The idea wasn't complicated. That was the point.
Every piece of software I'd seen adults my parents' age struggle with had the same problem: it assumed you already knew what you were doing. I didn't want to build something clever. I wanted to build something a six-year-old could pick up cold and a forty-year-old could lose an evening to without noticing the time. Simple rules. A curve of difficulty that never let you feel stupid, only almost-there.
I built two of them. One was physics and grudges — birds, a slingshot, a smug row of pigs that had it coming. The other was color-matching, deceptively soft-edged, engineered around the specific itch of one more move and I'll stop. Neither idea was hard to code once {Coding Lvl MAX} had finished doing whatever it did to the part of my brain that used to find loops confusing. The hard part, again, was Skye — obscuring the source, routing the builds through servers that didn't trace back to a six-year-old's bedroom, making sure that when people inevitably tried to reverse-engineer what I'd made, they'd find scaffolding and no foundation.
I registered the company myself. Filed the paperwork as an LLP with Ron listed as guardian, because the state of Illinois had opinions about six-year-olds signing contracts and I had no interest in relitigating them. I called it The Infinite, because I liked that it didn't promise anything specific — not games, not software, not even ambition. Just room to grow into whatever it needed to be.
I put both games up on Netscape's download index the same week, free, no fanfare, under a company nobody had heard of, made by a name nobody would connect to a face for another few days.
By the second morning, the download counter had rolled past numbers I'd budgeted for the second month.
"Sam." Ron's voice, from the kitchen, doing the thing it did when he was trying to sound calm and not quite landing it. "There's a man here. Government, I think. Suit."
I came downstairs already knowing, more or less, what this was. Not because I'm psychic — because six days of exponential download curves eventually cross a threshold where somebody in an office notices a number moving faster than a number that size is supposed to move, and when the number's attached to something as new and unregulated as software distributed over the internet, "somebody in an office" tends to wear a suit.
The man at the door was younger than I'd pictured, early thirties, a government-issue haircut and a briefcase that looked like it had never once been opened in anger. "Samuel Witwicky," he said, checking a name against a printed sheet like he needed the confirmation more than I did. "You're invited to Washington. The President would like to meet you."
Ron's expression did something complicated. "Sam. What the hell did you do?"
"I made a couple of games," I said. "Registered a company. That's it, I think." Which was, again, a fact and not the whole truth, the same way it had been every time since the multiplier first caught. "Should I ask him if his kids have played Candy Crush?"
The suited man's face cracked, just slightly, at that — the specific expression of someone who has, in fact, watched his kid play it every night that week and has strong opinions about the third boss level.
"I'll take that as a yes," I said, and went to go pack.