Derek spent the morning walking.
Not pacing, not wandering—walking with intent.
The Blackfire building no longer felt empty. It hummed. Screens glowed behind glass walls, keyboards clicked in uneven rhythms, voices overlapped in bursts of technical jargon that would have sounded like madness to an outsider. What had been an abandoned shell weeks ago was now a living organism, and Derek moved through it like a surgeon making rounds.
On the seventh floor, the core development team had commandeered an entire wing. Whiteboards were filled edge to edge with diagrams—network architecture, physics pipelines, latency mitigation strategies. One of the senior engineers launched a demo, showing a crude character model running across a low-resolution terrain.
"The movement engine is stable," the engineer said. "Input delay is under forty milliseconds across local networks. Global latency is still a problem."
Derek leaned closer to the screen. "Your interpolation curve is wrong," he said calmly. "You're smoothing motion for aesthetics instead of prediction. Reverse it. Let the client assume intent."
The engineer blinked. "That would cause—"
"Less stutter under packet loss," Derek finished. "And more realistic combat outcomes."
Silence followed, then hurried scribbling.
Two floors down, the historians had turned their space into something resembling a medieval archive. Replicas of armor hung on racks. Maps were pinned to corkboards. One of them was arguing heatedly with a designer.
"A twelfth-century farmer would not carry iron tools of that quality," the historian snapped. "That level of metallurgy wasn't accessible to commoners."
"If we nerf their equipment further, early gameplay becomes tedious," the designer shot back.
Derek listened without interrupting.
"Scarcity creates value," he said at last. "Let them struggle. That's the point. If survival is comfortable, the world has no weight."
The historian smiled faintly. The designer grimaced, but nodded.
By noon, Derek had visited every department. Psychologists showed addiction curves and reward cycles. Animators presented skeletal rigs and early combat animations. Cryptographers discussed secure in-game currency exchanges that blurred dangerously close to real financial systems.
He absorbed it all without praise, without criticism unless it was necessary. By the time he reached the third-floor conference room, the tension had been building for hours.
It finally snapped when the psychology team proposed modifying death mechanics.
"If loss is too punishing, player retention drops sharply," one of them said. "We recommend memory persistence—skills retained after death. Enough to soften the blow."
"That destroys historical realism," a historian fired back. "Death was final. That's what made the era brutal."
"And it breaks the economy model," a systems analyst added. "It introduces inflation in skill acquisition."
Voices rose. Chairs scraped. Someone laughed sharply and called the entire project delusional.
Derek sat at the head of the table, hands folded, eyes distant.
"You're all solving the wrong problem," he said.
The room quieted.
"This is not a history simulator," Derek continued. "And it's not a dopamine machine either. It's an ecosystem. Psychology doesn't overwrite reality. Reality shapes psychology."
He stood.
"Death remains final. But information persists. The world remembers. Player behavior alters the environment so future lives adapt differently. Fear remains. Stakes remain. Retention comes from meaning, not mercy."
No one argued.
But as Derek sat back down, something settled in his chest—an unfamiliar pressure. Not doubt. Awareness.
He could arbitrate disputes. He could see the whole board. But he couldn't manage every piece forever.
I need a general, he thought. Someone who can command while I build.
The realization lingered even as the meeting dissolved.
That night, long after the building had quieted, Derek stood alone on the twenty-fourth floor. The city of Los Angeles sprawled beneath the windows, indifferent and vast. A single whiteboard stood in the center of the room.
He picked up a marker.
At first, the lines were chaotic. Nodes. Arrows. Feedback loops. He erased and redrew, faster now, thoughts accelerating. Procedural terrain generation wasn't enough. Neither was scripted history.
Then it clicked.
The world shouldn't be designed.
It should emerge.
Derek began sketching a system where geography, climate, population density, disease, war, and trade fed into one another dynamically. A famine in one region wouldn't be a scripted event—it would be a consequence. A kingdom wouldn't rise because the story demanded it, but because players created conditions that allowed it.
The game wouldn't simulate history.
It would generate it.
He stepped back, pulse racing. Reality Quest wasn't just possible—it was inevitable.
The next morning, the financial briefing was short and brutal.
Seventy million dollars per month.
That was the burn rate once full staffing, server expansion, and security scaling were factored in. The finance director looked nervous delivering the number, as if expecting outrage.
Derek nodded.
"Double the hiring pace," he said. "I want the first playable version ready by September."
Someone laughed in disbelief. Another whispered that the timeline was impossible.
Derek didn't respond. He had already moved on.
Outside Blackfire's walls, whispers were turning into noise.
Tech forums buzzed with speculation. Anonymous posts dissected hiring patterns, guessed at military contracts, rumored government backing. No one could find a press release. No interviews. No leaks.
Blackfire existed like a black hole—visible only through its effects.
In a glass-walled boardroom across the country, the senior staff of JDM Investment sat staring at a projection filled mostly with empty space.
"No valuation data. No disclosed funding rounds. No product announcement," an analyst said, irritation bleeding through his professionalism. "But they're burning more cash than most unicorns."
Another leaned back. "You don't spend that kind of money unless you're building something world-changing—or hiding something."
The room went quiet.
The managing director tapped the table once. "We do both," he said. "Request a meeting. Quietly investigate in parallel."
Eyes turned toward the screen again, toward the only confirmed name tied to the company.
Derek Morgan.
Somewhere in Los Angeles, Derek erased the board and began again, already planning the next move.