"And... time! There you have it my loyal viewers." Cayden grinned into the camera offset a few feet to the side of his screen, giving his best impression of a carefree roguish grin. As if the onscreen heart-rate monitor synced to his watch didn't show his heart-rate up around a hundred and sixty. He had streamed the run half a dozen times since he'd decided on his methodology, but with days ticking away Cayden had honestly expected to leave this last task undone. It was probably a good omen, right? "A full 1-101 all boss clear of Runes of the Guardians in... six days, five hours and five minutes. One hundred and forty nine hours, and I undercut Seraph89's record by a full seven minutes and two seconds!"

Cayden lifted his hands and rewarded himself with a ludicrous golf clap as his eyes trailed towards the comments on the side of the live-stream. It was just a wall of scrolling text, moving faster than his eyes could even hope to follow. His viewership today was an all time high for him, over two hundred and ninety thousand concurrent viewers. That might even be a record in and of itself for a non-Babel stream.

"Thank you, thank you. You're all too kind." Cayden hammed it up for just a few moments longer, relishing in the sweetness of his victory. The hundred and forty nine hours he'd put in was for just this attempt alone. All told he'd probably put well over a thousand into RotG over the past year. It was an overwhelming amount of effort simply to shave seven minutes off a world record. Were it any other game he probably wouldn't have put in the effort, even if the previous record holder was kind of a dick.

But this was RotG, the closest thing on the market to a Babel knock off.

"Alright, so. Before I go take a shower, eat an entire pizza and fall into bed I know there has been a ton of speculation about what game is next on my chopping block. It's probably why there are... damn, three hundred and six thousand of you. I feel a little on the spot."

Cayden was nearly as good at playing the nerdy, somewhat self-conscious young man persona as he was at the games themselves. He had the sort of face for it, with smooth shaven features and big blue eyes hidden behind a shock of stylishly unstyled black hair. He looked like the pre-drug addict version of every boy band member from the dawn of pop music, handsome yet fragile

At least, that was his own high opinion of himself. He'd read a less charitable description a week ago on The Escapist that described him as "The default setting in every create-a-character mode ever made". That stung.

"I could drag it out but... the speculation is right. The article posted early this week got my birthday down to a tee. I'm seventeen on Monday, which means I'll be leaving for NYC this weekend."

That certainly got their attention. If the chat log was flying by earlier, it had jumped into warp speed by now. Individual words disappeared as quickly as they arrived, with only complicated Ascii meme's sticking around long enough for the eye to process. A textual uproar was what he expected and it was what he got, an unruly virtual mob ready to riot if they weren't thrown an olive branch.

"I know it sucks, but this isn't the end of my channel! I am sure that a lot of you are worried that I'll just become another streamer doing the same old same old on the first twenty or so floors. Or worse.” He let that hang for just a moment in spite of himself. There was a reason why streams from Babel had a five minute time delay by law. “Let's be honest though. I'm not just any sort of gamer. I'm a speed runner.”

“And that is what I am going to do. I'm going to be broadcasting live, day in and day out as I progress through the tower. The progression guilds have a head start of over two years on me. But while they were out banging their head against undiscovered dangers, I've been studying them and I've been studying the classics.” Cayden paused, drawing a breath and steadying himself. “I'm going to do it in four months.”

That would get a reaction. There were only about five thousand players currently active on the highest floors, and almost all of those had been playing release day. Even with the current stalemate, he was proposing to run the same content as the most skilled players in the world, in a sixth of the time.

As expected the chat was afire, racing past at a warp speed that made it look like one of the background screens from the matrix. He'd just assured some good viewership for the first few hours of his stream. If only because people would be watching to see how quickly his hubris led to his downfall. “On that note folks, it has been fun. My twitter will have updates on my travel time, progress, and the start of my stream. Until then, keep running.”

He reached out, a few clicks of his mouse minimizing the game-play window and then closing out his stream. A few more brought up a wire-frame view of the infamous tower.

Even as nothing more than a foot tall rotating 3d image the tower was equal parts imposing and majestic. In reality it was enormous, Three kilometres in diameter, its peak rested one hundred and one kilometres above sea level. That put it a full kilometre above the agreed upon boundary of 'outer-space', no doubt by design. At such a dramatic size, lights on the surface of the tower could be seen by much of the hemisphere on a clear evening.

Despite its size the tower didn't want for detail when viewed up close either. Its surface was ringed by hundreds of thousands of archways, each a unique work of art cut from the unique yellow-white stone of the tower's outer surface. Those closest to the ground held carvings of bravery and battle, of men and women squaring off against all manner of creatures in battles to the death. Further up the tower the carvings became progressively more unusual. Explorers had found carvings of everything from knock-knock jokes to lewd pictorials, to a hundred arch long stretch depicting the entire plot of the original Star Wars trilogy. Strangely, the prequels were nowhere to be found.

