The dorm room was quiet in the way only university housing could possibly manage. The thin walls let in distant voices, footsteps in the stairwell, four different stereo bass lines and the echo of a laugh track from someone watching TV on the floor above.

  Alex’s room felt like a bubble inside that chaos. He had made a trip to the thrift store to drop off the rest of his unwanted belongings, returned the university bar fridge he had been renting, and given away everything else he wasn’t taking with him back to Earth3. He had just finished putting his plants in the dorm lounge and hoped someone would find them and take care of them.

  And that was it. This was the last night this room would ever be his. After today, everything was going to change. Again. For someone who spent most of his life avoiding change, the past few months had been pretty hectic.

  Everything he was taking with him to Earth3 was packed in the closet, all ready to go the next day. The rest of the room was empty and clean. A pocket of deliberate isolation with the curtains drawn tight and the lights dimmed to a low amber.

  The only space in the room that wasn’t empty was his desk where three devices sat in a tight arc around his chair: a fold-out slab running a hardened OS kernel, a wafer-thin auxiliary screen pinned for raw diagnostic output, and—most important—his cold-gapped rig the size of a hardcover book, matte black, no radios, and no ports other than optical and power. The thing purred softly, like it was telling Alex it was ready to go.

  He had barely touched this rig, or his school laptop in the past couple of weeks. They felt like they were from a completely different world than the one he lived in now and, he supposed, they were. But this, even more than RPGs with his friends, had been part of his life for the past ten years and he wasn’t going to leave it behind on Earth, even if he could only use it in the Undercity on Earth3.

  Coding, and later, hacking, had been a core part of his life for a long time. He had started young, building his first game mod when he was eight, hunched over a borrowed laptop every night for two weeks. It was trash. All he had done was import different images and textures into the game to make everything look like his favourite cartoon. But his friends had loved it which had been enough motivation for him to keep going and eventually start learning how to code in truth.

  Alex rolled his neck once, then twice, feeling the faint pressure under the skin behind his left ear. The ANIP sat there somewhere, in its ceramic shell with nanofibre tendrils braided into nerve clusters. It was a million-dollar miracle wrapped in institutional firmware and legal fiction, handed out to kids so they could all roleplay on a new world.

  It was insane, when you actually thought about it.

  Alex wondered, and not for the first time, how much good something like the ANIP could do if it was released to the world as a general product. But then, what would the world look like if everyone was walking around with super strength, speed and endurance. Would it be chaos? Or would it just be a new norm—humanity with a higher ceiling?

  Of course, not everyone would have access. That was just the reality of the world now. The gap between the haves and have-nots was huge and growing. Alex was fortunate to have been born into a corporate family and had never really wanted for anything. But most of the world didn’t have that same access and if the company ever did release ANIP as a product, he had no doubt that it would likely only be available to political dynasties, corporate executive families, and the rich.

  Alex sat there for a long moment, staring at the computer, considering. He thought about his friends' reactions when they learned about the ANIP. Jake and Ryan had been just as excited as he had been by the idea of growing stronger and faster. He knew he had been too focused on the benefits without regard to the potential issues in the beginning. But Kira had zeroed right in on them and was right to be concerned.

  The ANIP had given him so much already, but through it the company had a possible way to control the adventurers. He couldn’t see why they would want to, but then he knew the corporation itself wanted to create a bigger and bigger presence on Earth3 over the coming years. He couldn’t trust that they would always have their best interest at heart as their priorities changed.

  He’d been thinking about this for days now and it all boiled down to one simple fact for him: If something like the ANIP was going to exist in his body, rewriting him at a cellular level, he couldn’t leave the control of it in the hands of a third party. He couldn’t just sit by and be a passive user. Not when he could actually do something about it.

  He leaned forward and reached for the keyboard, flexed his fingers and opened his HUD.

  Just for a fraction of a second, static ghosted at the edges of his vision, a phantom scrollbar stuttering where nothing should be scrolling.

  “Ok… so we need access control and then this glitching needs to be fixed,” he muttered to the room.

  The bear’s pulse had done something to the system. Not enough to brick the chip. Not enough for the medical diagnostics to flag. But enough to fray the software somehow. Likely a byproduct of whatever it was doing naturally—not an EMP exactly, but close enough in effect.

  Everytime the bear had pulsed, it forced a rapid mana discharge and some kind of localized field disruption that seemed to affect their electronics as a side effect. Not enough to fry hardware, but clearly enough to have some kind of effect on the chip’s timing.

  However it happened, what Alex, and everyone else with an ANIP got was some kind of state corruption and latency issues.

  He took a breath, turned on his monitor and killed the room’s network. No more Wi-Fi. No campus mesh. No ambient handshake pings. He booted his cold-gapped rig last, its optical interface glowing dull red.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  “Okay,” he said softly, to himself, to the machine, to the idea of what he was about to do. “Let’s see what we can do with this.”

  He stuck a thin sensor patch onto the back of his neck, just above the ANIP’s anchor point. There was no external port on the chip of course, but this would give him a passive induction connection.The ANIP may be a unique system, but single job implants were nothing new in the world and they used standard connection techniques. He was banking on the fact that the HEX guys were using standard protocols and nodded when he saw the data pop up on his screen.

