Hal left a ridiculous souvenir just before his disappearance. A black box built into the program.
“I can’t announce something like this. I can’t take responsibility. ‘Fragment’ should be postponed,” Kirsh said.
“How long will it take to remove it?” The president said, lost for words.
“All the programmers are working on it now.”
“So when will it be done?”
Kirsh looked at McGivan and shook his head.
“I don’t know,” Kirsh said.
“For now, we can’t view it or delete its contents. It will crash if we try to remove it.”
“Is that okay? We have already set a release date and have a publisher. ALTIMIT is also working with that schedule in mind. We are not the only software company involved. A lot of people are involved. We can’t delay it any further.”
The president turned his eyes to Veronica.
“Nika. You were coaching Harald. Didn’t you notice his strange signs?”
She bit her lips. She had no words.
“It’s not just her fault. We were all deceived by that shithead.”
“That’s right. Fortunately, the game works. No problems.”
McGivan carefully chose his words and spoke.
“It looks like there are no problems. I don’t know what it’s doing inside the program. What if there is a virus or something in it? What if it had a really bad program like Pluto’s Kiss?”
“In any case, I can’t delay the schedule,” the president resolutely insisted.
“The virus will not work on ALTIMIT OS. Right? I understand what you’re and I understand that you are worried. Your fears are unfounded.”
In the end, nothing changed.
Even if Hal had gone missing, “fragment” was released in July as originally planned.
And it was over in a little over two months.
It’s not that CC staff did nothing during the release period.
Kirsh and his colleagues desperately tried to analyze the black box.
But when they realized that they couldn’t make a dent in it no matter what they did, a kind of helplessness began to spread among them.
They became very aware of the difference between them and a genius.
“Fragment” ended with great success. However, when The World started, the employees began to quit one by one. There was a change in the waters. A transformation in the process of growing a small venture company into a large company.
Both Kirsh and McGivan quit.
The president had also changed. All the members involved in the development changed jobs.
Only Veronica remained at the company.
She wanted to watch over Harald’s The World.
Over time, she was promoted and her title changed so quickly that the ink on her business card didn’t have time to dry. She had succeeded in the industry and earned the high salaries that she wanted.
Occasionally, when she got interviews with industry newspapers, she usually had the following exchanges. “You were involved in the development of The World. You have an attachment to The World.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Veronica Bain would try to answer. “No one loves The World as much as me.”
Hal didn’t just leave the black box when he disappeared.
The development tools he had used to create it were also left behind. It had been purposely prepared by Hal for his own use. When he had showed it to Kirsh and the others at the time, it had been so innovative and hard to manage, and perhaps nothing would have changed.
Other than Veronica.
She had hid the development tools so that no one else would find them.
Nika, as she was sometimes called, was always watching Hal’s work up close.
Only Nika was able to break through the black box and read what laid behind it using the development tools left by Hal.
In fact, she had been looking into the black box on her own, even before Hal disappeared.
And she had a vague understanding of various things.
For example, Hal’s anguish. The Epitaph of Twilight. Emma Wieland. And their daughter, Aura.
What did Hal want and why did she come to San Diego?
Nika asked herself this after coming to understand these things.
I want to watch over The World, she thought. There was no lie in that feeling.
The work of the genius Harald Hoerwick was worth preserving.
Emma Wieland was not needed there.
Aura was unnecessary.
Neither were needed.
They were not essential.
So, using Hal’s development tools, she tweaked the program code a bit.
In order to distort the system’s ability for self-awareness.
She didn’t foresee everything that this change would cause. It was almost as if on impulse.
However, the dishonest Emma, who caused Hal such pain, and her child would cross paths. What kind of situation would this cause? She was convinced it would do something.
Nika wanted to keep an eye on Hal’s The World.
She would no doubt see a worthy ending for a fake family.
.hack//Translate 