For most people, it started like any other: office commutes, school drop-offs, unpaid overtime, morning news humming in the background. Cities bustled. Trains ran. Markets opened. Clouds passed.
But somewhere between 1:00 PM and 1:02 PM, local time in every country, something began to feel wrong.
And then — people were just... gone.
Fifty-three in South Korea.
Forty-nine in Germany.
Fifty-two in the United States.
Fifty in Brazil.
Fifty in the UK.
Fifty in Canada.
Forty-seven in South Africa.
Fifty players. One game.
CNN Live – May 10th, 10:30 AM EST
“...emerging reports suggest a total of over 1,000 individuals — all confirmed players of the same online strategy game — vanished yesterday afternoon during what’s being called the largest unexplained mass disappearance since the Montauk Incident in 2013…”
The news anchor shuffled her papers with shaking fingers.
Behind her, a map lit up in red markers — global scatter.
“The game in question, Tower Civilisation, is a massive online world-building simulator available only through Beam, a game distribution platform used by indie developers. Beam has declined to comment. Reaching out to Tower Civ’s developers has proven... impossible.”
She glanced at the screen beside her, showing screenshots submitted by confused players still able to launch the game.
The leaderboard, once populated by the top 500 towers — gone.
Every slot read:
“| TRIAL IN PROGRESS |”
BBC Radio Report – 11:15 AM GMT
“What makes this stranger, perhaps even terrifying, is that no one knows who made Tower Civilisation. Its Beam profile lists the developer as ‘ObeliskOne,’ but the account has never posted, replied to messages, or accepted payouts…”
“A hobby project, many assumed. The game appeared in early 2019 and slowly grew to cult status — now boasting millions of players. But after yesterday’s event, a terrifying question lingers: What is Tower Civilisation really?”
/r/TowerCivilisation Megathread – “WTF IS GOING ON?” – Pinned by Mods
[u/HexConqueror42]
“My brother was Rank 23. Logged in daily for 3 years. He lives in Tokyo, and he’s gone. Just gone. Police found his computer still running, game screen frozen. No signs of break-in. No signs of a body. Just... like he stepped out of existence.”
[u/SeekerOfRanks]
“Leaderboard blanked out at 1:00PM sharp, my time. Only message says 'Trial in Progress.' No patch update. No live event. No dev comms. Not even server logs changed. My friends are joking that it’s some ARG but this feels different. Way different.”
[u/LastTowerRising]
“The game's AI messages are all gone too. Even the Tower Keepers. The towers still run, but everything inside feels dead. No ambient music. No greetings. No diplomacy. It's like... they’re all waiting.”
South Korea – Seoul Times
A photo showed the chair Mujin once sat in. The screen beside it was frozen on a glitching logo. His apartment had been untouched since the moment of disappearance. No one could explain why his phone still pinged location updates for several minutes after his reported “last sighting.”
Experts speculated remote device manipulation. Others whispered words like quantum error, neural extraction, or AI rogue signal.
The President issued a press conference. Words like “investigation,” “cyberterrorism,” and “beam compliance” echoed across international headlines.
But there were no demands. No ransom. No signs of anything.
Just... a wall of silence where fifty lives had once been.
Across continents, messages sat undelivered:
"Hey bro you playing Civ tonight or what?"
"Dude, I just saw the forums. Are you okay?"
"Answer me, please."
Families begged police to check internet logs. To trace Beam servers. To find something. But Tower Civilisation was hosted across a decentralized mesh network. Nobody really owned the servers anymore. Nobody could shut it down.
And the creator, “ObeliskOne,” had gone completely dark...
...or maybe had never existed at all.
Back in the game world, every player logging in now saw the same thing:
The usual log-in screen was gone.
Replaced by a pale interface. White-gray static. A single line of text, centered in the void:
“The Trial is in Progress. Standby for Witnessing.”
Below it, the Continue button was grayed out.
Millions waited.
None could enter.
None could log out.
Location: UN Security Council Sub-Committee | May 10th, 9:45 PM GMT
The conference room was sealed, windowless, buried beneath Geneva in reinforced concrete.
Twelve officials sat in silence, watching a holographic display loop over the same footage: twenty-seven different players, from different countries, sitting at computers. Then not. Just... missing.
One second there. The next, gone.
