Prologue: Gambling Snake

Teenagers—the main audience for games. I deal with them every day. When I was their age, console games still ruled the world. Who could have imagined that kids today would get to play fully virtual online games controlled by their brains?

I've worked at this game company for several years now. My first job was as a dealer in a virtual casino. The advantage of working in that environment is that even when someone goes berserk over their losses, they can't suddenly pull a gun and open fire on you.

I remember getting promoted two months after joining the company. I suppose management had noticed my talent for gambling. Personally, I think gambling skills are like any other skills. If you want to excel, you just have to work at them. That's all there is to it. Talented people simply need less time to develop their skills than people without talent. People who can rise above everyone else on talent alone don't exist. At least, I've never met one.

Once I became the casino's floor manager, my coworkers started talking. They used to tease me by calling me a “cold-blooded killer,” which I could accept, since I'm admittedly not much of a talker and don't smile very often. I hadn't expected my promotion to turn me into some sort of “hidden master” in their eyes, quietly concealing extraordinary abilities. The stories only grew from there, making me something of a celebrity.

Before long, a player with the ID “God of Gambling” challenged me. It really was rather funny. A player challenging a GM to a gambling match inside the game.

To be honest, I didn't think much of it at the time, but the company seemed ready to turn it into a publicity stunt and privately promised me a tangible reward if I won.

With such easy gains right in front of me, I had no reason to pass them up. So I thought I'd beat him, and beat him thoroughly enough to leave the impression that I was unbeatable at the card table. Settle it once and for all.

After that match, “God of Gambling” never logged on again. According to my coworkers in the data department, he'd deleted his account. Several months later, they made a point of coming over to tell me he'd returned to the game with a new account and a less conspicuous ID. Heh. Young people these days really are amusing.

Anyway, as the winner, I did receive the company's reward. I was promoted to general manager of the casino and got an office of my own, though it was inside the game. Of course, giving me an office in the real world would have been pointless. Apart from a handful of departments and the bosses who had no actual work to do, most people at the company spent their working hours in gaming pods, myself included.

My life over the past few years has been smooth sailing. The only disturbance was the “Great Crash” a year ago, which shook the worldwide online gaming community. The company suffered heavy losses. Large amounts of data were lost, countless players complained, and our coworkers in the technical department all said they could neither determine the cause nor fix the problem. It took the company a week to get the game running normally again. Fortunately, the players were fairly easy to fob off. Most were perfectly happy to shut up after receiving a little meaningless virtual compensation.

Three days after the Great Crash, even HL sent people to our company. It seemed some of the rumors I'd heard were true. The game's incredibly powerful AI system really did have something to do with certain Imperial technologies. I imagine they were worried someone might use the same method to break into government computer systems and damage them.

But whenever I think back to the day of the Great Crash, all I remember is a man who utterly destroyed me at the gambling table. He was an ill-behaved lunatic, and to this day I haven't worked out how he did it. No data on him has ever been found, either. For a while, I even suspected he was directly connected to what happened that day, but as time passed, I stopped thinking much about it.

After that, the quiet days continued. I like living an ordinary life very much. If I'd been able to live this way from childhood, perhaps I too would have had dreams, and a chance to fulfill them. Now my dream is to hold on to this hard-won peace. I have a steady job, a substantial income, and I've made some friends. Late at night, when everything is quiet, I find myself wondering whether I too could settle down and start a family like a normal person…