Chapter 7: Feature Testing

Bruce’s realm was private, but Delta’s current status had her as Paradise’s chief authority. She could go anywhere now, and she poofed in at the realm’s outskirts to stay out of sight.

The realm seemed to a pixelated landscape of a world with a bright blue and simple sky. Before she had time to take in the blocky sights, she received another holodisplay prompt.

‘More realm data. These interruptions could get annoying.’

Delta pulled up the code again. Her vision was swarmed with white text on black windows. She sifted through it to get to the relevant chunks. A code chunk caught her eye.

“

# Full realm data display.

# Should work with new sense-integration feature, but untested.

If (user.enhancedSenseIntegrationRealmData() == ESNSINT_OPT_YES) {

enhancedRealmDataDelivery(user)
}

”

The code seemed to check for an option being set--a ‘flag’ as programmers often called it. If it was present and set to the value of the constant ESNSINT_OPT_YES, she could try this functionality out.

Her plans to comment out the information delivery functionality changed. Why give up the data if she could just passively ‘know’ it all instead? The prompts bugged her, not the info itself. Information of any kind was power, after all.

Delta went to the section of the code where that flag was set. To her amazement, she found hundreds of such flags. There was one corresponding to realm settings, one for model data, and many others.

She saw most everything commented out so as to not get processed. One of the few exceptions was “enhancedSenseIntegrationAccessData”, and another was “enhancedSenseIntegrationDesign”

‘So that’s how I knew I had additional accesses when I first changed my status. It was also how I could design things so smoothly. Interesting.’

The way this code worked was to check if status was GODMODE, then it set the flag to that “YES” option. The other flag options worked the same, but they were commented out for now.

‘Must be in development still. I think I’ll be nice and test it out for them~’, thought Delta.

Smirking, she quickly enabled each and every flag. A moment later the file was processed with the changes and her body was alight with warmth. That wasn’t Paradise’s doing, it was the natural reaction of a power-fetishist getting flooded with new and amazing capabilities.

Delta became aware of the realm resources afford to Bruce’s realm without having once looked at that holodisplay. Memory amount, processor utilization capacity: she knew that info to the last byte as keenly as she knew the back of her hand.

Delta looked down at pixelated turf with short blocky grass. She wiggled her toes and felt its strange frizzy feeling. Not natural, but not unpleasant.

Her face had a wide smile to it. With this new integration feature she enabled, Delta knew exactly what was under her even before her yellow eyes gazed down. Object-model and object-placement data for the current realm were part of the information-dumps she now received directly into awareness. Similarly, without even looking back up she knew there was a square-made mountain to her front.

It wasn’t that Delta ‘saw’ the mountain, but she saw the block-objects used for it in her mind, and she knew that the coordinate information of those objects made a sort of triangular shape. She looked anyways just to confirm, and giggled herself giddy at how right she was.

‘Amazing~’

She knew the type of world this was. It wasn’t a custom-made realm, but one started from a “realm-base” one could buy in the Nexus. For some, realm making could be overwhelming, difficult, or otherwise feel like a chore. Maybe they just weren’t the creative type? In any case, those people could simply buy a pre-made foundation for their realm. Sometimes these were complete in their own right, and other times they just provided a series of rules, objects, and tools to work with. This realm was made from a “Make-Landia” realm base, which fell into the latter category.

An odd sort of “game” realm, Make-Landia provided the realm owner with a random generated landscape made entirely of square blocks. Block dirt, block stone, and other block features and resources abounded. The realm’s owner and any other “players” in the realm could then harvest these blocks, or just spawn them in if lazy. You could refine blocks to fancier looking ones and make houses and sculptures and the like.

It was very popular with the engineering crowd. It made sense that Bruce would have a realm like this. She knew he was a programmer too, after all. Not nearly as good though, else he might’ve been in her position now as the hijacker of an entire simulated reality.

Delta flew up into the sky at a thought, light-tan toes curling in the air. As part of her new “powers”, she found her eyesight amazingly keen and took all the sights. Bruce was quite the sculptor. All sorts of monuments made of stone and gold bricks dotted the blocky landscape. There were replicas of buildings, amusing emojis, and even some TV characters she recognized. Plenty of original designs too: tall square structures, pyramids and so forth. It was hard to find something shorter than a home in size.

Delta couldn’t wait to feel it all crumble under step.

She hovered back to the ground. Delta knew more than just raw realm data. She had a sort of meta-knowledge: she knew *what* she knew and had access too. She no longer needed a display to alter realm settings: she could do such things as easily as she could bend a finger. Easier, even.

With her GODMODE status she had permissions in the realm even beyond its owner. In particular, Delta checked the save settings for this realm. It autosaved the realm state every once in awhile: just in case Bruce deleted something he wanted back. Naturally, Delta turned that feature off, and removed his ability to save and load. While in his realm settings, she also disabled his ability to fly and warp around. Another thought and Bruce no longer had “owner” status in the realm.

There was something else she wanted to do, but it wasn’t part of realm settings by default. Made sense the developers of Paradise wouldn’t think of it as a feature.

Delta pulled up the code for realm settings and just wrote the functionality herself. Just as she locked everyone from leaving Paradise, she wrote up some code to stop Bruce from leaving his *own realm*.

Toys stayed in the boxes she wanted them in.

All that done, she blocked his ability to send messages to people of other realms within Paradise, and was then finally ready to reintroduce herself. A simple thought had her body shooting up to 500 feet in height. The pixelated grass under her soles disappeared under her increased weight as some destructive physics came into play.