Other than a couple side conversations with Milo, Nigel's weekend was spent on the computer, leveling up Jake's character to level thirty-five (out of a possible seventy). Nigel was investing as many hours as another would doing a part-time job. He navigated Jake's character through the virtual world of The Colossal Machine, realizing a more efficient leveling process was needed, then froze as a single thought entered his mind: I forgot to work on my class project.

Nigel sighed. Sleep will have to wait. Where are those machine learning project notes? He didn't want to be caught without any progress, especially since this was the only class Nigel liked.

Nigel needed a way to continue leveling up Jake's character in the background while working on his project. Pretzelverse, the game developer, allowed users to make enhancements to the game without modifying its core code. After a few searches, Nigel found an article by a programmer who removed much of the graphical interface, allowing the game to run on less powerful computers. A link to a demonstration video was embedded into the article. Nigel watched in amazement as a scene of a forest transformed into text-based characters. He noticed a tree having several rotated equal signs for the trunk and greater- and less-than symbols for the leaves. While this approach wasn't perfect, it did a decent job of showing the world without real graphics. The modification was so good that Pretzelverse awarded the Modder its best game modification award at its annual gamer conference in Cologne, Germany.

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Nigel thought he could use this information to virtualize a subset of his operating system and accommodate running the game in the background without taking too much of his computer's resources.

Before long, Nigel found the original modification programmer, or Modder, had a page on Prog-hub, a site most programmers used to share their work. His project was called PretUIModder. Nigel downloaded the program, and in a few short hours he was leveling Jake's character while simultaneously writing code for his class project. Nigel worked until his eyes began to ache. He drifted off to sleep.