He'd been playing 'Living Jade Empire' since the beta. Heck, he'd been playing it since the alpha, but all the data had been wiped and the system reformatted at the beginning of the beta. How, you might wonder? He was one of the programmers hired near the beginning, seemingly at random, by the weird but surprisingly competent head of the programming division, Lin Hao.

His name was Josh Beagle. He wasn't good at socializing, but the nearly isolated community created by Starcraft Technologies for the developers in the early days suited him, and many of the other programmers and people on the design team were similar.

Just when he thought that the new expansion was going to kill his character, and all the other characters who loved crafting intricately layered pieces into a whole that no one had suspected could be built, he had a sudden stroke of luck. He had been reviewing old articles by the linguist Chompsky whose work had changed the world's approach to AI almost as much as Ladyzhenskaya’s equations had changed digital fluid dynamics. And then he'd happened across an interview answer where Chompsky talked about how, before quantum physics, chemistry was regarded as a calculating device.

One of the projects Josh was working on in his spare time was a battery for intersolar projects. Well, it hadn't started as his project, but had been sent to him by his grandfather who had gotten it from his cousin some number of times removed that he couldn't remember. The cousin had abandoned it though, after having gotten the kind of sweet job after graduation that every young genius deserves, and few find.

And it wasn't like he was actually building batteries either, it was just another set of complex calculations and layers of elements with known properties to him. But thinking of the whole structure as another kind of calculating device opened up a different angle of approach.

He tested it, in theory, from as many different directions as he could think of. And then he contacted his grandfather who put him in contact with his distant cousin who he sent the new design to. His cousin replied basically, "I built one, your design works. But this is not even remotely based on mine, it's all yours, so don't ask me what to do with it."

He was a little perplexed, because as far as he was concerned, this was just the logical evolution of his cousin's design. After some thought he submitted it to the company he worked for, since it seemed like it would be really useful for the maintenance drones that maintained the core of his world. Or at least, the core of 'Living Jade Empire'.

The first response from the company was a standard auto reply. The second response was along the lines of a recruitment poster. Josh was perplexed again. Finally he decided that it was just that they were hoping that he'd transfer to the hardware side of Starcraft Technologies. He replied basically, "No thanks."

They had him fly halfway across the world to sit in a room with beautiful women in business suits who were confused by his lack of interest in the job offer. They kept trying to figure out what he wanted from Starcraft Technologies that would lure him away from whatever he was currently involved in, without ever getting down to specifics.

He got frustrated and finally told them bluntly, "Look, I love my current job. I don't think there's a better one on the planet right now. I was just enquiring about selling the design."

One of the women asked, "Surely there is something that we can offer you? Maybe you just don't understand how much we are offering you? If there's really nothing, of course we still want this design."

He was rather appalled by the 1% offer they started with for just the design. When he suggested 5%, they countered with other kinds of benefits on top of a 3% contract.

He told them honestly, "The only extra thing Starcraft Technologies can offer me right now is to put through our petition to stop the 'Living Jade Empire' expansion that will destroy complex crafting within the game. If people can't practice logical construction, how do you expect more things to be built in the future? Honestly this expansion is the worst thing that has ever happened to the game. I've put so much time into my enchanter, and I know that other people have too!"

They called people. They called the people in the first division of the part of Starcraft Technologies that he worked for and threatened them until they agreed to drop the crafting downgrade. Josh meekly signed the offer that gave him 3% of the profits from the batteries for the next fifty years without any other benefits. He was kind of afraid that if he kept resisting, they'd just call back and have him fired next.

When the less intimidating secretary outside asked him on his way out, in an awed voice that showed that she'd been eavesdropping, "Where do you work anyway? No one has ever refused an offer like this?!" he froze and stared at her.

"You don't know?" he questioned.

"Usually we'd have all that," she admitted, "but we couldn't find anything about your employment, your government has your status locked."

"I work for a division of Starcraft Technologies," he said finally.

She said a few unladylike words and quickly looked him up in a different database. Then she looked up and gazed at him with awe. Josh edged uncomfortably toward the door. "You helped build the game!?" she squeaked. "No wonder Starcraft Technologies paid to have your information locked! Oh my god!"

He asked a little nervously, "Is this still valid?" He waved the chip the new contract was recorded on.

"Eh, yeah?" she replied.

"Good," he said simply, and made his escape.

On his way home he decided that it was just as well that he was making the design for his stone spaces freely available for anyone to use on the forums, despite the complaints of his guildmates who wanted to corner the market. Having a design you'd made officially recognized and sought after by such determined people was scary.

When he got home, the newbie in Design Integration had already dropped another kind of bomb on the hated expansion. The revised expansion would be rewriting the way NPCs were stored and the way developer quests were handled by the system, it was the kind of change that seemed obvious when you thought of it, but neither he nor Lin Hao had. She'd seemed bright enough when they'd talked on lunch breaks during her training, but he decided that he'd underestimated her.

Rumors were flying around about her character in the game too. She turned out to be the first fairy dragon, who Lin Hao had marked as a personal project because he'd stuck one of his weird god skill marks on her. Eventually he wanted the system to issue them to people who tended to get into what he referred to within the division as "useful trouble."

Her character name was ZipZing, and she and his character Logical Heart were already friends within the game.