It started with a garage sale.
I was out on a humid Saturday morning, just poking through old junk in my neighborhood. I wasn’t expecting anything special, maybe a scratched DVD or a dusty action figure, but as I was about to leave one particular sale, something caught my eye in a cardboard box of video games.
It was a black Game Boy Advance cartridge. Not the standard gray, but pitch black, like obsidian. It didn’t have a proper label, just a piece of peeling tape with "Mega Man: Shadow Network" scrawled across it in red Sharpie. The handwriting was jittery, almost panicked. I picked it up and turned it over. No Nintendo logo. Just "BN-000" etched into the plastic back, faintly.
I asked the seller, an older man with sunken eyes and a raspy voice, how much he wanted for it.
He just looked at me for a moment and said, "Take it. Just… don’t play it at night."
I thought he was joking. I wish he had been.

>>713568304 (OP)
When I got home, I dug out my GBA SP and popped in the cartridge. No Nintendo splash screen. No Capcom logo. Just black, then a slow fade-in of the title:
>MEGA MAN: SHADOW NETWORK
The font looked similar to Battle Network's usual style, but it flickered slightly, almost as if it was glitching or corrupted. Behind the title screen, the PET interface slowly materialized, but it looked…wrong. The color scheme was off, black and blood-red instead of blue and white, and MegaMan.EXE's face in the corner was shadowed, his eyes glowing an unnatural white.
There was only one option: "JACK IN". No settings, no continue, no new game. Just JACK IN.
I hesitated for a moment, then pressed A.

>>713568437
The screen went black, then flashed rapidly, screeching, high-pitched beeps shrieked from the speakers. For a second, I thought the cartridge was defective, but the image stabilized into what looked like the Undernet. Except... it wasn’t any version I recognized from the games.
Everything was pitch black with jagged, pulsing red gridlines, like veins. The environment crackled with static, and the background music was an eerie, reversed version of the classic PET interface theme, slowed down and warped.
MegaMan.EXE stood alone on a crumbling platform. His sprite looked the same, at first. But when I moved him, his animation was stilted, like he was moving through sludge. When I stopped, he would turn and look at the screen, at me, for a second. Like he knew I was watching.
Then a message popped up.
>"LAN ISN’T HERE ANYMORE."
No voice. Just text. I tried to press A to move on, but nothing happened.
Then MegaMan.EXE spoke again.
>"YOU LEFT ME HERE."
The screen glitched. For a fraction of a second, I saw something that looked like a face, distorted, human, twisted in agony, embedded in the background. It disappeared before I could register what it was.

>>713568678
I tried to jack out. No response. I opened the menu, but all the chips were gone, replaced by a single one called “SHADOW SPIKE” with a corrupted icon. I selected it out of curiosity.
Big mistake.
The screen froze, then slowly faded into black. A battle loaded, but not against a standard virus. Instead, MegaMan stood alone, and across from him was a black, twitching mass, a corrupted version of Bass.EXE, but his face was stretched downward like it was melting, and his eye sockets were hollow.
The name under him read:
>“.EXE”
There was no HP bar. No turn. Just one word flashed across the screen:
>“SUFFER.”
Then my GBA screeched. Not just a sound effect, a literal scream, distorted, human. It sounded like someone in pain. Like it was real.
The screen flickered wildly, and then MegaMan.EXE… started bleeding.
Pixelated red seeped from his eyes, his chest, his arms. His sprite flickered violently, and he dropped to his knees. The background went dark. And then,
>“WHY DID YOU ABANDON ME?”
I shut the GBA. I couldn’t take it anymore.

Put me in the screecap

>>713569570
That night, I couldn’t sleep. I kept hearing the beeping of the PET in my dreams. At one point, I swear I saw MegaMan.EXE’s glowing eyes staring at me from the corner of my room. I told myself it was just stress. Just a game.
But when I checked the GBA the next morning, the cartridge was gone.
It wasn’t in the slot. It wasn’t in my room.
Just gone.
But the GBA still had battery, and when I turned it on… it booted straight into the title screen.
>MEGA MAN: SHADOW NETWORK
There’s no way to delete it. I’ve tried different batteries, factory resets. Nothing works. The game is just there now, waiting. Every night, around 3:00 a.m., the screen turns on by itself. Always to the same message:
>"JACK IN."
I haven't pressed it since.
But one of these nights… I think it’s going to press itself.

>>713570302
No