to the bottom floor and Gordon got introduced to Eli or Alyx’s father, his dialogue seemed to be normal, after he told me I could have a look around, I noticed the family picture and walked over to it which caused more dialogue start, but with this dialogue before he finished his sentence the game started to lag again and I said “not this bullshit again”. He tried to say something but of course the dialogue was broken again,“Wh.y…..d..id……..you..leave”. At this point I was seriously considering uninstalling the game and just to watch videos, but I forced myself to keep going. I recorded the note and kept playing. The game was normal for a bit. When I got to Ravenholm and encountered a crazy priest called father Grigori. I was a bit unnerved by him from how he acted, but it seemed to be apart of the actual game. But when I encountered him again and he wanted to give me a shotgun, his dialogue was normal but with a bit of a sad tone to it. I thought nothing of this at the time thinking that was he not wanting to kill more zombies that were people. I continued on through the game and was enjoying the game finally because there were no weird things happening. I was in nova prospekt and meet up with Alyx, once we got into the first control room and she was searching for her fathers location in the prison. When she started finding innocent people and then found her father and sent him to another control room, she turned around and looked at Gordon with an extremely pissed look and only said this “you caused this”. I was confused, what did I cause? I put it as another note in the notepad file and was beginning to become afraid that more of these messages would pop up and bring back the bad memories which I have tried so hard to suppress. To make sure I did not miss anything I checked another video and went back and played. The game continued normally, I was surprised when I got to the part when Alyx got to the next control room to talk to her father and nothing was off. No weird dialogue, nothing. When I got to the teleport chamber with Alyx and Mossman at this point, the game was normal up until Mossman and Eli were about to teleport. Right before they teleported Eli said “you could have done more”. Like the last message, I did not understand it at the time. I was confused by the message and just type the note down on the notepad file like I had done before. I tried to go back to the game but I just could not, I had this urge to read the message and try to find out what they meant. Curiously got the best of me and wish it did not. I looked over the last three messages, I sat there and read “why did you leave, you caused this, you could have done more”. I thought about it and thought that they were saying to Gordon about when he left and was put into this weird sleep when he agreed to work for Gman, sorry for spoilers. The thought of the messages being said, crept into my mind and I tried to shake it off and because that's what I thought last time when I read the messages previously. I really do not want to have another break down. I was becoming tired and went to bed. I sat there staring at the ceiling and tiring to fall asleep and the messages were going through my mind and I did not understand why this was happening. I tried to think that the torrent was a hack and was to scare the player. I tried to convince myself of that, but I could not.

November/8/2007 Today I was hoping that the game would not have anymore of this weird stuff. I started from Kleiner’s lab and after teleporting from nova prospekt. Nothing odd was happening for a long time when I was going through the ruins of city seventeen. When I finally got to citadel or the combines main base if you want to say that. I got to the top and was destroying the dark matter reactor. As I shot the last energy ball into the dark matter reactor, and it started to break down and explode. As it was about to explode, Gman appears and stops time like the game normally would do. Gman started to speak about everything Gordon did throughout the game like normal. When he seemed to be done talking about that, he said only this, “why did you let us die”. His speech was clear here and did not sound broken like the other messages. Then the screen cut to black and the credits started to roll. I was on the verge of another break down because that message, that message made me feel guilty for letting my family die and not trying to help. I ran away like a scared child and did not care what happened to anyone but me when I got out of my house. I was crying, angry and wanted so answers. So I went back to the website of the torrent and clicked on the link. All it did was bring me to a 404 error page and said “why did you let us die”. I tried multiple times to refresh the page to see if it would load, but no luck. I refused to let this stop me from getting answers. I jumped onto my grandparents laptop, and lucky enough for me the page loaded but this time and there was no download link, their was just the author's name, “David”. That is all it said. I did not want to believe that my friend made this hack of half life two. It had to be someone else.

November/9/2007 When I got to home today, I jumped onto my computer and went onto Facebook where I still had some type of communication with my friend David. It showed that he was not on, but it did not show for how long. He did send me a message on November sixth 2007, which was the same day that I started to play the torrent of half life two. The message said “Hey Shawn I finally was able to make a torrent half life two and I want you to try it out, also there is a surprise at the end of the game for you” and it had a link to it. I clicked on the link and it was the same page, which I had downloaded the torrent from. It was David who made the torrent, but why did he do this. I messaged him hoping he would see the message soon. “why did you make the hack and why the fuck would you put those messages in the game”. Less than a minute later he appeared to be online and was typing a message to me. I sat there in shock and awe that he was typing to me only minute or two after I sent him a message. The message said “The reason I did do that is because I wanted you to know that I would have stayed with my family trying to protect them”. After he sent that message he went offline again. I could not believe that my friend would do something like that. I got up and was about to go into another breakdown. I can not handle this hell anymore. I walked over to my grandfather's gun cabinet and pulled out his handgun, loaded a clip with one bullet in it and was ready to end this hell I was going through. I was thinking of the mistakes I had made when that night occurred, I could have done more. I was about to pull the trigger when my grandmother stopped me, I went into another breakdown. My grandmother tried to help me that night but it did not help. Only a day later, my grandmother put me into therapy again. All I can say now about the event is “why did I let them die”. 