One month earlier

You had to be sneaky. You had to be careful. But you had to be bold as well. Where was the fun otherwise?

Sumiko glanced around to check nobody was looking. She had complete creative freedom and it was not often that some boss came to see what she was doing, but there was always the possibility that someone was peering over her shoulder, maybe to catch a glimpse of her new designs. What she was doing now was more than frowned upon, though, and if she was discovered, not only would she be fired on the spot, but Digidream would also sue her pants off.

It was not for money, either — there would surely be some people interested in purchasing what she was trying to unbury, but she hadn’t contacted any of them or even knew who they would be. She was a designer, not a salesperson, so that was out of the question. No, it was personal curiosity: the game was huge and complex and technically marvellous, and she ached to take a good look at it. Not only the part that depended on her, but the game as a whole, even if it was still an unfinished prototype and it would be for some time.

She had started hacking a couple years ago, and she’d had some successes — but retrieving and copying the Anderworld posed several problems that she hadn’t yet figured out how to solve. First of all, the universe was huge, bigger than anything else Sumiko had laid her eyes upon, and the mere task of copying it somewhere would be daunting. This, without even considering how to do it sneakily, opening a connection to somewhere else from inside the Digidream building, transferring that huge amount of data and doing it without being noticed. Impossible, maybe. But achieving the impossible was the pride of a hacker.

Even if she couldn’t get her hands on the whole thing, she would be contented with actually playing it. She might be the first person to do so! With so many people working on so many aspects of the gameworld, with the codebase in a constant flux of change, the possibility existed that nobody had ever played the game as it was intended to be played. Testers experienced the gameworld and gave feedback about its workings, the landscapes, the weapons, the physics system... but it might be that none of them had actually played as a character and followed a storyline inside the virtual world yet. And in that case, she wanted to be the first.

Finding a way in was difficult since the game was not actually running at all — not online, not offline. As she went through the virtual corridors fishing for pieces of code and file hierarchies, she thought she would have to create a sandbox where she could sneakily load a runtime and then...

What the fuck!

She almost said the words out loud, but she could refrain herself before it was too late. The loglines on the screen would look like gibberish for anyone who didn’t know what she was up to but for her, they were shocking:

The game was already running.

With players. Real players. There were people inside at that very moment.

The runtime was disguised as just another running service under an abstruse name: XDF0Arun.VRa. The extension meant “Virtual Reality asset” and was used everywhere by the system, so it looked like an innocuous file. But she soon realized it was actually the heart of the system, an executable piece that loaded a version of the gameworld where stuff would be working to some capacity, since there were people playing.

She bit her lower lip as curiosity got the best of her. Now she needed to know what it was like. She was so close... the gameworld was right there, behind a thin wall of code, inviting her to break it, peek inside and see what was there.

No, no. It’s too risky.

But... but... it’s there. It’s all there.

Temptation was so strong. Sumiko realized she was sweating in excitement. She looked around once more, nervously this time, feeling that everybody was watching her. But of course, it wasn’t true. The few people who were in the open office at that hour were minding their own business, oblivious to the discovery she’d just made.

Who did this? And why?

A thought struck her as likely. Victor Anderen, the head of the company, had suffered a stroke a couple of months earlier. This game was like a son or a daughter for him; he had given many years to it, even using his own surname as part of the codename, like a father would do. He’d been working hard, day and night, pushing everyone in the company to work hard as well, so that he could see his dream realized. And after the stroke, he came back stronger and pushier. His energy had redoubled instead of diminished.

Maybe he wanted to see what it’s like. Maybe he’s afraid to die before the game is done. So he had a custom version more or less “finished” for him and his friends.

The more Sumiko thought about it, the more likely this seemed to her. There was no way the game was anywhere near done, so what she was looking at would be at most an alpha version, but the fact that it was running at all was so enticing that she felt she was about to faint.

Then she found the others.

The ones who were leaving subtle traces in the system, the ones who tried to cover up their tracks as they followed the virtual breadcrumbs and inserted their own code at strategic points so they could get hold of this or that routine, modify this or that number, like ghosts in the machine.

The ones who were already hacking the game from inside.