I turned around and smiled up at the glowing angel called Mom. I knew the girls would already be gone, and I would see them again, but now, Mom and I need to have a serious talk about what was going on. Too many things have been left unanswered and it was time for everyone to come clean and stop hiding things from me.
"Okay, Mom, Who are you?"
Chapter 236: IT'S A FUCKING TRAP! Pt1
"So, what don't I know about you and the girls, and you're not kicking me out of here until I know the full story. Too long have I been running with scissors in the dark; I almost deleted someone, do you know that? Where were you when that happened? When I was grilling your daughter about if she was still a puppet? I could go one, but you and I both know that isn't necessary. Is what Dansei said true? And how do I know that?"
So many unanswered questions wanted to spill out of me, but doing that wasn't going to get the answers I needed. No, what I needed was the story from before the game started. If I designed this then there would be a way for me to control things better.
"Telling you will do nothing, but leave you with questions. You need to see from the beginning, and just know this. The girls and I owe you all owe our lives to you and could never ever repay you for what you have done and are still doing for us all," Tequila said as she floated towards me.
"Well, I have a rough idea now of what happened, but I am missing the important specific parts. I want to believe you Mom, but right now, I need to stay firm with my resolve. So, show me what I am missing."
Mom nodded, and reached forward to my forehead, and then her hand went inside my head. I was shocked at first, but there was no feeling of it. It was like a hologram passing through me; just a ghost feeling of something being there that wasn't.
I placed my hand on Mom's other arm and it was as solid as I was, and oh man was her skin smooth. Stop it, Dave! Or I was going to have to stop calling her mom! Ugh, if Grace was still here I would never hear the end of it, but then, someone turned out the light.
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[2 years before the launch of Reborn]
I opened my eyes, and I was in a bed, very familiar. I looked around the room, my room, this was my actual room. This started to drift into my mind, this was my room when I first started to work on Reborn. I looked around more, yeah, I was an Otaku from Calgary, Alberta, and my room was living proof of my claim.
The walls were covered in shelves that were filled with manga, Dungeons and Dragons books, and other Fantasy and Sci-Fi novels. The free space on each shelf had figurines of my favorite animes, and any free wall space was filled with anime girls. Even though this was me, I was still shocked at my own level of geek, but that wasn't important.
Why was I here?
"Hey, dipshit, are you awake yet?"
The door banged open and my loud-mouthed blad older brother walked in. That right, we live together, mom and dad, are down in the states at the time-share place they pay for right now.
"Why are you yelling? I'm right here you jackass! What's the big deal?"
"Big deal?" Hyde asked coming over and slapping me around, not hard, but I still had to defend myself, but this wasn't a game and I was just a scrawny twenty-year-old programmer, Hyde was not.
"Alright, UNCLE! What the fuck do you want?"
Hyde pulled off me when I said uncle, but then made a feint at me when I swore at him. The guy was always bullying me, but I have had to bail him out of jail more than once for putting someone in the hospital after they messed with me. Still, what the hell was he…
"The launch for Second Life you fucktard, remember you, stupid little friend? You know the one that you insist is only your friend? [email protected]$##@, were you drinking while coding last night?" Hyde asked, but the name he spoke scrambled.
"Who?"
"[email protected]##@, are you deaf?"
Now he was looking like I was going to get a beating for real this time, so I dropped it. There must be a reason why I couldn't hear that name, but I knew who he was talking about, and we were just friends. I had known the person since childhood and she was a crazy perverted weirdo that has been helping me design my new VR game worlds I had been working on.
"Don't hit me, but what year is it? My head is in a fog right now, so just play along for now. I will get ready as you talk."
"Jeez, man, I bet you were up all night talking with [email protected]##@, and now your brain is cooked. At least you will just have to watch her go in, lucky bitch! You and I both play way more games than her and she got picked over us, but I heard out of the one-hundred and fifty people going in for the playtest, one hundred and thirty are girls. The rest are males that paid a lot of money to get into the game, this whole thing seems fishy. It's Nov. 28th, 2035, and it's Wednesday if your brain's that cooked."
Once I was dressed, I grabbed my winter jacket, and warm toque pulled them on, and stepped in my boots. I could see the bit of snow on the ground outside, and I hated the cold, so I zipped up before leaving the apartment. Hyde laughed at me and pulled up his hood, asshole better off letting the truck warm-up before coming to drag me out of bed.
Personally, I could have just watching from my clear lens and still be working on my game, but [email protected]##@, had asked me to come for the hour she would be in there. I had agreed and here we were; Hyde was just eager for all the single ladies that would be coming out of dive after. His thought was, they will have been tired of all the same things in there and nothing real, so he would be the first real man they see coming out.
