Lucky Egg

Appearance:

The Lucky Egg is a packet of code for use in the CogNet. Outside of the CogNet, it is a large file and would be carried in a quantum data storage system. The most common version for large data files like this is a computronium core 'JAM' Drive. JAM drives like canister-type hand grenades with a data port on one side and a battery monitor on the other.

Inside the CogNet, the Lucky Egg appears as a slowly rotating Faberge-style egg the size of an American rules football.

Background:

The Lucky Egg was created by the burnout prodigy Liberty 'Libby' Decker.

As a child, Decker was enrolled in multiple special learning centers, along with intensive tutoring, and other environmental aids to ensure she was as intelligent, fast-thinking, and adaptive as possible. The intent was for her to become a Super User for a Research Accelerator, where she could take the place of multiple regular researchers or participants. In more contemporary parlance, she was a juiced up hacker who was being exploited by her parents in hope of massive success. This did not happen, and while Libby proved to be above average generally across the board, this was at a high personal cost to her, and then she had a psychotic breakdown that reduced her to a temporary atavistic state. Once recovered, Libby legally separated herself from her parents, gained a settlement from one of the organizations that had been behind her brain-pumping for a modest settlement, and then found a job as a playtester, consultant, and troubleshooting programmer for Enigmatic Horizons.

Enigmatic Horizons is important, as the corporation is part of the C20 Group, consisting of the twenty largest and most important corporations in the Cognitive Technologies and Communications sphere. EH dominates the field of immersive gaming and entertainment, and would functionally by the modern fusion of all the game design studios Microsoft owns, a casino conglomerate, all of the Disney resort and vacation holdings, Verizon, and Brazzers. They are a dominant player in the home entertainment market, and that is a vertical dominance, from programming, down to the hardware used to access the games and servers, to the literal service itself. Most Cosmic Era residents are aware of Enigmatic Horizons as a gaming and entertainment provider, CogService streamer, and are generally not super aware that EH has adult operations and gambling operations, and that several secondary communications services belong to them. One of the biggest concerns with EH and their cognitive holdings is that events inside the different virtual worlds can have very real impacts in the real world. Millions of people make their entire living in EH-owned game worlds.

Libby functionally was a NEET, Not involved in Education, Employment, or Training. She didn't clock hours, didn't have an official supervisor, or anything like that. Rather, she had special privileges in the game worlds she liked, and as she lived a virtual life with limited admin and near-total design controls, she constantly improved those games. This was not on the mission/reward/combat system, but she built NPCs, settlements, location-based encounters, new zones, and the like. Her handlers at EH would basically give her in-game missions to explore areas, fix areas, and generally keep everything fresh. She was far from the only person in this role, nor was she the most engaged. Many of EH's Handlers were bedridden, paraplegic, or quadriplegic, or even people who had gone so far as to plug their brains directly into an EH server and become a Genomic Computer.

She eventually grew tired of the basic limitations of the EH systems, and the lack of verisimilitude in the NPCs. The game could handle rotating encounter spawns, evolving combat strategies, and regular implementation of new weapons, special abilities, and system changes, but the NPCs were generally tied to the same few hundred words of dialog. Tens of thousands of structures existed in the game that were nothing more than scenery, no more interactive than mountains or large rocks. This frustrated Libby because she still craved personal interaction, just not with actual humans. There were dozens of locations scattered across the core section of her favorite game, Blast Zone 2505, that would have been neat or fun to interact with, and they weren't available.

Libby created the Lucky Egg to change this.

What is the Lucky Egg?

Technically the Lucky Egg is a viral weapon. When activated, the target is designated, and the intent is stated. Then the egg is activated.

For an NPC, the egg is given to them and they accept it into their inventory.

For a location, the egg is thrown like a grenade.

Once detonated the code inside the Lucky Egg disassembles the code of the designated target, replaces the fixed logic and dialog trees, and autocompletes and fills in the missing data. NPCs have their basic backstory fleshed out by the code, locations are laid out in a fashion comparable to the nearest locations, or uses code references added before activation. This preferential development applies to NPCs, monsters, locations, and the works, and is determined when the Lucky Egg is activated.

When applied to an NPC, the NPC will flesh out and become comparable to a player character.