In a few clips, the player’s monitors displayed flashing code — glyphs spiraling briefly before blacking out. In two videos, low-frequency distortions were picked up in the microphone logs, audible only when played at 4x speed.
No footage showed death. No bodies. Just absence.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
A South African delegate leaned forward.
“What do we tell the public next week? We’ve lost fifty citizens — that we know of. Do we blame a rogue nation? A cyberweapon? Because right now, everybody is terrified.”
The American representative steepled her fingers.
“We don’t tell them anything until we’re sure it isn’t real.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“I mean...” she paused. “...what if Tower Civilisation isn’t pretending to be a world? What if it is one?”
Silence.
Then, laughter.
“That’s ridiculous,” said the French ambassador. “You sound like a goddamn conspiracy feed.”
But no one looked at her.
They all remembered the code.
And the bell sounds. And the timestamp correlations. And the way the game still functioned, alive, despite having no server infrastructure that could be found, shut down, or traced.
YouTube Clip – [Channel: VyralByte] – Uploaded May 11, 1:00 PM
Title: “What If Tower Civ is REAL? – 50 Players Vanished (New Evidence)”
Views: 8.2 million in 36 hours
“Guys, I’m not saying we’re in a simulation, okay? But I am saying this game behaves in ways no dev system should. Beam has no source code. No official patch notes. ObeliskOne has never posted. And check this — the original Tower Civ file uploaded to Beam? Dated: March 2, 1983.”
“That’s impossible.”
“I know! Beam didn’t exist back then. No digital signature should predate its hosting structure. But there it is. Verified by three archivists. Even Beam Support couldn’t explain it. They just said...”
(cuts to screen recording of email)
‘We are unable to access that title’s publishing backend. It no longer resides in our system.’
TikTok Clip – [@beetlemilitia] – Posted May 11, 6:03 AM
“My cousin Jin was obsessed with this game. He used to call it his church. He said the tower talked to him sometimes, when he was half-asleep. That it knew him. That it would choose him. We laughed at him. Thought it was burnout. But now… he’s gone. His chair was still warm. Coffee half full.”
Tweet – [@numbworld] – May 12, 2:18 AM
tower civ is god and it’s hungry
all the top players got sacrificed. new digital pantheon loading. y’all ain’t ready.
#trialinprogress #wewereneveralone
Transcript from KBS News – Interview with Ms. Yoon Aera, Mujin’s Former Teacher
“He was quiet, but bright. Lonely, sure. After his parents passed, he barely spoke to anyone. But he loved that game. It gave him purpose. Structure. He once told me, ‘In Tower Civ, no one pities you. You either build or collapse.’ I think... that was the only place he ever felt safe.”
The camera cut to Mujin’s apartment. Still sealed by police tape. Inside, a blank monitor reflected nothing at all.
Internal Report – Beam Network Analysis, Confidential – May 12
“Tower Civ’s codebase displays properties not consistent with any modern architecture. File indexing is recursive — certain assets reference variables that do not exist in human language. Others are encrypted with keys no known decryption method recognizes.”
“Even more disturbing: some error reports reference timestamps not bound to UTC. One such file listed the date as: ‘1,005,023,128,112 A.C.E.’ This appears to imply an age beyond Earth’s known history.”
The analyst who wrote the report requested medical leave the following morning. When asked why, she reportedly said:
“The game isn’t just a simulation. It’s a filter. Something ancient... something vast... it’s looking for something through us.”
Inside Tower Civ, the towers remained standing.
Inactive. Silent.
Players could still view their towers from the outside, rotate them, look into their cities — but nothing responded. Civilians no longer moved. Units stood frozen mid-patrol. Fires flickered without sound. Shadows stretched and twitched unnaturally.
And floating above every player’s tower, burned into the virtual sky, a new icon had appeared:
A single white ring. Slowly turning.
No one could click it. No one could remove it.
When hovered over, it simply read:
“THE EYE WATCHES.”
On May 13, at 3:33 AM, a single streamer captured something new.
He had left his Tower Civ client running overnight on a secondary monitor. Around 3:30 AM, the screen flickered. The tower camera tilted upward, on its own, panning to the very top.
There was no sound.
But for one frame, a white room was visible. Empty. Sterile. Almost surgical.
In the center, the silhouette of a man stood alone.
