PART TWENTY-EIGHT

I logged out and took a shower. I'd had one before the party, which I now realise was weird and dumb because it was a virtual event and no-one present could have smelled my pits or my bits - but showers help me think. And there was one thing I knew: the end of the end of the world was a sliding doors moment. If I was fast and got on the train, my life would go one way. If I was just too slow and the doors shut in my face, my life would continue on its bleak path. Right then, at that moment, it was enough that I had a chance. I knew I was lining up at the start of a marathon with the train doors all the way at the end. But I was there! In my t-shirt and too-tight shorts and with my number on my chest. That number? 386. Only 26 miles and change to go. Ready... set... Now, sometimes I get messages from people who think I'm amazing, and I always try to downplay my skills by telling them how lucky I was. They never believe me. But think about what had to go right just to get me to the START of the race. I had to get the Woke Up skill, which was just a random loot drop that could have gone to anyone. I had to find a dungeon or some other entity desperate enough to listen to me. I had to meet Valentine and her team, or someone equally connected. And most of all, I needed ThetanSoft to look the other way while, frankly, I vandalised their game. BUT! With the end of the world cancelled I suddenly had lots of advantages. Cards up my sleeve. I had my relationship with 386 - unique in the whole BetterVerse, I was sure. I had a business plan and thanks to the Swords killing themselves my 'company' had almost 50,000 mana in the bank. I owned loads of land outside the dungeon and had a half-built inn. ThetanSoft had seen what I was doing and by not shutting me down had given me tacit permission to keep going. They'd even given me 6 months of VIP membership! And a quality webcam! And most of all, I was the only player in the world who knew why the end of beta had been postponed. I ended the shower before I really started to feel the benefit. I knew what I had to do. The Socials I went to every social media platform I could think of - including the ones that make my skin crawl - and created new accounts. But for that first night most of my activity was on Twitter and similar platforms. My username was @BVleaks. (I thought about being BVanon but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I do own that account but only to stop someone else having it.) I quickly tweeted: I know what happened. 100 follows buys the first clue. Meanwhile, ThetanSoft's own Twitter account was having a mini-meltdown. It was the focal point for millions of perplexed customers, all with the same question. Clearly, the account's minders didn't have the answer. Here's what came just before the intended midnight wipe, and just after: 11:55 Nearly time to make that last memory! #kissmegoodnight [30-second advert featuring two models too shy to smooch] 11:58 It's been nice knowing you all. See you in the next life! #whatdreamsmaycome [gif of the BetterVerse logo, shining with pristine perfection] 00:03 Uhh where's the off button

00:06 This is fine [they were so frazzled they forgot to attach the 'dog in a room on fire' image]

00:10 Anyone wanna buy a second hand universe? Asking for a friend.

00:12 lol someone's getting fired

There was then a big break which made people lose their minds even more, followed by:

