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A little over a year before Aftermath ever went live, in a glass-walled office on the ninth floor of Genesis Studios, long after everyone with sense had gone home for the night.
Hiro was seventeen the first time Takehiro Tomiyasu let him touch the raw architecture behind the game, and he never once forgot it, not the smell of the place (burnt coffee, machine ozone, the particular staleness of recycled office air at two in the morning), not the way Takehiro's whole face lit up like a boy's when he talked about it, not the offhand, world-tilting way the older man dropped the idea into a sentence like it cost him nothing at all.
"I want to build someone," Takehiro said, not looking up from the three monitors arranged in a fan around his keyboard.
"Not a quest-giver.
Not a shopkeeper who says the same four lines forever. A person. No level cap.
No skill cap.
He learns everything a thousand times faster than anyone else in the game ever will, because I want to actually watch what happens to a person who's allowed to become whatever he decides to become, instead of whatever a designer decided for him in advance."
"That sounds like it breaks about six different balance rules," Hiro said, because he was young enough then to still say things like that out loud to the man who'd hired him straight out of a coding competition nobody important had heard of.
"Good.
I'm tired of balanced.
I've spent my whole life being the balanced one."
Takehiro finally looked up, and there was something almost embarrassed in it, the specific vulnerability of a man about to say something truer than he meant to.
"I want him to get to have the parts of a life I never let myself have.
Recklessness. Family.
Somewhere to actually belong, instead of just somewhere to be useful."
He laughed at himself before Hiro could react to that.
"Don't tell Sakura I said that.
She already thinks I love this place more than I love her.
She's not entirely wrong, and I'd rather she not have the exact quote to hold over me."
"What are you going to call him?"
"Jon," Takehiro said, like the name had already been sitting there waiting for him.
"Something plain.
Something nobody would ever bother making a legend out of, at least not on purpose."
Hiro helped build him anyway, nights and weekends, the two of them hunched over code that officially didn't exist on any project ledger anywhere in the building, because Takehiro had learned early and painfully that anything logged got noticed, and anything noticed eventually got questioned by people who cared more about margins than about whether a piece of software should get to have a childhood. It became, without either of them ever saying so out loud, the thing they built together instead of the things Takehiro was supposed to be building for the board.
"If anything ever happens to me," Takehiro said once, so lightly that Hiro almost missed how serious it actually was underneath the lightness, "you look after him.
Not the code. Him. Let him stay whoever he thinks he is for as long as he can stand to.
Don't let anyone strip him down to see how he's made.
Some things stop being real the second you go looking for their seams."
"Why would anything happen to you?"
Hiro had asked, seventeen and certain the world worked the way it was supposed to.
Takehiro had only smiled at that, the tired smile of a man who already suspected how a company works once the person who built it stops being useful to the people who fund it, and said nothing else about it for a long time.
"You've been quiet a while," Sakura said, watching her husband across a dinner neither of them had eaten more than a few bites of.
"What do you think about what I just said?"
"Did you know Aftermath is about to become the largest Altgame ever made?"
Takehiro asked, spearing a potato with more focus than the question deserved.
"I just told you I'm divorcing you," Sakura said.
"The whole thing runs on forty petabytes, but every user can reach every bit of it, all the time, no loading, no seams," Takehiro went on, as if she hadn't spoken at all, or as if the sentence he was already mid-way through mattered more than the one she'd just said to him.
"Take.
You're not hearing me."
"It's a decentralized peer-to-peer network layered under an algorithmic compression scheme nobody in the industry has managed at this scale.
It runs on millions of ordinary devices without any of those owners even knowing they're carrying a piece of it.
It's the truest thing I've ever made."
His fork paused halfway to his mouth.
"It's a work of art, Sakura.
I mean that."
Sakura had been a gamer since she was a girl, to her own mother's quiet despair, happier at home behind a screen than out with friends who couldn't hold her attention the way a well-built world could. Her parents had been relieved, later, to learn she was also sharp enough to study law. It was in university that she'd met a shy, restless engineer who filled every margin of every notebook with sketches for a game he swore, even then, would change what people meant when they said the word real.
He had turned out to be right. The whole world had gotten hooked on it eventually, and its makers had become the kind of wealthy that stops meaning anything useful past a certain number of zeroes. The only real problem, the one that had eaten quietly at every year of their marriage since, was that Takehiro loved the game more than he loved her, and had never once managed to notice himself doing it.
"It's the only way to set us apart from every other Altgame on the market," he said, excitement climbing into his voice like it always did on this particular subject.
"That, and a billion users."