When the image was brightened, enhanced, color-corrected, one thing was visible behind him:
A holographic screen.
“WELCOME, MUJIN.”
The stream cut to black. The footage was deleted from Twitch within 3 minutes. The streamer’s account was locked. His backup drives were wiped.
He posted one final tweet at 3:37 AM.
“The towers were never ours.”
By May 15th, four days after the vanishings, the world was no longer in passive confusion.
It was slipping into obsession.
"The Trials Are Divine."
"The Tower is the True Axis."
"The Gods of Simulation Demand Proof."
These weren’t Reddit comments anymore. They were chants.
Cult forums began springing up — digital enclaves forming around the Tower Civ disappearance like scar tissue. One of the largest called itself “The Flame Beneath”. Its members believed the missing players had become digital gods, having passed a "Final War of Selection." They held that anyone who had played Tower Civ for over 1,000 hours had been judged and found wanting.
Others were darker.
One group, self-titled “Ascendents of Floor 999”, livestreamed themselves performing “Tower Initiation Rites”: ritual burns of modern technology while reciting player names from the original leaderboard. They claimed Mujin was the “Door,” though no one could explain what that meant.
Of course, not everyone gave in.
Professors, cryptographers, data forensics teams — thousands of professionals worked around the clock to dissect what had happened.
Theories included:
Neural hijack via subconscious suggestion.
Biochemical reaction from exposure to flashing patterns.
Post-hypnotic triggers embedded into update loops.
Experimental psychological warfare accidentally released by an AI.
But every theory hit the same wall: No data matched the behavior.
No real-world system could explain a disappearance that left no heat signature, no sound, no residual echo — only an absence in the most literal sense.
One physicist said in an interview:
“If they died, we’d find death. But there’s nothing. Just… non-presence. We have no scientific language for what happened. It’s like the game opened a window to somewhere that can’t be defined with current physics — and they stepped through.”
This was never in the news. But it spread — word of mouth, then message boards, then voice notes passed around like curses.
Children who had never played the game — too young for Beam accounts, no exposure to Tower Civ — began to talk about “The Eye.”
They’d wake up screaming, drawing circles on the walls. When asked what they saw, some gave eerily consistent answers.
“The big tower with no bottom.”
“People screaming inside clocks.”
“The white man with no mouth.”
“Fire falling upward.”
One girl in rural India reportedly said:
“The war is not over. They are picking soldiers. We don’t have long.”
She had never touched a game console.
On May 17, a NATO-backed cybersecurity taskforce forcibly seized Beam's remaining servers in Geneva and Singapore. Weeks later, official reports would deny this.
But screenshots leaked from employees showed a new branch folder deep in the drive:
/Tower_Civ_ResonanceFiles/
[top_layer.t2c]
[echofloor11.t2c]
[trials_unfolding_a.t2c]
[mujin_loaded]
The last file, when opened in a hex editor, reportedly caused GPU failures on two machines. One employee was hospitalized after viewing it. He’d later describe “seeing sound” and “hearing light” in rapid sequences. MRI results showed over 170 new synaptic branches had formed in his visual cortex in under two hours.
"It wasn’t code," he whispered under sedation.
"It was an invitation."
On May 19, players still logged into Tower Civ received a new message.
No update.
No patch.
Just a text box that appeared for 0.7 seconds before vanishing.
Most missed it.
Some captured it.
It read:
“THE FIRST HAS BEEN ACCEPTED.”
“SELECTION CONTINUES.”
“YOU WERE NEVER ALONE.”
The message included no sender, no context. Only the same icon as before — the white turning ring, now pulsing faintly red.
That night, twenty more players vanished.
These were not top-ranking players.
Not leaderboard entries.
Not known influencers.
Just… dedicated players. Thousands of hours, quiet users, unnoticed.
The Trial had grown teeth.
n one final streaming clip, a player left their game camera focused on their tower’s highest floor.
There had never been access up there. It was just aesthetic — a dome of light, clouds swirling around it. Empty.
But at 3:33 AM, the clouds parted.
A door appeared.
White. Seamless. Perfectly circular. It pulsed open without sound.
For a brief moment — barely a frame — a figure passed through it.
One viewer, analysing the footage frame-by-frame, posted the results.
“His name tag said MUJIN.”
Then the tower camera reset.
The door was gone.
The clouds returned.
And the Trial continued.