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[Re] What? My “Information Club” is Actually an All-Knowing Secret Society?
Genre : Apocalypse, Fantasy, Superpower, Action
Tag : Misunderstanding, Secret Organization, World-Freezing, Super power
Chapter 1.1 : The Architect's Blueprint
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[Location: Arlen’s Apartment, West Jakarta]
[Time: Day - 30 / 11:45 PM]
[Temperature: 35°C]
The heat of the apartment felt like a weight pressing down on Arlen’s shoulders. A bead of sweat traced a path down his spine, soaking into the frayed fabric of his t-shirt. Above him, a dusty ceiling fan spun with a rhythmic squeak, just pushing the humid air in circles.
The only light in the messy room came from the blue glow of his monitor.
Arlen sat slouched in his creaky office chair, his eyes bloodshot from hours of screen time. His stomach let out a rumble.
Arlen was a twenty-four-year-old starving writer with a bank account balance in the single digits. He clung to a part-time job scrubbing mud off SUVs at a local car wash. He was a man drowning in the reality of urban poverty.
But inside the glowing boundary of his computer, he operated as a Omniscient Architect.
Arlen cracked his knuckles, the pops echoing in the quiet room. He leaned forward, scanning the directory window on his desktop.
The folder bore a simple title: [The_Frozen_Era_Lore_Bible].
It stood as a masterpiece of world-building. The directory weighed in at nearly eight hundred megabytes. For a folder containing mostly text, and low res images, that size was big.
Over the past four years, driven by a desire to make his thriller as realistic as possible, Arlen had searched the deepest corners of the internet. He downloaded hundreds of complex scientific papers. The folder held MIT dissertations on thermodynamics, geological surveys, declassified topographical maps, and peer-reviewed journals detailing cellular mutation.
Arlen stitched his narrative directly into the fabric of this real-world data. He connected the science of atmospheric silicate scrubbing with his fictional "Black Snow." He masked his imaginary "Breath Technique" power system behind medical research concerning mitochondrial overdrive. He intertwined what the real facts with his apocalyptic lies.
"Four years," Arlen muttered, his voice a whisper in the dark.
"Four years of random mumbling and fiction research. I completed all of this bullshit!!"
He closed the folder, his expression darkening into a frown.
He had finished the last draft of his novel, The Frozen Era, four months ago. It was a brutal survival thriller that he believed was his life's masterpiece. But reality was a cruel market. Who would read a depressing sci-fi novel written by a nobody? Traditional publishers ignored him. Self-publishing required a budget he did not possess.
"Marketing costs money. Ads cost money," Arlen realized during a hungry night four years ago when the initial concept was born.
And that night too, he smirked. Showing eyes that found a solution for this problem.
"What about human nature itself?paranoid? curiosity? The desperate need to uncover a global conspiracy? That is free."
That was the moment 'The Architect' was born.
Arlen shifted his gaze to his laptop. A terminal window remained open, running an encrypted forum he hosted on a proxy server. He named it the Information Club.
He hadn't marketed his novel as a book. He marketed his lore as a classified government warning. For four years, while writing his manuscript, Arlen dropped riddles across obscure forums on the internet. He threw out breadcrumbs that led paranoid sleuths directly to his server.
For the first year, it was a brutal grind. But Arlen stayed in character, playing the role of a detached whistleblower predicting a global freeze. He fed them the pseudoscience from his lore folder, releasing riddles requiring knowledge of chemistry, orbital mechanics, and cryptography to solve.
Slowly, the algorithm smiled upon him. A few dedicated individuals cracked his hardest puzzles. When they decoded the riddles, they found a scientific PDFs and the faked research data Arlen had attached to them. The lore proved so detailed, anchored in actual physics and genetic theory, that they ceased viewing it as fiction. They saw it as the truth.
Because the selection process proved difficult, only the most fanatical individuals survived the filter. After four years of mental investment, the Information Club mutated from an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) into a devoted inner circle.
Currently, twenty-five members were online.
Arlen pulled up the primary chat window. It was time to initiate the final phase of his marketing campaign. In exactly thirty days, he planned to drop the pre-order link to his novel, reveal the grand curtain, and convert these conspiracy theorists into his first paying customers so he could afford to eat meat again.
His fingers hovered over the keyboard. He forced his mind to shift gears, taking on the persona of The Architect.
He typed a single sentence.
> [The Architect]: When the mercury drops, humanity stops. The Great White Silence is approaching. Thirty days remain until the first breath of the end. <
He hit the 'Enter' key.
Notification chimes broke the silence of his apartment as the members reacted to the transmission.
