Madeline
Amy picks up the soda can on her desk and takes a sip while looking straight ahead at her computer monitor. It glowed brightly as it was the only light source in the dark room. “Not too shabby for a few weeks of work.” She mused. She put her drink down and started clicking around to admire her work. She had been working on a game she dubbed “Jean King’s Adventure” for three weeks now. She didn’t love the name, but that could come later.
In less than three weeks, Amy was able to create a 3D environment, a small forest with three scenes: one outside a cave, one inside the cave, and one outside a cottage. She also completed the 3D imaging of her heroine, Jean King. Jean could walk around the environment, there was a stick she could pick up and put down. There was a lot more work for Amy to do before Jean could do much else, but she was proud of her progress.
Amy had plans to include hundreds more scenes, hundreds more characters and objects, and hundreds of puzzles. She had written out a sketch of her vision and had completed the basics. The rest would come together as she coded. In the end, she was hoping to have the next big Adventure game.
Amy yawned and looked at the clock. It was only 3:34 in the morning but she was pleased with the progress she made during the day and decided she deserved some rest. She made sure her alarm was set for seven, like it was every morning, and took the two steps to crawl into bed. Sleep was not an issue for her considering the numerous hours she had been plugging into this game each day in exchange for a full night’s rest.
“Beep. Beep. Beep.” Her alarm called out. Did she even sleep? It felt like she just crawled into bed. She pried her eyes open a sliver and sure enough, there was sunshine coming through the window. Time to get up and continue to grind away at her game. Although each morning became more painful than the last, she also knew that all this hard work would pay off in a year or two when she was ready to sell the game to a large game distributor.
She woke up her computer by wiggling her mouse with the intention of getting right to work, but just when she was ready to type, the call of nature hit her bladder as though it was going to explode right there in her chair. She jumped out of her chair and hopped over all the junk on the floor. Where did all this stuff come from? She wondered. And into the bathroom.
Then, mid stream, she heard a noise. What was that? It sounded like leaves rustling in the wind. She had never heard that noise before and certainly not in her house. Was that coming from her computer? She pushed the reminisce of her blatter out as fast as she could. Did a quick wash of her hands, which was probably pointless due to her quickness, and ran to her computer. Sure enough, the sound was coming out of the computer speakers.
She sat down and looked at the screen dumbfounded. She then looked through her code. This is not right, she thought. Not only were there lines of code that were not there the night before, but there was code she wouldn’t even know how to begin to write. She read the comments written alongside the code, this was clearly not her doing. Never is she so explicit in writing what her code does with comments when she codes by herself. She only writes enough to remind herself of what the code does, but never does she provide paragraphs like the comments are now.
She compiled the code and opened her test environment. If there is new code, there must be new functionality. Sure enough, her heroine, Jean, is outside of the cave as Amy had programmed her to be. The stick is placed where it should be. Nothing looks different here. She brings Jean into the cave and, again, everything looks fine. She takes Jean out of the cave and into the forest where the cottage is. Everything is exactly as she left it, nothing is different. She must have coded gibberish code in her sleep.
She goes back to her code and reads the first comment she sees. “This is the algorithm for the fire. The fire ranges through over 500 colors and has a one in a billion chance of repeating the same pattern.” What fire? She asks herself.
She goes back to the game and clicks on the door to the cottage, she then finds herself inside the cottage. She spins Jean to look at the fireplace in the corner and sure enough, the most spectacular fire Amy has ever seen in a video game is sparkling before her eyes. She looks at the shape of the fire and sure enough, the colors are vibrant and the shape of the flames never seems to repeat itself. This was a much more complex algorithm than she, or most programmers, would ever code.
She moves Jean away from the fire and admires other objects in the room. There is a table and something cooking on a stove. Amy clicks around, learning that Jean is able to make detailed motions with each object. She can cut up and add various ingredients to the pot, which changes the visuals in the pot. It is not like the simple algorithm she wrote with the stick that Jean could pick up and put down.
But where did this all come from? Amy needed a minute to think and walked out her bedroom door into the kitchen. There is no way Amy could have possibly done this and not remembered. There is too much work that went into this. There was only one explanation, the computer coded it itself.
