The first real shockwave from Reality Quest didn't come from gamers.
It came from people who didn't play games at all.
On Monday morning, Derek stood barefoot in the glass-walled gym on the twenty-fifth floor of the Blackfire building, sweat running down his back as he finished his last set. His body moved with controlled precision now—no wasted motion, no hesitation. When he was done, he towelled off and walked straight into the adjoining living space, where a large screen glowed with muted news feeds, forums, and internal analytics.
Reality Quest's demo stream had crossed one million live viewers in under twenty-four hours.
Gaming forums were in chaos.
Some users were calling it staged. Others were dissecting mechanics frame by frame, trying to understand how NPCs reacted with such nuance—fear, hesitation, rage, grief. A few well-known streamers had gone silent halfway through their sessions, logging off without explanation. One of them later posted a single line:
> "That wasn't a game. That was a place."
Derek scrolled past it, uninterested in sentiment.
What caught his attention were the secondary ripples.
A financial blog speculated about the in-game currency model and whether it violated existing securities regulations. A psychology journal posted an open letter questioning the ethics of simulated trauma. Somewhere deeper in the noise, a clipped screenshot circulated—a memo header from a government domain, blurred but unmistakable.
Subject: Virtual Economies with Real-World Liquidity.
Derek smiled faintly.
They were late.
He closed the feed and switched to an internal dashboard. Burn rate: just over seventy million dollars per month. Staffing projections climbing. Server acquisition in Missouri on schedule. Reindeer Logistics' West Coast expansion nodes marked in amber, awaiting final authorization.
He tapped his comm unit. "Kyle."
Kyle Butler answered immediately. "Morning."
"I want Los Angeles branches prepared," Derek said calmly. "No announcements. No branding overlap. Warehousing, fleet contracts, last-mile readiness."
Kyle paused. "For Blackfire?"
"For construction and logistics demand," Derek replied. "That's all you need to know."
Another pause, shorter this time. "Understood. Timeline?"
"Yesterday."
The call ended.
Derek dressed simply—black joggers, gray hoodie, clean sneakers—and headed down. Ruth glanced up from the reception desk, shotgun secured beneath it as always, eyes sharp.
"Anything unusual?" Derek asked.
"Nothing loud," she replied. "A few people lingering across the street yesterday. Didn't cross the line."
"Good," he said, already moving.
Across the city, in a polished conference room inside Compton City Hall, the atmosphere was anything but calm.
Councilwoman Lakeisha Williams sat at the long table with her hands folded, posture controlled, expression unreadable. Around her were six other council members and, at the head of the table, Mayor Thomas Reed. The blinds were drawn. Phones were face down. This was not a meeting meant for minutes.
"You want to explain," the mayor said carefully, "how a multi–tens-of-billions-dollar redevelopment project is already being discussed in neighborhoods before it ever crossed this table?"
Lakeisha met his gaze without flinching. "Because it wasn't presented as a city contract."
A councilman scoffed. "That's semantics."
"No," she replied evenly. "That's jurisdiction."
She slid a folder forward. Inside were summaries—community equity structures, co-op residency models, profit-sharing frameworks. Nothing bore Derek's name. Nothing mentioned the Raven Corporation. Everything was layered through intermediaries, shell developers, legal buffers.
"This project," Lakeisha continued, "is structured to bypass traditional municipal funding. No city bonds. No federal grants. No zoning shortcuts. It's private capital engaging residents directly."
Mayor Reed leaned back slowly. "Which makes us look like we were asleep at the wheel."
Another councilwoman crossed her arms. "Or complicit."
Lakeisha's eyes hardened. "I was approached with a proposal. I evaluated it. I brought it to the community. That is my job."
"And what happens," the mayor asked, "when Sacramento or Washington asks why Compton didn't flag the largest private redevelopment in its history?"
Silence followed.
Then Lakeisha spoke, quieter now. "Then we tell the truth. That for once, someone didn't come asking what they could take. They came asking what they could build."
A murmur ran through the room—unease, not agreement.
One of the senior council members finally said, "You've blindsided us, Lakeisha."
She nodded. "Yes."
The admission disarmed them more than denial would have.
Mayor Reed drummed his fingers on the table. "Who is behind this?"
Lakeisha shook her head. "I don't know."
That, at least, was true in the way that mattered. She knew the face. Not the full shadow.
"Then you'll get us a meeting," the mayor said. "A quiet one. Before this grows teeth."
Lakeisha didn't answer immediately.
When she did, her voice carried a warning of its own. "I can ask. But I don't think he's the type to ask permission."
Back at Blackfire, tension of a different kind was brewing.
On the third floor, arguments spilled out of conference rooms. Developers clashed with historians over accuracy versus optimization. Psychologists pushed back against combat mechanics. Engineers complained about impossible timelines. Voices rose. Egos flared.
Derek observed it all from the glass balcony above, hands in his pockets.
This was the cost of ambition.
He descended into the room without raising his voice. The arguing slowed, then stopped.
"You're all right," Derek said calmly, once silence settled. "And you're all wrong."
They turned to him.
"You're not here to win arguments," he continued. "You're here to build something that has never existed. That means friction. But friction needs direction."
He paused, then added, "I'll be appointing a Chief Operating Officer for Blackfire. Someone whose job is to make sure disagreements become progress."
The tension shifted—not gone, but contained.
Later that evening, as the sun dipped low over Los Angeles, Derek stood alone in his office. On the whiteboard behind him were layered diagrams—world-state persistence, NPC behavioral lattices, economic feedback loops.
Reality Quest was becoming real in ways even he hadn't fully anticipated.
His phone buzzed once.
A message—not anonymous, not threatening.
> The council is uneasy. The mayor wants a conversation. This is moving fast.
—L.W.
Derek read it, then placed the phone face down.
He walked to the window and looked out over the city—millions of lives stacked in concrete and light, all moving according to systems they barely understood.
Projects this big always created fault lines.
The difference was that Derek wasn't afraid of the ground shifting.
He was counting on it.