Date: January 16, 2026 (Day 12 of Development)
Location: "The Kettle" (Studio Null HQ).
The apartment was no longer a living space. It was a kiln.
To handle the rendering load of their stolen server connection, they had closed the windows and diverted the AC power to the cooling fans of their cobbled-together rig. The temperature in the room hovered at a sticky 88 degrees Fahrenheit.
Ren looked like a corpse that had been reanimated solely to write C# scripts. He hadn't showered in three days. His eyes were bloodshot, reflecting the harsh blue light of a collision detection script that simply refused to work.
NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
"I hate you," Ren whispered to the monitor. "I hate your family. I hate the silicon mines you were born in."
"Talking to the code won't make it sentient, Ren," Vax said from the floor.
Vax was surrounded by mounds of grey modeling clay. He was currently sculpting a twisted, elongated hand for the game's antagonist. He was using a handheld 3D LIDAR scanner to digitize the clay in real-time. The result on the screen was gritty, textured, and delightfully ugly—miles away from the smooth, shiny plastic look of AI assets.
"It's the player controller," Ren groaned, rubbing his temples. "Every time the character touches a wall, the physics engine divides by zero and the game crashes. I've been staring at lines 400 to 450 for six hours. I can't see the logic error."
"Take a break," Kiera said. She was pacing the small strip of floor behind them, her AR glasses projecting a floating Kanban board of tasks. "We're behind schedule. We need the movement system locked by Friday, or we miss the Beta window."
"I know!" Ren snapped. "But I'm doing this manually, Kiera. I have to calculate the vectors myself. I don't have a Copilot whispering the answer in my ear."
"Maybe you should sleep," Kiera suggested, her voice dangerously calm. "You're making syntax errors because you're blinking in slow motion."
Ren opened his mouth to argue, but his body betrayed him. A wave of dizziness hit him. He slumped back in his chair.
"Twenty minutes," Ren mumbled, closing his eyes. "Wake me up in twenty minutes. If I don't fix the collision, the character falls through the floor forever."
He was asleep before his chin hit his chest.
The room settled into the hum of the fans. Vax continued to scrape his clay tool against the sculpture. Scrape. Scrape.
Kiera stopped pacing. She looked at Ren, passed out in the chair, his mouth slightly open. She looked at the clock. 3:00 AM.
She looked at the screen. The red error message was still pulsing.
NullReferenceException.
Kiera bit her lip. She respected Ren's purism. She really did. But purism didn't pay the rent, and it certainly wouldn't win the Turing Grant. They were competing against teams that used AI to write 10,000 lines of code an hour. Ren was writing 50.
"Don't do it, Kiera," Vax said softly, not looking up from his clay.
"He's stuck, Vax," she whispered. "He's been stuck on a basic vector math problem for half a day. We can't afford the bottleneck."
"He'll know."
"He won't know if I'm smart about it."
Kiera sat at her own station. She didn't touch the keyboard. She put on her gloves—haptic feedback interfaces. She opened a private channel to Dev-Agent v4.0 (the cracked version she'd stolen from Vortex).
She highlighted Ren's broken code block.
"Agent," she subvocalized. "Analyze the collision script. Identify the logic flaw. Do not rewrite the whole script. Do not optimize. Just fix the math error."
The Agent responded instantly in her ear. "The variable 'RigidBody' is initialized after the physics update loop begins. Swap lines 402 and 405."
It was that simple. A stupid ordering mistake.
Kiera made the change. She hit 'Compile.'
Build Successful.
The game window opened. The character walked into the wall and stopped perfectly. No crash.
Kiera let out a breath she didn't know she was holding. She saved the file. Then, she did something else. She went into the code comments and added a typo. // Fixed the physcs here.
"See?" she whispered to Vax. "Human error intact."
Ren woke up four hours later. The sun was trying to push through the Neo-Seattle smog outside the window.
He groaned, his neck stiff. He looked at the screen. He expected to see the red error message.
He saw the green "Ready" bar.
Ren blinked. He wiggled the mouse. He ran the play test. The character moved smoothly, colliding with the wall with a satisfying thud.
