Chapter 6: Exploit
Delta tested things again. She slowly raised the continent in her hand, which she was sure caused enough wobbling of buildings for physics calculations to abound. This time, her eyes were on the reflection of the building. She saw the buses and NPCs start jumping from one location to the next after pauses.
That was lag alright. Real lag. It should have been impossible. The complexity cap was guaranteed to kick in before that was an issue. Lag was something you learned about in a design class as a history topic, not something to see in the real or virtual world.
Delta was on to something here. Holding the continent in her hand, her 50ft form went on the move a bit. Her bare feet left cracks in the road as she walked down the street. Every step had the realm visibly stutter--her form excluded--till the lag suddenly stopped a couple buildings away.
The young woman was in thinking mode, too focused to notice one of her feet resting over the midsection of a bus. It’s only once her foot tapped in thought that she absentmindedly recognized the sensation with a smile.
“This lag could be something...”, she mused.
Delta walked backwards to try and figure out what changed. Sure enough, after a few more steps the lag kicked up again. She studied her continent to see if anything significant changed. Of course not, why would it? All she did was move a bit. A few buildings shook, some probably broke, but she didn’t change it’s design.
Delta turned to the shiny building at her left. She smiled.
“The reflection!”
In that moment, the hacker figured it all out. The complexity limit detection algorithm didn’t account for reflections. Her mini-continent and its empty cities weren’t detailed enough to cause lag on their own. If she broke a mini-city twice as detailed, it would’ve been. That’s what the mirrored surface of the building made the system do, yet it wasn’t detected! She bypassed the soft-cap.
‘What an oversight.’ Delta thought. It must’ve never come up. There probably wasn’t another realm as complex as hers, she reasoned. A lot of realms were just fancy homes. There were game realms with some wacky worlds, but people were lazy when making stuff. Adventure lands reused mountains, and towns were sparse. Delta designed each and every one of her buildings uniquely, and at a speeds few could keep up with. Her world was one of the most taxing; today wasn’t the first time she got a complexity-driven realm reset.
So, while there were definitely realms with mirrors and the like, they probably never reflected too much. Even if they did, the objects would likely be simpler than a meticulously crafted skyscraper. Moreover, the system could shortcut things by storing the object once in memory and just copying it as needed to populate the realm.
Not so with Delta’s usual realm setups.
Grinning, the circuit-haired woman lifted her finger over another of the city spots on the handheld continent. She smashed it hard and saw the realm freeze for a bit. There was lag alright.
Delta had another question to answer: what exactly was lagging? She thought to what she knew about Paradise and how it worked. Paradise used the distributed and dynamic computational power of the computer farms, just like the transit systems, climate mitigators, drone AIs and all sorts of other programs. For each and every realm, there had to be some sort of construct to manage it: a server. It wouldn’t be physical of course. That’d defeat the purpose of the computer farms. So, when her realm lagged she was taxing some virtual server in the ever shifting throng of Paradise realms.
She could do something with that. Whenever there was an oversight like this, there was potential. That’s how she made her riches as a hacker after all.
Delta asked herself another, more common question: ‘What could I gain from this?’ She already had a means to bypass the soft-cap on complexity, but there had to be something more for her from this discovery.
She thought of another, more interesting question.
‘What would happen if a virtual realm server crashed?’
Clearly this virtual server her world was contained in, presently, had a buffer of objects and a capacity for calculations that she could overflow. And if overflowed, where would it go?
‘The realm’s very code.’, she figured.
Code and memory were just bits and bytes interpreted differently after all. So, she’d probably break something. The last question, then, was would she break something in a way to help her, like she usually did?
It was time to find out.
Delta got to work designing. With a few thoughts, she deleted almost everything in her realm; even the green landscape of her world turned to a boring white plain. The only things still here were herself, that mirror-faced building and the NPCs behind her. She saw them waddle about in the reflection of the shiny structure.
“You little things might not be so useless after all for once.” she said, teasing them as though they could hear.
A thought had the building stretched out near infinitely wide and thin. Another made it a proper mirror. She looked up and the sky itself changed from blue to a curved mirror. She had reflective surfaces stretched all around her realm on all sides. Another thought had the very “floor” of her world become a mirror. She saw herself and the NPCs reflected 6 times over, not counting the mirrors reflecting each other’s reflections, of course. The groundwork was set, and now it was time to create.
