The Colossal Machine had been so popular that Pretzelverse Games had barely been able to keep up with maintenance, let alone create an expansion. However, Alexander Vandervoss insisted that one be developed. As a result, the main cadre of developers that led the original team were whisked away to a secret company retreat to develop an expansion for one of the most successful games of all time.

John Appleton read the latest subversive list briefings that were published surrounding any activity in Eastern Europe, where his main focus was Collective activity. A massive multiplayer online game was hardly the focus of his day-to-day work, but he had a personal interest in games or programs that captured the imagination of the general public.

How could a company with a modest development staff release an expansion at this breakneck speed?

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As far as John knew, the game had been out for a few months before the expansion was announced at the All Games conference in Southern California. One of the more disturbing aspects of The Colossal Machine’s expansion was integrating DNA samples into the game. One of the previous bulletins published about The Colossal Machine discussed the process in detail:

“Pretzelverse Games has introduced a new feature named P.E.T. 2.0, which stands for Personal Entity Tracker version 2. There is no official explanation of the acronym. Pretzelverse wants to convince pet owners to scan their pet's DNA into The Colossal Machine, to play with their pets in the virtual space. However, test players soon realized that they no longer owned the rights to their pets, their likeness, or even their names. They all became property of Pretzelverse Games.”

The report continued with a highly technical explanation of the FBI’s understanding of the process. John thought scanning and filing DNA was all pretty creepy.