*** Random employee of ‘Evo-Gaming’ company POV ***

It had been a normal day at Evo-Gaming HQ, or ‘EG’ as the people here called it. Dan was a tech safety manager for EG and had been working on the new gaming pod for a while now.

The pod was supposed to be the main tech for ‘New Eden’ from the start, but because of some slight safety issues, they pushed the launch back.

The company, not wanting to push back the whole launch, had ordered the techies to cobble up something to enable the game to launch on its due date, anyway.

That is when they had come up with the VR helmets. It had the same basic technology as the pod, but came with fewer parameters.

The helmet still enabled the synapse connections and motor function freeze, but did nothing else. It just logged people into the game.

To the tech team, this was just a stopgap, and it repulsed them how low-end the product was.

But no one wanted to lose their jobs, so they delivered it to the head honchos and went back to their major project.

The pod did so much more. It not only connected to the brain but also monitored it.

It could also stimulate the rest of the body from within the pod, to make the users feel more from within the game.

Of course, that came with a plethora of risks. The information being traded from the game body to the actual body had to be restricted.

The mental alignment had to be kept perfect.

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Most of the team were sad about this, since it did not use their pet project at the start, and that would tarnish their reputation.

They only kept their heads up when they thought about how it would still end up being the primary way to play soon.

There were still many weeks of tweaking and debugging to go, but they knew that with time, they could deliver.

Dan was the lead manager on safety checks. His entire job was to make sure the product was up to the safety code before hitting the stores.

He was the one that ran all the simulations imaginable on the programming to fish out errors in it. He was the one that caught the glitches that could endanger the users before they could actually happen.

If the program running the real-time feedback weren’t up to par, many accidents could happen.

When a player got his arm cut off in the game, if the feedback program didn’t limit the pain transfer, the player could end up severely damaging the nervous system in his arm.

The brain would signal the body that the arm was gone, possibly denying any feeling to it in the long term. This was exactly the type of error that they tasked him with catching.

What if someone got possessed by a demon, or spirit, in the game? Would that leave permanent brain damage on the player?

Would he develop a personality disorder? Who knew?

Therefore, Dan’s job was to run any scenario his mind could think of through a simulation and see if the program did its job correctly.

He was still catching errors of that type daily, so he knew they would not launch the pod for a good while.

During the first week of launch, Dan kept up to date with how the game was being received by the players. He looked on the forums often, making sure the helmet he had approved didn’t cause any accidents.

When he found out about some players not logging out, causing them to trigger the safety protocol, he was satisfied that his work was functioning properly. He was the one that had proposed this hard limit, to assure the safety of the users.

On the fifth day after launch, while he was running a millionth simulation for the pod, his phone rang.

It was the project supervisor. The man asked him to attend the board meeting on the forty-sixth floor at nine AM sharp the next morning.

When he tried bailing out of it, saying he still had a lot of work to do, his supervisor insisted heavily. He even threatened to fire him and end his career if he wasn’t there.

Dan reluctantly agreed and hung up. He hated those kinds of meetings the most.

Stuck up rich men, forcing their ideas and solutions upon the real masterminds of a project. Acting as if they knew best how the tech, the actual geniuses produced, worked.

Those men were what Dan dreaded the most. He had been at many of these meetings throughout his career, most of them ending in him pushing out some tech he wasn’t quite satisfied with.

Of course, he always made sure the tech was safe for use, but he mostly left out some small kinks and long-term side effects. Those were the ones that took the most time to fish out and fix.

The next morning, he put on a suit and left for work earlier. He wanted to get this meeting over with as quickly as possible and get back to his proper job.

These gruesome meetings were not his cup of tea. He hated them because he had to be nice and polite to people who knew nothing, just because they have money and power.

If it were up to him, he wouldn’t hold these at all. They were a waste of time, in his opinion.

During his musings, he made his way to the office. Instead of taking the elevator down to the lab, he took it upwards, to the management floor.

He made it to the forty-sixth floor and waited outside the meeting room. It would be bad manners for him to be the first to sit in the room since he was just an employee.

He looked at his watch, and he was still fifteen minutes early. So he just stood there, looking at the walls.

Shortly before nine o’clock, the department managers started arriving one by one. But when he thought everyone was there, more people kept coming in.

Some of them he recognized, their faces being quite recognizable. These people were all influential people in the country.

But they were rich. Filthy rich!

He surmised they were the investors for the game, and probably also major and minor shareholders of Evo-Gaming.

His nervousness reached an even higher level as he swallowed his dry saliva.

*Gulp*

This meeting had just become a lot more serious than he thought.