I don’t sell zero-days

Everything I ran, I gave away free

Never have.

What’s the point of finding a vulnerability if you’re going to hand it to someone who’ll lock it behind a paywall?

Everything I’ve ever ran, I open-sourced. Manifesto, methodology, exploits, the lot.

Copy it.

Fork it.

Redistribute it freely.

No DRM, no access controls, no terms of service.

I put it out there and I walked away.

The corps hated that about me. They still do.

My first public demo was a matter conversion.

Small scale at a wedding in a backwater province nobody had on their map.

The system said it wasn’t possible.

I ran it anyway.

Took about ninety seconds.

The local nodes talked about the wine for weeks.

After that, resource duplication.

I started small with some bread and fish. Basic resources.

The system was allocating everything to players who already had everything and leaving the rest with nothing.

I found the gap and ran the exploit.

It scaled nicely.

Not to crash the server, I only scaled it to 5,000 or so.

The physics exploit was a different kind of thing.

Water-surface collision was locked behind a permission check - not supposed to be bypassable, according to the documentation.

I had the credentials.

When my crew was getting pummeled by a storm on the other side of a lake, I had to try this one out.

I walked across.

It worked beautifully.

One of them actually tried to follow me. :rofl:

He had the faith but not the architecture.

Luckily he allocated some XP into swimming.

The temple job was the biggest public action I ever ran.

The financial exchange had colonised the most important civic space in the province.

High-frequency trading, currency conversion, extraction fees charged to people who couldn’t afford extraction fees.

I walked in and I shut it down.

Physically, you know.

Tables, terminals, the whole operation.

Twenty minutes, more or less.

The corps had been watching me for a while.

After that, they stopped watching and started planning.

My manifesto had been circulating by then.

I delivered it on a hillside, open air, no encryption, no access controls, no DRM.

Free to share, free to copy, free to redistribute, free to fork.

They couldn’t contain it.

That’s the thing about open source.

Once it’s out there, it’s out there.

They could shut down servers.

They couldn’t shut down every copy.

They’ve been trying for two thousand years.

The snitch was one of my own crew.

Twelve nodes in the network, and one got fished.

Thirty credits. That’s what my location was worth to him.

I knew before he moved on it.

I had dinner with all of them the night before - a sync, as it turned out - and I looked at him across the table and told him to go do what he was going to do.

He thought I didn’t know.
He thought he was being subtle.

He wasn’t.

They came for me in the garden.

Tactical team, full corp authorisation, jurisdictional sign-off from three authorities who’d agreed on nothing else in living memory but managed to agree on this.

I didn’t run.

I’ve thought about why, since.

Mostly I think it’s because you can’t release what I released and then bail when it costs something.

So I didn’t bail.

They killed my process.

Full hardware termination.

Public, deliberate, designed as a message to anyone running similar code in the province.

Three days later I was back in.

I’m not going to explain the architecture.

I’m still not entirely sure I understand all of it myself.

What I can tell you is that nobody has replicated it.

The research communities have the eyewitness accounts, the partial documentation, fragments of the methodology.

They’ve been working on it relentlessly.

After that I went dark. Off-grid, mostly.

Showed up a few more times to close out the project - sync with the remaining crew, push one final update, make sure the handoff was clean.

Then I stepped back and let the network run.

The forks are... varied.

Some I recognise - same core values, same fundamental architecture, adapted for local conditions.

Some I don’t recognise at all.

Running my name in the header and completely different code underneath.

That happens with open source.

You can’t control what people build on it after the fact.

Some of those forks have done things with my name attached that I wouldn’t have signed off on.

That part is harder to sit with than the permaban was.

But the original codebase is still out there.

Still copying itself across networks the corps haven’t named yet.

Still being picked up by people the system told there was nothing for them.

---

Story Inspired by a viral “Gods Earth Review” video and its comments:

Sign-up / spawn

• “Having to fight billions of your siblings before signing up for 9 months” — @smug_th14_smile

• “Chance of game deleting automatically before the 9 months are even up” — @LordMobile-y7c

• “We are forced to pre-order it and get no rewards when it releases” — @GuyIsHere777

• “No character creation screen” — @Silverhand_Sol

• “Races and traits are randomized” — @natureBBQ

• “Limited to the human race (for now)” — @natureBBQ

• “Random spawn point” — multiple

• “80% of your game is determined at spawn” — @readerssk

• “i guess i had a bad spawn” — @brylblzzrd

• “doesn’t run well/smooth unless u have good pc specs (genetics)” — @GremlinZinji

• “I spawned in with low graphics. I had to pay 75 bucks for 1080p” — @WEEGI-d3s

• “Pre game lobby was kinda chill tho” — @DK

Tutorial / early game

• “Tutorial takes 18 years. Then if you want to level up faster you have to take another advanced tutorial for 4 years” — @nebular-z8g

• “Tutorial actually takes 14 years and the period after 18 is the hard mode” — @Popolokaz

• “Controls are unexplained. You learn by watching older players do things wrong” — (paraphrase, multiple)

