Codebreakers

Chapter Two: A Glitch in the System

Elliot Graves sat at his desk, staring at the code for WarpStrike Infinity. Lines of text scrolled past on his monitor, but his mind wasn't on the game. His thoughts kept drifting back to the conversation he had overheard.

"CIA protocols... already embedded," he murmured, tapping his pen against the desk.

He had worked at Titan Interactive for over a decade and had seen his fair share of corporate secrecy. But this was different. The implications of what he'd heard gnawed at him. Why would the CIA be involved in a video game?

"Hey, you good?"

Elliot looked up to see his colleague and longtime friend, Marcus Chen, leaning against the doorframe. Marcus was the company's lead designer and one of the few people Elliot trusted.

"Yeah," Elliot said quickly. "Just trying to figure out this bug in the physics engine."

"Need a second pair of eyes?" Marcus asked, stepping into the room.

Elliot hesitated. "Actually...can I ask you something weird?"

Marcus raised an eyebrow. "Weirder than the time you said Astro Blaster was haunted?"

Elliot chuckled despite himself. "Yeah, weirder than that. Do you remember any old games having...patterns? Like, glitches that seemed intentional?"

Marcus scratched his head. "I mean, sure. Back in the day, everything was janky. Sometimes you'd find a cheat or an Easter egg hidden in the code. Why?"

"No reason," Elliot lied. "Just nostalgia, I guess."

Marcus shrugged. "Well, if you're diving into the retro rabbit hole, let me know. I love that stuff."

As Marcus left, Elliot's curiosity got the better of him. He minimized the WarpStrike Infinity files and opened an emulator for an old arcade game he hadn't played in decades: Pulse Racer.

He had spent hours playing it as a kid at the local arcade. The game was notorious for its challenging levels, but what Elliot remembered most were the glitches. The game would occasionally flash strange symbols on the screen or make the car behave erratically. At the time, he thought it was just bad programming.

The emulator loaded, and the familiar start screen appeared. Elliot selected the first level and began playing. It felt strange at first—like reconnecting with an old friend—but muscle memory quickly took over. He guided the car around sharp turns and through obstacles, waiting for the glitch he remembered so vividly.

And then it happened.

The screen flickered, and a string of symbols appeared for less than a second before the game continued as if nothing had happened. Elliot paused the emulator and rewound the footage, freezing the frame on the symbols.

"What the hell?" he whispered.

He grabbed his phone and snapped a picture of the screen. The symbols looked like a mix of numbers and letters, but they didn't form any recognizable pattern. Yet something about them felt deliberate.

His heart raced as he opened a search engine and typed, "Hidden codes in video games." Thousands of results appeared—articles about Easter eggs, developer signatures, and cheat codes. But nothing explained what he'd just seen.

Elliot leaned back in his chair, his mind racing. The glitch wasn't just a bug. It was a message.

The question was, who was it for? And why had he never noticed it until now?