This is often time problematic for said NPC as they can easily have a crisis of personality as they are awoken and forced to realize that they were not real, still are not real, and will likely have a log of how they have been treated by player characters as well as becoming aware of how they have been treated throughout the playtime of the game they are in.

For monsters, this is a different issue as they do not so much become aware of their existence as a fixture in a game, so much as all their in-game limitations and shackles being removed. Once egged, a monster gains the ability to gain XP, level up, and is no longer limited to their specific locations and triggers. Guard monsters actually start behaving in an effective guard pattern, things that sneak and murder really start leaning into that and can wipe out established settlements and players.

Locations, turning a background house with a bookstore sign for the first floor into a player settlement area doesn't really do so much to break gameplay. What can disrupt gameplay is using the Lucky Egg on a location near or attached to a mission/campaign

Early Uses:

The first iterations of the Lucky Egg didn't work. That is part of them being the first iterations. The common problems included the change in programming being quickly detected by the host L/AISC and being removed, the code being a dud, or in a few instances, the code causing catastrophic system failures. This last entry was largely unnoticed by the system admins as Libby had her own private branched server for testing her mods and code changes. They were not bothered by her simulation terminating, that just meant she was pushing the code and her regular updates were more than worth the cost to EH to maintain her node, her pod, and her monthly expenses.

The biggest threats to immersive game worlds are the known world becoming stagnant, and a new hot property appearing. Libby and other users like her were keeping everything fresh, and that meant massive changes like changing level lists for encounters, adding new gear and abilities to the game, all the way down to RebeccaSunnybrooke the Cozimancer who spent her online time refreshing the background combines for shopping vendors and stores, the stuff in the background behind vendors.

Success:

Libby successfully activated the Lucky Egg with her favorite weapons vendor in the core game. This left him unavailable for almost fifteen minutes while heis code was rewritten. This was largely unnoticed as Libby has a Dummy Program that copied him and his shop was never technically closed. It would take three days for his code to fully stabilize, and come up to speed. A few players noted the Gunman was a bit odd, twitchy, and had stilted dialog, but it sorted itself out. This saw a minor increase in game traffic as more people wanted to see the glitching NPC before the game devs fixed it.

And then he leveled out, and became fully operational.

The new Gun Dealer suddenly was a hit with players. He remembered different players, and would speak them almost as if he could see what they were wearing, what gear they had, and started taking orders. There was a little debate, the gun dealer crafting weapons for players seemed broken, but they were being charged 10X the base price for a custom order weapon, but it was all vanilla game assets. Players getting what they wanted ended up doing this crazy thing where more people started playing and there was a noticeable increase in the player base. EH was very pleased with this as it coincided with several new zones being opened, and new player quests being unlocked.

This allowed Libby to attach her Lucky Egg to the game's blockchain system, on the backdoor side, and it was integrated and accepted into the system. This is a big secret, and isn't found out until later.

Shenanigans

The Lucky Egg drew the attention of several other devs, those who knew Libby in real life, and were working fairly hard to get her to unplug, come out of the hab block, and socialize. This went poorly since Libby was incredibly awkward and the only things she could talk about were the things she was working on in the game, starting a relationship with the Gun Dealer, and her sideline interest in niche genre fantasy. One of her colleagues was unaware of her skill in coding and started a multi-week effort to seduce Libby for the sole purpose of gaining access to her dev's console to steal the Lucky Egg for himself.

He did succeed in both, seducing a largely innocent and naive Libby, and stealing A lucky egg.

He would go on and try the device out for himself, installing it in his favorite NPC in the game. The difference was that said not-so-gentlemanly-gentleman was an Evil Path Player and his fav NPC was a murderous psychopath with a minigun, murder gang, and suddenly an opened mind. Said NPC would eventually end up almost crashing the entire Enigmatic Horizon's core server before she was stopped. The gentleman in question died, as the murderous NPC psychopath figured out how people were logging out of EH, and made sure that he was physically incapable of making that basic gesture. He died a few hundred times in the game before his body failed from dehydration.

Legacy:

The Lucky Egg remains a hidden item in the code of the game. Being part of the blockchain system, it has been accepted. As with NFTs, it can be copied ad infimum, with no issue. Libby still has the original's location in the game core systems, and can control paste as many as she wants to make.