> [User: FrostBite]: The Architect just posted. Thirty days. It aligns with the anomalous pressure data I pulled from the southern monitoring station this morning. The timeline is accelerating exactly as He predicted. <
> [User: Seraph]: Ah, finally. The Oracle speaks. The rest of the world sleeps in its own filth, oblivious to the encroaching judgment, but He has graciously granted us a lantern in the dark. How beautiful. My devotion belongs to the Truth He writes. <
> [User: SilentWatcher]: @Architect, is the Safe Zone still valid? The coordinates you gave us last month? Will the perimeter hold against the initial shockwave? <
Arlen watched the text scroll past, a smirk tugging at his lips. He took a sip of tap water from a cloudy glass.
"Man, this [Seraph] user is incredible," Arlen chuckled.
"She has been roleplaying the 'elegant cultist' trope with chilling dedication for over two years now. It’s poetic. And FrostBite ... the guy actually hacks into weather stations to cross-reference my fictional dates with actual barometric pressure drops."
He shook his head, staring at the screen.
"The Sunk-Cost Fallacy in this group is insane. They’ve invested so much time into my game like they can't see the real world anymore."
Before Arlen could respond to SilentWatcher's query, another user intervened.
> [User: Seraph]: SilentWatcher. Please do not soil this sanctuary with such vulgar doubt. To question the Architect is to question the sun for rising. If He marked the earth, then that earth is holy. Do not make me pity your ignorance. <
> [User: Viper]: Save the poetry, Seraph. But she's right, SilentWatcher. Do not ask redundant questions. We've spent four years preparing for this exact window. If the Architect stated the perimeter is secure, it is secure. Our primary focus needs to remain on the 'Falling Star' contingency. <
Arlen leaned back, lacing his fingers behind his head. The internal hierarchy they naturally formed over the years played out like a scripted performance. Viper commanded the room with the authority of a military veteran, balancing Seraph's religious reverence.
Arlen leaned forward, typing his reply to maintain his aura of mystery.
> [The Architect]: Doubt is the frost that kills the mind. Preparation is the fire that saves the soul. The Zone is secure. Await the falling star. <
> [User: Seraph]: Your words are my light, Architect. <
> [User: Viper]: Understood, sir. Orders received. <
> [User: FrostBite]: We are ready. Standing by for the server wipe. <
"Your words are my light," Arlen mimicked the devotion with a sigh. He pushed himself away from the desk, his bare feet padding against the tiles.
"If they only knew that their 'divine light' is currently trying to figure out how to stretch three packets of instant noodles over the next four days so he doesn't starve to death before payday."
He walked over to the dusty window overlooking the city. Jakarta stretched out beneath him, a grid of traffic and neon lights. The night sky was clear, the stars burning against the dark canopy.
It was a hot, ordinary night.
"The Great Freeze, huh?" Arlen laughed softly, pressing his forehead against the glass.
"Whatever. As long as the lore is good enough to sell the book. Thirty days left."
***
[Time remaining until the Great Freeze: 29 Days]
[Location: Arlen’s Apartment]
[Time: Day - 29 / 08:00 AM]
The morning sun breached the horizon, baking the concrete walls of the apartment building.
Arlen woke up groggy, his t-shirt clinging to his chest, drenched in sweat. He blindly reached for his smartphone on the mattress, squinting against the glare. The notification counter on the app ticked past two hundred unread messages.
"They never sleep," Arlen groaned, rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
He opened the chat, scrolling past a technical debate raging through the morning.
> [User: Vector]: The cryptic riddle from three days ago referenced 'The Hollow Earth'. I have run the topographical mapping. It has to be a metaphor for the subterranean subway systems in the capital. That is our extraction route. <
> [User: NightOwl]: Don't be an idiot, Vector. The Architect speaks in macro-celestial terms. 'Hollow' clearly refers to the atmospheric void that will occur when the magnetosphere collapses. <
Arlen sighed, tossing the phone back onto the mattress.
The riddle they dissected with PhD-level physics was just a reference to a local donut shop he used to frequent in college. He refused to ruin their roleplay by telling them the truth.
Arlen pushed himself off the floor, his muscles aching. Today was his day off from the car wash, but it offered no rest.
It had been over two year since he last visited his parents' graves. The cemetery sat in a quiet district nearly ten cities away. It meant a long journey for a man relying on hot public buses and commuter trains.
As Arlen pulled a canvas backpack from his closet and tossed in a bottle of water and a peanut butter sandwich, an idea sparked in his mind.
