Elliot couldn't shake the image of the symbols from Pulse Racer. The moment they appeared on his screen, something deep inside him stirred—a combination of nostalgia and foreboding. He printed the screenshot, pinning it to the corkboard above his desk, then stared at it like it held the key to everything.
The symbols looked random, but they weren't. Elliot was sure of it. Years of debugging games and solving intricate problems had honed his instincts. This wasn't just a mistake in the code. It was intentional.
His phone buzzed, pulling him out of his thoughts. A text from Marcus:
Marcus: "Lunch? I'm starving."
Elliot: "Can't. Busy. Rain check?"
He couldn't risk explaining this—not yet. For now, it was just him and the code.
Elliot opened a terminal on his computer and started picking apart the Pulse Racer ROM. He wasn't sure what he was looking for, but he'd know when he found it. Hours passed as he combed through hexadecimal values and ancient assembly language, documenting anything that seemed out of place.
Finally, buried in the code for the game's third level, he found something odd. A subroutine labeled "PROTOCOL1."
"Why would an arcade game from the '80s have something called 'Protocol' in its code?" Elliot muttered.
He dissected the subroutine, line by line. It didn't affect gameplay—at least, not directly. Instead, it seemed to generate a sequence of numbers every time the game started. The sequence matched the symbols he'd seen in the glitch.
Elliot copied the sequence onto a notepad:
5A 8F 23 4D 91 6C
It looked like hexadecimal code, but for what? A message? A command? He searched for patterns, but none emerged.
Leaning back in his chair, Elliot rubbed his temples. He couldn't shake the feeling that this was connected to what he'd overheard at Titan. Could Pulse Racer be part of the same "CIA protocol" embedded in WarpStrike Infinity?
The coincidence was too big to ignore.
Later that evening, Elliot sat in his dimly lit apartment, surrounded by retro consoles, gaming magazines, and a collection of vintage cartridges. His workspace looked more like a museum than a home. He pulled an old favorite from the shelf: Vector Clash.
If there was a pattern, it wouldn't be limited to just Pulse Racer.
He loaded Vector Clash into his emulator and began playing. The game felt eerily familiar—the neon gridlines, the smooth controls, the adrenaline of surviving wave after wave of enemies. But he wasn't playing for fun. He was hunting for something.
About ten minutes in, it happened again.
The screen flickered, and strange symbols appeared for a fraction of a second. Elliot rewound the footage and froze the frame.
There they were: 5A 8F 23 4D 91 6C.
His stomach dropped.
The exact same sequence.
Elliot leaned forward, the glow of the screen illuminating his intense expression. These weren't random glitches. Someone—or something—had embedded this sequence in multiple games across decades.
He glanced at the corkboard, where the screenshot from Pulse Racer was pinned. Two games. The same code.
The realization hit him like a freight train.
This wasn't an accident. It was a message left for someone to find.
And somehow, it had found him.
YOU ARE READING
Codebreakers
Science FictionCodebreakers is a thrilling techno-conspiracy novel that follows Elliot Graves, a 40-year-old video game enthusiast and chief engineer at a leading gaming company. When he accidentally overhears a secret meeting about CIA-embedded codes in their upc...