Delta’s NPCs were of two types, differing only by torso shape. Each was the closest she could get a virtual being to a human without the system cutting her off from her fantasies. They had a stupid pre-made AI setting called “Wander”. Though entirely insufficient for a rampaging giant gal to enjoy herself, the setting had a special property: the AIs for her shape-people were dumb, but random. True random, thanks in part to the quantum computers mixed in with traditional at the remote farms.
Random was hard to predict and couldn’t be duplicated. The models and textures could, but she could fix that with a bit of code. Delta made a template for a new entity of her design. Their base shape was the same, but she added some random changes. New random colors, and their parts would be different in less realistic ways. Their cylinder or triangle torsos would have random heights. A random number of random-length fingers on their random-radiused sphere palms. She also added a simple function, one she was about to test.
She hit a button and spawned such an entity, then another. They looked awful. One’s head was huge, the other’s was small. Each fell over from some different anatomical failing. Their colors were different shades of puke pastels or eye-bleeding neon. They were different in almost every way, and the system couldn’t shortcut them.
Delta thought up a structure in the center of her realm. It looked like a tiny factory. She had it run some code she wrote with a quick thought or two. It was a simple loop: that is, it did something over and over.
“
While (true) {
wait(millisecond(0.1)); createEntity(randomShapePerson());
}
”
Every one-thousandth second, that little factory of hers churned out 10 random shape-based NPC: 10,000 a second. Yet, while the factory only made that many, the virtual server running her realm had to process many more: one per reflection, in fact. This would probably crash the server on its own fast, but not fast enough for Delta.
As the factory worked hard and the realm filled with entities, Delta grew up and up to a size of 5 miles. She stepped back, giving the NPCs some space as they’d simply disappear if stepped on. For once, she didn’t want them gone.
Once she had enough distance, the titanic woman spawned in a city at her feet. She wasn’t big enough to step on it in one go. In fact, she often played with this very city at this very size. One key difference, which she made with a thought, was to change every single detailed building’s textures to a mirror. The girders, windows--even the furniture inside was surfaced by a reflective sheen.
Just spawning the metropolis had the realm lag. Delta moved to the mirror cities edge, and each of her quaking steps shook the structures and froze all the wandering and wobbling of the shape-people below for a good second or two.
She raised her foot above a large swath of the city. The movement reflected many times over. Every building bounced the image off its mirror top to the mirror sky. The mirror realm-walls bounced the image of the side of her foot, back and forth along with the rapidly growing city population. She wanted this moment to be big.
Delta waited while the factory churned out more NPCs. They stumbled and bumped to each other in a big pile. She kept wiggling her toes above the city as she checked for something. A few wiggles after she started, and even she started lagging. Realms treated players differently, so she was really at the crux of the virtual servers limits with her hyper-complex realm.
Then, she stomped.
Blocks of buildings exploded against her sole. She cooed at the sensation of it all like usual, yet her voice was heard with arrhythmic pauses between the syllables. Lag.
A bunch of the NPCs poofed away as they were too malformed to move even *if* they had the sense to run. Yet, the computational load saved from their disappearance was used up hundreds of time over by the building physics reflected over and over and over. Every mirrored piece of the structures had to work as it moved through the air in laggy bursts.
Delta could think, but her body took forever to move. It was like she was frozen, seconds at a time with a brief moment of “catch-up”. She wasn’t afraid though, she was thrilled. This was it!
Her pinky toe hit a short structure after a laggy jerk. That sent her over some threshold. The realm went dark.
Everything disappeared except for Delta, who found herself able to move again in this void. She floated without gravity as the ‘physics’ of her realm was some weird basic state. She got a strange error message on her headclip. It was white text on a black terminal.
“ERROR: Program Crash. Beginning system level server reboot.”
“Pause!” she shouted, while thinking the command at the same time.
‘Kill process’. She thought the command and the reboot halted.
Two words caught Delta’s eyes. “System Level”. She had a powerful hunch of something. If true, she just made the exploit of a lifetime. Her realm was hers, she owned it and could tweak its code--in theory. In practice, the premade physics sufficed so she had no need.
