2 The email

I was never a skilled person, that's the truth, neither in sports nor in what I liked most, computer or console games. No, I wasn't; I didn't have the ability to do hand-eye synchronization, nor the intuition for combat, nor the patience to transform my defects with hard work.

This didn't turn me into the typical nerd either; I was just a normal kid, neither the tallest nor the most handsome, nor the shortest nor the smartest, nor the dumbest. I was not rich, but I was not poor either; neither the weight of orphanhood, nor a difficult family, nor a desire for revenge weighed on me. I was not your typical novel character with a dark or violent past.

Likewise, I was just a child who, no matter how much I liked video games, didn't measure up; I couldn't advance or pass on the trendy games... That's why I soon discovered my second great passion behind video games themselves: cheating, looking for tricks, exploits or cheats. Just hacking the games...

That was my true superpower; I was the best cheater that had ever existed in the history of video games. My simple skill was to find the quickest way to gain power in the simplest way, while what many found difficult, I obtained through mere intuition and analysis.

Many will judge my cheating behavior as a simple weakness of character; however, for an eight-year-old boy, having to read tables in hexadecimal to be able to hack a game, was it less praiseworthy than just being a good player? Knowing how to take advantage of that pixel of the screen where you could hide was worse than being the best in combat? In the end, I learned in another way to win in those fantasy worlds, in another way, in a way that everyone would criticize, but at the end of the day, they were my victories.

I spent a normal adolescence, with a conventional social life, and accumulated a lot of experience in the field of cheating and hacking games. I was a cheater; many times the games only passed through my hands with the challenge of hacking, cheating, or discovering the exploits that were in.

Without being a great student, I managed to pass the exam and enter a computer science degree, and even within the online community I managed to make me a name for myself with my games dismantling jobs. On the one hand, it was a bad name for good players, and on the other hand, it was a help for those without skills like me, and on third way a headache for video game companies, who saw how their months of work to create a certain level of difficulty came to nothing due to bugs that a twenty-year-old discovered and published...

In this way, one day, my first job offer came from a video game company. They required my services to find those bugs before even releasing the game... I won't lie to you and say that it was a super salary, but compared with the efforts of many friends from school and high school, I didn't earn a bad living.

This is how I went from one game to another, being paid for it and continuing to destroy the guts and efforts of those trendy games that did not deign to contract me... My online name became famous in certain circles: Lion the Cheater; my guides for newbies were sold well; and life smiled on me.

I liked the comfort, and I loved the freedom of teleworking wherever I wanted. That's why, when I saved a little money, I moved to a town, in the provinces, big enough for there to be a good internet connection, but at the same time small enough for the price of housing and life to be as cheap as possible.

I had a small town house with two floors, three bedrooms, a good kitchen, a living room with a fireplace, and a backyard. What more could I want? And a mortgage so small that by the time I turned 32, I had paid it off.

With the arrival of mobile games, especially pay-to-win games, my services became more in demand... What company that relied on the difficulty of its game to encourage people to buy paid packages would risk having a cheater like me dismantle the business by publishing the tricks that would allow everyone to reach their maximum potential?

This is how I turned 35 years old... The worst thing in my life was the loss of my hair. I was a bald thirty-something, and I had never established a stable relationship. Most of the girls did not see my work as something serious and with a future; in other cases, it was my clumsiness. Did I chase them away? Over time, I began to see my solitary life as normal.

From time to time, I would travel to the city to see my parents, or they would come home for a while.

It was a Tuesday, one more of many, and just a few hours ago I had finished my last assignment... a trick of a game for which they paid me a good amount. The game had a lot of graphics, a lot of AIs, and a lot of systems. Full of loopholes, the story wasn't bad, but in the end, it was just another RPG made to get the most out of 12-year-old kids...

I went in, and I gutted it in the three aspects that included my job... As for The security of the files, it was not bad at all. I was not able to find any security problems, neither in hexadecimal nor in static nor in the processes in play; there was no way to access and hack the content... However, as for the game and possible exploits... my god I have rarely seen something so careless... with the intention to make the game realistic they had fallen into major errors, usable scenarios that made knowing how to take advantage of them more important than the skills of the characters, usable bugs... Ugh, bad thing... and at the level of character architecture, thousands of interactions that created OP characters out of nothing...

After sending my report, I sat in front of the computer. I had not chosen any games, so I could take well-deserved holidays. That was what being freelance meant—organizing myself, setting my times, and now it was time to rest unless a juicy offer made me change my mind...

An email arrived in my inbox: "Recruitment offer for Lion the cheater" Although I did not really want to get involved in new projects, the fact that the sender was not a company I knew caught my attention. Sender: recruitment@athair.com. I immediately put the name on the internet and it took me to the strangest website I had ever seen for a gaming website, because it really wasn't one. The company and its website were a startup that worked on devices for immersive virtual reality. Few data points, nothing clear, much less a game behind it, or so it seemed...

I read the content of the email with more curiosity than anything else, because what would these people want from me?:

"Dear Mr. Lion,

First, thank you for your attention to reading these lines. We are aware of his multiple talents and that is why we would like to count on his services in the previous testing phase of our big launch, the video game "World of Athair".

This will be the first immersive reality game with a neural transposition device on the market, and in order to satisfy our future players, we require testers of your caliber.

For this beta tester phase, only 2,000 players will participate. The test period will be a maximum of 3 months, during which total and absolute availability are required. Knowing the inconvenience this may entail, the salary will be set at 50,000 euros plus bonuses.

Reply to this email to arrange the interview.

Sincerely The Athair Recruitment Team."

50,000 euros for 3 months of work??? that was approximately 1 year of work with my current wage... It was not an unusual amount, at least not from the point of view of the big professional players who between the companies, sponsors and broadcast earnings could far exceed this amount, but for me it made me rethink my holidays...

For years we have been waiting for a "real" virtual reality game, no glasses and 3D hands, a game where you feel everything, and have direct control of your body... This changed its development a lot, but it also made it dependent more if possible to the player of his real abilities...

I made myself a coffee and went out to the backyard to meditate on the subject when a creepy rat, huge as a cat, ran across the backyard. I tried to climb on top of the table, but with the clumsiness of tripping, slipping and falling off it with the coffee incorporated on top. I had scalded half my face, and the bastard rat seemed to be mocking me...

I ran out as best I could and locked myself in the house, luckily he didn't follow me so he was already leaving. I went to the garage, took my small utility vehicle and went to the nearest hardware store, I'm sure they had poison or rat traps...

Upon returning, and after leaving traps with rat poison all over my backyard, and after preparing dinner, I answered the email.