I was fucking cold out, minus twenty-eight, and Hyde still only had a black hoodie on that said NOFX on it, some old punk band that he cranked while gaming. We got in the truck that was thankfully warmed up already, and buckled up, Deerfoot was going to be a nightmare, but anytime outside the hours of midnight and four AM were a nightmare to dive in winter. Plus, seventy percent of Canadien drivers forgot every year what it was like to drive with ice o the roads.
Hyde was driving, so it was his problem. I pulled out my phone as we left Canyon Meadows, and made the long climb up the hill to join the actual city. One of the coolest parts about where we lived was being in a valley that hid the rest of the city from us. I had a missed message from [email protected]##@, man, even on my phone it was messed up!
'Where r u' [email protected]##@.
'OMW, traffic is bad and roads are worse'
I waited for a reply, but then looked up as Hyde was hammering his horn, and yelling at the window.
"Fucking, giving me some fucking room, you bitch! You fucking inching along, let me fucking in, or so help me god, I will fucking rip your head off and shit down your throat! MOVE!" Hyde yelled as he rolled down the window, letting all the cold air in and the hot air out.
"Close the window! It's fucking cold out! I complained, but that got me a glare that said, all of this rage can be yours for one easy payment of opening your fucking mouth one more time.
This was a daily ritual for us when we needed to get to work in the morning, but I didn't go in every day, no need to, I was the boss. My company had been supplying retrofit worlds for Second life and the A.I. concepts I had been working on for NPC. One could say that I really designed Second Life, Reggy, and his crew were in charge of the equipment, but, because they hired me, it was their game, and I was just another no-name developer.
That was going to change, I already had people reverse engineering a test model I bought from some that had got one and we're working on a new prototype. Speaking of Reborn, I should check my email, and see how it went, they had said in the last email last night that they had finally broken through the eternal block that was keeping my guys out. Hopefully today I would have some concrete info before [email protected]##@ went into the game.
Like Hyde had said, there was something fishy about what people were picked for the test run, and there they had only run males in the simulator before this. I was following everything I could get my hands on and I was thorough, even outsourcing to some
pretty shady people to get what I wanted, but my friend was going into this game.
Hyde was yelling again as we tried to merge onto Bowness, but I was distracted, I had just opened up my email.
'Boss, read now!' -Simon.
Was sent to me thirty-five times and I noticed an uncountable number of miss calls and started to panic. I immediately called Simon, not checking the emails.
"DON'T LET THOSE GIRLS GET IN THE GAME! ITS A FUCKING TRAP!" Simon screamed at me through the phone.
Chapter 237: IT'S A FUCKING TRAP pt2
The phone was ringing, but she wasn't picking up, and I was starting to panic. It had all been an elaborate trap to get girls stuck into a game world, and tears were stinging my face. If I had just hurried up and hadn't acted like such an idiot!
"Calm down you idiot! We are barely late!" Hyde said, while shooting me a look.
"No, that was Simon, it's all a trap! They are going to publicly execute all of those girls and no one will have any idea! I'm calling the police!"
"Woah, hold on, are you fucking serious?"
"Hyde, do I look fucking kidding right know? DRIVE!"
Hyde punched it and road peoples ass, forcing his way into lanes as I slammed 911 into my phone. I explained who I was and the proof I had quickly and they said they would dispatch a large team to the convention center. Next I fired off a text to Simon and the rest of the team to start working on a way to reverse engineer the problem, but almost threw up when I saw the reply from Simon.
'No, there is no going back. If the helmets are on, the girls are dead. The monitors, the set up they talked about, it was all just a distraction. I have a copy of the waiver you sent me and they cover almost everything in it that could go wrong. I'm not saying we won't bury them for this, but that's not going to change a thing for those trapped inside.' -Simon.
'Then start working on a way inside! You're going to get me inside of that game, and then we are going to figure out a way to get them out of it! Those are my fucking worlds and our work! I will make them all pay for thinking they could get away with this!'
I threw my phone at the window; this was beyond fucking crazy, the audacity to trying something like this, but he was going to get away with it. [email protected]##@ would have already called me back or answered my call if she wasn't in yet. My friend was just killed, but she wasn't dead, and I would find her!
----------------
[ 1 year, 6 months until the release of Reborn]
We never made it on time, and the police even beat us there so we couldn't get close, but Simon was right, all hundred and thirty six girls were dead, along with her.
Over the last six months, I hadn't left the office once. Hyde stayed, but we had a cat, so he would go home every night, but she brought me meals that I didn't eat half the time. I was too absorbed with the problem.
I had almost bankrupted Reborn, I had a four month savage fight in the court, while also funnel money into the burning and buying every dive set that was ever sold then buying Second Life completely out. This cost me millions but it was the blood money I had gotten for helping make a place for rich sickos to abuse girls endlessly, so I used every cent to close the world off completely.
