Darrel hated his job. It wasn’t the crunch time. It wasn’t the thankless work. It wasn’t even the constant questioning of his abilities. He’d dealt with idiots before and over-demanding bosses. What he hated was the fact he had no damned idea what he was doing.

Signing up and being accepted by Traveler’s Games R&D department had felt like a dream job. A steady paycheck, solid standing if he changed jobs and a lucrative number of benefits. And it had gone as planned in the first months. The steady increase of ranking and payment as his efforts were recognized. Some office romance with a coworker. Even a rumored project lead position if he played his cards right.

And then he was pulled onto the team that was developing Death Galaxy. To say it was a shit show would have been putting it lightly. Several warnings went off in the back of Darrel’s head.

The game was already complete. So was the VR pod that would be used to run the game. Hell, even the marketing team had finished in advance before the game was released. All Darrel had to do was smooth out the bugs with the help of a team of developers.

Darrel had thought it was a weird but simple request. A bonus upon completion and even a discount for the game and the VR pod when it finally came out. It had been too good to be true. And it was. Because the last couple of years were development hell.

The game would literally crash over the smallest thing. You logged in. It crashed. You got to character creation. It crashed. Your avatar loaded into the game. It crashed. It took literal months to get the game to run for longer than five minutes.

And that had been issues on just the game itself. The system that actually ran the game proved to be a rather hazardous machine. Whenever the game didn’t immediately crash, the capsule would experience a wide degree of malfunctions. Users would be ripped out of the VR without any safety features. Some remained aware of their real-world senses clash with the game’s virtual ones. Even an unfortunate few had gone into shock by the overloading level of information the pod shoved into them.

They had signed a waiver, but a check and apologies weren’t much compensation for their injuries in some cases. The only reason that Traveler’s Games wasn’t sued by this was the numerous clauses they had snuck into the waivers. It had boiled down to the injured party being threatened with financial disaster if they disclosed an ounce of what had transpired. They were handed money, were given a halfhearted apology, and then told to move on with their lives.

No one on the team could believe the lead director when she said the game was complete, much less the hardware. It wasn’t until she gave an example of both working perfectly did the team have their doubts swayed. Death Galaxy ran without issue on any other hardware, even some of the cheapest systems, a feat in and of itself. The Traveler’s Capsule as the VR pod was called could play any other VR game, to a staggering level of clarity.

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Both worked fine by themselves. It was actually getting both of them to work in tandem that was the problem. Something that the actual game developers or the VR engineers couldn’t tell them why they reacted this way. Darrel and his team were literally told to just figure it out without any direction of how to.

It's why Darrel spent the last four years of his life trying to fix this broken mess of a game that couldn’t be shipped with any other VR system or vise versa for the Traveler’s Capsule. It was a miracle in his eyes they had gotten the game to the level of playability they had. It's why everyone on the team was celebrating the release.

Everyone except Darrel that is.

Darrel didn’t see himself as a genius. A little smarter than average. But how he saw himself as a perfectionist. A painful attitude in an industry that was chock full of glitches half the time. But if he didn’t fix the problems in front of him, he’d have them nagging at the back of his mind until then. While they had solved the majority of the problems in Death Galaxy, there were shortly still some scattered around that the team had failed to notice.

And this is why he hated his job. Because while he was still at work, everyone else was partying as if they had just passed the finish line. Darrel himself knew they were far from safe. Death Galaxy had been a pain in the ass in a controlled environment. He could only imagine the hell that would be trying to keep it running with millions of players trying to break the damn thing every day.

And the only way they knew how to fix the damn thing was blind trial and error. A scenario that would be reinforced by the number of players that would play Death Galaxy on Legendary. The few test runners who had played on those settings had quite almost immediately, some full-on resigning from VR testers. There was such a thing as too much realism.

And now there were a few hundred thousand people who were going to play all at once in uncharted territory. He wouldn’t be surprised if the company lost sales because of it. If that were to happen, his head would be on the chopping block as marketing was looking for someone to blame. He’d be so lucky as to be the only one that got thrown under the bus.

Wouldn’t that be a blow to interspecies relations if the first new human-old human joint VR system tanked almost immediately?

With that thought, Darrel kept typing away at his computer. All alone in his own little cubicle, Darrel was monitoring millions of people explore and experience the game he had spent years fixing. It warmed his heart knowing people would enjoy the result of his efforts. It also frustrated him as it showed an untold number of bulls in his china shop of a game.

He hated being right.

He found the first major bug. Turns out the avatar, in an attempt to maintain realism on Legendary Difficulty, would not disappear when the user logged out. Which translated into a spontaneous vegetable becoming victim to the laws of gravity. Hell, some players had already died because of it unbeknownst to them.

How the hell was Darrel supposed to fix an intended mechanic of the game?

He didn’t know.

He hated not knowing.

He hated his god damn job.