| abstract
| - Have you ever seen a glitch in a game or perhaps on your phone and computer? I imagine so since it is common in all computers to be a slight hiccup in the code. I am a hacker who likes to mess with the code in software and programs to better suit my needs. May it be fixing coding glitches or possibly editing it to add a little more flare into things. The thing is when you start to mess with the code you find some things like left out content that developers were too lazy to remove it entirely from the program as well as the possibility of a line of code that has no apparent meaning. Perhaps it was the only thing that survived from a deletion of code. This story is about me finding some of this code and trying to figure out what it means... and why I should have left it alone. It was a normal day for me. I was locked in my office space in my house working on some code for a video game for my friends. They wanted me to add some new textures to some characters and give them a little boost in their power. While editing their power stats I realized I had to go into the base code for the power series of coding. Upon diving into this I found and odd line of code. With working in many many games I know when something doesn't belong. I decide to not remove it but copy the code over to my computer and examine it later. I finish up all the edits and send the file to my friends. I open up the code as well as the code for the game and begin comparing it to all the code in the game looking to see if it was just misplaced. I am a very curious man. Oddities always intrigued me. Solving a mystery makes my days. After searching through all the coding I found it had no correlation with the game at all. Even more curious I decide to transfer it to my decoder and convert the code into binary, to see if it perhaps makes sense in its more simple form. Sadly when I tried to translate the binary it only came out gibberish no matter how I organized the code. Saddened by this I decide to leave the code alone and move on with my life. A few weeks later I am requested by my friend to edit another game, this time for his hand held. I alter the game to his specifications when I notice something that brings up the code from the other game to my mind. I see another line of code that is similar to the one from the game I edited the weeks before. Two completely unrelated games on two separate platforms, similar odd lines of codes... This is too odd to be a coincidence. After transferring the edited data to his cartridge and giving it back to him I immediately transfer the code to binary and pull up the other code and begin to compare to see if they make any since. Sadly they were still gibberish, like I was missing something; a part of it. I begin to look in all the files I have edited over the years for any more occurring code oddities to no avail. I begin to explore the all mighty internet for any other hackers have found odd lines of codes in any games they have edited. I found a few people that said they have found odd codes in a Pokémon Red ROM another in a Conker Bad Fur Day for the N64. The last one I found recently was in a PS2 game called Kingdom Hearts. That’s five bits of code found across unrelated games and consoles. After much comparing and moving around I happily found that a few bits and pieces actually fit together to form a partial complete code for possibly a Jpeg or an AVI file. Sadly that was all I was able to find on the internet. Most people don’t make public their hacking hobbies. For many months I was not able to find another line of code. I have been borrowing my best friend’s games and looking into their codes for more of the code I am calling the Anomaly. I did manage to find one more a few months later in one of his Xbox 360 games. Now that I had the sixth piece I could tell I was close to having the entire line of code. I rent many games from video stores in hopes of finding more of the Anomaly. With glee I find another bit a month after the sixth in a game I bought for my PS3. I immediately plugged it in and with a huge grin on my face the code was completed. I insert it into a program that would be able to complete the process but sadly it would have to wait a while for the process to complete. A day later it is complete. The code was an AVI file, 5 minutes long. With glee I put on my turtle beach headphones and put the video in full screen to watch. It opened up into a dark theater with a lone man looking at a screen. The quality of the video was movie like. It looked like it was done by pros. The man turns and looks at the camera; it was apparent he did not want to be known who he was. His face was wrapped up to his eyes which were covered by dark goggles. Upon his head was a bowler hat while he wore a long leather duster as well as dark shirt and jeans and tight gloves. He motions for the camera to sit next to him and it moves as though you are in a first person view of the camera. Moving as id a normal persons head would when you walk. It is as if I am in the theater with him. The camera sits next to him and looks at the man. He looks at the camera and speaks. "Well..." he says. His voice is a little deep. I am kind of shocked in the normality of his voice. I guess I expected something dark or maybe epic. "It seems you have cracked my code" he says. "Naughty." "You have been looking at my work and messing with it when it should be left alone." "I bet you are wondering what the code is no? Well it’s not just a video that is for sure." "It is so much more than that." He points to the screen and says, "Zeros and ones." As he says this the numbers appear on screen as if he is in control of the movie. "The base code of all things computer... beautiful is it not?" He turns and looks at me now. "The code you managed to crack is one of the most complicated algorithms I have managed to create... You shouldn’t be hacking you naughty boy." He looks back at the screen and chuckles a little. "I do love my games... Did you play them? The ones they were in? They are some of my favorites." "We have been working with computers almost as soon as they were invented. We as in my family and I. As soon as we saw what computers could do, we knew we had to master it." so we worked with them, inserting ourselves into any project, any building projects involving then, anything that involved computers we were there... learning." "We began working with a government to see the psychological properties computers had on the human mind. Seeing if we could use them to control people’s thoughts, movements, and personalities." He looked back at me. I began to feel a little uneasy. I felt I should not know this. I knew I should have stopped but... I had to know what he was talking about. He continued soon after he looked at me. His voice took a darker mood. "After much working and testing with coding of computers, we felt that we were ready for... human trials." "We picked up a few random people, some kids some adults. We took them to a special facility and strapped them in to a chair with a computer in front of them. We then flashed the program in front of their eyes each with a special command for them to follow 2 minutes after we unstrap them. Now some were not affected, this was to be expected. Others…” he chuckles after he says this. “Others responded perfectly.” “There was one particular subject that did however respond very violently. Jeffrey Dahmer… God did that one turn out horrible. He killed two of the subjects before we were able to restrain him.” He shuddered a little after saying that part. “We knew then we had to work very hard on improving the code so we didn’t have the people who are exposed to the code go crazy. We took all the subjects back in their cells and gave them a special drug that would erase all memory of this place as well as the codes they were exposed to. Now you know Jeffrey as the infamous killer right? Well for some reason he was able to recall the code when we let him go and ended up going crazy again. Man that was a hell of a mess. Luckily the authorities could take him down. Saved us for having to intervene.” I was shocked at this information. What kinds of codes were these? Did they affect me some way? I didn’t know but I had to listen if I was to find out more. “Anyway after that we cracked down hard on modifying the code to work much better than before. Soon after we perfected it and after testing it on some more subjects, we started putting the codes all over computer programs everywhere. We have been guiding the world as we see fit since computers have been made. Now everything is a computer. Our codes exist virtually everywhere selecting just a few people here and there. Your neighbor perhaps? Maybe the principal of a school. Maybe the President of the United States…” He lets out an evil laugh at this. “Well look at the time, the movie is about to start. I shall be going… oh by the way heads up.” He points at the big screen and the camera turns toward it. An old time cinema 3, 2, 1 slide appears and as it hits zero… an absolutely overpowering shriek is admitted from my headphones. It literally blows out the speakers in my headphones directly into my ears. I throw the headphones off and realize that one of my ears is bleeding and all I can hear is a loud ringing.
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