By 2014, the extent of the US National Security Agency's secret surveillance activities had been revealed. The NSA - and sister organisations such as the GCHQ in the United Kingdom - had covertly created a dragnet capturing the private calls, emails and internet traffic of almost every citizen in the western world. For many, the concept of personal privacy was gone. At the same time, the introduction of games involving artificially intelligent 'virtual' people and simulated worlds had become mainstream entertainment experiences. Games like Call of Duty, Halo and Grand Theft Auto were dwarfing the revenues from 'blockbuster' movies and television shows. Players in these games comfortably slipped into new worlds; meeting, trading, fighting and loving other real and artificially intelligent 'virtual' players. The rise of massive commercial social media operations such as Facebook pushed these games further into almost everyone's daily life. Games like Cityville and The Sims Social encouraged players to invite hundreds of friends and acquaintances into the game with just a single click. Thanks to advertising and in-game purchasing, the games developers could afford to give free versions of these games away and still generate massive revenues. A fun, compelling connected world, supercharged by social networks, promising experiences unlike anything before. All for the same price as two tickets to the movies. Who could resist? To investors around the world, these games were the new 'rivers of gold'. What followed was an explosion of well-funded new businesses developing products which dived ever deeper into the personal details of the individuals. And all that data was greedily gobbled up by endless rows of supercomputers hidden away in Utah's NSA data centre. The rise of a company like WhiteStar Corp - the creator of the multi-billion dollar series of immersive games - came as no surprise. ''WhiteStar', as the company is informally known, was involved in a series of "incidents" in December 2019 and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection a few months later. Drowned out by the social unrest breaking out throughout the developed world, the proceedings against WhiteStar drew little publicity. However certain parties involved were open to discussing the events, many of which transpired in WhiteStar's high-security steel and concrete complex nestled in a quiet residential suburb of Sapporo, Japan. Events that would lead to the greatest peacetime loss of life in human history.
About the Author: Brian James Craighead (1965 - present) was born in the highlands of Scotland, grew up in Aberdeen before working in various windswept and interesting corners of the world. Starting life as a software engineer, Brian moved to Bermuda. where his first daughter (Rachel) was born. After seven years working in paradise, Brian moved to Sydney, Australia and began his career in digital marketing. Brian now splits his time between Singapore and Sydney, running a digital agency while writing tech thrillers based on his experiences. Brian married way out of his league, and now he spends his spare time with his wife Diane and two teenage daughters Rachel and Sara.