"I've been feeding them too many digital breadcrumbs for the last years," Arlen muttered, his eyes shifting toward his monitor.
"I'm traveling across half the Island today anyway. Why not turn this commute into a physical content farm for the ARG?"
His readers starved for new lore. They analyzed every word he typed. If they wanted a deeper dive into the abyss, he was going to give them the ocean.
He dropped his backpack and sat back down in his office chair. He opened a blank word processing document and cracked his knuckles.
"Time to create the exclusive loot drops," Arlen grinned, his fingers flying across the keyboard.
He bypassed vague riddles, opting instead to use his Lore Bible. He intended to bring the classified settings of his novel into the real world.
He spent the next two hours drafting five standalone pages. He formatted the text to look like fragmented research documents leaked from an underground laboratory.
However, Arlen knew a piece of A4 paper could not contain the volume of technical jargon and world-building he wanted to convey.
"A single page is just a teaser," Arlen reasoned, structuring the game mechanics.
"It needs a gateway. A key to the vault."
He opened an open-source cryptographic generator. He linked five `.txt` files from his proxy server to unique QR codes. These were giant data dumps containing the scientific PDFs he had hoarded, blended with his fictional mechanics.
He positioned the QR codes in the bottom corner of each page.
"This is ready," Arlen whispered, reviewing the layouts.
"Lmao, I hope they will be satisfied with this lore dump."
He loaded a stack of heavy-stock paper into his printer to give the documents a tactile feel. The printer hummed, spitting out the five physical artifacts.
Arlen laid the pages out on his desk, admiring his handiwork.
› Page 1: The Blueprint of the Catalyst.
The physical page featured a sketch of a human heart wrapped in barbed wire.
The QR code in the corner linked directly to a 40-page file titled `Evolution_Catalyst.txt`. Inside lay the biological schematics for 'Breathing Technique'. Arlen had mixed medical research on inducing cellular hypoxia with his fictional mechanics, creating a guide on forcing dormant mitochondria into a state of hyper-accelerated survival, generating internal body heat. In the novel, this stood as the foundational power system for the warriors of the new world.
› Page 2: The Bestiary of the New World.
The paper displayed an anatomical drawing of a rat with calcified armor plating protruding from its spine.
The QR code linked to `The_Bestiary.txt`, an index detailing the behavioral changes and radiation-induced hyper-aggression of feral animals. Arlen attached real-world scientific journals discussing how the collapse of the Earth's magnetic field destroys the natural navigation sensors of birds and dogs, turning domestic pets into disoriented predators.
› Page 3: The Sanctuary Map
A topographical map circling a rural region in the highlands. To Arlen, it was simply the quiet area where he possessed fond memories with his parents.
The QR code linked to `The_Sanctuary_Logistics.txt`, containing high-resolution satellite imagery and geological surveys. Arlen spun the real data to detail the area as an impregnable stronghold naturally shielded from impending tectonic shockwaves, complete with theoretical blueprints for subterranean hydroponic farming.
› Page 4: The Alchemist's Furnace.
The page showed a sketch of boiling root vegetables and chemical symbols.
The QR code led to `Thermodynamics_Botany.txt`. This was Arlen’s proudest piece of pseudoscience. He took botanical studies on the alkaloids found in aged ginseng and combined them with thermodynamic formulas regarding sodium ion reactions. The result was a thesis on synthesizing a volatile biological compound known as 'Vitality Stew'. A literal liquid antifreeze for the human bloodstream.
› Page 5: The Chronos Log.
The final page featured a timeline starting at "Day 0."
The QR code opened `The_Chronos_Log.txt`, a comprehensive predictive model detailing the sequence of the apocalypse. It chronicled the atmospheric shifts, the mass failure of the global GPS grid due to ionospheric disruption, the bruising of the sky, and the exact hour the meteor would strike the Pacific Ocean.
Arlen folded the yellowed pages. He retrieved a box of plastic bags from his kitchen and sealed each document inside.
He held the packaged artifacts, feeling a sense of finality.
"Let's see who among the flock is dedicated enough to find the truth," Arlen chuckled, shoving the bags into the front pocket of his backpack.
He walked to his closet and pulled on his sneakers. The laces were frayed, and the soles wore thin.
He stood before the door of his apartment. Even through the plywood, he felt the heat of the hallway radiating inward. The temperature in Jakarta was expected to hit 38°C by noon, and the humidity was thick enough to choke on.
Arlen turned the doorknob.
He pushed the door open, stepping out into the heat of the corridor. The glow of his monitor faded away behind him.
›› To Be Continued ‹‹
~KS