The entire time, I never left my office, or my dive table, except for the once a day I dropped out to do simple exercises to keep my body from fatiguing. I was in the game world, and I was working on a way to get the girls out of this single game world where they were all placed with infinite health, but zeros in all other stats, making them targets for even NPC. Still, I collected them all and with the help of MainFrame, Tequila, who turned out to be another one of the girls forced to watch over the world, but there were weird hacks in her file that I had never seen before.
The hacks were placed into certain parts of her codes to make her believe that the things she was seen were not against the rules. This made it so she couldn't interfere if a girl was being raped or abused, but that was the first thing I did when I got to the world. MainFrame's A.I. was my design, so I was easily able to see and removed the protocols, but I didn't delete them. I stored them in a cloud so I could study them later.
After Finishing tweaking the system back to the normal capacity, but then I made some very big alterations to the way that the system dealt with Players that were getting into the game and trying to hurt the girl. Now the system would flag anyone one with even the thought of doing something like that would be red flagged and targeted by NPC viciously. The Player would be killed repeatedly until they left the game for some, it was worse, but this game had been close to the world since release, and there was still some in here.
Some just came and enjoyed themselves and only had fun with the NPC in the marked location, and they would be left alone, but heavily monitored. I wasn't taking anymore chances, but I had found [email protected]##@, and she was fine, as she could be, with no real world or body to go back to.
Now, six months have passed, and I am finally ready to start testing the spark transfer to Reborn. The world Second life, was only a quarter of the size that Earth was. So, it was still pretty big, but living the same life, and not being able to start over after living a lifetime would make them go crazy. so, I have been working with others to get Reborn up and online.
Reborn was supposed to be a series of twenty five different game worlds. I was going to release it to the world in the next six month, but now with everything going on and all the editing we were doing, it was getting pushed back more and more. The problem was the way I had originally designed it was to have a player dive for an hour, but I had figured out how to tap into the brain to speed up time in our minds, relative to the time in this world.
Three years would pass in five mins, but there was no way to prevent the reset without beating the game. Then, if you could, the player of the game would have access to the entire game each time they signed in. This was fine for the people outside of the game who could just leave after sixty years, and that was only an hour of their time, but for the girls, anyone that didn't make it would be stuck in an endless loop.
The problem had been on my mind, and I have played throughout the game once and beaten it, but I had made the game so it wouldn't allow you to just add players that hadn't beaten the game, and now to take that appart would take years. So, there had to be another way, and that way came to me from Hyde one day while talking to my brother over some Mozza-Burgers from the A and Dub.
"So, I was thinking about your little problem, but we can have up to five people in a game right? Well why not put the girls into the server in line to be our extras? Then we can collect them and drop them in the Hall of Gods after each game and get more? You got old Mom up there in the Hall of Wishes now, and I am sure that she would think it was a great idea!" Hyde said.
"But who is going to be the other three?"
"Bah! Don't you worry about that! You get to work on making the game easy for us! I wanna be fucking strong like a mountain, that likes to benchpress other mountains! Don't worry about the team, I will get that together, and Bhan will for sure get in, he knees a bunch of the girls, and that's about the only thing that lazy prick will get off the couch for is his harem. So if you can get him back, then he will be here in a heartbeat, make sure you give him something convenient and that will allow him to not die from the first bus the idiots walked into!"
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[Hall of Wishes, Present]
Tequila was standing before me again, MainFrame, well not this games one, but now I understood what was going on, but I still didn't have all the pieces, but that wasn't for a lack of info. No, I needed the WorldWalker Function, and that was the last part of the builder system, ment to help try up loose ends for the player, but I needed to get back to the beginning. There was a locker I had left with my Admin stuff as a fail safe, but, then why hadn't I used it before?
"Renginold has always been there to stop you from getting it, but this time, he is gone."
"So, then this time I just have
to Get there before he gets back, and we could have a real chance of stopping him and preventing the reset. Okay, Mom, how many girls are left in the system, and, have I ever made it to her?"
"No, you haven't made it yet, but she is waiting for you, and knows you are trying. There are only fourteen girls left," Mom announced.
"Wha? How is that even possible? Bhan, and K both have less than ten? I assume Hyde took as many as I did, but where are the rest? Did Zero figure it out? Oh, hey, look, his name is back now!"
"Yes, Zero has been storing the girls in Hysteria Gem that he designed and they will act like spark containers that can be used to transfer the sparks into NPC of your choice."
"Perfect, load me up with fourteen and offer the girls all the choice of getting or coming with me to the Zodiacs. This next world Growing power will be my solo run, so I want everything ready for the last two worlds. Ugh, some much time had to be wasted, but soon I'm going to fix it all, okay Mom?"
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