Silence. Then a crackle. “FoxtrotSierra-Niner, push approved. Be advised… taxiway Charlie is not on your charts.”
“Aerosoft – Mega Airport Paris Orly – Update: You never left.”
“Not closed, Captain. Changed.”
Marc frowned. He had the v1.01 update. He knew every taxiway. “Tower, confirm. Charlie is closed for construction in the database.” -FS9 FSX- Aerosoft - Mega Airport Paris Orly v1.01 game
The pushback tug disconnected. Marc initiated engine start, the CFM56s spooling up with that familiar whine. As he taxied past the South Terminal, his jaw dropped. The static ground vehicles from the add-on were no longer static. A baggage cart moved on its own, circling the same spot endlessly. A fuel truck reversed into a 737, passed through it, and kept going—its shadow stretching in the wrong direction, toward the setting sun that wasn’t there.
No response. Just the hum of the engines and the rhythmic thump of the landing gear rolling over tarmac that felt too real. The fog thickened. The terminal buildings began to pixelate at the edges, then resolve into the lower-polygon models from FS9—blockier, older, yet strangely more solid.
The fog over Paris Orly was a thick, gray blanket that refused to lift. Captain Marc Dubois squinted through the windscreen of his Airbus A320, the “FS9” registration flickering on the overhead panel like a ghost. He wasn’t supposed to be here. Not today. Not in this relic of a simulator. Silence
“Glitch,” Marc whispered. “Just a rendering bug.”
“Tower, Airbus 320FoxtrotSierra-Niner, requesting push and start,” he said into the headset.
Marc had laughed. Shadows don’t move on their own. But as his FSX loaded the scenery—the detailed terminals, the accurate taxiways, the iconic control tower—he felt the familiar hum of his cockpit transform into something else. The LCD screens flickered, and for a split second, he saw not the default FSX blue sky, but a real, overcast Parisian morning. Be advised… taxiway Charlie is not on your charts
And the shadow of the control tower moved slowly, deliberately, pointing not at the ground—but at the empty chair in front of the monitor.
When the IT team at Aerosoft opened Marc’s computer the next morning, the FSX process was still running. The aircraft was parked at Hangar B-17, engines off. The time on the simulator’s clock: January 1, 2006.
The last thing Marc saw before the simulator crashed to desktop was the v1.01 splash screen—except the text had changed.
“Welcome back,” whispered the radio.
He froze. The voice on the radio was his own—recorded years ago, in a different sim, on a different machine. The FS9 version of Mega Airport Paris Orly had a notorious flaw: a phantom taxiway that only appeared in heavy fog, leading to a hangar that didn’t exist. Aerosoft had patched it in v1.01 of the FSX version, but they’d never deleted the data. They’d just hidden it.
