“I will be so dependable, no one will ever forget me again.”

Or at least, that’s what Leon Richardson told himself.

Of course, he didn’t mean that he would be dependable now.

Now would be a few years too late.

Any friends he might have had would have assured him, repeatedly, that of course it wasn’t his fault.

How could he be to blame for the cruel decisions of another? He wasn’t the one who cheated, after all.

That was, of course, if he’d had any friends to begin with.

Therein lies the problem, the crux of the matter, so to speak. He’d grown complacent, set in his ways. He knew that now.

What had at first been an idyllic marriage to the pretty girl in HR soon stagnated. As the days blended together and his marriage was filled with more of the same, well, who wouldn’t grow tired of it?

He knew what others might think, that he was being too hard on himself, blaming himself for the character flaws in others.

Unfortunately, it had taken him three years of misery to learn the hard truth.

It really was his fault.

Leon Richardson was a 34 year old programmer and game developer in the upper echelons of the massive gaming conglomerate E-World Gaming. He made a very nice salary, loved his job, had a beautiful home and drove a nice car.

There was just one small problem stemming from the fact that he did absolutely nothing with his life. Nothing ever changed for him.

After he'd solidified his position at E-World and got married to the only woman at work who’d paid any attention to him, he had done almost nothing new. He had gone to work, quietly and meticulously completed his tasks, traveled to his home where he designed new gizmos or modified his house, and slept.

He hadn’t truly known what he’d had, what he’d treated as an ornament, until she was gone, in the arms of another. It had devastated him of course, filled him with rage, envy, sadness, it had taken years for the shock to then bow out in favor of depression.

Soon even that settled into a deep seated loathing, a hatred for the man who he had become.

It seems overblown, looking at it from the outside. Yet that hatred was born from a thousand small, sad little instances where he could have put himself into a conversation, could have shared his views, could have asked a question.

Yet he did not.

Time and time again those chances had passed him by with nothing to show for it. Ten years in an office where few even knew his last name, mountains of work completed on a game which contained exactly zero of his original ideas.

Who could blame her, really, for losing interest in a man as detestable as he?

Even now he sat in his expensive suede office chair, his palms resting on comfortable ergonomic rests, his eyes never leaving the screen which showcased his already completed work for the day. No one noticed as he stared without seeing, seemingly entirely focused on his task as he battled through another bout of hopelessness.

The real kicker had come a year and a half after the divorce. Unannounced to his coworkers and distant relatives, unknown to all the many people in his surroundings, he was going to die. It had started with a small pain in his chest which had then blossomed to near constant agony, one which he had nearly welcomed during his weakest times, alone in his house. Finally he had mustered up the courage to take a sick day, go to the hospital, and run some tests.

Cancer, they’d told him. The incurable kind. The kind that put a definite number on the amount of days you had left. The kind that left you unable to hope for a better outcome. It was both metaphorically and physically the last nail in the coffin, so to speak.

He’d gone through all those familiar steps again, denial, shock, more rage, more denial, followed once more by that ever present depression. Not only had he never stood up for himself in life, never lived life to the fullest, he would now never get the chance. A year and a half they’d given him - and that was a year ago.

He had just six short months left before his own body killed him, and it was far, far too late to change.

It had taken him four whole, ever decreasing months before he had, in a rare bout of positivity, come up with his idea. His plan.

It was now all he thought about, it was what he fought his way through the fog for, it was, in every way, his second chance.

New Era Online was the crowning achievement of E-World gaming, the cutting edge of technology. Fusing the creations of the mysterious genius and CEO of the company, Alexy Rodette, and his invention of the artificial intelligence crystal, with the idea to make a game so realistic, so vast, so detailed, it would revolutionize the world of gaming and usher in a new era of technology.

Leon had worked on it with hundreds of other programmers and developers for nearly ten years, and the game itself wasn’t even run by humans! No, all that work had been necessary, to code the interface for the players, to find a way to give them access to the internet while they played, to design the pods that housed the player and transferred their consciousness into the game world.

While humans constantly tweaked and perfected every facet of the players experience, the actual world those players would enter was run flawlessly by the ever perfect AI. One which somehow controlled the emotions, actions, and physics allowing for millions of NPCs to live seemingly normal, everyday lives. The processing power required to run it truly defied logic. The memory banks - which no one had actually ever seen, would have to be truly massive, just to store all the latent physical details that filled this vast new world.

Getting that world ready for the players to experience had taken the cream of the crop in the game development world, and for Leon, an MIT graduate and natural born programmer, it had been his ticket to what others would consider a dream job.

Fortunately, in a world so vast, a world that was run by a machine and hardly influenced by its human creators, it wouldn’t be so hard to slip one tiny little detail through the cracks.

Namely, that one of the many developer testing tools, a lone NPC account, would no longer be accessible for the other developers.

It had come to him in a flash of inspiration so outlandish, so inconceivable, so strange, that he’d almost let the fog claim it. Let it die down with the rest of his dreams. Yet it stuck, and now, six months later he was nearly ready. He was almost done. His own creation, the aptly named Personality Matrix Uploader, or PMU, was nearly complete. He had just a few hours of coding left to do before the device was operable, before he entered the review stage and carefully checked and rechecked his code.

