My name is Allison Grey, a 20 year old certified ethical hacker and programmer employed by the government for network related crimes. Though I say I am a certified ethical hacker, I've only just gotten the certification in time to deal with a rather hellish incident.
World Fragment Online just so happened to be this hellish incident which was driving the department I was working in crazy as the developers of the aVR helmet and the game had trapped some 125,000 players in a virtual space and according to the threat, any attempts to forcefully remove the helmet would immediately send an electronic pulse through the wearer's brain, frying it. The developers were at least nice enough to send us a list of locations of those who had purchased the helmet so we were able to move the majority of those persons into hospitals whilst for some, we had to set up wards within their own residence. If you're wondering how they managed to move the helmet despite it needing a power source, apparently the helmet could remain powered on for one hour after being unplugged so it was a simple manner of equipping the ambulances and other vehicles used in moving the gamers with a portable power supply.
Solving the issue of moving and protecting the gamers, the government had to deal with the drop in the country's productivity whilst we had to figure out a way to crack this monstrosity via remote access through an unused aVR helmet as the game's servers were very well protected by the developers using electrical, chemical and biological traps and weapons. The media was having a field day with this current situation and in return the higher ups breathed down our necks harder everyday.
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The game's code itself appeared to be perfectly impenetrable as it changed in real time with not a single part of the code remaining the same for even a second and there was no system priority in the game which meant that everything had to be hard coded. Honestly speaking, that should be impossible as normally, in a computer program, there should be fixed variables for the embedded scripts to call upon. It wasn't beyond our team but we did lose a great deal hours of sleep. One person, a 30-something guy, was responsible for observing the network packets and intercepting where needed. Another person, a middle-aged woman, was observing the game's code to find any patterns with the changing along with me and another aged guy who was an engineer.
Yawning, I scrolled through the several 1000's of line of code that was changing in real time on my work computer. This was after three days when everything stabilized a bit more though even then, there were reports of some of those gamers dying due to the same brain frying pulse the developers threatened to use if the helmets were forcibly removed. Many relatives of the victims were worried and it was understandable as the conditions for the release of the players was for them to clear the game. A game no one out here knew what it was like.
The companies involved, Frag Corp and Solia, were both owned by the same person, a man named Wayne Frag, who had gone incognito since this incident had started. Apparently, his last public appearance is was one year ago when the game was first announced. If I had to guess, I'd say he's probably holed up in his company building, laughing as we bust our backs out here.
Finally, Martha, the older woman in our little group had a small breakthrough with the code patterns almost knocking over her coffee in the process. We gathered around her to listen to what she had to say.