Announcing the Catalyst

Galaxy-wide policies for programmers have always existed, of course, but there was something about putting an emergency order in place that felt different. Maybe that was partially because this plan was so wide sweeping.

Every new student was going to have traits programmed into them, in an attempt to make them better able to fight the virus. I shook my head; I could already hear some of the older game masters muttering about how “Back in their day” something like this would have never been necessary. And even though I was going to push hard to make it happen now, there was some truth to it.

Students in the past had never gotten infected with a virus like this. They had been able to see trickery and deception for what they were and steer clear. But now, something has changed. I dared believe it wasn’t something wrong with the students, but instead spoke to the power of the virus, running rampant through the VLG world.

What had impacted students in the past didn’t matter now. Whatever was different for this generation, it was real, and it was wreaking havoc. The new students needed new traits to be able to cope with, and hopefully override, the fear that was being generated in the system.

The masters we’re still going to get their chance, however. The second phase of the program was to deeply increase the number of game masters actively inside the program. I know that many of them will be eager to do their part to find out what is going wrong, and to bring back updates and information about how they could work from outside the game to fix it.

And finally, there would be a catalyst. A single player, chosen to enter the VLG and trained to awaken within the game.

This part was completely off-script. None of us had ever specifically chosen a student and tasked them with waking within the game, and there was no way to know if it would work like we hoped. A small part of my mind wondered if we were really about to sacrifice yet another student, losing them to the virus we still didn’t truly know how to defeat.

And yet….we needed someone to get inside the game and give us that chance.

Raella was a young programmer, filled with promise, and from what I had heard she might be exactly what we needed.

Intelligent, curious, knowledgeable. She loved questions, puzzles, and mysteries, and was naturally inclined to ask questions, observe, and figure things out. She was also young; she came from the generation being targeted, so she didn’t have the been-there-done-that attitude a game master might bring, however unintentionally, into the process.

The night before I had been sleepless, but now that I was preparing to announce Raella as the catalyst, I felt a glimmer of hope. It was possible we might make it through this, and that it might even bring us into deeper levels of peace than we had known before.