"It's happening again!" The yell came from a large conference room, where a dozen project leads sat sheepishly, as Jimmy ranted. The glass doors rattled as several temps huddled outside, listening with growing concern.

Two employees, at the head of the room brought up pages of data on the virtual view screen, as their hands held several tablets with pages of code.

"Eight more reports of a nigh-unkillable capital ship that looks like a regular stock model. They don't show up as users, but they don't code as NPC's and they are solving scenario's like they wrote the damn code.

Kabir shook his head, acknowledging that he had no answers.

"Ok, can we confirm that it's not a bug?" Jimmy asked exasperated. "Remember that before you answered, I fired the last leads because they said they didn't know.

"We know that it isn't random. The other leads think it's a hack, but the odd thing is, no one knows what part of the code could be corrupted. They are basically normal users." Nate responded, clearly aware his new promotion did not come at a great time.

"Could we play that it's part of the game, a ship designed to be caught by the elite of the elite for a top prize?" Said a sly female marketing rep flanking CEO Jimmy Walton, at the head of the table.

"Karen has a good point, if we could sell it as a feature-,"

"The problem is we have no way to control the glitch, if it takes down more beginners and noobs-" Kabir countered.

"Then we could seriously hurt new reviews." Karen, said sternly.

Anatoly the newest employee brought into try to crack Daly's personal code, approached the board and studied it. "I think we could be looking at more than one anomaly."

There was silence. Elena stopped taking notes, as Jimmy shook his head at her sternly.

"and… look at the items purchased, food modifiers, new clothes, a sunglasses mod, a sports bra, simple tool kit… these items are being used simultaneously. It's like…"

"A crew? Really?" Karen chimed in disbelievingly, folding her arms.

"Multiple hackers… working together? I thought you mapped out the entire thing already. You told me it was one ship! Same ship Multiplayer isn't even supposed to functional!"

"It's possible, the code is too vast, and procedural generation with this much processing power and the algorithm's are-" Kabir chimed

"And there in separate places, I mean this one could have six or seven users," He pointed to a dark spot In the galactic map. "This over here, is just one, but it's rapidly gaining XP." He pointed to an identifier that was blinking… I mean how do we-"

"I don't want to hear excuses, CallCon is in two weeks, and all the forums are talking about this… glitch crap, corporate is on our ass, and the Chinese investors are considering a buy. Can you fix it?" Jimmy said angrily.

"We have a couple theories-" Lucy from character development raised her hand.

"I don't want theories, our jobs are on the line. It's been three months since Daly killed himself and if we don't get this thing fixed, the only games we'll be designing will be damn indie pledge games. GET ..IT…fixed!

"We've been pulling double shifts-" Kabir complained.

"Triple shifts, or you're fired, tell your people if they flake, good luck getting a reference." Jimmy announced, then sat down in a slump.

"What if we introduced a counter agent, a NPC that's designed to seek out the offending code, and match it's stats… sort of like a hunter/seeker command. " Anatoly asked, leaning back in his chair.

"We could add multiple binary searches with trilateral algorithms' and a skin to blend into the environment to keep immersion!" Kabir added.

"Or-" Nate approached the board as well, but before he could finish Jimmy cut him off.

"Or how about you get of here and fix the damn thing? Until it's done this meeting, didn't happen. As far as anyone is aware, we don't have unregistered god-mode users, and any issues will be patched with the next update. Got it?"

"GO!" Jimmy bellowed, and the programmers and leads scattered. Jimmy sat down, and looked at a picture of Daly and him in their college days.

"Why did you have to do something so dumb." He asked to an empty room.