Till now.
She wasn’t in her realm anymore, she was in a virtual server’s pseudo-realm state. The server also wasn’t running her realm anymore, which meant it was running raw Paradise code with system level access. That meant she should be able to modify it. Delta pulled up the code files to prove it to herself.
“No way...”
Delta smiled wide. Her body was warm. She was too giddy to speak or think. It was like she was programming at home. As there, she was able to sift through and modify the code with her mind. Only here, she was working not with just any code, but Paradise code: *the* code for the simulated reality world itself. The very thing running, right now, across all Paradise.
Paradise had a live-changes model, just in case anything needed to be tweaked without kicking everyone out. That was the only explanation she could think of.
Delta’s mind fluttered with possibilities, but there was one spot she always checked first breaking into any system: user access permissions.
She found a code file with the different rankings of Paradise players. She saw some special statuses. Based on the code, seems everyone had “player” by default so those weren’t listed. What a long list that’d be.
Delta also saw a bunch of statuses for “DEVELOPER” and a few for “ADMIN”. Each qualifier was followed by a list of many or a few headclip ids. Above “ADMIN” on the list was “TECH_MINISTER” with just one headclip id.
‘That must be Martin Canmore’s’, Delta thought. She memorized it for later, just in case.
Yet there was one status above that, commented out. Then, even that was surrounded by comments: words in the code to be read as a message to the reader, but not processed by the running processor.
“
```
# Not to enable while live.
# Offline and local development purposes only!!!
GODMODE
<id goes here>
```
“
Delta’s heart started racing. Could this be real? All access to the system? What else could that status entail than “everything”?
She worked fast. In a thought, all the other special statuses were commented out: that is, she put a ‘#’ in front of them to mark them as skipped by the running processor. No more Developers or Admins to worry about. Even that Martin fellow would be one with the common person, unable to ban or debug or whatever it is they could do with that.
Next, she moved her thoughts to the “<id goes here>” string and replaced it with her own numeric headclip id: the first id she ever memorized.
Delta took a deep breath, then deleted the comments around the GODMODE status. That bit of code was now live and the change took effect.
Delta gasped as new levels of accesses reached her mind. She became keenly aware of all sorts of new information to explore. The tan woman had a new display prompt request. Something definitely changed. She accepted the prompt and an influx of information showed on a private-holodisplay popped out to her front. To a layperson it wouldn’t mean much: just numbers and the like. However, she recognized it all as data for the virtual server itself. She saw its virtual memory amount, virtual processing speed data and all sorts of info.
Delta closed the display to test things out. She intended to reboot her realm. Worst case, she knew how to get this exploit going again if need be.
The circuit-haired woman made the command and was surprised at how snappy her blue sky and green-filled landscape snapped into place.
‘Let’s try, a building.’
Delta spawned one of her building models at a size to come up to her bare ankle. The object spawned in instantly, and she found she had awareness of a ‘load time’ statistic. For fun, she tried to modify it and found it even more intuitive than before to change its top to a triangle, then a square.
‘It must be my status. I’m getting priority with the Wish-Interpreter’, she thought.
The Paradise Wish-Interpreter was the name given to the functionality of Paradise that “filled in the blanks” for user commands. When she thought of a building in the past, it was the Paradise system that thought to give it real world physics. When she spawned in candy, the Wish-Interpreter handled its flavor. One could overwrite such things of course, but usually there wasn’t a need.
‘No.’ she paused. ‘No this is too good, too smooth. It must be some development edition of the functionality.’
Delta continued playing with her building. She made its top something complicated: a fully textured chair. She found her ease of designing it inhumanely smooth.
‘Incredible. It’s like my thoughts are augmented or something.’
Delta imagined a continent at the top of the building. She made it with that surprising new ease, then spawned a bunch of cities on it. She crouched down to get a closer look at things. She curled her fingers around the landmass and crushed it.
‘No complexity limit either, and no lag. I must be exempt from the detection processes here, as well having an infinite quota from the virtual servers.’
She brought up the holodisplay from before and saw that, as predicted, the virtual server capacity increased in memory and the like to meet her new needs.
‘Amazing.’