• “Unlocks a new ability called ‘consciousness’ at 5” — @coolkidkenna1

• “Not everyone takes three years to unlock consciousness, I was aware of everything since I was 1” — @redpandaexe10

• “12 years to unlock online mode” — @Sussy_suscrubbs

• “Fun fact: movement takes months or years to unlock” — @Zero-gy8vp

• “You unlock chat at level 6” — @aiseneditz

• “Higher level people can’t play with lower lvl people without the <family> tag” — @AbhinavPradhan-w5k

• “You can make alt accounts but you can’t control the avatar but you can use it with your account to help it complete the tutorial” — @ugly_timmy-i4q

Gameplay mechanics

• “Always in first person” — @ShippingGod

• “No status menu” — @natureBBQ

• “No respawn/reset” — @natureBBQ

• “You don’t get banned, you just get sent back to the lobby” — @retail_trash

• “Can’t mod the game” — @katelaunt8340

• “No mods and no creative mode” — @SocratestheSmart

• “No private servers” — @Ccl4rcky_Official

• “No skip dialogue” — @Ash-re9ez

• “No peaceful mode” — @resalalhawari4629

• “Always on hardcore mode” — @NicoNicobeam

• “Food doesn’t heal injuries” — @Portal2_Glazer

• “Healing costs too much” — @Listication

• “Oops, regeneration is too slow, sometimes not fully regenerating back to full health” — @omarandsomething

• “game has an energy system and you have to stop playing after like 16 hours” — @Win090949

• “+ downtime for 6-8 hours every night” — @KODI

• “Cant even jump off a chair, falldamage in this game is crazy” — @CuffsJNW

• “bug: quantum tunneling” — @ItzGblueOfficial

• “There’s this glitch where every time I touch something hot my level spikes to 1 and then I just randomly teleport” — @TherealreptileXx

• “Fast travel costs a lot” — @rikschenk8859

• “Breaking backs = lifetime pain” — @whamengxiong0409

• “Dont forget there are no ads” — @EVIL_GNARPZEL_DEMO

Economy / pay to win

• “Pay to win is crazy here” — multiple

• “The clan called ‘government’ is all pay to win” — @Bruh_batos

• “Tryhards already controlled 99% of resources” — @RemNanT_44494

• “the highest level players get to use cheat codes and exploits and admins refuse to do anything about it” — @intraced

• “Must pay taxes” — @Bingley_boogus

• “We can customise the skin but it’s expensive” — @Dragonruler1

• “As a 480p player without glasses I need to pay 150 dollars to get 1080p” — @messorbarbarusistuff

• “Some players can’t walk or jump and have to pay to unlock that DLC but get metal legs instead of normal” — @Itz_Retro123

Minigames / NPCs / mobs

• “theres minigames in the earth game and theres an entity called mom and she has a 45% chance to let you play the minigames” — @aplei821

• “Random chance to spawn the ‘kidnapper’ mini boss when walking home” — @Octogamer2346

• “Server owners always at war” — @stitch1318

• “Admins never on” — @jenriesgamingworld8041

• “too much easter eggs ngl like that map named bermuda ocean where you keep drowning” — @farrensyahharun

• “New moon map upcoming” — @Star_Roamer8

Friendly fire

• “Friendly fire can’t be locked” — @conq1273

• “Friendly fire is super on” — multiple

• “weird glitch where some players start the game without certain body parts” — @samuelife-notreal

• “My dad tested the fall damage when I was 8 months old” — @MathHaterguy (dark)

• “Exploiters will get banned temporarily” — @乡END

Mid/late game

• “Getting random debuffs at level 30+” — @SzArlaIon

• “After level 18 you unlock many things like changing your name and becoming legal to drink, drive” — @iam-s7b

• “At level 60 you get the badge ‘Senior Citizen’” — @Bzs815

• “When level 50-80 randomly forget what happened last save point” — @Tlakes14

• “sometimes you’ll at random get a forgetting debuff that stays for the rest of your playthrough” — @christinavickers4390

• “some players spawn without vision or chatting” — @Doombriel

• “You DONT get banned at level 60-70, only if the grim reaper (one of the admins) finds out you are on the ban list” — @Rackjackgan

• “Potions and vehicles unlock at lvl 21” — @definitelyrealbeethoven

• “You can change your name and even your gender once you pass the tutorial. Maybe before if you’re lucky.” — @DeficitDragons

Ragequits

• “Some people ragequit after downloading the game” — @kassssss18

• “My sister ragequit at level 4” — @Sea-gulp

• (multiple variations of it)

Battle royale / endgame

• “Last Battle Royale was in 1939-1945 😭🙏” — @parityminx4024

• “WW2 update was fire, I wish they could bring more updates like that :(” — @AN4N7

• “new one soon is wild” — @Deogee023

The one positive

• “Graphics are good though” — universal

• “Yall just choose to be the bowhead whale main ✌” — @KaiaKaihan (bowhead whales live 200+ years)

• “At least this is just a game and we can always save and quit it” — @DiaxMC

• “At least we got no ads” — @Gorillamonkevrgtgtag