  Clock cycles. Power spikes. Burst traffic across internal buses.

  Alex smiled despite himself.

  The ANIP wasn’t a single system like standard implants that controlled heart rhythms or prevented seizures. It was a multi-layered architecture: a realtime core handling nanobot orchestration and biofeedback loops, a middleware stack translating biological signals into machine-readable data, and then the HUD layer on top of it all—the only part Dungeon Inc. wanted the adventurers to see.

  And wrapped around all of it was a thin layer of security. Not hard encryption so much as trust-based access control: credentialed handshakes, assumed-good actors, and a lot of faith that no one would ever try this from the inside. This system was still an active work in progress and he doubted the engineers at HEX expected any of the adventurers to be tinkering with it between dungeon runs.

  He smiled again. This was going to be more like tweaking etiquettes than hacking. Easy. He already had software on his rig that could get him most of the way there.

  After half an hour, three failed handshakes, one forced rollback, and a lot of swearing under his breath, Alex was in and scrolling through more detailed logs than he could access through the HUD itself. He had found the timing jitter. A repeating fault window every 0.73 seconds that would explain the glitches he was seeing.

  He wanted to better understand the bear’s magic but for now it was clear that the result had shaken the chip's timing.

  Alex worked on his keyboard, tracing through sub-routines to get a feel for the ANIPs code. His cold-gapped rig projected a tight-band optical pulse, translated by the sensor patch on his neck into a local induction signal the ANIP could interpret. This was the standard method for talking to implanted chips with nothing being broadcast wireless. Just a tight, direct signal to the chip.

  Information spilled across his screen. Module names. Functional classes. Abstraction layers. Things labeled in clean corporate syntax with too many acronyms. He dug downward.

  The nanobot control mesh was beautiful in a terrifying way. Distributed logic, fault-tolerant swarms, decision trees that adapted in real time based on blood chemistry and neural load. What it was doing on the nanobot layer was well beyond anything Alex understood. Fortunately he wasn’t really here for that.

  He needed to secure a backdoor where he could ensure future access without having to hack any future security implementations and he was going to use the timing faults introduced by the bear to help him get there.

  He traced the errors up the data stream and found the source of the issue: arbitration logic. There were two systems arguing about authority after the bear’s pulse had knocked them out of sync.

  This was his doorway. He didn’t fix it yet; he widened it.

  A carefully crafted timing shim, injected at the boundary between middleware and core. Just enough delay that when a reset command fired, he would always have the opportunity to respond first. Twenty minutes later he uploaded his code and reset the system.

  The ANIP tried to reboot.

  Failed.

  Tried again. Failed again.

  A third time. His HUD went dark. Not off like he was minimizing it, but grayed out for a moment. Then text bloomed back into place.

  Next, he identified his own stored biometric signature and used it to build a new credential packet. And, with a few more new changes he wouldn’t just be creating an admin account, he’d be changing what the system believed an admin even was.

  Alex traced the root authority chain upward, past the user layer, past the corporate credentials, past the OS root, and inserted a new origin point.

  He worked silently for a time, losing himself to the code. Then, one more reboot later and the ANIP didn’t ask the OS for permission anymore, it asked Alex. He had asserted ownership over his own system.

  Now it was time to have fun. He spent the next hour doing little more than poking at the system. Just mapping, learning, commenting and taking notes.

  He corrected the glitch, properly this time, realigning the timing domains the bear had scrambled. The static at the edge of his vision vanished after another reboot.

  With that done he sat back and looked at the notes he had been jotting while poking through the system. He had some ideas to play around with over the coming weeks, but there was one note in the margin of his book that he had underlined several times and then circled. He was staring at it now. He had to start somewhere and couldn’t think of a better place.

  The note read simply: Hack Connor?!

  Alex leaned back in his chair, thinking. The ANIPs communicated wirelessly with the HUB in the Undercity, but also with each other. There was a broadcast layer that telegraphed certain info to the users team. Things like health stats and location. It was designed to both broadcast and receive specific types of information, but Alex was pretty sure he could force through a packet that could open up the types of information that were receivable. Then, he could modify other peoples ANIPs without needing the sensor patch and a willing participant.

  For a brief moment he thought about some real payback, but pushed the idea away. Connor was an ass, but Alex didn’t want to hurt him. Just give him a little taste of Karma.

  “With great power comes great responsibility,” Alex muttered as he worked, very aware that he was about to do the very thing that he had just protected his own system from.

  Kira was right to worry about this. It was an invasive system at its core, and one that was controlled by someone else. Worse, anyone with even a moderate amount of knowhow could do this same thing he was now doing. And who knew what their intentions might be. If he could get the cross ANIP communication under his control, he could unlock his friends' ANIPs too. Once that was done, he would add more encryption and better security, ensuring they were safe from any future corporate stupidity or worse, malicious hacks.

  But first Connor.

  Alex leaned forward, flipped to a new page in his notebook and started jotting down prank ideas.

  ***

  Alex’s Class Notebook

  Security Architecture Lecture

  The most dangerous vulnerability in any system is the assumption that no one curious will ever touch it.

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