Regardless of their content, any one of the archways would have looked at home as the centrepiece of a lavish exhibit, and yet there were so many that even two years after launch day there were still thousands left to photograph in detail.

Launch day. The two words sent an involuntary shiver through Cayden. That was what it was most commonly called in pop culture, particularly among players and other gamers. Among other groups the names were understandably more negative. The East Coast Tragedy. The Manhattan Vanishing. The New York Massacre.

Politicians who threw around that last one always bothered Cayden. To him a massacre always seemed like a Texas Chainsaw sort of thing. Lots of gore and bodies.

New York didn't have any of the latter.

Names for the incident were so varied in part because no one really knew what had happened. There were clues, certainly, but only a few solid facts.

At 8:45am on 3rd April, 2025, the daytime population of Manhattan, roughly four million people, vanished. Recording devices that survived what came next uniformly shorted out at the moment of the event, giving an exact time but no further details.

Fifteen minutes later, the earthquakes started. Without a doubt the largest in east coast history they radiated from the now vacant island. Much of the iconic skyline was damaged or destroyed by the quakes, and the surrounding areas in Jersey and the remaining boroughs fared little better.

Flyovers from a Virginia airbase alleviated the initial fears that the sudden and total radio silence from Manhattan was the result of a nuclear strike. What they did reveal was arguably more troubling however. A new addition to the skyline.

In the forty minutes between the initial vanishing and the first overflight the tip of Babel had risen nearly a hundred and ten stories from the ground of what had previously been Times Square. It would continue to tear free of the ground, with correspondingly brutal earthquakes, for the next three days until it finally reached its full height and revealed its entrance.

Ridiculously, the US government tried to force a total media blackout regarding the existence of the tower in the immediate aftermath of it's discovery. A miles wide tower that grew by hundreds of stories in a matter of minutes, and they thought they could cover it up. The hubris was incredible, particularly in light of the fact that the tower had its own press release.

At the same time millions were vanishing into thin air in New York, another impossibility was sweeping the globe, a hijacking of every form of media known to man. TV's displayed a looping broadcast on every channel, in every language. Newspapers that had already gone to print were delivered with a full page ad that no one recalled inserting. Computer monitors, e-book readers, at least one recorded instance of a skywriter... Cayden was fairly certain that somewhere in the world a primitive tribe found unexpected smoke signals spelling out the announcement.

Whatever the medium, the opening message was the same:

Babel

The Great Emperor has issued his challenge.

From the ruins of the Old World rise the Tower. Its doors will soon open, and the great game will begin.

A hundred floors and a hundred challenges await the worthy.

And to the victor? A Wish of Unlimited Power.

Needless to say, the world was shocked.

The US government reacted as one would expect them to react. The military cordoned off the island, and special forces units attempted to raid the tower itself on April 6th when the entrance finally came to the surface. It didn't go well.

The announcement had been more than a few sentences of text. Every written version of it had come with an exhaustive list of rules, the Terms and Conditions as they were called. One of the most prominent among them was that the island of Manhattan was to be considered an international sanctuary, that no one should be prohibited from journeying to the island by any government or individual.

The various nations of the world railed against these restrictions. However, they were up against a force that vanished millions into thin air and crafted a tower that defied the very laws of physics. They didn't stand a chance.

The terms and conditions were enforced by some sort of power, an enchantment or hex. Obey them and no harm came to you, try to refuse them and you were subject to punishment in measure to your violation. The armed forces came down with a terrible, though non-lethal, case of what appeared to be dysentery within the first night of their encampment. The commanders who issued the orders found themselves similarly affected, while the president began to suffer from a sudden wasting disease that only abated and began to heal once he had called off the siege.

It didn't seem to matter what clever methods were attempted to circumvent the terms either. In an effort to stop unwanted immigration, the president appealed to airlines to stop flights and when that failed the subsequent effort to halt travellers by hiking fees was similarly a failure. Even something as seemingly unconnected as robbing a player who was attempting to reach the tower found the perpetrator suddenly paralyzed, or struck blind and deaf.

All of which made it frustrating for a young fourteen year old Cayden when he realized that the game did not permit players under the age of seventeen for quote, “Liability Purposes.”

It was a cruel joke that had stuck like a thorn in Cayden's mind for over two years. He was forced to sit by the sidelines as the greatest video game in history played out on every television in the world. Millions flocked from across the globe, men and women of every nation, of every size, shape and age imaginable all for one goal.

The wish.

Whoever, or whatever, made the Tower of Babel had unfathomable power. The terms and conditions alone appeared to rewrite the very laws of reality as they wished, and they were themselves only a fraction of the changes wrought by the developer. And he, she, it or they were promising one wish to the first person to clear the final level of the tower. No tricks, no limitations, no weird monkey paw shit. Just whatever you could imagine.

Two years, three months and sixteen days of waiting. He had his parent's permission, if not their blessing, though they couldn't stop him if they wanted to. Three more days and he could show the world what he was really made of.

For now though? Pizza.