Delta spawned one of the shape-based NPCs on the ground by her feet. It was of the triangle-torso variety.
She watched it wander around with its default AI, but to test further she swapped that AI out. She wrote a behavior script to mimic a fearful rampage victim once, just for fun. Of course, she was never able to test it cause of the ethics rules. But she had a hunch they didn’t apply to a GODMODE user like herself.
Delta lifted her foot above the shape-based person-being and it fell to the ground on its butt, raised a cylinder arm over its featureless sphere-head, and screamed in horror.
Her hunch was correct. Delta smiled, then set her foot down on the thing. Amazingly, it didn’t poof! Instead, she felt its shapes break apart like the bones falling off and away from a cartoon skeleton. A bit more pressure flattened the shapes out to the thickness of paper. Amusingly to her, the thing still screamed in its feminine voice.
The shape-based NPCs lacked a proper “death” state. If she had made one for them, then the system wouldn’t have let them be props in her fantasies. Of course, that changed with her GODMODE status. She let the NPC scream a bit longer before deleting it with a thought.
“Finally.”, she mused. “I can have a real city to play with.”
She grew up to 1000ft tall, spawned one of her cities, then designed a new NPC. Without the system’s limitations weighing her down, she thought up some actual people. The system normally didn’t allow human look-alike NPCs in any context, but she was exempt from that now. *She* herself was an exception to the rules: an exceptional one.
The city filled with generic looking men and women. Each were loaded with her “rampage victim” behavior scripts. Soon as that happened they looked up at her towering form. Some screamed and pointed, others cowered, and many more started to run. She grinned and lifted her bare right foot above the ground. Her sole met them and she felt them wiggle and pree against her sensitive skin there.
With a coo, Delta stomped down and felt them squash out as blips of warm red mist. Her foot was unstained when she lifted it off them to inspect the splatters.
Delta ran her fingers through her green-and-yellow locks. She was titillating herself here. But, something was still off. They looked human, and screamed like humans, but they weren’t. Why settle for that? She wasn’t just a normal player in Paradise anymore. She had power, and this power had to go beyond her realm. That code showed as much.
She decided to branch out and test her powers in someone else’s virtual domain. Some lucky person would be in for the surprise of a lifetime. She checked her new accesses and found she could search out any person who had ever been in Paradise.
She checked some of her old grudges. She found full profiles on them: names, descriptions, realm data and even headclip ids. Sadly, her old boss and professor were offline at the moment. One person on her grudge-list was online though: a certain programmer by the name of “Bruce”.
Of course, if she showed up and started stomping him to bits he’d simply log out. She didn’t want him, or anyone else, being able to escape. No one should be able to escape her grasp. She finally had the power to make that so, and it filled her with glee. Smiling, she pulled up the Paradise code she now had access to.
‘Let’s see here, logout functionality.’
She found the code that handled exiting paradise. It was a vast and complex series of functions. She added a bit of code of the start of the function.
“
If (user.status() != GODMODE) {return;}
”
That bit of code she added made it so whenever someone other than her tried to get out of the system, nothing would happen. Everyone was stuck in Paradise with her with her new powers and permissions. No toys could escape the box now.
Sadly, she saw some comments from the developers that made her frown.
```
# Forced logout via extreme events such as death
# is handled at the headclip firmware level.
```
‘Oh well’, she thought. ‘I don’t think anyone’s gonna die while logged in, especially with time-dilation in play. Ah yes, that.’
Delta scanned the program code for the time-dilation functionality and found it fast. It was interesting and complex stuff, but she just needed to find the constant they used for the ratio.
“
# Can’t set higher than the headclip firmware defined
# TIME_DIFF_MAX constant
TIME_DILATION_RATIO = 2*3600*ONE_BILLION
”
Seems they used a nanosecond level of precision currently. She called up the value of TIME_DIFF_MAX, did some mental math, and found out it’d set the time-dilation factor for Paradise to 32-1. That is, every thirty-two hours in here was one hour out there in the real world.
‘Measly, but an improvement’
She set the value. Any extra time here was a boon, especially now that she was exempt to the rules. She’d try and find a way past those limits later. For now, it was time to settle a grudge.
She poofed out to Bruce’s realm, thinking “no” when prompted on whether or not to announce the visit.