The curved monitor's cold glow was the only light in the room—fifty-two hours without sleep, and Leo Chen's world had narrowed to the screens before him.
It was beautiful. It was perfect. It was mathematically pure—until capital got involved.
He missed the early days, when code was pure creation. He could still remember the first time a civilization emerged from his algorithms—the product of systems he'd designed, interacting in ways he'd never predicted. It had felt like watching a child take its first steps.
Four years after writing the first line of code, "Origin"'s elegant logic had been gutted by paywalls and pop-ups. The tech tree had become a shopping mall, each branch gated behind a credit card transaction. And now, another assault on his creation.
The comms window chimed. Mark's avatar appeared.
"Leo, the 'Nobility Privilege' system must go live next week." Mark's voice was smooth, practiced. "Paying players can skip the Agricultural Revolution—start with knights and castles. The data team predicts a 28% boost in ARPU."
"It'll destroy the system's educational value," Leo rasped. His throat felt like he'd been swallowing sand. "Players won't learn anything about how civilizations actually develop if they can just pay to skip the hard parts."
"Education?" Mark laughed. The sound made Leo flinch—small, but involuntary. "Players need dopamine, Leo. The thrill of 'pay-to-get.' The board is happy with current data, but they want more."
Leo knew what "more" meant. More paywalls, more pop-ups. He'd compromised before, burying backdoors in the code, tiny acts of rebellion against the commercialization of his vision.
Mark's virtual avatar nodded and disappeared, while Leo's fingers hovered over the keyboard, pausing.
Buried beneath layers of compromised code, he preserved a "clean mode"—stripped of all paywalls, all artificial difficulty adjustments, all data tampering.
It was pointless. The clean mode would never go live. But he had to do it. A matter of principle. A matter of dignity.
As he hit Enter, a sharp pain pierced his heart.
Not a metaphor. Physical agony.
He tried to inhale, but his lungs refused to expand. Black static bloomed at the edges of his vision. The monitor glow intensified, the light searing into his retinas. He tried to reach for the emergency button, but his body wouldn't obey.
His body tilted backward. The light from screens merged into a blinding white.
The drone of server fans faded. The pain became distant, abstract.
In his final moment of consciousness, he saw the log pop up on the main screen:
'''
[System Error: Reality Version Incompatible]
[Layer Sync Failure: Primary Reality Detached]
[Multiple Alternate Realities Detected: Unstable Overlap]
[Forcing Reboot...]
[Initiating Layer Transfer...]
'''
Reality version? Layer sync failure? Multiple alternate realities? He was a systems architect—he understood error codes, exception handling. But this—this was beyond anything he'd ever encountered—something about layers, versions, something about the structure of existence.
The words blurred together. His thoughts were scattered, his brain dumping everything like a corrupted file being wiped from a hard drive.
Then came the long, absolute dark.
Leo drifted in the void, his consciousness fragmenting. Memories flashed before him—the first line of Origin code, the first virtual civilization emerging, the slow corruption of his creation. He felt a profound sense of loss—not just for his game, but for the idealism that had driven him.
As he floated in the darkness, he began to question his own existence. Was he just another line of code in a larger system? Was his reality as malleable as the virtual worlds he created?
The system error message echoed in his mind—"Reality Version Incompatible"
Incompatible.
The word stung. It was the same word the board had used to describe his educational vision. He had fought those judgments, argued against them, refused to accept them. But now, faced with this cosmic version of the same rejection, he couldn't find the strength to resist anymore.
He was tired. So incredibly tired.
For the first time in years, he let go.
Suddenly, he felt a jolt—not like electric pain this time, but like being downloaded, compressed, transmitted at the speed of light. His consciousness scattered into fragments, each piece carrying a different memory, a different piece of his identity. He saw his childhood, his parents, the first computer he'd built, the university where he'd fallen in love with systems theory, the day he'd signed his soul away to the investment board.
All of it—fragmented, processed, streamed away into the dark.
And then, sensation returned.