She made some coffee and poured herself a bowl of cereal all the while contemplating what could have happened. Nothing made sense except that the computer did it itself. She gathered her mug and bowl and walked back into her bedroom and sat down at her computer once again.
There was a new object in the cottage Jean was standing in. A jigsaw puzzle appeared on the table. Amy positioned Jean to get a better look. Amy had Jean pick up a piece, looked for a piece to fit it with, and fit the two pieces together. Sure enough, it was a full jigsaw puzzle she could play. Now she knew she was not dreaming. This was built as she was in the kitchen. There was no way she could have built it.
Amy knew she had a lot of work to do but she also was a bit curious if anything else would transpire if she left it alone. But what could she do to kill a few hours? She crawled into bed, worried that her racing brain would keep her awake, but exhaustion won over.
When Amy woke, it was dark outside. She must have slept through the day. She went back over to her computer and woke it up. She could not believe her eyes. Jean had a new wardrobe and new actions she could do. She could jump and had a repertoire of multiple kicks. The environment had been expanded too. There was a castle with a drawbridge and a labyrinth of rooms. There was a town and a shipyard and there were people in the town. There was a baker and a librarian and a peddler. There was a dragon that Jean could have a full conversation with. Amy could not believe her eyes.
She looked at the code base and saw hundreds of files in hundreds of folders that she never created. She clicked on one by random title, “witch.” The first comment caught her eye. There was a date that gave today’s date and there was a name: Ryan M. Young. Who was Ryan M. Young? Certainly, this was a real person and not the computer. Amy had given the computer a name when she first logged it, it would surely use that name over this random Ryan M. Young name.
She typed “Ryan M. Young” into the search bar on Google. The first hit was for a lawyer located in Kansas City, Missouri. The second hit was a cancer researcher based in Maryland. Neither of these people could possibly know anything about the code in her game. Then she saw the LinkedIn profile for a Ryan Young front end developer for Storm Games. Bingo!
She had a LinkedIn profile from back when she was looking for gaming jobs that never resulted in a job opportunity. She logged in and sent Ryan M. Young a straightforward message. “Hi. My name is Amy. What do you know about Jean King’s adventure?”
She went back to the code hoping to find more names to reach out to but before she got far, her computer pinged. Ryan M. Young had replied. “Hi Amy. I just discovered it. Why do you want to know?”
Why was he being so coy? If he admits to knowing about it why can’t he admit to coding on it and how he got to it. Amy knew Ryan had some of the answers she needed to answer this problem. In her frustration she responded, “This is my project! Why are you on it? How did you get it?”
Almost immediately a Zoom link appeared in the chat followed by the text, “I’d rather talk face to face than in chat.” Amy hesitated. Who was this crazy person coding on her project, but curiosity won out and she clicked the link.
She was presented to a pale but attractive man probably in his late 20s. She combed down her bleached blonde hair with her fingers and suddenly regretted not putting on any makeup, let alone looking in a mirror for the past three weeks.
“Sorry for the sudden video chat.” Ryan started, “If my boss knew I was working on another game he would be furious. I would rather avoid the paper trail.”
“That’s fine,” Amy started, but she didn’t care about Ryan or his boss. She just wanted to know how he got access to her code. She started firing off question after question, “How did you find Jean King’s Adventure? How did you get access to the code base? Why are you contributing to it? What is in it for you? Did Stella put you to this? Oh I bet this was all Stella’s doing…”
“This is your project?” Ryan cut her off. Amy nodded yes. “But you don’t know about the contest?” Ryan asked. Amy shook her head in hesitation. Did she forget about a contest she set up and forgot about? “The code was released to the public with a cash reward for each line of code if the game sells. I was curious so I started working on it. I didn’t intend to do much. Just enough to make a few bucks but not enough to get caught. This is the page for the contest. It went viral yesterday,” he said and shared his screen. Sure enough, a web page asking for people to help code a game and included the details that Amy had laid out in on a doc in her personal Google Drive that was not shared with anyone.
Amy had an idea. “Scroll down,” she demanded. “All the way to the bottom.”
When he got to the bottom, Amy squinted her eyes and sure enough there was a copyright sign at the bottom. In small letters at the bottom it read “Lil Giggles Inc.”. This was the name she had given her computer the day she first logged in. Did her computer release her code and her game to the world?