He would only get one shot with it, after all, and he needed it to work.

For his second chance.

So he dragged himself out of the fog once more, he shifted his completed workload to another monitor, where it would easily give any casual viewers the impression that he was busily plugging away at his assigned tasks, while his main view contained all the many lines of code he had written for the device that even now stayed carefully hidden in his home. He bent his back to the task, reminding himself that he only had a few short hours of work left before he would have to once again transfer it to his own uncrackable hard drive. He would wipe all evidence from his work computer, before bringing it home and - hopefully, if he could convince himself, spend a few hours more with it.

An hour later he was deep in concentration, meticulously going over each and every possible outcome of his code, when he was suddenly dragged out of his computer by the ding of the executive elevator, just three cubicles away from his position. ‘That's weird,’ he thought, ‘that elevator never stops on this floor.’ The doors opened to reveal a face known by everybody in the office, it plastered the posters on the walls, filled with motivational quotes and tough reminders like ‘E-World ALWAYS puts the player first.’ Alexy Rodette, the rarely seen and rather mysterious genius, walked quickly out of the still opening doors, another man who carried an office tablet following close behind.

”-I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again Romanov.” Alexy stopped outside a cubicle just within earshot of Leon, turning to face the head developer for the department. “You’ve got to think about the demographics here, think about the base price of the game pod, the monthly subscription to the game world. Our target audience has to be mostly college graduates and middle aged workers. No one who does not work a full time job or have a significant source of income can afford our product.” He paused to wave away another team leader, evidently indicating that he had no time to hear the man out.

He checked the expensive watch on his wrist before continuing. “That's why the time dilation is going to stay at six times the normal speed. Our customers will have on average two hours to devote to the game each day, two hours Romanov.” His deep voice was rising in volume now, showcasing his dominance as CEO. “That will leave each player with an average of twelve hours within the game world each day, and that’s the minimum I’ll accept on the matter.”

The head developer swallowed nervously and looked at his tablet with a frown, as if blaming it for his lack of a compelling argument, before quickly speaking up. “Sir, with six times the time dilation, players who are unable to be online all day will miss out on-” Leon peaked around his cubicle as Alexy held up his hand firmly, his face taking on a hard set which immediately stopped all opposition from Romanov. Alexy turned suddenly and Leon nearly jerked back behind his cubicle when he realized that the man was instead turning to face the desk he had stopped in front of, his face morphing into a friendly smile. “Now, Lisa, what’s this emergency your department is all in a fuss over?”

‘What’s this about an emergency?’ Leon frowned. Lisa worked in the same department and team as him, why hadn’t he known about this so-called emergency? He didn’t have time to consider it further as he instead focused on hearing her response. “We have a problem with some of the dormant dev testing accounts that have been abandoned over time in the game.” she started, clearing her throat nervously. It seemed clear that she had not been expecting a response from the big man himself.

“Of the several thousand accounts that have been created over the years to test different aspects of the game, many have been left for the AI to handle or simply forgotten about over time. This is generally not an issue as, once control has been relinquished, they simply integrate with the rest of the NPC’s thanks to the AI assuming control over the account. Unfortunately a few had some rather… game breaking abilities… given to them by their original creators. These accounts have also assimilated and now a few of them have the strength to affect the narrative we are going for with the storyline.”

Alexy frowned at this, staring silently at the concerned looking woman. “Regardless of the narrative, which can be corrected by the AI, will these NPC accounts break immersion for the players?”

Leon could swear Alexy’s eyes had flicked over to him for a brief second after he’d asked that question. Almost like a warning. He couldn’t know, could he?

Lisa nodded before pulling out a list of names, too far away for him to see clearly, she singled a few accounts out before handing the list to Alexy. “This one, this one, and this one here could conceivably affect the immersion experienced by the players, and while they might not be all powerful now, projections indicate that they will soon be nearly unstoppable if they are allowed to grow.” Alexy fiddled with the list for a moment before handing it back to the well dressed woman. “Flag the accounts and have them sent to my desk for review, I’ll have the AI find a way to delete them that doesn’t conflict too heavily with the NPC’s around them.” She nodded seriously, turning back to her desk as the world renowned genius turned and walked quickly away, back to the executive elevator where he would disappear once more.

In all of Leon’s ten years as an employee this would mark the third time he had seen the mysterious man, and just like that, he was gone.

‘If the NPC’s break immersion for the players… if they had nearly unstoppable strength…deletion…’ The words spoken by the CEO resounded in Leon’s head. What are the odds that the head man himself, the mysterious and rarely seen genius who had the power to delete entire existences from the game, would appear for the third time in his memory, right before he completed his plan, and say those words? ‘No…perhaps I’m over analyzing this… He couldn’t know about my plan. I’m just a small cog in this company, a rarely noticed piece of the machine, why would he make an appearance just for me? To warn me?’ It seemed rather unlikely, highly coincidental or not. The timing was suspicious, however.

Regardless, Leon would take those highly suspect words to heart when he designed his own character.

When he created his new identity.