I stared, disgruntled, at the screen I'd been looking through for the past thirty minutes.

It was a pretty simple table of elements in our game — Beyovaria's Horizon — and it was also the subject of much contention among my fellow software engineers. Namely, there were rapidly-expanding bits of unidentified code taking up space on our servers — all centered around two supposed "players", despite the game not being open to the public.

Our administrators had been pushing us to release it early. Just to get it out there. And we did want to! All of us were excited for the release of our poster child, the first true full-dive VRMMO ever made post-Revolution. But we all knew of the science fiction stories that told us whatever we do, we should NOT do an all-up test with unknown code in our systems. The fate of people's minds were in our hands! What would we do if shit went wrong?

Well, we couldn't just delete the code. It was tied in too tight, and becoming ever-more complex. Also, none of us were able to decipher around thirty percent of it — evidently, it was coded in an entirely new programming language (as was shown by the consistent calls and repetition over random noise), and as such most of the software team was salivating over the prospect of what seemed like full-AI.

I mean, we practically had full-AI already — our automated game systems administrators — but this was different, it was spontaneous. It could mean a lot for life as we know it, and whether or not the universe was a simulation, and yadda yadda.

But it also meant that we'd need another way of getting around these issues, rather than brute-forcing it. And that, at the current moment, fell to my hands to figure out. Go me.

Currently, my best bet was to make an admin avatar and go investigate myself. That, or teleport both players out of the map and into gay baby jail. But I didn't want to maybe mess with sentient AI who could absolutely break our entire game and servers, so the last thirty minutes had been spent purely trying to jury-rig a contraption that would allow us to at least verify what was happening and sanitize inputs/outputs from the at-risk individuals.

Agh. Too many things to think about. Not enough fun.

It was only a few days to the anniversary of the Revolution. We wanted our release date to be that day. In fact, we'd been licensing out some VRMMO tech to F-Runners around the globe — just to get the availability out there, and increase the amount of people we could effect with this game. So it'd sort of be crunch hours for a few days until we got a well-deserved break and let the backup crews go in for day-one tech support.

I thought for a second about a really, really stupid idea. What if... instead of passing everything through our filters, we passed the two sentient AIs quests that would let them build the filters for us? I mean, it wouldn't be easy to disguise. But I was pretty sure I could flavor things the right way.

Perhaps I could just remix the code we had for the magic system and re-use the filters for that? Or something. Something tickled the back of my mind, though.

That unknown code. There were sections where it overlapped with other code, the code for our worldbuilding AI. With a grumble, I flipped the screen over to a flowchart-view of the intersecting code. This'd be a lengthy time investment if it wasn't useful, but I had a hunch...

A few hours later and I'd successfully decoded the program, with the help of my text apps and flowcharts. As expected, it was connected to our worldbuilding AI's code. But it was connected in an odd sense — because it was an extremely advanced malicious code filter. I could simply reconstruct some of it and we'd have an easy way to define the unknown code's bounds. What made me concerned was why the AI made the filter in the first place — we couldn't simply execute it on any given program just due to the amount of variables needed for success, and it was so heavy duty that anything underneath it would be effectively constrained from all effect on the outside world beyond basic movement and physics. You could maybe punch someone, but that'd be all.

And it was all tied to one, singular item. An item that was held by one of the unknown players. Whose location was fast-approaching one of the towns we'd detected anomalous activity in recently. Something was absolutely up.

AI was complicated. We weren't able to fully control any of our AI, because that'd defeat the point. Additionally, they were simply too complicated to fully understand by any one person. But we could influence them, and that allowed for dynamic storytelling from the player's point of view. Since the game was spooling into late development, we were activating a lot of new systems all at once. Which put a lot of strain on both the worldbuilding and enemy AI systems.

So... why had this item been made?

Well. A question for another time. It'd make for a good story, and it'd be a fun game irrespective. The filter could also be retooled for security measures to keep anyone from being physically harmed by their gear in the real world, and I figured it'd be fast enough to implement by launch.

After that long-ass session, I let out a breath I hadn't known I was holding in. My eyes drifted over to my phone, absently.

No. I shook my head, clearing the cobwebs that lay inside from my long coding dive. I'd done too much to Colin, and it'd been far too long. He'd thought of me as his father, and I wasn't that. I wasn't a good one either. And he'd made damn well obvious that he didn't want anything to do with me. I couldn't betray his trust like that.

Things needed to go well for this launch. For all of us. The Revolution had been a good thing — a time of hope for all — and we needed to make it obvious that things were looking up. That even though we'd sacrificed a lot, things would only continue to improve. That was the goal of Beyovaria's Horizon. It was the goal of our collaborative game studio.

Assets and sounds and animations and everything. We'd automated some, obviously, but it was too much work for any one person. Everyone had pitched in, either through volunteer AI training or through programming help or through simply supporting the team behind BvHz. We needed to deliver, not because of any corporate executive but because the world needed it. That meant long days agonizing before the finish line for most of us. It meant I'd need to get back to work.

So I simply sighed, and went to go make myself a drink. The retooling and remaking of the filters would be difficult and arduous, but the groundwork had already been laid. I'd be able to do things right, I just needed some coffee and a bit of luck from the Lady herself. Also? A lot of fucking time.

I really hoped he was doing well. I hoped that the launch went smoothly. I wished well for the possible AIs in our goddamn videogame, and I sat down to get back to work of my own accord.

Nose to the grindstone. Here I went.

trigger7ff6

hi! as you saw from the announcement, i'm releasing a new series. it'll be up in one hour from now, and will be titled SLIDE // RELEASE. i realllllly wanted to deliver on the cyberpunk world i'd crafted for the first few chapters of this, and that story will sort of be a sister-series to this one: the main character gets isekaied into Cyl's home universe, coming from the universe that made Beyovaria. it'll also be aggressively transgender and involve an absurdly-eggy protagonist as well, and will have a dash of internet drama to keep things interesting and separate from this series!

i hope you all enjoy! as always, comments and reviews highly appreciated. hope to see you at the launch of the new story :)