Garrett Broke the Cryo Pact
There are many forms of betrayal in multiplayer games.
You can steal loot. You can bait your teammate into a bad fight. You can say “one more run” and then vanish to eat dinner for forty-five minutes.
These are all survivable offenses.
But what Garrett has done to me is different.
This is spiritual betrayal.
This is ideological betrayal.
This is the kind of betrayal that makes you sit upright in your chair and stare into the middle distance like a Civil War widow who just got handed a folded flag.
Garrett and I played Marathon (2026) together constantly. Not casually. Not in the normal, healthy way two adults should engage with a video game. I mean constantly. We played every bit of content together with the understanding that this was our game. We were going to learn it together, suffer together, get rolled together, improve together, and eventually conquer it together.
And nowhere was that bond more sacred than Cryo-Archive.
Cryo-Archive is not just another map. It is weekend business. It is appointment gaming. It is the sort of thing that makes you mentally organize your Saturday around the possibility of getting a vault done. Every weekend, that was the mission. Get into Cryo-Archive. Lock in. Get batteries. Get the vault. Extract with dignity if possible, and with panic if necessary.
That was the pact.
Not a legal pact, obviously. We did not sign parchment or cut our palms and shake hands under the moonlight. But it was understood. It lived in the soul. Cryo was for the boys.
More specifically, Cryo was for me and Garrett.
So imagine my state now.
I am sitting here typing this article, minding my business, assuming that our usual sacred weekend nonsense still means something.
And what do I hear?
Garrett.
In Cryo-Archive.
With random people.
Already that is nasty work. That alone is enough to make a man put his hand over his mouth and pace around the room. But if that were the whole story, maybe I could grit my teeth and call it unfortunate. Maybe I could say, “Well, he wanted to play and I slept in a tad too long. Painful, but understandable.”
No.
Because then I heard him talking about getting batteries for the vault.
Batteries.
For the vault.
Do you understand the gravity of this?
This means Garrett was not merely passing time. He was not just shooting AI, looting cabinets, and doing fake little side quests until I woke up. He was actively participating in the unique weekend ritual that we, as brothers in digital suffering, were supposed to do together.
He was willing to progress the sacred content without his boy.
Without his slime.
There are actions that reveal a person’s character. Returning a shopping cart. Tipping well. Telling the truth when a waiter forgets to charge you for something.
And then there is this.
If a man will run Cryo batteries with randoms because his duo partner slept an extra little bit, what else will he do?
Will he leave a dog out in the rain? Will he watch a friend drown in waist-high water? Will he eat the last slice and put the empty box back in the fridge?
I do not know anymore. I thought I knew Garrett. That was my first mistake.
What makes this worse is that we did not just dabble in Marathon. We built a whole stupid little friendship mythology around the game. We played everything together with the confidence of two men who believed history would remember them as co-authors of greatness. Not because we were the best players in the world, but because we were committed. We were in the mud together. We had a shared vision.
Apparently Garrett’s version of shared vision has a snooze limit.
Apparently if I do not wake up at the exact second he finds emotionally convenient, he is legally allowed to wander into Cryo-Archive with any random drifter off the street and start collecting batteries like some kind of morally vacant mercenary.
That is turbo ass behavior.
It is actually so turbo ass that I almost have to respect it.
There is something incredible about that level of impatience. I am not even dealing with a dramatic villain. I am dealing with a man who saw ten extra minutes of sleep and said, “Friendship had a good run, but this vault will not battery itself.”
Just cold-blooded. Just shameless.
And look, because I am fair, I will admit the case for the defense.
Yes, I slept in a tad too long for his liking. Yes, Cryo-Archive is weekend-only content. Yes, any true gamer knows the terrible fear of wasting the narrow window in which a game is doing its coolest thing.
I understand all of that.
But loyalty has to mean something.
If we cannot preserve the sanctity of getting our asses kicked in a weekend vault together, then what are we even doing? What separates us from animals? From random queue goblins? From the kind of players who say “my bad” after causing a full team wipe with a grenade they absolutely did mean to throw?
This is how communities fall apart. Not all at once, but battery by battery.
One day you are boys. The next day your boy is in Cryo with strangers, explaining vault mechanics in a calm voice like he was not just supposed to wait for you.
I want to be clear that this article is not me saying I hate Garrett.
I do not hate Garrett.
I love Garrett.
That is what makes this hurt.
If a random man had done this, I would simply call him a bum and move on with my life. But Garrett is my friend. My teammate. My supposed brother in extraction misery. Which means I have no choice but to document his crimes for the public record and hope shame does what honor could not.
Maybe there is still time for redemption.
Maybe he will step away from those randoms. Maybe he will remember the pact. Maybe he will look into his heart and realize that some loot is not worth the stain it leaves on the soul.
But until that happens, the truth stands.
Garrett is so turbo ass it is insane.
And if you hear a man in Cryo-Archive talking about batteries while his duo is still asleep, understand that you are not hearing strategy.
You are hearing betrayal.
I will still be there next weekend, of course.
Unlike some people, I believe in the pact.