2018:02:18:09:15.

Tick tock, the clock wore on until the frightful execution. Such a trivial task had its monumental occurrences in the past, but could any of them compare to one that might change the world? Dare anyone, by a single wave of his hand, deem himself worthy to control the lives of other men? Dare he consider himself a god?

Dasomov stared blankly at his computer monitor. Three weeks. That was the time necessary to find and utilize a certain exploit of interest. Dasomov moved his mouse around the screen and made a few clicks. In a chat window, a couple comrades began chiming in their ready status. Dasomov typed in a brief reply in his native Russian: "Let's begin the caravan." He then brought a terminal window to the front of his screen and entered the command: "rucc2". In a moment, the terminal window began buzzing away with miscellaneous info that only the program's developer would understand. Then it moved on to some secretive details belonging to another programmer.

"base id='10B8be13777777oa732'

name rom='uchuu_komupurekusu' kj='宇宙コンプレックス'/name

owner user='0031120634592174333019' hash='_'Kumichi/owner

root override='TITANSHEAD'

packagerios-95:/backup/pk/00/00/root_ -list/package

port ontime='90-12-31' access=''80:85/port

/root

/base"

Dasomov briefly examined the details before copying the file path. He opened another terminal, typed in another command, pasted the file path, and hit Enter. A progress bar appeared in his terminal, accompanied by a gradually increasing percentage sign. The progress bar took a number of hours to finish, but when it finally had, Dasomov typed in his signature statement into the chatbox. He then proceeded to close various windows on his screen, shut down his VPS and his new millennium version of Tor, and turn off his computer. Tonight's work was done, and as long as a certain corporation a few hundred miles away didn't care - even though he suspected they might have noticed - his work from now on might keep him very busy for the next several months.

The phone rang. Slow as a caterpillar on a frozen windshield, Dasomov walked over to the phone and put it up to his ear. "Yo," he said, his voice like a drowning bear.

A chipper young voice sounded off on the other end. "Chapter Zero complete, and she's a real dinger!" it tauted in the sort of casual Russian used only among the snowy otaku.

"Did you read the history yet?" the older one retorted.

"I did alittle research - enough for bits and pieces, but I kept it relatively independent."

"Some of us would like an authentic-sounding story, you know."

"Oh it sounds official alright."

"That's not what I meant."

"Ah don't worry. You'll love it anyway. You can read it on my blog come Friday, after I work out the kinks and fix my spelling."

Dasomov sighed. "Very well."

"Ok, I'm out."

Dasomov heard a click and then hung up. He went to his refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of vodka. After eying it for a moment, he put it back in and pulled out the milk. Pouring himself a glass, he sat down on his humble but comfortable couch and leaned back. The real fun was just about to begin. And fun was always more so with friends.

On the walls were printed photographs of a half-dozen comrades, representative of how the digital era had come to dominate their lives as much as it had strengthened their friendships. Now and then, the exchanging of bits was deemed unsatisfactory, and a physical token substituted in its place for a more real expression of friendship. These tokens would find themselves located somewhere within line-of-sight of the photographs bearing their sender. Fat ones, small ones, novelties, crafts, mystery items - whatever they may be - they all bore some connection to a mutual memory once cherished and later forgotten.

Dasomov didn't have time to remember things his mind considered unimportant. He might treasure a trinket or two, but once the sun rose and a project idea planted itself in his grey matter, there was no stopping its roots from growing alongside the nerves that filled his body. All at once, his morning breakfast would end and he would race over to his computer and start punching away.

With the exception of the occasional reminder of loneliness, everything about the solitary life was quite natural to Dasomov. He lived alone on the fifth and final floor of an apartment complex in Saratov, overlooking the Volga. His apartment reflected the sufficiency of this lifestyle: It was small - no more than forty-five paces in perimeter - yet complete with kitchenette, living room, bedding area, and bath. There were only a couple of overhead lights throughout the house, along with a heater - all of which could be manually activated from the same box of switches protruding from the kitchenette wall.

But the solitary life did come with a price. Like any bachelor's apartment, this one suffered neglect. Cracks as long as ivy raced up from the doorsteps of mice to the crease between the shields of privacy and rain. The kitchenette counter-top was grease-stained like the workbench of a car mechanic. The carpet floor had been vacuumed recently but only in the wake of an infestation of creepy-crawly and crumb-crunching company. Ragged and stinky, the carpet could have been replaced by the hair of a dromedary without anyone noticing. The toilet was another matter entirely. Its waters would have better served as the home of a mudskipper than a guppy. Now and then, an artificial waterfall would wash away the muck so long as their wasn't a dam downstream.

Yet life went on, and the waters outside acted as a reminder of that. Each and every evening, when he had brought himself to the brink of exhaustion, Dasomov would go out onto the tiny, poster-sized platform that was his porch and gaze out at the river water. Tiny glittering lights from various urban structures would reflect off the water crests and into his weary eyes. The chill of the breeze would sweep under his hem of his jacket and bring a comfort to his cramped stomach muscles better than a massage with a lotion of aloes accompanied with a swig of rum. It was simple moments like these that added the cherry on top to the life of living alone.

A life alone was both pleasant and cheap for such a man as Dasomov. Without a girlfriend, a pet, or a mortgage, he had nothing to pester him for money and attention. The only occasional disturbance came annually when a couple of tourist agents would play loud music celebrating the anniversary of the restoration of the travel industry after Pluto's Kiss. Dasomov didn't mind. Their jobs had been affected tremendously; his had not. As a programmer, Dasomov had worked his way through the ins and outs of his business and managed to land himself several security contracts.

The world was acting in fear, and it needed security experts. Times had become scary ever since Pluto's Kiss - a worldwide catastrophe in 2005 brought about by a virus created by a 10-year-old boy in California. The disaster had left millions without power, without employment, and without hope. For safety, much of the globe had turned to ALTIMIT OS, a supposedly full-proof operating system that wouldn't suffer from the same hacking as other computers had. But this hope had proven misplaced, and by the year 2018, everyone was scrambling for something better. Who better to ask for help than a Russian who had been cracking away at this digital dialogue for most of his existence?

If there is one thing to be said about the technology of man it's that it can always be cracked. Dasomov knew this well. There wasn't a single piece of software that he couldn't dissect. No matter how promising a piece of code appeared to be, he always viewed it with the same level of skepticism as an Orthodox fanatic viewed the intermingling of his doctrines with foreign ecumenism. With the precision of a hound chasing a rabbit, he almost never failed to pinpoint some weakness in the code. The code he trusted most was simple. And in most cases, larger tasks could always be broken into simple tasks and simple code could be run to complete them. Nevertheless, there was a subconscious love of complexity and a fascination with architecting do-all devices that made simple solutions appear as trivial and boring as grass in a flower bed. And thus, Dasomov would grow his grasses and unite them with a super script that would put the fear of God back into Bruce Schneier.

Two such scripts were designed for tonight's escapades. They were carefully crafted to employ a dozen other cracker apps, micro-manage a couple network connections, and siphon several gigabytes of data from servers in Japan to equally adept hardware in Moscow - all without their origin being detected.

Over the coming weeks, Dasomov would gradually fall into a routine involving of a couple meals, a dedicated work period, and an evening of analyzing line after line of the source code he had just ripped. Dasomov would have preferred this routine end upon the examination of the last line of code, but this was the sort of project where testing needed to begin almost immediately. A small band of other Russians were also involved in this project, and neither he nor they could withhold themselves from the excitement of toying with what was now in their possession: the world's greatest game, The World.