01:00 I'm being told there will be an announcement at lunchtime today. I also have five tweets to save my job. I was not idle. Have you ever heard of Trump Responders? They were people who tried to promote their own Twitter accounts by being among the first to reply to anything Trump tweeted while he was president. That was the kind of shameless hustle I was planning to run, so why not try it? I wrote cryptic replies to every ThetanSoft tweet but they got lost in the noise. And what noise it was! Each of the post-midnight tweets from ThetanSoft had exponentially more comments. One hundred thousand. Two hundred thousand. Five hundred thousand! By the time of the 1 am announcement, most major media outlets had picked up the story. I urgently needed traction, so I emailed Valentine, told her I was BVleaks and I could explain what had happened but I wanted to build an audience for my next scam and if she knew a way to spread the word about my new account, could she let me know. I started getting new followers right away. Dozens of them! I started tweeting. 00:14 THREAD. The end of the world was a scenario created by ThetanSoft. Basically the death star heading towards the game engine. But all death stars have an exhaust port... 1/? [picture of the original Death Star] If you don't use Twitter, that 1 and the question mark indicate that this was the first tweet of several. The long gaps between tweets were because I realised I was really bad at wording them. Mine didn't sound fun or funny whatsoever! But every time I posted one I'd refresh the page and see I had more followers and people were retweeting like crazy. My detached tone seemed right for what I was doing. I wish I'd meant it. 00:17 The engine is neutral. Its main job is to provide balance. People complain about the winds of magic but it's a great system for making sure wizards don't overrun the game. 2/? [picture of a macho wizard-terminator standing on a wall of skulls] 00:19 The end of the world was called the Torquemada event. Torquemada was an insanely powerful NPC who'd been plotting to end the world for decades. (BV used to run much faster - one day out here was like a month in there.) 3/? [black and white image of someone from the Spanish Inquisition, which is what came up when I looked up that name] 00:21 The engine did what it always does, what it was created to do - find and maintain balance. It nudged XP and skills towards an NPC hero who might defeat Torquemada. Possibly a series of potential heroes, but only one was in place to do something about the end of beta. 4/? [picture of lone space marine blocking a bridge with a horde of aliens rushing towards him] 00:23 The death star was just as advertised. TS didn't lie about the end of beta. They have over a thousand new quests and six major new locations ready to go. Everything in TS is geared towards BetterVerse 1.0. I'm not sure a single employee even knew about the hero NPC. 5/? [picture of Clark Kent] 00:26 You might have guessed by now. The hero killed the villain and saved the day. If TS's share price tanks in the morning, it's because their game engine is so elegant/stubborn it can't/won't run a quest line with no victory condition. 6/? [picture of Captain Kirk, caption: I don't believe in the no-win scenario] 00:29 The short-term future for BV is chaos. Unhappy customers. But long-term this is amazing. People are going to stop smiting chunks out of NPCs long enough to realise that what's under the hood is more sophisticated than they could possibly have imagined. 7/? [meme of salesman slapping car, caption: This bad boy can fit so much ADVANCED AI in it.] 00:30 People are going to realise that an NPC can even save the BetterVerse... from its own makers. Nothing like this story has ever existed in human history. This is brand new. When the market opens I'll be buying TS stock. Follow me for updates and more analysis. 8/8 [gif of mouse cursor clicking the follow button] Note I had no ACTUAL plans to get my broker on the phone at 7am and shout ‘BUY BUY BUY’ at him. It just seemed that people would take BVleaks more seriously if he was the sort of person who had disposable income instead of being someone who had recently gone three days straight only eating ramen noodles. Sleep By the time I went to bed I had 3,000 followers, a viral thread, and DMs from two journalists. I tried to sleep but I was incredibly wired. So much had happened, and my head was absolutely fizzing with ideas. When I finally got a few hours of shut-eye, I dreamed of green screens and cheesy transition effects. Politeness The first thing I did when I woke up was email Valentine thanking her for me going viral. She made a joke about herpes that I didn't get until I remembered she'd kissed me. I replied that I'd be taking the dungeon project to strange new places and hoped she wouldn't think less of me because of it. As always, she thought I was joking when I decidedly wasn't. I went to work, resented every minute of it as usual, then raced home and went to talk to 386. He was in full turtle mode - 50,000 mana points of traps - and that was fine with me. I just needed to talk to him. First to get any more inside information I could use to boost my new Twitter account. But most of all, to talk about our next steps. We agreed that he'd stay on high alert for another day or two and then return to daytime theme park mode when the NPCs realised their lives were back to normal. What I really needed from him was help on the next stage of my scam. I was honest with him - the scam was mostly for my benefit, but would ultimately help him out, too. When I told him what it was he was ecstatic. He made me leave the dungeon so that he could reset and we could get started. When I went back in he'd made a new room for me and we tried out some ideas. (Much MUCH more about this later!) After logging out I had a few minutes of WILD in-game footage and spent a couple of hours editing it with the ThetanSoft VIP tools. I knew I was too hyper to make good decisions so I decided against posting the video right away. Another stroke of luck! Special Delivery At 1 am, my doorbell rang. It was a delivery dude and he handed me a floppy brown padded envelope and scarpered. I was too zonked to yell at him or tip him or yell at him then tip him. Inside there was a phone. A flip-phone like from the old days! There was a post it note that said 'call me' and another one that said 'please destroy that note' and a third one that said 'yeah destroy all the notes'. I flipped the phone open - so satisfying! - and found there was only one number stored in the contacts. I called it. It was Isli, the woman who claimed to work in the payroll department of ThetanSoft. "Hi!" I said. "Billy-Bob," she said, wide awake. "I hope you are well. As you can guess, things are crazy here. Bonkers, in fact. The whole company's in turmoil." "Including payroll?" I said, with an edge of sarcasm in my voice. She sighed. "Yes, including payroll. But someone is keeping an eye on your project. They're worried about what you're up to now." I didn't say anything. Clearly, someone had been watching me in-game or waiting for me to start creating videos. Neither felt great. "Are you still there?" "Yes," I said. "Look, I don't know what weird videos you've been recording in your basement there. But you seem determined to use intellectual property from other companies. I've been asked to tell you to, ah, not do that." "Oh." I heard familiar sounds - she was cooking. "What's the point, anyway? You're wasting your time. Your videos will get blocked. Even if the IP holders let you keep the videos up, they'll claim all the advertising revenue." "I'm not sure I know what you mean." "Billy-Bob, can you be serious for a moment? Please? I haven't seen what you did. I just heard" - she started laughing - "that you fought Darth Vader, took his lightsaber and used it to cut the ring from Lord of the Flies." I didn't correct her. "And then you were dressed like Spider-Man and descended from a roof and upside-down kissed... yourself." "Some of that is not accurate." "Look, that sounds amazing to me. I don't know how you're doing it. But it's a waste of time. And it's self-destructive. You're creating work for people who really don't need that right now. We're all stressed off our ticks and you're trying to bury us under a mountain of lawyers." A desperate screech had come into her voice. "Could you just not?" I sighed. "Okay, I get you. I do. I'm not here looking to make your life, anyone's life, hard. I just want to create some fun stuff and maybe make some paper. You know?" There was a brief pause. "Right. So... But... But you're trying to create a world within the world. But... we already made that world. It's a big world. Isn't it? You can use assets that we own. I know it's not..." - she looked down at her notes - "a bard who plays Never Gonna Give You Up or a Jessica Rabbit photo filter... but from what I understand there's virtually infinite pre-existing assets. In the BetterVerse, I mean. Landscapes of every kind. Volcanos, deserts, jungles. There's in-game stories and in-game music. And there's monsters and different races and all that. There's a woman who just codes horses. I don't have a clue what any of this means but I'm told you really should be able to do what you're trying to do with what's available." Now it was my time to pause. She was right! I'd been trying to bring my experiences and references into the BetterVerse, but the game's designers had done all that. But they were hugely more diverse than me, more creative, more talented. Why was I using Darth Vader when I could just find some famous in-game baddie? It'd save me having to describe things to 386 in tedious detail, and it'd keep me out of legal trouble, too. "I hear you," I said, and when I woke up the next morning I had a whole new plan. A New Hope So that was the end of the beginning. Most of you won't believe what I write next. The crazy thing is that it's all true - except for a couple of obvious exaggerations and boasts. What might be hard to convey through words is just how much FUN it all was. Even those times when everything was going against me and my house of cards was about to tumble - it was a blast. A riot. But first I needed to talk to 386 about a new game.