Curing cancer was a dream most scientists carried quietly, like a private prayer they never expected to be answered. Even those who never touched oncology textbooks or peered into microscopes stained with malignant cells had, at one point or another, imagined what it would feel like to end it—to close the book on an illness that had defined fear, loss, and helplessness for generations. It was the kind of dream that felt too arrogant to say out loud.
In his previous life, Derek had done it.
Not in a gleaming lab with a nameplate on the door or a press conference waiting outside, but in obscurity. He had arrived at the solution sideways, almost accidentally, while chasing something else entirely. Research grants meant for materials science and computational modeling had quietly bled into biological simulations. From there, curiosity had taken over. Cancer, after all, was not magic. It was a systems failure—cells ignoring rules, consuming resources, replicating without restraint. Systems could be corrected.
The answer had been nanotechnology.
Not the science-fiction fantasy of self-aware machines swimming through bloodstreams, but something far more elegant. Programmable nanostructures, designed to recognize specific cellular markers, differentiate between healthy and malignant tissue, and do one thing relentlessly: consume cancerous cells until none remained. No radiation. No chemotherapy. No scorched-earth approach that killed the patient to save them.
It worked.
In simulations first. Then in controlled environments. Then—quietly—in live models.
Weeks. That was all it took. Tumors dissolved as if they had never been there. Metastatic chains collapsed. The body healed around the absence, not the destruction.
Derek had stared at the data for a long time afterward, feeling not triumph but a hollow certainty. He already knew how the world would respond. He had no pedigree. No institutional backing. No medical degree. No authority that would allow him to walk into the halls of academia and say, I have solved this.
So he didn't.
He filed it away mentally, adding it to a growing list of things he could do but wasn't allowed to. The cure for cancer joined cold fusion, radical energy storage breakthroughs, and half a dozen other ideas that would die quietly with him in that life.
But this life was different.
In this life, Derek Morgan did not need permission.
He sat alone in his Bel Air home office, the late afternoon sun casting long shadows across the polished floor. His screens were alive with diagrams—not biological yet, but architectural. Floor plans. Structural integrity reports. Electrical schematics. Logistics routes. On one screen, a listing blinked patiently.
ABANDONED SHOPPING MALL – KENTUCKY
Derek had never fully understood his fascination with abandoned malls. They were relics of a previous economic era, monuments to consumer optimism that had rotted into hollow shells. Vast open spaces. Reinforced foundations. Parking lots the size of small towns. Utility access that once powered thousands of stores.
Perfect skeletons.
Most of his server farms already lived inside them. Retrofitted, hardened, and invisible to anyone who didn't know what to look for. Malls were forgotten by design. Governments barely tracked them. Corporations wrote them off. People avoided them instinctively.
Nanotechnology required precision. Clean rooms. Controlled environments. Silence—both acoustic and informational. A place where nothing happened unless Derek wanted it to.
What better place than a building the world had already abandoned?
He finalized the purchase with a few clicks, barely glancing at the price. Somewhere in Kentucky, paperwork would move through a sleepy county office. Deeds would be signed. Taxes recorded. A forgotten mall would quietly change hands.
Derek leaned back in his chair and exhaled.
"Thank God for the internet," he muttered.
The next call he made was not to a contractor or an architect, but to Peter Bishop.
Peter answered on the third ring, his voice sharp but curious. "Derek. This is becoming a habit."
"I hope it's a profitable one," Derek replied calmly.
There was a pause. "That depends on what you're about to say."
"I'm going to need batteries," Derek said. "A lot of them."
Peter didn't interrupt.
"Large-scale," Derek continued. "Redundant systems. Long-term deployment. This isn't a single facility. It's an infrastructure project."
Another pause, longer this time. Derek could almost hear the gears turning on the other end of the line.
"You're talking about grid replacement," Peter said slowly. "Or at least grid independence."
"Yes."
Peter exhaled. "That's… ambitious."
"It needs to be clean," Derek said. "Stable. Paired with solar and isolated generation. No fluctuations. No interruptions."
"And no oversight," Peter added quietly.
Derek didn't deny it.
"I'll need production timelines," Derek said. "And I want priority allocation."
"You're asking me to bet Beowulf's future on whatever this is," Peter replied.
"You're already betting it," Derek said. "You just don't know on what yet."
Silence stretched between them.
Finally, Peter spoke. "Send the specifications. I'll make it happen."
After the call ended, Derek remained still for several seconds. This was the first real step. Not an idea. Not a contingency. Not leverage. This was execution.
Cancer would not be cured in secret this time.
It would be erased.
What Derek didn't notice—because he wasn't looking—was the notification that flickered briefly on one of his peripheral screens.
RQ Coin: $0.0011 → $1.00
The jump wasn't gradual. It wasn't organic. It was violent.
Within hours, obscure forums lit up with confusion. Screenshots circulated. Transactions appeared that didn't originate from the Reality Quest servers. Someone had used RQ Coin to settle a real-world debt. Another had traded it for services. Then goods.
Economists would later argue about the exact moment a fictional currency became real. Analysts would point to graphs and timestamps. Regulators would argue jurisdiction.
But the truth was simpler.
People had decided it had value.
In-game guilds had already been behaving like corporations. Now, some of them were acting like banks. Others like city-states. RQ Coin, originally designed as a controlled in-game economy, was leaking through the membrane that separated fiction from reality.
Derek eventually noticed.
He stood in front of his main display that evening, reading the report twice. Then a third time.
"One dollar," he said softly.
There was no alarm in his voice. No panic. Only thoughtfulness.
Reality Quest had stopped being a product.
It had become a system.
Derek didn't shut it down. He didn't intervene. He didn't issue statements or deploy emergency controls.
He simply added another line to his mental ledger.
Cancer will end.
Institutions are bending.
The game is no longer contained.
He turned off the screen and walked away, already planning clean rooms, nanofabrication protocols, and regulatory choke points. The world was changing in more ways than one—and for the first time, Derek wasn't sure which transformation would reach humanity first.
The cure.
Or the system that would decide who deserved it.