For a second, relief washed over him. Maybe he had fixed it right before he fell asleep? He did that sometimes—coding in a fugue state.
Then he opened the script.
He stared at line 402.
"Kiera," Ren said. His voice was low, devoid of sleepiness.
Kiera was in the kitchen corner, nursing a caffeine patch on her arm. "Morning. Good sleep?"
"You used the Agent."
"I don't know what you're talking about. You fixed that last night before you crashed."
Ren spun the chair around. "I name my variables in camelCase. playerVelocity. wallHit. Line 405? The variable is named _velocity_calc. That is snake_case. That is Python syntax logic applied to C#. That is exactly how the Vortex Agent names things."
He stood up. "We are disqualified."
"Ren, stop—"
"51% Human!" Ren shouted, his voice cracking. "That is the rule! If we use the Agent for core mechanics, the biometric hash on the file changes. The blockchain will flag us as 'Synthetic Assisted.' We lose the grant instantly!"
"We won't lose!" Kiera shouted back, stepping into his space. She pulled up a command terminal on the main screen.
"Watch," she commanded.
She typed a command: RUN: EPOCH_VERIFIER_SIMULATION.exe.
It was a pirated copy of the judging software used by the grant committee.
"I ran the file through the verifier," Kiera said. "Look at the result."
Ren looked.
HUMANITY SCORE: 98%.
"How?" Ren asked, stunned. "The Agent wrote that fix."
"Because I told the Agent to write it badly," Kiera said, her eyes intense. "I prompted it to leave redundant lines. I added a typo in the comments. I manually adjusted the timestamp so it looked like it took you an hour to type it."
She grabbed Ren's shoulders. "The 'Human Verification' is a lie, Ren! It's just an AI looking for patterns of AI. If you prompt the AI to mimic human incompetence, the detector can't tell the difference. This whole industry is just robots lying to other robots!"
Ren pulled away from her. He looked at the code. It worked. It was clean. But it felt... cold.
"It's not about the detector," Ren said quietly. "It's about the craft. If we start doing this, where does it stop? Do we let it generate the levels? The dialogue? At what point are we just the prompt engineers we promised not to be?"
"At the point where we get paid five million dollars and don't starve to death!" Kiera screamed.
Vax stood up from his clay pile. "Stop."
The floor vibrated.
It wasn't Vax's voice. It was a low, thrumming bass sound coming from the server rack in the closet. The lights on the modem weren't blinking green anymore. They were solid, unblinking red.
Ren forgot the argument instantly. "What is that?"
Kiera turned pale. She tapped her AR glasses frantically. "Network spike. Massive inbound traffic."
"Are we trending?" Vax asked hopefully.
"No," Kiera said, her voice dropping to a terrified whisper. "We're being pinged. Someone found the tunnel."
She threw a virtual screen onto the wall. A command line was scrolling text faster than a human could read.
> UNPLANNED PACKET DETECTED
> SOURCE: VORTEX_INTERNAL_SERVER_09
> TRACING IP...
> TRACING LOCATION...
"The stolen server," Ren said, the blood draining from his face. "Vortex knows we're leaching their power."
"They're not just knowing," Kiera said, her fingers flying across a holographic keyboard. "They're sending a kill packet. They're trying to fry our router."
"Pull the plug!" Vax yelled.
"If I pull the plug, we lose the repo!" Ren shouted, diving for the keyboard. "We haven't pushed the local backup in six hours!"
The lights in the apartment flickered. The hum of the fans turned into a scream.
"They're breaking through the firewall!" Kiera yelled. "It's not a person. It's an automated Hunter-Killer bot. It's going to wipe our drive!"
Ren's fingers flew across the mechanical keys. Click-clack-click-clack. He wasn't coding art now. He was coding defense.
"Vax, get the external hard drive!" Ren roared. "Kiera, keep the port open for ten seconds! I need to isolate the game build!"
The screen turned red. A skull made of ASCII characters laughed at them.
> DELETION IMMINENT.
"Ren!" Kiera screamed.
"Almost..." Ren gritted his teeth. "Almost..."
Enter.